Istanbul, Dubrovnik, Amman, Cairo . . . castles perched above the Bosphorous or the Adriatic, the backdrop of the Sphinx and the Pyramids.  All this conjures up a picture of floodlit arenas beneath the stars and velvet skies.  The imagination does not fill in other details—the make-up running in the pouring sweat, under a costume weighing 20 pounds more, in heat reaching 90 degrees even at night.  These, and gastro-enteritis, were not the only local hazards of this tour.
      In Dubrovnik, Antony and Cleopatra was played against the splendid backdrop of the Ducal Palace.  In fact this meant performing at the end of a sealed-off street.  The café next door to the palace stayed noisily open throughout and several hundred house martins roosting on the palace pillars were woken by the lights, decided it was dawn and kept up a deafening, screeching, twittering chorus, through which the actors had to shout to be heard.
      In Split it was Diocletian’s Palace which formed the setting—an all-too-solid palace when an actor going off stage left had to find his way through a maze of back streets and alleys in order to reappear stage right.  One of the actors, finding his way blocked in an alley by three apparent thugs, had the presence of mind to draw his sword to put them to flight.
      In Amman there were two kings in the audience, Hussein of Jordan and his guest Constantine of Greece.  Their presence required so many bodyguards that the actors had to push them aside to get on stage.  Only 100 yards from the Sphinx (for the Cairo performance) was a night club pouring forth Arab music while the open ground of the stage poured forth ants, half an inch long, which marched purposefully up the inside of cloaks and costumes.  And in Istanbul, the line ‘The rest is silence’ was answered by the mournful hooting of the ferrier in the Bosphorous below.
      Another diplomatic problem arose when Derek Jacobi’s passport was found to contain an Israeli visa.  He was hastily issued with a new one by the British Embassy to enable him to survive passport inspection at Cairo airport.  So great was the hurry that the passport photograph had to be taken in the interval, which is why, for the next ten years, surprised immigration officials will be confronted with a picture of him in the lace collar and beard of Hamlet.
      ‘You can’t do any really serious acting against such distractions,’ says John Nettleton, playing Polonius.  ‘Everything in the end is reduced to one strident note.  There’s no room for subtlety.  All you can hope for is audibility and knowing where to get on and off.’  

Edinburgh Festival

      ‘It will be nice to get back to acting again,’ Derek Jacobi says as they arrive back from the heat of Cairo to prepare to open the drama contribution to the Edinburgh Festival with Antony and Cleopatra.  They have had four days off—the first since rehearsals started six months ago—during which most of them have caught colds.  They arrive, oddly enough, to a setting just as makeshift and uncomfortable as the tents and castle dungeons they have toured and changed in around the Middle East:  the gaunt, grey, stony Church of Scotland Assembly Hall, the parliament of the elders of the Kirk.
      One enters the Assembly Hall through an outer courtyard where the giant, robed and broad-brim-hatted statue of John Knox raises its threatening hand against the sort of frivolity and loose living he no doubt associated with strolling players.  It is not an atmosphere friendly to drama.  A temporary Elizabethan stage with a balcony and an inner curtained space beneath it is being hammered together in the hall itself—usually given over to ecclesiastical debate.  Temporary amphitheatre seating has now been built over the pews, surrounding an open stage that is a postage stamp compared with the arenas the actors have just been playing on.
      Everything is makeshift once more.  Pieces of unsecured balustrade topple over during rehearsal.  Pillars wobble.  The paint on the stairs is wet.  And most of the entrances and exits have to be changed or adapted.
      If the stage is improvised, backstage is like an army field dressing station just behind the lines.  The Student’s Common Room of the Divinity School, which normally occupies the building, is partitioned into dressing cubicles.  In each narrow cell, four actors share a trestle table, a few mirrors and light bulbs and a row of coat hooks on the wall.  A few lucky ones have a wash-basin installed.  The rest have to trek to the public lavatories outside the hall.
      Meanwhile, perched above the cubicles, the company office from which the production is being controlled consists of three trestle tables and an ironing board . . . when the ironing board is not being used to press costumes just back from the cleaners.  There is one telephone from which all the administration, press and radio coverage, and contact with the Festival authorities, is somehow being organized.
      The costumes, which had been packed up still damp with sweat in the Middle East, and have now been cleaned and ironed, are still being mended by the wardrobe girls virtually as the actors climb into them for the public preview.  ‘It’s going to look so cheap from this close,’ mutters the designer, Nicholas Georgiadis, frowning from the front rows, which are only a foot or two from the stage.  In fact the costumes, made out of cheap furnishing fabric from a London department store, looks rich and magnificent—far more so than the balconied setting which was run up from a lorry-load of white timber which the company brought with it.
      ‘I like this kind of sordid chaos really,’ says Dorothy Tutin, making up as a bejewelled Cleopatra in front of a tiny mirror, with her belongings strewn around her on the floor.  ‘You are trying to make believe in terribly discouraging circumstances—which is what the actors of old had to do.  I like it better than sitting in a proper dressing room, surrounded by flowers and telegrams and people telling you you will be marvelous when you know you’re not.  Carrie!’—she calls her dresser—‘Where are my rings?  Haven’t we got any better ones?’  Carrie says she will go shopping tomorrow round Woolworths.  
      Two hours before the first night proper, Dorothy Tutin’s voice is giving out.  Pastilles and port and lemon are sent for.  As the director gives his last notes to the cast, the balcony is still being adjusted, the downstage entrances through the auditorium are still being painted, music is still being changed and, as always, ASMs are sweeping the stage.
      ‘We have got to get the feeling that time is running out for Antony,’ says Toby Robertson sternly.  ‘Ceaser is marching, events are overtaking him, he is a desperate man, a loser.  If you can take five minutes out of the second half without gabbling you will have done it.  Disintegration—that’s what it’s about.’
      ‘That’s what it’s about all right,’ wails Dorothy Tutin.  ‘My throat is disintegrating.’
      After so many try-outs at home and abroad, that old first night adrenaline can still be sensed amid the hum of electric shavers and ceaseless traffic of people borrowing eye-liners and safety pins in the field dressing station.  Does tonight feel different?—‘Yes, it does.  Pulls you together,’ says Alec McCowen, pulling on his cloak of gold thread and already barking in the style of Antony.  ‘Can I get you anything,’ asks someone.  ‘Courage,’ answers Derek Jacobi.
      Over the partition a voice can be heard singing wordlessly, hopping between two notes like a bird.  Dorothy Tutin is trying to encourage her voice.
      Thanks to the inevitable parade of pipers holding up the traffic and the audience outside, the play begins late.  The darkness banishes the feeling of a glorified church hall with its temporary scaffolding and plywood.  The narrow space and the low, unimpressive balcony which must serve in quick succession as Rome, Alexandria, a ship of war and a monument, somehow helps to contain the sprawling play and put the imagination of the audience to work—as it must have done for Shakespeare’s first audiences, piled into the Globe round a very similar acting area.  The costumes, in effect, become the scenery.  Their magnificence (even if obtained on the cheap) is not wasted.
      Dorothy Tutin, scarcely able to speak on her first entrance, finds her voice once the first hurdle is past:  the hoarseness was entirely psychological.  Now she is using it to sound notes that she has never attempted at previous performances.  You can feel confidence seeping back.  Timothy West, who tore a ligament when his foot missed the stage in the Middle East, has turned his bandage and stick to good account as Enobarbus, who now stumps the stage leaning on a pole, an old soldier bearing his wounds doggedly.  To everyone’s surprise, the play has gone well.
      How do actors unwind after three and a half hours strung up to this pitch?  The ‘darling-you-were-marvelous’ scenes that the public imagines are impossible for a repertory company, which lives and works together much too closely to trade in hypocrisy.  But it is necessary to be reassured afterwards, especially by the director, that the play has gone all right—or otherwise.  ‘I’ll be giving notes tomorrow,’ Toby Robertson adds to his congratulations.
      After that, most people eat.  Food, impossible before the performance, becomes the allayer of anxiety and the soother of nerves.  And on tour in provincial Britain it is not easy to find at that hour.  ‘If you can just get a meal after you’ve finished work,’ says Timothy West with feeling, ‘you feel you’ve won a major battle.’
      Bundling into Dorothy Tutin’s small car, helter-skelter down from the Castle Heights of Edinburgh, they wind up, almost inevitably, at a Chinese restaurant.  It is open.  There is a burst of high spirits.  Is this moment one of the ‘highs’ that addict actors to their work like a drug?
      ‘I’m never really elated, whatever nice things people may say,’ says Dorothy Tutin.  ‘The ultimate judge is really yourself—and you are always thinking of things that you should have done better.  Sometimes you feel more like weeping.’
      ‘There are nights of feeling elated but they’re usually a bad sign,’ says Alec McCowen.  ‘The performances you have enjoyed most are usually not very good ones.  You have probably been too self-indulgent.’
      But there must be times, surely, when an actor feels he has the audience in the palm of his hand?—‘Yes,’ says Timothy West.  ‘And you’d be very foolish to assume that because it’s happened, you’ve got them for the rest of the evening.  An actor has always to be wary—or you lose them again without knowing it.  If things are going well, one great satisfaction is to take a risk that you haven’t taken before—a way of playing a certain thing—and then hear the audience confirm that it’s come off.’
      For anyone who still assumes that the life of a successful actor—as all these are—is one long ego trip, there is news.  ‘If you’re left with one shred of self-respect at the end,’ declares Dorothy Tutin, ‘you’re lucky.  It’s like being in a war.  You feel that vulnerable.  You never know what’s going to hit you.  In a company like this one, you feel you’re going over the top.  Yes,’ she declaims proudly, ‘we go over the top.’
      ‘And isn’t it wonderful?’ says Timothy West, settling down to study the menu seriously.  ‘It’s over.  And we’re all dead.’