Oh heavens. We open tomorrow.
There’s still only two of us on stage. But it’ll feel like a village. Will and I both make a lot of noise both physically and vocally. We do it differently but we come from similar drives. It makes for a lovely partnership. And now there’s puppets and loads of tech. Six years ago I was sticking and lighting hundreds of candles every night. I was crawling under a table trying to rewire a surround sound system that people kept kicking out of connection. I’d be in the venue at least three hours early to help with tablecloths and reset. I can barely remember some of the fuckery but there’s been so much. Plunging portaloos with broom handles, taking the fucking shutters off, the RED PAINT, the Prophet of Zarquon… I think there must be a decent record in this blog now even if not complete. Maybe I should start sifting over old posts. No time for that now though… I remember building a set with Jack and Sam in two days using whatever the fuck was lying around in Theatre Deli Sheffield. We made it look pretty damn good. We literally stole some wallpaper from a major business in the process, and put up a load of flats we found in the attic backwards so we could paint them up and use the structure as shelves.
Now it looks great. It sometimes feels like I’m in a West End show, with all the tech in place, so well lit, it all looks brilliant and I’m being paid properly. Hoorah.
Longass day tomorrow though. The inevitable thing happened where they forgot how much space real people take up, so we can’t have Yet to Come in the audience anymore. It’ll be spookier from stage anyway. It’s huge. But it means we have to tech and then fuck around doing rehearsal things instead of getting show ready. So be it.
I’m thinking of Sheffield where Sam and Jack and I built the whole fucking show and literally didn’t even run the lines until about two hours before the first full house cus we were too busy building. And it was still a wonderful December and the show is robust. There’s been enough rearrangement this year that it could be honestly argued it was a different fish entirely.
I’m really forward to this month. But tomorrow is gonna be long. So I guess I should stop thinking about the past and clock off.
AlBarclay 