Two Nights at Highclere

Tags

A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol film, Charles Dickens, Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, The Café Royal

My final week of performing continued on Monday, just a week after returning from America, with the first of two performances at the magnificent Highclere Castle.

I had left my hotel in York at around 9am and with a decent drive I managed to get home for some lunch and time with with the family (the latter having been a rarity over the previous month), but at 2.15 it was time to get back into the car and head to the beautifully castellated and be-towered cuboid home that in real life is the home of Lord and Lady Carnarvon, and in fiction is the ancestral home of the Crawley family in the guise of Downton Abbey.

I first performed at Highclere two years ago, and the event had been a great success, but sadly one that we couldn’t repeat in ’20, for obvious reasons, but in 2021 Lady Carnarvon was anxious to celebrate Christmas well in the old house and booked me for a double stint, with shows on both Monday and Tuesday.

As the sun lowered in the sky I turned into the long driveway and was delighted when a security guard flagged me down and cheerily said ‘Hello Mr Dickens, just follow the road up to the front door where you can unload!’ so I swept into the large gravel area in front of the house and pulled up outside the great front door (such a spacious area deserves a good ‘sweep’). As I opened the car door I was cheerily greeted by John, the Castle Manager, who opened the large front door for me, and helped me load my things in to the Saloon, the great space, dominated by a huge Christmas tree, which forms the heart of the house and where I would be performing.

Two years ago a decent sized stage had been erected in front of the huge stone fireplace, and that had been surrounded by around 80 seats. This year numbers had been reduced to 50, to allow guests to distance as they required, and about a metre had been lost from the stage, to allow more room between me and the front row. Once I had my furniture placed I could see that the performances this year were not destined to be terribly active ones, as I wasn’t going to have much room to move.

I chatted to John, and Charlotte, the events manager with whom I have been corresponding during the year, and ran through the running plan for the event (start at 5, interval at 5.45, 30-minute interval, second act at 6.15, finish at 7 and then join the guests for supper). I also ran through the sound queues with Charlotte, and then took myself off to one of the ‘back stage’ private rooms where I laid out my costumes and changed into costume.

As I sat waiting waiting for 5 pm to tick around an email came in from The Café Royal in the heart of London, where I was due to be performing on Wednesday evening, saying that it was with great reluctance that they had been forced to cancel the event, due to the fact that many of the guests had decided that they didn’t want to be with groups of people in the middle of London, where the Omicrom Variant of Covid had been spreading rapidly through the previous week. I had fully expected to loose some shows as the national situation worsened and there was always the possibility that the government would introduce tighter restrictions on events, and scupper the lot. If the Café Royal event was to be the only victim, then I would be relieved.

At 5 o’clock I made my way through the various corridors and met with John, who would be introducing me to the stage. All of the guests had arrived, had been given a welcoming glass of champagne and were now sat in the Saloon ready for the show. I made my way to the top of the staircase, and John walked onto the stage where he said a few words and then welcomed me. Charlotte brought the music cue in perfectly and I walked down the stairs, through the audience and up onto my little stage. To my left sat Liz and our good friends Nikki and Martin. Highclere generously offer me the opportunity of bringing guests to the show, and it was so nice to see ‘my team’ among the audience (this would be the first time that Liz has actually seen the show for two years, and the first time that Nikki and Martin had ever seen it, although Martin worked closely with me on the creation of the video version, which is once again available to rent – details at the end of the post).

Despite the lack of space to move, indeed maybe as a result of it, the show was a very good one, concentrating more on the storytelling aspect, rather than the brash theatricality. I could tell that the little pieces of knock-about business wouldn’t play well with this group, so I didn’t bother with encouraging them to gasp at Mrs Cratchit’s goose, or to sigh in delight when the pudding was produced, I just told the story, and the show was the better for it.

The interval came and went, and I was soon calling to the young boy from Scrooge’s window. When I finally wished everyone a ‘Happy Christmas’ (remembering that I was now in England), and left the stage, the applause echoed loudly around the old walls, and I returned to take my bows to all sides, indeed I was called back once more for a second round of bowing. It was a lovely and rewarding experience.

I hurried back to my dressing room where I changed into a jacket and tie, so that I could join Liz, Nikki and Martin in the festive marquee which had been erected in the courtyard at the rear of the house and where tables had been prepared for each individual bubble of audience members. The menu featured salmon and beetroot, delicious Scotch Eggs with golden yolks, a demitasse of mushroom soup, all finished up with a mince pie and a chocolate caramel cup. Glasses of champagne were regularly refilled, although with a drive ahead of us all, we had to decline further top-ups. This was a rather different dining experience to the various meals delivered to me by Uber Eats over the last few weeks!

It had been a lovely evening, made so much more special by having Liz and our friends there.

The following evening I was back at Highclere for the second show and this time as I drove up to the house there was a beautiful golden setting sun behind creating an image that would have had the film crews of Downton Abbey running for their cameras to capture.

I made my way back to the dressing room and discovered that the staff had brought in a hat stand and hung all of my costumes up for me, as well as laying my shoes neatly out. It was as if the butler had come in, which was rather grand.

The preparations for the show, and the show itself followed the same routine as the day before, although the audience were a little more restrained. On stage it is very difficult to judge how people are reacting when most of their faces are hidden behind masks, but it seemed as if everyone was having fun, and the enthusiastic applause at the end certainly backed up that supposition.

After I had taken my bows I changed and packed my things up, and returned to the Saloon. I was not joining the guests for dinner tonight, so once I had retrieved the car and brought it to the front door, I could load up and return home by 8 0’clock, where I could have a supper at home with Liz – a rare treat!

Highclere Castle is a truly wonderful venue to perform A Christmas Carol in and I am delighted that it has become a fixture on my UK tour.

For any of you who haven’t been able to see the show this year, or who need an extra fix, remember that my film version is available to rent, and you can access it through the following link

TO RENT GERALD DICKENS’ A CHRISTMAS CAROL: https://tinyurl.com/ychp7t3r

Winterthur

Tags

A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol film, Amish, Astor, Downton Abbey, Gap PA, HF DuPont, Highclere Castle, Intercourse PA, Netflix, Queen Elizabeth II, Rockerfeller, The Crown, Vanderbildt, Winterthur

In a normal year I would be reaching the last few venues of my tour and over the decades these have tumbled around the schedule in various orders, giving me plenty of choice as to which one to choose from my online memory feed. Today it is Winterthur in the tiny state of Delaware.

The Winterthur estate was originally built by HF DuPont, whose family owned most of Delaware thanks to the fortune amassed through, firstly, gunpowder and then latterly petrochemicals. Nowadays visitors flock to the property and take tours of the house, wondering at the magnificence of life in an age that boasted the Rockerfellers, the Vanderbilts and the Astors, as well as the DuPonts atop the rich lists.

Such is the popularity of Winterthur that it was necessary to build a visitor centre a short distance from the mansion to meet, greet and feed the thousands of guests who flocked there, and it is this building that becomes my home during two days each December. Like so many of my venues I have been visiting Winterthur for many years and have a close relationship with the excellent team there – Ellen, who runs my shows and Barbara, who is in charge of the well stocked shop and whose office I use as a changing room. That office is a real highlight of being at Winterthur as Barbara has the walls covered in little cartoons which always make me laugh.

A visit to Winterthur doesn’t start when I leave the car in the huge parking lot and make my way to the visitor centre, it begins early in the morning, usually in darkness, often in sleet, rain or snow, when I leave my previous venue which has tended to be The Country Cupboard in Lewisburg during recent years. I make my way back along the Susquehanna towards Harrisburg and from there towards Lancaster and into Amish country where rumbling trucks are replaced by fragile looking gigs pulled by ponies.

The icy crags of the Susquehanna valley give way to gently undulating fields studded with silos as I pass through the suggestively named Intercourse (the name most likely came from the fact that the village sits at a cross roads and was therefore a site for meeting and discussions – I was going to write ‘debate’ but feared I would mire myself even deeper into innuendo), and on towards Gap with its quirky lighthouse-shaped clock tower. It is always a happy drive and one that is invariably accompanied by my Christmas playlist.

I drive through Chad’s Ford and passed the Fairville Inn guest house, which is my extremely homely and comfortable lodgings, before crossing the line from Pennsylvania into Delaware and turn off the road to make my way along the serpentine driveway which leads me ‘home’.

The actual venue for my shows is the Copeland Lecture Theatre, attached to the visitor centre, and which is one of the most remarkable rooms I have ever had the pleasure of performing in. It doesn’t have an impressive stage for it is very definitely a lecture theatre, it has some lighting but nothing really theatrical, it doesn’t have a balcony so the auditorium is very long. The hall has no particular history, and Charles Dickens never visited this area, so what makes the venue so special to me? A carefully designed and shaped ceiling, that’s what. The acoustics of The Copeland Lecture Theatre, created purely by the shape of the room, are beyond compare and I can speak in my normal voice from the stage and know that the people sat in the furthest reaches of the room can hear me quite clearly. It took me many years to have confidence in the room and many was the time that I would walk onto the stage and look at the sea of faces diminishing towards a far distant vanishing point and doubt that I could do the show without electronic aids, but I always can.

Of course a perfect hall is nothing without an enthusiastic audience, and the people who come to Winterthur in their Christmas sweaters and warm scarves are always a lively and fun bunch who join in loudly and applaud long.

One particular pleasure of my visits to the Winterthur estate has been the opportunity to view two amazing exhibitions of costumes. During the years that Downton Abbey was popular, Winterthur forged close ties with Highclere Castle (where I also perform), and welcomed Lady Carnarvon on a number of occasions to speak about ‘The Real Downton Abbey’. In 2014 a major exhibition of costumes from the series was opened and early one morning I was able to have a special tour. It was a brilliantly curated exhibit displaying each costume in front of still photography, copies of scripts and video clips. With the ending of Downton so Winterthur turned its attentions to the next big British drama and mounted another exhibition, this time featuring The Crown, Netflix’s drama based on the life of Queen Elizabeth II. Once again I was snuck in before opening and marvelled at the craftsmanship and accuracy of the beautiful creations, ranging from the coronation regalia to Princess Margaret’s swinging 60s dresses.

Maybe one day they will mount an exhibition of costumes from my show, although I do admit they will only need a very small room! At least in my film version of A Christmas Carol I wear two different waistcoats and two different cravats, but I grant you it may not be the most thrilling experience. Perhaps I should just stick to performing in The Copeland Hall where I hope to be in 2021.

To rent my film and to view BOTH costumes, go to: http://www.geralddickens.com/films.html

Returning to Highclere

Tags

A Christmas Carol, A Christmas Carol film, Downton Abbey, Highclere Castle, Lady Carnarvon, Lord Carnarvon, The Queen

To miss-quote the opening lines of Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca: ‘Yesterday I went to Highclere again’. Last December on a very wet night I performed at the magnificent ancestral home of the Carnarvon family for the first time and loved every second of what was an elegant and spectacular evening. The castle was fully decorated for Christmas and the great hall embraced the guests as if that was its sole purpose in life – to entertain and delight. Lord and Lady Carnarvon had erected a small stage in front of the huge stone fireplace and somehow had managed to squeeze 80 chairs around it, and as the audience arrived they were in their finery, as befitted such a venue and occasion.

The evening was a great success and Lady Carnarvon confidently announced that we would repeat the event in 2020….Ah, 2020. Of course all of the best laid plans were abandoned early this year and the thought of returning to Highclere Castle disappeared from my mind.

The great building came to my thoughts once more when I was thinking of locations to use for my film, but when a building has such clients as Downton Abbey beating a path to their door, the location costs would have been exorbitant and actually in retrospect, wouldn’t have provided suitable locations for the sparsity of the story – Highclere would have been too lavish for my version of A Christmas Carol.

However as the summer continued there was a call from Lady Carnarvon, asking if I would be available to join her at the Castle to recreate a little of my performance for a national television network who wanted to make a documentary about Christmas in one of England’s stately homes. I was happy to agree, even though this was not a fee paying event, for the relationship with the Carnarvons is so good and the opportunity to gain some exposure for both my live shows and the film was one I couldn’t turn down.

On Tuesday 24th November, just two days before the release of the film on Vimeo, I drove up the long driveway, taking the opportunity to stop and admire the great building against a beautiful late afternoon winter sky. The drive was lined with mini Christmas trees and two larger versions guarded the front door. I swung the car round on the gravel drive (I knew that this is how you are supposed to arrive as I’ve seen it done so many times before on Downton Abbey). Granted, the staff with Carson the butler at the centre, didn’t line up en masse to greet me, but the house manager John did fling open the door and welcome me back in cheerful, hearty tones. In fact my arrival was such a triumph that I had to repeat it three more times as the TV crew from ITN wanted to capture the moment from a few different angles.

The film crew was of two, Brent and Amy, who both dutifully wore masks as they trailed me around. When I finally entered I stood in the Great Hall of the house with a huge lavishly decorated Christmas tree soaring to the ceiling above me. It seemed extraordinary to me that a year ago we had fitted a stage and eighty people into what now looked like a very small space, but the memories of laughter and bonhomie waved over me as I surveyed the scene. Such was my wonder and such was the splendour that I surveyed the scene three more times, as Brent and Amy recorded it from a few different angles….

Lady Carnavon arrived and we greeted each other from the prescribed safe distance and then made our way into the Smoking Room where we were to record an episode of the Highclere Castle podcast which the Countess has been hosting since June. We sat in comfortable armchairs with the rolling landscape bathed in the glow of a winter’s sunset outside the windows. For such a large house some of the rooms, including the Smoking Room, are surprisingly intimate and it proved the perfect setting for our convivial chat. We talked about Christmas and Charles Dickens’ influence on it, as well as the heavy toll of the pandemic on both the entertainment and tourism sectors, and from there discussed how the lack of opportunities to perform in front of a live audience had presented other opportunities: cue promoting the film!

Having wrapped up the podcast recording it was time to prepare for a performance of a few extracts of A Christmas Carol to the massed audience of their Lord and Ladyship, John the manager, and their assistant Cat, who was also recording the snippets of show for an Instagram link. I was directed to my ‘dressing room’, which is in fact a spare room in the castle and in which I was surrounded by photographs of ‘Porchie’, Henry George Reginald Molyneux Herbert to give him his full name, the 7th Earl of Carnavon, to give his him his title – the Queen of England’s trusted confidante and horse racing trainer.

Once I was nearly changed there was a knock at the door and the voice of Brent asked if he could film me preparing for the show. I let him and Amy in and for the next 15 minutes or so I took cufflinks off and put them on again, took my cravat off and put it on again, took my watch out of the waistcoat pocket and studied it before replacing it, all whilst chatting about the experience of being at, and performing in, Highclere Castle.

Eventually we were ready to go. Lord and Lady Carnarvon settled themselves in two armchairs, whilst John hovered deferentially in the background and Cat set up her recording equipment. After a brief introduction by Lady Carnarvon I began.

Oh, it felt good! Oh, to move in that space saying the lines, creating the poses, telling the story. As I performed I could feel the room full of twelve months before, hear the laughter, see the tears. The idea was to perform very short snippets but I just didn’t want to stop and carried on throughout the first scene until nephew Fred leaves Scrooge’s office on Christmas Eve: complete self-indulgence.

I was more restrained for my second piece, the appearance of The Ghost of Christmas Present represented by the magnificent tree, and for a final clip I performed the closing words of the story to neatly wrap everything up.

When Brent, Amy and Cat were happy we wrapped up the performance aspect of the afternoon and mingled while a bottle of Highclere champagne was produced and we all toasted to the strangest of Christmases.

Having posed with Lady C in front of the tree, keeping a strict two-bough distance (in line with government festive guidelines), I changed out of costume, collected my things and drove away into the night.

For a couple of hours I had been back doing what I should be doing at this time of year – performing. But as I drove a strange thought came to me and that was that in 2020 my show will probably be seen by more people than ever before because on 26th November, the day I would usually be flying into Boston, to begin the final weeks of my tour, my film of A Christmas Carol will finally go live!

Film Link: Films (geralddickens.com)

Lady Carnarvon’s Podcast: Lady Carnarvon launches new Podcast | Highclere Castle