Booked a day tomorrow with two lads and a van moving some bits up and down to Folkestone. I thought I’d be in rehearsal but I need some costume out of Canterbury. Last minute it turns out I’m not called tomorrow so I’m gonna go join them and do the picking manually rather than having to fuck around with video calls from the rehearsal room, which is genuinely a very positive outcome.
I haven’t had time to stop and take stock lately which is probably a good sign but is also knackering.
Today we had Alexandra in, to choreograph the violence. I do most of the violence so it was a busy morning. Cheryl and I trust each other thankfully. We built that trust together over summer and it feels like a deep thing now. But an expert can really raise the level of what we can do physically. With her help we have arrived at something that looks extremely uncomfortable even when we are just marking it without effort noises and vocalisations, but which is mutually understood mechanically in a way that feels controlled and safe.
John Waller used to say “excited is not exciting,” and even if he pulled pretty much all the intention out of the fights we had at Guildhall (likely because he didn’t have time so was putting safety first,) it’s a good lesson and one a lot of actors need.
I learnt from the brilliant Peter Noble back as a young man. He taught me all the points, safety, pulling, control – but also intention. His fights were safe but they had edge. I remember him teaching me how to be stabbed by making me think he’d stabbed me. He had a really sharp blade. Put me against a wall. Put it to my sternum. Full eye contact. Pulled the blade away, jammed his thumb in. “You see? Your first reaction was incomprehension and betrayal. Then you looked for the point of insertion. After that and only after that you might have responded vocally and physically to the pain if I had really stabbed you”. I’ve used what I learnt in that moment a few times since. Inhale. Take stock. Then react. But… it hits strangely with full context.
He was into LARP and had choreographed some major movies in the eighties before I met him. Ladyhawke and Willow among them. We were friends in that we saw each other regularly and I liked him – we even had a weekly fight club where we trained with his broadswords, quarterstaves – whatever he had and he had loads of interesting fun kit.
He killed his girlfriend brutally by stabbing her in bed repeatedly. He did it shortly after I left Reading… With that sharp knife… It was fucking impossibly awful hearing about it. I think he’s still in prison.
It took me a few years to be able to pick up a sword again – to get back to stage combat. It’s weird history now, I knew him last millennium. He taught me a lot. But fuck.
I sometimes mention him to stage combat guys just to see if they knew him. “He trained me,” I might say, because he did. Once I met another old friend of his who helped me with a stabbing. Neither of us could make sense of it about Peter. It’s so unusual. We pretend to do this stuff. We don’t do it. Surely that’s the contract?
Ugh. Anyway. Thankfully this is a safe room. And the way things are taught now are much more thoughtful and restrained than back in those days at Reading University…