Bank holiday Sunday but we were rehearsing. I didn’t realise the extent to which I have become a mercenary. But I’m worth it. You want me to do the acting thing I put everything on hold for? Pay me. But this is my Alma-Mater and perhaps I owe it some sort of debt of gratitude. But I’m not grafting like I normally would.
They need some costume. I have some costume. As with many low budget theatrical things, they are willing to pay the clothes. If I find some clothes maybe they will pay the money I want for my time. We work the angles.
They haven’t put a Shakespeare on in Speech Room since forever. Six years. The entire cohort of students will never have seen a Shakespeare in Speech Room. It’s a tremendous drop on the part of the school. In this environment, when the great and the good are telling Fatima that her next job might be in cyber and she just doesn’t know it yet, their children have had their early access to culture pulled out from under them which will only compound the idiocy. But yeah, the system tells us that your child becoming an actor is somehow a parenting failure.
I don’t think the OH Play has ever been wonderful, but it can be charming, it might be memorable. I was packed off to Cymbeline when I was fourteen to write a punishment essay review of it. I enjoyed it. My review was a summary of the action. Many reviews still are in major broadsheets. Back then it was a curiosity that I understood it, as much as that I enjoyed it. Dad was shelling out for me to have a refined education. There was an opportunity for me to start to crack into the idea of Shakespeare as a story told by humans in a room, with the audience.
Even the guys in the Old Harrovian Julius Caesar company I’m in mostly hadn’t heard of the fact that, before The Globe was finished, in 1993, the first show went on in the earthworks of the theatre. Sam Wanamaker, who had driven for it his whole life, fifty years after he had come to London and been appalled there was no Globe, Sam was in a tiny audience for Taming of the Shrew. By Harrow boys. Directed by a man who sadly didn’t covet my arse so I never got a look on on his shows. I didn’t go to his memorial the other day. Sam though, he saw that strange raw young show in the place where his dreams were finally coalescing. He died in the December of that year. That show happened because of the tradition of an Elizabethan theatre in Speech Room, and Globe Education knowing about it. Now the costumes are mothballed and un-cared for. The pillars are gone, perhaps forever. Speech Room is just … a room for speeches.
I’ve done enough speaking today though. I’m lying back listening to an orchestra in the park playing film themes. They just did Jurassic Park. “There are dinosaurs there are dinosaurs there are din-ooo- saaauuurs!”
I feel like one right now. Another early bed eh? All sorts of parties I could go to. Nah.
AlBarclay 