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Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (adapted by Phil Woods) - The Vicar

- The New Vic Theatre of London (South Pacific cruise & US tour). Originally directed by Michael Bogdanov.

I had already been in this production some years before, playing a smaller role. Now, in this version - played back to back with Dracula on a tour of the US - I was promoted to the role of the Vicar.

The Vicar acts as the 'MC' for the show, welcoming the audience, introducing the Geoffrey Chaucer competition, organising the various tales, and dealing with the increasingly anarchic interventions from Micky's Miller. In effect, he acts as the straight man to Micky, and as such has lots of scope for improvisation and comic business as the show crumbles around him. It was huge fun to do, and working with Micky and the other actors to develop (or re-interpret) the various stages of disintegration of the competition was sometimes hilarious.

This particular tour had a fantastic beginning. We had been booked for two performances of Canterbury Tales on board a cruise liner for the Holland America Line. We would fly in stages from Heathrow to Samoa to pick up the ship on the South Pacific leg of its voyage. After an overnight at the Rainmaker Hotel in Pago Pago, American Samoa (which was interesting!) we crossed by prop plane to Western Samoa and boarded the ship for a week, with full passenger privileges and only two shows!

The Holland America Line cruises seemed to be mainly for elderly, retired Americans and our ship, the MS Maasdam, was absolutely incredible with a standard of luxury I have never experienced before or since. Cinemas, piano bars, cocktail lounges, dining rooms, a casino, a mall, three swimming pools, a hospital, and a fully-equipped theatre - it was like a five star hotel and more! So for most of the week, we had a taste of how the privileged few live, coming out of a cocktail bar at midnight and standing on the upper deck of the ship in the warm Polynesian night watching pods of dolphins playing alongside the ship in the light of the phosphorescent wake stretching across the Pacific behind us. Another Margherita!

The first of our two shows was an experience though! For a couple of days during the cruise we experienced what the captain of the ship himself described as 'the worst weather he had ever experienced'. The seas were very rough - fifty-foot swells at one point - and the ship, huge though it was, was tossed about like a cork. There is something strangely disconcerting about walking down a corridor and with every alternate step feeling that you are either floating (as the ship descends the wave) or doubling your weight (as it rises up the other side of the trough). Many of us, myself included, became VERY sea-sick, and we did the show on a horribly unstable stage, staggering like drunks with the lights above us rattling wnd shaking and strategically placed buckets in all the wings!

We called at Tonga along the way. To my astonishment, most of the American passengers never went ashore when the ship docked at its various destinations, preferring to stay on board rather than venture into the 'foreign' climes away from their air-conditioning and gold-plated luxury. This seemed to me then (and still does) quite bizarre; to pay vast sums of money for a cruise that visits so many different parts of the globe (the full cruise circumnavigates the world) and then, quite deliberately, not experience those places! Why not just stay at home?

At the end of the week the company disembarked in the Bay of Islands, New Zealand and caught a flight to LA ready to start the American leg of the tour - interesting and exciting in its own way but hardly the lap of luxury we'd come to enjoy the previous week!