Ben in the house

Our first two show day tomorrow so I’ll be warming up on stage at half eleven. That’s less than twelve hours from now. Ben was in the house. One of the only Factory members to have actually met Lou so far, and that’s just by coincidence. She was at Glyndebourne with him and I had clocked he might be there. She met him on a staff bus and made him guess who she was going out with. He inevitably reeled through all the glamorous and attractive men in The Factory and eventually got down to me about six months into the interaction, and then covered it by insisting that he associates me more with Guildhall as that’s where we met. Nah. I’m just punching above my weight.

Another show tonight. The tide goes in, the tide goes out. I didn’t feel as aligned as yesterday but I’m still chasing the devil.

Tiny tiny movements magnify and gain significance on stage. There are actors I love when we’ve had to have someone lying on the floor holding their feet in rehearsals to stop them making unnecessary meaningless steps and then they still do it as soon as someone isn’t holding their ankles. It makes the actor feel comfortable but steals their power. I got in command of that one, and the devil immediately shifted up my body.

There are actors I love whose hands twitch with neurotic energy as they work. I got in command of that early too, after making a “withered hand” tension offer playing Richard III at Uni which I then carried into my next few roles as if I could only act if my right hand was clawed. Now my hands are relaxed and I’m not stepping back and forth meaninglessly. So where did the tension go?

Wendy my movement teacher taught me all that time ago that you absolutely have to chase that nervous tension around. You think you’ve moved it in and then it comes back somewhere else. On stage everything you do is magnified with meaning, so the game becomes physical and vocal tension chasing. You squeeze it away from one place, it comes into another.

Right now I’m very very relaxed compared to old me, but there’s a new old devil in the back of my neck I’m chasing. My warm-ups are working on killing it. Once I’ve done that it’ll show up in my eyebrow or my left foot, and round we go again. But this is a long run, and that’ll help me refind all of that complete awareness.

It’s harder work than you’d imagine, this Shakespeare. Thankfully we’ve got resources. A very clear movement and voice team, aligned completely with TC. It’s a rare treat. There’s been nothing but support across the board. This is a damn fine show and I’m a a damn fine small part of it.

And tomorrow we’re doing it twice. So I’ll have to see what it’s like to go to bed now. It’s not yet 1am, but that’s late for people who aren’t on late work.