“Spreading The Word”

BY MATTHEW DUNN

Last Tuesday I was in the fine city of Nottingham to engage with an actor, a director, an unnervingly adroit theatre crew of burly blokes, and a Nottingham Albert Hall packed with theatre-goers. Oh, and I was also in the metropolis to meet a CIA spy.

Nottingham was a first for me and, aside from knowing that it’s famed for stealing from the rich, I knew little about the place. It’s big and does have a tendency to go on and on, least ways if one’s on a “bum’s rush” to reach a hotel, get sorted, grab a taxi to the Albert Hall, and admire a mighty organ while having a pre-show 2 hour meeting with vested-interest experts who occasionally had a somewhat disconcerting tendency to adopt a thousand yard stare while looking at nothing and muttering things like, “Fingers crossed”.

But time accelerated in that former Victorian place of godly worship and before I knew it I was backstage behind a massive curtain with the show moderator who’d once acted in The Onedin Line and an American who’d unwillingly waterboarded Al-Qaeda masterminds. Though we couldn’t see them, the three of us - “The Talent” as we were wholly inappropriately called - could hear the audience arriving on the other side of the curtain. Music was playing. Announcements were being made. Vast on-stage TV screens were crackling.

The Washington Man started quickly sipping water and had a look in his eyes that was probably not dissimilar to the one he had when he wanted to know who started 9/11. The Actor began loosening his vocal chords with a massage technique that apparently he’d learned from Peter Cushing on the set of a vampire movie. And I distracted all thoughts by pondering the adjacent organ and its impressively convoluted keyboard, wondering if the antiquated thing still worked and whether people would see the funny side if I got on the damn thing and gave it a go.

But no time for that because then the tannoy blares: “Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome on stage…”

On goes the professional actor-come-moderator.

But before Count Dracula’s nemesis takes to the mic, the two spies have a moment alone. We look at each other and smile. It’s a faint kind of smile. Knowing. One that all spies understand. One that resignedly yet mischievously says, “Never a dull moment”.

SHOW TIME.