Malta

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In fair Verona where we lay our scene...

... Or in this case, Malta. A little note of exposition for our journey to Malta. We had spent a weekend off in Vienna, which was a decadent slurry of museums and fine food and flea markets and cake and prosecco and sculpture and ‘oh dear, there’s a big bar brawl outside of Café Sultan’. But I won’t get into that here. The important thing is that we got to Vienna airport, and got on our plane to Malta.

And then we got off again. Having not left Vienna airspace. Cue 11 hours of loitering around an airport like disaffected teenagers at SPAR. We have to break into a Starbucks just to have somewhere semi-comfortable to sleep: our rationalization is that dealing with swords after exactly 0 hours sleep would not be a good idea, and we need our rest while they fly a new plane over to us from Malta.

But we can’t sleep. So we organise a prestigious, multi-national chariot-race (read luggage-carts) through the terminal. Many of Shakespeare’s plays could be referred to as an adventure, but many of them are not about trying to keep a cast of actors under control in a semi-deserted terminal whilst they worry about whether they’ll make it to their show the following day. Now that could be called an adventure. It’s a lovely moment when you realise that in all of the years that Vienna airport has been up and running, that this is probably the first time that an entire cast has spun through the corridors inviting other delayed, currently infrequent flyers to run the Ben Hur gauntlet. We line up 8 hardy champions and manage to begin the race just as security appear and start their grim march towards us. Cue a hectic gallop through the terminal, past sleepy travellers and admirers taking flash photography. The closest we’ll ever get to the Tour De France, I’m sure.

Anyway, without too much ado we are up in the air by 5am and touching down in stifling Malta that morning, eager for some shut-eye before the evening performance. We see a suitcase on the luggage travellator which Benvolio jokes is mine: it is wrapped in brown masking tape and has had it’s handle broken off, clothes trailing out of it sadly. Then I look closer. It is mine. The farcical nature of the situation wins me over, and I smile as the airline lady takes photos and gives me an insurance claim. But misfortune descends in threes, and as we exit the airport we discover there is a taxi and bus strike. We call the Maltese Festival to be picked up. When they arrive, with two small trailers for luggage, and Juliet’s bag is popped up, a pack of taxi drivers begin arguing with our festival contact. They seem to think he’s a private taxi driver, crossing the picket line. The tension escalates, the argument explodes, and a short, brawny Maltese driver picks up Juliet’s suitcase as if it were a cardboard box and throws it from the trailer. The crowd erupts in indignation or affiliation. It’s like something from On The Waterfront. Brute solidarity. The police arrive but quickly make it clear whose side they are on. We trudge along to a McDonalds café, slightly disturbed to notice a car-full of taxi drivers are following us. I have a feeling the night’s lack of sleep and broken luggage-rage may come in useful after all.

Curious point: over the past twelve hours we socialist, anti-capitalist actors have taken refuge from homelessness and violence in a Starbucks and a McCafé. We feel dirty. But the irony is pleasing in it’s audacity.

Back at the hotel, we all manage a few hours sleep, then wake up in the rooftop pool with a side helping of sunshine, extra large. I’m not sure that any of us were expecting an island with such a North African feel – hot, yellow and ochre flat-top buildings, spiced up with Latin balconies and balustrades.

There is an unfathomable heat. It’s like performing in a sauna. Our playing space is on the top of the Maltese botanical gardens, looking out over the busy harbour and beautiful, clustering buildings. There are crickets in the trees above the stage (lovely trees that you can brush against from the camper van — that’s a new touch), although the crickets in this case sound more like electricity pylons. The audiences are bursting at the seams, so it’s back to performing completely on three sides, almost in the round. The stage is littered with giant ants and upstaging cats. One such cat, actually, a beautiful silverback with bright green eyes, manages to make a double-whammy cameo: one during Mercutio’s: ‘Why, he’s more than the prince of cats…’, and again on Romeo’s: ‘Every cat and dog and little mouse…’. Note to Globe: get him in for next year’s season.

The audiences are so enthusiastic that they, as one cast member put it, need taming, focusing. In Tybalt’s stabbing of Mercutio my bandana manages to slip off just as I’m thrusting the blade, and the blood-red Capulet colours fly through the air and land in the audience. We bag our second standing ovation, though it seems more relaxed and much less life-or-death here than in Romania.

A word about sweat. I think we are actually wetter here than in our Mancunian saturation. Smells were coming out of our costumes that we had not had the pleasure of encountering before. After my fight with Mercutio and Romeo I lie onstage pretending to be dead and between the heat and the costume and the exhaustion I think I might just throw up. As upstaging goes, it’s a winner. Thankfully I keep my body-heat and gag-reflex under control. I’m very glad that this is (hopefully) the hottest weather we’ll see.

Fireworks gild both nights’ shows — a Maltese tradition, apparently, all through the summer. That’s a lot of fireworks. It complements the Capulet party scene very nicely indeed.

Malta being primarily English speaking, the audiences are much more ‘British’, albeit a more docile strain of bulldog. I wander down to a local shop and ask them if they have postcards, Irn Bru and rolling tobacco. ‘Of course,’ he grumbles back to me in east end dialect, ‘It’s a newsagents, ain’t it?’.

I think we’re all ready to return to the green hills of England for now. But, as these diaries will hopefully have made clear, this has been the opportunity of a career-time. I wonder how many of Shakespeare’s plays made it to Europe back in his day. Answers on a postcard please. Hopefully we did the bard proud.

Perri Snowdon

Have you seen the show? Post your thoughts on the Romeo and Juliet blog.

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