There Are Places I Remember

Being a peripatetic sound designer means that I spend a good deal of my life in various hotel rooms in various cities and in various countries. Depending on the budget and the generosity of the producers, the salubrious nature of the accommodation varies considerably, and I have learned through bitter experience to check well in advance what sort of place I’m being directed to and how to prepare accordingly.

My very first stint away from home was on a strange play, starring, and ultimately directed by, Peter O’Toole. It wasn’t a particularly good piece, and the original director had been sacked fairly early on in the proceedings, along with the rest of the creative team, except the designer. My job was to rescue what was left of the sound design and to add more as required, and my first venue was in a coastal resort in the south of England, much loved by West End producers for out-of-town try-outs.

The lighting designer, knowing that I was a touring virgin, took me under his wing and told me that he knew of a nice little place that I was sure to love. I met him at the venue, and he led me through the back streets, until we came to a rather seedy Indian restaurant. “Here we are. You’re going to love it!” My room was a little larger than a closet and directly over the kitchen, so not exactly conducive to the late-night editing sessions that I was having to do on my portable reel-to-reel machine to try to keep up with the changes in the show that were being made on a daily basis. I kept asking the LD why he was so pleased with this place, but he just winked and said that, by the end of the week, I would truly love it. When the week finally ended, I went to pay my bill, and the proprietor asked for the relatively small amount of money that we’d agreed. I asked for the receipt to claim back my expenses from the producers and was greeted with, “Certainly sir, and how much more would you like me to make it out for?” The LD nudged me in the ribs and whispered, “There you are. I told you you’d love it!” Thus ended my first salutary lesson in touring etiquette.

During my time with The Royal Shakespeare Company, I frequently found myself on the road, setting up what was then known as The Small Scale Tour, but it was really anything but. Touring a seating and staging structure and a full sound and lighting rig and playing in sports-halls, school gymnasia, and the odd cathedral, we covered the length and breadth of the UK, with the occasional foray into what was then a very troubled Belfast. Inevitably, given touring folks’ predilection for a drink at the end of the day, the tensions engendered through working in a city in which armed soldiers patrolled the streets and staying in what was then known as the most bombed hotel in Europe with a bar that stayed open until the last man standing finally fell over, after-show relaxation tended to become a tad boisterous.

On one night, two members of the company decided to indulge in what I can only describe as double somersaults, where each person grabs the ankles of the other, making a sort-of human tank-track, and went on to traverse the bar in a somewhat inebriated fashion. One of the bar staff hurried over to what was a scene of increasing chaos and admonished the pair, not with a stern reprimand about their drunken behavior, but with the words, “No, no, you’re doing it all wrong,” and proceeded to demonstrate the correct method with another company member. On that same visit, or maybe another, memory being rather hazy about that particular time of my life, I woke up after a fairly heavy night to discover that I was sharing my bed with the stage manager, who I was quite sure had not been there when I retired for the night. The explanation involved some light horseplay in the SMs own room, in which the shower had played an over-active part, resulting in the room being extremely damp, not to say completely flooded. This was followed by a blatant lie to the front desk and the not entirely correct assumption that, as we’d known each other for a long time, I wouldn’t mind the nocturnal imposition.

On another part of the same tour, we’d been booked into what was billed as a first-class hotel, but that turned out to be a rather more second-class establishment that was also, when we arrived, hosting a wedding disco. My room was directly above the dance floor, and I came down to reception to see if I could relocate. I was beaten to it by designer Bob Crowley, who was complaining that there was no shower in his room, despite the assurances from the manager that there was. Bob explained that the room contained just a bed and a small closet and nothing else. “Did you look in the closet?” demanded the manager. “No, why on earth should I?” said Bob. “Because that’s where the shower is,” came the reply. We moved, en-masse, the next day.

There's No Door

My own Monty Python moment came at The Stratford-upon-Avon Hilton, when I checked in after a long day at the theatre. I was assigned a room and dragged my case up to the relevant corridor to find it. I followed the door numbers, as one does, and realized that the room I’d been assigned didn’t seem to exist; there was just a gap in the wall that I assumed was a passage to another part of the hotel. After double-checking, I investigated the gap to discover that it was indeed a room but with no door and with all the appearances of having been occupied by Keith Moon on a particularly bad day. I went back down to reception, and the conversation went something like this:

Me: “My room’s a disaster area, and there’s no door on it.”

Desk clerk: “How do you mean, there’s no door?”

Me: “Just that, there’s no door.”

[Clerk calls the manager]

Desk clerk: “This gentleman says there’s no door on his room.”

Manager: “What do you mean, there’s no door?”

Me: “There is no door on my room. My room has no door.”

Manager: “What’s the room number?”

Me: “206.”

Manager: “Ah, there’s no door on that room, and it’s been trashed. We’ll give you another room with a door.”

The explanation involved a pre-wedding party the previous day and a bunch of the groom’s friends who decided to play a bit of a joke on him by trashing his room, stealing his clothes, and removing the door, forcing him to go down to reception drunk and naked to get it sorted out. They might have been amused, but I was not.

On a filming expedition to Ukraine in early post-Soviet break-up times, we were forced to overnight in Lviv, where I had earlier become The Hero Of The Petrol Pump, by dint of having a MagLite, but that’s another story. The hotel mounted an armed guard on the Range Rover to prevent it being stolen and/or looted, and we’d been advised to bring extra cigarettes and liquor from the duty-free shop on the ferry, which we rationed out to the border guards and army patrols as we progressed through the various checkpoints and roadblocks. When we arrived at our final destination, our local fixer, already pretty drunk at midday, showed us to the accommodation that he proposed for us, which turned out to be the double-bedded room of his aged parents in the attic of a small farmhouse. When we protested that, friendly though we were, my colleague and I had specified separate bedrooms in private accommodation, he looked sad and reluctantly showed us to the rather grand hunting lodge where we actually stayed. Our interpreter was of the opinion that he’d intended to pocket the money for the lodge, while forcing his parents to move out of their bedroom. The whole Ukrainian trip was one bizarre occurrence after another, but at least we had a nice place to stay.

But probably the strangest, and undoubtedly the quietest, hotel I’ve stayed in was what was then called The Station Hotel in Hamburg. Arriving quite late, I climbed a steep flight of stairs to a tiny reception area, where I checked in. I was shown to my room, a large, rather old-fashioned affair, with a preponderance of red velvet in the furnishings and a large canopy over the bed. After the clerk had left, having shown me the adjacent bathroom, I noticed that there was no lock on the door but that the door surround was heavily felted and the door fit very tightly. Too tired to explore further, I went straight to bed and slept soundly, waking in the morning refreshed but somewhat disorientated and vaguely aware that something on the ceiling was moving. Waking up a bit more, I was able to discern that the moving thing on the ceiling was me, reflected in the vast mirror mounted above the bed. At breakfast, the explanation came: The hotel had, until very recently, been a notorious brothel, seized by the local authorities and turned into a state-run budget hotel, a favorite with the theatre in which I was working. Although I relished the peace that the heavily sound-proofed room provided, I never quite got used to waking up to my own reflection, looming menacingly overhead.

Finally, when on an effects recording trip for David Hare’s play, The Breath Of Life, I arrived at my lodgings on The Isle Of Wight, a quaint outpost of Britain, stuck fairly and squarely in a 1950s time-warp, to be greeted with, “At last, we thought you weren’t coming! We’re just about to go to bed.” It was 6:30 in the evening.

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John Leonard is an award-winning designer who has been working in theatre sound for over 40 years. In his spare time, he records anything that makes an interesting noise in high-definition surround sound. His sound effects libraries are available online at   www.johnleonard.co.uk/immersive.html. Live Design readers receive a 30% discount on all libraries, excepting the monthly Dollar Deals, with the code LDM30.