AlBarclay

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.

Happy Al, back at home in my hot room, two cats scrambling for attention.

I think the dishwasher has packed up but that’s a thing for tomorrow. The sink is full of plates. I didn’t eat at home tonight though.

Sometimes when we do these events at The UnderGlobe they put the clients in the same room as we are. Usually they stay until just before dinner and then go and sit in the main space in enough time for the two of us to drop our pants, run lines and make plans for gags based on the theme. Just occasionally they set up shop in there with us, which limits what we can do. They did it this evening. Thankfully they weren’t the highly strung versions. They were lovely.

It was hot as hell in costume but by the time we got to performance, Joanna and I were comfortable enough with the clients that we were sitting there with our costumes undone in the breaks trying to get the air onto our underwear. Mic or no mic it is hard work playing a space like that even when it isn’t roasting.

Joanna did sterling work for her first time. She was getting all sorts of “advice” from me. “Because you’re on mic, they can’t necessarily locate you as a speaker so find reasons to make broader gestures than you might normally, to draw the eye,” “Keep moving constantly while you’re talking – you’re always going to have your back to someone.” She dealt with a difficult learn and an unhelpful performance space admirably. Also it was much later than usual owing to things outside our control. She rolled with it. Fair enough… I’ve been working that space on and off for 24 years now. I still haven’t had a sniff of the one above it, and were I to ever audition for it I wouldn’t mention this work. But we keep our integrity.

We were fed too. Aubergine and melon thing. Chicken. Rhubarb fool. I managed not to drop any of it on my ruff. Doing this new material with another actor helped me realise how tight it all is. It works. Likely we will add another one before long but this one is a good one, built out of necessity when a client asked for “As You Like It and Sonnets”. Now we have it in our back pockets. And another lovely night’s work. Medical professionals, I’m told. I’ll be back there on Wednesday.

I finally bit the bullet and got myself a reconstituted phone. The old one was held together with hope. Nothing worked anymore but the final straw was not the low battery life or the fucked camera. The charging port. Planned redundancy, effectively. It just started pushing out all chargers and refusing to take charge from all but the best.

So today I’ve spent ages downloading everything and transferring everything across. Most recently I’ve had to set up my Google keyboard, but it doesn’t remember me so well now. What used to be a very swift writing experience is slightly more stuttered now as I have to teach it words like “stuttered” and encourage it to understand that I’m much more likely to be swearing than talking about ducks, much more likely to be intentionally ungrammatical than to be point perfect.

The heat is oppressive. I’m enjoying it but haven’t been inspired to take advantage of it in the outside place. I’ve been doing tech. Brian and Maddy are watching The Wire and they’re way ahead of me. Maddy has mostly slept today after a mangly Pride. I’m proud of her, she still has all her makeup on. Apparently she was singing to Brian in the small hours. She was fast asleep when Simon came over looking for costume. I found him a good quality gown for his preacher. I have no idea where the surplice ended up. I might find it. Got a bit of time and tomorrow morning I’m gonna start the ball rolling that ends up with Armadillo Canterbury no longer coming for my life blood once a month just try keep hold of a load of weird clothes. The unit must be empty and closed next week next week next week.

Oh the joy.

For tonight I’ll likely have a cold shower and then mess around with setting up this new phone with all the apps I didn’t have space for on the old one. I’m tempted to try one of those AI home makeover tools so I can think about what kind of carpet I get but honestly there’s no substitute for just doing it and AI is bollocks, let’s face it. It is being absolutely rammed down our throats now and sure its a useful tool but the era of AI first, AI everything… It’s a flash in the pan. And we are blistering the world for that flash.

A case arrives tomorrow. This phone has a stylus. I will never use it. But the camera works. I zoomed in on Buddha over the river…

Enough. I’m home. Things have quietly been stacking up in my absence. I have an ungodly amount of emails to work through about a dayjob that I might have to cancel at last minute as it clashes with some potential filming. Still I’ll have to do all the prep and proceed as if it doesn’t go my way. Also some of my usual shenanigans coming up in the next few days. Ffion is on holiday so Joanna and I are doing The Globe on Monday. My head is full and I’m gonna need Sunday to take everything out, organise it, and put it back in again. Factory show next week too and a talk. Nothing too stressful though.

For tonight though I’m not putting any pressure on myself to do anything other than eat. I’ve put chicken kyiv and a jacket potato into the oven. This evening it’ll be the nineteen eighties. I’ve just downloaded some absolute dross by Raymond Feist onto my kindle and I’m gonna get lost in a pair of worlds I haven’t encountered this millennium. I last read this book so long ago I can remember nothing about it but the names of some of the characters.

The drive back from Brighton was mercifully quick which is excellent as I’m done with driving for a bit. A job just came up for tomorrow picking up in Devon and going towards Bristol but I sacked it off because it is time not to do that for at least a few days now. Bergie can have a rest.

Before this month is out though I’m gonna need to get that fucking unit empty. I’m gonna give two weeks notice on Monday and then just work to that. It is taking the skin off my back.. There has to be a better way of having nice costumes. I will find it.

Right, time to get my face full of hot garlicky chicken and my head full of bold deeds of magic and daring from Mara and Pug and co courtesy of mister Feist. I believe he is in his eighties now and just published a new one. Good on him. From memory they are big books that roll along extremely quickly and require very little concentration. Exactly what the doctor ordered on these hot evenings.

It’s a bloody long way back from Oswestry to Brighton. Yeah I like it up there. But … it’s a long long way to drive. With the sun on the right. And no air con. For hours and hours.

We woke with the dawn in our happy little off grid hut. We showered al-fresco and ate a banana. Then drove through the valleys. I like Knighton. Only about 3500 people living there but it is on a hill with running water and feels bright. Oswestry is a bit more happening, but there are pockets. More property there but more roads too. Still I feel like we did some useful groundwork. Lots to think about. But it was interesting, and my agent is on holiday now so I reckon things are gonna slow down now for August. This is why she tried to encourage me to audition for a summer Shakespeare at £450 a week before fees and tax. But I still reckon I’m better off these days staying available for filming or jobs where they can pay me what I’m worth. That stuff is lovely to build the 3 C’s – CV, Contacts and Confident. No actor likes not working but I’m gonna keep rolling the dice for more filming. I’ve got too many mad documentary ideas in the pipeline not to be still trying for a spot of profile. Go on, manifest me that big job so I can walk the length of Africa solo or drive to Sydney in a vintage racing Bentley or one of the many many other bananas plans I would very seriously make real under the right circumstances, or die trying.

We are back in Brighton. It got hot and fractious in the car but only right at the end. That’s the sweet spot for it. Then a shower made it a bit better and now we’re in bed and I feel like all the moisture has been sucked out of me but I reckon I’ll still wake up tomorrow morning somehow. Might even get through the night without having to give libations to the Colossal Prostate, blessed be. Tessy will doubtless have something to say if I’m still asleep at 5.

A lot to think about in terms of what we’ve seen today and what Lou needs. We covered a lot of ground up through Herefordshore and Wales, skipping up the borders, often beautiful on both sides, definitely a place for drivers still.

This flat feels more and more temporary by the day with crap workmen gutting the corridors and homogenising all the empty flats around the two remaining tenants. I’m trying to help her quest for security on her own terms, trying to understand it despite my easy happy London pad.

A long drive to Hereford. Lou is looking at Leominster. We both love it in this part of the world. “Is anything happening here?” I ask John, who could describe himself as “happening in Herefordshire”. “There’s lots,” he assures me. “But it’s not London”.

Lou is done with Brighton which is basically London with wind. I still love London but I also like the world in general and I’m not feeling as stuck in the smoke for work as I used to now that self tapes exist.

So we wandered around Leominster for a few hours. Everyone we spoke to was lovely. We stopped at The Body Clinic, dropped into some textile shops, tried to get a sense of the people Lou would be working alongside if she were to start any one of her many forms of practice here. 250k people in Brighton. 15k in Leominster. If they’re a bunch of twits you’d feel it pretty quickly.

My old friend at D3 is just down the road. There are people I love nearby. It isn’t far to loads of places. There’s work to be found or made. But to move here cheaply would take every penny and more for her, so it can’t be a half arsed plan.

Tonight we are sitting in a Shepherd’s Hut. I made a fire. It will be quiet and dark. We will likely be up with the dawn. I love how things like this are possible at short notice via Airbnb.

Tomorrow, who knows. Something in the area. Gotta be back in Brighton tomorrow night for the cat. Tonight though I’m rushing this blog out as I wanna cuddle up by the fire in the last of the light.

I’ve been earning my keep today down by the sea. Male human with big car do lifting driving. Lou cancelled one big storage unit and booked another one half the size and less than half the price. About fifteen minutes drive between the two. The theory was that we would get pretty much everything from the big unit, where there was a bit of space to think, into the small unit, where there’s none. I have no idea how we got it all in there. It’s like a fucking wardrobe the new one, but Lou had measured it all out and worked it out in her head using maths.

Plenty of lifting, plenty of driving, plenty of depositing and it is mostly done. There’s stuff left in Bergie that’ll likely have to come up to her flat, but that can wait. The big unit is empty. The small unit is packed.

There are so many storage lockers in this world. We all have so much stuff everywhere and either lose rooms in our home or pay people to have potential energy.

I remember my first serious girlfriend being utterly contemptuous of her father in Wales for losing two rooms in his house to boxes of crap and then trying to justify it by saying to us “look, you see, I’ve got a pasta maker. Let’s make pasta”. “Two rooms,” she sneered all the way home. “For a pasta maker once in a decade.”

I didn’t learn the lesson then, I’m getting better at learning it now. For instance I currently have two perfectly good tents to put up in my attic. I only actually need one of them. Will I keep the other one “just in case I go to a festival and someone needs a tent”? We shall see.

I know why Lou is keeping all that stuff. She used to have it in her workshop. It is muchly “just in case” stuff for work. Materials and tools. I get why she’s been paying but with all these things you need to make the pasta more often than once a decade.

Joanna dressed up in an Elizabeth costume the other day. I’ll have a ruff on next week. That alone doesn’t justify me dropping £750 a month for a great big unit in Canterbury full of costumes. So that’s the thing I absolutely have to promise myself I’m fixing this month. Enough is enough and there’s gonna be some time. Lou is an inspiration here. She’s saved herself a lot per month in exchange for a day of hard work. Time to look at my diary.

The next few days though, a relax.

—

Starting with attending one of Lou’s Yin Yoga and Singing Bowl classes. That was absolutely glorious. I got to roll around and stretch and then vibrate, all with a gorgeous Lou running the room. I helped her put it all back after. Now I’m in bed.

The sun is going down as I stand at the entrance to Palace Pier waiting for Lou. She’s having a treatment. I’m just arrived from London.

I’m glad it’s not quite so hot. This morning I put a suit on and then jumped on a Lime Bike. Low budget filming so they ain’t sending a driver. I arrived at a lovely wee flat in Holborn. It’s a new learn but only a short film. Someone couldn’t do it and the old game of being “LAST MINUTE ACTOR GUY” seems to be coming back into my life after a brief period of absence. I enjoy the discipline of it, the rigour of the cramming, the human bit of integrating with a group of strangers who have been working together a while, the craft bit of reading quickly how the others need or like to work so I can click in with them quickly. Some actors really want the cue the same every time or they can’t hold their thought. Others need a shifting flow. Others are just focused on their own noise and you can do anything to balance it.

I think it was a good shoot. These things can be disproportionate. You can spend one day doing something, forget everything about it, and much later suddenly start to have people remind you of it for years. There’s a great bit in Stephen Fry’s autobiography where he talks about someone shouting “Flanders pigeon murderer” at him and panicking because it was a moment of his life, but there are some people who have watched that Blackadder episode hundreds of times.

I’m happy its done now though. Suddenly rather than having multiple projects in my head, I’m under much less pressure. Awaken, the Meisner show, is still bubbling. Halloween walkies is under planning. Some interesting auditions in the can and waiting for the YES. But there’s time.

So here I am in Brighton, waiting for Lou, looking forward to a few calm days where I don’t need to remember lines or plumb up nasty emotions from nowhere or stand on a mark. I WILL have to carry around a load of stuff and drive loads but that’s to be expected really.