It’s 2:23am. I’m sitting in a terraced garden alone outside a party. I’m wearing a three piece suit. It’s cold.
This afternoon we all stood around a sheet in the Ashcroft Room. It’s a powerful room. Wood and sunset, windows. It’s the most charged room in a very highly charged building.
We threw flour into the sheet for the moon. I’m wearing a moon amulet at the moment. Moon is instinct. Polenta for the sun. That’s all the masculine male fuck you stuff I walked away from but I’m channeling in my character. Roses with messages. Personal things. Entire bottles of wine poured on the floor as libations. A bottle of Glenfiddich. I put in a hagstone of chalk, a sliver of my Kumano stick, and bark of a coastal redwood. Then I put a small amount of my mum’s holy water and a large amount of Florida water. I had been stealthily running around with Palo Santo smudging everyone. Jules was running the ceremony, channeling. The room charged up. We bundled it all up.
I love the bundles. We love the bundle. People sometimes hate the bundles. It is a thing Mark Rylance used to do when he ran The Globe. I remember years ago someone being overly exercised. “It’s disgusting, there’s chocolate and wine and all sorts of things and then they leave it there. It’ll bring rats.” It won’t. The thing with ritual like that is that it is everything but it is nothing. If you are proud to be logical, it is completely fucking pointless. If you are happy to accept the possibility of magic it is the most powerful thing you can do. But these worldviews have become binary to many people.
Ideally we will have it under the stage, but for now it is hanging in The Ashcroft Room. I tied the knots, an easy bowline to start and then moored it like you’d moor a boat. My message was “To heal old wounds”. There are many old wounds to heal, not just for me but for us all. This Othello, this gorgeous ritual of a show, this teaches us we can do it. We can heal. But the knots were a surprise because one of my old wounds is about a boat company with atrocious HR who stuck the knife in right when I needed a hug.
I went to see the bundle a few times during the show. I sung to it once. This is a powerful thing because I want it to be. After I sung to it something in my nerves dropped away.
Friends old and new, my agent who is my friend all were there. Many aspects of this life I’ve strived to do as well as I can. Wonderful to have such support, both in and out of the cast. I am absolutely blown away by the company feeling, and the support I feel from my friends in this. I’m the kind but alpha male at the end of a messy tale. We’ve trusted Tim and he’s borne it out into something rich and strange.
I’m going to rejoin the party as it is fucking freezing here in the yard despite the stars. It’s late…
AlBarclay 