This is the second time that many of us have ever met. We did Henry V. We all had nothing but 3 line cues with no character attribution, and the lines our characters spoke. No idea how long or short inbetween them all.
I’m gonna put it right up high on the list of fucking terrifying things I’ve done for the craft of acting, a little bit under the first night improvising The Odyssey in Blackwell’s. We have to challenge ourselves. We did that and actually I think I’m gonna make good friends through this. A wide age range, and I should add that M from my pissed off blog the other night made lots of sense in his context. We have costume, we can be a bit wacky and it’ll land.
We are working alongside re-enactors and massive history enthusiasts. We get to put this show on together as part of a delightfully geeky happening. And now we have done it once we can relax into the festival a bit.
Right now I’m under my new sleeping bag on my new air mattress in my new tent. It’s almost 2am. The show went up late and then we inevitably de-adrenalised. I’ve only just finished pumping my mattress… Didn’t have the headspace to do it before the show. I’m knackered and the sun is gonna cook me out of this tent shortly after dawn. The next few days will be much more relaxing than I have budgeted for. We don’t have another show until Sunday. All my energy has been pointing to opening this. Now we are open I can chill.
Bren guns, potatoes, Alfred the Great. Rationing, Thatcher, Offa. We walk in our Elizabethan costumes past WW2 reenactors and busy men and women dressed in the smocks of medieval serfs. This is gonna be a strange few days now we are open. I’ll get my few hours sleep now while I can and find out about the programme tomorrow morning, now the learn is out the way.
AlBarclay 