AlBarclay

It’s just gone eleven pm. I’m up at the top of a hill in Chalke, exactly where we camped last year. It’s gonna be another heatwave in a tent but first I’ve got this little patch of brainflood to negotiate.

I have a strong feeling that, with the week I’ve had, Banquo is gonna have his emotions pretty close to the surface. They’re often doing that anyway. But good lord. My eyes still feel a little teary now. I had to rebalance with a tuning fork before driving over here.

I’m finding this Meisner room in the cracked black box an incredible room to be part of. It’s a great reckoning in a little room. I’m being made very welcome in there while shadow exploring a person who goes to some pretty dark places. There’s nothing like feeling safe enough to go to that dark with truth. Today I did some pretty fucked up things and then got killed and surprised myself in my own ending. It’s hard to fully encounter even half of what comes in this work with these people – they’re steeped in it and brave every one of them. I’ve always been curious about the work – Abigail drove us up some twenty years ago to see some of them do Three Sisters in the Scottish Borders. That was a friendship gesture but also a curiosity. I’m sure I would have looked into it further had it not involved spending money.

I’m hoping the lines will hold in my brain tomorrow. I’m hoping I’ll be fresh enough to drive back after the show. If I leave at ten I should be in bed by 2 which will give me 6 hours sleep. Then another day of shadow and then one more long drive and I get to languish in the sunshine for a few days and listen to clever people telling me things and be free of obligation until Sunday afternoon.

Bed in my tent. Hungry, as I didn’t think to get dinner and there’s nowt on site at this time. But I’ll sleep like a baby very soon and honestly I’m calm enough and like the cue script work enough that I’m really thinking of tomorrow as just a lovely opportunity to be really live and really listen.

But a good night’s sleep would help. I forgot a pillow so I’m resting my head on a death cape. Today has involved a lot of my death. Hopefully that’s it for a while.

It’s peaceful here and not freezing. I can hear quiet chatter from nearby but nothing that’ll keep me up. A generator down the hill but far enough away that I can tune it out. My lovely old big festival tent, still going. I bought it in 2013. Should’ve brought a pillow, it’s such a luxury parking next to the tent.

Right. I’m home. It’s solstice! And I have to go to bed before ten. It’ll still be light.

Last night I got pulled from deep sleep at half 1 because there’s someone staying at mine and she couldn’t work out how to open the door with the key.

Today was very much not an ordinary Sunday. We were back in the scratched black box, the six of us and a very lovely dog.

The Meisner stuff is growing on me as I start to internalise what its for. My initial concern was that we were going into “rinse your own life and beat the shit out of yourself in the process” territory, but actually it is about safely creating genuine experiences that you can subsequently channel. They put me through my paces today after going easy on me yesterday, and I was looking forward to that in my masochistic way. I like these guys so I’m happy to go there with them. So I opened a few doors. Lots of crying and rage, creepiness and manipulation. All the best bits. It’s like shadow work.

I’ve got to play Banquo on Tuesday though. I really hope the lines are in there somewhere because this overlapping week is a category-A headfuck. The two projects couldn’t be more different. Tomorrow I’ll wake up and record a tape in a third world, a telly world. Then I’ll drive across town and dig into the dark bits of my psyche with some really connected and exciting actors. Then I’ll drive three and a half hours, put up a tent, fall asleep in it, wake up and before long I’ll be running around in tights remembering verse with a very different bunch of delightful committed clever actors. Then I’ll probably have to drive back to London Tuesday night so I can dig in again on Wednesday before driving back to Salisbury. It could have been more inconvenient perhaps. But there’s a joy in having made it all work. I love this stuff, the variety, the exploration. I’ve been pretty wobbly this summer but this is a reminder of the sheer joy I can find in the communities and the crafty bits and the difficult things. My middle class guilt means I’m always more fulfilled when it feels like hard work.

I’m gonna turn in. Kinda wanna sleep naked in this heat but our guest is a young woman and my prostate is a cannon ball. At least she’s home tonight and not going out so I won’t get pulled out of dreamland by frantic late night knocking. I need to be tip top for the next few days.

Off to the Meisner rehearsal room. It’s a black box, but surprisingly one I wasn’t aware of. Very near the old Arcola. It looks like it has been flooded, possibly squatted too. Round the back of a building and down some stairs and this subterranean space but it’s all you need. You can get stuff made in a black box.

I wasn’t sure what to expect today, I had a sense of the ladies having met them all but the gentlemen were people I had observed but never really communicated with. What are they like in their work? Pretty generous and free, thankfully.

The director was being kind to me today by not throwing me in at the deep end. I largely got to hear and watch them work, long form physical and emotional exercises designed to build connection and truthful experience with the text so as to help create experiences that can be genuinely remembered and tapped into when, at the end of a long strange road, you find yourself in that place where the lights are shining and someone has miked you up and you’re looking at another actor and your job is to say the things written in the book after the things written before them. I can see how this work will quickly build a foundation that can be accessed without cost. It’s a way of working that I’ve rarely been lucky enough to encounter in the main industry. Process driven work often gets sidelined by people worrying about deadlines. “Let’s go in over the weekend to block this properly, we’ve never had any direction,” said the leading actor in a process show I did about ten years ago, and I couldn’t bear that anyone could so completely miss the point. But we’re all scared of being found out. Some people respond to that by wanting to be told what to do, so they can blame the director if they’re shit. I’m not in it to look good – (although it feels nice when you do). I will hit my marks if needed, do as I’m told if asked, but generally I’m happy not to know exactly what’s gonna happen until it happens. I think I’m going to enjoy this process.

Tidying my room again today, and I’ve thrown away loads of stuff but somehow it feels like there is still the same amount of stuff. I think I’ll need a few more passes before I get close to having a clear space around me but progress is progress. I’m all hoovered, blown through the cobwebs, and the bath is running. Hard to believe this is a weekend. Back to Meisner tomorrow…

Brian and Maddy have gone up north. Tonight I’m home alone. I’ll start a new job tomorrow and got someone staying tomorrow night but tonight I can finally explode. My room got too full of things that need to be laundered and sorted out. When they’re home I don’t want them to be wading through piles of clothes waiting for washing, fighting through jungles of drying sheets, stumbling over mountains of bags with things for charity. I have a moment to express myself through the medium of tidying. I need to clean my launchpad. How can I expect things to flow, professionally, how I want them to flow if every day I wake up in a pile of old clothes and dusty books? How can I be the tiptop physical version of myself that I am sober to get back to if I can’t find a clean pair of pants in the morning? Sure I have no end of available frock coats or pinstripes or suits. The costume side of living in this world is fine. But day to day clothes are a lottery. I think I’ll do a baby Marie Kondo…

Kirti invigilates at Imperial with me and she is very much not a potato like some of them. She never worked a day until her husband died but she’s working now and I really love working with her but she made me throw away my jumper a while ago. “The money gets out through the holes,” she told me. I reminded her of it today and: “the same thing happens with your socks,” she told me and my sock drawer is an absolute chaos of ruined socks. My toes are baby soft but the nails are often talons, and my heels are made of sandpaper.

So this is my Friday night. Running the washing machine ragged and cooking a curry. Then once everything is dry I’ll shinto my underwear, although that’ll have to fit around rehearsals and lines. I’ve had too many projects, happily, while I moan about the fact that the sexiest looking jobs keep going to some other old fucker.

It is sweaty in London. The barometer just dropped an inch towards rain. This afternoon was lovely though. I took my lunch into Brompton Cemetery, dropped a couple of crisps and ended up with an army of crows behind me.

It’s a gorgeous walking place in my borough. I only just realised how easy it is to walk to from one of the common exam venues for Imperial…

Cymbeline not Hamlet. It was Hamlet once. Now it is Cymbeline. But at Dulwich Hamlet. At Dulwich, Cymbeline. At Dulwich Hamlet, Cymbeline.

Dulwich Hamlet is a football club. It’s nice seeing the word “Hamlet” everywhere. They very generously and trustingly let us into their grounds with Cymbeline instead, in many ways that spiritual successor to Hamlet. We are in a run of weekly shows WE ARE IN A RUN OF WEEKLY SHOWS. It is fucking glorious, as we edge towards solstice, to have twenty people get together and do random shit with attempted rigour and as much nonsense as we eat.

The more we do it the more we will start to properly understand the game and how to play it best. Right now we are mostly winning but there are plenty of misplays and missed plays. We need to train better together and on our own. We need to be paying attention to the squad more closely and knowing when to play and when to just keep our eye on the ball. People flow in and out all the time. Most of the shows I’ve been to I’ve ended up playing unfamiliar parts in some way so have not yet experienced a Cymbeline without a base level of white noise. There’s always the constant shift of “what’s the offer now” but I would like that not to be running alongside “what’s my cue?” and “what’s my line?” I’d like a clear head finally. I think I’ll get that in two weeks at Bold, when I’m likely only playing parts I’ve played already.

My level of brainflood came through most strongly when I found myself saying “things bad begun make strong themselves by ill” instead of “some falls are means the happier to arise”. The former is from Macbeth and definitely not Caius’ line. Fits the rhythm and the sentiment though. Oops.

Next week we’ve got a champion of improv who doesn’t know the show improvising the part of Cloten which is gonna be a hell of an obstruction and potentially genuinely joyful and I’m sad I’ll miss it but next week is crazy busy for me, I’ll be at Chalke and rehearsing in London too so pinging up and down the whole time.

I’m glad this show is out of the way to be honest. I need to look at Banquo for Tuesday and Awaken for rehearsals starting Saturday. Good to be busy, sure, and I’ve had a lovely audition come in once again for me to try not to get too excited about. I’ll have to fit that in on Sunday night or early Monday morning.

Fun?! And now I’m gonna wash / lie in warm water for half an hour. Bed is calling. I’m gonna change my sheets.

Still the days are getting longer but we are almost at the peak, the high point of the year. My mood is zigzagging all over the place and I’m fine with that as its a damn sight better than being numb. I’m supposed to be securing my lines tonight for Caius Lucius tomorrow, I’ve never played him before and it all feels a bit wobbly. But I needed to earn a crust so I went and watched a load of people take an exam. Then it was off to Hampstead.

Part of the joy of the Halloween walk is in the planning. We always do it over summer and it is usually an excuse for a pint and a good walk. Right now I still find pubs hard because the habit isn’t gone. I know it is possible to have one pint and then drink nothing for weeks. But I’m not there yet by any means at easy not boozing. I have to be an extremist until it stops being difficult. And that will be a while.

The walk is still possible though. So I went on the walk with Siwan and John and now Joanna. I’ve brought in a friend. She was on As You Like It, she knows the sort of actory walkabout type thing that we are all doing at Halloween… She’s extremely organised but she’s also very brave in her work – a rare combination. I hope she proves a good fit for the company and that she can do it. I have already lined up my replacement, anticipating that something will start to ping in the old acty-stratosphere. But hopefully he won’t be needed too much. We shall see.

My head is tired and woolly. I got all the way through to now, half eleven at night, without eating a thing apart from some crisps in the pub to soak up my non alcoholic beer. I totally forgot. It happens. Dinner is in the oven finally – a jacket potato and a barnsley chop. I shouldn’t go straight to sleep after that so I’ll do y Cymbeline lines into you wee hours.

And my phone just rang. Looks like I’m gonna go get a bar from Haggerston tomorrow morning and sling it into Bergie. Och. So much for staying up late.

Oh the reflecting pool. What a metaphor! Just watching it from afar, it is astonishing, hilarious, upsetting.

So there’s a pool in Washington that Obama spent some money on. A lot of what Plumpkin does is about trying to be better than Obama, probably because he never can be and because “Hussein” isn’t white.

So he did this expensive unnecessary refurb on this reflecting pool. His usual taste got involved. This is the guy who isn’t aware how much he’s like a late stage Roman Emperor with his circenses but not much panem. This is the guy putting plastic gold everywhere and bulldozing beautiful things to replace them with horrible expensive things and trying to write his name on stuff. We know he’s a dangerous idiot, of course. But Christ alive the pool.

So he made it look like a public swimming pool and called it “American Flag Blue”. That was only a few days ago. And nature happened, likely accelerated by the darker colour and the fact he chose midsummer. And now it is full of algae again. I suspect that somewhere there’s a consultant scientist head-desking about it after being sidelined. Although is the administration smart enough to consult someone? Genuinely perhaps not. They just want the optics. Which lasted just a day or two.

So today people started pouring bleach into it. There might be dead birds around it now like he says are around wind turbines, and people coughing if they aren’t careful with dosage plus it’ll have to be maintained like a really expensive swimming pool because otherwise that pesky wind blows in… He’s making it toxic in order to try to control it. Just like he’s doing with America.

When I first heard the phrase “Trump derangement syndrome” I assumed it must have been in reference to the people who support him no matter what he comes up with and who double down every time he turns out to be the fraud or the idiot he is.

Apparently not though, it’s a condition he’s made up about anyone that knows what a nasty joke he always has been. He only effects me in as much as we have always copied America, about two years behind. The overamplified significance of misunderstood flags over here recently, the misuse of the word “patriot”, those jokers “taking the knee”… Reactive eejits over here are wolfing down his noise and puking it back up jumbled.

But yeah these people for whom Trump can do no wrong – of course they don’t understand anything at all to with the natural world apart from to shoot bits of it. The latest they’ve got is that “lefties” did the algae in the pool. Ok right great. Lefties did a nature in his lovely clean pool? We really are at the end times.

I had a fish tank by the Thames and open windows. These nature things happen fast and unfortunately not wanting them to happen doesn’t affect things at all. This time of year is when I got terrible algae.

Honestly, everything he touches turns to shit. Art of the deal? Pull the other one. No art. No deal. Iran today – they are where they started with them but with a younger leader and an empowered regime who have realised they have a strong weapon to use when they want to, and all of us are paying more every day because of it.

I’m off to watch some Shakespeare.

—

It was lovely. And distracting. Loves Labours Lost. In a square. With friends. After the show I helped with the van load. That has always been part of the romance for me of those long summer tours. I felt the lack of the one I might have been on, but still no, not anymore at that rate. I can take some comfort knowing that I am better at setting boundaries for myself, and knowing I have value in a company. Tom and I went home talking about Sprite. Some of the happiest summers of my life, around this time, and I came home with exactly the same amount of money I had when I left.

Got up far too early in order to drive to Haggerston, to just outside Playhouse East and help with the get-in for Sarah’s play – the one I blogged a few weeks ago when it was on at the Hen and Chickens.

They just needed to know they had access to humans with arms if needed. I was happy to help. I like them. And as I said last time, it is hard enough getting purchase in this industry if you’re from an acting dynasty. Thirty fucking years and you really would think it would stop hurting. But I’m always happy to carry stuff or do whatever to help people starting out because without our friends, our communities, we would be totally screwed.

Driving home I spoke to another mate of mine the same age as Sarah. He’s booked a film which he totally deserves, and he’s thinking of getting out of London for good. “Perhaps you just haven’t found the right place to live,” he says. He might be onto something. If I kept chickens in a wood I’d have less time to question my life choices.

Talking to these friends I inevitably remembered myself at that age. Just hatched into the industry. Booked a big job. Mum dying. Life vs Art. Family vs Momentum. I fell into a hole, which I have no regrets about now but only because I know what I learnt down there. That learning can help carry me through this patch I’m having at the moment where nothing seems to be going right.

I turned down an audition for an excruciatingly low paid Shakespeare job in Kent playing a smaller part than I’m used to. That would be my life now if I’d auditioned (and got it ha). I don’t miss it, I don’t need the experience anymore, the one thing you can carve on my forehead is that I’m good at this shit now. “Don’t come moaning to me if you aren’t working this summer then,” said Esta. Fair. And I can make more money dayjobbing but I was believing I’d book some filming. Manifesting the fuck out of it. It’ll come. It’ll come.

Another rejection this morning and this one they kept me on the hook for months. “This date or this date? This whole month? This date? What if it’s this date?” I just told Angus the associate: “Whatever they say tell them I can do it and I will”. And apparently I did a great audition, I very nearly got it. Very nearly. Very nearly got it. Very nearly. Very nearly. Very nearly got it. Very nearly. Very nearly.

But I didn’t get it.

If my sperm had very nearly got to mum’s egg it would be a very different thing. There’s no consolation prize. “They went with a different vibe.” I’ll put that on the shelf with all the others then. Can’t do much about the vibe. I read the brief and did the vibe on the brief. Does this mean it has gone to someone who couldn’t do the vibe on the brief? Shh brain. Shhh now. Hush there.

Bad week for it when I’m newly sober.

I know it gets easier but all this “feeling stuff” nonsense, I used to have a handy way of avoiding it. How have I deliberately chosen to take the wheels off at a time when people are queuing up to throw piss into my eyes? But, rationally speaking, it is infinitely better that I had the meetings. There are friends of mine who haven’t auditioned for ages.

Crying is a good thing, I tell myself, cus it is. I’ve been largely expressing myself through that medium today. Good for the blepharitis to have an existential crisis about your life choices at 50. And it is a purge. ‘Tis the season. I should get a motorbike and start saying “man” all the time. I already wear socks with sandals.

—

Home made bangers and mash with glorious onion gravy. Apple crumble with custard. And a lovely phone call with a very dear friend. There are always solutions if you look for them. I’ve got loads on this summer and should be proud of myself for that. Need to get better at looking at what I’ve got. This hunger though, this endless endless hunger to work…

And off to bed.

Flipping ‘eck. It’s a bit warmer. Come on summer, do the thing we pay you for!

A peaceful day today. Not an easy one to stay sober for. But peaceful.

Lou’s flat in Brighton is a haven and while she was travelling back from Newcastle I was grooming her ridiculously fluffy cat, doing the washing up, and looking out the window.

Last night the rock I had used to prop the window open rolled out the window, down the windowsill, and fell three floors into the street below. I think there might have been a car underneath it, parked illegally on the pavement. I went down this morning to see if I could find it but I couldn’t. Hopefully it didn’t mess up someone’s car. If it did I wonder if they will blame the seagulls.

I grabbed Eggs Benedict at Café Rust which is pricey but they do good coffee and they are close. Then a mission up north to get myself to London for the AGM for AFTLS. That’s the group that tours suitcase Shakespeare all over America and it is a lovely bunch of coconuts. Not a great turnout sadly. Last year there were loads more, but the trains are fucked this weekend and that probably contributed to low attendance. We did business but really it was about going to the pub together. Which is where I struggled.

Booze is such an easy habit and this week hasn’t been the kindest week for news. In fact the last few months have been an absolute shitshow. This is the age I was waiting to get to, you see. “Get to fifty and you’ll never stop working,” they told me. Grumble grumble.

It was nice to go to the pub with theatre friends but dammit I wanted very much to dose up on toxic forgettyjuice. I’m two weeks in now so it’ll take maybe another week until the craving is tiny. Right now though I’m in “just for today” territory – as they say in AA. Not that I’m going to AA. Maybe I should. But I think I’m okay on my own right now frankly. I am such a huge masochist so of course I’m okay on my own. Jeez.

Anyway, nice to see my friends even briefly. Grace is going back out on the next tour and I’m thrilled for her. She’s playing the line of parts I played first time I went out with them.

I’m feeling a bit discombobulated if I’m honest. I’m trying to stay upbeat and all that but I’ve got an early start tomorrow and maybe it’s best I just stop the noise tonight and go sleep.

Two men my age but twice my weight stand in the evening sun outside The Golden Cannon talking about lefties. One of them passes their reticent pale eyes over me as I pass. “He’s a leftie,” he concludes at me. They stub out their cigarettes and go back into the pub, turning their backs on me as I pass. The Cannon is usually like that so I don’t think much of it. I’m in a pink jumper. I have my hat on.

A bit further down someone is driving his bright yellow BMW with the top down. He’s blasting out Bob Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues and eyeballing people walking by. “Don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.” He’s silver fox. Nicely dressed. Looks like he’s pretty happy with himself. His mouth moves with the words like he wants us to absorb them.

I’m on my evening constitutional in Brighton. I’ve inadvertently stumbled into politics. As I carry on walking I see more evidence of noisy opinion. The official noisemaking is done and now it’s go home with the placards time, or get drunk time, or both. T-Shirts. Face coverings. Little groups a-wandering hither and yon. Mostly “Choose Love” or “Refugees are welcome here”. The um the er the … The”patriots”? came on the train. They’re not from round ‘ere that’s for sure.

It doesn’t take me long to work out what’s been going on here. A protest and a counter-protest. “Save are women and kids with violence” vs “oh for crying out loud, you lot again?”.

A small group of frightened semi-literate ogres have been galvanised out of bed to come to Brighton today to get drunk and shout about brown people. The intention of the organisers was to get some videos of them being completely outnumbered by Brightonians to further push the narrative that “right thinking British Englanders from English England are the oppressed minority.” “VIOLENCE,” shouts one man hopefully into his phone camera on my Facebook. “Antifa have MISSILES,” he carries on. It’s genuinely like being back in a mudfight aged 12 where we’re pretending its the Vietnam War. “Peow peow! Napalm!! DUCK. This twig is a HELICOPTER whupwhupwhup”. Another commentator screams into a megaphone about how Brighton is “the lion’s den”. He of course means the lion from The Wizard of Oz. He has imported the American myth that “antifa” is an organisation rather than just a large number of intelligent people that know he’s a prat.

“The thing is though,” says the homeless busker I’m walking by right now “These idiots who showed up today calling themselves patriots, they don’t even know what this country is. The music. The food. The culture. The art. I’m more of a patriot than any of them.” He’s skinny and stoned, playing ragga beats and talking in rhythm. He’s got a fair point.

We mustn’t polarise. We mustn’t be divided. It’s the billionaires. We know all this. But maybe the guy outside the pub was right about me being a leftie with my hat and pink jumper and my curiosity about the unfamiliar. If you have an opinion that I might disagree with and you feel you’ve thought it through I’m happy to examine the unfamiliar and make my own mind up. My mind changes on things all the time. Extremists on both sides annoy me, but the high handed and patronising tone of extreme left annoys me less than the protective self-adoring shouting of the extreme right. And the way they are trying to colonise every form of protest and argument. To paint themselves as victims. To take the knee for fucks sake. It’s immature and so self involved. They take themselves so seriously that at some point it is going to tip from ridiculous into scary.

This wave of rightyboys and girls annoys me because every single one of them seems to be willfully dumb, purposely stupid, cut off from logic and empathy. This level of stupid is worrying. At some point early in life they’ve run into something they can’t understand alongside other people who have understood it. They’ve reacted by retreating into themselves rather than trying to expand into a revelation. “I’m not stupid, I just have a special understanding”. And that has been the end for curiosity, for critical thinking, for anything other than to become big vessels for the noise of anyone that strokes their ego. That small mindedness has been amplified now – they’ve found millions of other cabbages online. And the guys at the top know they are empty and pour vitriol into them.

So yes, they were massively outnumbered in Brighton here today. But that’s what they wanted. “Brighton is fallen. London is fallen”. All that noise. It’s just so fucking sad, and I don’t see the exit right now. I’m glad I didn’t go when it was happening. I wonder what the way out of this is? Do we have to wait for the transatlantic manchild to finally catch fire?

I’m gonna walk it off. It’ll be light late, and still a week until solstice!