Barcelona to London: 25 hours by bus and 7,000 euros less in their pocket as to not disappoint their audience

London (ACN).- They have passion for and a great commitment to theatre. The members of the amateur Catalan theatre group 'La Careta-Teatre' took a bus for more than 25 hours to arrive on time to their scheduled show in the Technis Theatre in Camden Town, London. They could not get their flight in Barcelona due to the crippling strike of air traffic controllers, so they decided to book a bus and pay up to 7,000 euros to get to the United Kingdom.

“It was a nightmare”, said Alicia Lledó from 'La Careta-Teatre'. The actors and all those accompanying them had to cross all of Catalonia and France to arrive to Calais, where they took a ferry to Dover. From there, the bus drove them to London, where they arrived exhausted but happy to be able to represent their play in the theatre. 'La Careta-Teatre' is performing 'Bodas de Sangre' in London, an adaptation of the original play by Federico García Lorca.

In fact, the tickets for the four shows were sold out beforehand, and they didn't want to let the audience down. “We had no choice but to arrive to London on time”, Aurora said. She added, “We had two plays on Monday and two on Tuesday. All tickets were already sold, and we couldn't disappoint the people that hired us”.

Exhausted after the trip, the members of the theatre group did not hide their anger with the air traffic controllers that called a strike in the middle of a national holiday in Spain. “This is not right”, Aurora claimed. “It is not only about all the people who were going on holiday and had already paid for them, but also about passengers like ourselves that had things to do and have had a horrible time”, she explained.

Aurora and her colleagues have already asked for refunds from their airline, and they expect to receive some kind of compensation from the government of air controllers to pay for the bus that they needed to hire to arrive to London on time. However, they confessed to CNA that money was not the main problem, but rather the “moral damage” it caused to all of them. Finally, though, and after hours and hours of travelling in a nervous mood, on Monday the curtain went up to Londoners delight.