AlBarclay

Longfield Hall on Knatchbull Road down in Camberwell. Last time we were here we all did the show in an upstairs room and didn’t move, so tonight we got them to come out into the park. There’s a little secret garden. We moved around in it and found some lovely moments while telling the story of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline.

My Frenchman ended up in an apple tree with everyone else. There were parakeets and helicopters and planes, often little gifts from God. The old game of “acknowledge and incorporate the distractions” was being played well by much of tonight’s squad. It felt well put together and very live, which is what we were trying for. We were clear and less gimmicky than last time – I didn’t get in any bins – and it felt like the squad is learning how to trust and play with each other. Pace was needed, we settled into things a bit too much and there were gaps for remembering dressed up like dramatic pauses.

I’m glad we moved it around. It would have been too hot in that room, and I feel like we exhausted it last time.

I’ll have to write about the show on a Google doc tomorrow. We still document our shows in forensic detail. We used to have a wetpaint site with blogs from every show we ever did but it fell off the internet a few years ago. I think Simon Muller saved a backup, but I might even be wrong about that. I’m sure it exists somewhere, but like so many things I like to be involved in there’s something ephemeral and unrepeatable about it to the extent that even the record gets lost.

I’m back home now on this late summer night listening to music come across the river in the slow summer air. Tomorrow I’ll have to book a whole load of vehicles and get all my tools out and charge them. I need to carefully write my budget down as well, and make damn sure I’m keeping within it. It’s Lou’s birthday coming up so I want to make sure that’s all done before I go and spend time with her.

It’s a lot of work coming up in the next few weeks, and an unknown amount of stuff to be processed somehow. Ideally I need to find a business in Kent that buys second hand Dolavs. There’s loads of admin to do and loads of careful planning ahead of three rush days where the absurdly expensive warehouse manager only works 9-5 and doesn’t strike me as a man who is interested in grafting. Last time he was more of an obstruction than an asset. I doubt a leopard changes his spots.

It’s half past seven in the morning. I’m at Harlow Town Station waiting for a coach to take me to the second day of this conference, out of town in a secure site. I drove here and parked in a council estate courtesy of Just Park. Often self determining is easier than the admin involved with asking a big company if I can get a permit to park on site. Nobody knows who to talk to and you send loads of emails and end up back where you started. I tend not to bother these days. They’ll refund the £7.00 I’ve paid.

Driving in to Harlow was depressing. Clearly the people of this town are not optimistic about the England vs Argentina match tonight. England flags all at half mast line the streets on the way in, mostly looking tattered and unpleasant. I’m a touch more optimistic than whichever pessimist put those filthy pennants up. I reckon I’m gonna watch tonight’s match at home after work like normal people. With a can of alcohol free Heineken.

Before the tournament I made a few bets to keep myself interested. One of them was the inevitable England to win bet, and another was Lionel Messi for Golden Boot, which is most goals scored. I got good odds because he’s old. He’ll only lose to an England player now if he loses. So hopefully it’s win win tonight for me.

—

I’m half an hour early at Harlow. The company have laid on a coach with very specific timings and to be honest I don’t think they’ve thought this through. Loads of young people travelling somewhere unfamiliar first thing in the morning? They’re really starting the day with an aptitude test. I have a feeling someone will be doing shuttle runs throughout the morning, but it’s not my responsibility to make these calls so I’ll just be ready and let things play out. “The coach leaves at 8:30 prompt” says the email. Yeah pull the other one. Whoever wrote that email didn’t put train arrival times / departure times from London hubs to meet it etc. Whoever wrote that email thinks they wrote it to adults. Not inner city teenagers going to the boondocks for the first time. I’m trying to imagine the depressed England fan who put up those half mast flags. I picture him dead eyed and cheeks flushed, speaking in uncertain certainties. I don’t think we’d be friends. Harlow. Here we go.

—

Well. That happened. It was a fun day. Bus left twenty minutes late with only 4 no shows and two people who had no passport and wouldn’t have been allowed into the secure facility. I realised a little late that I’d be presenting two more PowerPoints over the course of the day. Three in a row is too much for anyone so I pretty much binned one and did a workshop instead which I know is allowed because they understand my offering at this company now and still somehow seek it out.

A beautiful day to be inside all day. I’m happy to catch the late afternoon light. Time to get back home, sharpen up my Caius Lucius lines for tomorrow and change my head again. Tech begone! That was a flood.

I’m very very stinky tonight. The place I was working in was hot and full of geeky teenagers. If you’ve ever been to a comic convention, there’s a certain miasmic odour that goes with large groups of geeky youth. So I’m writing this as I run a lukewarm bath for myself.

Last night and this morning I was quite proud of myself. Brian and Maddy thought I was dead. I went to bed before them, woke before them and managed to leave quietly despite coffee and a noisy one sided conversation about cuddles from Misty. Misty looks like a cute little fluffpot but she screams like a 40 a day Rolling Stones fan. They messaged checking I was okay at about 9. I had even set the coffee machine back to their preference. I like the espresso bubbler. They like a plunger. Different grind size. I love that grinder, and the milk system we have going now. Great coffee at home saves loads.

Ah the bath is ready. I’m in it.

So yes I’m off out tomorrow again early. Great big companies employing me for this one and you know how I am with NDAs, I can’t go joking about the smell of ’em and then tell you who they are.

They gave me a sandwich and a double decker for lunch, and I walked to Heisenberg for an excellent and oddly Breaking Bad themed latte.

But yeah I drove to work and parked for less than a tenner. JustPark have blown the doors off, they are making London so much more driveable for those of us with cars left. For the price of return tube I get to go in Bergie with air con and my choice of music. I parked in someone’s driveway. No wonder NCP have gone into administration. Work was in Ealing near the studios, so quicker for me by car than any other way. I had a moment of pause thinking of the distance between what I expected for myself this age when I first laid eyes on Ealing Studios aged 20. I’m glad I’m good at running tech conference rooms but…

Anyway I’m gonna wash the grime off.

My brain is absolutely fried.

Over the last month or so I must have received some thirty emails with information regarding things like how DNS works and bits and bobs about artificial intelligence and the nuts and bolts of tech we mostly take for granted as consumers. All this stuff has a structure to it, of course it does. It’s easy to take it for granted or think weirdly about it. We do that with everything. There are things we have no hand in that we try to understand – sunset, climate, tide, wind, clouds, albedo, space. People still believe all sorts of fanciful nonsense about them despite thousands of years and generations of people building on previous generations of painstaking scientific understanding. But… when it comes down to it, we don’t really understand anything very much. Even if we’ve made it ourselves.

How do the taps make drinking water? How does the battery work? How does the fridge cool? How does the pen write? How does an engine actually fit together? Each one of us, if we were locked in a garage with everything we needed to make a working car and given a month? Not many of us would have a working car at the end of that month. Or fridge or oven. Maybe a pen. But… we are a clever lot when we put our minds to it. And we’ve made technology the likes of which were dreams when I was a kid.

These emails have been full of information breaking these things down. Slide decks putting these things across.

I have to teach people something I only started to understand at about 3pm today to a load of sixteen year olds. Tomorrow morning.

It’ll be fine, of course it will be. But I’m feeling a bit fried now.

On a side note, someone interesting tried to flog me a course on enhancing my offering in a workshop context, and improving the marketing side of it. He did it on zoom this morning. It’s the usual pitch: Pay me loads and it’ll pay you back down the line. I know from friends of mine that sometimes it does and sometimes it doesn’t and the payback is determined by the work you put into getting the payback. Some of these motivational people are connected to communities. Sometimes it’s just someone like me trying to make a crust. I don’t need anyone to pat me on the head so I’ve got to determine if shelling out for this guy will make me enough money down the line, and crucially – do I have the time to make it work?

Well, tomorrow and the next day I’ll be making money from workshops anyway. I’ve done a lot of that over the years. In science as well as Shakespeare. I’ve got a skillset, that’s certain.

But I want to be acting God dammit all to hell and back. Not telling people how routers work.

It’s all part of the tapestry. Today would have been my first day on set for the most recent audition that I was hopeful about.

I enjoy the whole process of the Halloween Walk. Getting together with friends on days like this. Now I’m better at not drinking I can enjoy being on the heath and in the pubs without either overspending on those pretty gakky tasting non alcoholic alternatives to beer, or feeling strangely anxious.

We met at The Freemasons Arms on Downshire Road. That’s where we’ll start this year. Siwan has nailed the route down and it’s a figure of eight taking in some lovely places we don’t normally get to. It’s a good walk of an evening even without the spooky actors. It’s so good that now there’s some rip off merchant using our name and paying for internet presence to get hits above us. I’ve had the misfortune to get stuck behind them last year, they were going the same way as us, their group stood there looking bored and occasionally glancing up the hill to our group where people were enjoying themselves. You can know everything in the world but if you can only project your voice in a throat constricted monotone you’ll lose people.

Siwan brought me a bag of non alcoholic Heineken. She lives near Emirates stadium so she has been known to flog cool beer out of her front door on Arsenal match days. We’re an enterprising lot. She realised the non alcoholic stuff doesn’t sell in anything like the quantity she thought it would. Very kindly she donated some of the overspill to the Al Barclay sugar craving society.

We walked around for 2 hours. It was a good two hours. We covered a lot of ground and I certainly have a better idea about what to build now. Although I’ll have to get a replacement for some of it as the lovely Meisner lot are going to bring that piece back in October and I want to be available for them if at all possible.

It’s always good to have to juggle things even if they’re things we made for ourselves to keep ticking over. I’ve been asked “So what’s next?” so many times in the last few weeks. They should train people at birth not to do that to actors. “If it was good, you’d probably already know about it.”

Although I’ve got a Factory show on Thursday. That’ll be a delight as ever. Second crack at Caius Lucius so now I will be less in survival mode and more in forward motion.

That was a lovely trip to Oxford. 30 years of Creation Theatre.

Lucy and Charlie from Creation were extraordinary champions of mine for years. I was Cyclops in the improvised Odyssey they did co-pro with The Factory years ago. It was a glory. They wanted me back.

Lucy used to call me in for auditions regularly. The Welsh Centre near Kings Cross. Nearly always CC running the audition who wanted two contrasting monologues and never offered redirection during the audition. I applaud Lucy and Charlie for persisting. I think I auditioned 5 times for CC with nary a recall at the end of it and not even a moment of redirection or a note to play.

I diligently prepared different monologues for each of the auditions and until the final one I held it in that I felt she wasn’t even considering me. She used to assist TC and he has a very specific verse requirement. “Do you need me to do TC verse?” I asked her in my first meeting. “I think verse is important,” she gnomically replied. So I did TC verse. We had the same exchange time two and time three with the same result. I will gladly play the house rules but I need to know what they are.

Final audition with her I remember greeting her familiarly and saying right at the start: “Is there any real point in my being here? After all we’ve been here before. Many times.” I do that sort of thing more often than I should. It’s the legacy of growing up with Max. Clarify everything. At the time there was an uncomfortable moment and then her mouth said the words “Absolutely. Of course. Of course.”

So… I remember my first speech was “This is the excellent foppery of the world,” because it isn’t my casting but it is my voice. No redirection. No notes. As forever. No conversation. It isn’t an audition in my opinion if you don’t establish if you can work with someone. Perhaps she just … knows exactly what and who she wants and it isn’t me… But I digress. I’m not here to pick holes in someone who was a gatekeeper in my early career and I’m sure is lovely and loved. It’s always funny when you know someone doesn’t like you and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m obfuscating the name. This industry…

I went to Oxford today and saw a wonderful Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lucy and Charlie and co aren’t running Creation now, it’s Helen. Lovely Helen, who I’ve known through many friends. Claire and Jon and Simon principally.

Despite annoying auditions I’ve been up to Creation a fair amount over the years, with Wind in the Willows, with The Tempest. Zoe Seaton totally understood me, and that was courtesy of Lucy and Charlie. If I hadn’t done The Tempest, I wouldn’t have done it again in lockdown on zoom with a tinfoil hat and a snake, and I wouldn’t have encountered Lou who is the single best thing to have happened to me this decade.

Midsummer Nights Dream was wonderful tonight. They are doing it in rep with Twelfth Night and they’re a good focussed clever passionate and talented company.

I bought myself a tea towel and a programme. I’m not made of money. If you are, go on their website (above). They need money to survive. They are doing great things. I had a wonderful evening with important and loved old friends.

It took me far too long to work out why I kept on getting up and walking into the kitchen. I would open the fridge and look in it, then close it wondering what I was looking for, then open again a few minutes later, then close it. It’s odd because last night I squatted in a bin for half an hour and then ordered a non-alcoholic Guinness and then went home on a broken Lime Scooter that nearly killed me before making me drop it off in Scotland and then walk home. At no point last night did I question my desire not to have any booze through all that. And then this evening, starting about 5pm, I took ages to realise that my fridge trips were that bit of my brain that wants it all to go away, looking for a wee drop of forgetting. As soon as I flushed it out into the open I could trap it in a mug of chamomile tea. And I did. And it was yummy. The chamomile flowers survived the kitchen purge. There’s loads of booze in the house, but I gave the white wine to Max when he came round so it ain’t there in the fridge rolling around on a hot night looking refreshing.

I’ve been having a bit of a wobble, but I took care of myself through it and acted on all the things I felt I needed to act on. Grown up response to mental health fuckery. We all need to take care of ourselves sometimes. I cancelled my work plans as they were just me working for me. I went and sat in Chelsea Physic Garden until I felt better about the world. That’s what it’s for, that garden, and it’s on my doorstep and I pay annually for it.

I overheard a tour guide saying how the garden used to be accessible by boat, and realised that the river would have originally come right up to my doorstep. I pottered about looking at plants. The sun was beautiful. I told you it would be a proper summer. Didn’t quite anticipate HOW proper.

A quiet day really just being slow and taking care. I carried some stuff up to the attic with Brian, sent an invoice , stroked the hot cats, and made a difficult phone call that’s very important to a great big fucking non acting job I’ve been building up to for over a year that’ll happen in early August…

A great deal happened to us all tonight over the course of Cymbeline, but sadly it will always just stay in my memory as “the show where I got in the bin at the end”.

We were at Bold and finally someone had suggested that I make my Frenchman French sounding. It’s not the sort of thing you’re supposed to be doing generally, accents and all that are a bit too acting. But occasionally you get a free pass. 

Someone said tonight: “You’re basically just doing Meisner Shakespeare,” which I thought was interesting in the context of what I’ve already been doing this month. I see where they’re coming from in that we are looking at each other and listening to each other and responding authentically. So I tried to do all that with the obstacle of bad English. Trying to overcome an accent that happens when you aren’t focusing is often the best way of doing an accent. So I did my best attempt at a Frenchman trying to be English. While listening and Shakespeareing. Oh and posing on some sort of pedestal. If I’d been able to find a moustache I’d have gone there folks. This was the sort of night I was having.

Frenchman done it was time to go to Soothsayer. And that led to the bin. That’s not Meisner. That’s Al Barclay. Ugh. Bin. Why?

I had considered and dismissed it a couple of times. Great big fucking wheelie bin. But the moment came and I had people to help me get in and one of the three was mostly empty and had clearly recently been powerwashed. It just had a trolley in it. I think it was a utility bin. I got in, with some help. It was tall. Came crawling out as The Soothsayer in the last scene trying to channel the girl in The Ring. Someone had to? Nah. I had to? Hmm. Yeah. Because I’m a fool? Well… Now you come to mention it…

I got in the bin way too early.

So then I’m listening to all the resolution in the last scene and it’s been a hot day. Evening now but still… Clean in there thank god. No pong, but … boiling. I was keeping it open to a breeze as best I could but the lid was heavy and I was squatting. Good for my core strength. My Soothsayer also had an improvised hot cape from some artificial fiber blanket. So I’m squatted down in this bin so I don’t touch the sides, with a boiling sweatwet cape wrapped round me, sous vide in my own juices. All for an entrance. That’s showbiz folks!

After a while I realised I’d been squatting so long that if I were to pop up and start doing long iambic pentameter speeches I’d get a headrush from all the blood going back into my legs. That happened to me once in Oxford. I thought I was going to pass out then, but knew the part well enough that my robot mouth said something while my entire focus shifted to not blacking out. That was 2013. I’ve learnt now, so I started to ease out one leg and then the other, yoga stretching without touching the sides of the bin, keeping my breath steady and my blood flowing. Friday night Elephant and castle binyoga

Outside my binhome people were speaking great verse, listening to each other, responding. The yoga made me momentarily flatulent.

By the time I was ready to pop out and make my entrance I was sweating like a dog and uncomfortable and angry with myself for getting in the bin in the first place. And you can show that paragraph to your nephew who wants to be an actor and tell him: “This guy is doing quite well in the industry”.

My Soothsayer had already established himself as an outsider though. I had been wandering around in scenes hissing at people. He was an angry dodgy vagrant. Coming out of a bin was in keeping with what I’d made of him, which is why I figured I could make sense of getting in in the first place.

So I came out of the bin screaming. Half horror half relief. Al, you’re an idiot. I crawled out, across the top of the next bin, eyeballed the audience Jono and I finished the play.

That’s my bit for bins and the arts this week. I’ll let the people of Clacton do some now. Bins for the wins.

Summer has brought the offspring of horny moths that got into some rice. Without my thinking about it we were storing dry food above the plates in a nice hot dark cupboard. Unfortunately Maddy is a bit sick and she pulled a plate out to eat some “chips” and then realised there was extra protein. We are talking 5 of them and they are about 3 millimeters at largest. It isn’t The Creature from the Black Lagoon here, but it’s still something that needs to be dealt with. My head was full of facts though, preparing for my evening job. I wasn’t the most helpful. I’ve always been in the habit of putting mugs in the cupboard upside down so you don’t get dead spiders in your tea. That never happens in this flat, we are too elevated and towny. But at this time of year it’s no surprise to see nature happening. You just don’t want it happening on your plate.

I went out for lunch, let some Italians cook for me at a little café I really like on Battersea Park Road. There’s 2 hour free parking next to it and it does good pasta. Battersea Brothers. I had lunch with an old friend, we used to share an agent.

I’ve been trying to fob off a massage table on everyone I meet at the moment. It’s a bit fucked but serviceable still and if you’re handy and can be bothered you can fix it up nicely. It folds down and is currently sitting in Bergman but I’m not gonna take it up to the attic: it’s friend or bin. I’ve got to move well on reducing my bollocks footprint, because I’m about to end up with a whole lot more. So yeah, you want a massage table in London or Brighton I’ll drive it to you.

Meantime this evening I got myself into The Globe again, upstairs in The Balcony Room. I love it there and told them as much. It was a lot of people connected to Barclays Bank. “They put a worldwide shout out for actors with genuine  Shakespeare chops and the surname Barclay, and I’m the best they could do. My name is Al Barclay, and I’m here to tell you a little bit about how this incredible theatre came to be here.” It’s cheap but it got a laugh. The delivery, of course, of course.

They were a nice lot, but behind me stood one of those robots that mimic people with camerafaces. That’s for the tech demo and I was concerned that it was scraping me. I think I’ll be dead before stage actors start losing their jobs to robots but they’ve already come for the voiceover artists. I didn’t like it.

But I’m home now. Tomorrow we will set fire to everything in the kitchen and then bury the ashes in lime thousands of feet below the earth in a warzone. That’ll hopefully deal with those moth larvae once and for all.

My friend had an idea this morning and she took me along for the ride.

She’s gone down a rabbit hole of User Generated Content. This is the logical next step from all the empty-headed fuckwits calling themselves “influencers”. Businesses have started to cotton onto the fact that influencers are pretty much universally atrocious human beings. Morally bankrupt attention sucking vacuous mincing ego machines. “Give me free stuff, I’m a disgusting person and I want to show my drone army your thing.”

But… Online user generated adverts are how businesses thrive these days. If you’re an asshole running a business pretty soon everyone knows you’re an asshole. The same if you’ve got something great. Word of mouth travels online. You have to hide being an asshole and pretend to be nice to people or you’ll be hounded in user reviews. But the people saying you’re an asshole aren’t going to be ShinyStarxxx with their million followers. They’ll only attack you if you don’t let them have all the free stuff. The people doing the real reviews – they’re us, the users. (And occasionally politically mobilised mobs, like with the London pub that chucked out Hatey Slopkins.)

So … the next wave is perhaps businesses reaching out to people who are in their target demographic and getting them to make videos about their thing. Or, in most cases, people reaching out to businesses: “Can I stay in your hotel? Here’s a load of lovely videos I’ve taken of other people’s hotels.”

It’s a quest for authenticity. It might find some authenticity for a short while along the road to eventual inevitable total corruption.

If it’s a bubble, sure it’s gonna burst, but maybe for a while people like my friend can have a nice quality of life taking photos and videos of nice places and then recommending them to other people. After all, if you don’t know it’s there and it’s great, you don’t want to go there cos you don’t know it’s there. These user videos show you IT’S THERE! AND I THINK IT’S GREAT. People who are curious might click on them. “Here’s a person doing the thing!” I’ve got a picture on Google of a bucket of crayfish in Arkansas that’s been seen almost 50 thousand times. They keep emailing me about it. It took me half an hour to work my way through that bucket of crayfish, but… it keeps on giving. Hey maybe I could try to get a free bucket of crayfish from a rival restaurant!

Whether the economy of it works or not in the long run, or even the short run, we went for a free swim today and it was brilliant to try and frame it as “work”. That way we can’t feel too guilty for this work of a Tuesday.

We just walked confidently past everyone, quietly got into the lift and grabbed some towels. Had anyone stopped us my friend was going to try the “I’m making content, here’s my site” routine.

I didn’t hold up much hope that “I’m making content” would hold water, but we didn’t need to try it. We got in. It was glorious. And we got some lovely videos of it which we can now put on various socials. And then we can say to other businesses with rooftop pools : “Hi, I take nice videos of rooftop pools and I’ve got loads of followers. Can I have a free swim please?” Which only works if you’ve got loads of followers. But you can probably buy 10000 obvious bots for less than the price of a swim these days.

It was perfect today. Absolutely perfect. It really wasn’t very crowded, at one point it was just me in the water and not because I’d been farting. We would have stayed a few hours longer if there had been drinking water available. To have access to all that flowing swimming water, not chlorinated, much more classy than that – probably Baquacil: it couldn’t have been better.

An infinity pool, walking distance from my flat. With some incredible views. I’m not naming it because this isn’t what this blog is for, but there it sits overlooking the nipples of that dead cow by Gilbert-Scott. I might edit together a nice video of me swimming around and stick it on my insta with some soulcrushingly predictable music choice underscoring it. The Rayban Metas got a proper workout – hell of a way to take a camera swimming. I’ve now got enough phone memory to support them so I might actually end up doing more stuff like this. If it works out, it’s peak lifestyle blag and fits with the way the world actually works. “I have already done the nice thing. This means you are more likely to let me do the nice thing. Because only if one hath done the thing is one allowéd to do the thing without obstruction, lo for it hath been decreed.”

Most of the videos I took, I was unable to resist narrating them in an exaggerated Valley accent “ermagerd that’s like where they kept all the power for London^ for like hundreds^ of years^” type stuff. But it means the sound is basically no good cos I can’t keep my mouth shut. It amused me at the time. I might edit some of that together too. A PROJECT, A PROJECT! And a lovely lovely swim on a hot day.