Now it’s just me and the cat. A restful day as planned, up here by the sea. I didn’t even pay for Bergies parking until half eleven but thankfully no inspection early on a Tuesday up this way.
She had me up at half five to make her soup, but then I was right back down and asleep until eleven. Then she came in again demanding treats, and she got her medicine. It’s a learning experience, squeezing two syringes of goop into an attack cat. I tend to sleep naked when it’s hot and almost came a cropper as a result. When she wants to she can FLY. Lou almost always has a few scratches or bite marks, but today I found it easier than usual, mostly because I was more confident. Animal trainers usually say that the bulk of the work is in training the owner. I see that. When I’m not confident she can sense it and she worries. No foam at the mouth this time, and it all went in her mouth which is a turn up for the books. She got her treats.
I didn’t want to go anywhere, so we sat and looked at each other. Eventually I went and lay down for a siesta and that’s when she woke me up with the most unbelievable hairball. It was the length of her aesophagus, just solid hair. Poor thing was quivering with the strain of it. I cleaned it up and sat with her a while. Hairy cat in summer – I’m gonna need to get stuck in with a brush.
Evening bath and then we sat and read together. Neither of us feeling adventurous today, and the weather wasn’t good enough to make me feel I’d missed something.
Now I’m in bed. She’s next door. She’ll wait until I’m sleeping and then walk over my feet. It’ll just be she and I for a few days now. Maybe I’ll learn to speak cat. She’s trying to teach me. She ain’t a lap cat, but within her boundaries she’s a poppet.
This morning I woke up only reluctantly in my little Premier Inn bed. The alarm felt too soon. I felt far from rested. My sleep had been active and dream laden, likely as my brain was dumping all the Shakespeare to try to remember the facilitation.
At 8.25 I was already trying to make sense of unfamiliar technology. By 9 I was in full active mode, throwing out all the energy, seeing what came back. Three two hour workshops back to back. Thankfully real coffee at elevenses and pasta bake for lunch. Nonetheless when I was done I didn’t take into account how tired I was until half way to London.
I’ll tell you that my stamina for driving is exceptional, because it usually is. Today though, suddenly, I was borderline narcoleptic in my car. Radio 4 wasn’t helping with Today in Parliament. The heat likely wasn’t helping either, and neither was the sugar crash from having shoved most of a packet of Oreo cookies into my face as I exited Leicester. Droopy head and I was on a motorway. Eyes defocusing. Not fit to drive. I knew it immediately and knew it was going to be dangerous even getting to an exit and finding a layby. The hard shoulder was very big with a storm runoff extending it. I took a hard call that I had to use it, and pulled in.
With my passenger wheels in the storm drain, I put down the passenger window, rolled back my seat, put the hazards and the handbrake on and vanished instantly into dream.
The traffic police are pretty quick it seems. I reckon I got half an hour, forty five minutes tops. I was deep in dream when “Alright mate” came loud and clear and I woke from a cricket dream with an audible scream. A little ginger guy was leaning his head through my window and for a moment my head put Ben Stokes’ face on the neck. “You’d better be broken down and not just sleeping,” he said. I was still half asleep and in no mood to be anything but honest. “I had to stop, I was too tired to be safe.” “There’s an exit just ahead and another one behind,” he informs me. He’s reasonably cheerful and I get the feeling he’s not gonna issue some sort of fine. “If you sleep here and there’s a crash you’ll wake up dead.”
However long I got it was enough to get me to London. Then I repacked my bag for another week in Brighton, slept for maybe another hour and got back on the roads for the last push.
I’m here now safely with the little pussycat in the soft and peaceful flat of Lou. With the heatwave I’m pretty glad to be in Brighton, and with the – currently – empty diary, I’m happy to be looking at a bit of stop time. We will see how that pans out though… But I already turned down a short job tomorrow in Leeds so I can hang with the pussycat. My intention now is peace.
A hot hot day today and a little bit of rainfall pushed the first half of the show into the emergency weather marquee. On a day like today, tents turn into ovens. We were all drenched in sweat immediately in that marquee. I was never happier than when I got to remove my cotton shirt and put on my silk one. Hot hot hot. They’re gonna put out severe weather warnings for the rest of the week, and Lou is in Saudi where it’s ten degrees hotter in the shade and you wonder what all the fuss is really about over here. It’s just a bit of temperature. I’m certainly happier sweltering occasionally than not wanting to get out of bed and live in the land of freezing hell. Second half thankfully brought us outside, back to the beautiful tree that frames the little stage.
The Willow Globe is deep in nature, and there’s much to feel around here. A horsefly landed on my finger during a scene in the second half causing me to momentary pop out as I shook the bastard off. Round the back you constantly hear a call that was lost to these valleys for a while after hundreds of years – the call of the red kites. They were almost totally extinguished in this country by silly people. Now they are back, and their very distinctive agile whistle sounds around the theatre as we wait for our entrances. Moles and rabbits have left evidence of good activity all around. The entirely docile chickens that shamelessly interrupt scenes are proof that, for now, the foxes are looking elsewhere. I’ve had a very peaceful few days, slipping into that slightly irresponsible show routine where I stay up too late processing and then miss too much of the morning.
The show wound up and I stayed for a while to enjoy the celebrations, but I was always gonna have to cut and run – I’m back to the dayjobby grind, about to run a workshop about batteries again. I’ve just driven to Leicester. I’m far from the kites and the chickens, the William and the willow. I’m in another Premier Inn, cocooned in my plastic sheets, listening to the roar of some sort of air thing I can’t switch off. A little wasp woke up in my light when I switched it on, so there is still nature but it’s not as deep here. In Wales I had to clean the front of Bergman because the collision sensor got a dead bug on it.
I’m tired. I start too early tomorrow. Midnight just happened and I’m going to take it as my cue to spark out.
I’m staying in an old farmhouse deep in the Welsh countryside. If I’m not being thoughtful, I brain myself on the door to the loo. There’s a big lump on my head already, compounded by the time I’ve been here. I could not live in this place for that simple reason. It would eventually kill me.
We had a show tonight again. We started at the beginning and finished at the end. The middle was up for grabs largely, but the whole thing was largely sustained by the company.
My character veers from being an insufferable and bloodthirsty piece of shit to being a fun happy festival voice. He’s the bacchanal. No surprise it’s me playing him. Party party party party KILL party. This is a voice I know deeply deeply deeply from work and karma. It’s a big part of the mess of human chaos that oor wullie was interested in. He was on the edge of the oral tradition when he was making plays. His stuff has survived as he wrote it, when just a generation before him there was little chance of that happening.
Oral trad stories are much more likely to be morally difficult. As soon as a left brainer writes it down – and the early clerks will have mostly been the equivalent of our intellectuals now – their preference affects the stories because they aren’t very good at staring into the void. “Let’s make Grandmother still be alive when the woodcutter cuts!”
Merchant of Venice is horrible. It’s incredible. It’s vile. Oral tradition lite though. Most oral stories have no resolution and either kill everyone or destroy hope because they have been built to respond to this arbitrary and hopeless world where the only certainly is the eventual heat death of the universe.
Willy told stories for money, so be avoided such didactic nihilism. He isn’t dumb enough to peddle happy ever after though. He lets everyone speak their fullest and hopes we can think around things and come up with our own conclusions.
Gratiano is the pro capital punishment voice, in the end, in this play. And he starts as the FUN voice. Like so many genuinely dangerous and charismatic humans. “Hey wow, let’s notice things and be opinionated and noisy and let’s believe in God and be in love and angry and actually if I had my way people who don’t think like us should be killed, yeah?” The people with the strongest faiths are universally the most dangerous, as they reckon they’ve got the moral high ground and have outsourced their responsibility. They can do whatever “the thing” is cos *insert higher power* wants it based on their interpretation of *text*. I got pissed off with some American eejit on Twitter recently who said that the rainbow belonged to The Bible. I tried to tell him by how many thousands of years Gilgamesh predated the transcription of myth that he wanted to sell as history. Thankfully it didn’t make me the focus of ignorant rage. You see it so often with these Christian Americans. If it wasn’t Christianity it would be another myth, so I’ve nothing against it in particular. But the scattergun is absurd. I’ve even seen them try and say that Caduceus is to do with Satan as a way of slamming the NHS.
But my father taught me “You can’t argue with stupid”.
My character is that guy. He’s immediate and opinionated and dumb. And lovable. There’s the point though. We can all frame the world however we want. It’s only when we start dismissing those who don’t share our frame that we start to do harm…
A full house to this place. Families wanting to see their friends. People living here who have no live experience locally. Happy local audience. Let’s track it back a bit… I don’t know the full genesis of this but I know a little.
“We want to build a theatre!”
“You’ll never get planning permission.”
“What if you just plant it?”
When I was at Reading University, for a short time, we had found a way to make an incredible summer Shakespeare. Andy Hunt was an ex copper and scaffolder and very handy, and he was helping us out. We also had an excellent budget from the Uni because we would fight for membership in Freshers week. Andy had his Jewson’s budget paid by the uni on our behalf. God knows what he was skimming on the side but it didn’t matter. He made a scaffolding theatre on the campus three years running. Every year we made bank in ticket sales. We had a budget from our student union. We returned that budget to the union in sales. We were visible and bold and we were trying to do interesting things. We were also utterly clueless, and the only reason we made bank was because none of our student actors were being PAID, and Andy was handy.
I was a tyrant at times, clueless at others, but always ambitious and always supported. With practical Andy to help we made some powerful stuff. It was only when my committee treasurer clocked that he was on the Jewson account and I had to take him off it that the things that were possible shrunk. I had to tell him. He was aware of all the things he had made possible. At the expense of a little bit of embezzlement, we had a very fine structure to make plays. I could never make art now without paying the artists but in the context of university shows it seemed legit. Not many of us are still in the game. Tony is still on the hustle. Tim is still on the craft. Jake is still on the make. I’m still hacking things together.
Phil and Sue moved out here to Radnorshire after both living a career in theatre. Phil is an actor, Sue a director. I know one of their offspring is doing remarkably well in our industry. Passion breeds passion.
They literally planted a theatre. If it’s a tree you don’t need planning permission. Nobody could have anticipated such an incredible result. They’ve made this mystic and lush place out of living willow, and they’ve made it full of possiblity for the local community over time.
I’ve come and plugged in. There are all sorts in his show. They were stuck for an actor after a last minute loss, so they asked The Factory if anyone was free at short notice. I didn’t really know what I was getting involved in but reflexively said yes as I’ve had wonderful times here in the past and I always try to say yes. It’s delightful and there’s huge community. It makes me even more want to move to this neck of the woods.
We just finished our first show. I met everyone yesterday. I’m slow to make friends but quick to study. Now the white noise show has gone well we are free to start properly listening, and maybe I’ll make friends.
I’m inspired by Phil and Sue, by what they’ve done. At Reading I was lucky – I timed it well, and was well supported, to be ambitious with outdoor theatre, even though we were all clueless about acting. I think it would be disingenuous of me to dismiss the things we learned through that university experience. I remember having a certain drama school audition panel hacking into me about it. But … this living theatre is a similar shape and size to our scaffolding structure. If reminds me of it. Twenty five years of practice lends ease. I’m ready now to play the parts I played then. Playing those parts before I was ready gave me grounding to learn and front them as an adult practitioner.
I arrived somewhat fraught. New lines pushed into my head. New people to integrate with.
Gratiano. I never really looked at him before. He’s an interesting one, as they all are when you get under the skin with this timeless writer. Often there’s a hook about who the character is in the first thing they say. His first speech starts with an observation. He notices things. “You look not well.” He then offers his advice, cut from his very personal perspective. This is a rich man who really need do nothing and still be happy. He’s chosen to be a playboy and commentator and self styled fool. “You have too much respect upon the world. They lose it that do buy it with much care.” Advice not to get too swept up in this artificial consensus we have decided to call “the world”. And yeah, we can quickly get weighted down if we give it too much respect. This is good advice, right off the bat, from a largely egregious voice in the line of the text. Gratiano grates. He speaks out of turn. But his way would work for some of the characters in this complex play.
Last time I did it I played Shylock. Back then I was struck by how much text he’s given to properly explain to the Venetians why they are hypocrites. There’s a heart in that man and his flaw is revenge. In many ways it’s the tragedy of Shylock, as I’m yet to see the Venetians not look like overprivileged twits. To play this gauche fellow now – it’s interesting. There’s enough throughout this play that every scene has meat, and he has plenty. And he’s high status enough that he can speak in any situation and it’s given the floor.
Dress rehearsal tonight and I just needed to get through it. Some small reference to my cue script. Mostly lines were in place, but I was solving lack of certainty with the illusion of certainty (aka bombast). Tomorrow they let the audience in. As far as my character allows me, I’m gonna see how far I can go into nuance. Time to listen to the others and trust that my learning will carry through. This is very squeaky bum, but it’s also just a friendship group that I’m not yet part of, putting on a play for the sheer joy of it in a truly beautiful setting. I’m in.
Darn, I was just about to go to sleep when the internal warning system reminded me “no blog written yet”. But a very pedestrian day, largely. I was woken up at 5 by a hungry cat, which is something I’m anticipating in a few hours time. I fed her, then went back to bed. Up a few hours later and off to the crack house for coffee. Medicine for the cat and then writing out all my lines. I find it helps with the learn to write the lot down on cue scripts.
Then the cat and I hung out. At one point she had an altercation with a seagull through the skylight. I think that was the most dramatic thing that happened all day. At about half past two I remembered I had to post a tray, so I wrapped it as best I could and took it to the slow lady in Kemptown who calls everybody darling and charges too much. Hopefully it’ll get to Northern Ireland in one piece.
Outside of that it was line learning. I need to sleep now so my head arranges what I’ve stuffed into it. Right now I’m a little addled.
The wind and the sea here, and it feels much more expansive than London and not so expensive… After the weekend I’m gonna be here for a good chunk of time. Something to look forward to.
For now though I have to sleep. I’m right at the end of my wakefulness, but didn’t want to miss a day. Sweet dreams.
The last time I properly crammed a Shakespeare part was a long long time ago – I think 2007. Someone had been sacked and I was drafted in to replace them on a tour playing Malvolio. It turned into a delightful thing in terms of fellowship, a helpful review at Edinburgh by Gyles Brandreth no less, and sadly no more money than we started with, but that’s touring theatre, particularly when you’re young.
I’m curious to know if my time addled brain is going to soak this up the same way. It’s Merchant of Venice and they’ve lost their Gratiano. He’s not one I have been near before. I played a Shylock once but that was only short. No delving.
He seems to be the highest status in the play just as he’s given the final line. The person left alive with the highest status pretty much always speaks the last line of all the Shakespeare plays. Now I’ve said it you’ll notice it. But that being the case it looks like I’m playing an upper class twit, which is no great stretch. It opens on Friday back at The Willow Globe, and I’m just so happy to have a chance to go back there so soon after The Factory did Caesar. This is the house show. I love the whole creative team there, and what they are doing. I can’t remember everything I’ve done there… Banquo with a freshly broken rib, Bottom, Malvolio… Bit parts when there’s no time to learn, chunky ones when the world is slower. We told The Odyssey around a huge bonfire one night there, late at night it felt. I remember faces in firelight, snatches of song. This sort of thing is why I’m still plugging. Yesterday I needed to get things off my chest. Saying things can take away the sting of them. Today I’m just excited about the chance of more odd magic, if only I could get the lines to stay in my head.
Three sleeps is what I prefer. I couldn’t really do any work yesterday so I’ve had a few hours today, I’m gonna have all of tomorrow to cram and then I’ll drive to Wales mumbling to myself and plug into the dress rehearsal.
Green land right in the heart of Wales and decades ago now Phil and Sue quite literally planted a theatre. The border is all a living willow, changing with the seasons, teeming with life. The stage is small as is the house, but there is undeniable magic there, and I’ve been going there for what must be a decade now, doing our rigorous but ad-hoc Factory shows, trying to find the balance between fixed and flowing where the magic seems easy, supported by the local audience, and all the lovely dreamers who have joined the team. It’s a thin place, lush from heavy rain, and you might be soaked or eaten as you tell your tale. There are semi-feral chickens now, and one of them joined us for Marc Antony’s funeral oration a few weeks ago. It’s a remarkable and unique place, and it gets under your skin. What a wonderful thing they’ve made, and I’m thrilled once again to be part of something there – this time their in-house show. Likely it’ll be a bit less unpredictable than The Factory, and I’d better get back to line learning and do a bit more before I crash out…
If they’d said “yes” I expect I would have been looking at the edges and thinking “Gosh well that’s an awful lot of time in one place, and even though its reliable money it isn’t gonna make me rich and what if the big filming job comes in etc etc” But they said “no” so instead I’m thinking “Oh wouldn’t it have been lovely to know what I’m doing for such a long time, and how delightful to refresh my dancing and singing in a company of new friends and consistent employment is such a holy grail etc etc”
They don’t get my calm and friendly and slightly mystic energy in their company. No feedback either. That’s sad. That’s their funeral… And I lost a good part of the day to it being the constant hum in the background of my thoughts. “Should I have made it clear that I’m very happy to learn dances?” “Maybe if I had updated my CV properly and curated myself online I would look more employable…” They are employing fifty actors in this and I still didn’t get the part. If I think about it too much I’m tempted to just run headlong into a wall as essentially I’ve been doing that to myself metaphorically for decades. Fuck it fuck it fuck it fuck it. And onwards.
Better out than in.
Why do we all put ourselves through this constantly? So many of my friends are imploding at the moment from the build up of pressure over decades. Too many years and we all still carry hope like naïve clowns. Now the convenient narrative I had of “Well, I haven’t ever auditioned for a regional theatre before not to mention a national, so it’s not like I’ve had the shots and missed them.” I’ve just missed my first shot, twenty five years in. And I’m still stupid enough to keep on hoping. Hey, at least they recalled me.
Thankfully I’m in nature. Lou and I just went to Stanmer and I fell asleep in the sun under one of the ancient cedars and momentarily forgot this punishment of a career I’ve inflicted on myself and just existed for a bit and hung out with trees.
Then I started thinking about Shakespeare because once again I’ve got stuff to learn. It’s far from a disaster in this existence but oh seeking the bubble reputation even in the cannon’s mouth… It hurts.
I remember discussing the story of Pandora’s Box with someone as a child. It’s a precursor to the Adam and Eve story. She’s given a box and told not to open it so she does. It contains all the bad things. Death. Disease. War. Famine. The last thing that comes out is Hope. “At least there’s hope in there to make it all bearable,” I remember saying. “But it’s Hope from the box of evils,” my interlocutor said. “It’s as bad as all the other things because it decieves you.” *poor sod* I thought of him, this adult, unable to see the shining light of hope. *I hope I never get so jaded*
Not sure how I’ve done it but I’m still not. I still see hope as a shining thing. Possibility. Light! Like the fox and the grapes I’ll soon be able to convince myself I didn’t want this job anyway. But after my experience with my old school house year, I have that old wound open – the desire to be accepted – and today’s news is a wee bit of salt in it.
It’ll be better tomorrow. Or the next day. And I have a feeling I’ll get to say “Thank God I wasn’t tied up in that show or I would never have been able to do this wonderful piece of work…” But you never ever know. It’s just down to chance.
The lockup in Camden now has a lock on it that will most likely withstand nuclear attack. It cost £360. It’s integral to the door and Mister PissyPiss will have to ram-raid us to get in, which he can’t do if his car isn’t working.
Why did I replace the lock? Because the same fucker got in again. I suspected they would though. Mister PissyPiss. I was reasonably careful about what I put in there because of him. And I set a trap for him.
Once again he absolutely trashed it in feverish and haphazard search for GOLD.
I couldn’t assess what had been taken until the cops had dusted it all for prints. Last time, Mel and I spent a day resetting it and making it nice, and even though we isolated all the handled things and handled them only with gloves they refused to come. This time we had to leave it. It had been screwed shut anyway by a concerned neighbour who found it open.
When I discovered it with the bolt cut again I just walked away. I didn’t want to think about what had been taken. It was with a heavy heart that I went back today to find out.
My top hats were in there. One of the fly heads. The costume. The items with sentimental value… All there.
They literally took nothing that I cared about. Phew.
What did they take? Some old dead laptops. Some old dead consoles. Two television sets, one with all wires and remote worth about £40 – £60 on eBay if you’re patient, one that I had picked up off Tite Street with no wires or remote but for an investment of about £30 you would yield about £180. I hadn’t got round to it. The tools that were too shit to take the first time they broke in. An Apollo Tuck folding bike with two flat tyres and no seat. For an investment of between £30 and £80 and quite a lot of time you could yield about £120 – £150. A couple of figurines just over the edge of being crap. And I think they took Staffordshire Prince Albert, a lovely bit of set dressing but you’d struggle to get a tenner. And parian Victoria the same. These were my “later” projects, or they were set dressing. They were things where the work of selling them only just balanced the profit.
Of course they pissed on some of what they couldn’t carry. This guy has likely constructed reasons to hate me so he can justify his hateful behaviour. He didn’t have enough discernment to piss on anything valuable, and didn’t have enough piss to do much damage. Just a faint whiff in some of the old sheets, now thrown away. Whoever nailed it shut forgot about a pigeon that was in there, so there was a dead pigeon by the door but even the necrosis was not too smelly.
And they fell into my cunning trap…
A long time ago when I had the Audi, I filled a green petrol can with diesel to keep in the back in case of emergency. I never used it and I was aware of the danger, as green is for petrol. I put that can right by the door in the lockup where it couldn’t be missed and for good measure I wrote “Petrol” on the side of it with a sharpie. “They might break in again,” I rationalised. “If they do, maybe they’ve got a car…”
Chances are they don’t have a car. But if they do I’ve given them every chance of pouring diesel into the petrol engine.
Intriguingly there were still a few things stealthily in there with real cash value. They passed them through their hands. They didn’t know. I’ve rescued them now.
What a fucker. I hope they find him just because of the piss. If it was merely theft I might be able to marshal my compassion, check my privilege and accept that he was probably desperate even if it was an addiction that had got him there. But he pissed on my stuff out of spite, and a pigeon died because of him. So I hope he sold that diesel to a gang leader with anger issues who then put the stuff into a Maserati and now they’re misfiring and refusing to start, and they are angry and have come looking for Mister Pissypiss. “Try pissing when I’m done with you!”
It’s not set back. I haven’t the energy I had in November to clear up after some total wazzock does that. We made it so nice… What a goitre.
AlBarclay 