Month: October 2024

I haven’t been paying as much attention as I might have to when our first public show happens but it turns out it’s tomorrow night. I’ve been trusting the process, and I still do. We did my talky bits this morning under the lights at last. We got to the end of the show. You’ll be able to come and see it from tomorrow. Good lord.

Stage Management Cake Day. The end of the tech. I’ve still got a while to organise press night cards although some people might do them for the opening. It’s such a huge number of people to write cards to, but as expected we’ve come together and got to know each other better in Stratford now, since there’s not much else to do.

It was a party tonight at The Other Place and it’s telling how different I felt about it compared to the last press night I was at round here. It was for The New Real, which might explain things as I haven’t been able to see it yet and barely know the cast. I’ll catch it in October. David Edgar’s Pentecost directed by Peter Clough at Guildhall is still a standout piece of theatre in my memory, and now I’ve got a passing acquaintance with the writer as he’s been very much about in London and here. His works always have a political bent and often make dry reading on the page, but they ping out with good actors and directing. I’d like to see his latest. But instead I showed up at the press night briefly.

I didn’t show up in sexy clothes and stand around looking to be witnessed. I hid in a corner and ate free sausages with my coat and scarf still on, passed the time with a couple of actors and then picked up my mail and did a french exit. Too much to think about with the company I’m part of, even though we have a fortnight of previews and I’m pretty sure things are gonna change a lot from where we are now. This show will still be breathing hopefully for the whole run, even once we lose Tim back into Canada. He’s running a whole great big damn theatre there. We’ve been lucky to have him as long as we have, but we’ve hopefully got him with us for a few more weeks, to keep a careful gubernatorial hand on the good ship Othello.

Tech rolls on. There’s a lot of it. Considering it is a very clean and stark telling of this sad tale, there is a lot of technical stuff to work through. A huge amount. The engine of theatre… This stuff has such history, flying in huge things, trapdoors, massive lights. Sometimes I’ll be exiting down a narrow track with drops into the audience on both sides and a bright light shining right into my eyes, and I have to exit like a normal person walking instead of someone who is concerned they might stack it into the audience and look like a twit.

I’ve finally popped my cherry on the big old stage, teching the first few bits of Lodo. We will finish tomorrow. Tech is a friendly time to experiment when nobody is really thinking about you. Experimentation with physicality and voice. I’m still enjoying the discovery process with my boy. He gives a fuck, Lodovico. And he’s very very high status. How do I settle into this extremely handsome and commanding human being? Well, obviously it’s just who I’ve always been etc etc.

Today has been largely about working out where I need my costume changes, what my show track will be, where my hangers need to be, when I have time down and when I need to be alert. We’ve all been in shows where someone has missed a cue. The key is to never be that someone. It’s not that much to ask but right now it’s bombardment. People who are sure on their words can still momentarily lose the plot when suddenly they’re in a blinding light looking at something that isn’t the person they’ve been talking to in rehearsal. I’m sure all of us have done movies and TV where you only really get one shot and you don’t have all this rehearsal time. We dress rehearse tomorrow, but there are so many previews to come. It’s remarkable. So many previews, and a surprisingly short run.

I’m loving this process, drinking it in. In the corridors I walk past signatures of old friends and acquaintances – there are clusters of names associated with old shows. Some make me curious as they have been painted over. Others make me smile. There’s this long old history of actors doing acting in the place. I’m happy to play my part.

After tech today a few of us grabbed a pint in the duck to decompress. Then I cooked myself dinner and somehow it is really late and I guess I’m going to have to get used to these days that start in the afternoon and end at night. Hey diddly dee. I’m off to bed. These sheets are wonderful.

I got myself into the RST on a speculative tech call – I figured I might not be needed yet but my costume is ready for Lodovico. I wanted to try it out. The fitting in London had been on a sweltering day and I almost passed out. There’s a lot of material. I want to be comfortable in it, but also learn what it gives for free.

It gives so much for free. I would post a picture but intellectual property is important with big companies. I don’t want to blow it before it is officially released even if I’m just a little cog in this machine.

Huge breeches. Beautiful fitting jerkin. A custom made sword belt. I stuck my sword into it, walked around back stage a bit. “I’ll put my lenses in,” thought I. “This lift likely leads to the dressing rooms.”

“It’s just through this door I think.” *click*

The theatre is big and closed to the public today. And suddenly I’m in the locked up public area and the door to the staff section is locked behind me and needs a fob which I haven’t got with me. I’m on my own in this incredible costume with a sword. All the lights are off.

For about twenty minutes I stalked the halls of the RST, a Jacobean ghost. It felt like hours. I considered panicking but figured it was better to just explore. I pressed my nose against glass doors, rattled handles. I likely set off many alarms. Someone would have been watching me at security, chuckling at the eejit actor. I contemplated unbolting a huge wooden door and then running round outside to stage door, but the rain is heavy tonight and I knew that would set off an alarm. It’s one thing to get lost, it’s quite another to disrupt the tech. Up and down in lifts. Finally I found a door propped open leading to the back end of running wardrobe and a familiar staircase and behold! My dressing room. I put my eyes in, and nobody had missed me at tech, and my heartbeat went back to normal.

Now I’m sitting stage right. I’ve been singing “THOO” in a little clump whilst Annie picks up a hankie. Now Sam and I are just chilling out. I won’t be needed again but I’m here in case they go back on it. Tomorrow will be Lodovico tech time, so I can just enjoy listening to other people working for a bit. I love this lot. This is a glorious gig.

Ok guys so… I bought these expensive sheets from The White Company but I was on the phone to Lou at the time and she was quite rightly telling me they were too expensive so I kinda pretended I hadn’t bought them. But the thing is, I write this daily blog and she’ll read it. I’m gonna be really careful not to spill the beans. I’ll need your help. Let’s all pretend that I didn’t spend £110 on these silky smooth 400 wotsit cotton sheets and duvet covers that I am not about to writhe around on. Ok? We got this, right? “Al didn’t buy the sheets.” That’s your line. Don’t put the emphasis on the word “buy”, it’ll make it clear you’re lying. What else would I have done with them? It makes them into a thing. Avoid “the” as well. That’ll just sound weird, like there’s a separate entity called “sheets” that we all ought to know about. Obviously avoid “Al”. I’m not pretending some mysterious benefactor bought them. Avoid “didn’t” too. An obvious lie. “sheets”… that’s your friend if you really have to emphasise a word. It’s at the end of the line so it must be the most important word. “Al didn’t buy the sheets.”

Those of us who are mostly or all in the second half got an unexpected break suddenly. I thought I’d be rehearsing until ten tonight but no, just until half five. That’s when I got the text saying I didn’t need to come back in. “Excellent news,” I thought. I shall do some spring cleaning and then cook my steak.

I’ve done all the washing up. I’ve put the laundry in, although I have no idea how I might be able to hang it up. And then I went to The White Company and NO NO NO I um then I didn’t buy these incredibly soft embracing sheets that are enveloping my little tootsies as I share this with you. Definitely not. I’m lying on the ordinary plastic sheets I’ve slept on for a week.

These grey things were on the bed when I arrived. They are largely polyester. I’ve slept on them since I arrived in Stratford and this morning I experienced my waking olfactory senses before my visual, my hearing, even my touch. The sheets smelt like an unfamiliar creature, like I was sleeping inside something ‘other’. It wasn’t even a familiar comforting ‘me’ smell. It was pungent. Eloquent. Nuanced. It had a name.

So I ordered some reasonably priced sheets on Amazon. And then I got released from rehearsal early and I didn’t go to The White Company and spend £110 on these lovely sheets for just one night of smell free sleeping.

I’ll put the quilt on them. I’m gonna cook a lovely dinner for myself hours before I thought I would be able to. Then I’ll have a hot scrub. And then I’ll take myself off to my mad dreams in an odour free hug from these brand new sheets I absolutely didn’t blow money on.

Lou is totally right. I could have got sheets from ASDA that were just as good for a fraction of the price. I just needed to be less of a lazy git and drive there.

So I um I bought some White Company sheets on Vinted, right? Yeah that’s what I did, they’re coming tomorrow or something and then that’ll explain why the buttons say White Company.

Oh fuck it.

I spent £110 on these lovely 400 wotsit cotton sheets. I did it. I’m a profligate. And I’ll sleep well tonight. mmmmm

A day off in Stratford. What is this town?

There’s a little weekend market just outside my door. Lots of stalls and they’ve been selling their things for decades, some of them. Catching the tourist crowds come down to the river. Selling the things they’ve worked out might get bought. But it was cold this afternoon and dark. I was wandering by as they were packing up and “at least we didn’t get wet” was the general consensus. But, winter is here whether we like it or not.

I went for pub lunch with Claire and her mum and dad. My lack of surviving parents always makes me curious about the parents of others. I love Claire’s mum and dad and they bought me lunch so I must be doing something right. We went to The Garrick. We sat just by a gargantuan bust of Shakespeare. Suddenly we are in the machine. Willy is everywhere. I wonder who supplied all these businesses with their Shakespeare paraphernalia.

Lovely roast beef, and a chilled evening and we aren’t even in until 1 tomorrow as they are gradually weaning us into our late night schedule to come. I went to Dirty Duck and caught a moment with some of the cast. Good people. Now it is early by my standards to be horizontal. But I’m thinking I’ll put my head down and have more of the mad dreams I’ve been encountering. I might be on Waterside with heavy footfall, but nothing compares to the big old road forever shouting at me in London.

I’ll be happy here I think. Old ground, old words. Only six or seven generations, but it still feels a long time ago when you consider how the world has changed. He would be horrified at the monstrous commercial vomit that has taken place in his name, but I like to think that this guy who wrote for his mates might have made sense of me. One of his mates definitely had my voice regarding death – I still forget how many people aren’t as easy with the normality of it. If we aren’t dead yet it’s just luck.

The less said about yesterday’s attempt, the better. I’ve rarely found myself so astonishingly incapable as I was when I tried to make that blog. Oddly I remember trying. I had just got in the door, unfamiliarly drunk after an evening with an old friend. We had eaten well, but I had drunk better. As a practical thing, I had put two fingers in and emptied myself. Sleeping on that would have been worse than getting it out, and today it was technical rehearsal all day. Thank the lord I’m only really in the second half. But I needed every inch of sleep I could get and I knew it.

Into the theatre.

With my pass I can get in through all the doors at the RST. It’s lovely, but it’s still a maze to me. My dressing room is shared with Scott, up on the second floor, overlooking the river avon. Chloe is the unfortunate soul tasked with looking after us. There’s daily laundry, so none of that wearing wet clothes malarkey, except perhaps on two show days. My first half is a departure from what I’m used to. I’m dressed up in Jacobean costume just because I sing on stage for a few moments. Then I go sit in a box stage right, surrounded by an array of microphones and amusing singers. For a good chunk I’m the only actor in there, occasionally droning into a mic and trusting that the sound guys are making it all sound like a human voice. We do a midnight song and then some others join and we do a sea song. Currently that’s as far as we’ve got in tech, but I’m beginning to make sense of the fact that, for the first half of proceedings, I’m a musician. Quite a pleasant thing to experience. As you know I like to experiment with different aspects of craft.

The theatre interior will grow to familiarity over time. Right now it is new but energetically it is absolutely howling with currents. This town has played host to so many tellings of so many remarkable tales, channeled with joy and craft and pain through a wide range of humans. Names of friends are written on the walls. Little pictures and memories from other shows that have passed through. So much history here in this sleepy riverside town.

I guess I needed to get that boozyness out of my system for good last night. It was great to see an old friend, someone I haven’t seen for perhaps twenty years. But good lord.

Day off tomorrow and I’m glad of it. Time to gather myself together again before we open. Next week we will get to the bit when I come on stage and do words. That’s quite a thing to look forward to in that building with the team, these lights. It’s exciting.

And so. The whole thing. To bed nd that to a QA

l

f

a

it’s here to mmm.

I’m trying to write

this is absurd

I’m here but have been with old friends

leisure

outside

profit

Prussia

for fucks sake

maybe it can all be crazy

I’m sorry.. bed

The first thing I did on arrival in my digs is worked out how to switch the heating off. Then I could sleep under my lovely birthday quilt.

Now I’m just too cold. I get home to a place that can be warm and I want it to be warm.

I went to Billy the Butcher today and bought a good rib eye and some sausages for a fraction of what I’d end up paying in Chelsea Green at Jago’s. We are not in London anymore, and not being in London perhaps means I can shift my habits regarding avoiding central heating until November.

We finally got into the theatre today. It feels like a good working theatre, and not as awkward as it exists in my memory. I was fixating on how it’s neither proscenium nor thrust, and thinking about all the sightline issues I’d have to think about if I was assisting, but I’m not. I’m not building, I’m not assistant directing, so I can just do acting and leave all that stuff to the stuff people. It’s like a crazy new freedom. And Tim really fucking knows what he’s doing. The next few days are about me waking up fully and absolutely challenging all my complacencies to make sure I’m part of a team that honours this remarkable piece of writing with this extraordinary cast in this beautiful historic place.

It’s a ghost town in the evenings though. I walked out of my final song call at about half ten. I went looking for a shop that sold toothpaste. Even Sainsbury’s and Tesco are gonna be shut after the show. I was moseying around in my coat and hat looking energised and curious and I got approached by a lady flyering for the “gentleman’s club”. It’s open until 5.30am. I’ve actually heard of this place by reputation – past companies have organised deals where they can sit round the corner where you don’t have to see boobies and use it as a slightly more expensive late night dive for a company birthday etc. This team doesn’t feel like the sort of team where that’ll happen. But here we are, Shakespeare town. It seems the only late option is a strip club. Or someone’s digs, and it takes a certain type of maniac to offer their digs as the party house. I’ve done it before. I’m not doing it this time. I’m crap enough at tidying. And I like sleep.

It’s warming up in here as I write. I might get clever and set times so it isn’t going all the time. In a flat this small it is quick to make things toasty. I don’t like not having toothpaste. I’m tired and it’s late and I only finished recently and I’m still not sure it makes any sense for us to ever be making live music invisibly. This is theatre and we are singing in a box full of microphones. Might as well be recorded. But that’s for the artistic team. I’m just a drone.

After all that business of early morning cape work after my birthday party we are back to square one on the whole “I wouldn’t mind coming on stage a bit in the first half please universe” thing. It looks unlikely.

They need me to drone. Offstage. For a moment. Instead of wearing the lovely robes and headgear that have been made for me and popping my nightly adrenaline cherry as a listeny senator.

“Sometimes it’s important to be the one who vibrates in a corner”, says Jethro, knowing I’m slightly put out. He’s right, despite: “Who is that strange man in gold, mummy?” I’m the surprise actor. The Al-in-a-box. I’ll just show up at the end and be nice and say some stuff and then say three words that’ll be very hard indeed to get away without all the school groups sniggering at peak tragedy. “You’re playing Lodovico?” asked Ollie at my birthday drinks. He’s an architect, married to a writer friend. I don’t know where he went to school, but six foot two in a woolly beanie hat and I guarantee we’ve heard of it. “You’re the one who has to say ‘Oh bloody period!’ ” he immediately observes. Oh yes I am. My penultimate bit.

There will be sniggering classrooms full of Ollies in training, and grown up Ollies sitting with them. School groups tend to be about year ten. I’ve been trying to disguise the words by doing it while the action is happening, making it into an exclamation lost in action, but I’m not allowed to. TC (the director) wants “Oh bloody period” isolated and I absolutely trust TC. So I’m gonna lean into doing it at as truthfully, clearly and oblivious as I can in the clear knowledge that the chuckle brothers are waiting. I can’t disappoint my twelve year old fifty year olds. Bless Lodo. He is a rare good man in this tale and he doesn’t care what the kiddies hear. Neither will I. Neither should I. And also that hearing surely existed when it was written. I’m part of a team channeling the words of someone who really fucking thought about words and how they sound, and who spent a huge amount of time enjoying them he was called Willy. Just because I’m concerned about ninnies sniggering on a line doesn’t stop my words from being the ones Willy decided to stick in there. The pit would have clicked in when someone barked with unexpected laughter at peak darkness at a childish double hearing. My job isn’t to care about how my words are received. I just have to deliver it truthfully, competently and audibly. Let others do interpretation. Willie knew his stuff better than any of us knobs on stage. He was on the edge of the oral tradition. He carries sound and meaning so we don’t have to labour it. The more we try and govern how Willy is received the further we get from where Willy wants to go.

That’s for tomorrow. Tonight in the gathering wind, I’m off to bed ahead of a long call and our first foray into the space they’ve built for us. Time will tell how much of a willy I make of myself. It’ll be my making if I do. You can link me back here then.

Right now the back half of an artic from that great big Stanley Mathew or whatever they call themselves depot in Bognor Regis has been stuck into the scene dock at the RST, unloading panels and whatever the hell they have. It isn’t turkey burgers. I just can only remember the single t in Mathew. The van looks like a huge rectangular dyslexic mosquito feeding. It’s doing the opposite. It is pumping things in.

All the people with tools are currently running around in the theatre, likely working late shifts. There’ll be drilling and painting and sawing and dust and noise and shouting and it’ll be a very very familiar world in there to my recent life. Hard hats and hi-vis obligatory. Cherry pickers and forklifts. This is a big old build, but it’s not a temporary sport stadium. I don’t have to show up with all the kit plus a fucking expensive harness and work something out that a day worker has abandoned. There’s a whole team to do that and all I need to think about is “so shall I cross the stage when Desdemona enters?” Because I’m a creative now, darling. And we are traditionally clueless. And I’m happy to be there, clueless, pART of the ART.

Lodivico needs to remember to ask his character’s questions properly. Lodovico needs to think about why he is taking a breath in the middle of one of his verse lines. Lodovico doesn’t have to worry about whether or not the floor will shift, or how we’ll fly that thing in. Someone else will worry about whether Lodivico will be capable of standing in the right place when they do the whatever they’re gonna do. Lodovico is the athlete in this equation, the one who is supposed to think that there’s been no hard work, that nobody has been freaking out about the fact that all the screws provided are too short, or there’s no fucking drills, or you can’t secure the panels properly. We’ll walk onto this huge work of thought that is underway as I write. We’ll be told where it is safe to stand and how we are supposed to negotiate with it. I’ll have to switch off all my build thoughts and just be obedient. We won’t be allowed on it until they are happy it is safe for us, the liability actors, to mix it up there.

“Thespians”. That’s the name of the local Indian restaurant. I am a gentle man but I’ll break your fucking jaw if you tell me I’m a thespian. It’s like telling me I’m “resting” when I’m out of work. “Good luck, oh I’m not supposed to say that…” Say what you like. That stuff was all about self-mystification. The same impulse that led Larry to have the lights imperceptibly raised as he came on stage. I’m not a thespian. I’m just doing my job. I might have things in common with Thespis but you don’t own my attachment to him. But yay I’m doing what Thespis did at a nice place with a team attached and using Iambic Pentameter as opposed to dithyrambs. Still pointing the purpose through the same ritualistic deities. Dionysus will rarely be out of the equation when I’m in the equation, wine or no wine. But you can wish me good luck as easily as broken limbs, and you can talk about all the Scottish kings you choose. I’m a happy man doing a happy job, telling a sad story at a cold time.