Month: September 2024

A slow and comfortable awakening at Latimer. Expensive but special, that place. If I had a list it would be on it.

After collecting Bergman from his yew tree, we hit the road back into town. Lou in the passenger seat very helpfully drilling lines for this afternoon. No call in the morning.

I got to the room just after lunch. It’s a lovely room to be in. Great to be in rehearsals, great to be in THOSE rehearsals. I’m likely gonna be full of beans for months on this one. Met an old friend in the foyer, threw some ideas around in the room. Various games around finding the positive. It’s very easy to play heavy if the material is heavy. It’s generally pretty helpful to remember to be always seeking the light, looking for the positive. That’s how we go through life. And none of us know we are in a tragedy in Cyprus. We are just living our best life.

I’m back at home and again looking at the flat practically. I’m perfectly happy in these anonymous hotels and I’ll be perfectly happy in my digs in Stratford. I don’t need to be surrounded by all this stuff. “You never throw anything away,” said Maddy last week and she’s got a point. But now I know there are boards under my horrible living room carpet, I might get into the idea of making enough room to pull it out and expose them.

Pie in the sky for now though. It’s bedtime. I’m knackered. It’s getting dark earlier these days and it knocks me down earlier, particularly if I’m not wearing my lenses. Looking forward to what the week will bring. Heading to Dreamland now. Already that wonderful relaxed weekend feels like ages ago. Time is strange.

This middle aged spa hotel thing is surprisingly moreish. There was a sauna and a lovely warm pool up in Arden and we made good use of it. Then we punted up to Pelsall to see Lou’s folks. I’ve seen them on and off for years now and started to get involved in their trials and tribulations. Considering I only get my £300 pension at 75 years old, the fact they’re both in their eighties is encouraging. There’s little health stories I’ve been following in their lives. I missed out on all the “parents getting decrepit” thing which sometimes these days feels like I got a free pass in exchange for a gut punch in my twenties. Loads of my friends are having to witness their grandparents slide to Jacques’s seventh age of man. The seventh age of nan.

Mostly we had a lovely chat in the living room. Lou and I had a redbush tea and she had brought them loads of condiments, which landed better than you might suspect.

I only decided this morning that, rather than go home and stay together at mine tonight we might as well double up and have another nice night away. Not the cheapest, but we booked the De Vere Latimer in Amersham and it is much better than the pictures. Sauna and steam room again, but this time it is powerful land. Bergman is parked beneath a yew tree. Outside the bedroom window is a grand old cedar. And apart from the coughing of another resident it is peaceful here. Sunday night helps I guess, so no pissed up double wedding, but apart from the fact it really ain’t that cheap, this is a good place considering it’s more or less on the tube line.

Driving down from Pelsall Lou got roped into helping drill my lines so I can come in easy despite a relaxing weekend. I’m only having the weekend because the money from the work has made it possible. Glad not to be counting the beans. We even stopped at Hawkyns by Atil Kochar in a pub on the Amersham High Street, where you can get out pretty cheaply as we did and still have a good meal, or have the taster menu for £60 with a £49 wine pairing which looks wonderful. Bigod I was tempted although still not by the wine. But – involved meal was a bridge too far. Some luxuries can be passed up on a weekend of luxury. And anyway, we wanted to check in at this sexy place and try out the steam room, sauna and pool.

I’m definitely feeling rested now. Not called until the afternoon so we will pooter back doing lines (not that sort) in the car. And then back to the lovely rehearsal room that Tim has made with us all. More joyful work to come.

Lou and I have escaped to The Forest of Arden. Shakespeare would have us believe that it is a bucolic paradise, where the exiled Duke and his court find their true selves, happiness, love, purpose. Go away to come back…

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons’ difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter’s wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
‘This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.’
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.

There are a few things I’d change about this forest of Arden. It’s a golf club outside Birmingham. There are two weddings on. We had top scran but we had it early – we are half board here, so dinner and breakfast. The restaurant was full of howling blue collar males on the sauce. Not a woman to be seen but Lou. Most of the guys I saw probably weigh as much as the pair of us.

It’s an escape though. And a welcome one. Despite the fact it is shitting rain outside. Tomorrow morning we’ll be up early to make use of the facilities. This is the most middle aged weekend I’ve booked for ages but we are combining it with a visit to Lou’s parents in Pelsall. There won’t be much chance of that as rehearsals take hold.

Monday’s call is in and I want to be off book comfortably if I can be. That’ll take a spot of work beforehand, but today I do having down time, taking the weight off, sinking into the Arden vibes. This is better than London. Tomorrow we will go to find the tongues in trees and books in the running brooks.

I’ve only got one eye open right now, lying in this gargantuan bed in a peaceful annex of the hotel. I think I’ll close the other one.

Clapham North used to feel a long way away. It’s never really been on my hit list. Some of my friends live there, but largely it’s not a well trodden part of London to me so I was surprised to discover this afternoon when I was almost late for a call that it takes me just eleven minutes to get from my door to the rehearsal room. That’s if all the ducks line up. Forest Bike was right outside the door, and it was a good one. Traffic lights largely in my favour. 11 minutes though… I’m impressed with that even if my bike did most of the pedalling for me. Impressive bits of tech these bikes they leave all over London. I’m amazed they can make money from it but they clearly can considering there are multiple companies competing for territory. They cost a lot if you don’t prepay, which might help. But winter can’t be a great time for them, and we are moving that way.

This Othello is feeling more and more like a ritual storytelling. There are moments of magic. “A sad tale’s best for winter,” and this is a strange and desperate piece of work – wonderful and human but one of those plays where every time you watch it you want it to just land slightly differently this time. Like Romeo and Juliet… All the information comes at the wrong wrong time.

Today’s call for me was about what James Oxley our musical director calls “Al Barclay’s Aria”. This involves me trying to resonate my head while repeatedly droning a deep bass underneath the more proficient sounds of three professional singers. If I hold the line it makes everyone sound a little bit better like magic. James has used me in this regard before and I’m glad to be back on duty. Hopefully some of it will be visible, but I have a feeling that’ll be my first half – making low sounds while everyone who has paid to come and see me is wondering whether they’ve booked for the right play. insha’Allah. It’s a Mesoniktikon. I’ll have to learn a bit of ancient greek to go with it.

Every day the show deepens and grows. I’m really starting to feel like I’m part of a beautiful thing. For the first time this evening, I went to the pub to break down the week. Ended up in a conversation about music, way over my head, nursing my Lucky Saint. It’s another step in the right direction, pub with no booze. It was good to spend relaxed time with the cast, some of whom are still relative strangers while others are long long friends.

Bed calls now though. I’m tired again. The weekend is needed. I’m gonna relax with lovely Lou and I can’t wait.

It’s rather pleasant having a regular commute for a change. It was raining this morning, so I put on some extra layers and went in search of my Forest Bike. My area tends not to have very many of them there overnight, so in the morning you have to be quick to get one. I’ve considered clicking hire from my bed and then immediately pausing it, as twice now I’ve looked on the app to check if there’s a bike, seen one, put my clothes on and someone has rented it. This morning though I had one directly outside but it was one of the shit ones. These bikes take a beating. Some of them are faulty. My one this morning had a dicky speedometer that kept jumping to 30 randomly and cutting out the power assist. Without the power assist you might as well be pedalling a rock.

Still I made it to rehearsal in time to discover I wasn’t supposed to be in yet. It was good though to watch Jethro and Will work and to be in that concentrated room. I’ll be involved in this piece of theatre for a long time, so I want to feel as connected to it as possible. Detail and care obviates boredom. There’s always more to discover, not just in your own work but in the work of your colleagues.

Costume fitting, but not for Lodovico. For my generic “citizen” type appearances. Lodovico is being made up. I pimped out Lou and her making services to the designer again. Her parents live near Stratford. Then a spot of singing. As I thought, I am going to need to sing very low drones in ancient greek. Oddly enough I’ve done it before, in 2012, in Oxford and then London for our arty anticommercial joyful theatrical friendship group, the lifeblood of my work for years now, The Factory, in a co-pro with Creation Theatre, in the Norrington room of Blackwell’s bookshop, improvising Homer’s Odyssey. Happy weird days.

My bass is still there but it needs reminding. I’m all bunged up. I’ve been habitually pushing my voice higher than is natural. The musical director is a technical wizard though, so I reckon it’ll come back in time. Tomorrow I’ll be joining three proper opera bods to see what sort of a noise we can make.

And so to bed. I get a late start tomorrow and I think I’ll take advantage of it this time. I’m starting to wake up better now and I like travelling the same short route daily – I’ve started keeping an eye out for the same people leaving their homes as I pass.

Scattered thinking this evening though. I suspect a good sleep will wind the threads back together.

Technically a half day today. I probably would have stayed around as rehearsals are curious and delightful. But the taxman must be appeased before he consumes me utterly, and that takes more admin and, thankfully, the help of clever people. Marie. More musically talented than me, sings with greater ease, game for a laugh – (she and I danced in windows dressed as animals in lockdown). Marie. Good at maths, understands balance sheets, can do tax things. Marie. Has a small dog… You get the sense of it. Renaissance woman Marie, capable of things that make most of us flinch. Dog poo, maths, showtunes… And helping me with my tax. We have begun a process when much of my small world was thinking about the rising iambic line, and it might lead to not being fucked anymore by my own horror of numbers.

The morning was gorgeous. This large circle of good people – we are still enjoying geeking out about this play that deepens the more time I spend with it. Always so many layers with oor Wullie. We are stripping to the meaning together and this disparate group of curious individuals is carefully solidifying into an ensemble. It’s lovely to feel. Such a long time still ahead of us, but so much to do, so much ground to cover. A wonderment with his plays is the depth of character that you can find. The deeper you dig the more there is to dig for. With just a few lines I still have a good bit of mining to do.

Now it is night time again. Once again Tom to my right in the living room, Brian to my left. Once again a slow wind down ahead of me via herbal teas.

I had a big package arrive this morning of this stuff:

Todd’s Glucose Energy Boost.

This is because of the hole in my life left by the sugar tax. When I was a child in Jersey, I was often sent to the grandparents for a night so mum and dad could have fun. Grandpa kept a supply of Lucozade in the spare room at Granville. Glass bottles with knobbly bits at the top and a piece of inexplicable orange transparent plastic wrapped round the top. If you were sick you got some in a glass, and you got the orange plastic so you could look through it and EVERYTHING ORANGE Da you’re ORANGE etc

I developed a familiarity with that glucose bomb of a drink. It used to be stocked in pharmacists only. Sugar tax put paid to it though. You can still buy bottles of aspartamine and cat piss. The last real ones went out of date in 2016. I had a stash of them at home, but wolfed them in lockdown. Todd has tried to knock it off as best he can. I will gladly give my money to him. But you wouldn’t want to drink that stuff before bed. It’s a rocket ship. Useful while I’m off the uppers. Glucose doesn’t count, ya?

Detox is really kicking in. I’m not doing the crazy faddy ones where you consume nothing but what the celebrity tells you they consume. “I get up every morning and have acai and a pomegranate, and Jack’s Handy Supplements TM,” says their ghost writer while they have their Weetabix.

I’m just avoiding caffeine and alcohol, thinking about when I consume meat and the quality of the meat, being a little bit more mindful. I’m pushing fifty. We are supposed to start doing that stuff. My mum was dead at 55 and that seems impossible to make any sense of whatsoever. I have no desire to follow in those footsteps. I’ve got shit to do. Five years? I just got sent my equity pension and it says my retirement age is 75. So I’d better start looking after my instrument more carefully as I’m gonna be using it a lot longer.

The flat is full of men. Tom’s on the sofa to my right, Brian is in the room to my left. Both of them are audibly snoring. Neither of them tend to do that on a normal night. It must be because the weather is breaking. They are catching up on early sleep. I would be too but I ran myself a cold bath by mistake which set me back about an hour. Now I’m getting my head down, after processing the rehearsal today. I’m still loving it. There’s a bit more opportunity to go home though, as the rehearsal calls are being restricted to some of the larger parts. I don’t want to always go home when I’m not gonna be acting, but I’m buried in a financial disaster made of my own negligence, and nobody is gonna bail me out of this but me myself and I. A good opportunity, before I get swamped in Othello as we get closer to performance time. Application of time will maybe help dig out. And I think it’s gonna be worth an official ADHD diagnosis just in case it gets me off some of the fines. Over 2k in fines. That’s the extent of it really. But their existence has caused the ostriching that has made them grow. The fuckers know how to get money out of people in the long run. I’m with your stoned friend who thinks some nebulous “them” people are sucking our energy. If money is energy. Which it is.

So on one level, “detox” can be renamed “can’t really justify blowing money on something that will make me shitter at my job.”

On which note I’m gonna join in the snoring.

Back in the room. The days go disconcertingly quickly. We are in and it feels like it has barely started when we are finished. I tried to remember my lines in front of people and my head was full of so much noise I said Venice instead of Cyprus and then got angry with myself, but better by far to have all that noise now when it’s a new learn and everyone is still holding scripts in their hands.

The space got meticulously taped up over the weekend, so now we are sitting in a circle of chairs ignoring immaculately taped up boundaries of what the stage will be like in Stratford.

We had three singers in today but we aren’t finding the songs yet. Georgian influences though, and acapella, which I know can be extremely emotive. Once again I’m thinking I should have worked my singing muscle out. Like line learning, like acting, it is a muscle that atrophies if left unattended too long. I’ve always kept the others up, but I let the singing drop. It was never really attended to at Guildhall. Some of the best voice teachers in the world, but a slightly haphazard and unguided approach to singing when I was there, that left me with little clue how to use my voice until we did The Odyssey a decade ago.

This is my focus now though, and even if it goes quickly, right now we have time in the bank and I’m gonna make use of it.

After work I drove to Twickenham. Minnie had a self tape and we haven’t seen each other for ages. A pizza and a catch up. She’s a useful perspective on my various concerns and insecurities, just as she’s spent years up in Stratford working for the same company. I’ve slept on many a floor cushion concoction, very possibly in one of the little cottages where I’ll be staying, after seeing one of her many varied shows. She feels my enthusiasm and shares my love of craft. And good lord she can turn it on. Her tape was barnstorming and she did most of it in one take. Why waste time? Especially after all the time it takes to learn the fucker.

I’m feeling happy and rested after the weekend, although my toxins are coming out and they aren’t so much fun the second time. Another week and I reckon I’ll be feeling the benefits. Right now I struggle to get to sleep.

Two days off in a row and my first weekend since I stopped the old habitual glug. It has very much found it’s way into my habits. It’s hot, I’m thirsty, there are multiple bottles of white wine in the house. Spritser! But no, I made do with good old fashioned water out of the tap, herbal teas of different denominations and an entire pack of chocolate chip cookies.

Looking back it has been a remarkable first week of rehearsal. Very together company, lots of staff, lots of stuff. We have had meetings in rehearsals, where equity deputies have been selected, and health and safety advocates chosen from among the cast members. I’m thinking back to Rhys going through an unsecured trapdoor in Peter Pan and falling twenty feet in the dark. He landed like a cat in an empty space l space, but it could have been a very different story. We had a very shonky trapdoor in Blackwell’s and Maz hurt her fingers in it when it was closed and her fingers were in the hinge. Could have been much worse, if it had been a dramatic slam. Good to have someone keeping an eye on possibilities. I perhaps should have gone for Equity Dep, but I’m too busy trying to sort my own flat out before I go to Stratford. Plus my tax returns etc etc.

Creatively it is fertile, but I’m disappointed with myself for not keeping my singing voice in good nick. James the musical director knew me ten years ago and got good use out of my bass. I’ve let it slip. I wanted that Sowerberry in Oliver! up in Leeds for that reason – no matter if it’s a bad part, there’ll have been ensemble work and a shot at Fagin via understudy. My voice would have had a proper good long practice on the job, which is always the best way to learn.

I’m enjoying the text work. It’s about pushing us into the moment, coining it, not making noises that sound like speaking. But also it’s about rigour with text. The fixed and the flowing. It is back to that. And we are back at it tomorrow. And I can’t wait.

I’m full of chamomile, and Brian ordered a very expensive Dishoom mash up, involving all sorts of fart inducing wonders, enough so that I just got into a tepid bath on purpose and scrubbed myself pink.

Now I’m trying for an early bed and I’ve laid out juicing fruits for tomorrow and I’m enjoying working from home.

This evening I considered a night cap, sniffed a whisky bottle and was still repelled by the smell of alcohol. I think grandmother tweaked something in my strange brain. I did ask her to…

Total digital detox yesterday and I didn’t really want to communicate with anyone or do very much. Just reset. I barely ate. Had a bit of tea. Wanted some booze so was examining the shape of that one while distracting myself with old editions of 2000AD. It’s good to reapproach habitual things from time to time, particularly when the external world has shifted in some way.

Long hours of sleep have left me feeling tired though. In fact I feel like I’m hungover – all the fun none of the booze. Toxins are only entertaining when they go in.

London is still deep in late summer madness. The party boats on the river are shouting their music into my windows at night, and then periodical sirens throughout the night. I’m aware of the traffic noise more than usual. I’ve been away a long time. Yesterday was really my first day off for months if you don’t count the weekend when I went to Hereford and induced long form hallucinogenic dream state in the name of healing.

It worked though, at least in the short term. Although tidying my bedroom wouldn’t go amiss. And doing some home improvements. That’s the next stage. It’s enough this weekend to break the habits.

This blog of course partly exists to make sure I don’t do too many yesterdays. Silent days of reading and then sleep and late wake was a pattern associated with depression. Brian was concerned, but I was very open about it. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Spent too long in sponge mode, needed to wring it out. But I’m fine. Better for it. Working through things but not in a negative way.

Still, it’s late. Gonna get a cup of tea and post this just for the shape of things, and experiment with communication again.