This afternoon we had Holly and her family in, as part of a well sold kids matinee. We cut all the swearing and our inprov is made clean. Jeff the Pervert Strangler becomes a ballet dancer and pirouettes for us. Sue is so happy that all she can do is shout “Woohoo!” It is nothing to do with her alcohol consumption.
There’s a game. Holly very actively wanted to play it. It involves getting up onto stage and sitting in all the lights, in Scrooge’s chair.
Holly is 7. “She saw a video of you guys online and insisted that she really wanted to go,” her mum told me after the show. She’s definitely the youngest person we’ve ever had up playing the game. I have a suspicion she’ll be an actor though, and do it well. She was pretty grounded. But watching her calibrate the experience of being in the light like that was remarkable. There’s quite a hefty rig. If the cumulus and haze has been rolling you really can’t see the audience without stepping out of it. I forget how I automatically try and stand where I’m blinded, knowing it’s the best place. She was momentarily dumbfounded seeing things from our side, but we watched her comprehend how we can mostly only pretend to see the audience when the lights are up. Her brilliant mum came up to help keep her safe. “I’m invisible,” mum announced, and hid behind the chair. Holly just made sense of it, in her own time, and won the game better than plenty of drunk people have over the years, with such a supportive audience and her ace Spanish mum hiding behind the chair, realising in the moment that she’s probably reared an actor.
Will and I have secured our tigers and how we coexist. He’s a fire tiger, I’m a wood tiger. We both like to play, and we both talk too much. We have learned how to start editing each other. Great new friends, we are. He’s a joy. He plays the fire, I try and plug the roots in, and we both get lost in our own ideas.
In any sensible world we would have a day off tomorrow. It is the thing that I balked at most when I saw the dates, just as I know what happens to our voices. No Monday off after 3 back to back 2 show days. It’s tough. We are both vocally tired but full functioning… we are aware of upper register bits that are a struggle. A full day with steam etc would guarantee a clean week. Not to be.
So I’m gonna get in the bath now and then collapse, relatively sober.
Moments like watching Holly calibrate what it meant to be in the light, and then guess that hard question for a 7 year old… Joy
AlBarclay 