AlBarclay

Another 9pm bed. I’m just getting more and more rock and roll.

I drove up to a friend’s. I had a self tape. The client wanted a full length body shot on the slate which is always an absolute ballache. I did it and got my friend to pull out from the ident by hand. It always shows too much, the chaos of our little flats. The artifice of the barriers and lights. This is part of the craft, I’m okay with it, but there are people with a big room in their house who can just casually do the full length shot in landscape and have clean edges. If it’s summer I might go outside for it. Today we just let them see reality. A rectangle of barrier and then a human flat surrounding it. So be it.

The script is set in England, my character is English. My character’s vocal idiom is American. There were five details that slightly clang, some more than others. I chose to send the version written down, rather than to anglicise it. No point in being too clever, I figure. And if they like the version of me that calls my trousers pants, they’ll know I can substitute words.

Nice to have a shot at something so quickly on coming back. This one would be good casting for me, I reckon.

I got to hang out with friends in Camden afterwards, but honestly I’m not made of the stuff I used to be. I don’t want to spend money and time drinking until bedtime. I’d sooner go home and eat nice food, play with the cats and get to bed at a reasonable time. Boo and I hit the laser pen and now I’m contemplating going to sleep without even using sleepydrink, and its ten past nine. Who even am I?

I need to put time aside to tidy my bedroom though and fully deconstruct my case. I sacked the cleaning lady before I went to America so I no longer have the reluctant reset button that she sometimes provided when there wasn’t a major Jehovah’s witness conference to watch on YouTube. Got to actually clean up after myself again. Lordy.

Knowing the axe was about to fall, Lou and I deliberately have spent two days just existing, no pressure, down in kemptown with the sea and Tessy. I know she’s about to go into a high pressure work environment with mister lookatmework in charge.

I’m feeling absolutely zen now. My agent has done their thing and brilliantly got me a very apposite meeting. It’s a tape but I totally hear it in my voice. Last night Lou and I spun through the director’s back catalogue. This is an American casting director, I’m willing to drop this one at the feet of my agent. Yay for Esta.

Might be a fair few people in the mix, but actually I’m right for it so it is one of those chilled ones where I can just show me being right for it and they can deal with the old agent-politics. There’s a layer where the actor either gets the job cos they’re with the right agency even though they’re miscast, or they don’t get it despite being perfect because darling you just HAVE to cast Bumply, and I know you want Faceface McGee. I’ll give you Faceface for the lead, and I know Bumply will be terrible under pressure but I’m going to make you sling your weight around and baffle everyone creatively in the name of convenience. None of that crap here.

I’m in bed and it is barely nine. Got no reason to stay up. Lou just took off. I’ve got stuff to learn. The world has kicked back in. I’ve loved my night by the sea. Lou and I quite often go to sleep by 9pm. It is ten past nine. I’m going to bed. Sure, that’s way too early. This is the new Al, who went on tour with a bunch of people twenty years his junior, and his only major insecurity was not to do with being unable to keep up – it was to do with being judged conversationally when he was bringing up friends of his who have made an impact in one way or other. I really want them to revisit that crap in twenty years time when they are my age. Yes, I call the Google voice Fiona. It’s funny. I’m not doing it to show off, I barely know her, through Fitzrovia Radio Hour, etc etc etc. It’s funny to have a name , but I heard that being received like I was trying to drop a name CLANG. We are surrounded by friends here and all of us do things from time to time that gain traction. But these guys are all right at the start of their career. In five years time they’ll all either have surprisefamous friends, be surprisefamous, or have quit the industry.

The times I have felt most isolated on tour from the lovely group I’ve been working with have been when I’ve used an example from my life that has sounded like bragging. These people are still at the beginning of their journey. They are still maybe carrying the necessary mistake that recognisability is talent. This profession sells the most tickets if we can flog the idea that there are special people. And we are of the special! Be impressed by us as we apply our special to these tales of the mundane. Be inspired. Bleech.

Some people I know are doing really very extremely yowza well. I don’t mention most of them because I’m not very well integrated into the notional meritocracies that have sprung up around this business of telling stories. Just because friends have been allowed to do well doesn’t make me feel special, it just makes me curious about their journey to that in a way that I’ll bring them up to people getting started. But… I’ve been “the justice” in a cast full of lovers and soldiers, and none of them have been able to see “the bubble reputation” from the outside because they are all still “in the cannon’s mouth.”

Hindsight is 20/20. Perspective is tough. I love these guys I’ve been working with.

I’m too tired to cap my argument. That’ll do. The thrust is intact.

Grey rainy skies aren’t going to dissuade Lou and I from going to Friston for a walk in the woods. Although they might curtail the walk somewhat. It was pretty miserable, but she’s going to be in Mumbai where it is on the edge of the rainy season and hot and humid and full of mosquitos. A squelchy walk in the woods where we can see our breath will feel like worlds away for her soon.

Me? I’m back next week into the rollercoaster of temporary jobs chosen for their temporary nature and therefore unpredictable and sporadic and sometimes all consuming. Maybe a self tape will happen around them. Maybe an old contact is planning something. Time will tell and in the meantime one more peaceful night here in the seaside penthouse with fluffy miss Tessy and healthier food than I normally eat, and wonderful peaceful Lou.

After we squelched through the woody woods we went to The Sussex Ox because as you all know I’m a sucker for a place with a good kitchen, but we’re both watching the pennies so we just had hot chocolate and sat by the fire. Getting older is no fun if you can’t do old person things in pubs. We didn’t play Canasta.

I’ll be driving Lou to Heathrow tomorrow. They had to reoute the flight – it was going through Dubai. The Kuwait leg has been cancelled altogether but she’s off for this one and I’m confident it’ll be fine, as is Lou, but perhaps not her mum and dad. This world… It is getting darker and darker by the moment.

So I’m happy that we are coming into the light again here in England. In terms of weather, not in most other terms where it is sliding sliding sliding. I tried to hook the weather in Louisiana and carry it over by plane, but it only half worked it seems. Hopefully the rest of it is not far behind, although not the tropical storms and flooding bit please, just good old fashioned T-Shirt and tan times please.

Curry night tonight. Lou buys these home made veggie currys from a local business and they are gorgeous. I’ve been missing curry in America – they don’t get it right over there.

Into town this morning for a lunchtime meeting sending some emails and making some strategic calls ahead of dayjobby work next month. Clicking back into gear with all the scattered obscure things I’ve been doing to make ends meet for the last few decades. Man oh man… And I’m knackered.

Grace Sam and Jo are all meeting up on Mare Street for martinis and a London night to see off what has been a really special dynamic. Benjy went home – his son is sick. The circle is already broken. I took a call not to join them. Don’t want to blow money on London price booze. I love them, but I’ve got to look forward again. I’ve gotta start saving like a grown up.

So I made my lockdown Carbonara tonight and fed everyone and there’ll be enough for another helping when I get back from dropping Lou. She’s off back to obscure distant climes. Mumbai this time. They were originally routing her flight through Dubai but in the light of recent scattergun Iranian rage incidents she has a different route now. I’ll get to see her briefly in Brighton tomorrow and then she’s off, but this time she is just off for a few weeks.

I spent some time with Bergie today. He is not happy. I left a load of damp cable ties in him and he’s got a little bit mouldy as a result. The ties plus the fact that he has a little crack at the bottom of his windshield made him a bit damp inside while I was away. Looks like a pothole crack. I don’t remember it happening but it isn’t in a very visible place. I’ll fix him up, but first I’m gonna need to pull money in. There are more pressing things to spend on first.

Tomorrow morning I’ll bring a warm cloth down and just give him a little wipe down. When I’ve got a bit more time I’ll process the rest of his contents and I’ll get a windshield and bring it to good old Shak at Culvert Tyres, who knows Bergie well, and who I absolutely trust with him.

I’m happy I’m not out in hackney tonight even though I do miss those guys. I sometimes felt every inch of my twenty years older than themness on tour. But mostly I was absolutely enamoured of the fact that they all live as hard as they work.

C’est ça.

For me, at least, that’s that. Some of the others are back tomorrow to the ND London campus to teach workshops. But for me, this glorious job is finished. “Have a rest,” my agent emailed me, and I won’t because I’m plugging into every fucking dayjob I can find, all the while hoping for another meeting and another good job. The voodoo lady in New Orleans took a look at me in my hat and coat. “Sherlock!” She called me. “Or Doctor Who!”

These things have power. I’ve been wearing a shirt on stage that was made for a character playing Shakespeare in a Doctor Who thing. I’ve not yet met the casting team for that telly show, but I’ve driven loads of their stuff around. I’ve got a storage unit full of fascinating memorabilia that I’ve been gradually sorting and refining. But … whatever power was swimming around in the voodoo ladies nexus, I’m happy for it to attach to Doctor Who for a wee while. I want to manifest an audition for it. Fuck it, why not? I’ve got loads of friends who have been through it, some very well known indeed in the old world of it. I’m not really a big fan, but it is a great export.

Yeah I’m still working on my familiarity both inside and outside the industry. Names like that on the CV make better jobs available, it is just the way it goes.

So yeah, Priestess Miriam Chamani, any good juju you sent towards the names you pulled out immediately when you met me, thank you for it. Your temple was a deep deep place, slow and full, simultaneously energetically busy and clean. Time works differently in there, and there are many many years of bright wisdom carried through to it. My company all set intentions with Florida Water I bought from you before the London show. We then played a great show. I’m very happy Mel brought me to you – just a week ago today. I could use some magic right now.

Some years ago I did a reading for a script with an older Sherlock Holmes, intended for West End. At the time I was just the stop gap, to hear it out loud. They wanted a known actor. It was a decent script and fitted my voice. I should find out what became of it, because by now they might be willing to release it for a number one tour in which case I wouldn’t have to be Cumbers. There are always things that can be chased down I guess. But production is a full time job.

I just ran off the cliff again so now I’m gonna gradually go deeper and deeper into overdrive until I find the next creative outlet. Hopefully not too long.

Extraordinary and wonderful to go to Richmond and see something at The Orange Tree. Sam and Auriol were running it when I left drama school. I went so often to see friends. They had a strong audience. It always felt like a small theatre and when I was in my twenties I was trying to only think big. I loved it for my friends and discounted it for me.

Pomona blew the doors off and shifted the audience a little bit. But in the end, you have to put bums on seats, even if they’re aren’t many seats. This is Richmond. This is a London fringe theatre that was trying for decades to preserve muscular texts that are just not being performed these days. You can do new things and make them wonderful, but you have to be careful not to alienate the groundswell of people who pay and know what to expect from a venue. You need a lot of Arms and the Man type shows to bank a Pomona. And you can’t follow it with more Pomonas, you have to bring back familiar stuff to the people who pay, even if you don’t like them.

Henslowe knew this, it is why “The Theatre” was built back in Shoreditch forever ago. You can experiment if they’ve already paid. If you’re on a cart in the town centre and they don’t like it, you starve, so you’re gonna be doing Noah’s Floode until you die. Make ’em pay in advance. No bucket shaking. It’s the model that stuck.

Too much “new” almost buried a theatre that had a die hard audience. It has realised that now and shifted patterns.

I bought my ticket back in December for this show. Every seat in the house was full by now. And it is a Strindberg play: The Dance of Death. Not the easiest sell for a fringe theatre that isn’t known for such things. Like this one.

Our friend Will is in it, from Othello. I realised this is my only window around AFTLS to see him, and he’s working with Lisa who was on my first job. I managed to book it on the right night – AFTLS shows yesterday and tomorrow but coincidentally not tonight. It landed properly, even if I couldn’t have predicted it.

Claire was my plus one. I haven’t been there for ages and haven’t seen her for too long. Sure the audience is fuddyduddy but actually these people pay our bills. And the show was superb. Will is just brilliant. So detailed and clever and unusual. It was only three actors and the other two were brilliant as well if course. I was there for Will but know their stuff.

It is a coup to be directed on the fringe by the likes of Richard Eyre, and everyone rose to it. I like Tom Littler who runs the venue. He’s clever and he’s doing good things with this community venue in Richmond. I’m closer to the theatre by road than by tube – I reckon it I were to work there I’d use a bike. But it is tiny. Chances are small, but not so small I’m not gonna push my energy that way a little bit. It feels like a really special place to work.

Final phase in the plan for this As You Like It takes place where it all began. Where the audition took place all those months ago.

It’s a great big building, an extension of the Notre Dame campus in Indiana, but located here in London. It’s more or less opposite the stage door of The Haymarket Theatre, from whence I would emerge every night when I was working as an usher there. Just by The National Portrait Gallery.

Up in Trafalgar Hall, we put down our ivy boundary and covered it with our purple material. That’s the stage. And then we worked out how to cut the hell out of the script. We needed to hack about half an hour off it. Somehow we did it, mostly from the middle. They need the start to establish things, WE need the final scene intact as it was such an almighty headfuck to make it work with just the five of us and every character on stage.

I honestly don’t know how we did it but we did. Loads of stuff went, whole scenes went. We would honestly have cut All The World’s a Stage if we could. It doesn’t further the narrative in any way. But it’s too famous to slice. “Kill your darlings,” I was taught at drama school. Just because you love doing a scene doesn’t mean it is necessary. We all lost bits we love today, I have no doubt, but now we have a version running at one and a half hours with no interval. I don’t think we could have been able to do that at the start of this process, but we know it now and thankfully the dynamic makes it possible.

First ever show from this company in that hall and they have been angling to do it for ages.

The audience was a load of American students from having grad school at the London campus. Closed shop. The front row of the audience was almost completely empty on both sides, which is never a good sign. They were all on the same level. Owing to the room configuration, we played it in a diamond shape, like we were the altar in a cruciform church. Some audience were there for the extra credit, some were big Shakespeare fans. It landed very well, although we had to work harder for reactions than ever before, but largely that was because they didn’t feel certain they were allowed to laugh. They did though, and they invested and they went silent from time to time.

Early class tomorrow, too early. I’m getting my head down now. Can barely keep my eyes open anyway. I will miss this when it is over … Zzz

It’s all kicking off in the Middle East… I’m planning on putting Lou on a plane to Mumbai via Dubai in a few days, and if it was today that would be cancelled. I don’t think anyone will be specifically targeting productions of Wicked, or anything really in Mumbai. But still it is enough to spark concern from those that love her.

She was in Dubai last week and it looks like there’s been some collateral there already. She had a massage in a hotel that is on fire as I write.

Kuwait airport has been hit? She’s supposed to be flying there before long…

There’s a lot of money in Dubai. With that comes power. With power comes the chance of mediation. But the last thing we need on this global stage is more full on fucking war in the middle east. And it looks like things have escalated pretty thoroughly over there. I’m getting the news live from Lou as I write.

I started off saying “ahh it’s just posturing” but actually she was sending me videos late at night walking home of buildings that are now evacuated. “The one thing about this town is it is so safe,” she was saying. The area she was walking in has been hit by missiles and drones from Iran. I tried to Google “Who shot first”. Too much noise to be certain but I get the feeling it’s gonna be Netanyahu, what with it being Ramadan right now, the holy month, I would be very surprised if it was the other way round. But if it has already spun out into so many countries I get the terrible feeling we are about to have a load more fuckery to join the epic world fuckery we have already been trying to ignore.

Interesting times, indeed. Far too fucking interesting if you ask me. My guess is that, with one of the rumours being that Khomeini is dead, it has been a successful targeted strike on him. He’s devout so likely more predictable at Ramadan. But if that happened then that is a scandalous almost impossible disrespect of a faith in their holy month. Whoever can push the Iranian buttons is likely pushing as many as they can. And I’m sure whoever provided the arms for the strike on Khom will tell us in caps before long that he’s STOPPED NUKES, and then ask for a peace prize. And maybe … they are extremely close to enriching uranium. This is a dangerous time to be alive. Easter gonna keep the MI6 very very busy as our next holy festival… Christmas too. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the future much globally. Peace prize? Seriously?

A week is a long time and things change fast. For now best to just let it settle and we will inevitably have more clarity over time. I’m glad she’s back here tonight with me in Brighton at least. We went walkies in nature and I’m feeling pretty good about jetlaggery. Gotta do a show tomorrow and be all energetic and enriching and whatnot. Might as well have a bath and try not to go down a news hole.

The show must go on? Well, yes, that’s why Brian has been to Kyiv twice in the last year or so. But nobody wants to get blown up for a musical about witches.

I often think of my old contrarian dad though at times like this. His memory voice and my learned voice start to blend now, too much time has passed, some of it is dad, but much of it is me these days, and my memory of how he reacted to things. “Wait a week or so, and then you’ll be able to get really cheap holidays and flights to India. Everyone is going to be cancelling, they’ll be desperate for business”. He’s not wrong…

More or less the moment I got onto the plane last night my phone screen went apeshit apropos of nothing. It seems the temporary fix I did was temporary but at least it got me home. But I can hopefully find some boff in Lewisham to install a new glass screen on it but for the moment the process of writing on it is mostly guesswork.

There’s a bright pair of lines on the the right of the screen like a fucking plasma ray cutting through my typing space, but the fault is entirely a visual fault. Still they only ever fix both screens at once. At least it made it all the way round the tour and then went blooie when it was no longer crucial. There was a bit of negotiation over how I was going to prove I had bought a digital only national express ticket Heathrow to Brighton, but then this plasma ray thing started happening. I think the pressure of the airplane probably contributed to the screen going completely blank when this first started.

We rely on these things way too much. If Lou hadn’t known what bus I was on things would have been much less smooth, but actually here we all are in Brighton and there are cats and good good food and excellent company. And since I can’t write properly on this screen I’m giving myself a free pass…

At least I’ll schedule it for the time you’re all used to instead of just hitting publish as soon as it is written. That’s the American way.

That was a whistle stop to New Orleans but in excellent company. Mel knows this city well so she was an excellent tour manager, plus she has a car and managed to find a house for us both to live in. We hit the underside of this town.

Hurricane Katrina seeded lasting damage into the structures of the town here and to people’s expectations. Everyone has a story if they were there. And all over the town there are buildings gutted – huge buildings, small houses. The hospitals all got abandoned and have never been reused. “They had to euthanise some of the patients.” These huge buildings have been squatted since, gutted since. Some are for sale, others are just abandoned. But with the work needed, or the cost of demolition, the land isn’t worth the building. It’s a buyers market in town but its all sinking and nobody trusts the levees anymore. It’ll happen again, it’s just when.

We went for lunch in a Creole Restaurant. It’s fancy and they sell martinis for 25c on a Thursday lunch so all the tables were dotted with colour.

I couldn’t get through my pork it was so rich. The turtle soup was great as well but everything so complicated. I’m glad we went though. Afterwards we walked around the area looking at all the huge houses, full or empty, dotted through this fancy part of town.

I hate that it’s cold in England. But at least I can be happy that I’ve been away through the darkest months. Maybe the light will come back now, maybe I’ll be able to drag it back with me from the swamps here. I’m at the airport right now sweating like a dog in my suit and my coat with my boots on. They moved me to a middle seat because “the emergency exit isn’t working” so instead of having a peaceful window seat with legroom I’m gonna be in the middle and I’m so angry about it that I’m having to manage my breathing to make sure I’ll still be able to sleep. I really want to be able to rest on this flight so I can beat the jetlag fast. They’ve absolutely fucked me. Hopefully the woman next to me won’t be coughing all flight this time.

My hope is that it turns out to be oversubscribed and they upgrade me. Or I’m just gonna try and use my digital boarding pass with my old seat allocation. “Emergency exit not working” sounds like they’ve cleared it so flight staff can sleep.