Lou will be in Newcastle tomorrow night. She was in Rotherham last night. But somehow it makes more sense for her to have come home for tonight so I’m writing to you from bed with her to my left and Tessy aggressively colonising the part of the bed where I might need to put my feet later. She went for me when I was drying my foot earlier so I’m gonna have to negotiate this bed thing extremely carefully. She’s a beautiful cat but not if you value your hands.
I picked Lou up in her own car at the coach stop at Old Steine and we drove up to Fiveways to eat a late lunch at a little Italian place – my reward for slamming it down here last night. Then we went for a walk up the hill in Hollingdean wood. It’s a steep wooded path enclosed by housing estates but there’s a bit of history and a bit of nature under all the noise. There’s golf on the top there, and it’s a good place for a course, with so much wind and air and light. It was wild.
“You can see the Isle of Wight from here if it isn’t foggy,” said Lou, making space for a dad joke. ‘I can see it!” “Can you?” “White? Yes.” Aha. Aha ha. Aha haha. You see because it’s white, fog. You see? Sounds like Wight? White?
We somehow managed to get lost even though it is tiny up there. We were happy to schlep around though, plenty of grass, plenty of trees and my body is finally detoxifying having had two weeks off the poison now. I started to feel hungover from all the walking. I think maybe it would be a good thing to take Brian up on his offer of joining him at boxing. I’m getting to the stage now where I’m pissed off enough to find my targets.
Tomorrow morning will be an early start. I’m wearing my good boyfriend hat and driving Lou two hours each way to meet the car to Newcastle tomorrow morning early. Much less faff than a coach for her and it’ll start my day. So we are bedding down early. Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy wealthy and wise, my father used to say all too often. I still remember him bellowing “oh what a beautiful morning” every fucking morning at 6 as he went down to put the kettle on at Eyreton. He was probably all three of those things, so I guess he had a point. I’ve got some catching up to do with the last two in particular. Could definitely be fitter as well.
Just stopped in Brighton. It’s ten to one in the morning. Tessy is chowing down on soup.
Some Meisner where I felt largely misunderstood and then an email telling me I didn’t get the latest nice filming job and then early evening I was standing in five layers of clothing on a bit of high walk overlooking Lauderdale Tower, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. It’s the part of the The Barbican where I had my first round audition at Guildhall and where I met Alex Hassell – so the start of a big journey in many practical ways, taking in The Factory and my training along the way.
We were doing Cymbeline. Largely, THEY were doing Cymbeline. I’m still making sense of what the fuck Cymbeline is but it’s okay, I tell Tom. I’ve got a chilled evening, I tell Tom. I just have to play The Frenchman. Done it before. Be a bit alpha. Remember a bit of prose and one list. Over right at the start. Then I can just be a bodyguard for Caius Lucius or something. Easy life, I tell Tom.
And then Scott arrived. Took me aside in his unique manner: “Al, I was wondering…”
Fuck.
Waggy has done a tremendous amount of work learning Cymbeline, making sense of the play, showing up at sessions while I’ve been gallivanting. Waggy knows it so well nobody else there that night had it learnt. Least of all me. Ahhh The Factory.
It’s the nature of the game. If you aren’t ready to play don’t put yourself in the squad. Waggy can’t make it suddenly.
With twenty minutes warning, I’m given an edited script and I’m gonna be sight-reading The King, Cymbeline, just the title character, no pressure. Not as big a part as Imogen but plenty of it. “Are you sure you’re okay with this?” Scott asks, and he knows he doesn’t need to check and so do you by now. Bring it on, forever. Nothing I like more than a challenge.
And I sank into the happy happy embrace of disciplined chaos. Loads of players. Loads of new faces. Loads of familiar faces.
This is a pure project and it feels very honest to what The Factory has been for me. A place to try and be truthful within a rigour. A place to listen hard to each other and yet attempt to surprise each other. A place to tell a Shakespeare play with clean text but messy truthful world.
This Cymbeline is shifting. A new stage now, as more of us are learning more parts and so new players are bringing their vigour and their rigour to new areas of the play. There are many moments of delight in these plays, and they are so live and so ephemeral, like gossamer, this one is done now and shattered to memory. And through the white noise of it, I played The King and held myself and my friends, and STILL made time for pure Factory mischief. If I know the show well, my track beginsa neverending circle of placing myself somewhere, realising it won’t work, finding another place, that won’t work either, move again, listen, move, listen and then make the most recent offer, the only one still relevant, having abandoned multiple other possibilities that bubbled up and died before they were needed. I didn’t know this show well enough to be so agile, but Dissy spotted an opportunity. We were both at the edge of the action, looking for the offer, and we struck up a conversation with Duncan, a resident. Next thing I knew I was in Duncan’s flat and my next scene was a proclamation – (for audibility). Duncan: “Should I hide when you start speaking?” “No, I’m the king, you’re my attendant.” “Would you like a glass of wine?” “Two weeks ago I might have bitten your hand off. No thanks. My body is a temple”. He is an artist and he’s got some nice white wine there. It’s a lovely flat. I like him.
Perfectly located flat. And look: Duncan is being my attendant!!
I wouldn’t have got up there without Dissy. She did the talking. We connected and went prowling looking for the mischief. And together we found a lovely moment. I met her in 2010. There’s history with this company, so much history in my life. And tonight was a lovely happy vindication of the time I’ve spent building friendships in this craft.
Perfectly timed. I needed a lift after more frustrating news. Endlessly frustrating on one hand, absolutely joyful on the other. The craft giveth and the craft taketh away.
I’ve made a rod for my own back though. Gonna have to learn Cymbeline now as well as Caius Lucius.
Hell of a way to learn his track, but you’d be amazed how much my head will have already eaten of his words now I’ve spoken them all under pressure. Spongebrain into action.
I was buoyed back to Brighton by Scott’s: “I KNEW you were the right man to ask.”
Back at Meisner and I was caught being a bit glib because honestly I didn’t really want to go there. Not because I can’t but because I can. I go there for my work all the time. Why? I’m being paid. It’s my job. I kinda don’t want to have to practice going there because it’s like taking all the guts out of a fish and being the fish and the fish being a big hairy man full of pain. If you have to put the guts back in the same its gonna be really tricky. You’re gonna spill bits and make a mess. Still, I eventually managed to stop myself skipping over the surface, if for nothing else then for my partner who was a genuinely lovely young man. I’ve got a zip on my guts and I pulled it two teeth down. Yes I’m sure I’ve got loads to learn here. But I spent twenty years dragging those guts behind me as I walked and putting make-up on them and now I can unpack them and repack them as needed but to practice doing it isn’t my favourite reason. Thankfully the woman leading us is, inevitably, really perceptive. She runs a safe room, which is seriously important when acting comes this close to therapy. If it was my room I’d take a bit more time to close the ceremony, just as it’s exposing stuff, tender stuff, painful stuff. All very close to the surface in all of us. We all think we are doing such a great job of pretending to be okay. My favourite technique of hers is to counter “I don’t know” with “What if you did know?”
Fuck it though. So many weird beans in me at the moment. And my job is to puke them on people. Might as well stir them up a bit, make a better stew.
After the workshop I got another Lime Scooter through a fucking hailstorm. How the hell do I always time it so atrociously?! I went up to Hampstead and I was feeling exposed and shaky and really just wanted a beer but I’ve only gone and dumped my A1 coping strategy so I sat disconsolate with a Guinness Zero. Happy with my life choices but not evolved enough in them to go to a pub after Meisner and not desire a hefty punch of mistress forgettyjuice.
We’ve been planning Halloween again. I couldn’t really focus post class. I’ve got a Factory show tomorrow evening and then I’ve got to drive to Brighton. I’m strung out. So I was twitching a lot over the course of the evening. It did turn into a good enough meeting in the end. Thankfully there are three other brilliant people involved at this point and hopefully Jo as a fourth.
And now I’m nearly home and it’s still too cold to be June but apparently the weekend will show up for us. I’ll be in Brighton. Best idea would be to pack tonight. Am I too tired? Nah.
A rare free evening. I wandered over to a local school hall and sat at the very back of a room with about fifty friendly people in it. My local Nichiren Buddhists. These meetings happen very frequently and I only occasionally go. Last time it was functional, to jettison a very unwell man who might otherwise have attached himself to my sofa. This time it was purely to connect to the thinking of it all. An opportunity to embrace the mystic and the human at the joins.
It’s great to chant in a room full of people. I am slightly ashamed that I’m not able to get through Daimoku (the long bit of the chant) as fluently as I could a few years ago, but I wasn’t leading so it’s all good. I just mumbled into my prayer hands. “Jim iffl mim ho aho no ku jin mmpf flippy pff noo” Didn’t think to bring my little book where it is all written down phonetically. Poor woman in front of me. Then we all sat there and shouted Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo at a scroll for ages. Loosely we are just saying “DEDICATE MYSTIC LAW LOTUS SUTRA” over and over. It’s a thing.
Then a guy did a talk.
Loads of our local Nichiren Buddhists are Italian. I have no idea if it’s the Italians in Chelsea or the Italians more widely with Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo. But the guy who did the talk was certainly from Southern Europe.
We were thinking about “On Establishing the Correct Teaching for the Peace of the Land,” which is the zingy title our Nichiren came up with to speak truth to power in Kamakura whilst simultaneously scoring points against that douchebag Honen. Honen was running around trying to tell people that they could only attain Buddhahood in a tranquil pure land after death. Nichiren crucially held out that anyone and everyone can achieve Buddhahood in this lifetime. And what’s more you can do it without being a toady to a load of inevitably corrupt priests.
There’s a big old drive towards Kosen Rufu (world peace) which is great despite the fact that things haven’t really improved since back then. Back then Genghis Khan was wondering if he could get across to Japan. Now we’ve got Putin Trump and Netanyahu playing “Who’s gonna push it?” So anything I can do to try and shift the energy to peace is a good thing. So I chanted and then connected to the talk.
Dialogue – there’s a lot about dialogue, and being sensitive but honest and firm with people who are entrenched in worldviews we think are foolish or backwards. The evangelical drive in this secular sect to try and get more people to just be chilled out peaceful kind people who brainwash themselves into being simpler by saying a tiny fragment of a sutra over and over and over again. Mantras definitely have power, I’m not knocking it, I’m curious about it.
You can’t really do this Buddhist thing and still have the spite to get all hateyjealous. If we had everyone praying for peace and tranquility it would give ’em something to do instead of throwing bins at cops or shooting cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon off the fence again.
I haven’t done an acting workshop for years on the receiving end. I sometimes play with the idea of doing one of those “meet the casting director” affairs, but then I apply my own principles. What would I genuinely think about someone who had paid just to meet me? I might be compassionate, I might offer advice. But I would be much more likely to employ someone I thought I had somehow “found” through being good at my job. We are proud creatures.
Today I went and took a technique class. So terribly American. What can I say? Eight of us, a good mix, I’m the old guy. I got it for free through complicated means. I want to see what this is all about.
Stamford Meisner did for Stanislavski what Nichiren did for Buddhism. He simplified all the dense complicated stuff and boiled it down to repetition. It isn’t Nam Myo Ho Renge Kyo but it is in a similar instinct place. It’s another way to flood the mind so the instinct can take over. We mustn’t think with our heads when we are acting, it just makes us look smug and dull. But people like me need to find ways to shut that crap off cos my brain is going bananas all the time with distractions and noises.
I’m clueless really regarding Meisner Technique, but later this summer I’m gonna be thrust into a company including one of the chaps who imported it to London. There’s a shared language, a way of working, a way of being. Best I get ahead of the curve so he doesn’t get all sniffy and shake his stick at me.
Plus it’s fun.
I really enjoyed being in a room with all these kooky humans. Actors are a funny breed, curious actors are lovely. I once before did a three day course in this stuff – won it in a charity auction twenty years ago at the underGlobe. I am still in touch with some of the people from it. It gets intense.
I’m hoping not to just skip over the surface here. I’m pretty chill in my craft these days. There’s two more days of it this week so I’m just gonna try and learn and keep my head quiet and look at the people I’m with.
Lovely strange people in the room. I’m not gonna write about them though. I’m enjoying it. We did precious little technical stuff at Guildhall, it was more about sustaining a safe way of working long term and being a team player. All absolutely golden and I wouldn’t have had it any other way. But this summer is my summer of being curious about Meisner. Like The Factory, there’s a rabbit hole to go down. Like the Factory, I’m gonna bring a ball of twine before I jump in.
Up and out onto the TUBE. Going to The Globe and its in the congestion charge zone so no driving even though it’s a Sunday. Emma and Callum have booked a rehearsal room at Globe Ed and we all went there to top and tail screamed entrances and exits which is the closest we are ever gonna get to a rehearsal for the cue-scripted Macbeth we will be doing at Chalke Festival later this month. Banquo has the good grace to get murdered nice and early which was helpful as I needed to run off at 2pm. In my absence they’ve created a lovely little slaughter dance and like any other dance routine I am gonna have to internalise it so eventually I can get through it without the narration: “and back and grab and barge and draw and ‘fuck you slash’ and back the other way and he’s got me and ow my hand and block and ow and eyes and down and eyes and Neck and spin and dead.” And JAZZ HANDS.
It’s a nice bunch of people killing me. I won’t see some of them again until we do it. I still haven’t met my son Fleance or my son Young Seward as they couldn’t get off work in time.
Once I was good and dead I tubed it back to Sloane Square and drove Bergie up to The Cockpit, where I met a writer who used to be a newscaster and three actors. Wole Sarah and (Grace character name). And just a couple of hours later the four of us did a very unusual piece of writing in front of a live audience.
It’s always a joy to see the actybits land especially when you haven’t got a clue who your wife and daughter actually are in real life. We found a chemistry and discovered energy and rhythm. The writer Sarah is brilliant even if I did call her Sue in the Q&A. This one was really last minute. I replaced an old friend and I’m happy to have done so. Connects me back to the old friend as well.
And now I’m home and I just realised that the evening thing I thought I was doing tomorrow is actually on the 8th July so I am gonna have only one thing to focus on tomorrow (plus lines) which is an absolute wonder right now as I’m feeling a tiny bit flooded tonight in a good way.
Reading through my musings on Camino from 2018 yesterday revealed something uncomfortable. In one of my posts I envisaged some nightmare world where somehow people had managed to demonise kindness to justify going after kind people. It was a thought experiment, a joke. Less than a decade later, it exists.
The narrative goes that white liberals are holding the doors open to the evil brown soldiers who exist in order to replace everyone white. That by being in any way accepting of other cultures – primarily those where the average skin tone is a few shades darker – we are destroying the fragile culture of whiteness and are thus actively enemies of the state of whiteness. I had someone sneer at my “Choose Love” T-Shirt the other day. “Choose Love” has become a wrongheaded political statement to a growing wave of extremely fragile failures in this country who have been taught to outsource responsibility for their fuck-ups. Easier to get drunk and shout at a hotel than acknowledge that maybe you should have paid a bit more attention to life’s hard lessons.
This is the excellent foppery of the world, that, when we are sick in fortune, often the surfeit of our own behaviour, we make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and the stars; as if we were villains on necessity; fools by heavenly compulsion; knaves, thieves, and treachers by spherical pre-dominance; drunkards, liars, and adulterers by an enforc’d obedience of planetary influence; and all that we are evil in, by a divine thrusting on. Blame the stars… Or nowadays blame the “other”.
You fucked up. That’s on you. The best you can do is learn and develop so you don’t fuck up again. But it’s not the fault of whoever you are blaming. It’s your fault. Grow from it.
Sure I’m not gonna start telling victims of violent crimes and so forth that they brought it on themselves. But every catastrophe in our life can be a learning experience if we can zoom out on it. We frame all that stuff for ourselves. If we just start blaming other people for all the things that aren’t working in our life, we have no way of growing, in fact we are likely to atrophy. “How could I have done that better?” is a much healthier and more expansive approach than “How dare they do that to me?”
This bubbling rage in America and now over here cos we copy… It really doesn’t feel healthy anymore, if it ever was. But it is getting too close to the normal. I’m sure people like me started feeling like this in the 1930’s in Germany, and the clever ones got the fuck out before the bubble got too big. It’s already really toxic online on social media but more and more now you get people smashing all your windows because they’ve been told to be angry because some idiot has done something awful and the idiot wasn’t white. But where do we go? Iceland? New Zealand?
What a fucking ridiculous wanker that Sikh boy was, and to use his kirpan too? Sikhs are so well integrated, generally so peaceful… He’s really done some damage to his community and that’s a huge shame. Plus the cop was an idiot.
Sure the bulk of the ogres don’t have enough thought to differentiate a Sikh from a Muslim or an anything really, but still it’s an excuse to go throw bins at cops again, destroy people’s cars and piss on things to mayk are country grate agen.
I went to Dishoom for lunch with Lou in King’s Cross. It was super crowded with people enjoying the result of generations of cultural overlap. Nobody threw a bin at us. But maybe before long there’ll be people firebombing these places cos someone says on the internet that they use child blood in the Tikka to get that red colour, or anything really.
I associate the idea of intelligence with critical thinking and the ability to clinically empathise, even if you aren’t able to feel it. I grew up with a brother loosely on the spectrum and watched him learn that stuff.
This ripoff Nero in the White House, he’s cunning but he has none of the things that are valuable in human intelligence. There’s precious left of anything in him frankly, he’s just a noisy shell for himself. But his existence is empowering the worst people in the world. And I can’t wait for the pendulum to swing, but I think we have a few more years of this yet and I don’t think it’s gonna be nice.
A peaceful day by the sea. Taking the down while I can – I’ve been a little flooded with new things, which is as I like it to be.
I’m dreaming of another long walk. I spent far too long today looking at various options. I can’t afford the time for Shikoku, coupled with the expense of going to Japan. There would have to be a perfect alignment for that, like some filming in South Korea. So I’m looking at Europe again. Principally the old Camino just cos I know there’s infrastructure and people clambering over themselves to get you to sleep in their albergue.
So I did something unfamiliar and I went over old blogs. September 2018 it was, when I did the trad Camino. Feels more recent somehow. I extended my route beforehand and ended up walking for about a month and a half. I remember now the tired feet, but I also definitely dealt with a load of dead weight and blocks in my life. There’s more to come out though and the first one was for my mum and grief. I’m wondering if I will have time for a Camino Norté, or a Portugues. Or even a Primitivo. I think the Norte is the shortest – I could bang it out in a month, get a bit more toned, and tanned on one side of my body like a truck driver as I’ll be walking south the whole time down the coast. And get into my body properly again.
Chances are I’m too swept up in the delusion of momentum though, and also there’s more to leave behind than last time. Lou. Cats. More good dayjobbery. My structures and relationships are better than they were in 2018 thankfully. That’s the point.
It has been a delight to stop here with little Tessy by the seaside. I needed it. Today and tomorrow will be my weekend and then things are gonna get busy again. I’ll need to clean up one of my history lectures tomorrow as I’m gonna have to deliver that at The old Globey on Monday and I haven’t done it for a year or so. But it’s only twenty minutes and most of it is in my head anyway.
I’m perfectly fine to dayjob when I’m not acting. I’m perfectly fine to talk about it. I know damn well that some people outside the industry don’t get it and stigmatise the idea of it, but that’s backwards thinking. The only people left in the industry would be the phenomenally successful and people who are considerably more privileged than me, and I’m uncomfortably close to little lord fucking Fauntleroy with my riverside Chelsea flat.
Today it was a school doing what used to be called Dragon’s Day but has been customised. An Enterprise Workshop for year 7. They invent something and pitch it, make a jingle, all that. This was a tech heavy school. They all designed and built things on their iPads. Some of what they built was good.
But for me it felt really auspicious. I walked into my classroom first thing in the morning, getting ready for a day job day, just after an audition for a part I really hope for, and the first thing I set eyes on was a poster with my name on it.
I’ve got that poster in my kitchen. I persuaded everyone to sign it cos it’s a credit I’m proud of and a show I was really happy to be in. And it was and still is a really happy company. The Othello WhatsApp group is still a pleasant place and not too spammy. We don’t have anyone who is doing the usual WhatsApp shit like spamming petitions or constantly sending memes. We share news and occasional banter and I have never needed to mute it. Most of my WhatsApp groups I might as well not be in anymore. I like the Othello one.
So… I sent that photo to the group. And I felt held all day running a workshop alongside a reminder that yes by jiminy I’m an actor that does acting, and this is just one of the many side hustles I’ve managed to pull together. Cos I’m a resourceful and enterprising human being dagnabbit.
At the end of the day I signed it with a green sharpie. I think though that it was a whiteboard pen so it’ll rub off almost immediately. Just like so much of what I do even my signature was written on the wind. Ah the ephemeral. I didn’t stick around to check. I wrote a little note for the teacher as she wasn’t in school today. And drove to Brighton. Thank you Birmingham for a happy alignment moment. Hopefully it is the universe telling me that one of these lovely jobs is gonna land. Or all of them.
This is cheapest room in Birmingham that you don’t have to share with anyone. It’s one of those houses where they’ve turned every upstairs room into a locked bedroom, and the only bathroom is downstairs through the kitchen, which ain’t ideal with my bladder but I’ve brought pajamas and I’m up early either way.
A lovely businesslike audition first, at Spotlight. First audition where I’ve worn shoes for ages. I’ve sent so many barefoot tapes. I’ve even done a few tapes in my pants and a smart jacket and tie. Comfort is key. What I liked about this one is that I had done the work, shot it, they did a redirect on the first and last short scenes and let me do the long one straight through just once. None of the second guessing of a self tape. What’s in the can is in the can and it’s clear I’ve done the work so now it’s just about how tall I am or the colour of my eyes or what have you.
Spotlight have moved from their office in Leicester Place. It must have taken them ages to get all the hoarded actor gold out of the basement. Now they have a very similar setup in Covent Garden. It felt both familiar and unfamiliar. I liked the team in my audition room. I’m already under NDA so you’re getting nowt. A spot of filming would be nice too thankyouplease universe. I’m still wobbling a little after the lovely one that died on me. I’ll always have the callsheets… HA ack yuk.
Complete sobriety is a surprising help in navigating the emotional rapids. It turns out if you push stuff away it just gets biggerer. If you look at it long enough you see the shape of it and after a while you know its name.
So yeah. Now I’m in Brum. More specifically I’m in Bromford. Just went for Balti in a place that was full of locals, many in traditional dress. The confused people in Southampton would have been climbing the walls in that place. Awful to see how many people are motivated by sheer idiocy propagated by obvious villains. It was a yummy balti and cheap for what I got. If I lived here I’d have got a doggie bag.
I’ll go to sleep early here in my strange little room. Blowing £40 of my fee for tomorrow so I don’t have to bang it up in the car from London at dawn. After petrol it’ll still be worth the day and I can go see Lou afterwards instead of squabbling back into London.
I need every penny I can eat right now to keep me in Baltis and petrol so I’m happy for tomorrow. Bergie is moaning about something. It’s electronic though and not crucial – it’s the Stop/Start thing, which I hate anyway as it makes you stall if you ride the clutch, which I do all the time. But it means he’ll have his engine light on for the rest of his life though I reckon.
