AlBarclay

Live music on the wind. The sound of laughter through the window behind me. The people of Luton have come up to their Henge for this festival. And we are dressed in thick black Jacobean clothes trying to work out how best to disguise our radio mics. Showtime, for one night only. Another of the uncountable number of temporary groups that we have all been part of in this game. We are getting ready. I thought I’d write a little down before we start.

Adrenaline will kick in before long and I’ll start walking in circles and popping and obsessively checking my presets. But… for now there’s space in my head to write some words to you oh constant reader. I haven’t really been making time for this of late, I’m dashing them off at the end of the day (waheyy) frequently tired and becatted. So I thought I’d start it pre-show, here in Marsh Farm House, in the downstairs “History Room” – allocated as our Green Room, as we all put on our thick black clothes in the evening sun.

Another great costume I didn’t know I had until recently. The boots I’ve always had but the rest was in Canterbury.

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At this point a huge choir of people bundled into the Green Room and my dream of a contemplative moment was dashed. So we all went and changed with Bergman. He’s been pulling his weight as a dressing room / cast transport / shed this weekend.

We all performed this powerful unusual needed piece of theatre together in a stone circle at the height of this exposing stark summer. Now I’m home and the full moon is smiling down through promising looking clouds. A smattering of skywater wouldn’t go amiss. What a few months this has been.

How many times have we all come together in small groups to make magic and then disippated again? It’s a great community to be part of, theatre folk. Going for a 0% drink with my agent last week helped me key into that – there’s a consistency through the generations. We all care about this strange thing, for all the multiplicity of reasons we have, and it is at its best when we get to do it and pay the bills at the same time.

Next week I’m tearing things apart. Happy to go into that from this, to remind me what’s possible with work and belief so I can have that head on when I assess what to throw and what to keep. There are so many factors at play with theatre. I’ve got the community bit sewn up. But… which stories do I want to tell? And what do I need to tell them how I need to tell them? That’s my question for next week.

Once again I’m bouncing from version to version of myself. Today I was experimenting with a new version of Van Al which combines him with Gaffer Al. Since I was paying for a day of Canice, I figured he could drive the van so I could better do emails and logistical things from the passenger seat.

Canterbury is too far away. It took all day to go down load come up and then do it again. I am likely about to fill that unit up again, so I’m happy we have pretty much emptied the fucker. All options for the swift evacuation of this Dargate unit the better. Much better to have the costumes in London where they can be sorted, used and, God forbid, monetised… I’ll be wearing one of them tomorrow, a combination of things from clearances and bits I’ve bought, with a Glyndebourne shirt. Simon will be wearing a Glyndebourne top as well. And the death cape came through Hammer into Gatsby before it ended up in a load of things Jack and I had to pull out of a damp warehouse out south west somewhere and now it lives in my car.

As Lou observed last week, everyone is being forced into smaller and smaller places to live so everyone has to get rid of things all the time. Certainly the people I know do. If a friend had just moved into an empty house I could make it look incredible in a fortnight. But as it is I’m gearing up to be as ruthless as I can, knowing that time is going to be my worst enemy here.

But tomorrow I get to forget all that again and go and be creative in Luton. It’s showtime. I’ll be back in Actor Al – the version where he doesn’t look like he’s enjoying himself but secretly he is. Nasty person actor Al. Surrounded by good people. A treat.

I walked in the door twenty minutes ago and put the bath on, ordered a bacon cheese burger from Five Guys, stroked Misty and let Boo six sniff my toes. It’s half ten at night and I left just after 7 in the morning. A sausage butty and coffee at Gregg’s. A coke. A refuel and an Irn Bru. And never not rushing. Plenty of lifting. Some quick decisions. And the costumes are in London. As are two lovely chairs and a Cyberman Desk. And I’m gonna scoff this burger, wallow in a bath, go to sleep and do a show about witches tomorrow in a magic place.

Thank the lord for Canice. He escaped the van drop off but he only got out of my clutches at about half eight. A good hard day. Much achieved. Zzzzzz nomnom purr purr splish splosh zzzz drive drive ACTING drive drive zzzz.

I am absolutely bewitched by Luton Henge.

My first ever day on set was in Luton, at Luton Hoo. Somehow I ended up in the thick of it, thanks to Wendy and Stephen. I was in a neighbouring Winnebago to one of my heroes, Richard E Grant, who had enough grace to spend the day with me and keep me company. I met Sir John Mills that day as well. “Your first movie? It’s my hundredth!” “I hope one day to be able to tell someone the same thing.” Ha.

That was, as you can imagine, a magical day, perhaps made more magical by my latterday understanding : it wouldn’t just become an everyday thing for me. Back then I assumed this was the new normal.

I’ve rarely been to Luton since. I was there today and I’ll be there on Sunday. But… the henge is a very different affair to the hoo.

The Hoo is a stately home for hire. The Henge is a new thing, a piece of magic on the land. Built from passion and need. A stone circle thoughtfully constructed in ancient ways by modern minds. Parks and dirt bike tracks intersecting. Public land but inhabited. Room for play, room for ritual. A border space, that old word liminal, the shore where one world brushes against another. This is where we need to make art, where we have to make art. The border spaces are the only fertile spaces left once everything at the extremes has become toxic.

I don’t know who spearheaded this henge but I see what it is. Volunteers with a building and a site that they can use to teach workshops to the local kids. One of them wants to teach kids plumbing. “There hasn’t been much sign up for that,” I’m told when I ask, because for me I know what a free workshop about plumbing could have saved me over the years, let alone what it could have earned me on top of that. It’s a skill that pays more than law these days. But the kids of Luton are yet to catch on to that.

It is a powerful initiative, beautifully executed in a strong site. We are helping make it flow by embodying Cheryl’s script there for just one night on Sunday.

It’s gorgeous. Arid at the moment as this summer of drought has been proving. But the thistles are flowering. The long grass is straw now, and at least there’s been no fire. We will do a show on Sunday about connection with the natural world and ourselves. We will keep making art while the world burns around us. We all need to try. It’s the only way we can justify ourselves as a species, making beauty. Otherwise we really are just barbarians.

Showed up at The Cockpit with a bunch of stuff. A top for the puritan minister. A slitted black doublet and hose with boots for me. And a death cape. The label inside it says “Bill”. I’ve had it for ages now, that cape. And it has been in Bergie cos I use it as a blanket. I’ll be wearing it soon, finally. While banging a drum. It has arms and everything. I forget what I’ve got, a lot of the time. But I think I’ll be able to have a place for it in London for a while. I might be able to make sense of it yet, friends and rates and deal dependent.

These people are great. Running mates. Most of them I’ve crossed paths with before but often unawares. We are all still here though, doing this ridiculous thing.

Ellie and I met in the early noughties doing a thing best forgotten with a load of people best remembered. The money man was running the project, making what he considered to be art in a well loved space. He employed a couple of dozen young actors – he was the money man so he was looking for people he could attach his stuff to but didn’t have a great deal of instinctive discernment. He found a brilliant company by mistake by Sylvia.

The most impressive thing about it is that pretty much every one of the actors is still in the game decades later. It was the beginning of many great collaborations and friendships. Mel and I met on it, even if we forget that now. Ellie and I and ditto. Annette and I, but she inexplicably stopped using me or responding. Dan and I – we still see each other often, employ each other. So many others that I’m in loose touch with or could pick up very easily. I don’t want to list them any further as there are so very many and I still hear from most of them. Very few have quit, which is the point. Some are doing mad well. And obliquely, (precisely because it was a tasteless mess), the tasteless event we did led to Jon spearheading the corporate stuff he and now I have been doing ever since. The leader of that particular project would have made an enthusiastic mess of that so he blew his shot. No taste or understanding. People aren’t idiots.

This weekend I’m going up to Luton to do a powerful piece of theatre with an extraordinary small group of genuine creatives. And I wouldn’t be doing it if it hadn’t been for that odd thing we all did decades ago that introduced me to Ellie. “The problem with Al is that he says yes to everything,” my agent was quite rightly told when I signed. I’m getting better at that now but I still do it… “yes” leads to life, to colour, to mad joy. Without these things, why would we weather the waiting?

But it’s 11pm. The next few days are gonna be full on. Bedtime, I think. Night night friends. And if you are anywhere near Luton on Sunday, I think I’m right in saying that this round is free. We will be back in October. But if you want to be part of some sympathetic magic in a powerful place, this is the best link I can find…

Sleep well my pretties!!!

X

Another early finish today. Once again very welcome, I’m working through my options at the moment and trying to consolidate ahead of taking in a load more stuff. My pathways out are getting slightly more well trodden but there’s still much to be learnt. August is going to be research. September will be a huge movement out. And this winter I want to build something I believe in with what I think I’ll have, aiming for a spring launch.

I like the room I’m not in right now. The breaks are welcome as I almost always have vans to book. I’m not paying myself for any of my recent Globe jobs just to make sure there’s money in the bank against next week. I still think I might need another van but… it’ll be pricey and also I fear it might be crowded on site so I’m going to trust what my instincts have booked already.

We’ve been rehearsing upstairs at The Cockpit in a room I’m starting to know well. It’s hot up there. You can get a Chicken Shawarma in the market for £2.99 that will let you keep the contents of your stomach and tastes of something. But if you want a coffee you’re out of luck. There’s a place purporting to be Italian that will give you a superheated liquid that tastes more like battery acid once it finally gets to drinking temperature. All the places in a half mile radius are working with the same beans, which if not nuked at astonishing temperature have a residual taste of shoe leather. Likely it’s a racket by the local mob. Honestly the stuff is fucking AWFUL generally there. I’ve learnt to get a Lime Bike or walk for half an hour until I’m out of the radius if I want something palatable. Christ what am I, a fucking hipster? The epicentre of the bad coffee is Church Street. It isn’t a new problem, it’s been like that for decades.

You’re also in trouble if you want a drink after the show… That’s less relevant to me now obviously, and we are just using it for rehearsal either way. Muslim area, I guess – the mosque where I went and got advice about how to practice Ramadan is just down the road. The guy I spoke to had me tracking to Saudi time – I would wake up to an alarm and drink a huge bottle of water at about ten to three in the morning. I lasted about a week and a half. Nobody to do it with, and actually I’ve since learned that there’s really no need to be that strict. You can use the clock of your own country, I think… I was just trying to make sense of what so many people put themselves through. Not easy when you have nothing behind it but an unusual approach to self discipline and a curiosity. You need a community and a faith. That’s what it is about. Good to learn though.

Early bed tonight. It’s too hot to be awake. I’ll do the rest of the things tomorrow. Problem is it’s too hot to be asleep too. But I’ll give it a go. At least I don’t have to get up before dawn and drink a day’s water. And I’m not called until tomorrow afternoon.

Early finish, you say?

Normally I’d be perfectly happy to sit in the room with these wonderful people and watch them work. But my specific work was over by lunch and then I literally just lay there as willingly as I could. But when it was suggested that perhaps my second half afternoon was my own? Fuck yeah.

Honey from top to bottom, back in my light bubble, yeah it’s important. And I’m off off off.

First up, Bergie was full of shit from car boot. He’s gonna be costume transport and will need available seats. So I Lime biked home and immediately drove up to Camden. Now the massage table is locked up there along with all the car boot equipment. You need a certain amount of stuff to efficiently car boot. I did one of them with Lou on Sunday. Didn’t write about it at the time cos of Christopher Nolan. Often I omit big parts of the day to write about a detail. It’s my prerogative. Emptied a load of shit into the lockup. Later for that.

Being in that neck of the woods anyway it made sense next to go to Sacred Distillery in Highgate. We needed to pick up the Spicy Vermouth. I might be working much of Halloween but I’m still building the fucking thing. I love it. Reader, I made a social media.

Yeah, I’ve done it before, I’ll do it again. Ray Ban Metas. I adore them, the possibilities open up when there’s a GoPro on your face. I haven’t had a phone with enough memory for them to be relevant until recently. But last year I did a POV video of an invented Igor type servant picking up the booze. It was the same brilliant woman in the shop. One take, and trying not to focus on her face – that’s the rules I’ve made for this sort of thing. I briefed her beforehand. “I’ll come back in here in a few minutes very energised and distressed and I’ll mostly just mumble and try and pay you in whatever I can find. Just tell me master has paid and give me a bottle of spicy vermouth.” She is and was fab. That’ll go up on the socials before long. Because IT IS BACK AGAIN. I might not be guiding every night, who knows who will be, maybe it’ll be a ghost that ate my mind, maybe it’ll be a new friend forever. It’s not about me it’s about a fun weird random spooky evening. People love it. You love it. Don’t you? Yes you do. BUY IT BUY IT BUY IT MORE BUY IT TUESDAY FOREVER BUY BUY BUY. Yeah I’m good at marketing. Yeah. Eat my copy.

That previous paragraph end is a link that might lead you to bliss. We all need bliss. And we WILL sell out whether or not it’s me in the hat. So book early kids to avoid disappointment.

I love making stuff. I love accumulating useful things for making stuff. I love being busy.

I have no complaints about the next few weeks and how they will go, but fuck me every spare moment is going to be filled with things right now. insha’Allah.

These hot nights it is hard to motivate, but having been in a rehearsal room all day playing an oppressive man it felt like the right thing to do to tell my agent I could grab her an Edinburgh Festival programme from The Cockpit. As a fringe venue they get a bucket of them.

She’s in Chiswick so I got on a Lime and only realised halfway there that I was in a war with my new phone’s battery. I needed the map to get to the house. I needed battery to end my ride. I had to switch off my phone and guess most of the way and then when it came to end it, my phone died while sending the instruction. Thankfully it must have hit the system as the bike locked. A second later would have cost me a lot of money. Damn we rely too much on our phones.

Esta and I went for a walk and a pair of non alcoholic beverages in her local, and a long needed chew of the fat while a friendly lady behind the bar charged me up. She’s a bloody marvellous agent to me, Esta. I’m so happy to be an actor with no complaints. Loads of people I know bitch about their representation. The industry can be a total fucker but we keep coming back and the longer we can avoid trying to blame people the better. She’s fun and fab and knows what she’s selling.

Now she has an Edinburgh programme and I got to spend time with her – a double win.

And Mighty Spacebeard that programme is HUGE. Face after face. Logo after logo. How the fuck does it work for ANYONE? But yeah… I remember people it DID work for. I mention two of them to Esta, a boy and a girl. “They’re the only reason people still take things there,” she tells me.

It’s kinda tempting even at my age to build something mad and take it there, to be another face in that book, to create something out of hope and chutzpah and sticky back plastic and then watch as maybe you hit something, maybe you just get by, maybe you are desperately flyering in the last week hoping you might just get some of it back with a rush at the end. It’s one of my many stupid ideas bubbling away down there. There are so many. But it’s such an unbelievably roll of the dice. To do it well I would have to pull every fucking favour I have, and to pull those favours I would have to deeply believe in the thing I was making. Anything shy of that would be a crash.

Bedtime soon in this heat though. Tomorrow I’m part of a company where someone else is doing all that horrid production work. I just need to be sure what I’m saying and to able to listen and respond. Bread and butter.

I’ve put nice new sheets on. Gonna see what sleep looks like in this heat. Early alarm. I want to hit tomorrow running.

We tell stories to work out who we are. And we don’t fundamentally change. A good tale can help us understand ourselves and others, ourselves in the context of others, ourselves in the context of the world.

Early tales are full of Gods and Monsters, before we all knew that we’re both.

I love the old tales, the ones that have somehow survived, the ones where civilisations are making sense of their scars.

The Odyssey. The second great preserved epic of the Homeric bards, and perhaps it was blind Homer with his stick that first caused this immense story to be written down. It was probably told over many nights, varying in the telling with the needs of the audience and the news of the day. It got big enough and copied enough to survive the great library burn where we lost who knows what.

A few hundred years after the greatest known human cataclysm of the ancient world, this story of a homecoming began to bubble up into general familiarity. A great coastal city to the east, likely in Turkey. Ilium. Troy. A Greece dominated by these huge dangerous Atrides brothers, the sons of Atreus, their name taken by Frank Herbert into another epic. Agamemnon the king among many small states in a scattered Greece, later murdered in bed by his wife. Menelaus, married to Helen, charming and deadly. Two brothers willing to destroy a whole civilisation over a lost love. A war about a woman? A competition between jealous goddesses played out among men? An almighty mess of an ancient siege told and retold and romanticised.

Ten years on a beach, a trick, one night of atrocity. The fields sewn with salt, the women and men of Troy enslaved or killed. Troy utterly deleted. Marlowe’s topless towers of Ilium lost forever.

The scar of “what did we do to Troy?” That’s what the Homeric bards were examining in The Odyssey through this tale of a difficult homecoming. It’s a whole society knowing their prosperity was built on a huge act of violence far away and long ago.

The story covers a great deal. Hospitality is a huge theme in it. How we treat strangers comes up again and again and Nolan’s film leans into this, and spells out the ancient code – strangers might be Gods, treat them well. From Lastrygonian giants eating two out of three crews with no hesitation, to unwelcome suitors emptying Penelope’s cellars of wine. Playing the cyclops in our Factory Odyssey I could always find a clear justification for my violence. They ate my cheese without permission, these nasty little spiky men. And they’re after my sheep. They came to my island on their little boat and now they want my things. It’s an ancient reminder that sometimes we are the native and sometimes we are the visitor. This is sewn into the fabric of the tale.

There’s a lot about taking responsibility for our actions. War. Leadership. Coming of age. The monster action is largely in books 9 to 12 of 24, starting with the blinding of the one eyed monster Polyphemus. Remember that the storyteller is thought to have been blind, maybe even that he WAS blinded for poetry. The blinding of the cyclops and the bragging about it, that’s a hard hard lesson Odysseus learns in the poem that the film still teaches him but elsewhere. “Nobody has blinded me!” “Ha ha you idiot, my name isn’t really Nobody, it’s Odysseus!” *cue angry Poseidon*

Nolan treats this story with his usual incredible mind. He invents sequences to connect characters – a temple raid for a father and son, an expanded role for Argus the dog, an expansion (and topical blinding) for the swineherd Eumaeus and contraction for Laertes, Odysseus father, mentioned but omitted. He shoots it on film, for IMAX, because he is a champion for our industry. His movie is a telling for our times and it’ll age well. Good god I’d love to work with that man. My first movie was on film. I approach them all like that. Come ready, don’t fuck with the take, there are too many other people involved.

As with all big stories properly told, there are moral quandaries. Nolan cuts the hanging of the maids. It’s a difficult thing to forgive which is why I always made sure we looked at it when we improvised it. This story isn’t happy dancing ponies, and Odysseus is written as a deeply flawed man – a man of many turns. It is unsettling that in the calm after the slaughter he immediately oversees a second slaughter of servants. I thought Nolan was building to it making Melantho so unpleasant, but he has Penelope shut her in the slaughter room instead. Kinder. I didn’t miss the hanging.

No good story tells us how we are supposed to behave, it just tells us how someone else behaved. It’s noticeable how noisy the modern equivalent of the monsters are being about things that make no effect on anything. The casting of two minor characters has raised so much online howling from the usual silly nasty scared people.

But these stories teach us who we are just as they teach us who other people are. I’ve watched people I know magnifying themselves about these small things and I’ve sadly understood a little better why I haven’t been seeking their company. Skewed perspective. The cyclops has one eye. No perspective.

—

This is my writing about the story, and the film which has reminded me of the story. Both are important, the ancient and the modern retelling. Tales must be told anew as things in society shift.

As I said at the start these stories can teach us more about ourselves. How we react to them, what we take away, what we hate, what we love… There’s enough in this one that we can find a million things to love or hate depending on our inner life, our twists and turns, our polutropos. I loved how Nolan showed us the wine dark sea, the cost of sacrifice… I loved the way we learnt with Odysseus. I didn’t miss Nausicãa and the Phaecians. I didn’t miss much of what he cut, and kinda see why he cut it and made the changes he did. It all felt complete in execution. My bum was tired.

I miss improvising it with The Factory. This was a great way to go to the cinema. Do it.

I woke up this morning when I realised that the satnav had taken me to Rotherhithe. Luton van had to be returned by 8am, no overnight key drop and its in Upminster. It hadn’t occurred to me that the satnav was gonna try and route me through that fucking tunnel. You can’t tell Google maps or Waze that you’re in a van yet, which is an oversight.

I was having a lovely dream about traffic and momentum when I was startled into very wakeful problem solving. Thankfully I know my town now, so I found my way to Tower Bridge. In the end I only lost a few minutes.

Early Saturday morning bus to Upminster station after returning that van. Times like this I really wish I had my own Luton.

I left my Makita in the van so I’ll be carrying that back. Got my kindle with me. About to sit on the District Line for a week or two until I get to Sloane Square. Upminster. I don’t think I’ve ever been here before. I’m in a Café Nero on the high street getting my caffeine fix before the incredible journey.

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Made it all the way back, mostly courtesy of my Kindle. I so rarely get on the tube these days, now there’s Lime and Just Park. But today I jostled elbows all the way to Sloane Square. A territorial neighbour also with bare arms. There’s a strange intimacy in that war for armspace.

—

Siesta with the cats and then up to the lockup to grab the car boot equipment and once more a mission to the seaside. Lou and I are catching a day of car boot and Odyssey before I go into performance week for Luton Hoo and Awaken, this wonderful and intense Meisner related theatre that found me.

Lou is cooking a risotto as I write. It’s windy here so she wants to ground us with stodge. I’m looking forward to a snatched weekend here. It’s gonna be two very different busy weeks.

Still a lot to process. I’m building a team for a big job. There’s gonna be a lot more than just the basic stuff that goes on in my head. I’m freelance and employing a lot of freelance people.

Today John and I went down and made sense of all the shit left in Canterbury. It was a lot. There’s the costume stuff which I think of in a different part of my head. I hoped that I might have a place for that today even temporarily but my friend is on holiday. I’m scared I can’t afford what they might want on an ongoing basis, but maybe for a month… Maybe. I’ll need a few months to make sense of any business I want to establish with the stuff I’ve got. I still think there’s something in it, but my focus is everywhere.

So I brought everything but the costume up to London. Buckets and buckets full of pewter tankards and gas lamps and stationery and hand grenades and guns and puppets and alembics.

I’ve left two huge great big thrones and a Cyberman desk with the costume. Hoping the local auction house will have it. The only Doctor Who auction I’ve ever seen was in Newcastle. Maybe that’s the best place for the desk… I don’t want to pay to store it anymore, like with Christine’s crap.

I’ll likely have to pay the lads next week to move the costumes and stuff and make room down that way. I’ll be switching my head back next week into Meisner and performance. Actually I’ll have to give you all a link for tickets. I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing for a week – gainful acting. Playing a broken man who breaks things and doing it the Meisner way.

I’m close to flood on this so I’m gonna just go to sleep and see how it looks in the morning…

X