Travel hits and misses: Isobel MacKinnon

Isobel MacKinnon.

HIT

Working in theatre means being prepared to travel. Last year my faithful Swedish suitcase and I spent six months on the road, schlepping our way from the Far North all the way down to Bluff and back again. Touring is a uniquely bizarre way of travelling — you don't get to choose where you're going, how long you go for, or who you're travelling with. It's work — but a weird kind of work, where you wake/eat/sleep alongside your colleagues and sometimes run out of clean clothes and have to borrow each other's undies.

The beautiful thing is that you forge some really silly, special bonds with those people. By our fourth month together we were like a pack of naughty siblings. This manifested in a series of increasingly outlandish dares.

My favourite memory of this is of daring a deeply extroverted actor with an amazing voice to walk into a sombre-looking fine-dining restaurant in Nelson and sing. He did not refuse. I watched in horror through the window as he gracefully swanned up the steps past the maitre d', situated himself beneath a chandelier in the centre of the room, and belted out Sia's Chandelier. When he finished, people actually applauded.

MISS

In 2014, I spent two weeks in Perth with a show. The day we arrived it was 41C. It was oddly windy, which felt like I was standing in the blast of an enormous hand dryer. We were doing two shows a day; needless to say it was a sweaty time.

The second morning into our stay the water at our accommodation stopped working. The festival had sorted our accommodation and we were staying on the sixth floor of a pretty big, recently constructed apartment building. When we left to head to the theatre we saw that a sign had been put up on the ground floor — no one in the building had water, but fear not, it would be back on by the afternoon.

When we got home that night the water was not on, but there was a new sign. Water would be on by 10am the following day. "We can survive one day without a shower", we convinced one another.

So anxious not to be a bother, we waited five full days without water before we awkwardly broached the subject with the festival staff, who were horrified and could not understand why we hadn't told them sooner. Whoops.

Isobel MacKinnon performs in Yorick, part of Q Theatre's Matchbox 2018 season, playing at Loft from June 12-23.