The Face of the King

Let’s go back in time.

Reading. Elgar Road. 1995 – 1997.

A little house rented out to three students. Me, Adrian and Tim. The gas oven igniter doesn’t work. We have to throw a lit match into the back of the thing to get it to take. We do this daily for months and never remove the matches, which calcify into a strange monument to unsafe cooking.

At night, often into the wee hours, the three of us dream with each other, downstairs. We all love theatre. We are all creatives. We all love to make things happen. I’m the President of the Drama Society at Reading University and the three of us have managed to get a big budget from the student union. We are programming. I’m the actor. Tim is the director. Adrian is the writer. That’s the base dynamic, but we experiment with roles.

The soundtrack is from CD. We are playing Loreena McKennit, the Braveheart soundtrack, Under the Pink by Tori Amos, Jagged Little Pill. Late night music. Sometimes we play cards. Shithead, or Magic the Gathering. We write scenes and perform them for each other and with each other. We write whole screenplays. And we believe forward. We believe hard. In each other, in hope, in hard work.

I don’t often put my memory back to those days. They were happy and focused. I prefer not to look back too much, certainly my halcyon days will always be yet to come, but they were happy times back then.

This was the tiny community from which I launched into this dumb job I still do. This was the hope and the rigour at the start. Three brilliant clueless boys, who rushed home on Friday night to be in time for Friends, who wrote poems for each other. Who went to London to watch theatre and wanted to make it ourselves.

Adrian married a singer and moved to Leeds. He had a kid and he writes still, as prolific as ever. His stuff is and always has been brilliant. He has had good recognition now for it, and he has stuck to his principles and his work ethic. Various awards have happened. I’ve heard people describe him as “legendary” and honestly, I agree with them. He is.

A while ago I did some readings for a podcast called Starship Sofa. I wasn’t paid for them, used them as upskilling excuses. I wanted to get better at editing etc and refine my home studio. I stopped doing it once I was happy with my sound. The guy who used to book me recommended me to a guy who is building an archive of video recorded Dark Fantasy short stories.

The long and short of it is, I got booked and paid to record a fantasy short story. When I told them of my history with Adrian, they sent me one of his stories to read. I did it at a studio in West London, right next door to my favourite casting director. It’s where I went with Sammy to direct her reading a book about light-en. They are very rigorous there. We recorded it on two cameras simultaneously and we had just an hour. With faffing and way too many notes from the engineer at the start, we had to rush the hell out of it. I still can’t quite believe we turned it in on time, but we did, and we did it well. Me reading one of Adrian’s short stories to camera. It’s a delight. It is so familiar to those long long evenings dreaming in Elgar Road.

This is the brief: “A young king is deposed by his grand vizier. Having been ditched in a cavern to die, our feckless anti-hero has a face nobody knows, a bag of money, and a vicious revenge streak a mile wide.”

It is written in a very unusual person. And it is read by a very unusual person.

I’m very very proud of this weird thing we’ve done because it connects so deeply to so much of the strange history that got me to wherever the hell I am. If you have time and inclination to consume this unusual tale, please do, it rings through my life and my passions. And Jesus for the love of God please leave a positive comment that isn’t about the sound levels. That’s on the engineer, not me. The guy was a bit of a harlequin, bless him.

I should have shared this when I did it, but it came out of the edit when I was in full rehearsal for As You Like It. I didn’t have the headspace to look outside of Shakespeare. Now I do, I would like to share this with any and all of you. It is 40 minutes of sparky writing, embodied by yours truly. Enjoy.

THE FACE OF THE KING – By Adrian Tchaikovsky. Read by Al Barclay. With a moustache.