A month of predictable hours whilst living at home. A strange and beautiful luxury. I have bought food for the fridge. This evening I just had a simple bowl of pasta but I’m in admin hell. Tomorrow Lou will be coming into town and I’ll meet her after rehearsal. But largely I’ll be trying to impose a good routine upon myself.
First day today, start as you mean to continue. I woke bright and early, juiced up four oranges and a grapefruit and didn’t have a cup of coffee. “Think of what you’d normally do and do the opposite,” said Natalya after the ceremony. This sort of thinking is making it easier to rejig my self medication. I’m not being a monk about it – I had a cup of black tea with milk at 11am – but I’m just trying to stop doing mindless things for a while. I drink coffee for habit as much as for addiction, as what is an addiction but a habit? I’m not gonna make myself angry and headachey for rehearsal – the caffeine withdrawal headache hit my brain at the same time the sananga hit my eyes. You can’t have a headache anymore when your face is on fire. I’m not giving up anything forever here, I’m just breaking bad habits for as long as it takes for me to know they can be safely addressed. Although right now with the medicine in my system, even the smell of alcohol is poison.
I took a Forest bike to work, which is now parked outside the flat. It flies to Clapham, and if it’s still there tomorrow I’ve got a lovely start to the day. The day itself was a tonic. What a brilliant room to be in, surrounded by creatives, making a very deep story together as best we can. I sat between Kevin and Nyasha, but it wasn’t table work or readthrough. I’m glad of that as readthroughs often cause some actors to just cement their performance and then drag it through the rest of rehearsal. And table work becomes a safety anchor that can weigh the whole show down with ideas over practicality. We were working together as a company, and people were standing and talking their lines with enough game involved that there wasn’t room to be clever.
There’s a movement teacher in the room, a voice teacher too. There’ll be songs. I’ll be back on bass duty.
It’s wonderful to be in that room, and there are enough familiar faces there that the ensemble is already half made and just needs us to be as welcoming as possible to the people we don’t know. I’m good at that. And since my guy doesn’t speak until the end of the show really, I’ve got time to just be positive and inclusive and wide and dumb and try and make it a happy place. I think it will be, I really do. I’ve seen companies go south, but it normally drips down from the top when that happens. It feels like we are in safe hands here.
AlBarclay 