Month: June 2025

This new version of The Master Builder references The Fountainhead in its first sentence, and again a few times after. It’s a play about an architect referencing a huge culturally influential book about an architect. I guess if you’re going to modernise an Ibsen play about an architect, you have to look at one of the biggest popular culture shifts around the business of building. Howard Roark. Individualism. Ayn Rand. Chaotic Neutral D&D alignment – a very hard person to categorise as she led a movement until people realised she was leading a movement and was female at which point all her little Howard Roarks joined everyone who already hated her to demonise her and throw up the likes of Jordan Peterson instead.

I absolutely consumed The Fountainhead as a teenager, it’s a teenage boys wet dream. There’s nothing in it about kindness or community, it’s about the great thrusting I AM. I can see why it needed to be put at the heart of this Ibsen rework.

I love an old building. If the building is still standing and beautiful why knock it down and put a new one up?

But the theatre was packed. It was packed with Star Wars fans and the like. Afterwards it was absurd, to witness this breathing mess of people who wanted to get a photo with or a scribble from the mister famous person.

This was a beautifully directed piece of theatre, brilliantly held by excellent actors. It didn’t need to be modernised but I guess the crowd might have been perplexed if it hadn’t been. The change from “The Master Builder” to “My Master Builder” perhaps betrayed an authorial intention to make it all about the Ewan part, whereas in the original it is ambiguous – who is the master builder really? The one who builds buildings? The one who builds a social situation to fit their needs? The one who builds a career despite every possible negative influence?

It’s a dark piece about how we lie to ourselves and others, a warning about why we should never outsource our happiness. It’s an incredible account of a great play. I did enjoy the modernising, and the references. But I couldn’t find the edge. Ambiguity is all very well but I didn’t have enough to hook things on so at the end it was just like “oh he’s badly hurt” but it’s the end of a play, it comes out of nowhere and why have we sat here and watched this story if there’s no conclusion? Nora’s door slam was heard across the whole world. Ibsen, that’s the thing about him, he lets his people talk, but then he punctuates the ending.

The architect part was given enough unexamined misogyny to make him unsympathetic but it was all slightly at odds with the emotionally responsive character we watched when they weren’t saying the chosen awkward things. The ingenue was wonderful and empathetic and powerful and it is good to see an actress hold her height when surrounded by wee ones – shypokey head and hands is the end of so many gorgeous tall actresses. She really held her territory and shone for it. The master manipulator knows what she’s gonna say and how it’s gonna go down. She was certain and delicious and occasionally showed a great heart.

It was strange to see them leaving the theatre to a sea of Johnnies. Lou came out before Ewan so I didn’t see what would have descended on the poor fucker when he got out. If I was him I’d rig a deathslide to a building opposite. If he tries to be willing every night, he won’t get home until next week.

I had a great night at the theatre.

A quiet day today. Very quiet. With Lou in Brighton and Brian and Maddy in the air coming back, I decided it was about the only time I could binge the whole season 4 of Clarkson’s Farm without someone asking me why I was watching that crap. I find it compelling, the whole business of an enthusiastic ADHD clueless well meaning celebrity trying to manage a farm. Plus I understand the whole crazy ideation thing, and the split focus. It’s comforting to watch the successes and the failures. It’s getting me better at planning, just as that’s where it always collapses.

In the evening I thought it would be nice to go get Brian and Maddy from Heathrow. They got in from LA about twenty past eight. I banged up there in Bergie, left as soon as they landed, got into the short stay car park just as they came through security. If there are checked bags I normally beat people, but Brian and Maddy know how to travel. Honestly, if I am not dependent on other people I usually just pack hand luggage. Got dad’s voice in my head, showing me the wee bag he travelled round the world in. It’s actually a pretty good way of doing it, so long as you’re either Camino efficient with laundry, or happy to lose half a day on a shopping street once a week buying new shirts and pants etc.

I am glad of my peaceable day with the cats. Now we are back to the carnage of computer games on telly and VR. I’m in bed with a comic and I’m gonna just go to sleep and see how things go tomorrow. They’ll be up for ages. It’s eight hours behind over there, I find it much harder to get back on track returning than I do going out.

My head is swimming with words for a tape and other delights to come. This month is about to get busy busy. Last night was a hard sleep, if you know what I mean. My dreams were tense, I woke up wired. Misty perhaps was helping by rasping that cat-tongue over my face at 4am. I almost put her out of the room when she decided she would lick my bald patch.

Jigging all over the place right now. I found a place in Herne Bay where I wouldn’t be on top of everyone. My previous sleep was shite just as it was like staying in someone’s spare room, but the daughter had moved back in and hated the fact I was there so the whole thing was awkward where all I needed was a discreet place to sleep. Plus I had to check out by half seven.

This morning I had a lie in and then I took a load of cables to Whitstable Metals Ltd. “We call these pluggie cables,” he told me. Didn’t get the best deal by weight but he knows and I know that they aren’t great big fucking cables. He tells me how they’ll be broken down. I also gave him some old appliances  that pretty much certainly have interesting metals in the circuits. Some of them had great big coils of copper built into them. He absolutely gashed me on those. I’d have been better tearing them apart by hand before going in and working out what was what. But… this is business, I’m still piecing it together, it’s like the dump fucking me even though I’d sorted the wood, just as they knew I didn’t have an alternative option and I was under time pressure. “Ah sorry mate we can’t take that wood as wood it has to be general,” for two loads, where given time and space I could’ve sold much of it. I didn’t have dickhead charging £650 a day this time so I was able to try and get what things are worth.

I didn’t want to drive around all over the place looking for a slightly better scrap deal generally so I let the scrap metal guy take those big old circuits for his lowest rate as then they were gone. I’m just trying to move things on right now. Better by far to him, he’s a decent guy and clear about things. If I can find an old book dealer half as efficient and straightforward as he is I’ll be a happy man. I’m cutting back on the units but I’ve still got two – that needs to become one, and it can pretty quickly now. I’ve made my list. Until the list was made it was never about shifting things. Now the list is made it is ALL about shifting things.

I’m back with the cats. Had a good dinner, I’ve been chilling out. Not as early a bed as last night but working on it.

I ended up staying in Herne Bay. There’s a scrap metal dealer who I’m gonna take a load of cables to, just up the road from here. It felt a bit like progress and it’s a little bit too far from London for it to be an easy commute so I’m better off making use of my time down this way. More active time, fewer trips.

I booked into a guesthouse today. Yesterday I was in someone’s house and their 22 year old daughter is living there again and doesn’t like that mummy has paying guests. It was all a little bit fraught. I didn’t feel I could relax, particularly as the hostess doesn’t like her guests being home alone. It was literally a stranger’s spare room and I had to be out by 7:30am. So I drove over to the storage unit, parked in the shade, and began to soundproof my car interior. I set up this pink condenser mic that looks like a penis – fuck knows where all my decent kit has gone, I ordered this one in Amazon yesterday. Had to record a test for a videogame baddie. I like the script, it reminds me of intro sequences to games I loved growing up. I wanted to get some sort of decent sound environment patched together. A car is a reasonable booth, but my position in the shade was unusual to people passing by so I lost a surprising amount of time to people being dicks after they saw me parked weirdly and sitting in the back with a pink mic. Kent. It’s a timewarp. Everybody is over sixty, even if they’re thirty. “That guy in his car must be an instagrasshole porn pervert, probably foreign. I’m gonna put my radio on and bang around. That’ll show him.”

It’s not ten yet and I’m in bed and if I didn’t write this every day I would already be asleep. Early ejection and then I poured energy into that tape. Then cataloguing and carrying. Now it’s time to start sending things back out into the world. First though, sleep. Man. I’m done for the day. Early start listening to the kid moaning about me being there pitched for me to hear. Hmpf

Night night. The seagulls are all making their bedtime noises. The last of the light is fading.

I’ve got a plaster on my thumb from an incident with a potato peeler. Lou boiled up some tatties veg and mackerel for her lunch, and I melted up a fuckton of reblochon and poured it on top of my portion, cos… if you’ve got good ingredients then know the right time and how to use them. I was excited for my lunch and perhaps a touch too enthusiastic with the peeler.

It’s not like I’m bleeding everywhere, but my last time in temporary accommodation down here near Canterbury there was washed out blood on the sheets. I’d sooner not cause my hostess that problem. So it’s covered.

I’ll have to leave by 7:30. This is what comes of booking private accommodation instead of a hotel. She goes to work, and she doesn’t want anyone in her house when she’s not there. I get it perhaps. But I’ve stayed in quite incredible houses – ones in Spain, California and France spring to mind – where the host has been away but there’s been a way to get in. I’ve ghosted through these properties filled with valuables, felt lucky, left no trace. The booking website and your profile on it is usually enough to stop the host worrying someone will nick their … i dunno … Plates? Pictures? Silver plate cutlery? Bananas? Generally, your stuff isn’t worth even a fraction of what you think it is worth. Shops lie. Grannies exaggerate. But… This host is very boundaried and she’s located exactly where I need to be for tomorrow plus she’s very cheap so … fuck it this is tonight. 18 more Euro Crates to inventory tomorrow. Game on.

I went to Korean Cowgirl Barbeque tonight and ate meat. It was good. It was meat. I had a glass of organic rioja that was excellent even if I had to send the first one back as it was stale. Now I’m lying here upstairs and very happy just to have a bed near where I’ll be working for myself tomorrow. I’ll definitely finish the cataloguing tomorrow. Then I can start to move things on. Need any cables? Lavverley.

Silk Street. With Minnie.

In a previous millennium, I walked through a door in this complex. I began the process of training that gave me the skills and the perspective that I have now, and the friends. Minnie is one such friend.

I used to walk in to Drama School every day from Mansion House tube. I’d go through the deserted high walks. I’d stop and talk to the sculpture of the muse. It felt like we always had alone time, that sculpture and I. I shared my hopes and dreams with it. I projected onto it. Guildhall.

In the same building, just a bit down, there’s a great big cinema. Orlando Bloom, one of the stars, says in the Q&A “I trained just next door,” and Minnie and I both momentarily get very emotional that he’s keyed that specific geography. That training, those teachers… You can only really know a golden age in retrospect. We were so lucky to have met and worked with those people, a shared experience. That building isn’t really used anymore. The staff is different. Still wonderful. But there are crucial pieces missing from the puzzle now.

SXSW London tonight though with all the glitz and the glam and I’m there with Min and she was with me plus one when Bright Young Things opened in flipping 2002. How many years? Friendship is friendship.

I’m so happy she showed up for tonight and honestly, all I needed to do is tell her the premise of the movie and she was curious. Improv comedians are seriously recruited as spies. (I think she really came to support me though! Love her.)

It’s s great movie. It’s genuinely hilarious. It’s exactly what I like to see. I’m kinda gobsmacked that I’m in it, right at the start and right at the end. I’m playing an eejit. Thankfully I know that life role intimately. There’s a satisfaction in knowing that you did a good job in a good thing. This is a good thing. And I’m happy with my work.

It was good to talk to the muse again, up on the high walks, before and after. My walk to the college was always somewhat talismanic. I knew I would still be working still be playing still still still after time time time and one of my only moments of rage back then was when the potential major agent said “you seem to me like a long term slow burn type actor,” to which I said “Yep, I’m here for that, let’s go” to which they said “But life is long. Who knows where you might go. You have many other things you could do.” … I said “I think you underestimate how stubborn I am,” and they said “I don’t think you know how many times we’ve had this conversation.” They had met a load of fucking daytrippers and they mistook me for one. Ach. So be it.

I found Esta. Wish I’d found her sooner. But here we are. And there is a great film that I’ve touched. It exists. We are go. Release on the Twelfth I think on Amazon Prime. Boom. Deep Cover. Bryce Dallas-Howard, Orlando and Nick Mohammed. It’s a fucking delight. A tightly written British comedy flick. It’s a win.

One of the things I turned up recently is a thurible. It’s likely Islamic in origin, I’m not certain. But it’s the perfect accessory to my obsession with smoky sniffs. With a little disc of treated charcoal and a pinch of Frankincense resin, I can make the whole world smell of ritual, and entertain the cats with a swingy thing into the bargain. I changed the cat litter the other day as it was ponging out the bathroom, and twenty minutes wandering around with this thing was enough to get the memory out of my nostrils.

Now I’ve got some weird stinky oud, loads of Frankincense and a lifetime worth of Japanese temple incense. I burn things all the time, but I would have to be dedicated and hardworking to successfully burn everything I currently own before I fuck off into another existence.

The cats are lying on me at the moment else I’d spark it up and wang around the place swinging smoke and pretending I’m a proper sanctioned holy man rather than just an enthusiastic exponent of ritual and belief.

They’ve been a little put out with me, the cats, as I’ve been going through the crap in the fridge today and then banging around with pots and pans cooking when they expect me to just chill out. Lot and I were bopping in the living room to Tears For Fears on the Alexa. And Bananarama. They were unimpressed. I’m going to spare them an evening of weird smoke and just curl up with them now. It’s cold. I put a light duvet on last night so Lou and I don’t cook at night. Now the temperature has dropped so I’m clinging to these felines for warmth and dammit it’s June.

The contents of the fridge make a great deal more sense now. I’ve been making a start on line learning. Tomorrow I’m meeting a wonderful mad collaborator and hopefully there’ll be some work soon, making people smile. And I get to hang with a best friend tomorrow oh my God I never get to hang with her and she is coming to the premier of a delightful bonkers British comedy movie I’m lucky enough to have a small part in. Wahoo.

Urgh my tummy has been complaining all day today. I’ve got myself into bed early and I think I’ll just curl up with the cats and sack it off until tomorrow. I’ll need to still be awake when Lou gets home but that’s the extent of it.

She’s just started on her new gig, taking over with running wardrobe for the Master Builder remix in the West End. I’ll go see it soon but wanted her to settle in first. It’ll be nice to have her here for a month or so. I expect I’ll come out the end of the month much healthier than I am now. Right now my intestines are very unimpressed at my decision to have hot chicken bites and a pint last night instead of supper.

The cats are providing good company and its a warm evening. I spent the day catching up on admin and pottering around in my local area. I’m happy Lou has started her new job in the West End. It feels like a wee while since I’ve had any traction on the acting work. Something will roll in. August has always strangely been a lucky month for me. And generally I’m a summerlover. But at least I’ll get to see some good theatre.

For tonight though just a rest and looking after my funny tummy. Lots of line learning on the horizon, and the strange little day jobs are clicking back in. Things will start to feel busy again so I’m gonna try and keep enjoying this slightly empty time and treat it as an opportunity to breathe it and allow all the weird things like upset tummies to happen because they can because they aren’t getting in the way of life.

Still, an early bed. I should have given Lou keys, but it’ll be nice to be up when she gets home. I’ll try and stay awake and take my phone off silent.

A lovely slow Sunday. The weather might have been less windy but for the first day of meterological summer I am okay with it. The wind wasn’t freezing. Just present.

We went for a stroll in the park, by the serpentine, Marie and I. We’ve been friends for a while and we danced in a window during lockdown with mascot heads on. That sort of thing bonds people, to the extent that she has been able to put up with my awful ADHD accounts and admin blackout and largely get the tax return in on time. Although I did get fined crazily for one year when she was too busy and gave up. Largely she’s been a lifeline though and without her I would be in an even worse position than I am. God, the dream of consistent employment in my profession… A few close friends have booked a whole year on stage in the west end. I’ve kept this flat, believed and believed. Surely something soon. There’s a premier coming up for a lovely wee britflick. I’ve got my American movie coming. But where the fuck are the meetings? It’s not like they aren’t making anything anymore. I’m feeling like I’m right at the top of my game, right in my casting, and there’s nothing, but for what I’m generating myself. I think that’s likely to be the thing I’m gonna have to go towards.

A pleasant walk. Then up to Camden to feed a friend’s cat. Great big silly old Boy. I gave him more water than he likes with his food cos it’s hot and he’s on his own. He was working through it when I left. Flying visit.

Then to the Edinboro Castle and a strategy meeting and catch up with Shoe. And maybe a pint. Now I’m home and covered in cats and it feels like it was a good day all round. A proper Sunday. Now for the week in technicolour. I’m ready for it.

Off to a unit in Old Street much like the one I’m looking for, where Callum has a large selection of glorious Elizabethan costumes and props. Bottom heads and Chanticleers and boxes of ruffs. I ended up with a green jerkin for Fluellen and a nice top for Burgundy. What the fuck am I doing? It’s like The Factory but I don’t know these people, we will have posh clothes on, and we are only working off cue scripts. I’m playing Fluellen at a history festival in Wiltshire.

Years ago I was asked to play Fluellen by the OH Players, the AmDram outfit associated with my old school. My willingness led me to say “yes” to them for a while with Don Pedro and Shylock but then it got like too much work. I care deeply about my career. I can’t be involved really, it does no good. The last time I was asked, it was for Fluellen. He’s Welsh. “I only do these parts if I think the learn will be useful professionally down the line,” I said. “I’ll never be asked to play Fluellen professionally.”

Bugger. I couldn’t have expected that.

I’ve got a lot of prose to learn now, look you. And it is in a Welshish Shakespearey accent – that’s in the text, look you. I’ll have to make sense of it. Playing Burgundy as well. He at least gets to be delightful and versey. It’s probably for the best I didn’t do Flu back in the day, for many reasons. But I’ve got prose to learn. Fuck it. I eat verse. Prose is slow.

Summer is a good time for Shakespeare though, and energetically this festival feels like a right thing. New friends, passion and work. It should be joyous.

For now though I’m home and knackered. The day started in the dump trying to offload loads of paint and contaminated Euro Crates. They wouldn’t let me dump a tiny amount of white spirit and polish because its flammable so it is better to book an appointment to have it safely disposed of instead of finding a drain and just pouring the fucking stuff into it. Less than two litres in total. Still, I made progress. Horrid glass covered books, done and recycled. A Bergman load, emptied. I need to do at least two more next week.