Waggy came into rehearsal. I don’t really know him but I like him. He put me on the spot about text work cos he’s just started to play in The Factory and thought I would know it. I panicked and talked shit. Yes of course lots of what we do is about text work and rigour but I’ve been deliberately keeping it out of my practice with these guys and this company as it is is a different idiom. We do accents in AFTLS. We stress the pronouns sometimes. Hopefully we don’t point at ourselves when we say “me” and “I” but… We wear things that look like costume. The game is just … different. It aligns, many Factorites thrive in this setting. But there are many ways many ways many ways.
I’ve seeded a couple of things that have become fundamental to what annoys me. The double hand side slap. Every fucking actor does it all the fucking time on stage and NEVER in real life. I’ve kept tennis balls out though until today cos I don’t wince when people don’t end stop. TCs verse work takes years before you come out the other end anyway. There’s pretty much universally a period where good actors start sounding like clocks when they’re working it through.
We haven’t got time to work through it so I’m just doing verse lite which I think is enough. Know where it is. I might introduce “Stop leading into the first word of the next sentence and then breathing to try and make it sound more natural, it doesn’t.”
Let’s not be zealots here though. We have a story to tell. And I know so well too well how Factory rigour and play stuff can leave company members isolated if it isn’t a company where literally everyone buys into it, even if directed by TC.
One friend had a horrible tour with this company because they only trust the Factory way of working. They’re an incredible actor but also a fundamentalist zealot. It didn’t blend with the rest of the company. They ended up resenting my friend and the whole idea of the Factory that had been set up against what they were doing. So… I’ve been choosing my battles, cherry picking the parts of my later learned craft that match with my knowledge of what works. As we must do. We are craftspeople.
Patsy always made us run the thoughts. That’s helpful too. My education, with Martin Tyrrell, Chris Deacon and Jeremy Lemmon helped me hold these big thoughts and work in a way that absolutely flies in the face of Factory work. Big broad strokes. I went back to school a few months ago and did that stuff with Marc Antony. We use all the tools we have. I go towards Factory when possible because often it is not what is accepted as the “correct” way to go about things, and it involves A HUGE AMOUNT MORE WORK. You can’t turn it in with chutzpah, someone will bust you on it. I’m always more interested in exploring dark alleys than going down the main drag and that’s my weird friendship group but it’s not what we’re doing here.
I love and trust this group. We are building our shared language. It’s gonna be a great show.. insha’Allah
AlBarclay 