Month: September 2022

A whole hell of a lot of actors. Most people went in a minibus to Wales, but I came in Bergman. I need to be self-determined. We are all sitting downstairs in a beautiful vast stone home into which we have been welcomed. Last year, in Covid crazytime, we camped. This year we are welcome here in the house once more and it truly is a wonderful thing. The lush wet pasture around here. The river flowing by. The hills. This old old ground. Deep and unchanged for generations. For ever. This land has never been owned by the Ikea-fools. No new lamps for old here. Old lamps. And old friends.

My old friends. My new friends too, and newer friends who are now long standing…

Scott. It was a different millennium when we both met one another. Back then we had at least a full head of hair between us. We have held friends for so long. I adore the depth and time of it. We still challenge each other and piss each other off. The work is getting better the more time that passes. Then more recent friends, with equal complicated depth. So many different odd humans whose lives have touched each others, and we are all gathered here together under these eaves and bound in this stone but deep deep deep in the heart of the Welsh hills. And Lou is here. She’s far too smart to miss a chance like this. I’m glad to share it with her. I wanted for so long to be able to share my adventures.

Right now we are in a circle just … talking lines to each other, sitting in a beautifully well appointed room. The moon is just off full, bright through the leaded windows, forceful and clear. We will sleep upstairs in a huge room in the eaves, where the wallpaper matches one my grandparents had in their bedroom when I was a tiny tiny child. Tomorrow morning we will wake, earlier than I’m happy to, and go by minivan to The Willow Globe, and there we will do two versions of that beautiful strange sad romantic comedy Twelfth Night. I know it better than many. Post zombie apocalypse, you’d get a better quarto from my memory of Twelfth Night than most of the rest of the canon. You’d get a decent maccers, a heavily cut Hamlet, a decent shift through some of the histories and the Romans, the best bits of measure for measure, most of Dream, and the crown of my post apocalyptic memory would be a detailed Twelfth Night including academic variations and notes and a very bad recall of only the Orsino and Feste lines. Many of the rest of the plays would come in patches. And then at the end of my attempted preservation volume you’d have Cardenio Prince of Athens which I guess I could make up out of the ones I really don’t know anything about. I would perform them for the zombies and it would feel exactly the same at touring through Eastbourne on a Saturday matinee. The zombies wouldn’t mind my atrocious paraphrasing.

Tomorrow though, they’ll be a lively audience and there’ll be the Shakespeare experts there, as they always are. Still, this audience – they know we care, they know we work and drill and they know we then go from rigour to mischief. We’ve been coming here annually for eleven years doing such last minute half cocked joy. They will be looking for our mischief, and despite all the hard work we are trying to do to connect up the words and our energy and bind together, in the end we are doing all this work so we can jump into the show holding hands with each other, keep it live alive oh and have a lovely time with the people who are watching. Let’s make something fun!

First though, it might be time to clamber up to my room in the eaves with Lou and sleep in peace and darkness and silence, warm in stone and humanity and material and good air. The willows are waiting.

Earlier today I didn’t clamber back up into the tree that broke my rib. I went a little way up, to put my hand on the new growth where three years ago in high summer that big branch shed with my weight and sent me plummeting. I thanked it for teaching me a lesson. Then I probably would have pulled myself up into it anyway had Lou not been there to help me remember the lesson. We are not immortal. But we can have a lot of fun while we have this big life chance. And then eternity.

The rain really has settled in, and on Saturday we are gonna try to do Twelfth Night at The Willow Globe slap bang in the middle of Wales. We are gonna get soaked.

In a strong example of pathetic fallacy, the skies have been weeping. The water has been pummeling down. The roads are flooded. The gutters are backed up. Driving through London I was feeling awful for the poor cyclists, bobbing on their little frames through massive floody puddles.

You can’t get any music on the radio but for the National Anthem. Indignant journalists complain about those young people taking selfies outside Buckingham Palace. Others speak as slowly as they can, perhaps knowing how much of the schedule they are going to have to fill with words. Chelsea Physic Garden will be closed tomorrow, in mourning. Who knows what the roads will be like to Wales, or the audience when we are out there. “London Bridge is down”. That is, apparently, the code phrase to tell us that the Queen is dead. And so indeed she is. She just held on long enough that someone other than Boris Johnson got to talk about it for posterity outside number ten. Subsequent generations, watching the footage, will say “who is that outside number ten?” Liz Truss just met her majesty before she died. I have a feeling a lot of old people will die this winter.

But the Queen will be remembered. A stateswoman. A remarkable figurehead. An international symbol. She helped our frightened little island look a lot less chaotic and foolish than it really is. She brought gravitas and a sense of tradition into international relationships – the sort of thing that gives us our USP to other nations. The thing that sold Downton, The Crown, Bridgerton…

Jugears is coming in now, older than many. Who knows what will become of him – he hasn’t the weight of his mother. Do the fates of the Charlies alternate? Do I hear the grinding of an axe? We now have an android for Prime Minister and a twit as king. I’ve met the king though. How unusual. He was personable. Maybe he will fund the arts. He seems to like theatre. We shall see. I guess they’ll have to put his face on the next minting of coins.

A day of trying to remember lines in company, and tomorrow we all drive up to Wales. I’m looking forward to it. Lou can come and we all get to stay in a huge country house. Perhaps Malvolio will wear a black armband in mourning. After all, Olivia’s household is a mourning household. But plans plans plans. Plans are not allowed.

I’m sleeping in Richmond tonight, surrounded by packing boxes. I wanted to see Tristan and Tanya before they move to Ham and lose the spare room. I’ve got a friend on the sofa and another in my bed. Makes sense to do it now, and we can talk about all the immediate responses to this news of the day, that will eclipse all other news for literally weeks. The pageantry. The funeral. The coronation… This will be big business. People will fly in from all over the world. It’ll actually help our economy in the short term before the actuality of the new regime becomes apparent.

I liked her. Loads of my friends just detest the whole institution. I just preferred her as head of state than the unelectable fools we keep having to choose between. A monarch is a lottery. It’s totally unfair. But for the ones who do it, it is their job and they learn from an early age. Still, some are mad, some are bad, some are great. We’ve had a great one. Expensive thing to have but it brings in more money and interest and love for our nation than many people are willing to accept. I hope that son of hers has learnt well.

Farewell Queenie.

Suddenly autumn.

It seems we are doing seasons this year. Not the most optimistic for energy bills in winter. Right now it’s all bucketing down again (have they lifted the hosepipe ban yet? No? Nothing to do with fracking though good heavens). Our new Prime Minister is an idiot. Tout ça change. Apparently Plato nailed it, back all those thousands of years ago – “the one fucker that shouldn’t be in charge is the fucker that wants to be in charge. But that’s the only bunch of fuckers positioned to be in charge.” That’s a direct translation from the Ancient Greek. It’s fair. Nobody wants the porkrobot to be calling any kind of shot. But we’ve got her. She’s as bad as the one before, likely as bad as the one to come. Another vacillating untrustworthy morally bankrupt wisdom-cavity flapping their jaw in the face of growing poverty, and spoon-feeding the richest people whatever the poorest people need.

I’ve been in the basement of a Catholic Church, running Shakespeare scenes and trying to think about getting the words out in the right order. We are all off to Wales on the weekend and who knows, it’ll come out in some sort of order. Hopefully it’ll be the order we need. We will never be together as a full company until we are in Wales. That’s always the way. We rarely get this much rehearsalising so it’s better than often. I’m looking forward to throwing shit at the wall. We shall see how it all goes.

Bedtime now just as soon as I’ve taken my pants out of the washing machine. I suddenly realised I’ll be away a few days and I’m running low on clean undies. No tumble drier and it’s wet so I need time for them to dry. Ah life admin. I can just about stay ahead of it, even if some days like today I have to put my pants on inside out. And yeah, maybe we expect too much of these morons who want to lead our country. I can learn huge tracts of Elizabethan language, but I can’t wash my pants on time. Maybe Liz Truss is extremely efficient with her gardening or something, in a way that excuses the fact she’s utterly dogshit at public speaking. Policy remains to be seen, but she can’t be any worse than the parade of fuckwittery we have witnessed this last age.

I’m fed up with it. Go be a politician, reader. What though you don’t want to? Great. That’s your recommendation. Really the best leader is always going up be unwilling. But the ones who want it are always going to push past and fuck everything up. As with school games, so with politics and everything else. Ugh.

Car rage, but it can’t be directed at the garage… They got me back on the road quickly, they moved some things around to accommodate it. They charged me so much money. So much. But they fixed my car and I have a 2 year guarantee (or 20,000 miles).

Driving back from Stratford on Saturday and the revs suddenly started to go crazy with very little purchase. That familiar smell of burning rubber. I put the hazards on in the slow lane. It got worse and worse. No purchase on the gears, revs going crazy. I rolled into the hard shoulder. Tried to get him started again but the clutch refused to rebound. Something badly wrong. Lou and I had to sit on the hard shoulder for over an hour. Anyone who knows Lou will know that that’s not her natural environment.

Mr Clutch is a big business, and they are preferred by the RAC. I had no choice but to go there. Like with other big garages they can kind of name their price, and they did. I could have literally bought my previous 3 cars before Bergman and had change for the money they took from me to get him back on the road. A big bold hard figure. Having been debt free for some time now, I’m now maxed out on both of my overdrafts and scared about it. No flex from Mr Clutch. Even though he pulled the numbers out of his arse, my customer service complaint has gained no traction. They are paid now. Somewhere on a beach in Turks and Caicos some fat bastard has ordered another mojito. And Bergman is back on the road.

Driving is a luxury. I do a lot of it. Even though I work with electric cars in multiple different ways, I still prefer a combustion engine full of petrol. I like Bergman because he’s a big fatty and he can carry lots. But maybe I need to move on. It’s only a matter of time before he’s no longer ULEZ compliant and then he’s a brick.

Driving back I stopped to hand-feed broken up chicken bits to a sick cat. Turns out he’d emptied his bowl before I showed up, but he was still happy to have a bit of chicken from my hand. It’s a strange experience, hand feeding a cat. That little raspy tongue. Those sharp fangs. We get on, he and I. But he’s unwell. By the time you read this he might well be under the knife, having the canker excised. I hope it’s enough. Send some positive energy, cos it has been an expensive process thus far for my friend…

Unexpected expenses. We who are self employed live in fear of them. And so often they come on the back of lovely work. The money for the car more or less exactly matches what I’ll get from that wonderful day on set yesterday. God save us all from unexpected expenses.

I’m having a glass of ouzo and then I’m gonna crash out and dream of how to make back the money I’ve spent today just to stand still.

“How did the clutch fail so catastrophically? Is there something I’m doing that I need to stop doing?” “Likely you were towing something too heavy?” Ach. Bergie has a

—

And we all feel asleep with our phones in our hand at that point. Or at least I did. I think I was about to blame the damage on the previous owner for trying to tow something too heavy.

Rain in the city.

Vast hard sheets of water. Flooding into the edges of the roadways. Catching the lights and flooding the pavements. Hard rain. Sudden rain. You wouldn’t have brought an umbrella this morning. You would have wished you had done. Out in it? Soaked. In moments. Wet to the bones. Wet wet wet.

I was in a bus. Problem is, buses don’t take you home. They take you nearer than tubes for less, but… After twenty minutes of waiting at the drop off I finally caved in and flagged a passing black cab. I didn’t want to get soaked and that was the only other option. It’s still pouring now. I’ve been home over half an hour and I’ve had some food, plus I’m not gonna get pneumonia. Eleven quid though, for a black cab from Victoria to my flat, which is less than a mile. This is why you have to be rich or stupid. How do they operate when it’s not raining? That was a necessity hail, pure and simple.

We’ve been plotting the Hampstead Walk this year. That mostly involves following our leader who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the area. We were going to start in The Flask in Hampstead, in a Diagon Alley substitute street that I think did feature in some of the potter movies. The management never got back to us though and ultimately it was too much faff trying to get contact. Added to which there’s a brilliant Flask pub in Highgate, just the other side of The Heath. With two flasks, there’s way too much risk of audience members showing up at the wrong pub. I did it. Chris did it. This evening the photographer did it too, so we had to try and rethink the route on the fly. The Hampstead Flask is right by the station, which is in its favour. But added to the potential confusion from competing flask pubs, we can’t raise the management. It really helps to be able to warn them we are coming. We cap at 30, and it’s probable we will hit good numbers. We are probably going to shift the base. Then we can have comms.

But yeah that’s been the day, plus a really unpleasant interaction with the garage that has taken in Bergman, who are honestly going to try and take me for every fucking penny they can…

Car at 6:35. And I’m lucky. The Winnebagos are on The Mall. Darren picks me up. He’s an unusual human. Very tall. Maybe a bit touched. Is he ex services? When I come down, he’s staring up into the trees. “You’re after the crows,” I tell him. He agrees. “They’re eloquent, these ones.”

I have some local crows that know me. They trust me so they come to me. Darren didn’t know them, but he could sense they were biddable. He was checking them out. Communing. You can’t park outside my flat without being checked out by those local crows.

Darren is a bit sideways as a location driver which immediately makes me love him. It’s a balance. You have to have personality but you mustn’t fuck up the route. Darren had his secret right ear satnav earpiece – (PRO-TIP) – but he was still a bit lost in London. He mostly got me where I needed to be but he was always late in the process. I didn’t mind. I don’t need to spend time over my breakfast. It reminded me of the Extreme-E stuff, where I’m basically him.

I got onto set promptly after changing superquick. I then said my 38 words. I knew them inside out and back to front and I had actioned them all and was just willing to roll them around. That’s easy when the sides only have 38 words. Those motivations and transitive verbs were well explored. I was sub though. The other actors had far more to say than I did. But … I had my bit. And they covered it from so many angles. The camera was only on me twice, but I must have said that tiny piece over 20 times before all the shots were covered.

It helped that I was talking to people I admire, who turn out to be good people too. I met another human I respect very much. I’m looking forward to using today’s shoot as a point of contact with them when I’m playing an equal part. Today I was a service part. Today I tried to push myself back into the old game. Today was lovely. We are only as good as our last job, and today I was taken seriously and worked with humans I have liked in theory. Lovely to see that, in the case of all the well known names today, they were all balanced and professional actors.

Obviously I tried to jokingly persuade the writer “You should have more scenes in this restaurant and get me involved.” I wouldn’t have made the crack if he hadn’t been the most lovely fellow. I trusted that he would know I was making an obvious joke about actors. “Have you played a waiter before?” asked the director. “I’ve been a fucking waiter,” I told him because I have. “That’s not the same,” he responds. And he’s the director. So “yes, of course I have” trips off my tongue. But I haven’t. I’ve been in the abyss until recently. I’m looking forward to playing lots more waiters and fuck knows what else going forward.

In real life I went straight in at Maitre d’hotel for major event restaurants and that’s the me I was channeling. I know the bullshit. I know my high end service personality. Unctious little shit. That’s what I served up. They seemed to like it.

“You’re not gonna get much change from a grand.”

I had suspected as much. Not what I wanted to hear. But… what I expected to hear. The universe has a way of working out when you’re feeling flush and stealing that feeling.

I was driving back from Stratford. “Something is going weird with Bergman,” I remarked as the rev count occasionally went nuts and that old familiar engine rubber smell came in. “I might have hit one of the buttons?” There’s this stupid cruise control thing on the steering wheel that’s easy to hit. It caps the speed at like sixty. I might have hit it while accelerating at 80 and caused the clutch to burn out. Either way, something went bang as I was going into the hard shoulder, with enough force to knock a plastic panel out onto my knees. We ground to a halt. No resistance from the clutch. Poor Bergman, all of a sudden a hunk of useless metal.

The guy who made the prognosis at the top – he’s the RAC rescue guy. His name is “Cider”. He has it written above his cab. Lou spots it. “Is that because you go out with your mates and they all have beer but you have cider?” “Yep,” he replies. This gets Lou into singing The Wurzels. Her dad is a cider drinker. There’s a song about being one. She knows it from her dad. He knows it too. “That’s the Wurzels,” he acknowledges. I’ll be off to see them next week in Tewkesbury. Saw them last week too.” Lou and I have hit on something here. As poor Bergman is towed to Cowley, we discover that The Wurzels became famous in 1976 with “I’ve got a brand new combine harvester”. They are still going, but only two from the original lineup are still alive after the drummer – formerly the oldest drummer in popular music at 86 – died of Covid.

Cider spins us into the garage and I drop Bergie off. He then drops us near the Banbury road and we get a bus into Oxford. Thankfully I’ve got history with expedient travel from Oxford to London so we end up in the Oxford Tube. I’ll have up wait and hear about Bergman. I’ll be on set in costume and made up at 8am tomorrow, talking. I won’t want to think about mechanics.

The car to pick me up and take me in will show at half six. It’s half ten right now, I’m wound down and happy. I’m gonna crash imminently. I can’t worry about poor Bergman. But considering he’s the most expensive car I’ve ever bought he might be about to teach me an important lesson about how you might as well just keep getting old donkeys… I’ve been ragging him, the poor sod. But … this is a surprise… Something bad has happened to the big bugger. I’ll find out soon if I can afford to solve it. For now though I’m gonna think about the shoot.

I just went upstairs. It was when Lou and Minnie started talking about the Upanishads and yeah, I’ve got a blog to write here dammit. I’m sure I could benefit greatly as I do every day from the combined yogic wisdom of these two humans. But… Bedtime. I also figure it’s gotta be bedtime for mummyminnie too. She’s got two remarkable tiny humans growing under her wing. I thought by going upstairs the two of them could have the yogic conversation they seem to be craving before morning comes.

She was marvelous tonight. The McGuffin that brought us up to Stratford tonight was Richard III. Min is finishing her journey as Margaret, the only character who consistently plays through four plays in the canon. Margaret in Richard III is a shuffling remembrance of all that failed and bloody ambition that pushed the action of the Henry VI plays. She’s a reminder that all that kingly ambition is death. Physically echoing Japanese horror, and with the specificity and confidence she has always carried, she was again – as always – a master of her art. I’m so fucking proud of her. And of Rhys, who has been holding space for her across the way, looking after those two small girls and keeping his own practices alive within it.

Watching the play with Lou was a joy for me. It’s complicated. All those lords. I toured it with Love and Madness back forever ago as a last minute replacement for a lost Buckingham. Buckingham is a bugger of a part – all the lines and none of the glory. He’s the kingmaker and he makes a bad king. I was channeling Mandelson but that’s how long ago it was. But my working experience of how it runs helped me sketch out the basics for her to follow it. She has taught me opera. These histories are like opera but without the opportunity to look at the orchestra when you clock out of the action.

She really seemed to get it. It was a solid company, as you might perhaps expect up here. It was easy to get lost in the politics, and the direction was so smart towards keeping the momentum going through the bits that sometimes drag. Arthur was a great Richard. I liked revisiting it as a spectator, and thinking about the nuance and the audience experience. It’s a mischief, that play. So dark, but so full of jokes. We all have a different moment where we can’t be charmed any longer by that poisonous bunch-backed toad.

It’s so late. They are still talking about yoga downstairs. I’m off to sleep. But yeah… Dick the bad, right now, up at the RSC – It’s a great show… Watchywatchy. Nighty night. In a satisfying way, this is the first time in my life I’ve been asleep before Lou. That’s my good friend. Yay. Yoga. Zzzzzzzz

A flying visit to Stratford is pending, and I’ve been trying to juggle all the odd requirements of the TV company. They own me for a week from Saturday, although it’ll only be one day of filming within the week. This to me is a reasonably new way of booking actors in small parts and it’s kinda nice as it means we get the weekly rate for one day of work. I’ll have to jump when they say jump. But unless something goes tits up, the location will have been booked for just one evening and we will have to show up and do it. Barring Covid, I can’t see it being cancelled. And with all the testing going on, nobody is gonna have Covid. I have to go to a test AGAIN tomorrow morning though, and I’m not under contract yet. I had to do two before I was even in wardrobe, but they showed up on my doorstep. Because I’m off to Stratford tomorrow morning Lou and I have both had to juggle, and rather than me going to Brighton this evening, she’s up on the train tomorrow morning to meet me in London post test. I’m up super early in order to go and let someone shove things up my nose again. I’ll have to drive to Bishopgate in the Congestion Charge area for the privilege. It’s a total ballache.

Worth it though for a week of work in a day. Worth it for the lovely team, for the lovely work, and for the feeling I got coming off set yesterday. Film sets were my first experience of professional acting. It’s lovely and familiar every time.

Gotta love the bootstrap theatre as well though. This afternoon a load of us went to Nadia’s flat and talked to each other in heightened language for a few hours. This is The Factory again. Some old faces, some newer. Twelfth Night at The Willow Globe and a brief opportunity to remember that geeky joy and fellowship. It’s forever delightful to revisit that company, and the rigour. There’s a shared language still where we can challenge and bust one another, even if the initial monastic doctrine has faded over time with changes: the absence of our patron saint, the robust career of one of our founders, the incomprehensible sacking of the other and the recent death of the New York heart, dear Louis.

Still, we muddle on. Today we couldn’t remember it all but we tried. Who knows how it’s all going to fall out in Wales but we’ve done obscure canon plays with cuescript before having never been in the room. Having the chance to be in the room together beforehand – that’s something of a luxury and lovely to see the team.

The joy with The Willow Globe is that we are known by their audience. They come for the anarchy. It’s our annual opportunity to hang out and be sexy and make Shakespeare. I love it there. I’m so happy to be going back.

After rehearsal, I went and lit a candle for my friend’s sick cat. As my mum would say, “beam on positive thinking”. He’s having an operation tomorrow…

Back into the groove.

Early morning car. Down I go with my buttfungus. I’ve showered and clean shaven. I’ve squirted myself all over with musk. This is just a costume fitting, but it’s not theatre where I can eat a pork pie during the fitting. It’s telly. I need to be sleek, unruffled, magically professional and not volunteer that I have cooties on my bumbum.

Unit base is in Bishopsgate, just down the road from my old drama school. Location today is Hyde Park, just up the road from my flat. Typically though, I have to go to unit base for my costume fitting and location for hair and make-up.

My costume is horrifyingly white and clean. There’s only one of them. I have to look immaculate. The whole purpose of my character is to disapprove of how the important character is turned out. It’s a living, darling, and I’m very happy with it. But Christ. I don’t want to touch my clothes. I can’t drink coffee in costume. I’ll have to be super careful. Plus it’s basically made out of plastic.

Even though it was just a test, I had a trailer with my character name lined up for me in the park. It smelt brand new. Sitting in it I could look out at the trees of Hyde Park, and the runners. “What are you filming?” I would hear them ask to other people in earshot of me. I would hear people vaguely avoid response. Even if we haven’t signed an explicit NDA we still know that we have to be very very careful. These huge moving sets… So many of them all over the world. I have to say, I thought they’d be more prevalent in my life over the last twenty years. My first job was all about it. I never expected the drought that only really broke about three years ago.

“Hair and make-up are ready for you now.”

The make-up wagon is always a fun community with a specific voice. This one aligns with my preferences very closely. Ocean makes me look fabulous and they tell me about how everybody in the wagon loves cats and coffee. Both easy things to love, sure. But… I am given one of the best cups of coffee I’ve ever had on a set, and I find strangers who are as concerned about my sick cat friend as I am. This is a lovely group. Shame my character is only in one scene. I feel at home.

More soon with these guys and then off to Cornwall. Man, I fucking love my life when I get to do this kind of thing. Thank you universe. This is what I have been working towards.