I suppose it was inevitable but the reality of it is nonetheless hard to accept. My one remaining booking for Fylde Show at the end of September has been cancelled. So the travelling theatre in all its repainted splendour, new stage floor, new booth for Martin, every flat re-varnished, props gloriously gleaming – all will remain in lonely lockdown for 2020. The spike in Preston has spooked the local authority and they couldn’t allow it. I do understand.
I spent a long night last night working with a wonderful video man - check his show reel out here - https://www.victorpennington.com/. If you are looking for a video solution to anything then he’s your man. He travels. I asked him to film a short show for Barking Folk Festival which is going online next month and we spent an exhausting but fruitful few hours together. I think the end result, which I will share with you once it is edited and ready for viewing, will be as good as it could be considering my ambivalence about video.
However I found the filming process exhausting and it took quite a toll on this old frame of mine. A night of pain with cramp was the penalty. The sort of cramps I generally have after the first few shows of the season. By August I am usually well into the swing of it and l am leaping around the stage in my usual flouting of the accepted laws of nature; that a 70 year old man shouldn’t be jumping anywhere, and certainly not squeezing through folding chairs, balanced on a plank.
So you are the first to hear it here. Next season will be my last with the stage. There I’ve said it. I’ve been working up to telling you, keeping my counsel. But I need to embrace the obvious (you can’t embrace anyone else these days) and the pandemic has been the precipitative push I needed. My intentions are still in the process of being worked out in detail, but the shows I do next year will allow me to finish paying off debts and to find the next keeper of the theatre. Big Doc Marten red boots to fill.
I designed and built the theatre in 1984 and steered it through all its different stages. Three different and extremely talented artists have responded over the years to the challenge of painting my dreams. From sitting on the winched-down side of the Billy Boy Brown and the Circus FG 550 truck bought from Martin ‘Zippo’ Burton when I was his first Ringmaster, through the seasons in a box trailer towed behind my Hobby and the ridiculous American motorhome I once owned, through to its current bespoke and beautifully-painted trailer, towed behind my lovely live-in lorry. Apart from the (painted) poster on the back wall alongside the stage door, I have never personalised the theatre to Mr Alexander. It was always a theatre in which Mr Alexander happened to be performing. I always knew that it would outlive me, indeed it was designed to do so. And now the time has come for it to move on. And yes, of course I will cry.
But it is the right thing to do. I have written recently about the new rules that must govern outdoor shows. Indeed I have helped to write some of them with pages of risk assessments. However the thought of this new way of working doesn’t make me feel excited or happy. I would rather remember shows as they used to be, with hundreds of families overlapping each other, fighting for a square foot to sit, watching bunched up children alongside total strangers in the Summer sunshine, than be part of them as they will have to be from now on; sitting masked in bubbles, avoiding contact, the scent of sanitiser swirling in the breeze.
I can’t do this quickly or overnight, so a final season will allow me to say goodbye to the many, many lovely people who have watched the show, who have invited me to their celebrations, festivals and events and have been so much part of my life for getting on for fifty years. I hope my talented and trusty troubadour friend Martin will tinkle the ivories one final season. And of course I will be still be around in some form. It isn’t a death sentence or a terminal illness, thank goodness.
It might be in video, it might be in other forms. I need the time and space to think about what I am going to do. A bucket list of sorts I suppose. Perhaps I can teach. I have ideas for an entertainment school. I know I have a way with words so I hope you are pleased that the blog will continue. If I had a good memory I could tell my story but to be honest it has all blurred into an impressionist painting of a life, probably painted by Degas or Lautrec. Trying to make out all the little details that would be the backbone of any biography would be boring and bothersome. (I do like alliteration).
I know there will be many who will shed that tear with me. But courage, mes braves. Life goes on. There will always be shows. There will always be entertainers, storytellers and shaman. Shamen? Shamans? Shapersons?
All the best from a road near you,
Mr Alexander
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