AlBarclay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America …

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

Winchester Virginia changed hands 70 times in the civil war. The accessible version of history of this area is tangled up in the recent squabbles of the colonisers. You will usually get half a sentence about the true history, and then a load of noise. “The Burgernurga valley was significant to the native Americans, and then Murduck Bumgitt opened his goat farm here in 17xx.”

There was a lot of death in this town though. The confederacy, the unionists, going round and round. We went into the town hall and it was a slaughterhouse. What the fuck would the world look like if the confederacy had won? It seems the current president is keen to find out, as he dismantles all the things that made this country great in our lifetime, all in the name of making it “great again”. Aka plunging it back into the anarchy that this town is a warning about.

The staggering arrogance of unexamined wealth and power. What an absolute twit.

But here I am and it isn’t as bad as it looks in the media, on the ground here. We haven’t had much bullshit. I did karaoke and built a “fuck ice” into my song twice and nobody shot me. The majority of people are reasonable, but yes there is an untrained self elected militia here controlled by a child who has never grown up. There’s a cancer at the heart of this once great nation. I’m terms of international standing, it might recover, it might not. It depends how the eventual collapse is handled, and who takes the public eye in the aftermath. It’ll need to be a strong hand that can negotiate all the “left” “right” poison that is being propagated by those who want things to continue to be just as they are now for their own financial concerns.

The “left” is allegedly weak and stupid and doesn’t realise how we are under attack from nebulous agents controlled by unfamiliar religions or slightly alien worldviews. The “right” is allegedly cruel and selfish and can’t understand that most people aren’t as acquisitive as they are personally – the only people we need to be protected from is the right because they will take everything for fear that someone else will if they don’t. These are the polarities.

Going to these civil war museums, I can really feel how people got behind their polarised worldviews. The slave owners desperately needed an ascendant worldview that allowed some people to be merely property. The unionist held truths to be self evident that all men are equal. Hundreds of thousands of people died right here in Washington for this ideal. 20000 casualties in one day just down the road from here at Antietam – the single worst day of American warfare.

This nation self determined as champions of equality after a dalek-like systematic extermination of the mostly welcoming indigenous population. And then they fought for equality and won, abolished slavery, became an almost laughable self styled world police. And now… this fuckery. A deluded fool shouting and millions of people echoing his shouts.

It’s not as bad on the ground as it seems in the media, but there’s something rotten in the state of America.

Travel day today. Somehow right at the start everyone had already worked themselves into a tizzy. It was perplexing. We had ages and everything was definitely going to be fine, but you can see when people’s breath is high – there’s not much you can do to calm it but be compassionate so I did that as best I could even though it was much ado about nothing. Thankfully it was just Benjy and me in one car to the airport. “Is it me or is everyone else really highly strung this morning?” “This is the relaxed car mate. It’s fine. Let’s just have a nice drive.”

I didn’t want to return the cars unfilled as Hertz charges $7 a gallon to the rental, where we could have got 3 bucks easy and been refunded. Better to fill them up and send a receipt surely, I argued, but it is in the contract that we can send them back full, and spending somebody else’s money is better than doing ten minutes extra driving, apparently.

I drive so constantly and instinctively that I forget that most people think of driving as a separate thing from, like, walking. Finding unfamiliar parking, leaving an airport, going to a petrol station. It isn’t a big thing in my imagination at all, but I know from Lou learning that dad taught me to drive when I was ten so it never really wasn’t instinctive. It’s just another way of impelling myself in a direction. Like skiing. I once tried to teach a girlfriend skiing. I realised I couldn’t remember learning it, so I had no idea how to teach it to an adult. I was bombing around the pistes aged 4 like those little kids in crash helmets these days. Just it was the seventies so the crash helmet was my head.

Things calmed down gradually as it was clear that none of the imaginary monsters, whatever they were called, were biting. We all made it to Winchester no trouble as we would have done just as easily if nobody had been stressing out. Long fucking day though. Chicago first, then change, then Washington DC, then get the rental cars and drive baby drive. But here we are.

We all got here in the dark, to Winchester Virginia, to another Hamptons by Hilton. We went to 50/50 for a burger and now it’s early bed. Got my first class tomorrow. And yeah I’m tired, cos I did have to concentrate and make sure everything was fine, and the stress dissipated gradually, I think people were just timing it like it was an international flight, not a domestic. Annoying though.

“Two hours and ten minutes and we are not halfway through yet.”

“It’s not sport really is it?”

“It’s capitalism.”

Pageantry. Adverts. More pageantry. More adverts. Lots of big men run at one another. Adverts. Celebrities. Adverts. Celebrities. Someone kicks a ball.

SUPERBOWL

We are in a Mexican restaurant.

I just had quesadillas. The big boys are playing the big game bigly. We are supporting the Seahawks arbitrarily. I’ve had a load of college footballers in my classes this week. I throw balls in the warm-up. Theatre and sports align very well, and these big enthusiastic boys do very well with a bit of Shakespeare text. They are used to getting stuck in.

I borrowed a book from one of my teachers here, Hal Cosentino. He is a published playwright, writing trans plays, and he had a methuen anthology where his play “Oh Buddy” has been published. I read it this afternoon and it is remarkable, really vital, playful but with edge. These tours we align with so many fascinating characters. It really is a treat to come to these places. When will I ever be in Arkansas again?

Which is why we went up to Petit Jean state park. We walked to the creek. We saw waterfalls. We laughed and breathed with trees and it was good, all five of us. We do things together when we can and it is a truly bonded company now, five brainy geeky actors running around small town America. My only sadness is that this is such a short tour, but that’s the environment at the moment.

Tomorrow we fly. I have to pack. Seth the fireman just showed up at the restaurant where we are watching the advertmatch and gave us each a fire department challenge coin! Now I’ve got 3! Air force, navy and fire department. I like the tradition and they all end up on my altar.

I’m gonna go back to my hotel room and pack, then get an early bed. I might leave the advertbowl on as I pack.

So much fucking AI in these shoddy adverts. I hope we are at peak AI now, as the servers burn the planet so idiots can rehash everything from aggregated stolen creativity language and identity. It all looks like shit anyway.

Post show karaoke. Unexpected, but there are some proper musical theatre extrovert types in this company, and Sam.

Sam kicked it off a few days ago with Sweet Caroline in White Water Tavern in Little Rock. That is a glorious place covered in graffiti and absolutely unpretentious. We met some people there.

“There were some kids who had never been to theatre before,” said Antonio, the guy who brought us in and raised the funding. “I didn’t think they were coming back for the second half, cos they all went to the parking lot and got completely stoned. But they came back! I spoke to them. They’ve never seen anything before.” “Yeah, they were our friends…” That was Elana. She played pool with us, then sang karaoke after Sam did Sweet Caroline. She was absolutely tiny, probably just 21, we literally just told her what we were doing and then she showed up mob handed to a Shakespeare play and stayed.

Antonio was generally pleased about us bringing in our weird audience members. “They stayed, and then they asked what else we have on,” he beamed.

The lady from the car hire in Little Rock, came with her mum and her friends too! She was bemused but happy. It’s a good show and as it should, it connects us to the audience.

After the show we went into town.

“I like you guys cus you clearly don’t fit in around here,” said Brad tonight as his opener. This was before anyone sang karaoke. We are just in the only good pub in Conway. JJ’s. Brad is depressed. He moved back here from Cali. His dad died. Now he lives where his dad lived. It is entirely on him to get over his shit but right now he hates his life. I wonder the extent to which we all get into these expectation tangles.

I’m just here now. I kinda had to sing a karaoke really so I did Johnny Cash covering U2 One. I can talk that mostly so

Now I’m writing at the bar while everyone goes about the things.

We had a matinee today and that was that. We are now all packed up and good to go. Lovely to see the guys off who have helped us in the theatre. It’s a brilliant college, Hendrix, with a really tight team running the training at the moment. I’m hopeful that I’ll come across people here in the greater industry. It is a frequent thing for me to meet a young American in the UK who might be at Stage Door and tell me the college we met at, and I will always remember them exactly. Some are friends on social media. None are given this link, which I’ve realised I basically never share to anyone. I think that’s ok. I’m not writing for you, darling. And it isn’t monetised so it means nothing if you read it or not. One of my friends who thinks all the things keeps apologising for unsubscribing and I literally couldn’t give a fuck. I still love them. My love is not conditional on you reading these ramblings or even knowing they exist.

That said, there are some of you who I know about and I love you for it, because life is hard. Support is a powerful thing, and even basic interest somehow implies support. So yeah – In the tone of all the instawankers: I’m so very very glad of you all. At least I’m not shouting into a void. When I’m shouting.

Right now I’m just happy to find so much liberal art in Arkansas…

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.