The Lady in the Van: Nichola McAuliffe: touring the country in a van Every politician, posh boy or adenoidal oik should join us on tour in Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van. Partly because they should have to find decent accommodation and feed themselves for £202 a week but mainly because they'd really see how stark the differences are, not just between North and South but between neighbour and neighbour. Despite Manchester and Stoke on Trent being 40 minutes apart by train they have nothing in common. Where Manchester is vibrant Stoke, or the six towns that live under that heading, is a ghost town, muffled in disappointment and the effort of maintaining the pride of the Potteries. The view from the dressing room window is bleak, a hoarding on the side of a derelict crater declares "Cultural Quarter." This presumably includes the brutalist lump that is the theatre. Inside its brick carapace the auditorium is, actually, a rather beautiful old 1600 seat cinema, with the worst acoustics I've experienced since hailing a taxi in the Rotherhithe Tunnel. It was radio for the deaf but as it would cost money to turn on the two sad looking microphones at the front of the stage we endured a week of complaints from audiences most of whom would have difficulty hearing The Sex Pistols playing Joe Loss's greatest hits. This was demoralising enough but having to spend £210 on an hotel - the only way of getting a private loo - whose 3 stars seemed to have been awarded for the amount of times you have to have your key card reprogrammed, was almost the last straw. That was actually not being able to sleep as the guttering was so overgrown with grass there was a sixty foot waterfall from the roof to the tarmac outside my room, which sounded like the urinal of the Gods. In the "theatre," a space which would be much improved by several thousand gallons of chlorinated water and a diving board, the audiences were lost, and so, to a certain extent were we, reduced to, as Tim West describes it "shouting loud at night in a dark room." Our first venue was Theatre Royal Brighton, a beautiful, if shabby place, where the number one dressing room has its own lavatory at the end of a corridor- in winter so cold it might as well be at the end of the garden. When I played The Wicked Queen I draped my costume over the bowl, like a toilet roll doll, in an attempt to prevent frost bite to the nether region. This time, in the hopes of having a pleasant week by the sea I booked a "studio flat," we were to be doing twelve to fourteen hour days and a little luxury would be better for my morale and health than austerity. So, full of hope, I drove up to an impressive villa on the outskirts. The apartment had its own entrance, which I finally found after banging on various doors in graduating states of decay. It was quickly obvious this was an "artistic" house as the last time it had been thoroughly cleaned was for the Coronation. There was a spider the size of a pit bull in the bath, a battalion of woodlice on the carpet and a curtain of lady birds across the windows. I'm surprised I wasn't charged more for living in a wildlife reserve. Once I'd Gaffer taped the caravan aerial to the downpipe I could get channel five intermittently. There was no shower and the rubber hose provided didn't fit the taps. Perhaps it was provided for visiting sado masochists. And, in common with most places we're rented, there was no sharp knife, as if our thespian temperaments might lead us to open a vein when the Isle of Arran Shoemaker's Gazette gives us a bad review. The audiences for "Van" were large and appreciative and the smell of success almost obliterated the overwhelming odour of damp in the flat. The pound shop in the high street almost sold out of Neutradol that week, though I didn't have to, as I had many years before, point out to the landlady the rather lovely fruiting body of rampant dry rot. Cambridge Arts Theatre though made up for everything. Audiences so good they should be bussed round the country, and within commuting distance of my own bed. Here I must recommend "Parkatmyhouse.com" a terrific website which makes parking close to rail stations and other awkward locations, easy. But a week of success only lulls you into a false sense of security but even Stoke on Trent didn't prepare us for Blackpool. The first night in the Grand Theatre, a stunning Matcham masterpiece, beautifully restored, was horrendous. The audience, such as it was, more used to When Did You Last See Your Trousers was resentful that Bennett's bitter sweet observation of self wasn't a rip roaring farce. They were restless, noisy and so hysterical at the word turd it was as if it was the only thing in the whole evening they'd understood. The front of house's excuse for the endless foot traffic in the stalls was that the audience was of a certain age, and couldn't control their bladders for 58 minutes. Actually it was a spectacularly stupid group of youngsters who'd wandered in thinking it was the Wall of Death or a KFC, which caused the problems, not a mass failure of the Lancastrian Prostate. Trouble subsided as the week went on, but then we wondered if the only thing keeping the audience upright was rigor mortis. On the last performance there were two women on the front row who did not move, smile, laugh or even breathe for two hours. At the curtain call they looked up at us with exactly the same blank incomprehension they'd regarded us with from the first line. We almost had a seance to see if we could contact them. At each other venue cheers were routine but here the roars of approbation sounded like the air being let out of a haemorrhoid cushion. And on Friday and Saturday nights, after the police had erected the electronic knife detectors in the street, the promenade filled with hen parties and stag dos. I mentioned the fact that the females were, almost without exception diabetics and cardiac arrests waiting to happen. The stage doormen said if I saw a thin female she was probably on heroin. These herds of obese girls, almost uniformly dressed in black leggings, luminous tutus and sleeveless, cleavage scraping teeshirts with the legend "Lusty Lisa" or "Randy Rita" on the back are the wives and girlfriends of the malnourished, pasty lads singing "Delilah" at two a.m while urinating against a row of mobility scooters outside the 24 hour Karaoke. This place makes a fortnight in Playa de las Americas look like a weekend at Sandringham. And yet, it's these lads who'll join up and be the dead heroes of Afghanistan. These girls who'll be dignified in front of the cameras as they cradle their newly fatherless babies. But our politicians don't, on the whole, seem to acknowledge them til they are tragic statistics. I have been touring this country for the best part of thirty years and I have seen a terrible change. London is now a separate country, the only part of the land which could be described as multi cultural. The poverty we're seeing now is deeper, worse than I've seen before because there's little opportunity to get out of it. In Stoke, where Spode, Doulton, Wedgwood and all the great ceramics names have been reduced to a display in the local radio window, 200 small potteries survive, but its identity has been undermined ruinously. Why are our politicians not saying, in the year of souvenirs, commemorative plates, Diamond Jubilee mugs: "Buy British." We shout from the rooftops that this is Our Olympics, Our Queen's Diamond Jubilee. But they're not Stoke's, or Blackpool's, or Darlington's or Hull's. We've played these places over the last year and they are more foreign to Westminster than Lagos or Warsaw. If Messrs Cameron and Miliband would like to really understand what's happening in this Sceptr'd Isle I suggest they come on the road with us and live as touring actors - on our subsistence - for a few weeks. And then they'd maybe see that live theatre's not an unnecessary cherry but a cherished break from increasingly depressing times. And next? Leicester and Malvern. And the best curry is in Malvern. Not a lot of people know that. Nichola McAuliffe is currently touring in Hull Truck's production of The Lady in the Van