Avenue Q has 7 weeks left on the road; my shoulders are
relieved, my bank manager is anxious and I am becoming nostalgic. I have been re-visiting all of the cities we
have seen in my mind and I think we will have experienced a fair cross-section
of The British Isles in 6 months.
Back in April, whilst wandering around the beautiful city of
Canterbury, I pondered over pilgrimages as I saw the shrine of St Thomas Becket
in the cathedral. Millions of people
have journeyed to this site, the most notorious being the characters in
Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales to see where the Archbishop was murdered in 1170 - travellers
are on my mind again! People are
inclined to travel for various reasons; so, of course, my brain began to make
comparisons with my own group of troubadours.
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A pilgrimage is “a journey or search of moral or spiritual
significance, typically to a location of importance to a person’s
beliefs.” So where should we actors head
for? Stratford-upon-Avon? The BBC? Or maybe Greece to holiday where
theatre first began, (that’s if the Euro holds out.) Chaucer’s pilgrims told stories as they trudged
from Southwark, across the South Downs, towards Canterbury; lusty tales of
adultery, money and power – Chaucer obviously felt that everyone has a story
worth sharing.
My current travelling companions hail from Japan, USA,
Australia and the UK and we all, too, have histories and stories to tell. Indeed, I choose to divulge mine here
online. It is “en vogue” to tweet, blog
and ‘status update’ our stories nowadays; I would hardly call my blog here
classic literature but perhaps tweeting our nightmare train journeys is the
modern day equivalent to Chaucer’s roaming tales. Young Gabby in the company is a wonderfully
witty tweeter @GabbyBro, especially with her #dailylesson tweets, so I have
cast her as our “Avenue Q Chaucer!”
“At night was come into that hostelry,
Well nine and twenty in a company
Of sundry folk of aventure ye-fall
In fellowship, and pilgrims were they all.”
General Prologue, The
Canterbury Tales
“Rehearsing new cast of# avenuequktour at
@Jerwood Space,
Southwark, heading to Canterbury in April”
General Tweet via
Twitter in 2012
In the “Eat, Pray, Love”
generation, we often believe that escaping the humdrum of everyday life will
help us find solutions to life’s problems.
After messy break-ups or crappy auditions I am sure that a month in an
Indian ashram is the only answer, hoping that meditating and yoga at dawn will
help heal the loneliness, insecurity and general self-loathing. You could say that the middle-class youths rite
of passage, the “gap year” is a pilgrimage of sorts; dealing with the inability
to go to Uni or settle down until they have found themselves via fish-bowls in Bangkok
or skinny dipping in Sri Lanka.
 |
| This beach in Cuba helped my troubled mind a bit! |
We, on the Avenue Q tour, all have our own reasons for our theatrical
pilgrimage; ambition, a desire to escape normal life or just paying
mortgage. We may have wheely suitcases
instead of the clothes on our backs and be seeing the South Downs through a
South Eastern train window instead of on our knees like poor King Henry II, but
perhaps our motive are similar; to pursue a personal goal.
I’m not sure if our journey has “a spiritual or moral
significance” (I certainly found none of the above in Coventry,) but every
journey and its participants deserves recording, whether it is online or in a
leather-bound book.
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