AlBarclay

Well then. I went to the basilica this afternoon. Took a bit of extra time out of my day to go and connect with the catholic powers here. Last time I broke my phone screen, it was entirely to do with Inari and my not fully understanding that particular spirit.

Today I went to the basilica. It shocked me to walk into a devotional building that is so warm, I’m very very used to cold churches. I went and prayed there. It is insanely warm. 

Then I went to the replica they have of the Lourdes grotto. I prayed and lit a candle for mum and another for Lou. Then on the way back to the theatre space it was as if an invisible hand blammed my phone to the ground. The screen is totally fucked.

The touchscreen works, so I can write this. But a million tiny bits of glass when I write. My finger is tracing patterns and getting sandpapered in the process. I’m swipe typing, as who is crazy enough to do any other form when that’s an option. Sure I’ll sandpaper my fingertips but I’ll still get things written impossibly quickly.

Japan, Osaka… I thought it would be cheap there, fixing tech. It is meant to be tech central and the exchange rate is good. It cost me over £300 for a new screen. I could buy a new handset for that, but I was in a hurry and perhaps they saw me coming. I’m gonna try for a few screen in Chicago, cos I like my fingertips. Sure, if I keep writing like this and I swap fingers enough, I’ll be able to have that career as a jewel thief again after China and America both harvested my fingers. I’m really hoping it won’t be so much. The exchange rate is decent at the moment, as America is falling, but I’ve only got a weekend in Chicago. I might get a new handset though. The camera is fucked on this one which means I can’t really share images, and it makes me sad as I often want to. Money, eh?

The last show tonight to the home crowd. Really delightful. I want to write more about it but writing actively hurts my fingers. So I’m gonna hope I can get a new phone tomorrow. Chicago has got to be a good town for that, but whatever I get has to be compatible with Vodafone.

Second show. These are actors actors and I’m still just loving being in their company and working alongside them.

After the show last night we all decanted to O’Rourkes, which is quite an open plan “Irish” bar in Eddy Street Commons, very close to our hotel. There we deprocessed adrenaline together. About halfway through the evening, a group of young American lads arrived and sat at the table next to us. They were very ostentatiously drunk. Drunk in a proud way. Very much wanting everyone to see how drunk they were. It was pitiful really. We are better at being drunk in Europe, I think. They felt like idiots. But they gave Sam and I and Cate an experience that honestly will stick with us all, to us all, for a long long time.

Almost immediately upon arrival, one of them dropped a fart right by our table.

Reader, this was not any ordinary fart. This fart had a name. It hit me in a wave from left to right, and it spoke to me as it passed into my presence, in foul forgotten ancient tongues. It growled into our noses, telling of rot and death, the decay of plague pits, the miasma of abominated civilisations galaxies away.

This little preppy baseball capped fucker full of lager and meat and very possibly coke by the look of him, dropping a bomb for us. I had to move until it went. 24 hours later and Sam says “Do you remember that fart?” and we had to share memories once more, like trauma victims in counselling. This is America. Ugh.

I’m in my hotel room, but I might go out and find a bite as I couldn’t eat before the show. I’ve got a slow morning tomorrow thank the lord. I want a lie in. My body needs to process that primal poison. And the adrenaline of the shows and the bone tiredness that this extreme cold can inflict.

Even the salads are full of cream and sugar. Likely I’ll end up with something terrible and quick, almost certainly involving chicken, nary a vegetable in sight. I saw a couple of flecks of courgette in my tortellini sauce at lunch, but they really aren’t at home to mister vegetable here. Hence that godawful stench I suppose. I am still in my outside clothes. It is an effort going out into that but I’m used to making it. I’m always happy with the audiences – they have filled the theatre twice running, giving us plenty of folk to talk to, and to share this story with. Apparently Arkansas has had snow too, but unlike here they haven’t the mechanisms to cope. Let’s see how that goes next week…

First night tonight. It coincided with Lou’s first night in Dubai, her home ground for the tour she’s on.

Lou had the billionaire writer in the audience. Our writer might have been there in spirit, but likely South Bend is too far for a ghost to go unless it’s Jesus off to see Joseph Smith and his magic hat.

We started the show at the beginning, went through all the bits in the middle and ended at the end. It was glorious.

We all work together to make this show. When we aren’t on stage we have likely directed it. As a result, every inch of it bears meaning for us now, which is what they’re selling. We know it deeply, and we play so many parts we rarely get a break. It is a unique experience to this work, to come off stage having just committed to the moment of something huge only to remember that someone is holding a piece of clothing for you that means another person and you have to go straight back on with your body aligned completely differently almost before there is time to draw a breath.

In the daytime we teach workshops about all sorts of things. Tomorrow morning first thing I’m going in to a group that is studying The Book of Job. I’m gonna workshop presentation skills, but via Shakespeare, not the Bible. They’ll be doing presentations later in the term on Job. I can help them appear less introverted, to connect to their breath, to know their vowels, to be a better vessel for text. After all its my life’s passion and somehow the world is actually letting me do it both on stage and off.

I do adore this work and this company. Good people doing things for similar reasons to why I do things – for joy and light. For connection. For energy shifting.

The fivesome we have is masterfully assembled. Nowadays it is easy to think in terms of neurodivergencies and the complement we have in this group overlaps beautifully. You need a good mix to make a complete team. We really have that, and within that we all have absolute space and care for each other. If we all feel as held as I do, and I think we do, then that is a very special place for a company to be in.

But… It is twenty past one. I’m gonna have to be enthusiastic and inspiring tomorrow somewhere a long snowy way from the place where I would normally be getting coffee and sitting peacefully in the smallest room at that time. I’m gonna turn in and turn in now so I can make certain I’m half decent for the Job kids. “I’ll take the early one after the first show, don’t worry guys, it’s fine.” DAMN YOU, PAST AL.

I remember a summer hut in Celerina as a very very small child and how wondrous it was to me that the hut was so completely buried in winter that people on the nursery slope would ski over it without even knowing it was there.

I remember the height of the snow banks up the hill in St Moritz, where dad is buried. Right through my teen years I remember the freezing cold and the blizzards, the incredible difference between summer and winter. But that was way way up high in the Swiss Alps. Dad slept with a humidifier, as the moisture was frozen or cooked out of the air. Fresh clear clean thin cold air.

Here now it makes me nostalgic. But this is lowland, it used to be a swamp. All these huddled red brick buildings. I was in one this morning getting young Americans to think about Iago and his first speech. “The politics of envy” was the module title, and the set text is Othello so it was passed to me. As these brilliant and sparky young men and women worked, I looked out the window and saw the wasteland of white across the campus. The snow keeps on coming keeps on coming. It I hadn’t been digging out the car every morning it would be an impossible task by now. As it is it is a war of attrition.

Everyone still gets up and gets out every morning. They drive as far as they can and trudge the rest of the way, wrapped up in many layers. Inside the buildings it is hot hot hot. You get there and strip. Then dress up again like a tank for your five minute walk in the real world.

It is stark and cold here. We are all working through it as best we can. Thank God for my new boots, they are worn in now and my feet would otherwise be drenched the whole time. Everything is either snow or slush and it doesn’t stop coming down. My heated gilet was an impulse buy on the offchance. It is my most treasured possession this week. Probably I’ll never wear it again but it is worth more than its weight in gold. I’m like a futuristic cowboy. My ears are the only true victims of vanity. If I had a beanie hat I wouldn’t have to do complicated things with my scarf to stop them falling off.

Three classes today and then I got a hot corned beef sandwich after tech. We open tomorrow, at last. We are ready now. This has been a long journey to getting game ready. We will still tweak things, add things, change things, play with things, make things better, make things different… This show with this company will just breathe and breathe and man I love the lot of them. It feels exceptionally safe in this group of five. I’m very very happy to be part of it, the old guy, eek, etc.

Bedtime now though. There’s not been much time to stop properly yet, but there will be. This weekend perhaps in Chicago. But with the majority of my classes today, I’m well placed for a relaxing tail end of the week despite three sold out shows.

We just got back from a pub quiz. We came second. My contribution was minimal as pretty much every question was on American pop culture or geography. Nevertheless its nice to use a free evening to share an experience.

I’ll be teaching three classes tomorrow on all sorts of different topics. The remit though is pretty clear and familiar. I go into these rooms full of clever positive forward American youth and I get them to experience embodying text. Body and breath and text stuff. We only get an hour. I could do this all day. Connecting people to their words, through their breath which is through their body. So body, breath, brain in that order and just hope that by the time brain comes back in the other two are front and centre and they aren’t monitoring and they surprise themselves.

It is still unbelievably cold here.

The car gets buried in moments. My first action most days after coffee is getting into it, getting the engine on, switching on the heated wheel and seats, scraping like an absolute motherfucker, and then sitting clinging to the warm steering wheel until I get the feeling back in my hands. My gloves are fingerless. I am okay with this choice as it makes things possible. I ski in fingerless gloves when I can. My touch is terrifically sensitive and I feel almost blinded to lose the tips of my fingers.

It feels like a powerful time to be in this country. The news is incredibly hard to palate. Not just the news but the willful misinterpretation of the trigger issues. I’ve never seen such clear examples of cognitive bias.

A friend once sent me a photo of a document that had clearly been doctored. I pointed out to them how it had been doctored. They agreed when I showed them that I was right. And then they said “but it’s worth it to get the truth out, right?” So they supported fake evidence that backed their worldview.

I see people clutching at straws regarding this guy they executed for dissent in Minneapolis. People who will go to their graves for the right to bear arms are trying to say it is on him for carrying, even though he clearly never even thought to draw it and it was taken from him while they were beating him. ‘Twas ever thus… People largely want to be told what to do. This country is desperately fighting for authoritarianism. And for xenophobia. And right now that voice is ascendant. With added hypocrisy. And a superior tone, because right now the guys in charge are atrocious human beings, buoyed up by power, feeling immune and making their thugs feel immune by proxy. It’s frightening to be a visitor here. I’m here under sufferance. I am alien.

Trying to be benign. Haven’t had much chance to phone home recently but I’ve tried to be helping with ouch. That’s my thing, generally. I’ll go to bed now and tomorrow get people into their skin a bit. Then on Wednesday we will all finally do what we came here for and we will share the work we have been percolating with a full house for the first of three nights.

It’s good work this. It is established and powerful work. I love this company and willingly will spend my time in it.

Even the antacids are dressed up like skittles.

We went for breakfast today at a diner. You can get eggs. Some tiny sausages. A baconish thing. PANCAKES.

They bring sugar syrup warm to the table. You have to ask for hot sauce or ketchup. The sugar is standard. Then they give you these pancakes made of sugar. And you put sugar on them. And that’s breakfast.

No option for beans. For mushrooms. Hell no way for broccoli. You can maybe get some guacamole with sugar in it.

To get there to breakfast I had to drive through frozen roads. Defrosting the car takes a good fifteen minutes. All the cars are automatic here so you get to watch them all sliding around when they try to start moving at lights. This is a nation of sugar addicts driving go-karts. There’s rarely even a vague comprehension of momentum with the drivers on the roads. They drive fast, hard and stupid and if something goes wrong they likely can’t diagnose it least of all fix it. “My thing ain’t working. Mend my thing.” Kids. Loads of crashes. Heavy handed traffic cops.

Snow ploughs abound, but it’s pointless when it is so constant. The roads are black ice and you can’t see the markings at all. I cranked up Michael Jackson – Off the Wall and went and got Benjy back from the station through the wilds.

It is SO COLD. A new experience. I was strangely thrilled when my beard froze. I’ve read about this stuff. Never had it happen. This is a new definition of cold and I’m up for learning it.

I’ve got my heater on right now. So noisy. I’m about to get into my vast but disappointing shower. I would give my eye teeth for a bath right now. Even a steam room or sauna but that isn’t in the culture.

So I’ll have one more antacid skittle, wash the French Onion Soup from my beard and switch down for another cold night here in Indiana. I might even have a sleepydrink. I’m back at work tomorrow. Wanna be fresh.

I’m feeling pretty chill right now. A kind of day off. We ran the show in the morning. Still some tightening to go but we are close to it. Then Benjy had to get to the station. We only have one whip this week, a big old saloon people carrier type thing. It hasn’t got winter tyres. I’m pretty used to driving in snow and ice though. And dad taught me how to spot the black ice if there’s been snow recently. Which there has. I lost traction on a couple of turns but was expecting it and driving to cater for it.

When he was dropped off I went on a little explore. It is all grids here. By rights this whole hostile area should be uninhabited. But with building after wooden building these settlers have carved out their existence on the plains and my God it is a triumph of man over nature but no wonder the people here think nature is irrelevant. Human will has carved out predictable journeys through emptiness.

We all bought cheese and had it together in the hotel foyer with wine. I don’t think the wine is up to scratch here generally. I brought the best bottle I could find by my standards and it was getting roundly dissed by Sam. It was a Californian Rioja, 2020. I know that was a good year in Europe, might not have been so good over here. But allegedly the grapes are good in California. Just … wine doesn’t travel. It is much further from the wine zone to here in Indiana. Chilean wine or American wine has still travelled a long way to get here to the cold cold Indiana flats.

But this is why the world is dying. There’s local stuff. I don’t even know what it is. Because all the outlets are trying to sell things the same the same the same. We are such a boring species.

Coming to the end though I guess. So be it. The temperature has been incredibly low here, refreshingly low, yesterday minus 25 and my beard froze with moisture from my breath. It isn’t just the kids whose mother is their sister, it is the nominal leaders saying “Global warming eh?” When the morons are driving there’s nothing can be done.

It is pretty weird being here. There’s a lawless militia who are rewriting how things are done over here. Today they decided that the right to bear arms is irrelevant. They took a gun from a peaceful protestor and then executed him for his opinions. It must be hard to be a citizen of this country knowing that the law is changing and the cost of getting left behind is a bullet. That poor lady who was shot in the side of the face because her wife talked to the gunchild like the idiot he was… I don’t really understand it but from what I can make sense of, the “proud boys” are now called “ICE” and have been set forth without training to bring as much fear and dissension as possible, with absolute immunity if they want to shoot people in the face. It’s weird to think that this is an American thing. For most of my life it is what America has been protecting people from. It’s scary. I’m not a citizen. The militia shoots citizens with impunity. Am I taking a risk writing this? Surely not… The land of the free? I think I’ll be okay as I’m not a woman and the proud boys are mostly afraid of women. The guy ICE/Proud Boys shot was interrupting their chief pleasure of beating up a woman.

I’m trying to be light about this but it is sickening. These slow useless humans hiding their faces even though they were the ones deliberately coughing on your soup in COVID because masks are against human rights. Slinging their self importance around, clueless and mean, their atrocities condoned by power even before the evidence is considered. And all the little nasty Stans supporting authoritarianism like it’s never gonna come for them…

So to bed. With extra duvets. All is well.

“Si fueris Romae, Romano vivito more; si fueris alibi, vivito sicut ibi.”

We usually only hear the first half of the first half of this with a dot dot dot. “If you’re in Rome, live like the Romans. If you’re elsewhere, live like they do.”

“When in Rome…”

That’s St Ambrose. He didn’t like Jews or Pagans so, like many theologians there are personal boundaries to his advice, assumptions and internalised prejudices. But it ain’t bad advice for the traveller. “Get stuck in, wherever you are. Oh and remember, the Romans hate outsiders.”

We need to do more of it, that getting stuck in thing. Too often we hear people giving all the “We was in that Turkey and they didn’t even have proper fish and chips, it still had the head on it and all.” “I ordered a Coors Light and they didn’t even know what I was talking about.”

So I’m taking St Ambrose’s advice. Here at the home of the “fighting Irish” we are once again watching sport. There’s the band. There’s the pageantry. The stadium is full. It is men’s ice hockey this time so they won’t be exploding things on the court between quarters. Shouty tannoys, bangy music. Fun fun fun.

We are rehearsing tomorrow morning. We hoped to get away without. Peter Holland came to a run through. He writes the introductions to many of the Arden editions of Shakespeare plays. When I’m watching Shakespeare I usually know every fucking word of it and I’m looking at the choices people make. When he watches Shakespeare he’s seen all the choices already too and is likely just interested in how smoothly they are executed. “You’ll be coming in on Saturday to rehearse, I assume,” he said to us mildly after giving each of us at least one excellent difficult note. “We weren’t planning on it.” “Hmmm”.

We are coming in on Saturday. Everything is in place for this to be lovely. But it ain’t tight yet. So we are trying to tighten it now.

There’s weight in this work. It is gonna be the first Shakespeare of a lot of the audience. If it’s shit we burn jobs for people like us down the line. If it’s living, we keep the fire burning. Fifty years they’ve mostly sent out great shows. As You Like It is complicated and bitty but damn it is charming too. And so are we.

But tonight we are gonna be here with the sirens and the band, with the children waving rattles and the dancers. Last night they won the basketball. The hockey are 0-2 to Ohio State right now. The brass band is playing “Take on me”. The atmosphere is muted. I’d like a win in as much as I care, because I’m in Rome. I’m in a Catholic sporty enthusiastic academic institution in the US of A. Doesn’t matter how much of an international joke the president might be, the Romans had Caligula.

“Let’s go Irish.”

The chanting is more polite than the chanting we get in the UK…

I’m watching the Fighting Irish Women’s Basketball live at the stadium. There’s so much pageantry in American sports. The game is well attended and between rounds all the cheerleaders jump up and down and children throw rubber chickens and people play brass and it is all done in such a way as to make it feel it matters.

No wonder pockets of scum occasionally bubble to the top of all this pageantry and get the idea they are kings. This youthful nation is doing well and it has the self importance to prove it. Right now though that American youthful nation thing that is charming if it doesn’t run rampant is getting ugly.

Not that we see that here. We are in a rarefied environment and working hard. This nation is big enough that we probably won’t see empowered meatheads dragging people from their homes. We will just see happy uncomplicated people who love their flag and haven’t examined the inherited view that they live in the best nation on earth under God.

It’s concerning of course that much of the almost childlike messaging is being picked up by the more simplistic thinkers in England and carried as if it is some kind of brand new idea. “Flags mean pateritism! Are country neds to be proud of us together.” There are always gonna be grown ups with crayons but its definitely bad at the moment.

—

They just had a “science” interlude mid game. Kate The Scientist came on and blew up a whole load of hydrogen balloons before letting a bin full of liquid nitrogen explode for our pleasure…

Now the band is playing Bon Jovi.

The Irish are still behind… I’m hoping they turn this around as the college is working hard to make this fun for everyone. American sport though is as much about the gaps as it is about the sport. It makes me really aware of what we are doing here, how strange it is to ask people to sit and watch us do words that were written when this was vast empty plains running with buffalo and scattered nomadic tribes living in sync with nature. “Slow down,” was a note from Scott. This big thing has to be played lightly and then once we can be deft and light we have to make sure we don’t lose the audience.

—

Oh and now it’s a light show. I’m sure it was sport a moment ago… I’m gonna settle in. They’ve leveled the score… They’re one up! GO IRISH GO IRISH.

I have to remember not to schedule now. I’m in the time zone where I started this blog so I can just hit publish. Yesterday I forgot that.

It’s only nine. I’m right out of wakey.

I went to the pharmacy. Blew sixty bucks on stuff like vitamin pills and carmex. Aircon dries the air, and so does below freezing. All the moisture freezes up. We are doing lots of breathing, lots of thinking with words. It can dry you out.

We did All The World’s a Stage today as part of a pass. Honestly the speeches before about time decay and what fools are for – they are much harder. But I know how much weight will be on that one. It’s like To be or not to be, half the audience is gonna be mumbling along with me. It starts in the middle of a verse line, which telegraphs to me that it is coming on the fly. This is Jacques trying to do foolery, but his experience makes him sad so his foolery goes with his proclivities.

I know this foolery all too well, all too deeply, from my work with various strong medicines. This is the foolery that made the universe. Nothing or everything. Everything will go back to nothing. In the beginning was the word. Before the big bang what was there? Entropy? A universal being in nirvana state?

Noise, chaos, curiosity, light… All these agents of life exist despite and because of a defiance of the death state, the nothingness at the edge of vision that sucks and sucks at life. We are making a patch of light, and Jacques in that is the agent of the dark. It cannot all be pretty flowers and prancing sheep or we won’t be able to appreciate things for what stupid beauty they have.

A little red squirrel came and said hello yesterday in the snow and it was a wonderful moment of communion. We look at nature, nature looks at us. We look into the void, the void looks back.

Perhaps we will be pushed back to a less unnatural way of living before long. There are still millions of years before the sun takes us out as a planet. Within that time, if we persist as a species, we would have to become unrecognisable and live in ways we cannot fathom. Maybe there will be oil fields made of us. Who knows what will come but sure, this period we are in where even though we all have the same basic anatomy arbitrary differences are dividing us deeply. Stuff we’ve made up like economic and political differences. Stuff that is irrelevant but extremely charged, like gender and racial differences.

Here in Indiana I’ve seen nothing of the division that seems to be rocking America – social media is a very bad window on anything. It’s like London. London is more chilled now than when I was a student. Hackney used to be dodgy, now it’s just kombucha and sandals. Brixton was angry, now it’s food and cheap tut. Chelsea was posh high society, now it’s Botox and balloon lipped chancers wondering where they all went. The world moves how it moves and trying to frame anywhere as being in one state because it serves your narrative is mere hubris.

Anyway I’m tired.

My experience makes me happy, largely. Being sad is often a choice from privilege. Jacques is choosing to be sad and do nothing because there are other people in the woods with him who kill and cook the deer. He can think of the morality of mortality because someone else is doing the heavy lifting and putting food on his plate.

All of us reading this to a lesser or greater extent have privilege. I think one of the ugliest things is when people take their privileges for granted, treat them as God granted, as their right. There’s a lot of that in the world right now. Nobody is special. Circumstances and work breed opportunity. Some who are all circumstance disparage those who are all work. Some who are all work disparage those who are all circumstance. I’m both. I disparage those from extreme of either who gave created justifications for hating their opposites on the scale.

I’m so tired.

Don’t be dicks, kids.