From SAN DIEGO'S GLOBE to LONDON'S GLOBE: UK Theater Tour with Blue Badge Guides, Guest post by Hal Fuson

Stage, Globe Theater, London

I thank my friends Hal and Pam Fuson for the following post about their recent trip to the UK for a close-up look at the British theater scene, led in part by the excellent Blue Badge Guides.

Recently, long-time friends pushed us to join them on a theatre-themed tour of London, Bath and Stratford-on-Avon sponsored by The Old Globe Theatre, a San Diego company with an 80-year history of producing Shakespeare and a wide range of other plays, both new and old.  As a director of The Old Globe I knew many of the other forty members of the tour group and, of course, we shared an enthusiasm for seeing plays and looking behind the scenes at some of the world’s other great theater companies, including London’s 1990s reproduction of Shakespeare’s original theater, also known as The Globe.  

Mild October weather makes the gardens of Blenheim Palace, where Winston Churchill spent his early childhood, a welcoming stop in Oxfordshire.

If anything, the prospect of being in the hands of a tour company was more of a negative than a positive. On earlier trips we had successfully bought discount theater tickets at the Leicester Square TKTS ticket booth. And since we did more or less speak the language, we questioned the necessity of paying someone else to steer us about on a schedule not our own. Happily, as it turned out, we rather enjoyed being steered about, partly because we could always blame the tour company, instead of ourselves or our friends, for the inevitable mishaps and aggravations of travel.  If the bed was a little too soft, or the food service a tad slow, or the last sight a bit passé, well, so it goes. There was always a next restaurant or another fascinating backstage for us to look forward to without any of us having to worry about the timing or the tickets.  

Wearing signature orange National Theatre jackets, tourists go behind the scenes

A stark reminder of what can go wrong came at our first theater booking, “The Play that Goes Wrong,” a farce that is doing well in London’s Covent Garden.  What went wrong for us was that our forty seats were double-booked, apparently because of an error by the ticket agency on which our tour operator had successfully relied for more than twenty years. The tour operator compensated by finding us seats for a matinee a few days later, this time featuring David Suchet as Lady Bracknell in “The Importance of Being Earnest.” It helped that the Oscar Wilde masterpiece was directed by Adrian Noble, the former director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, many of whose Shakespeare productions we had seen during his turn as the artistic director of the summer festival at San Diego’s Globe.  

Blue Badge guide describes the effect of later additions on Hampton Court's architectural integrity.

Another task the tour operator undertook for us was hiring a remarkably good crew of guides, all of whom were certified holders of Blue Badge status under the UK’s demanding system of training and testing.  Each guide had charge of groups of 15 or less when we were moving on foot, which was most of the time when we weren’t seated in theaters or restaurants.  

Visitors peer down at the Roman baths with the Bath Abbey looming in the background.

 Not only did they know where to lead us and what to say about the sights along the way, they were theatrical acts onto themselves.  They herded groups of us mostly older cats, with our different capacities for mobility, hearing and attention span, keeping us on defined time schedules across busy urban landscapes crisscrossed with traffic diversions and occasional traverses of royal or parliamentary carpools.  Not the least of their skills was in always knowing the way to the best nearby pub and, shortly thereafter, to the nearest restrooms, or, in the Queen’s English, the “loo”, a matter of considerable intensity for us older folk.

At tea in this home in Bath, Jane Austen, or a very good likeness, still reads from her work.

But managing the logistics is only the beginning.  Just as important is the guides’ stock of stories about the sights we were seeing.  For example, the origin of the terms “loo” and “Big Ben”.  It happens, as a guide in London told us, the origins of both terms are a bit hazy.  One story is that “loo” has something to do with the Waterloo train station, or even with the battle after which the station is named.  Another has it that a one-time maker of iron cisterns branded its products with the mark “Waterloo”.  Our Stratford guide steered us to a prize-winning loo next to the River Avon, but he affirmed that the origin of the name was uncertain.  

Guide Sean Kelleher in Westminster discussing how Big Ben, the bell, got its name.

Big Ben, we learned, is actually the bell within the tower now named for Queen Elizabeth II on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of her reign, just as the other tower on the Houses of Parliament was named for Queen Victoria when she passed the same milestone.  The bell, we were told, is inscribed with the name of Benjamin Hall, the first London Commissioner of Works, under whose leadership the towers and many important items of modern infrastructure, including perhaps a number of loos, were built.

Looking up a Hampton Court staircase toward the Chambers of Henry VIII.

I have learned in my involvement with theater that when you have a particularly knotty problem with lots of moving parts prone to failure, you should hire a first-rate member of the stage managers union. Now I know that adding a Blue Badge guide to the team sharply increases your chances of success.

A guide explains a feature of the almost 800 year-old Salisbury Cathedral

You don’t need to be a member of a tour group to hire your own guides.  The Blue Badge and London Walks web sites provide details, and web searches and guidebooks for other destinations should reveal similarly qualified guides at locations around the world.  Just be sure to check references.  Also, remember that most of the usual stops on many routes offer good and inexpensive tours of their highlights — our Blue Badge folks handed us off to local guides at locations like Blenheim Palace and the four theatres whose backstages we toured —The Royal Opera House, The National Theatre, and Shakespeare’s Globe in London, and The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford — and their guides were uniformly excellent.  Pricing and other details are available on the web sites.  Our tour operator was the unflappable Barry Tobias of San Diego-based Break-Away Tours.

Shakespeare speaks often of swans, as in this line from Othello: ˜I will play the swan,/ and die in music".  Hundreds of the majestic birds frequent the River Avon near Stratford