I wasn’t ready but when are we ever ready? A show tonight and quite a few people booked in, doing Cymbeline in a great big hall in Camberwell. “It’s a work in progress,” Scott told them all and yes.
I wish I could have made it to more of the sessions we’ve had in the run up. In the audience was Matt from Guildhall the year below me. We fell to talking like two old lags, after the show. This stuff, training for The Factory – it has got harder to do over time. It’s just so much more expensive to be alive in this city now. We have to grab hold of every single dayjob opportunity. Ads are less frequent and less well paid, voiceover stuff is pretty much nonexistent now unless you’re already established.
Yesterday I was gonna come to a session but there was a piano needed moving and money for the job. I can’t prioritise an unpaid rehearsal over that. I have expensive tastes in an expensive city and I’ve never been on a salary and it is getting to the stage where I am worried sick what will happen to me if my body gives up, cos I’m feeling older than I was. My back still ain’t 100% since lifting Julius Caesar. I need to be able to function in theatre when I’m 80, if I get that far. No pension. No savings. Hand to mouth for decades and that’s with the flat my mum’s death made possible. Sure the service charge is basically rent but… What am I gonna do? How does anyone survive in the arts right now?
For the short term it’s run around like an absolute crazyman taking every single opportunity to trade my brain or my body or both for positive numbers in this utterly fucked attrition game. And yes I KNOW the powers that be just want us all to jump ship and find our next job in cyber, but everything dies when we lose the arts. Sure I sound like an overdramatic luvvie but imagine if it was just these ham faced incel drips in silicon valley programming all the new stories out of Frankenstein’s old stories? Tilly fucking Norwood? Come on. That thing is a thin veneer over a wanking zuckerlike – a derivative and dull bit of code with a drawing of a face. Things moved faster than they can be regulated and these stains think they can do art by writing a prompt and the only way out is through. Because what they promise and predict won’t come like they think it will, in the end this is just regurgitation. Same crowd as NFT, same noise, same hope that it’s another bitcoin. Same dull sad creepy Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
Live theatre is unlikely to suffer too much, but even with that in mind the great big nobs in the industry are apparently looking into how they use the AbbA tech to hologram in Barfy McTwitface the big famous name in the West End show when they ruin their voice on the third night and can’t go on stage. Might it be cheaper than employing an understudy once it’s up and running? Yuk. But someone with a face made of sweaty tripe is probably coding some experimental platform as I write.
We all had a lovely time together in the room tonight. Let’s have much more of that. And let’s hope we weather this storm as an industry and come out stronger so we can be on stage with Barfy using our genuine depth and life experience so they can get on with the business of being familiar and probably nepo.
“It’s about surviving 2025,” I’ve heard a few times, but remember when we thought like 2016 was the worst year ever and then the next year was worse and the one after worse still and actually now we’ve stopped logging it cos it’s just gone bad here in the world for all but about twelve people who don’t give two hoots about anyone but themselves.
Well, I’m home. I’m in bed. The cats are sprawled on me but they are a bit unsettled and perplexed about wearing a Christmas collar.
AlBarclay 