Last year I swore that A Midsummer Night’s Dream was the last ever tour. I don’t know why I even bother wasting my breath - I must have said that about five times now and here we are again. My reason over the last couple of years for not wanting to tour again was that I was getting too old for scrabbling about in wet flower beds for cables in the pitch black, too old for wearing silly hats and doing ridiculous foreign accents, and as for living out of a tent for a week…well, quite frankly, no.
And then something happened. I turned 30. A friend had told me that turning thirty wasn’t all that bad as it felt like you were still twenty but you didn’t really care what other people thought any more. I had spent my twenty eighth and ninth years worrying about getting older, and now that I had definitely got older it didn’t seem quite so important. If the only excuse I could find for not touring was that I was a bit too old, well then, that wasn’t good enough!
Over the last year Off the Ground has been growing steadily, the youth theatre has been expanding both in quantity and quality, we have been working with more schools and community groups than ever before and we have a full programme of work from now until the end of next summer. Most importantly though we have managed to gather a team of fantastic tutors, actors and technicians who all believe wholeheartedly in the company’s aim of bringing high quality theatre to as many people as possible. The majority of this team are part of the cast or crew for Swing in the Willows.
The summer tour is very important to Off the Ground. A performance should be an event - not necessarily one you have to get dressed up to go and see or one that costs the earth - but a night out that you look forward to. Going to a show is very different to watching a film - in a cinema the actors can’t react to anything that is going on around them and the audience are just onlookers. In theatre the audience make the show possible and they should feel as much a part of the performance as the cast. A lot of theatre events, particularly in the UK, forget that, for an audience member, being involved in a performance, is more entertaining, more fun, more frightening, more whatever than just being an onlooker. Which is why summer tours are so important to us. Outdoor theatre has an amazing way of bringing audience and cast together - probably the knowledge that if it rains, we are all going to get wet together!
Which brings me nicely to the daft people (120 of you) who turned up to Ness Gardens last year in the pouring rain to watch an outdoor show. Its that kind of ridiculous insistence on enjoying yourselves, despite what the heavens can throw at us, that make the tour what it is. Thank you for your support. Now crack open the drinks, open the picnic and, if the mood takes you, feel free to get up and dance.
