Dress rehearsal this morning. Two times through, which was a relief as I expected just one. More or less as soon as I started speaking the first one the writer started giving me writer’s notes. Writer’s notes aren’t necessarily helpful to at this stage but I’m big and happy enough to understand they come from an excellent place. I’ve seen things come apart when writers give impossible notes to insecure actors. I’m not insecure and the notes were good. There was just a degree of nervous energy involved that might have been better absent at this stage when people need to step into their confidence. “It’s yours now,” Pinter would say when asked about his obtuse stuff by actors. Good on ‘im. Come and do all your anxious stuff when the rest of us aren’t anxious and we will lap it up, but when we are about to show we don’t need left brain.
We have a thing and the thing will be lovely even if people are occasionally wearing the wrong hat. Content is always gonna beat style in the long run and we are gonna nail the content down pat pretty quickly, with minimum rehearsal, and the style is just gonna show. Some brilliant people involved, truly. Recent graduates of some of the best trainings in and out of town, smart creatives assembled just by dint of having existed for long enough making nice things and not being arseholes… and me. And a brilliant and motivated writer. And our “tour guide…”
I met an incredible woman. She is at the heart of this tour. She used to be governor of St Helena, where my great grandfather went into exile with his dad who wrote Napoleon’s biography. I am so curious about that island, with my island obsession. That and Ascension and Tristan de Cunha… There are so many archipelagos, so many strange islands… But God I’m drawn to them, by shadows of my past and those of my ancestors.
It also gives me a very different eye on Napoleon to what I casually hear, to the prevailing narrative. “History is written by the winners”. Oof. What might?
We spoke about the island. He escaped from Elba and made Waterloo so he was sent somewhere truly remote. What a thing. He may or may not have eventually been poisoned anyway. There’s an account of his life in six volumes written by great great great grandpa, and I’ve got an early draft of it. It’s in French or I would see how it correlates with the eventual published text. My French is good but not that good. He was Spanish naturalised to France which made it hard for Kerry to track him down on ancestry… the name changes all the time. De Las Casas, De las cases, delascases… And he was Napoleonic. French, Spanish, Corsican? Who gives a fuck if we are all united. They were trying for a big idea.
Then I had to rush off to Glyndebourne. Merry Widow. An old Fitzrovia Radio Hour contact is associate director and Lou is always gonna be involved somehow up there. What a delightful thing. A proper romp of an opera with incredible costume and energy, so populated, so bright, so merry. I’ve got the can-can in my head.
But it’s bedtime. First show tomorrow and I have to send a tape looking sexy in the morning.
Off we gooooo
AlBarclay 