This is the second time that many of us have ever met. We did Henry V. We all had nothing but 3 line cues with no character attribution, and the lines our characters spoke. No idea how long or short inbetween them all.
I’m gonna put it right up high on the list of fucking terrifying things I’ve done for the craft of acting, a little bit under the first night improvising The Odyssey in Blackwell’s. We have to challenge ourselves. We did that and actually I think I’m gonna make good friends through this. A wide age range, and I should add that M from my pissed off blog the other night made lots of sense in his context. We have costume, we can be a bit wacky and it’ll land.
We are working alongside re-enactors and massive history enthusiasts. We get to put this show on together as part of a delightfully geeky happening. And now we have done it once we can relax into the festival a bit.
Right now I’m under my new sleeping bag on my new air mattress in my new tent. It’s almost 2am. The show went up late and then we inevitably de-adrenalised. I’ve only just finished pumping my mattress… Didn’t have the headspace to do it before the show. I’m knackered and the sun is gonna cook me out of this tent shortly after dawn. The next few days will be much more relaxing than I have budgeted for. We don’t have another show until Sunday. All my energy has been pointing to opening this. Now we are open I can chill.
Bren guns, potatoes, Alfred the Great. Rationing, Thatcher, Offa. We walk in our Elizabethan costumes past WW2 reenactors and busy men and women dressed in the smocks of medieval serfs. This is gonna be a strange few days now we are open. I’ll get my few hours sleep now while I can and find out about the programme tomorrow morning, now the learn is out the way.
An unexpected visitor. In my fantasy world, this evening would have been to do with pulling my lines into place with cues and making sure my packing stuff is packed. Not so. Oh lord, am I going to be ready tomorrow? It’s like being on set, all this learning in isolation.
I went to an outdoor shop in Camden and bought the lot. My old festival stuff is all fucked. But I’ve been using it for over 15 years. A five year gap where I weirdly wasn’t getting the festival jobs started just as it reached the end of its life. Now again it is happening. I know this so well. I should bring my tarot cards and my outfit for Melisande and The Master, but I’m not sure I can be bothered to add value and for this festival it would probably have to be Marseilles which is flat to read. I could get away with Ryder Waite but it pisses me off. There’s a conversation between artist, reader and querent. All three have a voice but if one voice is too loud it kills the vibe.
Mel is coming round tomorrow morning fresh from landing at Heathrow. She isn’t coming to the festival but I’ll have a jetlagged festival friend to help me emergency pack. This isn’t a wreckhead festival, I need to keep remembering that. I won’t need lifesaving things but I’ll want comfort things.
Mostly I’m going to have to remember my cues and my lines. Sounds easy but I’m expecting some serious moments of brainfry tomorrow.
And John Holt Roberts appeared. He and I have delightfully improvised many a strange situation. I love him through my bones. He was Marley to my Scrooge, before Jack Whitam, before Will Seaward. Musical Marley, and a good heart, but I needed to work tonight. I’m now writing this as fast as I can so I can do an hour of lineblitz before bed as tonight is the last sleep I’ll get before remembering it live without peeking in front of people.
Half a week at a history festival might be a delight, but I’ve got to get the first show out of the way before I can relax.
Multitasking today and I just threw money at one problem to make it go away. Someone will come and take away our old dishwasher and replace it with one that works, next week. We are all perfectly capable of washing up after ourselves but we are also all very busy and distracted a lot of the time and robots do make things easier. Like the one that eats our cat shit.
I’m sure that some investment is going that way, but… so much of the robot industry investment seems to be engaged in stealing and repurposing the work of creatives instead of cutting back on the drudgery of daily life – it makes no sense.
I backed a Kickstarter a while ago for a butter-bot, absolutely based on Rick and Morty with the blessing of the franchise. It is an AI driven desktop robot equipped with existential crisis and the power to pick small things up and carry them to you on demand.
It is the modern day equivalent of the eccentric grandfather’s train set for passing the salt around the table. I am looking forward to it coming just as it will be simultaneously dystopian and hilarious, and it will be using AI in a more creative and practical way than just stealing your voice. There are no tiny people who will be put out of a job by my butter bot. There’ll probably be at least one voice actor not employed, and it will have that flat and dead inflection that we are going to get so used to that maybe we will forget how lucky we were when Fiona was the living voice of Google rather than dead dead dead dead Fionalike.
But… Start with passing the butter. Rather than the hubris of thinking that this vast regurgitation we are encountering – like those images – is doing anything other than providing a footnote about the decline of this civilisation in a book written three thousand years from now about how we trapped ourselves forever on this planet by ignorantly putting all the precious metals and vital resources into things that would draw us a derivative picture of a goblin on a bicycle in thirty seconds.
There’s about to be a generation of people entering the workplace forty percent of which don’t really know how to write having got people from the internet to do all their work via the aggregators they are calling AI. Decline and fall. With all the nuke talk and with measurably moronic narcissists in positions of almost impossible international power it feels like civilization is pushing to the equivalent of the collapse of the Roman Empire. All the markers are in place. I can’t think there’s gonna be anything other than us getting stupider and stupider as a species. I think it has already happened. Who reads books anymore growing up? Now it’s too often just summaries of books, online articles after articles. Generations pass knowledge down through literature.
Yes there are large language models that have been trained on that literature but if you aggregate the individual voices of these incredible teachers we have had, we lose the fact that every one of them had an edge, they all had their perspective, their boundaries. We learn from flaws too. Coleridge was a dope fiend. Wordsworth was a bore. Byron was an arsehole. But they were flawed people making money and pushing their agenda and they cannot be expected to be perfect, none of us can. But this aggregation and the resulting homogeneity – even of prose as we are encountering now. Look at advertising copy, look at social media posts about whatever, anything the algorithm has identified you’re interested in. The copy is all AI, and likely measurable in an exact amount of words. But you can taste AI copy when you start to get a feel for it. Like the voice stuff it lacks life. It just… Isn’t. All the words are in the right order, there are carefully placed deliberate errors. It’s everywhere. I am so bored of it. I’m not making any money out of this, but honestly that’s how this sort of noise is best.
Hopefully I’ll have my little weird programmable butterpassing robot before the collapse of civilisation. Meantime I’ll get off my soap box and go to sleep.
I am not Rick, but the whole adopting adapting and transcending tech thing is admirable in the writing of that show, Rick and Morty. I rarely persist with anything. It gets convoluted at times, it starts badly, it is almost unbearably dark in moments and didn’t the original creator fall into his own trap by turning out to be a baddie? But… God that show is a show for our times. Maybe I’m drawn to animation as I don’t get pissed off when there’s a bad actor. Bojack is another show I consumed utterly.
I thought this cough thing was signed off. Couldn’t quite make sense of how it happened so quickly. It was just retreating momentarily before another advance. I’ve been wheezing all day to the extent that Brian was worried enough about me that he not only bought me but made me a lemsip. It was very comforting, and the paracetamol is a wonderful edge removal device. I’m off to make myself another one as the evening closes in and the manflu tries once more to dominate my thinking.
The cats have been exceptionally good company while I’ve been feeding sorry for myself. They are hot so they don’t want cuddles but they want to stick their faces in your face and generally make cute noises. It can be a healing thing when you feel sorry to have a stupid catface in your mouth. No licking my hair though at 4am, dammit.
I had a hot bath. I’m a glutton for it. Here we are on the hottest day of the year and at noon this idiot has run a bath with nothing but hot right up to the overflow and is topping it up with only enough cold that getting into it won’t flay the skin from his bones. I wanted to sweat out this thrice damned beastie in my bloodstream. This tonsilfucker. It won’t get any further down, I’m fighting it with rest and steam and solid food. Gotta be in a field soon for a few nights. Festival season. Happy memories.
Highlights of the day: a chance to chat to Lou and a tiny walk around the local streets, feeling sorry for myself and tired. The dishwasher is broken so I used that as an excuse (less washing up) to order Burger and Lobster from Burger and Lobster, and have it carried to my door my someone on a bike. Dreams again soon. Much organising to do with the securing of cues etc. Rest now. Festival Al was in younger than this Al. Gonna keep an eye on my endurance and look after myself. Rather than order £150 worth of max strength pills, some buffers and sinks and grounders and a little bag of MD, I’m just gonna get a nice new sleeping bag and a tent, a foldyout table and a wind up lantern. Maybe some coconut milk.
Beautiful weather today. I went for a little wander. Up through South Ken to the park. Round the Serpentine. People are a little pissed off in the city. Everyone is feeling … close to everyone else. But I love the heat. I’m fine cooking. Solstice.
The days will get shorter again from now but the days are so long I’m not gonna be sad yet, and equinox is a long long way away and this is the weather I love. I’ve had the blinds shut in the flat so I don’t cook the cats. They are covered in fur and there’s nothing they can do about it. We naked apes in this flat, we are taking full advantage of being naked.
Once I got back from my excursions I wandered around in my pants for the rest of the day. Fixing or trying to fix appliances. It seems that the dishwasher has finally died. I’m not totally convinced it isn’t a waterflow issue, but the dishwasher we have replaced an old one maybe 6 years ago and was free after Christmas Carol, so, easy come easy go.
Lines lines lines and just a chance to relax. I earmarked this Saturday for this. My vinted haul has started to arrive and if clothes were a thing right now I’d be parading about in expensive looking denim for cheap. I’ll pack all sorts of things for the festival. Once again I’ll wonder why I threw away the wind up lantern. Maybe it’s time to buy a new one. I used to festival every year without fail, usually three or four in a row. This summer looks familiar but different. I’m gonna have to wake up my living in a field instincts again. I do love it, it was a huge part of my summer for about a decade and then COVID slammed out every single programmer that used to lazily pick me knowing they’d get value. I’d have to do all the application work from fresh now to get halfway back to where I was. And more legitimate work is biting at my heels these days. Summer field weeks are a luxury. It won’t stop me bringing my tarot and some costume though. Fuck it, let’s add value. Particularly when I go back to Wilderness in early July, where I was a fixture for a decade, now just there to stage manage a dear friend.
Ah ahhhhh summer. Yes. It’s been a long time coming. I love being too hot, the air not moving, the relentless sun. Finally I’m not too cold. For a week or so perhaps.
“So are you gonna do a Welsh accent for Fluellen,” M asks me. First question. “It’s not important,” I reflexively reply. Because it isn’t. I’ve got text to convey, drive and meaning and purpose within it. I’ve got to try and make a believable person with some words on a page. I will almost certainly sound more Welsh than I do when you usually talk to me. But it can’t be my focus or the work will suffer. “I’m doing a Cornish accent,” he goes on to tell me. And he does. He observably “does” what may or may not be a Cornish accent. “I do a good Welsh too,” he says, and makes some noises. And I got thinking about this whole business of acting.
To my ear, I couldn’t hear his text because he was doing the Cornish accent. He knows what he’s saying but we don’t and we need to. I thought of my instinct when he asked me if I was doing Welsh – to go full taffy and prove I can “do” it. But then I checked myself. A: Because my job is to be an actor. Not to prove I can act. To be it not do it. And B: Because I don’t think of myself as strong in Welsh. So this has to be my standpoint. But I do think of myself as strong in Scottish, for instance, but again there’s huge nuance district to district. Buying a crocodile at a car boot in Carnoustie sounds very different from getting a girl in the gorbels in Glasgow. Welsh can’t be painted with a fat brush either.
A bit later on he was talking about his ADHD and I thought that tracked. Pretty much every actor I know is dealing with a lesser or greater degree of ADHD. But now it’s a big part of your dialogue. I’m not gonna pay for a diagnosis unless it somehow becomes relevant.
Another frequent actor option is narcissism. It’s either all about THIS STUFF AND OOH THIS IS INTERESTING AND WHAT IF I WAS LIKE THIS OR THIS. Or is I AM WONDERFUL, OBSERVE ME, HANG ON MY WORDS YOU SERRIED RANKS. Sure, there are plenty of them, we’ve all worked with them. They do well or they quit. There’s got to be an engine for this shit we do though. It’s not fun enough between the jobs otherwise.
Work smart. Learn your lines neutral but to the depth of reflex. Be alert to your surroundings aka don’t walk into each other and the furniture. Be audible. Target things and make responsive choices live.
This is cue script Shakespeare. It will only fly if we are looking and listening. We have learnt it all in a bubble, but we absolutely have to play it all for and with each other or it’s gonna be a company of actors in fucking hamster balls. “I’m sure you’ve all planned loads but in order to do what you’ve planned then you have to know your cues and your lines,” says one of the group leaders and all my learning from doing work like this for so long is that the less you plan and harder you listen the more you fly and pick everyone up with you. If you know how you’re gonna say it before you say it, it’s dead in your pocket. I don’t want to be Fluellen in a hamsterball derby.
Rant aside it’s been a lovely day. M is old school and is newly at The Factory where he has been quietly pissing me off for ego and coarse acting and academic interpretation long before I realised he is involved in this. It’s a generational thing though and I like him as a person. This job ain’t the Factory either and I can lay some of that down. It is a lot of lovely practitioners with definite actual chops coming together at a history festival to do a cue script rendition of Henry V their way. It’s historical experimentation. It’s a geek out. “Let’s try and do this like they would have done it.” For a load of history buffs and re-enactors. I’m on side. If I end up having to go full taffy to fit it I’ll swallow my pride and run around with a leek.
The original Shakespeare company all had their roles within the unit sorted. You can really track the voices through the plays. We are just a bunch of relative strangers to each other. Perhaps by the end of this we will be friends. But not if I let myself keep being annoyed with M for being coarse. It’s why I’m writing it out here. Getting it out of my system. Few enough people read this that I’m confident it won’t get back to him, and if it does I stand by every word of it and it’s perfectly legit to like someone who annoys you at work.
I’ve got a lot more work to do and not a very long time to do it. Less blog more sleep.
How the hell did I recover so quickly from my manflu? Not a clue. Miracles.
I heard tell, once, of a man who survived manflu. Perhaps if I hold hard I too could see this through. It started with the hurtythroat, oh my dear children. I suspected at the time that it might be something beginning, but not the manflu. Blithely I went about my business, visiting the apothecary who told me it was a minor infection and I should monitor it. But nay, for verily it is the manflu come upon me like a judgement in my manliness. It may unman me? Oh hell oh spite.
The hurtythroat, she is still of the ow. The bones? They do the ache now for verily the snot runneth from the nose and the not one but two eyes leak oh how they leak. And behold, I cough. I hack like writers of Daily Mail culture. I splutter as with the pollitick people as they starmer and bugger and flap. I pull deep into my body and lo! hideous vile things come into the world that were not there before, warped and strange, the exclamations of the trumpet, fit only to be spat at the roadside.
This morning is the first morning that Tessy didn’t frolic upon my head at 4am. I think she must have sensed my need for sleep and allowed it. Bless her.
I am back in London. The boats play dance music upon the Thames. I’m running a hot hot bath to try and sweat and steam this fucker from me. I’ve been learning Shakespeare for days and it isn’t in yet and it’s hard in isolation. And now this illness is upon me like the Spartans. It pulleth my resolve, niggleth at my throat, tickleth my tonsils. I am looking longingly at my sequestered antibiotics, but not yet, not yet, they are only for terrible infections, this is manflu. Nothing more. This is what my tonsils are for, to catch things like this high.
I will weather this storm of mild discomfort, much as every woman I know weathers something worse once a month for decades. And I will emerge strong and ready for Shakespeare in a field. Oh yes.
Oh God and I’ve got to get up and do a self tape before nine tomorrow. Just as well I’m pretty much ready for bed. Grumble.
“How on earth do you learn all those lines,” the people ask. “Oh it’s my job,” I casually say. Like it’s easy.
Days and days of homework. I’ve been learning prose and verse right now. Thought reconstruction and tennis ball. Until we know our lines and know them know them we cannot be free. It’s only a short job but that doesn’t matter, you need them secure short or long.
I’ve been learning those lines and also sorting out my digital shop front as best I can. There’s some good things coming. Gotta be looking reasonable. My work in The Lady got commuted to “uncredited”on IMDB so I’ve submitted to have that changed. A week in Thailand, and I know the guy who submitted the incorrect edit. He just did it to spite me. Duncan. The fabulous imagination-free man.
I’ve also added a placeholder bio. I didn’t think it would get accepted so wrote my education and family history but didn’t get into my career. IMDB is a database so once I’ve managed to get my credits up then it’ll be golden. A friend of mine saw a documentary the other day where I was reading from the Koran. I remember it, it was one day of my life, no follow up. She’s gonna see if she can find the link, because there is so much stuff I’ve done now that is lost to me, forgotten. Even the jobs that inspire people were only a day or so here or there. I’ve been writing on the wind for so long.
I literally just had a message about Deep Cover. There’s a case in point, I guess. A lovely job, two days of my life, and it’ll pay back in notice.
I’m trying to shift again. With the agent support and some good credits in post it is time to make sure that the momentum I lost resting on my laurels after Bright Young Things doesn’t become a repeat performance. I fucking love my work and I’m good at it. Just let me do it more now please. Just let me do it more.
Meanwhile I went to Suriya the local sit down Thai, and asked the chef for a 3 chilli red curry. They are really really cagey about making their food even slightly hot. 3 chilli and it was still pretty mild (and this is the language of chilli I learnt from the chef). Next time I’ll get the duck which is bulked up with lychee and pineapple. And I’ll ask for 4 chilli which the chef seems to think of as maximum. He’ll probably only give me 2 and it’ll be like pudding. I think they have had too many people complain about heat.
This time a year ago I started in Paris. God what a long long time since then. This has been an excellent year.
There’s a lot of space here, energetically, by the sea. Things can be sent out. There’s light and big sky. I grew up with this. I know and love it.
My obligation here is mostly to Tessy. If she has her regularity and company then all I have to do is not drink in the flat and not set fire to everything by mistake.
The issue is really around Tessy’s regularity. Last night I went to Plateau and had a few glasses of their orange wine. I sat outside with the falling sun. At this time of year it is perfect and if you sit there at sunset you’ll know how I ended up ordering two glasses. But it meant I got home a little squiffy. She has a routine with me, it seems.
At 3am she likes to come in and use my head as a jumping off point to get on top of the clothes rails. Then at 4.30am she likes to come and sit by my face. She will gently rub her hairy bum in my face until I roll over, and then she will poke me in the back with a paw. She wants snacks. I’m not gonna give them so early. But you can’t train a cat and we are into the lightest part of the year, which will be her motivator.
It’s a good thing I adore cats, and think of them as psychopomps. I’m happy she is comfortable to push me around, it means there probably isn’t anything very wrong with me at the moment. Even if my throat is fucking killing me. I think I rolled onto my back and snored all night last night until Tessy woke me at 3. I had an early bed so that’s hours of dry snoring. My throat feels angry, generally. I remember dad had a humidifier by his bed in Switzerland. Altitude and heating, those rooms in St Moritz were dry. And Jesus he could snore. Hopefully it is just snoring. I bought some lemsip just in case.
I’m trying to learn lines at the mo. It’s hard, Shakespeare prose. A new crowd and I want to be easy with it.
It’s not ten yet, but I think I’m just gonna turn in and lie myself in the complicated position I assume when I don’t want to snore. My throat needs a break. It feels bad. And I’ll have to do lots of talking for money over the next month or two. Vocal rest. With this ridiculous floof. I’ve been grooming her this evening as ever. She likes me to really get stuck in with a brush. This sort of floof needs maintenance.
So yeah I’m trying to think about my digital footprint. I hate it hate it hate it. But there’s this dude called me who likes working. And then there are loads of people who don’t know how to find dudes like me. And then there are loads of people who can’t do what the people are looking for but can make themselves visible to the dudes who are looking.
My Spotlight is about 8 years out of date and I have not addressed it cus I hate having to look at that shit but who else is gonna do it? I have lines to learn as ever. But I spoke to my old mate James and he said I have to get the things that are in my control sorted. Sure I could have done it years ago, I could have written my own wiki… I hate that sort of thing so much though. But I’m finally learning that you have to play the game to have your scores logged. I schooled with a bunch of plugs. All I knew was that I wasn’t gonna be them or care about the them things.
Lou and I went to The Reading Room, which is a new cafe experience type thing with bright red seats down the coast from hers. She drove us there in her new car. Then she asked me not to pay for parking so she could get the apps set up on her phone. So we sat. I had the photo with the numbers, she tried to get it all working. “Excuse me, I thought I should just mention, isn’t it just the most beautiful view from here whilst you are doing nothing but checking your emails,” said this guy next to us. If he cycles, he wears lycra. He had his little shitty goatee. He triggered me into my class, which Lou hates. “Oh, hello mate.” Apparently my volume went up. “It’s great you’ve pointed out this lovely view, thanks how thoughtful of you. Lou here is paying for parking and has a brand new car and has to download an app to park here.” Lou has observed that he’s got cases with him, he’s a tourist. “i live just up there,” she points. She strangely asks me to bring my volume down, which is a break as I’m happy to be high status with this idiot and a united front might have been better but fuck it, he’s an idiot to both of us for different reasons. For Lou he’s an idiot because he’s wrong, for me he’s an idiot because he thinks it’s ok to be passive aggressive like that. It’s probably for the best that she commented on my volume as I would almost certainly have torn him up into tiny tiny little pieces. I might well have hardpatronised him. He had nothing to offer. It’s good that Lou keeps me under control when it comes to things like that. I was inches away from : “Thank you for expressing this, can we both just dig into where this comes from, that you think it’s legitimate to be extremely passive aggressive to strangers, based on a misunderstanding of what they’re doing that lines up with your cognitive bias. What else do you approximate in your life?”
His date came back from the loo. He started blithering on about all the devices he had and then fucking Star Wars – he’s ten years older than me. I dunno … if you are going to police other people socially, you need to be able to do social properly, ya? He thought he was being clever and it came from an observable self importance and then his conversation was bullshit. I hope his date overlooks it all and I’m glad we didn’t humiliate him after she came back. What a twat. But The Reading Room is my new favourite Brighton coffee, despite mister twittybeardface. And he’s just a lycra-lout out of uniform. I’d lay money that he had a skin suit and helmet in those bags, and some kind of bicycle locked very correctly up the road somewhere with an industry standard lock that he wants to tell you about. What a twat. Sorry if you’re a lycra-lout. But God.
AlBarclay 