I’m sitting here in Doldowlod and wondering how many times I’ve been lucky enough to be here. So many times over so many years. One year I camped when COVID was still pernicious. This evening I’m camping voluntarily. There’s a refurb of the upper floor. There aren’t enough beds.
This land is powerful. And this house is solid. People who haven’t been in a big old house frequently want to try and feel it is haunted, I see people do it when I’m here. This place is a science house and it is about as haunted as Misty the cat. It’s just big and old, full of portraits and clocks, stone and panels, creaking floorboards and noisy things. I used to say that Eyreton would talk at night. It was another safe house, much smaller than this one but… Big houses like to be part of the conversation. If there’s strangeness it’s usually the house, not the supernatural.
So I’m camped just outside. It’s wet. I’m not thrilled with myself for agreeing to this. But with no time to go to sessions, I knew it was the only way. And actually I’m looking forward to waking up on this land.
“It’s a thin place,” the vicar once said to me about The Willow Globe. He’s right. Phil and Sue have activated magic that was already on the land. It is exactly the right place for Shakespeare.
Tomorrow there’ll be Cymbeline. “Don’t give me a big part I’ve got no time”. I’m Soothsayer and Frenchman. Like Henry last week that’s a prose part and a verse part. Soothsayer is verse so he already lives in my elbow. Frenchman is prose. I’ll say it, I think, at the right point and correctly. It’s a smaller part than Philharmonous.
I love that the Soothsayer is named by a character. Philharmonous. Bringing all the sounds together. But the script calls him Soothsayer. His role is more important than his name. He gets one of my favourite “unnecessary Shakespeare character-giving” lines.
“I saw Jove’s bird, the Roman eagle, wing’d
From the spongy south to this part of the west,
There vanish’d in the sunbeams: which portends—
Unless my sins abuse my divination—
Success to the Roman host.”
What’s the prophecy, prophecy bloke?
Yeah so I saw this bird, and you know it stands for the Romans and it came up from where those absorbent fuckers live and into where we are and then instead of the bird I could see nothing but brightness, so this means – UNLESS I’VE FUCKED UP MY OWN MAGIC BY *!THE SPECIFIC THINGS I’VE BEEN DOING, ACTORS CHOICE!* – Romans gonna win.
I think of Jane Seymour in Live and Let Die, fucking things up for a generation of querents by playing to an idea that tarot is magic. But no matter how much the expression of the cards in that film pisses me off, there’s an interesting connection to something Shakespeare must have been aware of. She can’t read cards accurately anymore once Bond has had sex with her. “Unless my sins abuse my divination.” I wonder how old the idea is that we need to be pure to do magic? Certainly we can’t be part of the everything…
Anyway, it’s half twelve. I don’t think my tent has blown away. Everyone else is abed, I’m awake to write this in the house before hitting the tent.
Goodnight. Wish me good luck and a not too cold and wet night.
AlBarclay 