Walking Class Hero: Lover’s Walk
Welcome to Walking Class Hero a regular blog about walking and the walking environment. Whether you like walking on your own, with friends or in an organised group this blog will cover it. It’ll embrace walking in cities and towns and villages. Walking in the countryside and along the coast and up hills and down dales. Walking through parks and by rivers and across heath and down and moor. It’ll comment on public rights of way, access to open country, permissive paths, public urban space and countryside protection. Basically if you can walk there it’ll be in this blog
Lovers Walk (1 October 2010)
Back when I started this blog there was no point that I thought I’d being writing an entry as a theatre critic. This is a blog about walking, right? Theatre’s indoors, right? Theatre’s about sitting down, right? Theatre’s polite and passive, right? (Feel free to use as much rhetoric as you like answering those rhetorical questions.) Well Friday evening proved all this proved wrong for me. Devised and written by HighHearted Theatre and led by Matt Odell and Rosie Waters, Lovers Walk is an outdoor guided tour. As it helpfully says all over the information about the play: “Audience members are advised to wear suitable clothing and footwear”. It was performed down in Brighton earlier this year (during the summer) but transferred to the Southwark Playhouse for a 3 week run (during the autumn).
At this point it is important to mention the weather. There’s a line in Carole King’s I Feel the Earth Move: ‘I feel the sky tumbling down’, which although written about an earthquake, goes some way to describing the how the season of mist has announced its arrival this year across the whole country including London. Autumn rain – you bet. Maybe not the best day to choose to ‘rediscover the city through the eyes of the lovers, the lost, the lucky and the lonely, those whose stories haven’t yet been written on blue plaques or in history books’. Still the bar was open and almost empty so I prepared for the performance with a couple of pints of Meantime Pale Ale.
The 2 performers gathered us together in the bar, offered us umbrellas and then ushered all 19 of the ‘audience’ outside. Although the skies were ominously leaden the rain had finally stopped. The safety instructions were cunningly interlaced with the opening lines of the play. So we were ready to begin our outdoor guided tour with a difference. We crossed Tooley Street and threaded our way towards the river stopping every so often as the play played out in front of us. It visits the park benches, bus stops, alleyways and shop fronts that will never be forgotten; the scenes of first kisses, last fights and stolen cigarette breaks. Lovers Walk is a witty and poignant dissection of the ways in which a love affair can forever etch itself on a place.
The rain held off for the whole performance and the hour flew by as we meandered round the back streets of Southwark. The cast made the city part of the play and the one thing about being a Rambler is that I didn’t feel at all self-conscious about the public staring at us because I’m so used to leading big groups of walkers round urban locations. The dialogue was taut with just enough freedom for the odd ad-lib and the protagonists were both believable and likable and it didn’t feel the slightest bit odd traipsing around after them. Lovers Walk is a witty and poignant dissection of the ways in which a love affair can forever etch itself on a place and well worth giving a go if it plays in a town or city near you.
More information:
Southwark Playhouse: http://www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk/
Useful links:
o The Ramblers http://www.ramblers.org.uk/
o Meantime Brewing http://www.meantimebrewing.com/
o Carole King http://www.caroleking.com/home.php
Listen to:
Jonn Serrie – Where Lovers Walk
Ralph McTell – Streets Of London
Carole King – I Feel The Earth Move
Eric Clapton – Let It Rain
Crowded House – Weather With You
Neil Young – Walk With Me
- This entry was posted on: Friday, October 8th, 2010 at 11:30 am
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