Boston

Winter is here and last weekend I went to Boston to see Rebecca Hall in her play. We took a Chinatown bus: cheap buses with eighties fabric and no nonsense armrests that run from Chinatown to Chinatown in the North East of America, from New York to Boston to Philadelphia to Washington DC, from dim sum to sweet meat rolls. We took it at seven o’clock in the morning, in the dark. The bus was gloomy and I thought it was empty but no there were some shadows in the corners, holding onto plastic bags with hats down by their eyes. We took seats and stretched away. I was borrowing a Louis Vuitton bag from my flatmate, Mark, who had lost a job in his persistence in looking for the right Vuitton fake. He spent so many hours walking the streets in Lower Manhattan, searching for the right browns and paler browns that he stopped doing his work. Then he dyed the handle to give the bag age and he let me take it to Boston.

The sky went from grey to grey and we growled through industrial lands and along highways with old smashed up ponds and cold-looking trees. In Boston it was early still and the streets were so hard and that wind – who can say what place that wind came from that morning? It was an old dead wind and it wrapped itself around your fingers and it hollowed down between the hairs on your eyebrows. It was so cold I was squeaking. We found a café that was part of a hotel and got a tall jug of coffee and plates of eggs and rediscovered ourselves and Boston took on its first colour. Walking in downtown Boston without knowing which way is up or down is a grey thing – the city seemed to take a big hit from the sixties / seventies builders who spat towers and carparks all over the place. When I finished my eggs I squinted over to the telly which was mutely mutely over the bar and I read two words which became clearer as I bunched my eyes. “SADDAM CAPTURED.” And we took a seat at the bar with the coffee and watched the tyrant’s teeth and beard again and again and enjoyed the movie-ness of it, the “hold-that-thing, turn-it-up-willya-George-what-in-the-name------ my god!”

After Saddam we saw shops and pulled into the theatre to watch Rebecca be Rosalind and say nearly all the words of As You Like It. I’d never seen it before with its forestry and women/men/women love unrequited. It was amazing to hear the silvery American audience judging her twice – not just a young hopeful doing all this Shakespeare but also being the Hall-ette. You don’t have to worry about her too much though. She does carry it. I was relaxed watching her, just tensing and tiring at the lines that went like “wherefore tis marry not a knave who knows himself not but rather the wit who knows himself too well who is thence none of which that nature hath given him but only hence the coming forth of fortune’s goodly expectation…” And she pulled together the last act very well, where it all collapses quickly to produce about nineteen weddings, managing to get real feeling into a folding box of scenes. Outside it snowed like a postcard.

Then it was a party at the British consulate for the Actors and Don Sir Hall who was in town for the day. He looks like a powerful old tabby cat – shoulders bunched around his thick neck with his salt-pepper slick of hair pulling back from those eyes. We shook hands and he met people and when asked to say a few things said: “I first came to Boston in 1957 and was directing a play when I received a very long ordinance from the city telling me that on no account were the words “Goddam” to be said in the performance. Since the script was littered with Goddams we were wondering how to take them out when I saw an advertisement featuring a nearly nude Brigitte Bardot [and he said her name with real rolling relish] with the words ‘God Made Woman.’ Since then I have always regarded Boston with a certain ambivalence….”

An actor became drunk and knocked things off a table and we fell out into the snow and threw it around, carrying Rebecca because her boots couldn’t stand it. The cast were good and we joined that vibe where you’re together and doing a show and nothing matters and we’ll drink and then get up at noon and have a hilarious brunch and somehow do it again. It’s a very loose good feeling and Rebecca was saying that she’d miss it. The actors were funny though – one of them blew up a train in Charlotte Grey, a film very few people saw (even he hasn’t seen it), and Cate Blanchett gave him a cheese. Then there was a small woman who had been on Casualty twice and Phillip Voss and David Yelland who have done many many things.

We ate Thai and the snow turned to rain and suddenly the weather was ungodly, wet all around, cold underneath, spitting freezing in your face, lurching deep cold puddles and we hankered for taxis. We found one and then a bar and one of the actors had his younger brother in town and he told a joke: “What does NASA stand for after the Columbia space shuttle accident? Need Another Seven Astronauts.”