The Masonic Tour: are you a freemason?

Just when I was starting to suspect that all the guided tours on offer in Bath are industry standard, along come the masons to prove me wrong. There is nothing to tell you it might be unusual, it is listed in the official tourist booklets as a tour of the Old Theatre Royal and Masonic Hall and it takes place regularly in the Summer. 

Once inside I was told that photographs were not allowed; the images of the hall below have been culled from the internet. There were seven of us waiting for the tour and I was the only person under 50. We got held up by an alarm that kept going off and our guide, who was in his 80s, couldn't figure out how to silence it for quite some time.

The tour began with him asking me, "Are you a mason?" to which I replied I was not. He wouldn't let go and asked again, "you're definitely not a mason?" It turned out that almost everybody else on the tour was a mason, hence his surprise that there was this very proper looking man who was not one of theirs. It was a strange beginning that felt to me as if he suspected I was hiding something, that I really was a mason from an ultra-secretive lodge.

We passed into the main hall and he gave us a history of the building. This did touch upon its former use as a church and as a theatre but there was little detail here except the surprising one that 1000 people crammed in here once to see a show. Under modern health and safety regulations, they would be hard pressed to squeeze more than 200 in today. What he lacked in terms of theatre history, however, was more than compensated for by his knowledgable of its use as a masonic hall. He showed us shields and heraldic designs which designated different lodges, and no I still don't know what a masonic lodge is precisely. He also showed us framed certificates, outsized paintings depicting biblical subjects and wooden boards that recorded the names of the heads of the various groups that met here. I noticed the dates on these boards continued right up into the present: this was not just of historical interest, this place was very current. Two of the masons in my group were visiting from Preston and they asked how the rituals were observed here. At this point the conversation rapidly turned esoteric, at least it was for non-masonic (really!) me. There was a woman on the tour who looked as lost as I was; she later told me she was researching Theatre Royals (next stop Harrogate) and she said to me, it all sounded like 'mumbo jumbo'. She was right, this was professional jargon designed to keep us out. That in itself made it quite interesting, and every now and then, a crack in the surface would open up and meaning emerge. The guide forgot his words once or twice, understandable for his age, and would then search for the word in the air in front of him until someone offered it to him. This was quite a nice participatory side to the tour.

We then descended into the basement where there was a display of masonic medals, paintings and paraphernalia. It was not particularly beautiful, it had a stiff aesthetic that was at once opaque, coded and yet also very establishment. Our guide talked about bodies being exhumed from below the building and then he got onto his lodge, the Knights Templar. There was a great deal more mason talk and I could hang on to bits here and there about certain lodges being very secretive ones whose meetings even other masons would not be allowed to attend. The tour concluded with him telling me they are the UK's second biggest charitable organisation and then suggesting I seriously consider joining. He gave me a DVD with this video on it, which the Preston men said was, "very good" and that was that. The overriding impression was that there is indeed a state within a state quietly directing things at the micro and macro level. Rather than allaying my suspicions, it rather made me ask myself whether I should be more aware of who they are and what they do. What's more, I also felt that they are attempting to create positive publicity to counter the conspiracy narratives that circulate but do so reluctantly as the masons natural instinct is to be discrete and act in the background. I was not expecting such a tour, I thought it would be a standard architectural tour focussed on the theatre's past. Instead what I got was a slice of the masonic present.

Father Courage: a intimate large-scale theatrical tour of Dubrovnik

The performances of Father Courage (Otac Hrabrost) directed by Boris Bakal and staged on the streets of Dubrovnik are now completed and it is now possible to say one or two words about it. 

Here is Jelena Lopatić, one of the five guides who led the audience from location to location. Each of the guides had an audience that followed them around throughout the entire show and so there were five audience groups of upto 40 in number. The guides led their groups through the streets and offered narration that was often personal or unreliable and not to be taken at face value. At five of the locations, an historic building, a courtyard, a space beside the city wall, a schoolroom and an outdoor basketball court, there were performances that involved other actors. The guides interacted in these five scenes with the other actors in different ways so there were, in a sense, five different performances within the the one larger one.

This is a sketch of the timetable as it was imagined at a middle point in the process. There are the five locations on the left and the initials of the performers who will be at them at any point in time. This was only ever going to be approximate and it was only after trying out the show with real audience groups that it was possible to make it all come together and avoid scenes clashing with one another. It required timekeepers who travelled with each guide to keep the whole system together and with this it functioned pretty smoothly. The sixth location on the diagram 'Klarissa' was the meeting point for everybody at the end of the night where people who had seen the performance with one of the guides could hear how it was with another guide. In this way the sense of the performance could grow in the imagination.

For a tour that included 494 stone stairs up and down it was really quite demanding on the audience. As they were mostly people from Dubrovnik however they were well used to it and that was not going to stop some of the ladies doing what they customarily do for social occasions like this: wearing heels! This woman was far from alone in sporting footwear like this and, trooper that she was, she made it through to the end of the show balancing on these orange heels. The price of fashion.  

The premiere party was certainly a glamorous affair with cameras, interviews, celebrities and so on. Not being part of the Croatian TV industry I was more a witness than a participant to the media circus that followed. I did have to note however that such attention existed for a show that was far from mainstream and this is something that would be most unlikely to happen in the UK. There have followed reviews which have been very positive, though they are in Croatian, so if you can't read the language and are curious, it is Google translate for you.

Finally, I caught the end of a meeting on porous dramaturgy that talked about the performance, tourism, the city, the training of the performers, the history of this work and much more besides. There will be some publications forthcoming on this topic, I'll be sure to flag them up here as a central part of the idea of porous dramaturgy is performance structures that are open to interaction with the environment they take place within.  

The Father Courage Tour

I am currently helping prepare the performance Father Courage for Dubrovnik Summer Festival, which will premiere next Tuesday. Directed by Boris Bakal, it is a performance that takes place in a number of locations around the old city and so requires some walking as there are no cars inside the city walls. I won't disclose too much about the show in advance, as there are some very nice surprises, but it is enough to say that the work brings together guiding, multi-media theatre, tells many stories in personal, political and poetic ways, and it remains an open-ended and at times beautiful experience. 

While the work deals less directly with tourism than most of the tours I have been writing about here, since it is happening here in Dubrovnik, tourism remains a definite presence. It is the city's main industry and it has transformed the character of the old town out of all recognition and besides, we keep crossing the paths of tourists as they mill around Stradun (pictured above) in the centre. Last night we made a run through of the show and a tourist from Italy happened to join us out of curiosity. She seemed very happy to have had this experience which led her through many parts of the city and into situations that a tourist might not otherwise encounter. While this sort of work is probably not for every tourist's tastes I genuinely believe that for a significant number of 'reluctant tourists' like the Italian woman from last night, it can be far more engaging than standardised guided tours. In a sense, with most touristic tours the format is completely familiar, it is just the content that varies from place to place. With this however it is an artistic performance which, in many ways, gives a much fuller and more vivid, subjective impression of the city, culture and people.