I Told You This Would Happen - On Tour

Hello.

I'm going to put some thoughts about touring I Told You This Would Happen here because this show is really hard, and also really brilliant to perform.

I can't promise there won't be spoilers. So if you haven't seen the show and plan to, read on at your own risk. If you like knowing what's going to happen before they do, maybe join a group or something, because life happens man.

Thursday 28 May

We opened in Hull last night. Part of the story I'm telling happened in Hull. I realised as the Humber Bridge loomed from behind the bend of the M62 that I hadn't been back since. Good, I decided. I'm back on my own terms. Frankie's Tavern, the docks, the station. Still, good. 

The tech didn't finish until 19:40, I was on at 20:00. Less good. (Nobody's fault, brilliant and patient technicians getting to grips with a technically nuanced show). Lounged at the desk, sharpening my pencils, feeling more in the room than I remember feeling during the previews. Back then, I was deafened by my heart gulping in my ears, tonight I'm enjoying the pre-show music.

Clearance, first move, start talking: to the people in the room Kathryn. There are people here to hear you. I don't want to be here, I don't want to do this (I'm talking though, the words are coming out, in the right order). I feel this to a certain extent with every show, it's a hard story to tell, I have to get to a dark place by the end, and at the beginning that feels like a crazy thing to be volunteering myself for. But it's written in such a way that the play just happens to me, and the more I let it, the better it is. There was a catharsis when I wrote it, and there is in the playing too. 

I make eye contact with a couple in the front row, there's an interesting woman on the end, another older couple further stage right, a man I come to silently refer to as 'the reviewer' for reasons unknown to me, and a sporty looking man in the middle, on his own, possibly straight from the gym, what made him book this? I wonder. He's precisely who I want to have this conversation with tonight. Come on then, you're on.

Off to Halifax this morning. Raging thirst. 

Me: There's a retail park behind this roundabout, I'm just going to pop in there, want anything?

Tech: You really do know Hull then.

Me: Yeah.

In Boots: all Boots shops look the same except when you're a time traveller and it's 2007 and that's not the pharmacist you remember. 

Bought some vocal zones, because I'm here for a show. Still good.

Tech: So was it just coincidence then, that the tour started in Hull?

Me: Yeah. 

I slip Dr John into the cd player. Nicked my boyfriend's car cd case before I left. Feels good to be blasting some good blues as we zip up the flyover, past the Humber churning mud. 
Feels good to be playing music I listen to with someone brilliant. Feels good to be doing this on my own terms, and not on my own.

Halifax is lovely.

Friday 29 May

The get-in in Halifax made me want to take up smoking. The anticipation of performing filled my stomach with acid, at twenty to curtain up I'm having that kind of full body flush usually reserved for being sick. 

The show was fun though. Endless technical hitches gave my relationship with the space a live quality that allowed me to play, and we got some nice laughs.

I learnt I don't need feedback. I asked my producers to send out a feedback form with the programme sheet. What was I thinking?! People can have whatever reaction they want to this show, and frankly it's none of my business. 

Toying with the idea of collating any feedback I get and posting it to Douglas McPherson in a glass box with a big TICK painted on the side of it. 

Dear #tigerdouglas, 
Here is some testimony of what subsidised art means to people in rural communities and anywhere else that isn't ONE POSTCODE IN LONDON (who wouldn't see work like this or anything else without subsidy). 
A bientôt,
Beaumont x

PS. Turns out Capitalism isn't an entirely fair system and money has a funny way of making its way back to the same people. Measuring success on ticket revenue is a bit like the star rating system some of you critic types still go in for - pretty fucking arbitrary and entirely based on the bias of the critic or system.

And just one measure of many.

And I'm getting off topic.

Saturday 30 May

Cleaner show on the tech side of things meant it was easier for last night's audience to join the dots, and they were wonderfully with me through the whole thing. Chipping in with 'yeah's and 'oh no's. Looking forward to tonight, and a whole day in sunny Hexham with no get-in.

Tuesday 2 June

There's a thing that happens about two thirds of the way through the show, after we've had a few laughs, and around about the time of the 'fucking' slide, when people stop looking at me. Maybe it's counter transference on my part, but it feels a bit like I've betrayed them with what our relationship is about. I'm really pleased with this as a dynamic. It enacts the subject matter. 

To the woman who cried. I am sorry, but I hope it helped.

Doncaster tomorrow.

Great Aunt Joan

She wasn't religious, or married and had no children. She worked and travelled, and delighted in new discoveries. She went her own way. She was small and steadfast and strong; and her strength has become mine: galvanised by the way she lived. She was witty and wise, and I will miss her. I already miss her.

We watched The King’s Speech one Christmas, which she enjoyed ‘although, I don’t actually remember the speech they’re all going on about. But then we were being evacuated at the time, so we had other things on our mind.’ She remembered singing ‘Hark the Herald Angels Sing, Mrs Simpson’s pinched our King’. 

She went on to college and graduated as a teacher to deaf children. It was strictly forbidden at that time to use sign or even gesticulate too much so that children were forced to learn to lip-read, and she learnt to teach with her hands in her pockets.

She stayed curious and captivated by learning her whole life. There was hardly a time when she wasn't on a course, whether restoring Ancient pottery or reading Modern literature 'not really my period, I think I shall stick with my 18th century, I know all of them.'

She was stoic and private but also acutely astute and social.

Our last conversation before she went into hospital was about the trouble she was having with her iPad, which she had bought because 'as far as I can tell, if you're not on the email you may as well be dead'.

She had a smile that made her whole face turn upwards towards her eyes. Her laugh was simultaneously generous and knowing: a gleeful acknowledgement of ‘yes, I see what you did there’.

The last time I saw her was at the theatre, she had come to see me perform. At the top of the show we asked the audience to make little plasticine protestors and placards (it was a show about activism). Aunt Joan was not going to be rushed. ‘I don’t like all this pressure’ she declared to anyone attempting to badger her. I made a point of reading the placard she had given her protestor ‘No Bullying.’

She took herself to hospital during her first heart attack. On the bus. I went to see her in hospital and when I asked her what she wanted from her flat she replied 'Reading material. There's a copy of The Odyssey in the bookcase, bring that'. I laughed and asked if she wanted anything a bit lighter. 'Now's as good a time as any for Homer, don't you think?' came the reply.

I find myself wanting to use the word ‘delight’ over and over again. She delighted, brought delight, was delightful. She took pleasure, unapologetically. And was equally nonplussed about not going along with anything she didn’t want to. ‘We’re going for a walk in town Aunt Joan, fancy it?’ [Great Aunt Joan peers at the blizzard outside the window]. ‘No thank you.’ [Turns the page of her book, looks up, smiles].

She was born in Kennington, but for as long as I have known her she lived in Highgate. In a little crows nest of a flat at the top of the hill, on a clear day you could see the Eye winking from the Thames. She loved living in Highgate. ‘Victoria Wood lives in Highgate, sometimes you’ll see her out and about but nobody bothers her.’ When I lived in Muswell Hill, we would meet for lunch. She didn’t drink much anymore, ‘that’s the thing about getting old, you can’t do as many of the things you enjoy. But you must have a glass of wine, and I shall take pleasure from yours.’

She couldn’t drink proper coffee anymore either, but didn’t count instant ‘which is more of a coffee flavoured drink’.

‘Was it the years of drinking too much coffee when you were teaching that has stopped you drinking now?’

‘Yes’ and then after a pause ‘and all the gin’.

 

Have I said she was small? She was the size of a grande latte, which meant losing her in a crowd was almost guaranteed. I turned around for one minute in the British Museum, and that was it, she’d disappeared. ‘I don’t much like that photograph taken with your father, your Gran and I look like a couple of smurfs.’

 

But she was also a giant. If you try and follow her footsteps now you will see, by a trick of perspective, that in fact you can never span the full breadth and length of the imprint she left on the earth.

One of the last voicemails she left me was in typical Great Aunt Joan form. She didn’t want to make a fuss ‘we’ll revert to Plan A, I’ll give you a wave and then disappear.’ 
And then last week, she died. Suddenly, and without fuss, she disappeared.

There is a time for many words, and there is also a time for sleep.

- Homer, The Odyssey.

On you go Great Aunt Joan; I’m following right behind you, with my face turned upward to the sky.