DAVID

I think there are 3 key areas to look at from the individual’s point of view. Identifying the skills within yourself, preparation and reactivity.

IDENTIFYING

There is so much pressure on getting work that the desperation that can take over can outweigh the reality of you succeeding in the role you’re going for. It’s an absolute proven science that touring is not for everyone. However I firmly believe that can be mitigated by looking at yourself and your own process.

The hard part of that, is being honest with yourself. 

Ask yourself, in your life so far, how have you fared when being away from home? How do you get on in small groups? Are you good with new people? If you’ve ever had people say it can take a while to get to know you/get on with you, this is something you may have to consider addressing due to the hard and fast nature of getting on with other people, who are in the same boat as you. 

Do you have any life circumstances that might make it hard to do these kind of things? Spouse/child/sickly relative etc. There are two factors to consider here - one - the strain these things can have on you, and two - the additional strain that can add to the others in your tour company. 

On you - you can feel like you need to be everywhere all at once, and that can be detrimental to the work you’ve chosen to undertake. It’s really important that all sides of your domestic life at the very least respect the choice you’ve made to be away, but therein lies the issue - if being away causes more issue to your home life - you will have to return to it eventually, and that can lead to great difficulties. It’s not to say it can’t be done - but if you feel like you being away will cause more pain than good, then it might be worth considering alternative work. Gaining the respect and acceptance from loved ones can be difficult, but it’s vital for your headspace to be clearer when on an all consuming job. Not having it can give way to the job being too much. 

One thing that’s difficult to look away from, is accepting any job because they offer. It can be that you know deep down you don’t really want to do something - and you take it because nothing else does. That takes real guts to go through with because then you have to fight resentment right from the off. You have to be honest with yourself and look at the overall project, because ultimately you will need to find a redeeming quality of the job every day you do it. Whether that be the people, the venues, or hopefully - the people you’re with. But, for example, I worked with someone a few years ago on an outdoor show, she hadn’t had any work for a while, so took it because nothing else had. But, she hated the rain and/or cold, and so it was a long difficult summer for her, with lots of tears. I’m not confident she’s completely solved from it, but I am confident she won’t be making that mistake again - ultimately a mistake that with a bit better counsel - wouldn’t have been made to start with. So what I guess that leads into is - have a support network that can take your blinkers off. It’s easy to get tunnel vision, and think I have to get work, I have to get the rent paid etc, but take a step back and try and involve someone in the decision making process that isn’t in the industry to look at the sheer practicality of it. Other artists are prone to the same almost mercenary like attitude so it’s worth having someone who isn’t in the industry. They won’t get everything, but they might be able to spot a glaring hole or two.

By extension - identifying that you are a person first and the job you have is being an actor is ESSENTIAL. There are so many people who don’t get this, and it can make pub chat insufferable. But more importantly, it’s exhausting to be ON all the time. So - get some avenues in your life that aren’t anything to do with being an actor. For example, I have a football team that when I’m available - I play with once a week. I also love exercising, and having a few injuries in the last year has really proven to me how important that is for my mental health, which can really fluctuate with a totally inconsistent career. But at home - have a room where you work if you do tapes, if at all possible. Try not to bleed spaces as what you physical retain in memories can also affect your day to day. There will be periods of no work, and so you’ve got to try where possible to remove avenues of resentment,. Basically - do something regularly that has NOTHING to do with being an actor.

Part of identifying within yourself - is looking at momentum boosters you can give yourself. If you reverse engineer what you put on your tax return, can you afford to do something that will benefit your career? Trip to the cinema? Gym membership? New headshots? All those things cost varying degrees of money, but they all can have an effect on boosting your own momentum. Sometimes the jobs just don’t land, the castings just don’t, so keeping yourself ready to be there when they do - is important, It can be easy to think - I’ve got no work, I’ll just get a ’normal’ job, but before you do - look to see whether you can do anything to give yourself a boost. And be reasonable with yourself, there’s no point giving yourself sold office hours to refresh emails that aren’t coming in, set aside a day a week to make sure profiles are up to date, and send NEW correspondence. Obviously you can reply to older chats when they come in, but there’s far too much of an idea that actors are basically office workers when they’re not in a job, and it’s not the truth. You’ll go mad.

In summary - are you in the best position to down your home life and go on the road and be fully committed? Or if you’re not - can you live with it? What are you doing to keep your momentum going? What are you doing to separate your career from your life? Why are you taking the job? 

PREPARATION

Arguably the one where everyone falls down. In my near 15 years of touring experience, the people who have the worst experiences, are the people who haven’t prepared in one manner or another. 

Firstly - the actual job. It’s become more of a catchphrase in the last few years - ‘I can’t learn lines until I”m on my feet in the rehearsal room’. That  is in the top five of least favourite things anyone else wants to hear, unless you were ready to say it as well. Truth is - touring theatre especially, operates on such a small time scale, that you need to be as ready as you could possibly be for the first day of rehearsals. It’s not like there’s only lines to learn and that’s it, but if your head is in the script, you certainly aren’t being given direction other than basic blocking, and most importantly - IT JUST DOESN’T FEEL GOOD TO NOT KNOW. My gut is that actors who don’t learn their lines are protecting themselves from being criticised in a qualitative manner. IE - if I don’t know my lines, I can blame not knowing them for why I”m not getting a particular bit for example. The best rehearsal rooms don’t have wrong answers, but not knowing your lines doesn’t give you the chance to get it right.

Have a script that is separate to your phone. I know we don’t all have access to printers etc, and to an extent I’m ok with electronic scripts, but having it on your phone doesn’t delineate space between work and social. Physically it makes people bend in over their phones, and perhaps most importantly, whether its the truth or not, or you like it or not - it just looks like you couldn’t be bothered to print your script off. The likelihood is as well, is that if you have done any script work, it’ll be difficult to easily access the annotations on such a small device. And making notes as you go is much easier on a paper script. So basically, don’t use your phone. 

You’ve got a job! Well done. Now, are you going to wait until the contract commences and hope all those doubts and unanswered questions just go away, or are you going to address them? I hope the answer is the latter. Keep a note of any questions that come up, for example - are we staying in hotels, and collate them into an email. Send the email to the producer or whoever cast you, and a good company will come back to you and alleviate any concerns. Again - whilst slightly referencing the identifying part of this write up - remove avenues of resentment. If they don’t tell you things you wanted answered, you’ll either resent them or yourself for not knowing. When people say - if you have any questions don’t hesitate - literally don’t! So let’s use the girl I went on the outdoor job with - she should have asked do we still perform in rain? What are the hours? Do I have to share a room? Admittedly these questions should have been asked and answered in the audition - but the fear of being unemployable stops many from asking. Finding out tour basics can be addressed in rehearsals, but for packing for the job - it would be handy to know whether you’ll be in self catering Accom or hotels, so you can get a head start on things to bring with you. For example - hotels - bring an extension cable as travelogues are notorious for the plugs being really far away from the bed etc. 

With that in mind though - always give the information sent to you another read before contacting companies as something that always gets their goat is if they’ve already told you. 

If it’s your first tour - always pack that extra jumper you don’t know if you’ll need. Bring something from home as well. Nothing too precious that I’ll trigger you if you lose it - but something that provides comfort for the down days - which there will be. 

Are you a morning person? Do you shower in the morning? Can you go without breakfast? If the service station doesn’t have your dietary requirements will you be ok? Especially important for vegans and gluten free diets. Do you snore? Do you watch series for hours on end? Or get to bed by 10 every night. It might be an idea to know these before you leave, so you can manage your own expectations for the day. You might be in the back end of beyond, which makes it tough just to nip to the shop and get some chocolate etc, so having a stash is a great idea.

Something to prepare for - is that not every day is a laugh a minute. There will be difficulties - ranging from traffic to personal discourse, but if you set yourself up thinking it’s going to be a right old jolly where everyone is best mates and at each others weddings after, you’re setting yourself up for failure. Of course this DOES happen every now and then, but I can tell you after touring for a long old time, I regularly speak to about 10 of my colleagues I’ve worked with. I reckon with some bad maths, that represents about 0.5% of people I’ve worked with. Being ready to make friends is important but thinking they’ll be life long friends is probably a little naive. 

Prepare yourself for compromise. Probably the toughest lesson you can learn on the road, is that sometimes you’ll have to give ground even when you don’t think you should. Touring is all about the course of least resistance, and patching up issues where they arise. Simple reasons compromise can be required could be - who gets the room to themselves, where to eat, who’s driving, where you’re dropping off people etc, the list goes on. But the sooner that you realise you cant be touring an ego - the better. We all make bad decisions from time to time, but hopefully with the right support and compromise, your group will feel like it’s listened to, and giving everyone the opportunity to be heard. If there’s an imbalance of this - that’s when you can look at having a chat, but the group dynamic is so important and the energy you give to it is huge.

We’ll get to issues in the next section

REACTIVITY

So much of tour happiness comes from how you and others react to circumstance. Like life, there’s a tour balance, and it’s affected by its dynamic. You can react positively to this, for example, getting someone a coffee, or an ice cream etc when they’re having a bad day. The likelihood is this will be reciprocated in kind for if you have a bad day etc, but trying to rebalance the scales can really benefit the group. On the road, it’s pretty much just you guys out there, and no matter how much detail you pour down the phone, they won’t get the energy you have with your peers, so making that work is really worthwhile. They can become second families, on the longer jobs, so finding out which buttons are to be well left alone is a quest well worth undertaking. 

Most of the time, my advice would be to leave conflict well alone. Usually people just need time to cool off if there’s been a spillover of tension. If you think you were to blame, apologise at your nearest convenience, because again - resentment can build up if it’s not addressed earlier. 

Take every opportunity you can to have your own space. Even if someone who you get on with famously with wants to do things with you - make sure you give yourself the opportunity to be by yourself so you can tune out of the group wavelength and give yourself a circuit breaker. Simple things like just going for a walk, or getting some air. It can feel like you’re always on, and so giving yourself a chance to exhale is vital.

If you feel like the issue has become larger than you can deal with as a group - don’t try and still tackle it. Speak to your boss/company manager etc and see if you can work something out amicably with someone who acts as a mediator. It does happen and it doesn’t make you a failure to need someone to come in and work out what the objective truth is behind the version of events. Ultimately it costs a lot of money to replace actors, so the choice that most will make will be to try and make the current system work. I”ve only toured with a couple of people who’ve had no intention of group work or making friends, so I’d say on the whole, most don’t want issues, and therefore, they’d rather that they weren’t there. 

Communicate how you’re feeling. Always. To someone at the very least. If it’s outside the group - that’s fine to start with, but ultimately you’ll have to communicate it to the group eventually. The more you hide, the more you hide yourself, and you can distance yourself from the group quite easily like that. Communicate with your bosses, tell them how you’re getting on. If you haven’t had information you need, chase it - don’t let resentment seep in. Touring can feel like a battle to fend off negative emotion - but if you tackle it with positive reinforcement - getting a round of beers, praising each other etc it can be a thoroughly rewarding time.

Ultimately - no job is worth your own mental health. If you find it is too much, staying on a job for the sake of it can be really detrimental for the long run, so if you’re in what feels like the point of no return, communicate and see what options are available to you. No one is a mind reader, especially not so when the powers that be are 9/10 not with you, and won’t be able to see that you’re not fine. Be honest with yourself at all times. 

David