Rehearsal week begins…

The time has at last come for the Back to the Future cast to begin their intensive week of rehearsals!

For the last four days we’ve been living as one big happy family in various light entertainment houses around Oxford. Our surrogate mummy Emilie is utterly marvellous! Every morning we awake to her bacon sandwiches (an essential part of the rehearsal process) – even though she’s a vegetarian; once we have worked up an appetite after a hard morning’s rehearsal she arrives bearing personalised lunchboxes containing our own pre-ordered choice of sandwich (she doesn’t even blanch at requests for spinach and cinnamon filling); and just when we think it couldn’t get any better, it turns out she’s baked us a cake…

 We’ve got through a lot in four days, but we haven’t yet staged the scenes where Marty McFly (played by yours truly) travels on the time machine Doc Brown made out of a… ahem… tandem. The stage tandem arrived yesterday, and several experienced cyclists in the cast found it hard to stay upright on the damned thing. This bodes ill for me, as I, to my great shame, cannot in fact ride a bicycle. I have never learnt. I have never tried.

 I now have three days to learn to ride a tandem…

Oh, well. As we say in light entertainment: “it’ll all be fine…!”

Ros