AlBarclay

Morning class was a great big lecture theatre and we were asked to do the opening scene of The Tempest with something between 100 and 200 students. Jan, one of the professors, had hunted me out a “Texas English” T-shirt in the ubiquitous burnt orange that denotes The Longhorns. They are the college team that dominates this part of town. I wore it.

We threw early morning energy at them, and ended up building a radio play telling of the storm with sound effects and shared voices. “It really takes it off the page doing it like that,” we are told by one student, which is the hope. That’s why we are here after all.

Not here for that much longer sadly. It was colder today. I might have joined the trip to Barton Springs had I not been multiple times in high summer. As is, I just didn’t want to be cold and wet. My Chinese year is the tiger, and there are some very feline aspects to how I look at the world. I don’t like wet and cold, you can bribe me with treats, stroking is nice, I’m just gonna lie here and sleep now, MEAT FISH YUM.

After the show tonight we went to The Broken Spoke. My third time. It’s an institution. Live honky-tonk and everyone is dancing. Cash only to join the dance floor. It hasn’t changed since 1964 but for the fact they take cards at the bar. Sam has to teach early tomorrow so I made a pact to leave when he did and we drove home to get back by midnight. The others might go on for a while, but they will ask be getting up to go on an excursion tomorrow. I’ve been to Gruen as well, a few times. I feel relaxed here as I’ve spent enough time in this city to be able to drop any FOMO and just exist.

My hotel room is good but they must have an open day at the university. There are tons of young adults here, snogging in the corridors and shouting through the walls. Every room around me fills up when the bars close and turns into a knocking shop. I haven’t got ear plugs so I’m just hoping to be asleep before it starts tonight. They were all heading somewhere when I got back at midnight so hopefully I’ll be flat out by the time they all get home and start shagging against the wall by my ear, or shouting about their bowel movements or arguing about what to watch on TV or whatever else they decide to do on what might be the first weekend away from home for some of them.

I’m still pinching myself about this job. It is nothing if not an absolute glory.

At Shenandoah in Virginia Benjy and I did a class in a chapel. Beautiful stained glass windows. I borrowed a ball from one of the students and we threw it around and thankfully everything was fine with the windows. Then I did some work with them all of on sonnets they had learned. There are some cracking sonnets – I get a lot of use out of them. Marriage of True Minds, the wedding sonnet. Compare. Nothing like the sun. They come up a lot with corporate gigs. They’re short and accessible and familiar to some.

We left the class slightly earlier than intended because someone was coming in to do a recital. Kayleen and Paul. We met them briefly in the corridor outside while they turned the room around and we immediately found a shared geek. They’re into their early music, she sings to lute, he composes. They are both into original pronunciation. And they just moved to Winedale, Texas.

Being back here in Austin is emotional, because James is no longer with us. James Loehlin helped create the Winedale Theatre Barn. If you know me well you’ve seen me wearing the T-shirt with William Shakespeare wearing a stetson. Winedale pleases me well. James was a wonderful enabler, but he inspired so many that it will roll and roll into the future.

Kayleen and Paul just moved to the area from South Carolina. They have three kids. They’ve found some space but they didn’t know about the Winedale Shakespeare connection. They are extremely good people. Grounded, earnest and sincere in a way that it is rare to find in UK artists. It’s an American thing, generally. We struggle most of all with earnest. Nobody can be as earnest as Americans apart perhaps from the Germans.

I took their number, they arranged childcare, I arranged free tickets, and tonight they came and sat in the front row, having their first date in three years.

This sort of thing is the beginning of a friendship, it feels. Opportunity, serendipity, alignment. I like these people and they like the work. They stayed for the Q&A after the show, then spoke with all the cast who all liked them, and I’m so happy we took the time to exchange contact details. We are all trying to make beautiful things together. But we need to have things like roofs and sandwiches. It’s good to stick together, to look out for each other, to share joy while we work out how to pay the bills.

I’m back at the hotel post show. We are back at an end on stage not a thrust. And we are still happy on the road with each other. I’ll miss this one when it’s over. One London show. 1st March. The Cockpit Theatre. It always sells out as those that know, know. It’s a great way to encounter a  Shakespeare play. And As You Like It is still one of my favourites, despite the fact I know it so much deeper now.

More exploring. I’ve racked up plenty of distance on Lime.

I had an extra long class this afternoon and decided to really lean into it and take my time. I was told I shouldn’t do more than 2 hours but chose instead to let it play for as long as there was appetite. So I did so and it was such a joy. Still early in the term so people didn’t necessarily know one another, and the first game I do involves names so I sniffed that. It felt like an absolute blaze at the end of the time we shared when one of them said “we didn’t know each other when you came in, and now we’re friends!” I think this is a unique part of the offering we bring with this job. These are not performance students, this is not a liberal arts college like Hendrix. These young people are doing proper academic degrees and are working in classrooms with academics like the lovely John whose class I disrupted today. We can come in as agents of play, teach genuine lessons about poetry in performance, sight reading, devising – multiple things based on our lived experience. And to do this job repeatedly you need to be an instinctive ensemble player, so you can be an ensemble builder too. And we did some good work on text.

Tomorrow it’ll be Romeo and Juliet. And then it’ll be Franklin’s Barbeque. You have to have said you’ve been there I guess. People queue for hours. It’s just meat at the end of the day. “Just go to a garage and get a breakfast roll!” said a very disillusioned local this evening.

We were at Donn’s Depot. Doing some dancing to an incredible band. We all needed to decompress after a fiddly and hangry technical rehearsal. There are only 4 cues. I’ve been throwing myself across town with lime and will continue to do so. It’s warm. I can do anything when it’s warm. And I will. Gotta remember that they accelerate at a rate of fucking knots though. Sam kept coming off the back when I tried to double it. I ended up driving it from the back after dumping him three times, but I didn’t give him the brief you need: “lean your weight full forward as I accelerate”. I’m not used to having a passenger. Learning learning.

Donn’s let you take in food so we got Kung Po from Lanas which is still drunk from Chinese New Year, but they have heard of vegetables.

I’m still happy in this town. I think the sudden heat after all this cold is making me giddy.

Gotta love this town. The sun is shining. And since I was last here the Lime Scooters have taken over. They are everywhere. Some might think of them as a blight but they make exploration possible in a short space of time. They widen my range. I have already spent way too much on them, one short trip after another. But my quality of life is much improved.

It’s Chinese New Year so I went and got dim sum at Lin Asian Bar. I sat outside. It was glorious. Now I’m having a decent flat white in Medici Coffee just near the campus. This is gonna be a great week.

There have been some changes to the place since 2019. The Lime bikes are part of it, but there’s also a rash of those fucking dumb Waymo things driving themselves round in circles trying to steal people’s jobs for novelty. You’d have to set me on fire before I gave any money to whichever billionaire it is this time trying to screw over all the drivers. But there they all go, hesitantly turning corners waiting for some dupe to jump in and celebrate another step towards us all being the batteries in The Matrix, while sending a fucking video of themselves to their preferred social media outlet. I’ve seen a couple of those fugly swasticars too. There’s no accounting for taste and as often as not the rich are the ones with none of it. They’ll all be bricks in a decade. Although the people who somehow manage to keep theirs running will probably have some value to counter all they’ve spent. On a car that can be remotely sabotaged.

I’m off to a class.

—

So apparently I’m Hispanic. I always forget this about Texas. My mum’s name was De Las Casas. That’s on my IMDb. So I was introduced as a British Hispanic actor. I hate it when they read our bio to the class but it’s my fault. I wrote that stuff for the kind of people that like it. “He’s been on The Crown!” A few days of work in a longass varied career doing wonderful strange stuff. Sure it’s lovely and important to have credits people can hook into. At least I’ve got a couple of hooks. More please.

—

And I’m watching the longhorns. Didn’t really want to but it’s where the day went. A bit more pageantry. I’d go anywhere right now just cos I can go there in just a T-shirt. I’ve got one red sock on. Chinese New Year. Horsey time. Let’s find out what we’ve all shed with the snake.

Oh Enterprise. They’re a big company and it isn’t right for me to say anything too bad about them, so I’m going to hold back and be kind and just say that getting a car from Enterprise Rent a Car is like finding a steaming pile of septic dogshit on your pillow after a long day.

Travel Day! And I’m Captain Travel!

People largely did well at hiding the fact they were stressed this morning when we headed off in plenty of time. Check in was fine, flight was fine, security was fine. If we hadn’t had a string of idiots at Enterprise we would have been fine all the way. But oh boy they showed up for us. It’s all too mundane to go into detail. It really is just pencil pushers who can’t push pencils, over and over and over. The company specialises in being at obstructive as humanly possible while still smiling. We had loads of cars out in Paris for the Olympics, quite a few of them in different bad spellings of my name. They were company rentals, not driven by me, I just collected them. Every month I get a tree of letters from them about whatever fines the drivers accumulated. It wasn’t my credit card, it wasn’t my rental, I just picked up the car, but they like sending me these stupid letters in French that are nothing to do with me.

We eventually got a competent human when the other guy went on his lunch. Now we have two cars, and they are gonna be tricky to park while we are here but we have them. Tomorrow I’m up at 6 to move them both into exorbitant valet parking. I could do it tonight, but it would cost the university an extra £140 and I’m not gonna do that to them for the sake of an hour or two of sleep.

I’m happy I have done Austin though. I’ve spent three weeks of my life here, that’s not much in the scheme of things, but I’m not gonna get FOMO knowing that they’ve all gone to an open mic night tonight and I went home to write to you all and pass out in my well appointed hotel room.

It’s hot in Texas. So the air conditioning is blowing cold. I’ve got good at switching that shit off fast now. How the heck everyone in this nation lives with that destructive bollocks is impossible for me to countenance. We kill the world to make the air processed. Unprocessed air is not fit for consumption? We aren’t burning anything like the amount of fossil we did when I was a kid. The wind blows over the prairies. This air processing lark is just hubris, an excuse to spend money. And if you multiply it by every hotel room and household in America and many other countries, it is probably one of the most destructive unnecessary details in the history of the planet so far.

We have two decent whips now at least. We don’t really need them in this city but having the option is good.

Tomorrow I’ll be hitting work running, straight into workshops. No show tomorrow though so I can stay up late tomorrow night perhaps. But I’m still on recharge and the travel day was costly. Onwards.

Today I just decided to stop.

It was raining. Pouring with rain. By the time I got up.

Grace had gone to DC to see the sights. The others had a hike and brewery type day planned, followed by a fun bar with games. They were leaving early to beat the rain. I was staying in bed.

I got up at half eleven. Closer to noon. The entire morning was spent reading in bed. I only left because I was hungry. Mangia Cucina Italiana let me do the Valentines Meal for one. Polpette and Saltimbocca, then Tiramisu. It’s a good kitchen, the portions are American. I didn’t need anything else to eat all day. And it meant I could stay here in in Winchester.

The rain demotivated me from any exploration plans I might have been harbouring. So I sorted out my bits and bobs instead. Checked everyone in for their flight. Paid for the extra luggage. Had a power nap.

I need days like this. It was great. I’ve barely spoken to a single soul. I didn’t want to have to.

Case is fully packed again. I’m ready to go to the last leg of this adventure – Austin. I’m gonna need to get some work pronto when I get back as theatre rarely pays for itself, my life expenses have been punishing lately. It’s great to be employed doing what I set out to do. I’ve had a ball so far and there’s still time left to revel in this, but the end is rolling down the track towards me and life will continue to be expensive when this stops paying me.

I’m gonna mix it up by sleeping on the other side of the bed this time. Rock and roll.

First a good long shower, a moisturise and a sleepy drink – I’ve been ekeing out a bottle, and want to definitely have some for the plane back to England as I’m planning to try and sleep most of the way back. But there’s enough for easy sleep tonight and a couple in Texas if needed.

I’m doing the laundry. Dunno why I volunteered for that but I did. Three people’s worth of stuff all mixed up. Rolling round and round and it is half one in the morning. We had two shows today.

This morning Benjy and I went to Bonny Blue for brunch. One of the professors I worked with recently had the surname “Trump”. “I don’t know if I’m ever gonna escape the association,” they said. I thought of friends of mine called Saville and felt bad for them, cos this one hasn’t even exploded yet.

Bonnie Blue is a breakfast restaurant in Virginia. There are other associations with the name. We went there with a limited amount of time. The waiter tried to make us go round the corner for some reason even though there were seats right in front of us. Accent? Still, we got sat down. We sat down in Bonny Blue.

Pulled pork? Smashed avocado? It was just Benjy and I and we were in a rush. We got crabs from Bonnie Blue.

Crab Benedict. And it was glorious. I was glad of it. Gave me the energy I needed to push through a two show day.

So much acting, and two very different audiences. The matinee there was one schoolboy, no lover but his parents – (under 30 people who look like they like each other), no soldier at all… Literally nobody bearded between the age of 30 and 50. I had to choose some good ole boy. I’m the Justice. They were all the pantaloon, with some very much pushing towards oblivion.

Just in case I’m being too obscure, I’m always checking out the audience working out who to direct the lines of the famousest monologue towards. All the world’s a stage. Often I hear people mumbling along to it like I’m doing karaoke Shakespeare.

Evening show we had one wing of the thrust eaten up by enthusiastic students. The reception was electric. We had to discipline ourselves not to showboat and to include the other two wings. At one point in a song I dropped my kazoo, character styled it and got a cheer for it and Grace quite rightly said “Don’t encourage him” to them. Moments later I told them they were fools in a circle. Bless them, they all stood up at the end. This is definitely a great way to experience a wonderful play. But clearly the good people of Winchester are starved of high quality culture. Nice to be able to bring it. This company and method is a well oiled machine now. Decades of sending out shows like this. I’m loving being part of one again. It is impossible not to enjoy it when I watch the ones I’m not involved in.

I’m still doing laundry. I got into a long long chat with Sharon at the front desk about the state of the union. And then I had to put everything in to tumble dry again. It’s fucking half past two. I will not be going for a hike tomorrow. 😦

Midnight. I just walked back from the grill down the road where they were serving fishy Friday fish and chips. I gorged myself post show. Everything always comes with something else. You can’t just order and switch off, there are millions of questions. You get two sides with that. If you do x then y. Ok you’ve chosen this side so that comes with three options. Ok option three has a branching list of 24 different choices with sub menus, we have to bring you out an extra menu to show you what you can have.

We had a lovely show tonight. A fun audience. Woke them up. Kids in the front row. It is always good to win them when they are that young, and we won them. There’s enough slide between the stuff we do for money and the stuff they do to make friends, if they can get beyond the hard language we use they can get into the playfulness. We get a lot of lovely bright comments about our physicality in this show, and truth be told I’m proud of it – the distinctions are really clear between characters.

This is a glorious group. I absolutely adore being part of it. Every night we try to grow the show, nobody is territorial or ossified, we rehearse in snatches to play ideas, we tweak moments in prep and also in live execution. It feels bright but we can be dicks to each other onstage when needed which is important too. I am sad this is the shortest tour I’ve ever done with them, just cos I love the work, I love the whole business of it – it is so busy, having to do everything. My next job will feel like a holiday in comparison but this has been bright bright life experience. The extreme cold. The work. The unusual small towns. The good people in and around the company.

I’ll get back to the uk just in time for spring. Who knows what will come. I’m hoping for a self tape before we land. I need to keep momentum going…

We got up early and drove out to Harper’s Ferry. Joanna is big into her history and knows the blow by blow of the civil war in this nation. We followed behind. Here was the Confederate Armoury. John Brown, the great abolitionist fighter, made a daring optimistic plan. Raid the armory, give all the guns to the slaves and tell them they’re free, instant army.

It didn’t work like he planned, because people don’t have context on themselves. He could see that they were oppressed. They just saw some guys in stupid hats blowing shit up in the town they were slaves in. There are big monuments made by the confederacy to various slaves that fought off the unionists that day.

It’s a pretty town, pretty much the mid point on the Appalachian Trail, from Maine to Georgia. I’ve been aware of that trail a long time. It’s low on my list compared to Shikoku and other iterations of Camino, but that’s largely down to where it is. There’s all sorts of bullshit American hikers romanticising their walk. It takes six months to do the whole thing, so I get the impetus. But the only God on that trail is nature so often the people I read who write about it think they are the God. I prefer a walk with external spirits, be they kami or holy. If I were to walk the whole trail I would likely adopt some animistic rituals to keep me honest. Likely I’d bring some shinto. There are some hilarious posts on Camino groups by idiot Catholics horrified about cairns. We really need as a species to get more private with our pretendy things. But they become pretendy clubs with exclusive entry. YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU BELIEVE THE WORLD IS A CARROT! YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU THINK JESUS WAS THE SON OF THE DIVINE! YOU CAN’T JOIN UNLESS YOU THINK ONIONS ARE ACTUALLY EVIL ROCKS! We can play this crap forever and we will and everyone who ever dies expecting something is thankfully going to be too dead to register their disappointment.

We walked a tiny sliver of the trail, technically from West Virginia to Maryland. Which involves looking at a rock and then walking over a bridge.

Then to Antietam. A killing field. The wind was up, this is a battlefield, it was punishingly cold. We covered it though. As with many American monuments, it is a driving route with stops. Makes it easier for the people who have eaten too much sugar. It was preluded by an excellent video, that helped us understand the slaughter that took place there, right when warfare was changing. Like the charge of the light brigade, like much of the first world war, generals marching soldiers into guns. Here’s the cornfield where loads of people got slaughtered. Here’s the sunken road where loads of people got slaughtered. Here’s the bridge where loads of people got slaughtered.

The emancipation proclamation was spurred on by this horrendous battle. The whole civil war was really just about slave ownership. It’s good it went the way it did. We are going backwards again in terms of thought.

A big wooden house out in the boonies, somewhere between Winchester and the Appalachians. The five of us drive up and park. We enter through the garage.

“This house was bought with Microsoft money”. Plugs hang out the walls now, and there are pictures up to cover holes. Two big beige leather sofas, big leather armchairs. A counter stacked with cheese and biscuits. Everywhere you look, instruments. And most of them are being played.

Ten players. Average age 75 I reckon. Mountain men and women, schoolteachers, farmers, all sorts. Vicky on the bass with her big grey curls. Two old boys on slide guitar, strange picks and devices attached to their fingers. Banjos and mandolins. Two fiddles. The bass is the only instrument that is amped. Vicky is holding it all together. Bluegrass night.

These guys meet weekly and jam. Different iterations of the same group. No pretentions here. Dinky plinky dinky plink. Dong diggy dong diggy ding dong. It is all I can do not to cross my eyes and shout “YEE-HAW” between songs.

The five of us sit politely round the edges. We are too shy to sing along even if we know some of them. The key is either too low or too high for our comfort voices even when we know them. This is by design. “Cold winters, and nobody knows how to sing well so it’s all written in screech so people make noise,” Vicky tells me later. I am in awe of Vicky.

“I get the sense a lot of them have never left Virginia,” says someone on the way home. That’s likely true of some, but these people have this life and it looks like it has been comfortable, but life is bendy as fuck and the illusion of peaceful serenity is best maintained by people who have got bored of screaming.

With their tattoos and their art, arthritic fingers picking as fast as they could, honest voices raised in a little beige room in Virginia full of cheese and actors. There’s a tiny dog that stands in front of the bass amplifier because he likes the vibrations. He’s called Tybalt. King of cats. This little tiny hairy pudding. One of the most ridiculous dogs I’ve ever met. Quiet and tiny, all hair and tongue. “What breed is he?” “Nobody knows, he’s a rescue.” Gotta be at least ten percent chipmunk. We were welcome but we didn’t know the songs, mostly. I sung quiet low harmonies on some of the more predictable ones, and when they sang “In the pines” it took me by surprise as it was only known to me as part of Kurt Cobains fantastically painful unplugged set for MTV just before he proved he was lying when he swore he didn’t have a gun. I could hear him screaming it in my imagination. Wouldn’t have been the vibe although Vicky would have rolled with it if one of us had come up with it. But it wasn’t our night. That’ll be tomorrow when we do the first of four sold out shows to these good people.

It was an insight though, being there, intersecting with these lives. “We moved to where we are now because my husband wanted to be able to kill deer in his slippers,” says one lady. “Problem is that now he could kill deer in his slippers if he wanted to, because they come to our bird table, they live in our garden. We put things out for them. They’re family. Can’t kill family.”

America …

I’m still making sense of this state. Arkansas was easier to get hold of, Virginia seems more spread out. A busy week won’t be enough. Even though we are being incredibly organised with our spare time, almost militarily so.