TOUR IN, TOUR OUT

I’m into week two of the Marginal Mystery Tour: 1923 And All That! At a rough guestimate, 5 shows in, I think the production has been seen by around 1,500 people so far, maybe more. And, the best thing is, I almost know what I’m doing on stage. Although having said that, last night in London, my mind blanked out completely halfway through Act One and I had to resort to my carefully placed sheet of prompts hidden on the set. There is no subterfuge, however. I just announced it. “And now, folks, I have suddenly not the faintest idea what comes next.” People are forgiving. Actually, they find it unduly funny. So, maybe people are just cruel. Or both.

I decided to put “1923” on stage last summer, shortly after the book was published. Because the nature of “1923” (the book) was so markedly different from anything else I’d ever written, I was nervous about its reception. Masquerading at times as an amateur historian, I was wracked with all the attendant nerves associated with imposter syndrome. But, soon enough, when very lovely reviews came back, not just from the readership, but from The Observer, The Times, The TLS, The Telegraph (and even, heaven forfend, The Daily Mail), my worries were assuaged. That was when I committed to the idea of putting it on stage.

These things take a lot of planning, even a relatively modest 22 date tour like mine. A year out, the venues need to be sought by my producers, negotiated with, and booked. Then the tickets have to go on sale 6 months in advance, the artwork done, and the title dreamt up: all before the actual show exists; even in its most embryonic shape.

So, from February onwards, I started to dream up how I might set about staging a very complex, quite dark story (there are zero jokes in “1923”, the book). The story operates on a few levels, contemporary and historical, swapping timelines and running down endless cul-de-sacs. It is both personal and factual, grandiose and mundane. I had to figure out what mattered and what was perhaps expendable for a stage version. I had to think about what the book actually meant, which, weirdly, was something I never stopped and thought about too much when I was writing it. I just charged headlong through the process, carried forward by its own momentum.

Working with perhaps my oldest friend in the world (I have known Simon Scardifield since we were both ten years old), who is a brilliant actor, director and writer, we started to dream up a way of approaching the story, allowing room for its pathos to settle, its darker side to find expression, and, most importantly, building in regular safety valves of humour and light along the way. The fourth wall isn’t so much broken as regularly criss-crossed. And at the centre of it all, I play myself, alongside the silent figure of Théophile Beeckman, the anonymous rider from 1923, whose spectral presence accompanies me into my voyage backwards in time, and forwards again to meet his descendants he never knew, and who knew so little about him.

For at least six months, I fretted. Quite, quite unsure of whether or not what I had painstakingly created was a heap of junk or not, I became, in the weeks before the beginning of the tour, morbidly convinced of its failure. I thought that I perhaps had finally jumped the shark, or attempted to, and landed instead arse-first on its fin.

So to know how well it has been appreciated (because, bless you all, you have told me, face to face after the shows and online) is a wondrous thing. On stage, now I am getting confident with the show’s complex structure, I am allowing for silent moments to settle, when we all share a few seconds of quiet, as the stranger, subtler threads of the story weave themselves into place. I love this.

But then, the next minute, I’m up again in the spotlight, remembering encounters with Mark Cavendish, or paying tribute to and taking the piss out of my ITV colleagues. That’s when the light comes pouring back into the evening.

It’s the fifth time I have toured a show about the Tour de France. This is itself is lunacy. It is an idea that shouldn’t work. The theatres I go to (at least for the first time) can’t quite believe what’s happening. But then they ask me back, and I often return. This week, I visit the famous City Varieties in Leeds for the fifth time – it is a venue that has featured in every one of my tours. I already know that when I step on stage there, it will be packed to the rafters once again, and with friends.

These have been a strange few days for me, as I am sure you might be able to imagine. At first, when the news broke about ITV on Friday (I was on stage in Horsham hours later), I was unsettled by having to complete the tour with a cloud settling overhead. But now, a few days later, there’s nowhere I’d rather be. If you’re coming to any of the remaining 17 shows, I so look forward to meeting you, or at least being in the same space, laughing, and dreaming of summer. And the Tour. At the end of the day, that has always been the star turn.