The very best Brits!

“WHEN I was at primary school we had to do a project over one summer holiday about something we were interested in. I chose to do mine on New York City. I'm not really sure why. I had never been and would never visit until November 2009. Something fascinated me about the city, it seemed wonderful, vibrant, alive, a place where anything could happen. I poured over street maps, staring at the grid, the districts, read guide books and even wrote to the American Embassy asking for help with the project. Being from a working class area of south east London the Ambassador obviously saw a bit of cultural duty coming on and invited me and my mother to come and look around the Embassy. It was the first time I had set foot on 'American' soil, and the nearest I got to Manhattan until we emerged, blinking and overwhelmed from a subway station between 60th and Park into the spotlit brightness of a sunny New York morning last November.

'We' were actor Saul Jaffe, compser/musician (and my long suffering husband) Paul Wild, production manager Simon Beckett and his wife Susan, and we were there to open The Elephant Man at the Brits Off Broadway Festival at the East 59th Street Theatre in the heart of Manhattan.

Proteus had produced the show first in 2007, opening at Central Studio, Basingstoke, then touring village halls, arts centres and small theatres in Hampshire and nationally. The show was incredibly well received and we had rave reviews, The Stage calling it ‘A technical and artistic masterpiece’. We revived the piece in 2008 for another tour via two festival appearances in the north of England and were then invited to the Edinburgh Festival in 2008. It was here that the producers for 'Brits' saw the show and invited us to the festival.

As I read that sentence it really doesn't do justice to the amazing journey that the show has made - from touring rural village halls where a Basingstoke resident could see the show in their community - often for less than the price of a take-away pizza - to a theatre just off Central Park, opening alongside Sir Alan Ayckbourn's brand new show!

The Elephant Man is a show about the life of Joseph Merrick, the most famous 'freak' of the Victorian era. Proteus has always worked with people on the margins of society, we are a theatre company committed to bringing theatre to all, and enabling everyone in the community regardless of age, race, disability or socio-economic status to participate in the arts, and therefore Joseph Merrick's story was an obvious choice for us.

I wanted to find a fresh take on the story and this led me to decide on a one-man show. Actor Saul Jaffe and I had worked together on and off for ten years and I had been thinking about creating a one-man piece with him for some time. The clincher was that after googling ‘the elephant man' it emerged that the condition he suffered from was discovered and named Proteus Syndrome around the same time that the company changed its name from Horseshoe to Proteus. I am, like most theatre people, very mindful of what the fates may be communicating, and this seemed just too symmetrical to ignore.

When we were invited to the Brits Off Broadway Festival, Ross Harvie (Proteus' creative producer and the man who makes it all happen) and I were by turns ecstatic and terrified. Proteus, like all small arts companies that offer real access to the community, are in grateful receipt of public funding. To take the company to New York would cost the company more than we were likely to receive in ticket sales from the run, and so we needed a sponsor.

One of the best things about working in the arts is the vast amount of talented people one meets and works with. Mary Rose, our business manager, is one such person. An incredibly talented actress with runs in the West End, Broadway, and of course Proteus under her belt, she was also general manager of The Old Vic for several years. She set about talking to Basingstoke businesses about us and the opportunity to go to New York, and found the perfect partner in Basingstoke-based global pharmaceutical company Shire.

The company has offices around the world including the United States and their focus is on the development of a range of treatments for specialist medical conditions, including medicines for rare diseases and in particular promoting early diagnosis and treatment for devastating physical abnormalities in children. Jessica Mann, senior vice president at Shire, and her team therefore deeply understood the contemporary parallels of Merrick’s story and also saw the opportunity to make a huge difference to a local company. So after a warm-up performance at Central Studio and then another at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, in London, we packed the set into a crate and sent it off to the big apple. Meanwhile Ross set about organising accommodation, travel, visas, and working out who would be in New York when. And so there we were, outside a subway station on what I could only describe as a film set.

If you haven't been, New York is like having permanent deja-vu. Look, over there, is the street the giant Marshmallow man walked down in Ghostbusters; there's the restaurant where Carrie met Big in Sex and the City; that's the cinema where Woody Allen meets Diane Keaton in Annie Hall.. Come to think of it, pretty much everywhere in New York is in a Woody Allen movie.

It doesn't disappoint, and to see 'Proteus theatre company, Basingstoke' written on a banner a stones throw from Central Park was quite the most surreal experience!

The venue was amazing, three theatre spaces from a small studio where we were, to a large auditorium (with around the same capacity as The Haymarket) where the Ayckbourn play was showing. We were staying in a house in Queen's - the real melting-pot of New York, with a dazzlingly diverse community, like renting a house on Brick Lane. The house, which had been the family home of a wonderful Latin American lady called Maria, was a short subway trip to the venue in Manhattan, and the experience of riding it every day like a native was wonderful.

After a good flight from Heathrow to JFK we had a couple of days to recover from jet lag and a day to get the set, lighting and technical aspects of the show up and running before the first performance.

The set was due to be delivered at 8am to the theatre. The production manager for the venue, Jim - a friendly red-haired, outdoorsy-all-American type - had promised to meet us and help get the crate inside the theatre. The van, improbably named 'Big John Trucking' arrived and we expected the driver to unload the crate to the side of the road for us. However, the driver made it very clear that all he was asked to do was to drive the crate there - he had no idea how to get it off the vehicle and was not prepared to clamber up into the back of the van to help push it off!! I inevitably had to assist, whilst our muscle-bound driver stood by and watched us struggle to unload a 12ft-by-4ft crate jam packed with the show's set and props onto the sidewalk and into the theatre. Having succeeded we sent the driver on his way - without a tip.

Once inside the question that had been waking me up at 3am for the past fortnight was about to be answered - had anything been damaged irrevocably on the way over? Would we be scouring Manhattan for a phrenology head? Or frantically searching the internet for an overhead projector bulb? To my eternal relief, all but one item was left undamaged, one of the three tailor’s dummies that we use in the show had suffered a cracked base. There were a tense few minutes as Simon tried, failed, then succeeded in fixing it with the strongest glue known to man and the material that binds the universe - gaffa tape. We had a fantastic local technician called 'Paddle' (due to her stint on the University rowing team, real name Trisha), who would take over running the show from our Simon when we returned home.

The venue were incredibly enthusiastic about the show and made us feel wanted and valued. As we were leaving the space to find some lunch on the first morning the festival producer stopped us and said he had needed a second opinion on the show’s publicity material while we were mid-flight, so he had called Jack Hofsiss for advice. Hofsiss is the award-winning director of the original Broadway production starring David Bowie and Penny Fuller – an actress who had won an Emmy for her role as Mrs Kendall in the television adaptation! After Saul and I had picked ourselves up off the floor we smiled weakly and staggered off - we were most definitely not in Kempshott now!

Audiences were small but enthusiastic for the first couple of nights, and then we were almost full every night for the rest of the run. American audiences are very different to us, not being raised on panto the audience participation within our version of the story was clearly very alien to them. For some it was clearly a delightful revelation - an actor allowed to interact off script with an audience - for others it was clearly the most unnerving experience they could have had in a theatre. New York audiences are well-known for their enthusiasm to leave the theatre at the end of the play and even if they have enjoyed the show they hardly allow a curtain call before they are off and out! Luckily for us, all our audiences called Saul back for extra bows at the end, but none would ever stay for a post-show drink. The theatre had an excellent bar but it was always full of 'Brits' actors post-show, never audience.

The critics were enthusiastic about us: “Stunning and moving theatricality” said Backstage, New York, “Saul Jaffe’s one-man performance is a tour-de-force” came from Curtain Up and Theatermania, New York called it: “Impressive, striking and memorable”.

The only negative review coming from one who was annoyed that a 'character had disappeared halfway through the play never to return' - this was because the critic in question had fallen asleep about 15 minutes in - despite a very lively audience laughing uproariously - and woken up after the character in question had left the story. I know this because I was sitting next to him!

It all seems like a movie to me now. My top New York moments included being mistaken for a Manhattan native and asked for directions by a yellow cab driver, seeing the streets of Times Square empty of traffic like a scene from a zombie movie on Thanksgiving Day and, of course, the huge poster on the side of the theatre with my name on it - not quite in lights, not quite Broadway, but for that eight-year-old girl drawing the Empire State Building on the front of her notebook - close enough. For now at least.

And on the opening night of Princess and the Pea back here at Central Studio in Basingstoke, I had a text from Saul. He was just on his way to the theatre, climbing the subway stairs and emerging into that beautiful spotlight.”