My niece… I think she’s pushing 18 now … she’s in the last year at school and they are doing Othello. If you like seeing women strangled like some of our reviewers this isn’t your Othello. If you’re studying it though it’s perfect, because there’s very little between us and the text. Bless her English teacher, when she discovered Catherine’s uncle was in it she booked a school trip. The school is within the M25. They had over two hours drive either way. And fourteen girls came to the matinee today.
I wasn’t sure what the protocol was, but I figured it was only going to add value to invite them all backstage after. I’m thrilled to be here, maybe some of my excitement will rub off on a new generation. I had to sign them all in at stage door for fire insurance and then gave them the basics. There are tour guides in the building doing everything much better than me, but I could basically take them through one person’s show. Lou has had it before. “Here’s the wall of names, here’s the sound booth, here’s the quick change, that box is full of swords, here’s the secret tarting yourself up area, and here’s an entrance point to the stage. Isn’t it big! Any of you want to be an actor?” *silence* Well done that lot. “Sensible.” So I took questions. Perhaps unsurprisingly we discovered my version of “How do you learn all the lines?” “Well the glib answer is that it’s my job, but in terms of how we do it, I learn the structure of the thoughts first and then fine tune with how the author put them. The show they came to was captioned, our first captioned show, but that meant there was a display with the actual words we were supposed to be speaking. I had a clean show but was perfectly happy to say “I expect at some point someone said things that weren’t quite what was written, but if you hadn’t been following you wouldn’t have noticed?” That was one for the hyperlexic kids like me and Lou, and there was recognition. “We always know where we are in the thought process, so we can’t really get too lost.”
Apparently the experience met with approval. I have been anointed by her classmates with “Cool uncle” which is infinitely better than many of the adjectives that traditionally come before uncle. For me it was lovely to share this with an up and coming generation. They’ll all be positively disposed towards the RSC now, so it’s ambassadorial work for this industry that I still somehow love despite the bruises.
Off to bed now. Nothing in the morning so I can chill until half eleven when I’ve got a free singing lesson from Jox. He just opened up the shop. I’m tempted to do something similar for woowoo. I’ll do some tarot and cleansing for anyone who fancies it. I’m just terrible at scheduling and also won’t do that kind of work unless I know I’m relatively uncluttered myself. I’m never completely uncluttered, the clutter comes with the package. But there are degrees. I’m pretty clear right now though. I have to be. Channeling every night.
AlBarclay 