AlBarclay

C’est ça.

For me, at least, that’s that. Some of the others are back tomorrow to the ND London campus to teach workshops. But for me, this glorious job is finished. “Have a rest,” my agent emailed me, and I won’t because I’m plugging into every fucking dayjob I can find, all the while hoping for another meeting and another good job. The voodoo lady in New Orleans took a look at me in my hat and coat. “Sherlock!” She called me. “Or Doctor Who!”

These things have power. I’ve been wearing a shirt on stage that was made for a character playing Shakespeare in a Doctor Who thing. I’ve not yet met the casting team for that telly show, but I’ve driven loads of their stuff around. I’ve got a storage unit full of fascinating memorabilia that I’ve been gradually sorting and refining. But … whatever power was swimming around in the voodoo ladies nexus, I’m happy for it to attach to Doctor Who for a wee while. I want to manifest an audition for it. Fuck it, why not? I’ve got loads of friends who have been through it, some very well known indeed in the old world of it. I’m not really a big fan, but it is a great export.

Yeah I’m still working on my familiarity both inside and outside the industry. Names like that on the CV make better jobs available, it is just the way it goes.

So yeah, Priestess Miriam Chamani, any good juju you sent towards the names you pulled out immediately when you met me, thank you for it. Your temple was a deep deep place, slow and full, simultaneously energetically busy and clean. Time works differently in there, and there are many many years of bright wisdom carried through to it. My company all set intentions with Florida Water I bought from you before the London show. We then played a great show. I’m very happy Mel brought me to you – just a week ago today. I could use some magic right now.

Some years ago I did a reading for a script with an older Sherlock Holmes, intended for West End. At the time I was just the stop gap, to hear it out loud. They wanted a known actor. It was a decent script and fitted my voice. I should find out what became of it, because by now they might be willing to release it for a number one tour in which case I wouldn’t have to be Cumbers. There are always things that can be chased down I guess. But production is a full time job.

I just ran off the cliff again so now I’m gonna gradually go deeper and deeper into overdrive until I find the next creative outlet. Hopefully not too long.

Extraordinary and wonderful to go to Richmond and see something at The Orange Tree. Sam and Auriol were running it when I left drama school. I went so often to see friends. They had a strong audience. It always felt like a small theatre and when I was in my twenties I was trying to only think big. I loved it for my friends and discounted it for me.

Pomona blew the doors off and shifted the audience a little bit. But in the end, you have to put bums on seats, even if they’re aren’t many seats. This is Richmond. This is a London fringe theatre that was trying for decades to preserve muscular texts that are just not being performed these days. You can do new things and make them wonderful, but you have to be careful not to alienate the groundswell of people who pay and know what to expect from a venue. You need a lot of Arms and the Man type shows to bank a Pomona. And you can’t follow it with more Pomonas, you have to bring back familiar stuff to the people who pay, even if you don’t like them.

Henslowe knew this, it is why “The Theatre” was built back in Shoreditch forever ago. You can experiment if they’ve already paid. If you’re on a cart in the town centre and they don’t like it, you starve, so you’re gonna be doing Noah’s Floode until you die. Make ’em pay in advance. No bucket shaking. It’s the model that stuck.

Too much “new” almost buried a theatre that had a die hard audience. It has realised that now and shifted patterns.

I bought my ticket back in December for this show. Every seat in the house was full by now. And it is a Strindberg play: The Dance of Death. Not the easiest sell for a fringe theatre that isn’t known for such things. Like this one.

Our friend Will is in it, from Othello. I realised this is my only window around AFTLS to see him, and he’s working with Lisa who was on my first job. I managed to book it on the right night – AFTLS shows yesterday and tomorrow but coincidentally not tonight. It landed properly, even if I couldn’t have predicted it.

Claire was my plus one. I haven’t been there for ages and haven’t seen her for too long. Sure the audience is fuddyduddy but actually these people pay our bills. And the show was superb. Will is just brilliant. So detailed and clever and unusual. It was only three actors and the other two were brilliant as well if course. I was there for Will but know their stuff.

It is a coup to be directed on the fringe by the likes of Richard Eyre, and everyone rose to it. I like Tom Littler who runs the venue. He’s clever and he’s doing good things with this community venue in Richmond. I’m closer to the theatre by road than by tube – I reckon it I were to work there I’d use a bike. But it is tiny. Chances are small, but not so small I’m not gonna push my energy that way a little bit. It feels like a really special place to work.

Final phase in the plan for this As You Like It takes place where it all began. Where the audition took place all those months ago.

It’s a great big building, an extension of the Notre Dame campus in Indiana, but located here in London. It’s more or less opposite the stage door of The Haymarket Theatre, from whence I would emerge every night when I was working as an usher there. Just by The National Portrait Gallery.

Up in Trafalgar Hall, we put down our ivy boundary and covered it with our purple material. That’s the stage. And then we worked out how to cut the hell out of the script. We needed to hack about half an hour off it. Somehow we did it, mostly from the middle. They need the start to establish things, WE need the final scene intact as it was such an almighty headfuck to make it work with just the five of us and every character on stage.

I honestly don’t know how we did it but we did. Loads of stuff went, whole scenes went. We would honestly have cut All The World’s a Stage if we could. It doesn’t further the narrative in any way. But it’s too famous to slice. “Kill your darlings,” I was taught at drama school. Just because you love doing a scene doesn’t mean it is necessary. We all lost bits we love today, I have no doubt, but now we have a version running at one and a half hours with no interval. I don’t think we could have been able to do that at the start of this process, but we know it now and thankfully the dynamic makes it possible.

First ever show from this company in that hall and they have been angling to do it for ages.

The audience was a load of American students from having grad school at the London campus. Closed shop. The front row of the audience was almost completely empty on both sides, which is never a good sign. They were all on the same level. Owing to the room configuration, we played it in a diamond shape, like we were the altar in a cruciform church. Some audience were there for the extra credit, some were big Shakespeare fans. It landed very well, although we had to work harder for reactions than ever before, but largely that was because they didn’t feel certain they were allowed to laugh. They did though, and they invested and they went silent from time to time.

Early class tomorrow, too early. I’m getting my head down now. Can barely keep my eyes open anyway. I will miss this when it is over … Zzz

It’s all kicking off in the Middle East… I’m planning on putting Lou on a plane to Mumbai via Dubai in a few days, and if it was today that would be cancelled. I don’t think anyone will be specifically targeting productions of Wicked, or anything really in Mumbai. But still it is enough to spark concern from those that love her.

She was in Dubai last week and it looks like there’s been some collateral there already. She had a massage in a hotel that is on fire as I write.

Kuwait airport has been hit? She’s supposed to be flying there before long…

There’s a lot of money in Dubai. With that comes power. With power comes the chance of mediation. But the last thing we need on this global stage is more full on fucking war in the middle east. And it looks like things have escalated pretty thoroughly over there. I’m getting the news live from Lou as I write.

I started off saying “ahh it’s just posturing” but actually she was sending me videos late at night walking home of buildings that are now evacuated. “The one thing about this town is it is so safe,” she was saying. The area she was walking in has been hit by missiles and drones from Iran. I tried to Google “Who shot first”. Too much noise to be certain but I get the feeling it’s gonna be Netanyahu, what with it being Ramadan right now, the holy month, I would be very surprised if it was the other way round. But if it has already spun out into so many countries I get the terrible feeling we are about to have a load more fuckery to join the epic world fuckery we have already been trying to ignore.

Interesting times, indeed. Far too fucking interesting if you ask me. My guess is that, with one of the rumours being that Khomeini is dead, it has been a successful targeted strike on him. He’s devout so likely more predictable at Ramadan. But if that happened then that is a scandalous almost impossible disrespect of a faith in their holy month. Whoever can push the Iranian buttons is likely pushing as many as they can. And I’m sure whoever provided the arms for the strike on Khom will tell us in caps before long that he’s STOPPED NUKES, and then ask for a peace prize. And maybe … they are extremely close to enriching uranium. This is a dangerous time to be alive. Easter gonna keep the MI6 very very busy as our next holy festival… Christmas too. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to the future much globally. Peace prize? Seriously?

A week is a long time and things change fast. For now best to just let it settle and we will inevitably have more clarity over time. I’m glad she’s back here tonight with me in Brighton at least. We went walkies in nature and I’m feeling pretty good about jetlaggery. Gotta do a show tomorrow and be all energetic and enriching and whatnot. Might as well have a bath and try not to go down a news hole.

The show must go on? Well, yes, that’s why Brian has been to Kyiv twice in the last year or so. But nobody wants to get blown up for a musical about witches.

I often think of my old contrarian dad though at times like this. His memory voice and my learned voice start to blend now, too much time has passed, some of it is dad, but much of it is me these days, and my memory of how he reacted to things. “Wait a week or so, and then you’ll be able to get really cheap holidays and flights to India. Everyone is going to be cancelling, they’ll be desperate for business”. He’s not wrong…

More or less the moment I got onto the plane last night my phone screen went apeshit apropos of nothing. It seems the temporary fix I did was temporary but at least it got me home. But I can hopefully find some boff in Lewisham to install a new glass screen on it but for the moment the process of writing on it is mostly guesswork.

There’s a bright pair of lines on the the right of the screen like a fucking plasma ray cutting through my typing space, but the fault is entirely a visual fault. Still they only ever fix both screens at once. At least it made it all the way round the tour and then went blooie when it was no longer crucial. There was a bit of negotiation over how I was going to prove I had bought a digital only national express ticket Heathrow to Brighton, but then this plasma ray thing started happening. I think the pressure of the airplane probably contributed to the screen going completely blank when this first started.

We rely on these things way too much. If Lou hadn’t known what bus I was on things would have been much less smooth, but actually here we all are in Brighton and there are cats and good good food and excellent company. And since I can’t write properly on this screen I’m giving myself a free pass…

At least I’ll schedule it for the time you’re all used to instead of just hitting publish as soon as it is written. That’s the American way.

That was a whistle stop to New Orleans but in excellent company. Mel knows this city well so she was an excellent tour manager, plus she has a car and managed to find a house for us both to live in. We hit the underside of this town.

Hurricane Katrina seeded lasting damage into the structures of the town here and to people’s expectations. Everyone has a story if they were there. And all over the town there are buildings gutted – huge buildings, small houses. The hospitals all got abandoned and have never been reused. “They had to euthanise some of the patients.” These huge buildings have been squatted since, gutted since. Some are for sale, others are just abandoned. But with the work needed, or the cost of demolition, the land isn’t worth the building. It’s a buyers market in town but its all sinking and nobody trusts the levees anymore. It’ll happen again, it’s just when.

We went for lunch in a Creole Restaurant. It’s fancy and they sell martinis for 25c on a Thursday lunch so all the tables were dotted with colour.

I couldn’t get through my pork it was so rich. The turtle soup was great as well but everything so complicated. I’m glad we went though. Afterwards we walked around the area looking at all the huge houses, full or empty, dotted through this fancy part of town.

I hate that it’s cold in England. But at least I can be happy that I’ve been away through the darkest months. Maybe the light will come back now, maybe I’ll be able to drag it back with me from the swamps here. I’m at the airport right now sweating like a dog in my suit and my coat with my boots on. They moved me to a middle seat because “the emergency exit isn’t working” so instead of having a peaceful window seat with legroom I’m gonna be in the middle and I’m so angry about it that I’m having to manage my breathing to make sure I’ll still be able to sleep. I really want to be able to rest on this flight so I can beat the jetlag fast. They’ve absolutely fucked me. Hopefully the woman next to me won’t be coughing all flight this time.

My hope is that it turns out to be oversubscribed and they upgrade me. Or I’m just gonna try and use my digital boarding pass with my old seat allocation. “Emergency exit not working” sounds like they’ve cleared it so flight staff can sleep.

Well then. Yesterday happened.

We started very contemplatively, going to mother Miriam. She’s 83 now. Mel has been bringing her cake for years. She has a new temple / shop. The last place got bad juju when an upstairs neighbour did some crazy stuff post Katrina and boiled an ex girlfriend.

Miriam spoke to us for some time and I swear to God she gave us that time back when we were done. We both listened and contributed to a very involved conversation about The Caspian Sea and the nature of immediacy and expectations versus reality. There in her shop, surrounded by all her powerful stuff, time stood still awhile. I’ve never encountered it quite like that. But we left that house the moment we entered it. And I got some Florida Water and some incense that I’m supposed to give to Lou. I asked her to send some good stuff to her. I want the light to be flowing into her life right now.

We went back to The French Quarter, stopped at Napoleon’s House. They built a house as they were gonna bust him out of St Helena with my great great grandpa, but he died before it came to fruition.

The picture ringed is a picture of him post surrender on the Bellerophon. It has my great grandfather and my great great grandfather in it. The original is in The Tate, but we have many copies in the family. It’s nice to see my ancestors on the wall here.

Then the mallort. Never again.

Today we woke up as early as possible with that stuff bleeding out of me, and we went to The House of Dance and Feathers. Madame Minnie showed us round. Another incredible history and testament to positive change through art, these dangerous boys working all year to sew beads onto garments so they can trash talk each other at Mardi Gras looking like vast beautiful shining Gods, in things they have hand sewn over months and months.

The cycle of this city, it sweeps people up. Mardi Gras is barely finished and already everyone is planning the next one, spitballing names for things, testing ideas. This is a place of light and decay hand in hand. “We just keep on living until we can’t no more and when we can’t no more we just … disappear.” That’s Madam Minnie. She’s just had her birthday, she’s older than she looks and she’s still fire. She’s only gonna open the door if she likes you. Mel knows the people, has lived the life, can talk the talk. I’m just in her wake here, and I’m happy with that.

I’m all packed up and checked in, heading to bed, back to blighty tomorrow. Damn. This has been an appropriate unexpected blast. Gathering time again now.

Wow. I’m starting to worry I’m not gonna be able to write to you.

I thought I’d start. I’m at a jazz bar. But I got mallorted.

Someone decided I was being too well behaved so they got me a shot involving wormwood absinthe and who the fuck knows what else. Christ. I am at least indoctrinated in some way. Essentially it was being hazed by two separate crews.

This town has been remarkable.

Mel took me to The End of the World, behind the squatted naval base in bywater. Wasteground and people have constructed shrines for loved ones taken too early. Ashes to the river but these memorials that stand for as long as we collectively wish them to stand.

The societal respect in this country is deeper than what we have in the uk. Some disaffected fucknut would almost immediately deconstruct these things if it was in England. These things are only gonna be fleeting, but let them rot like we do. Once they are built there’s no stupid kid who prioritises their own noise. Shrines.

A malort is a herbal distillate with wormwood. I asked Mel to define it. “It’s like anger in a bottle”. Well. I trusted and slammed. I have no anger. But it was the end of the evening as far as I was concerned.

Thankfully Mel is one of my oldest and closest friends. I’m safe. She’s got me. I told her about the woman passed out in the snowy gutter in Chicago. Nobody is trying to establish themselves as anything in this city. Everything that’s interesting here is in the gutter. This city understands mortality. We are a breath on the wind.

This place goes deep and I feel it. This evening they blindsided me. Mel is strong here and she fits. We stopped at the Columns Hotel, and she was there for a few months when she was teenager, before she trained as an actor at RADA with other friends of mine, in her early teens.

I can’t stay awake and I am astonished I have written sentences in this state.

Desire Street. There used to be a streetcar here. Now the rails are mostly covered but from time to time they poke out through the bad roads. Potholes and badly rigged wiring. Houses with personality.

“A line can be straight, or a street, but the human heart, oh, no, it’s curved like a road through mountains.”

This street is straight. This town is curved.

“We are all dancing at the foot of the volcano,” says Mel. This is an end of the line town. “Like Brighton,” I venture. But hotter. And connected to a bigger country. There’s theatre on the streets, there’s music and madness, and juju and art. Katrina was a huge thing for this town, much more so than COVID. The place was destroyed. Empty lots still sit next to the places that were swarmed by venture capitalists in the wake of the disaster. You have to be able to buy outright here, because insurance on a mortgage is off the scale. This is the Mississippi Delta. Flooding is easy.

In the French quarter, amidst all the trumpeting and song, the vibrant life, there are still gas lamps burning in the fronts of houses. Somewhere in the world where that still happens even despite the fires of the hurricane. A conflicting happiness to see them. The true environmental damage is done by the corporations, we all know this. Let the weird bar have a flickering lantern a few years more. None of us are perfect.

So we listened to music, we looked at buildings, we walked to the delta, we met the queens. We ate some of the best Vietnamese food. “Transferrable skills – this is a swamp. They came here and were better at catching shrimp and growing rice.

I knew I would like this town but I hadn’t expected it to get into my blood so quickly. Mel has been biting at me to get here for Mardi Gras every year for about a decade. Next year she and J9 will be the queens of their crew. I think I’m gonna have to make space in the calendar.

For now I’m just happy for the fact that despite all my expectations I’ve landed full on my feet again, living here on Desire in a house with Mel in the other room and we have a kitchen and shared bathroom and a door I can close and I am not on anyone’s sofa and don’t have to juggle my time to anyone else’s schedule. Thank the good lord for old friends.

It is cold here but bright. The only sound is the trains, and that’s a universal thing in America as they have to honk as they carry their freight as the line often crosses roads with no barriers. “Everyone knows someone whose car was hit by a train,” says Mel when I ask about it. But it was the same in Virginia, in Arkansas. I remember it being the same in Maine. “It’s a romantic sound, something from a bygone era,” says Mel. And yes. Maybe I’ll miss it when its gone. Like airport announcements.

They all went to gospel brunch and had breakfast brisket. I needed to pack. I’ll be sofa surfing mostly for the next few days I think, so I’m gonna need to be streamlined. Mardi Gras just finished and my good friend runs with one of the crews so I’m gonna hang out with her, partied out perhaps, but I’m knackered too. First time I’ve ever met her on her home territory. We have been friends so long I’ve got friends who were born after we met.

This job is glorious, but it is theatre and even though it is paid competitively, after agents fees, tax and upkeep on the flat I’m not coming back with any more than I had when I left. But the experience is enough. We all know it’s why I’m in this whole existence game.

So perhaps I should have gone to brunch, but I’ve been very happy to just rest in the gaps this week in Austin. I’ve been in this town a month of my life, spread out over fourteen years sure, but still a month.

The hotel parking was by valet only and it really stuck in my craw to do it as it is an absurdly expensive thing to do and then they all want tips. David signed it off though at UTA so I went ahead despite my better judgement. I want the people who book us, like David, to prioritise getting the actors from the London stage to come to their institutions. All hidden costs, extra petrol charges, valet charges, everything like that – it makes the person who books the company a little more personally aware of the cost of having us on their programme. Creative longevity is more important than personal convenience. Says the man who has blown over 25 years chasing a frequently low paid vocation. Although none of us had time to juggle cars during that last residency.

Three tours over twelve years. This one much shorter than the rest cos Trump. I’ve had such a treat with these guys and this play and this line. Adam filters and amplifies other people’s thoughts. Le Beau bombasts and gives permission to laugh. Silvius reminds us of our teenage immediacy. Jaques fools admirably but is too pompous to see his own foolishness. Hymen is mostly just singing his lines and hoping his fingers are on the right stops. The rest of the time I’m just trying to make sure I’ve got the right harp in my pocket, and working out which end of the fucking hoodie is the business end.

Oh yeah so there’s a link now. You can pay money to see us in Marylebone on Sunday. Here’s the link. If you click it you might get a free pet chicken. No promises.