AlBarclay

As is often the case, I’m beginning to settle into being here in Arkansas, more or less in time for it all to be over and for us to start again in another state. We have one more show, tomorrow. Then we are off again after the weekend.

We are playing on this gorgeous little pine thrust. The audience is right with us, although with my eyesight it is hard to see enough to pick out my soldiers and lovers. I had an actual child in the front row, and somehow hadn’t clocked it for the whining schoolboy. The tech department are extremely buttoned up about preserving the magical magicness. If I try to sneak a peek and find my lovers and soldiers and old men and kids before I go on, they really don’t like it, so I’m respecting that as best I can within my instinctive distaste for the letter of the law over the spirit. They got my back up just before warm-up by telling us off as a company about it. “This is a visible craft show for fuck’s sake,” I huffed later on to the team. It got me proper fuming. We literally walk on in the interval to arrange our boxes and there’s something quite pleasant about not being precious. We are all in this room together. It’s just that the five of us happen to know the words.

I worked it out of my system by sirening through phrases like “ridiculous shiiiiitbags”. It probably gave Jaques an edge. And they wouldn’t have felt it targeted as it’s no less ridiculous than all the other phrases we as a company use in warm-up. “SCANDINAVIAN NUNS!” – Grace will occasionally say that in surprised tones. All the usual tongue twisters that try to make you swear by mistake. Plucking pheasants and slitting sheets and cutting punts. Then the ones that go round and round. What a to do to die today etc. Peggy Babcock’s knapsack strap snapped. There’s a chipshop in space that sells spaceship shaped chips. It’s an odd but predictable space on stage before the audience gets in with lots of odd things being said quickly.

The weather has been gorgeous here, warm enough to sit outside for lunch even though the snow still slowly melts in piles around us. I had a purple milkshake and a rodeo burger in the sunshine and gave thanks we are no longer in Indiana freezing our asses off. They just had more snow.

There’s a Christian coffee place near campus doing the best flat whites I’ve had since I left. Conway feels a good place. I’m happy to have met it even if briefly. Loads of roads, but on Sunday we are gonna be able to properly get into nature…

This morning a number of people sent me a recent video of the wonderful Sir Ian McKellen on some talk show, doing a monologue from what would have been a very topical political play back in the early 1590’s. Sir Thomas More.

It was by the feel of it a collaborative piece, with more Shakespeare in it perhaps than Arden of Faversham. Including the bit Sir Ian chose. That is in a handwritten revision, widely accepted to be by the man himself. He delivered a tightened version of a speech from this revision. “The stranger’s case,” the speech has been called by academics. He gets the audience to shout something like “REMOVE THE FOREIGNERS” because speeches are better with context. Then he launches in hard:

“Grant them removed, and grant that this your noise

Hath chid down all the majesty of England

Imagine that you see the wretched strangers,

Their babies at their backs and their poor luggage,

Plodding too’th ports and costs for transportation,

And that you sit as kings in your desires,

Authority quite silent by your brawl,

And you in ruff of your opinions clothed;

What had you got? I’ll tell you. You had taught

How insolence and strong hand should prevail,

How order should be quelled; and by this pattern

Not one of you should live an aged man,

For other ruffians, as their fancies wrought,

With self same hand, self reasons, and self right,

Would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes

Would feed on one another.”

There’s much more of it, but… Authentic Shakespeare that, and topical. Things never fucking change, do they? Power is only relinquished with great reluctance… Supremacy is contextual of course. People who wouldn’t last 3 days in Somalia hate Somalians over in this country right now. There’s always an other. If enough people club together against that other, it can be intimidating. It is never positive, never constructive. But the people who do it to as many people as possible have started to feel it reflected back now.

First they came for the middle aged white men,

and we said nothing cos they were smug fuckers and thought they owned the world.

Then they came for the gammons painting roundabouts,

and we said nothing cos they were thick as shit and nothing they thought had weight.

Then they came for the incels who abominate women because they base their expectations on whatever shit they’ve consumed while masturbating,

and we said nothing cos their only way into the gene pool was force.

Then they came for the tech-bros,

and we said nothing cos they burnt the water to line pockets that would never be opened.

Then they came for the ridiculous hateful empowered militias,

and we said nothing cos they shouldn’t have existed anyway.

Then they came for him.

And we said nothing cos it had been building up for such a long time it is almost impossible he got away with it for as long as he did, but it turned out the web was being strung hard and well and glued with his lies and in the end they caught up to him they caught up they caught up.

Then they came for his followers.

And we all said nah, that wasn’t me, never liked him anyway, I just got swept up in it.

And everyone knew they were a bunch of cowards.

I went to the Central High School Museum this morning. This is the state and we are near the town where the Little Rock Nine went to Central High School despite being black. The museum details the riots, the desperate protests, the mockery and hatred they had to endure in the name of dismantling segregation in this country.

Arkansas is a powerful place in terms of the history of the parasite country. The true country is gone forever so this is America now, with some “Native American Reserves.”

It was very moving to think about these nine young people and what they had to put up with. It was originally ten, but one student gave up immediately and it is… It is kind of the museum and correct, in my opinion, that they don’t dwell on whoever it was that immediately gave up on this equality stuff. History knows that the others didn’t give up.

Segregation… These hard faced white men and women angry about the kids going to the white school. It was hard to see them on videos, coming out on the streets just to exercise their hate of the other like it was righteous. It was only a morning, but I was in a very contemplative state when I went for my morning shit in the gents restroom in the museum.

Sad comes unexpectedly sometimes. I got a little hors d’oeuvre of it this evening just out of the blue. Just for something as silly as the guys doing a white wash and forgetting to wait for me to bring my shirt. Suddenly all my little ostracisms came up and tickled my memory, even though I knew it was nothing intended.

It is an adventure being here. I’m a stranger in a strange land. Last night a ridiculous and enthusiastic karaoke bar in Little Rock. So much attack in the songs coming from the American youth. It was political, heartful and compassionate. There was a guy with a tracheotomy who did a track, and just danced and signed the lyrics. That got my emotions up, just as my closest experience of that extracted voice box is my own dad. He is so long gone now, he and mum. I’ve been stranded here a long time without the people I can deflect my stuff onto. There’s a support in having parents even if you fundamentally disagree with them on loads. They brought you up. Tried to make you the best you could be. Maybe even succeeded. Probably didn’t.

So I’m sad.

I’m also full of crayfish. Hot spicy crayfish. I went to “Eat my Catfish” for lunch. It was crayfish Wednesday so I schlupped a bucket of the fucking things. Fingers all salty and crunch crunch crunch. Tearing into these little things on repeat, pulling them apart and consuming the soft bits like some primordial death God. One by one. From the bucket they came, back into the bucket they went ripped apart and sucked dry.

Also I miss Lou. I love these guys and love the road. I can get lost in this work forever but sometimes I’m gonna feel sad because I’m human and that stuff happens to us humans.

So … I jumped in the Chevy at eleven pm and spun wheels into Conway and I’m writing this from JJs with a root beer, soaking in an unfamiliar atmosphere. Drunk Americans sound and move drunker than drunk English, I’m sure of it. It is the South so they are elongating their vowels, and low centre of gravity, wide body, swaying gently even when sober. That might be it. I’m having root beer at the bar. Occasionally people come up and shake my hand because I’m a stranger. Country music playing – Gavin Adcock, I’ve Got Three. This state was the heart of the confederacy.

It doesn’t make me less sad being here in this bar among the humans, but it distracts me. And sadness is … just a thing to be observed and worked through. It’s another colour in the palette. I don’t push it away when it comes and says hi. I thank it. “It is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels.” Jaques is a self important fucker within it, but as with all Shakespeare’s fools, he has a point underneath all the wise saws and modern instances. He’s probably the same actor that played Antonio, The Merchant of Venice : “In sooth I know not why I am so sad.” The opening lines. A familiarity to the human condition.

I’m playing a melancholic. The part is leaking again. It happens. I’m also playing a lovestruck shepherd. I expect if there were sheep I’d be trying to look after them. And I’m playing a dying old man. And a herald. So I’m sadly announcing my own weakness and mortality, missing my girlfriend, and a potential terror to any local sheep.

Acting, eh?

We have pretty busy schedules when we arrive for these residencies. As a result, we rarely if ever have shared time when we aren’t working, and if we do we need to have someone incredibly organised to maximise it, or we all just spend it resting.

This evening, Tuesday night, was the only evening that all five of us were definitely free to go in together and see what’s what in Little Rock, the capital of Arkansas.

Joanna is on this tour with us, praise be. She is the still point in a chickenshed of ADHD. But she is also extremely organised and focused, and full of mischief. She has been taking and processing all the various recommendations we have been receiving and then shyly suggesting itineraries the like of which bitcoin millionaires pay lifestyle coordinators thousands for.

Today started with a long and really elucidating Q&A about working in this way on Shakespeare. It was given the time it needed. We were unsure about it at first, not really feeling any spotlight was needed on us, but actually it was clear very quickly how useful it is as part of a training for them to have people coming in from a different culture and saying things that back up their teachers. When I talked about the Laban efforts I’m using to differentiate Silvius from Jaques I could see one of the teachers pop out with pleasure. Of course though, of course. We teach through those who have taught us. Laban, Litz Pisk, Gabrielle Roth… Physical gifts to future actors recorded for all time in book or audio form. The people who helped form my craft such as it is – dead or alive… it would take a whole blog to write the lot, so I just mention these three who I never met but who helped an intellectual kid embody muscular texts with enough confidence and clarity that I can travel with my work now.

There are so many people who I am naming in my classes as the ones who taught me this or that. I couldn’t list one of them without listing all of them and I’ve started to realise that 25 years in this game really actually is a long long time. We pick up so much from teachers, from our fellows, from people we teach, from that squirrel we watched last week. But sometimes people who teach us write books that get famous, or go viral. And sometimes people we are friends with go stratospheric. It can happen and when it happens it happens fast.

Nobody is inherently special. But some people are lucky, persistent, well placed etc. I’ve aligned with a few of these people and I sometimes hear their names coming from my mouth as people who have taught me stuff – because they have and I’ll name them as often as the people nobody has ever heard of who have taught me stuff. Because I like to give credit where credit is due. But yeah, you can’t do twenty five years in this game without running across some humans who go big.

One of my mum’s boyfriends kept on going on about people he knew who were famous, to the extent my friends and I would laugh about it. But actually, he was my age when he was doing it. And if I wanted to be accepted by you and you were going into acting and I was having great sex with your mum, I might be tempted to drop some of the inevitable convergences I’ve had with people who are doing very well in the industry, to try and make you … like me more. It just made us laugh back then. Every time we named a band he said he knew their manager. One night we were going to a warehouse party and Pascal’s Bongo Massive were playing. “Oh, enjoy it. I know their manager,” he predictably said. No he fucking didn’t.

I went to see him on his death bed though, and saw him off at his funeral, and was sad to see him go. Bono didn’t show up, as I might have been led to expect as a teenager. But we are all capable of being full of shit and still good people.

It’s nice to talk about craft to future practitioners. Minnie managed to get Al Pacino to speak at Guildhall and she smuggled me and Jonjo in. I still refer to some of the things he said to the third year students at the time. But there I go again.

Ten to five I woke up naturally somehow.

Twenty minutes later and the hotel alarm calls me. I’m in the foyer by half five. Too early.

It is a conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency Chicago, with an economy built around bamboozling people into running up charges on credit cards. We have had to be pretty careful. Nice views though. I refuse help from the bellhops and wait for the cars to the airport. I know nothing about Conway Arkansas. What I don’t realise at 5:30 in the morning is that, if we had just rolled into a car and started driving down the Interstate it would have taken the same amount of time as it did via the airport.

“Ice”. So we had to taxi for hours to defrost the plane before we took off. And Little Rock is southern states. They ain’t in a hurry there. The car hire was excruciating. Boiling hot airport, huge queue and they are working at a snails pace.

There’s ice on the ground here too, but allegedly it is the first time since 1918.

My whip is a great big Toyota SUV Hybrid of some sort. It runs quietly and jumps when you tell it to. We chewed up the road. But you can’t tell anything about a place from these highways. They all look the same. Billboards and tarmac, occasional cops.

Hotel is a Hampton, big rooms, I’ll be comfy. We immediately go to the university and look at where we will be performing. It’s a beautiful little wooden thrust:

You can see the whorls in the wood, the knots. It smells good in there, and feels like an intimate space. The Decio was much more performative. We can be lighter here.

The campus at Conway is beautiful – an ambitious Methodist build from the 1870’s. Lots of big open spaces to build things and learn by doing. It feels peaceful and there are loads of trees. “People always come here and take photos of themselves,” says our host. We do indeed see instafams snapping themselves and their kids with the rare snow in the background.

I think this will be a peaceful residency and a joyful one. Hopefully I’ll have time and inclination to explore tomorrow. Right now it is dark and I’m hungry. Gonna go grab something to eat and maybe take in the sights of the town. Then I’ll fall flat on my face and drool for 7 hours.

Up at half eight. Sam helped. He had some tutoring. We made a pact to wake each other. At 8:35 I walked in my pants most of the way to the lift. He had bought me a coffee. Sam and I operate a strange and arcane economy of buying each other coffee. It has deeply complicated unspoken rules and works best when it isn’t under scrutiny.

I checked everyone in for tomorrow and paid for their luggage.

Then I slowly stuck myself together and we went as a group to The Chicago Art Institute.

Good God. What a place. It reminds me of the Getty.

The five of us ran around there for hours. Again I think it is huge testament to this group that we all had thoughtfood the whole time we were there and we were there ages. There’s so much there, but it only takes one person to be going “oh come on guys can we just go do something fun” and the whole web of delight implodes. There are some really famous ones there – American Gothic, Nighthawks… There are Monets and Picassos, there are wonderful bright works from less familiar names. There is so much.

In one corner there is this figurine:

Pretty small. 5000 years old.

Nobody remembers who it represents for sure. People guess that it must be devotional because it was lovingly worked on. Let’s call that “cathedral thinking”. Sure, we have lots of examples of things that were lovingly worked on cos of worship. But it’s not the only reason. Still I like this little creature and there’s something pre-pan pan about it. What’s it up to? Expressive eyes even now. Maybe a memory of a dead God, but Gods don’t die any more than energy does so maybe still there’s something running through the funny curved feet, the horns, the arresting eyes. I thought I’d share with you, ping the energy of whoever it is out into the world a little bit.

I’m back in my high up room, near the frozen river. I’ve booked an alarm call in the morning just to take the pressure off. Taxis arrive to take us to the airport at six. I’m supposed to be coordinating, which will be fine as there are just 5 of us. I do this stuff for breakfast. So long as everyone is awake I won’t have any more work to do than the usual “be the calm guy and know what needs to go where” thing, which has been my favourite dayjob for over a decade now. Tomorrow, Arkansas. I have no idea what to expect.

Shaw’s Crab House and Andy’s Jazz Club are right next door to each other and five minutes walk from our hotel. This Chicago evening made itself – with a little help from advance booking. This young company is organised through the chaos.

My day started too early, getting up to pack and hauling into a rattling taxi across state lines. But here I am now by the frozen Chicago River. We arrived at lunchtime and priority seemed to point to a deep dish pizza. Last time I was here I went to Steppenwolf matinee. This time it was big deep caramelised dough at Pequods Pizza and then I walked with Benjy to the theatre door and he went in, while I went to pound the snowy streets. Part of me wanted the theatre but this fucked phone was important to me. 

A good man stuck a sticker on it for fifteen bucks and now I can write again. My fingertips are slightly shredded but they’ll recover. Fifteen bucks much better than $300 and the damage is cosmetic. Thank you John H! Getting a screen protector sticker was a timely suggestion by a friend who was aware of my plight through these scribblings. Once again I’m very glad I connect with the world this way. Even if I’m actually not sure any of the young whippersnappers I’m touring with have found this yet. I’m not putting it out there. But I could cos I love them so I’m not gonna be bitching about them. But they are all aged between 27 and 31. I thought Benjy was a decade older than he is, but turns out he’s just … lived.

What’s twenty years?

We are all in Andy’s. The crab shack was so completely my jam I was amazed it hadn’t been my idea. Sam booked it. He’s 31, with the same agent as me, kinda looks and sounds like the package I was selling back when I left Guildhall and had a six pack. I had more chin, he has more hair. Both clever dark haired poshywoshies. Both with the confused double standard where we know we had it good and want to have perspective on it but also actually just want to fucking work in this industry that is hard enough before we start sabotaging ourselves out of morals.

I am full of lobster and beef. There is some serious jazz going on very very close to me. All five of us are together, as it should be. We are very bonded, there’s understanding here, and I don’t feel in any way like a fish out of water despite being a frightening twenty years older than them. They are worrying out loud about little chips in their teeth, I’m quietly having entire teeth pulled out of my face and abandoned forever. “And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe and then from hour to hour we rot and rot, and thereby hangs a tale.”

This jazz band is led by the flautist. I thought I might try to learn the flute once, but the first two lessons were just about how to bring it up and down and honestly I can’t be fucked with technique, I’m not here to be in the orchestra, I want the fastest route to making the most useful dramaturgical noise possible. It’s why I’m thrilled with my purchase of a box of blues harps for this job. I’m getting more use out of them than my accordion and they add tremendous handheld atmosphere. It’s the little things.

I’m gonna plug into this band.

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.