It was as she first stepped on to the stage one blisteringly hot afternoon that Kate Fleetwood noticed something strange in the audience.
“There was a woman wearing a cardboard box,” she recalls. “She’d got a box, cut a hole in it and put it over her head to protect her from the sun. Audiences are really inventive about handling the heat.”
In any other venue such eccentric headgear might lead to an exit. But this was Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre, where such resourcefulness can be vital, for audience and actors alike. Fleetwood was playing Cruella de Vil, the puppy-pilfering monster of 101 Dalmatians — a woman whose signature look is fur — in 2022, the hottest UK summer on record.
“Often you have show-stops for the rain, but that year we had show-stops for the heat. If it reached 40 degrees, we had to pause so that everyone could get their temperature down.
“I was wearing these very, very thick multiple layers of costumes, microphones, wigs, fur coats, massive heels and thick make-up — so I was constantly putting ice packs down my knickers and down my bra.” She laughs. “It’s not glamorous!”
May is the month when theatregoers across the UK and beyond begin to pack up their sunscreen, wellies and blankets and head out in search of drama al fresco. That can include venues as magnificent as the ancient Greek amphitheatre at Epidaurus or as modest as a small city square. And sharing a story on a balmy evening amid nodding roses and rustling trees can be idyllic. But in the UK, it also means contending with every weather variation the British summer can throw at you — not to mention the exhaustive efforts of wildlife to get in on the act.
Starstruck pigeons and operatic blackbirds are a common threat, as are gnats and bats. At the clifftop Minack Theatre in Cornwall, where plays unfold against the stunning backdrop of the Atlantic Ocean, you can be upstaged by everything from the Moon rising, spectacularly, over the sea to fishing fleets, helicopter rescues and leaping tuna fish.
“The elemental thing of the sea behind you is just wonderful,” says John Brolly, associate director of the Minack. “You can be acting on stage and giving it everything — and suddenly you realise not a soul in the audience is looking at you because there’s a pod of dolphins behind you.”
All of which begs the question: why? Why, when we could enjoy the comparative comfort of walls and a roof, do we persist in flirting with midge bites and sunburn? For Fleetwood, there’s something fundamentally appealing about outdoor performance.
“It feels very playful: there’s a sense of abandonment and a kind of liminal experience, where you’re neither in nor out. The rules slightly slip and slide in the way they do when you go camping or you’re at a festival. It’s primal. Ritual is at the root of drama and there is something ritualistic about connecting up in the outdoors.”
Michelle Terry, artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe, agrees. “I think, whether we’re conscious of it or not, there is something about the elements that keeps drawing us back.”
For her, open-air theatre puts us in touch with the origins of the art form, reaching back through the mummers, mystery plays, ancient Greeks and even earlier, to our ancestors gathered around campfires. It’s an essentially communal experience, she adds: a reminder of the democratic function of theatre.
“We talk about theatre being a shared experience but at the Globe, when the rain comes down, you really are all in it together. There is something ultra-live about it. And of course the space changes depending on the temperature. You’re sort of sitting in the body of a guitar in the Globe, so if it’s really cold, the instrument goes a bit sharp and if it’s really warm the instrument gets flatter.
“I remember King Lear in the baking hot summer of 2022 [Terry played The Fool to Kathryn Hunter’s Lear]. In the evening, everyone who came had been in that 41-degree heat. Kathryn and I walked out for the storm scene and the heavens broke. And everyone had that visceral release. You can’t even try and recreate that.”
There’s an immediacy to such an experience that can be unforgettable. It foregrounds too the spark between actors and audience at the heart of all great theatre. That puts actors on their mettle: no matter what you rehearse, you have to respond, live, to the moment.
George Fouracres, a regular favourite at the Globe, says that experience can be daunting. “My first time there I was so frightened because there is nowhere to hide. But it sharpens you as an actor.”
He now loves the space: the unpredictability, the open sky, even the smell of the wooden building. “You can smell when it’s wet; you can smell when it’s hot. The way the level of sunlight changes the colour of the place is magical.”
He’s appeared six times, memorably crowd-surfing as the absurd policeman Dogberry in Much Ado About Nothing. The spontaneous move that sticks with him, however, occurred during The Tempest.
“A storm had started and it was really hammering down. The natural instinct for the cast would be to move back under the bit of roof that covers the stage, but everyone had the same idea at the same time, which was to move forward into the rain. Ferdy Roberts, playing Prospero, walked out into the middle of the audience so he could get soaked with them. And as he finished Prospero’s line about conjuring the winds, there was this enormous clap of thunder. It’s like the sky is answering you back. What more can you ask for?”
Drew McOnie, the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre’s new artistic director, adds that artists often respond to the creative challenge: “Stories with big human themes land beautifully because you have a group of humans getting together under the open sky, which is very moving.”
He choreographed the venue’s hugely successful Jesus Christ Superstar and Carousel and his inaugural season embraces the setting. First up is the UK premiere of the musical Shucked, set in an American cornfield — “We’ve got a beautiful, huge, abandoned barn centre stage and the corn disappears off into the trees” — and later comes an adventurous staging of Brigadoon, set in the Scottish Highlands, which will feature real gorse and heather.
“We’re going to be planting a lot of actual plants in the set,” says McOnie. “It’s part set design, part horticulture. We have to plant them in soil but then when it rains you can’t turn the set into a mudbath . . . It’s quite a skilled operation.”
Outdoor venues can bring new dimensions to beloved plays, as characters disappear into thickets or suddenly emerge over a hillock. And even the most benign park bushes change quality as night falls. It can feel magical when a darkening plot coincides with the setting sun, the audience drawing together as night steals in. That alchemy can strike when you least expect it. John Brolly cherishes an unexpectedly spine-tingling moment at the Minack.
“I was in this silly Restoration comedy, stood at the back of the stage wearing nothing but a nightie in the freezing cold wind. But suddenly the clouds parted and the moon was looking down on us. It was just ethereal.”
openairtheatre.com; minack.com; shakespearesglobe.com
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