Diary of a Gossip: What is this thing called culture anyway?

What is this thing called culture anyway?
Week One, Part Two:   February 2012 
Perth, Australia

Entries for Tony Bell's tour diary will be posted on the home page, as well as collected in links under the 'Tour Diary' tab.*

            Wow. Nothing for eight months then two in three days. My blogs are like buses, bugger all when you want them, then three at once. Well two, actually. I’m not planning any more, so don’t panic. I won’t have time now I’m on my Antipodean diet/fitness/life routine. The “diet” bit means swap meat-and-two-veg for detox juices six times a day. “Fitness” means wait in the foyer until someone comes down for a run, or a gym session, and tag along – there are fourteen of us so that in theory is fourteen sessions a day. Oh, thirteen, because one of those fourteen is me. The “Life” component is half an hour chanting a day – it’s based on the Buddhist idea but draws on school detention for inspiration. I say – “I will make use of my time in a positive, constructive, maybe self-obsessed, way” – as many times as I can while listening to side one of “Dark Side of the Moon.”



            Do you think I can keep it up until next Sunday? Maybe if it works I should carry it on in New Zealand? And how is it supposed to “work” anyway? It’s a kind of holistic therapy, I suppose, combining all the elements an actor needs in the twenty-first century: Sound body, clear mind, and sweet breath. I think you’re getting the picture. Nothing we do is an altruistic act. Even this blog is a way to get to sleep after a show, in a crispy white bed, sucked into an air-con vortex. Which really means everything is just a way to keep the loneliness of the long distance tourer at arms length.

            We opened the first show last night, in a rather airy two-thousand seater, which appeared to be full, but when Autolycus talked to the audience he saw bright lights and the odd flannelette shirt, and linen chino, rather than the whites of the Antipodean eye. The seats start quite far back, and my contact lenses were a bit dry and misty due to unforeseen humidity issues, so I spent quite a lot of the evening trying to remember the lines that were flying somewhere in the stratosphere between Salford Quays waterways and Singapore skies. It was something of a culture shock for all of us, what with Ben’s dresses and everyone’s smelly grey shirts lost in a suitcase at one of Qantas’ luggage holds until twenty minutes before curtain up, new curly-wurly, Aborigone inspired sheep crooks amongst the new props, and two and a half jet-lagged days on the ozone-free-zone beach.

            The audience response was alive and lively, with more laughter in Sicilia than we are used to, and some Aussie-vowelled bravo’s at the end, so I think, as is often the case, when actors are working on the tips of their anxious toes, in an unfamiliar environment, what translates across the footlights is an energy that makes the performance seem fresh and vital. Perhaps that’s my new regime’s positive mindset taking charge, but I don’t think I’m delusional yet. It’s true, I felt less sure of what “aging rocker” statements to make in the “Daffodils” intro. Should I be Mick Jagger meets Harry H Corbett, Ozzy Osborne meets Frank Spencer, or Tony Bell meets the Southern hemisphere’s answer to Basingstoke. It’s hard to judge Perth, you see. In one sense it’s a sun-soaked beach of ludicrously tanned and sculpted beautiful people, and in another it’s a bunch of commuters walking briskly into high rise office blocks in shirt sleeves and sober ties.

            I haven’t got the measure of it yet, from my beige “ivory” tower. And I probably never will, if I devote my time in these strange and faraway lands to writing blogs on my laptop, gyming on the treadmill, and chanting “I must open my mind to new experiences” in front of the flat screen, below the framed print of some squiggly flora and fauna, that frankly, could have grown anywhere, or nowhere, except on a hotel room wall anywhere in the world. See you next time, after Henry has opened, my freckles have joined up, and my breathe has got lovely and pineapply.




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