Author: albarclay

We slept over twelve hours last night and when I woke up I was still sleepy. My voice was recovered but I just wanted down. Nevertheless there’s plenty of island left to share with Lou, and only a limited amount of time. We tried to catch the light.

We went to Grève de Lecq barracks. I wanted to show Lou where we had been with the residency. It’s a powerful part of the island and strong to share. The sounds of the waves in the bay. The power of the wind up the headlands. There’s nature there. It was a strong headquarters for the residency.

Lou and I walked on the beach where I swam every day. I was very struck by how much it resonated with her.

It feels like she understands the beauty of this island, and can see the wild beauty that has always been here through all the crowds of oblivious moneyhumans. It’s a relief. I see potential here, and beauty. If only I had property here. Mum and my uncle sold my grandparents house, and I was always told that it would pass on to me through my uncle’s flat. Turns out that wasn’t the case. Poor Peter died, and who knows what happened to the flat.

Anyway. Right now we have a lovely rental for the duration of the show. I just wish I still had a foothold here as I’m seriously thinking of returning and there’s nothing and property is very expensive…

Lou and I went to Bouley Bay. I have had my eye on the derelict hotel there ever since I reconnected with the island. I love it there. As we walked past Mad Mary’s – (the eccentric tea shack)- we found a half stunned buzzard with what seemed to be a broken wing. Something had happened to it, clearly. It was gallumphing around, and not avoiding us even though we were unpleasantly close and it was bushed in with loads of brambles. Something was clearly wrong.

I didn’t want to get too close to it as picking it up would involve having a chunk taken out of my fingers without gloves. I love and slightly understand birds of prey but I’m not going to pick one up like a pigeon. I called the JSPCA. I got hold of Steve. He’s new on the job. But his job is animal rescue. The JSPCA is underfunded.

Steve showed up. He had big fat gloves and a bird carrier. He went in from the front, and I came round the back so the easy walking escape route wasn’t on the cards for our buzzard friend.

When we all got too close, the buzzard just suddenly thought “fuck this” and flew away.

I had been convinced it had a bad wing. Clearly it had just been stunned by a near miss from a car or something. Steve was like “The majority of bird calls we get, once we get close they fly off. Often they just like to sit there in weird places and look at you until they get too close.”

Steve was brilliant. I’m thrilled we were wrong about the bird. Most people in Jersey don’t give a fuck about animals so come on you non-Jersey legends: help pay Steve for the extent to which he massively cared for that bird when he thought it was injured, and the extent to which he will massively care for genuinely hurt animals he is called to as time goes by.

There goes my little fantasy of saving a buzzard. But I’m so glad it was basically just a bit stunned and hoping it could chill out without somebody trying to bundle it into a basket and fix it.

Donation link to the JSPCA here. I’m gonna help pay Steve’s wage with a donation of my own. But Steve is a great big healthy lad and he loves animals, and he was with me on my pointless call less than half an hour after I first contacted him.

Finally a day here when the good ship Jersey is not sailing through a storm. Grey skies and cold, but being outside was tolerable. Lou and I went up to St Clement to visit mum and her parents. Somebody has left little poppy crosses on their grave, and it’s pretty well maintained. I introduced Lou to them.

The church was open and being dressed up for Christmas. I told them I was visiting my grandparents and mother and was asked their name. “Oh yes, my husband knew your grandfather very well.” This small island…

We parked a moment at the gateway to Les Silleries, the land I grew up on. I haven’t plucked up the courage to go down the driveway. Sometimes it’s nice to just remember how things were.

We went to Gorey, which hasn’t changed since the seventies apart from the fact that if you ask for a flat white you get a coffee. We looked at boats, and the huge squat threatening fortification of Mont Orgueil.

Then we shot over to St Aubin for lunch and then hopped to St Brelade. Lou’s parents remembered staying at the St Brelade Bay Hotel a long long time ago. They think she might have come with them as a little girl. We had a hot chocolate in the bar, sitting on a huge comfy sofa and listening to local ladies dish the dirt on each other’s husbands in a little scandalous huddle by the window.

Up the hill from the hotel is a floodlit church. Lou was immediately drawn to it, so we ventured up to St Brelade parish church and her instinct proved excellent. There’s a fisherman’s chapel up there, reasonably recently excavated and filled with incredible medieval biblical art. They really look after it. The chapel and the church were both open and unattended and beautiful. I think my godmother used to do something with her donkeys there for the Easter parade. It’s hard to piece things together from the flashes of memory I have. But it was a truly beautiful church, and a place of power here.

A walk on the beach in the dusk and a good meal and I’m sleepy before the show would normally be over. I might end up turning in. Why the hell not? Rock and roll. It’s not even nine yet. Just so long as I am good to go tomorrow evening… Good to have a rest.

It’s the end of a long week. I’m feeling it. I’m at the end of my string. It was just Jack, Estelle, Andy and the shreds and tatters of my voice tonight, with another tricky audience. Sometimes if it’s a big loud room I can vocalkick over them and silence the buggers with the right note, but at the end of 3 two show days I had no kick left and precious little upper register. I’m tired. We are all tired. It’s a good tired but it’s a tired tired. Undeniably tired tired. It’s always an onslaught doing the first week of this. Maybe more so considering we are coming out of a period of “this is impossible” and very possibly going back into something shitty. There’s some messy rhetoric going on right now. I have a feeling that before long we will see everybody talking to one another in capital letters again.

I’m writing this sitting in front of the woodburner. Jack and I are winding down in front of “Inside the World’s Toughest Prisons”. We’ve become slightly obsessed with Raphael the presenter. He’s our best mate. It’s a Netflix series, but counterintuitively you mustn’t watch the first season. Just click into season two when our man Raphael took over as presenter. Not to denigrate the much less weighty Irishman who did season one. He just didn’t have the je ne sais quoi to make it interesting for us.

We sit following our high energy audience corraling show, and we watch this empathetic hardened human getting stuck in to unbelievably nasty situations. It puts our various show specific woes into sharp relief. We can remember that we are just jokers telling a story and no matter what the boozed up accountant twit did it’s nothing compared to what he’s having to put up with in the Ukraine. Or Belize. Even Raphael isn’t sleeping in these prisons… But he at least gets them and knows how to earn a degree of respect from the prisoners.

Lou is here! She’s absolutely knackered though. She’s gone to bed. I’ll be there before long but had way too much adrenaline coursing through my system for an easy sleep and it’s early for me. But I get to hang out with her on my day off and show her the island. Apparently it won’t be pouring with rain or blowing horizontal ice tomorrow. I picked her up from the airport and we went to El Tico between shows. There’s the advantage to the huge gap between shows! We just have to activate our time more. I wouldn’t have covered so much ground today if Lou hadn’t been arriving. Frankly I’m likely to be more active than I would normally be tomorrow because I want to share Jersey. It’s still a novelty, being here, and doubly so being here with her.

Sleep is calling. A shower first as I stink. And then sleep. Oh sweet sweet joyful joyful sleep. Soon I think it’ll be possible.

Another joyful if extremely busy day of shows. The schedule has always been pretty full on for us, but this one is even more so. Friday Saturday Sunday matinees, and early matinees too. Previous years with two show days, the first show hasn’t been until like 3pm so we get to recover in the morning and then just do two shows back to back almost like its one long show. This year we have just enough time to lose the warm before we have to warm up again. It means we are on for very long days too in terms of hours. We get there in the morning. We are there until late. Added to which, the house opens a full hour before we start the show. We used to open it as late as we humanly could and smoke the place just before they wandered in. In this venue, we will have spent a full 24 hour day of our lives waiting backstage in a little dark improvised cupboard type hiding place by the end of the run. Still, we won’t have to clunge blocked loos with broom handles just before the show while in costume, there won’t be daily dogshit in our dressing room, nobody will be shouting “when the saints come marching in” through a traffic cone just outside the window during the tender moments… Carol has always had strangenesses, and they have never stopped us from absolutely loving it. I’m loving the team this year once more. It’s a joy. It’s such a good team. I’ll tell you about them one day but I keep forgetting to ask for permission until too late and I don’t like writing about people until I’ve cleared it, as most of you understand by now.

Anyway, Jack and I hung out in the space again between shows. He watched the footy. And I can say what I like about him. There he is. Such a fine figure of manliness. Look on him.

I sat before the show as he watched the footy. I consumed a plastic spaghetti from Marks and Sparks, despite all the sexy food happening nearby. We don’t get show food unless there are fucktons of no-shows as its not on platters so they can’t plate us leftovers. Surprisingly that’s totally ok by me. In previous years I’ve been bored of turkey by now anyway. I would end up shunning leftovers and stopping my bicycle at the burger van on Chelsea Bridge… I never got bored of Natalie’s Pavlova when it was available, but we aren’t having it this year, and leftovers aren’t in the game because of Covid. As a result, I haven’t tried her figgy pudding. I probably never will, but I expect it’s good as Natalie really understands dessert… But I’m not gonna want Turkey every day of December. Occasionally, when loads of people don’t show up, yes. Otherwise nah…

I’m loving Carol this year. I’m loving this group and finding out about this audience. The Jersey audience is wide. They are surprisingly game. They get stuck in. Jack and I can safely say by now that there’s very little that hasn’t been thrown at us before. We let it flow as much as we can. We follow the river, trusting that we know the material well enough to hit back into the story. We give the drunkies their rein, and then snatch it back. There’s astonishing complacency in these people, and literally frightening entitlement. But they are mostly kind at heart. They are just … looking in the wrong direction. This is a good story to tell in this island. A man who followed money too far and forgot his humanity… I just hope certain members of our audience so far see the very obvious comparison between themselves and the humbugging miser they feel safe from..

It’s a two show day. We are on the office Christmas party circuit right now. They really know how to drink on this island. I’m sitting writing from Scrooge’s chair in between shows. It’s cold. But before long this room will be full of extremely merry people and Jack and I will be stretching the bounds of our energy to keep them from being sick onto each other.

Scrooge picks on an alcoholic in every show. I try to make sure everybody in the audience knows their name by the end of proceedings. It’s usually pretty easy to find someone, and in Jersey it’s even easier.

Last night it was Vicky. She was an easy pick. She had the day off the next day and it was her stated intention to get aa drunk as possible. Jack and I went home quickly after work last night. Vicky and her party stayed in the space getting more and more incomprehensible until the bar manager called time on them because one of them almost knocked over all the clean glasses on the way to the loo.

This morning, just before the matinee Jack suddenly noticed that our little joke puffin had been taken out of its belljar and replaced with a wine cooler. It’s not show crucial by any means. We like to have something ridiculous that Scrooge secretly loves. A few years ago it was a creepy stuffed partridge. This year it’s Oscar the Puffin. Anybody who grew up on his island and is similar to me in age will remember how the local ITV kids presenters had a toy puffin called Oscar. You could write and ask it to wink for you. Scrooge has it in a belljar. We can reference it in the show and then reincorporate and it makes another nice little moment. But it also calls attention to it. It brings it into the game.

Somebody drunkstole Oscar the Puffin last night. It was probably Vicky.

Jack and I became criminal investigators. “The belljar is fragile and unwieldy. The puffin was replaced with a wine cooler. The culprit is likely to have had accomplices in order to help with the switch. Also it stands to reason that the wine cooler was from the same table as the culprit, implying that the guilty party was drinking white wine or rosé – something requiring a cooler. They would have waited until most people were gone before attempting such a bold maneuver…” It was probably Vicky.

We were slightly spun out before the show as it felt like a safety thing and we started worrying about the security of our other props going forward. Was it malice, or just drunkenness? We worried for a short while. We sent an email. It was probably Vicky.

By the time the show was over, we had a deluge of emails from audience members. “We saw a certain merry group doing selfies with the puffin.” “We saw Goody Proctor doing witchcraft with the puffin.” “The puffin thieves were sitting in the chairs located exactly to the left as you come in.” “We know the name of the company the puffin thieves work for.” We knew everything about the puffin’s last few hours. This small island. You can’t even get drunk and kidnap a toy puffin without everybody dobbing you in. It was probably Vicky.

The puffin was guiltily returned to the car park during the matinee, with a foot broken off. Probably by Vicky. We found it in time for this evening’s show. Nothing lost but one show worth of gags and a bit of superglue. More flesh for the Scrooge’s puffin thing. We even contacted ITV Jersey and discovered that the original Oscar the Puffin still exists and is in the kitchen there.

It’s not gonna make us glue him to the set like they had to do in Punchdrunk.

I’ve been playing a game on my phone while we have been bedding in this show. It’s called “Bury me my love”. The phrase is one of great affection. I love you. I want you to outlive me.

It’s a game played out through fake text messages that come to your phone. The premise is that your Syrian wife Nour is leaving you in wartorn Homs in order to try to escape to the UK. She’s brought plenty of battery packs and has cashed in the life savings. She asks for advice and help and it tries to play out in an approximation of real time while you try to continue your life in Homs.

It’s written by a woman who made that journey, from Homs to London, and then spoke with many others with similar journeys. I first downloaded it a few years ago, and happily hit on a very optimistic ending on my first playthrough. I think it’s possible to end it badly…

I figured I was fortunate. Out of many possible endings it felt like a good one. I didn’t play through again until recently, when enough time has passed that I’ve forgotten the first playthrough. It doesn’t feel like a game made for entertainment, even though it is extremely compelling. It feels more like a game and an education simultaneously. The top review on Google after a quick search is snarkily written by some 24 year old called Oliver Roderick. It totally misses the point. Send him back to Fortnite and employ somebody with a backbone to review your games, switchplayer.

But yeah, so. First time I played it we got through fine, and she got off the bus somewhere in the suburbs of London and she seemed happy and felt safe and it all kind of worked. This time I’m deliberately giving her slightly sketchy advice, but nevertheless she’s made it as far as Lesbos by the skin of her teeth and thanks to the coastguard. It’s such a weird game. I like it because I suspect it is helping me deepen my understanding of something way out of my experience. Also there’s just something geeky and cute in the way it is written and in the way the characters communicate. Unlike poor soul-free computer game reviewer Oliver Roderick, I find it moving at times, and relatable. But also unlike him, I have had real relationships with real hew-mans.

It’s more of an interactive fiction than a game, sure. Your responses are limited. But I find it effective. Just before the show this evening I got a garbled call for help from Nour, with a GPS pin. My character tried to call the coastguard.

It’s worked out okay. She’s in Lesbos now. Meanwhile I was pretending to be Scrooge and dancing around like a tit.

It’s just midnight and I’m already in bed with a chamomile tea. Nour is asleep in the camp in Lesbos, Jack is asleep in his room over the corridor. Lou will be here on Sunday. I’m only just processing that for the next three days we have two shows and I’m in at half ten in the morning. I’ll be asleep shortly and having happy dreamtime. Humbug. Night night.

I’ve been trying to organise my life here around this very much all consuming show. I’ve got a spot of corporate training that I’m supposed to have helped with on zoom but it’s constantly having to be delayed. Good to be busy. But now we are open I want to make sure that dear dear old Carol doesn’t become the only thing. Jack and I are both obsessive enough that we habitually tweak as we go, throughout every run. This moment, that moment. Adjust. Sharpen…

We had the local Jersey papers in tonight. The Jersey Evening Post… My grandparents took it daily. I wish they’d been in tonight. Grandma would have been a nightmare of an audience member for us. But I would have been glad to make her proud in the context of this island…

It’s alright here. I’ve met a few people who could be friends. I’m slow with that sort of thing though… I’m still considering shifting back this way – to this island full of memories and ghosts. And this experience is making it possible.

The audience has been delightful so far, and it feels like an atmosphere I understand. There’s not much culture here right now so I’d want to come prepared to get stuck in to making things. We had the Jersey Arthouse in today, where I did that residency at the end of summer. They hadn’t made the connection that it was me. They are good people making interesting things on this island and they got stuck in. “Art materials!” they begged for, from an uncharitable Ebenezer at the start.

Let’s see what the local papers do. It’s an important one to a large extent. The Jersey Evening Post is the only Jersey Specific paper, and this place is far enough removed from the mainland that it is needed. There’s all sorts of stuff going on about fishing rights and storms and so forth. The weather has been terrible for the last few days, so the shelves in Waitrose were largely empty. If you subscribe to the JEP you at least know whether or not the boats are making it over. It’s a paper that has a good readership and gives news that no other uk papers are even really thinking about unless it suits them. If the JEP are positive we should sell the rest of the run. And much as I try to hold to the idea that theatre reviews are just one person’s opinion, I really hope that this good show is understood by this local paper, as there are ghosts here watching closely.

Uncle Peter. Peggy and Os. Mum…

Mother Mim, mum’s headmistress and her religious adviser. I would like to have told her about my Camino. Maybe, just maybe she’s still alive… I should look into that.

Anyway. We did a press night. And now I’m off to bed. And I took no photos as usual. Here’s some chains.

First night is done. An interesting bunch in the house. Three old bachelors in pride of place in the audience, connected to the venue. Maybe they own it? They were trying to work out how to balance the fact that this is low theatre and high theatre at the same time. Deliberate worldbreaks from them in the show and then pointed slightly snarky double meaning talk after until thankfully it turned out that one of them was genuinely friends with my uncle. They enjoyed it. Just … some people are worried about being seen to have fun if it’s not highbrow. Nobody who invests stock in being thought of as clever wants to be seen to enjoy something populist. And we are deliberately pitching our cleverballs low. The Dickens museum gave their seal of approval some years ago, as they understood that despite the craziness we are adhering very closely to the text. People who don’t know very much can sometimes worry that we haven’t done the work.

It was raucous, as ever. We are presiding over a party. This was a good, slightly gobby audience. This show was built in the North. It is MADE for people who don’t go to theatre very often if at all. You will be incorporated if we can do it. Honestly, the bulk of the lovely Jersey audience were there to have fun and as they did. The only weirdness came from those “special” people, and thankfully they knew my poor deceased uncle and allowed themselves to reframe. We had Spanish, Italian, Polish… We were full and it was clear. It landed. Phew. They mostly stayed after the show, as we always hope they will. We got to talk to them. There were some brilliant jokers. I got roundly hauled out for my scraggly beard.

And so. We are open. The days will start to shift. Until now I’ve been rehearsing in the day. Once we’ve ironed out the tech and details, it’ll be down to Jack and I to essentially monitor ourselves, tweak and rework moments as needed, and build towards the best version of this show that we can build towards for this lovely island. Before long we will get our days back and I can BE here.

Meantime I’m winding down. All that adrenaline. It’s half twelve and it feels like early evening. I’ll likely get used to it again before long. And I’m so happy to be back in performance LIVE. Fuck. About time. Oh hell. Truly about time. Here we go… Ebenezer Scrooge.

Here’s a rehearsal shot. I’m knackered.

Tech.

There’s more tech than we are used to.

This Christmas Carol has always been kinda low-fi, but it has also always responded to the people who are involved in making it. This year we have Adam as producer and director, and he’s a man who really knows his lights. I think he must own the little rig we have. Previous years have brought us the occasional birdie, maybe a fresnel, creative use of the house lights from time to time… Since we were at The Arts we haven’t had a rig even close to this one, and I can’t remember having the sort of lighting when I am comfortingly blinded and thus know that I’m in HD for the audience. It’s a lovely thing to have. But it means that the technical rehearsal is inevitably going to be long. There are things to plot. “LX is just plotting” is a familiar phrase for tech for big venues but I think this is the first time I’ve heard it for Carol.

We have built the show into a little outbuilding of L’Auberge du Nord. The northern inn. It’s up on the spine of the island, and they’ve been brilliant accommodating something perhaps quite unusual for the island. The Opera House has been shut down for two years. This place hasn’t had much theatre recently, and theatre in unusual spaces? Even less. They have a thriving am-dram scene, but this show has a high ticket price and doesn’t have your nephew in it. I reckon the remaining unsold tickets will go once we open. We sold well at the start but have slowed. By now everyone on the island knows somebody who is going in the first week. They’re waiting to hear it’s good and then there’ll be a feeding frenzy on the matinees.

The staff at the auberge practiced a service today. With Covid we aren’t using sharing platters. Everybody is plated up individually. It’s both simpler and more complicated. I think it’ll work well. It’s hard to tell until we’ve done it. I’m just going to let it pan out though because I’m just an actor in this when it comes down to it. All I can do is my bit and I know it works.

Sometimes in the past I’ve been involved in processes where people have pretended to be audience members so we can “practice” doing immersive theatre with them. I have never experienced anybody in those exercises who has ever behaved like real audience members. We can’t practice for the Jersey audience. All we can do is dress it, tech it and be ready.

It feels like we are ready. I’m curious. I honestly think that the reception and the nature of the audience we get will inform any decision I have pending about moving back here or not. Right now it’s just an idea I’m dandling with. If there’s stuff to be made and an audience for it … Game on.

A delightful day of nothing very much at all. Jack and I eventually left the house. The weather momentarily relented, showing us shafts of sun through dark clouds and hard wind. We jumped in the car and drove west to Corbière, that windswept lighthouse on the west coast of the island, banked into dramatic rocks and tides, pointing towards the sunset.

The wind was on the attack, blowing thick spume across the causeway. These huge sharp rocks that push up from the sea bed – the granite that makes up so many of the houses here – you need to go to edges to really see how this little island is just thrust up from the sea – just a huge protruding rock. We have seeded it with buildings while the wind seeded it with life. Strange things find shelter here and grow. Max and I found a dead egret in the rocks here once. If it had lived a bit longer, and a companion had blown here, we would have egrets. As it is we still have lots of strange fauna, lots of unusual flora, dumped here by the wind and the gulf stream.

We had a few hours before the tide shut us off to wander the rocks near Corbière. We crossed to the lighthouse. “The automatic tide siren is broken,” it tells us, and I know how easy it is in Jersey to underestimate the speed of the tide. Not wanting to have to spend the night trying to break into one of the lighthouse sheds as the sea ripped around us, we came back to the landward side of the causeway reasonably quickly. “Actors playing Scrooge and Marley in Jersey Christmas Carol forced to spend a night in the lighthouse,” is not the first coverage I want to see in the Jersey Evening Post. We returned home enervated from the buffeting wind and ready to cook a communal meal.

This is the last evening we will get that isn’t a Monday, until Christmas. Work is about to switch on hard. I’m so glad of it too. It’s what I signed up for, all those years ago when I auditioned for drama school. Hard work doing pretendy things. I slammed a jacket on and recorded a self tape on the return from the lighthouse. Scrooge doesn’t care about grooming so I am looking a little wilder than the part I was reading for. Let’s see where it falls.

This evening we made a roast. Chicken with most of the trimmings. Lots of veg. We lit the woodburner again. And we cosied up together, Jack and I, in the IKEA flat. It’s always been a good working and playing relationship, the two of us. We have another month and we are about to hit the run, when the nature of the day changes.

Tech tomorrow. Then we open on Tuesday. It’s not midnight yet and I’m in bed. Goodnight.