AlBarclay

I was supposed to make three trips out of my flat yesterday. I think the reality is that I made the second and then just forgot the third.

Trip 1: Take all the bin bags down.

Trip 2: Get the fire irons and put them in the car.

Trip 3: Go and get my bag with my diary, laptop and change of clothes.

I loaded the irons and drove away. No bag packed. I’ve only just noticed. yes folks I’m wearing the same pants I had on yesterday. I thought I’d left my bag in the car.

The car was so full of wood and mattresses that it was complicated getting the fire irons into it. I think I would have remembered trying to get my bag into it as well so I really hope that I’ll swing home tomorrow morning and find it there at the top of the stairs waiting for me. If not it’s a bit shit. Losing my laptop and my script and my diary would suck.

This behaviour is familiar to me though. I once went down to my car halfway through packing for a season at Sprite, just to look at the A to Z to plan my route – (long time ago now). I didn’t realise until I was actually in Yorkshire that I was a day early, my half packed bag was on the living room floor and my door was open. I paid my nephew to go get it, close the door behind him, and bring it to Greenwich so Jo could bring it up with her the next day.

So yes I can be an absolute airhead sometimes.

I blame the fire irons. They’re heavy and cumbersome. I thought they would come in handy here with Lou but they are kinda too big for here frankly so I’ll be taking them back when I go.

But tomorrow at 4am I drive Lou to City Airport. I’ll find out tomorrow whether I left my bag at home, in the lift, or on the street. I’m hoping it’s option one. I’m an idiot.

Nice being out in the countryside even if it’ll be a really early bed and early rise. She’s off to Luxembourg. I’m here to look at lines and stroke the cat.

I just wanted to empty my car. Hammersmith Bridge and Albert Bridge is closed so everyone’s favourite places to cross the river have changed and traffic is funneled to the overcrowded Wandsworth and Battersea bridge. Wandsworth bridge causes huge tailbacks and by the time I realised I was gonna be stuck in the dump for hours and hours I had no choice but to go ahead with my intended plan.

Throwing the stuff away took minutes. I pulled some out of my side door. When I got back to the vehicle the car beside me had driven forward and driven into my door. He’d drawn a big line down the side of his car and wanted my insurance details. I’ve given them to him but he fucking better not try and claim. It’s obviously his fault and if he goes through insurance the best he’s gonna get is split liability which, for a few hundred quid of damage will cost both of us a grand or more in higher premiums. What a twit.

I’ll wait and see if he tries anything. Annoying. Virtually no visible damage to my car, just a bit of paint on the end of my door. Driving without due care and attention. Hitting a stationary vehicle.  I wasn’t even there, let alone moving.

So yeah I eventually got out of this.

Three hours barely moving an inch it was. Listening to Bowie and The Doors. Still wasn’t fun. People telling you how long they’d been when they were on the way out. Drivers with passengers sending them to buy lunch and they come back and we haven’t moved.

Now I’m with Lou. Peace and quiet and cats and chamomile tea.

The lads and I all bundled in at 10. My brief: “Think about the walls. Don’t throw things about, care about it. This isn’t a set break. And the client is on site.”

We had so many stairs. The biggest fucker was the sofa bed. And it’s because it was too heavy. I hadn’t brought my socket wrench (why?). So when one lad said “we need to take the back off” and I said “okay” and came back to see them all looking at it ten minutes later I just told them “Get four lads, we’ll lift it”. We did one flight of stairs with five. The second flight was tighter. I let him win. He went to Leyland and bought some spanners on my ticket. I took myself away from the job and just let them do it. He took the back off. It was easier. He likes being right so endorphins all round. I got the job done and feel good for choosing the right lads, he was right. Huzzah.

Largely that’s the game here. The lads self-determine cos they are all intelligent multi talented ADHD lads (and lasses but today was a sausage party). Their personality comes through in how they work and how they interact with the client. Apparently the porter pulled Jake aside this morning: “Are they all actors?” he asked the only one of us who clearly isn’t. Had he been tipped off by the client? Or did he observe it? Because yes, that’s the thing most of us do when we aren’t hauling driving workshop leading invigilating quizzing decorating guiding catsitting healing mascotting making stage managing gardening recording clienting wardrobing joining designing boat racing event-building- breaking what do you need?ing etc etc etc

I never realised it would be so varied when I signed up for it. But I am so completely at home to the fact it is. I am an extension of my diary day by day. It runs me. There’s rarely any time for me to anticipate anything as I’m too busy in the present to know it is going to happen. But I’m off to see Lou tomorrow and that’s always a thing to look forward to. AND I have committed to Mardi Gras, although haven’t bought the flight tickets. I’m not gonna do T-Rex which is on the 20th January. I’m gonna consult with Lou and book either in the last days of January or the early ones of February. Fuck it. Sometimes something is a once in a lifetime. You can only be queen of a Mardi Gras troupe once. Mel and I have covered too much ground for me not to point towards going out, bringing a load of brilliant absurd costume, and celebrating 25 years of unbroken friendship and collaboration. Plus it’s a nicer time to go over to the states than it was last time when the fat militia were murdering citizens with impunity.

I was thinking about that rotting-meat person again today. Even though they voted against him it’s hard not to think about him. I was driving and hit a crap analogy in my thoughts. I’ll share it:

Imagine there’s a brown paper bag full of wet shit with a detonator on the table in the room with you. You only know it can detonate and that it will at some point and shower everyone liberally with horrid stinky wet shit. So obviously for the whole time you’re in the room with it, your eyes and thoughts will be largely on that bag of shit, hoping it doesn’t explode until you’ve done what you need to do.

As the explosive bag of shit, he mistakes that attention for respect. The explosive bag of shit can sense it’s constantly being considered. People are being careful how they address that bag of shit, they tread carefully. In case *pop sploosh*.

“They respect and love me,” thinks the explosive bag of shit. But no. Really no. They just don’t want to have to clean up shit or get shit in their face. None of us do. We are wary, we consider it, we respect the potential it has to cover us in shit. But… we know it’s merely a bag of shit, it has no intrinsic worth. It is only relevant to us because of positioning – on the table in the room with us – and the fact it could explode and make things horrible for everyone.

That’s my extremely eloquent political analogy. You’re welcome. And I’ll observe that my analogy is a pile of shit so you don’t have to, oh wandering spark from the dying flame. Should you be capable of reading this far.

Ça va. I asked Lou to help with estimates before I ordered all the clothes bags. She watched the video and helped me find the gusseted bags I was gonna need. And we had enough. I might have ordered one more load of boxes, and another roll of gaffer. You can never have too much gaffer tape it seems. But largely we had enough stuff.

It’s a house move. They are going just two minutes down the road. Down 4 flights of stairs. Into a van. Short drive, out of the van. Into a house more or less directly opposite where my brother Rupert lives. The distance almost doesn’t make any difference, apart from the fact that we’ll be able to do two loads easily tomorrow.

These guys who are moving are very minimalist and even so it took six of us most of the day to get everything ready for transport. It’s a good team. And I got to employ Lou. A huge portion of what had to pack was clothing. Considering she’s been on wardrobe for international touring musicals it seemed like a no brainer to put her in charge of packing a few clothes. I’m very glad I did.

It’s all ready to go but tomorrow is going to be a lot of stairs and a great deal of care.

I’m happy though that this business is working at the moment. I’m good at it, my teams are good at it. Everyone has a decent day and we get paid at the end of it all. What’s not to like?

I took a few especially fragile items over there in Bergman today just to get ahead of the game. I’m glad I’ve got good lads on the lifting though. I’m not feeling my physical best at the moment, my right arm hasn’t liked lifting for about a month now all in and I’m still not sure what I did to it – likely a flailing injury on set with Bread. There was some enthusiastic wrestling.

Thankfully I’ve got lots of big lads tomorrow and they’re all younger than I am.

Up this morning and into a zoom meeting. Line runs. I think there’s gonna be a lot of that in the next few weeks. Such a huge learn ahead of me. A lovely part in a very zingy play but it won’t be zingy if I can’t remember what the fuck I’m supposed to be saying.

Then I was heading to my workshop when I realised I agreed to invigilate an exam at Imperial. My only one of the season. They ask our availability too far in advance these days so I tend to just try and hoover up the cancellations.

Pleasant to sit in a concentrated room for a while although someone started messaging me asking for Little Mermaid themed children’s entertainers without being clear about the money. I have a large network but I can’t cope with vague. If I know the money I can say : “I’ve got a gig, here’s what it’s paying, here’s when it is. Who wants it?” She’s slightly taking the piss I think, likely because she wants to be the wedge between the client and the job and skim like crazy. I’m not really at home to that sort of thing. Likely would be much richer if I was…

Then as the exam was running to a finish I got a message asking if I could cover the pub quiz at The Porchester tonight in Bayswater. I figured it’s on my doorstep and it’s money. So another yes and then I went on a quick mission to get some boxes, my tools including a sander for Lou. I’ll see her tomorrow on the job. We’re packing boxes all day tomorrow in Kensington and prepping furniture.

After the quiz tonight I’ll have a zoom meeting at home at like 9:15pm to once again do lines and think about scenes for Strange Oaths.

—

Did so. Then went immediately to bed and thought I’d already scheduled this. Happy morning.

The crash that was coming came and I leaned into it. Nothing in the diary but a zoom reading today. I’m working with Hilal who recently came and joined The Factory with Cymbeline. I noticed a few things in the reading this morning. First of all she is already a long way into her line learn. Second it is gonna be an absolute bugger of a line learn to do. Third she’s really good.

It’s a fucking good company of actors considering it all was thrown together without auditions for just a few nights of a very wordy play in north London later this month. I’m gonna have to up my game or I’m gonna have lines written on props.

Today though I read my book and lay with the cats. It’s another Stephen King at the moment. Not one of his best, I often prefer him when there’s something a little bit otherworldly and this one is in the real world of America now. It passes the time.

Hard not to think about America right now. The algorithm gave me a video of Obama answering a question from a child and I found myself weirdly crying a little tear because where are the statesmen these days? Where are the great leaders? On both sides of the political spectrum. This isn’t just another one of those posts where I express my horror at the thing the Americans have voted for.

November is upon us. I think tonight is the night. Voting will happen. And believe me, if the vote doesn’t favour him he won’t accept it. Just a horrible selfish cruel cunning smug protective entitled slab of rotten meat on legs. Money will keep him going until he’s spent. He will do the damage he does. I don’t think history will be kind to him.

I’m in bed. I’ve been in and out all day, as I’m using the blanket to make a warm spot for cheap. The cats have caught on so they are sprawled out with me here. I ordered my shopping online with Deliveroo. Saved me having to leave the house. The substitutions are always eccentric but I was happy to take that chance knowing that my body just wanted to do nothing all day and recover from a busy month to make way for a differently busy month.

My plan to go to New Orleans in January is coalescing now as I’m getting clear dates from Mel. It’s rare I hope not to get a job, but ideally I’ll get nothing in the diary after December until mid February…

There’s a thing that happens when a project is over. There’s so much work, you learn lines and build a thought structure, you find an emotional landscape. Sniffing a bit of red chiffon takes on a totally new meaning. You build a nexus of connection, weaving delicately through a web of people. You give what you can. You breathe as part of a group. And then, quite suddenly, it is done.

Awaken and the Halloween Walk both finished last night. I’ve been intimately connected to them both. I haven’t had time to feel sad, there’s always more to do. But I’ll miss these things. And the sadness creeps in.

Last night of Awaken was a good validation of the work we’ve done. After my bad eating I decided to make up for it so I scrambled some eggs this morning and – a rarety – had three full square meals today. Around such practical concerns I drove the Awaken set back to Telos and then loaded up the pig masks and bits and bobs of loaned costume from Halloween. I’ll have to go to Freston tomorrow and make sense of it all, put it all back nicely. It won’t get cleaned but we didn’t sweat loads. I should get some of that spray they use.

Suddenly two big projects have ended. Next up Strange Oaths, but that’s a low commitment friendship project (aka they can’t pay me properly so I’m giving what I can). Then Scene and Heard which is volunteering and powerful and brilliant and I’m excited for it but it eats my head as well. And I’ve got various absurd dreams for December plus a locked in Santa thing where they pay me the balls but make me work like a navvy.

Life is busy. What a treat. I’m a lucky boy.

This evening on my way up north I dropped Ellie off near Drummond Street, after dropping off the borrowed furniture from Telos. Bergie is full of costume that I lent the production. I went and collected the pigs that I lent to the Halloween walk. We all rely so much on one another for what is creatively possible. Awaken would have happened without my costumes, just different. Halloween would have walked without my random bits of fun stuff, just different. It’s nice to be part of the creative nexus, making things possible. Adding details. Doing art. But it shouldn’t break the bank.

This show I’ve just finished has been working on many levels. Cheryl the writer is a medium and is channeling that into her work. There’s a lot in this play about witches. “When I wrote it first there were no witch plays but now it feels like there are loads,” she said to me a few days ago. “It’s a past life play,” I offered. There aren’t so many of them.

We play the same people in two different iterations. We look at the shared blood, the way permissions and society reshape the same souls. And yes, we look at what happened to more women than records keep, as a result of the invention of the printing press. The play doesn’t go into that, that’s me nerding out. Because it was the printing press that allowed Heinrich Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum – The Hammer of Witches to be distributed so far and so wide that one nasty little Dominican friar brought potentially millions of cunning women to an early death. In these isles the lore had been devastated before the hammer was distributed, but we were not always as we are and the hammer fell hard on the remaining keepers. We don’t know what we’ve lost, we can never know, but we can guess at it.

We still carry a primary faith structure that was imposed on us after the conquering Romans withdrew. They arrived as pantheists, but they left centuries later as passionate Christians with money and force. Likely the pantheism would have ellided better with whatever was ours, but  our home grown learnings were largely buried in the name of control. We only have snippets. Oral tradition takes time and thought to properly send down. Wisdom passed down by word of mouth has to have mouths to remember. Silence the mouths and you lose so much, and it can be lost forever if people seek to snip the trail off, as they did.

But we can channel things and intuit things. After the show, Angie – one of our audience members – said something about her past lives that shot right through us both, goose bumps, everything. A knowing. She hit on a buried truth in her records. I sent her to Cheryl in case it ever comes back, this show. We end with names. Names of some of the many more than we know who were removed by Heinrich and his fragile ilk for being a challenge to their nonsense entitlement. Important names that were silenced.

I’m home, cats jumping on me, aware that I’ve eaten nothing but a croissant today and it’s almost midnight. I just topped the cat food up. I might look into a late night delivery… Or what do I have in the fridge?

I’ll miss this show. I miss all the shows. But this one is a special place. A deep place. And rooted into early stages of my career in unexpected ways, based on some of the people who came.

—

Apparently Five Guys do late night delivery in my area. I am only a little bit ashamed of myself. I didn’t get a shake.

The cats have been alone a lot recently so they assaulted me as soon as I came home.

Boo is currently doing her weyard duty as a black cat on Halloween.

This evening many things.

In a London boiled with strangeness and the drunken energy of thoughtless party, we gathered in little Playhouse East. Six of us and we are all basically what they call Gen X. We had a play written on its own terms and we did it on our own terms. Process and care and bravery and risk. We let it in. We let them in.

Very full in there. Wonderfully so. I love a little space like that. We can drop all the projection and we can focus on listening and nuance. The audience is right on top of us so there’s no room for bullshit, like with TV. It’d clang as loudly.

Cheryl cleared some serious things energetic things tonight up there. This is closer than many jobs I’ve done to why I’m in this game in the first place. Othello did it for me too.

The alignment of theatre and ritual, the way in which we can do them both simultaneously. Law holds a safe space, that’s her thing and she’s the director. Lou spotted it immediately. “She held space really well as the wise woman. Made us all know we were held too.” That’s been our director, and I agree. This is a powerful feminine company and it’s huge to be able to be part of it. We called in the directions in the warm-up. We opened and closed a ritual in that little room and the audience were with us throughout. That’s the power of a little theatre like that.

When it was over I helped with the reset and then drove Lou to Victoria. Then I still have my Halloween Walk costume in the car.

James’s wedding. A Halloween wedding. I get on my crooked hat and my cape. Everyone else has been drinking for hours. “I just threw on whatever I had in my car.” A golden alignment of truth and cool.

I’m happy to have made the drinks. Too many weddings I’ve missed it missed them. Sometimes much damage has been done to friendships. A wedding is big banana. If you’re not an actor it is not easy to know how impossible it is to cancel a show to fly to Germany or wherever. Even to get off a crash rehearsal to go to one… I lost years of a good friendship by being forced into an unnecessary stressrehearsal on a Saturday.

James was an actor once. It’s how we met, very early days. We stayed in touch because of raving – we found Planet Angel and it kept us sane in the early noughties. Christ I genuinely don’t know if I’d still be alive without those days and the festivals. I’m the glowstick man still. Even without my endless supply of glowsticks.

I’m so glad to have been there and danced at his wedding, even after having done a show tonight and extended my heart into that work. What a treat, to get to do the thing I love and not have it ruin another old friendship. It was good to see him and his kids and his missus. What a thing that they’ve tied the knot at last.

Halloween and the energies are flowing still. I’m home now. Boo is welded to me. All is well.

Funny night tonight. Not a bad night but a strange second half. “I’m sorry for fucking up the last scene,” said Venus after the show. “It was a joint effort,” I assured her. Because it was. Everyone but Cheryl was floundering around. It’s always been 50/50 as to if some of the cues are gonna come or not, but that’s likely because it’s always been 50/50 as to the cue lines come out right or at all.

Problem with it is it’s a courtroom drama, that last scene, and everyone on that stage including myself is right brain dominant. So all the hierarchy nonsense means nothing to any of us, we are very just pretending. Then there are some lines that are very very similar. I think a crucial sound effect might be cued on the word “evidence” which is always gonna be carnage in a courtroom drama. We might need to rethink that. I know my way through it but the thought changes are often embedded in other people’s lines, some of which never come and others of which come out of order.

Thankfully the writer was on stage with us. She helped us get back on track…

We didn’t go so far off piste as it felt from within. We just hit a jolt, had a bit of improv, a few omitted interjections and slightly crazy tech. It caused me to switch into attack-barrister mode as I know a multitude of sins can be covered by attack and I was lost in it for a moment. I’m not the happiest that it’s the version that was filmed… My John was there tonight, but that last scene was a bit of a drop. We all tried to keep the internal logic thread, and succeeded. But we could have served it much much better between us, even if we had just allowed a moment of silence instead of running our mouths. Just a bit of funny sound cueing is enough to whack the brain out, it seems.

A lovely show at Luton. Madness. Delight. Onwards.