Author: albarclay

The two halves of today could not have been more different.

Morning found me in The City. I’ve found a lovely group of people and I am thoroughly enjoying the thing I’m involved in, and learning as I go. There’s so much about The East India Company that I wasn’t aware of, and the dire times in this country, just out of the plague. Elizabeth’s England – mostly we think of it through Shakespeare, but even then we forget the stakes. Her court was a brutal place – you could get killed pretty easily if you weren’t paying attention. Executions were common. Many of the most powerful nobles and her lovers got the chop. She resembled her dad in that way. And yet she was canny enough to rebuild, with careful choice of who she invested in and why. Plague was terrible for us, and we were falling behind on the world stage. The decisions she made indirectly led to the vast and awful empire. Pillaging on a global scale, but generations of economic security for the few who were here and doing well.

A thoughtful day in the sun, largely. The city is quiet on weekends and we were working on site. Occasional shouty window people, but this show is part storytelling part walking tour. It’s a good frame and now I see it from the inside I can see that it fits together nicely.

I love meeting younger actors too, as Lou will attest. I enjoy and remember the possibilities. What will these people make? Where will this strange passion take them. It is always the way that people come in and out of our working life. I’m happy these people have come in, and on and off this might provide joy for the next three years, when I’m not swept up in something out of town. Multiple actors in each role so it is easier to be flexible – the company understand the pressures of being artistic freelance, and the need to be available for that mystery last minute replacement thing that changes everything…

As soon as the clock struck six I got into my car and drove to Scala in Kings Cross, where I put on a rubber inflatable unicorn costume and danced like a maniac for hours. I was absolutely drenched in sweat after about thirty minutes and by the time I got home I had no moisture left. Retro Italian House music. I’ve done it before. They want us back. Thankfully I do it with a friend and we have found a pattern where we don’t get too knackered. But I am pissed off with myself for forgetting a spare t-shirt or two. Next time. I’m absolutely shattered. Running a bath.

Into rehearsal for this thing in the City of London and now I’ve met the people and understood the thinking I’m considerably more upbeat about it. Learning slightly odd lines in isolation is tough, and maybe I’ve been spoiled – a lot of my last minute learns recently have been Shakespeare. He’s just so easy to learn once you get under the skin of it. You have the verse to help, and there’s an unerring writer’s instinct in those long texts that is pretty much universal and gives the lie to the “committee” theory. The thoughts connect to one another. There are very few vast logic jumps, of the sort you have to make sense of by the half dozen a page with many axe grinding modern scribes. He wrote people. It really isn’t just a quirk of timing and contacts that caused him to jump to the fore. He’s working on so many levels. He uses the sound of words so well for atmosphere and double meaning. He’s honestly even properly considered the vowel sounds… When I hear modern actors translate his words it is always disappointing. It proves they can’t listen to more than their own intention.

An example? The other night there were loads in a production of Twelfth Night I saw. I didn’t have a notepad but I was largely confused as they rarely were necessary. The one I remember was perhaps the one I saw the reason for the best, so it stuck in my mind when other less logical ones fell away. It’s Orsino. I’ve never played him, don’t really want to, it’s not my part. Still, he has romanticised his own feelings towards Olivia. He’s the guy who says “If music be the food of love, play on”. This is an attractive eligible man who really likes the idea of unrequited love, of pining after someone. He’s romanticised his own lack of clarity about someone who just isn’t into him. He thinks if he loves enough, somehow it’ll change. Rubbish of course, Shakespeare knew it, but incels across the world haven’t caught on and never will. Lucky for him Viola just fucking gets his noise and can cut through the bullshit, plus he’s hot and rich.

He sends Viola to try and persuade Olivia to admit him. She asks: “Say I do speak with her my lord, what then?” (What should I do if I’m allowed to speak to this woman you so desperately adore?)

O, then unfold the passion of my love.
Surprise her with discourse of my dear faith.
It shall become thee well to act my woes.
She will attend it better in thy youth
Than in a nuncio’s of more grave aspect.

Leave aside the fact he’s outsourcing his own eloquence. That’s Orsino all over.

Nuncio’s. A messenger, in Latin. It’s an awkward choice. The actor I watched recently substituted the word “messenger”. “Why would there be such an awkward choice in an otherwise pretty clear instruction?” he maybe asked. Let me try and make sense of it.

Read that passage above, and only speak the vowel sounds. Try and sound longing. If you know iambic pentameter then let yourself aspirate the vowels only on the stressed beat. This is generally a brilliant exercise to find out how your character is feeling anyway, without putting anything on it. Notice how every stressed beat has a long aspirated vowel. “O theeen unfooold thuh paaashuhn oooorv mai laaaahve.” etc (I can’t write phonetics) to “than iiiin a nuuuuncyos oooooorve more graaaaaave aspeeeeect” Now do it again with”messenger” instead of nuncio’s. Try them both, to make them sound fussy and to make them sound longing. Nuncio’s just sounds more longing than messenger. messenger = ééuh. Nuncio’s = uheeoh.

Shakespeare phrases it awkwardly. Because he’s a fucking genius. And Orsino is romanticising himself. So sure he’ll speak Latin randomly from time to time – it’s a romance language – and every one of his stressed vowels will be aspirated if you go with it. And who gives a fuck if a modern audience doesn’t get it, there’s tons they won’t get anyway, this stuff is over 400 years old. Only one in a few thousand modern people will hear “nonce” in nuncio’s enough to derail their comprehension. It’s lazy work. It doesn’t need to be done. If you’re gonna substitute a word, make the fucking vowels work with the substitution. Shakespeare is working on so many more levels than just meaning. I mean “courier” would be better than messenger. The vowels are a bit longer and less fussy. I just pulled that out my arse. These guys had a rehearsal process. But just… don’t be so arrogant and lazy. This stuff is still around because it is stuff.

I haven’t really got space in my head to write this at the moment. Just out the bath, I’ve been running lines in my head but this is buckets of exposition and without a context to stick it to they just don’t hold well. I’m happy to learn my lines in advance when I don’t have to come up with all sorts of logic jumps to make sense of why I have connected one thought to the next or phrased something unusually. But apparently this is an existing show and the last guy couldn’t hold it in his head. I see why. But I’ve been confident with harder learns than this. Most of the corporate stuff I’ve done for The Globe has been equally as hard to learn, and I do that with the appearance of absolute confidence.

Learning comes in surges. You cram it in your head and then wait a bit while it settles. In the gap it is actually helpful to do something totally unconnected. Truth be told, it is useful to do that during as well. The one thing you don’t want to do is accidentally fall into patterns of movement or speech, like crap teachers teach schoolchildren. I find the most helpful thing is to be distracted. But maybe that’s my neurodivergence coming into play. I learn well while driving or doing the dishes. Or invigilating exams, running silent inside my head while watching the room. Things that can’t be predicted in terms of movement. Then you can test if the meaning has been learnt, or just the noise. Until you have the meaning you can always hit blanks. Once you’ve got the thought structure it is impossible to dry.

It’s harder when there’s not much intention – when the character is written to serve an idea and the thoughts are haphazard. But that’s where craft comes into it, and as I said yesterday, if you take the job you do it to the best of your ability or you’re an asshole. I learnt that the hard way doing a terrible play at The Finborough for no money and putting in minimum work. I should never have accepted it in the first place. We learn by doing but that was a messy way to learn and it did some damage.

So I’ve hit brainflood for the night. Tomorrow I’ll have to feel easy and relaxed first thing in the morning. So I’m off to bed and it is only just gone ten. Alarm is set for very early tomorrow so I can cram more with a fresh head. The context of this is that I’m playing the characters on the wrong side of the moral debate in the play, and like so many “villains” they are somewhat one-dimensional, often in scenes with people who are more rounded.

Anyway, all is well. It’s gonna be ace. They’ve already played it a few times and I get the feeling it’s a joyful show. Bedtime for me.

“How on earth do you learn all those lines,” is one of two questions you always get when you say you’re an actor. That and “Should I know you?” to which the answer is always “yes” because that’s how the word “should” works.

I’m honestly not sure at the moment about the first one though. Out of context, learning all these lines is proving sticky at best. The writing is somewhat on the nose, but as a result I kinda suspect that they aren’t precious about exactly how it has been phrased, just as it doesn’t appear as if they have put much thought to that aspect of it. Functional monologue follows functional monologue and everyone speaks their subtext. My job is to eat all of that, put aside any issues of taste (I took the job, I do the job) and learn the thing so I can give it everything I have. This I will do. I have three characters with no particular distinction in their voices on paper.

Got another day before we start rehearsals and I’m sure we will find ways to differentiate without going into the hell of panto. With all The Factory madness, with the white noise success/failure of The Odyssey which will forever be my finest and my most terrible work, I’m pretty chilled about things now. It’s never stressful anymore this job I cornered my life into doing. Even if consistency has been variable over the decades I’ve been working this acting mine, I’ve had enough time at the actface to trust my pick hand.

I’ll meet a whole load of people on Saturday who will almost certainly be younger than I am and possibly expecting me to be some terrible old stick in the mud. I’ll have to switch off my enthusiastic gobshite muscles and be humble and listen and give space, and to do that I don’t want to have them start worrying that I won’t be off book in time. Shaky line learning can waste so much time in late rehearsal. I like to learn organically with theatre, but having been filming more often these days I kinda dig the whole game of showing up ready to go out the box. My plan is to come half ready. Get the beats in roughly, square them off live. No time for rehearsal really. Fuck it. I’m in. They’re paying me. Not what I’d get if I had gone to the bar like pappy wanted. But enough that I can likely avoid bailiffs if I max my credit card.

It’s evening now and I’m off work. I’m obsessively watching Clarkson’s Farm while playing FF12 on my Steam Deck. Clarkson is a really interesting view on the farming industry in this country. It’s worth getting over any distaste you have for the man – he’s doing something interesting here. With an annoying amount of money and privilege. But still it is fascinating. Final Fantasy 12 is just noise, which is why I can do them both at the same time. Japanese rpg, atrocious voice acting – some of the worst I’ve ever heard in a computer game and I watched the intro to Alien Breed, Tower Assault on my Amiga in the nineties. But the gameplay is smart and they have a DIY AI battle system that with enough tweaking can be very satisfying as it runs itself and deals with all eventualities if you’ve thought of them.

I should go to bed soon though. Just one more episode. And I need to get enough gilm to buy better magic.

Today mostly just looking at lines and recovering from a hangover. I didn’t drink a lot last night – I was home alone – but I rather randomly mixed it. I had a cardamom gin and tonic, then a very hoppy beer, then a glass of white wine, then a whisky. I should have learned many years ago that nobody should mix, particularly like that. You can get away with mixing if you drink the strongest stuff last. I went to sleep happy and woke up vile.

Trying to learn lines was unpleasant with a head full of beef. Even walking was a horror, and my guests have long ago eaten all the painkillers without telling me. I use them so rarely that I put packets of them visible in the bathroom and expect them to be there in my hour of need. All gone. Brian suffers from migraines. It was three in the afternoon when I remembered that I had some emergency codeine in the car. Tiny pills but nuclear. By five I could move without swearing. I should probably buy some tramadol off one of the dodgy people who are still sending me text messages after twenty years because I bought some pills off them in festival season.

Which reminds me. Festival season. It used to be a huge part of my calendar, but since COVID it has been a desert. I want to do some performance work at festivals this year, ideally, but other work would do. Since I booked my next acting job starting late August the auditions have pretty much dropped off entirely, so I can’t rely on filming to tide me over until then. Bring on the festival jobs. I don’t even know who to pitch walkabouts to these days. The world has moved on. I reckon there’s stuff out there though. Bring it.

I’m in bed earlyish. It was a friend’s birthday but I couldn’t drink much with the codeine plaster over what I did to myself in front of the telly last night. I found myself empathising with Jeremy Clarkson. Lord.

The next two days I’ll have to be self disciplined to learn stuff and be a responsible adult. I’ve got two days rehearsal this weekend and that’s it for a bit of unusual street theatre type madness.

Right now I’ve got hiccups. I’m gonna have a chamomile tea without whisky. All will be well. Maybe I’ll try and drink a glass of water upside down.

I have allowed myself to get sucked into Clarkson’s Farm. I’m surprised but it has drawn me in completely. His personality is familiar to me. And the way he gets stuck in while being clueless. He might be punchy but I get his noise. Watch this space for, ah whatever I can pitch… Barclay’s Ridiculous Unplanned DangerTravel…

I can’t talk about danger though. On Brian’s suggestion I have downloaded an app that tells me when there’s an air raid in Kyiv. “It’s a weird equivalent of those lights you can touch that light up on it other side of the world” This evening the siren went off and I spoke to Brian. “Yeah I know it’s crap, I’ve just ordered a burger.”

He was in his hotel. He chose to stay up and have his burger. Better die immediately than get trapped under the rubble. Wherever the missiles were felled / fell he could hear the explosions. I think it’s brilliant and mad. When he told me he was going my reaction was “It’s hotter in Gaza”.

I’ve done it before but Brian is sharing his Ukraine stuff on a WordPress here. https://brianhook0.wordpress.com/2024/05/24/journey-to-ukraine-exploring-art-stories-and-cultural-resilience/?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR3dneOejhuXmCrcDZRM8YFrDuaqW1qUFAstCo1YznOXTrs4aDz8Y0fBURw_aem_AQnBLWL4_W9J2qSNyvdQbk231D3iZhgcV7ZmPoCJ5ZMkz8zwGWXZD_ZslyvlxYI-V8DTjEwBTZmZPMlEJWlCfujw

I am proud of him for being bonkers and doing this. The air alert app is brilliantly voiced by Mark Hamill, and when he gives you the all clear he says “May the force be with you”. I’m happy to have the possibility of being woken up by a siren and Luke Skywalker so I can stay in touch with the hook while he is on his travels. And I like that the app uses the idea of “the force” which was something a lot of us used as a cultural touchpoint for how we intuited the universe worked. Until the new episodes fucked it by bringing in midichlorian particles.

This is another all over the place blog but I’m tired. I’ve only been line learning but there’s loads of them to learn and very little time.

“You’re too trusting,” says Lou. I’ve come to realise over the years that I am. Occasionally I lose a bit of innocence though. This morning was one of those occasions.

It’s never nice being stolen from. As I drove home from Brighton this evening, the spectre of the guy who got into my car last night came with me. He took his time in there. You’re finding out about it now, you haven’t missed anything. I’m just writing about it strangely because I feel pretty strange about it. Bastard.

I left my bank card visible in the bit between seats. Also $150 in cash and a pair of sunglasses. Also THE SPARE KEY. Plus a bottle of port, some shortbread, my bose speaker, a mushroom knife and a cap gun. Plus loads of other things that they didn’t take. That’s the stuff I’ve noticed is gone. Maybe some other bits. It was very car boot in there and he took his time and didn’t miss much. He left the gold frock coat and my Gucci shoes.

The spare key though… That’s dumb. I’ll have to get an immobilizer. He was an opportunist, perhaps. But how did he open the door? No signs of force. I’ve reported it as an electronic theft.

Some time around 5am it happened. I was parked on the seafront in Brighton. It’s busy with wreckheads. This really went through everything. He was still awake at 10:03, but that’s the last transaction. Perhaps he couldn’t drive or knew that stealing a car carries greater penalties than using a stolen card – but he still took the spare key which is gonna be a security risk…

I woke up and thankfully logged into my online banking to pay my credit card. I noticed 3 unfamiliar transactions starting at 6am in Budgens. I cancelled my card and went to check Bergie. He was closed, which was likely a passer-by. Carnage inside. I stood looking at it shocked and rang the local police. My parking was about to expire but “that can wait” I thought.

As I was filing the theft report, a traffic warden came and stood beside my car. “This is my car, it’s just been robbed,” I told the guy. “I’m filing a theft report. I can’t get in it until they tell me whether they’re going to do forensics.” “Take your time,” says the warden companionably, and I see him starting to input my number. In disbelief I open the app on speakerphone and I pay £1.90 while reporting the theft. The bastard moves on. He would have tricketed me as I stood there.

I’ve got a report now and my bank tells me the transactions they made will come back to me. I do some amateur sleuthing and establish that whoever used my card was caught on CCTV at Cex in town. The manager lets me have his email to give to the cops. It’s doubtful things will come back to me but good to be able to help them try.

The initial haul on entering the car was so good that I think that’s why they took their time in there. I won’t be leaving nice things in the car again. Damn. It feels weird knowing they were in there for so long. I’ve lost a bit of trust… Still, could’ve been much worse. I could’ve woken up to no car as well as an empty bank.

Lou bought me breakfast and I drove back home with the spectre of the thief next to me. Maybe the key will turn out not to have been in it. I was worried my iPad was, but it’s at home so fingers crossed it is here somewhere and that’s why they didn’t drive off with it…

It’s a warm evening by the sea. A bit breezy but the day has just got nicer and nicer. I’m in bed but might get up again. I’m just keeping Lou company and she’s in need of an early bed. She’s had lots of late nights in a row, and she’s about to go work a festival for four days so needs to have a full tank.

It’s still light outside, as we move to the solstice. These long bright evenings. The wind from the sea is carrying some murderous bass from Concorde 2. Or maybe someone has a van full of speakers on the beach. They get up to all sorts here in Brighton on bank holiday. You’d think after the state everyone was in last night at the Spiegeltent that nobody would have woken up yet. Not so. The party goes on and on in Brighton.

We lay on the beach for hours, in a little sheltered patch near Shoreham. We drove out that way to buy some fish from the fresh fish place, and ended up lounging around with the monkfish in the glove compartment. Very few people on the beach, and yes we had a sheltered bit, but there were plenty of breakwaters. Why the Russian family decided to sit a few feet from us is hard to fathom, unless they just decided the whole beach was theirs and we were an obstacle. They might not have been Russian, that’s just a guess based on behaviour and vague language recognition. We still managed to relax mostly. It was just irksome. One of them seemed to have developed the ability to keep talking even on the inbreath, like didgeridoo players.

I tuned them out and watched the wind surfers, admiring their stamina, coveting their skill and kit. All you need is time, a van, a place near enough to the sea to warm up after, a decent wet suit, a load of expensive kit, good balance, core strength, someone to teach you, patience, cold resistance, youth, maybe a community of like minded friends. I’d do it if I had an army of masseurs waiting with a boiling onsen on a beach surrounded by barbeque bonfires for when my team of instructors brought me back in. I’ll leave that for the emperor version of me right now though. One day maybe I’ll live near some sea. Then I’ll work out how to light the fires.

Monkfish curry for dinner. I’m glad I’m with Lou this bank holiday as the other options likely involve getting drunk. This weekend has already felt restorative and calming and there’s a day left. Back to the grind Tuesday. Still really trying to find some consistent work to fill the gap until late August. It’s great having a job to look forward to, even if I can’t blog about it yet. I just want to make sure the time between ain’t idle.

I haven’t been out on a Saturday night for a while and this was a reminder why not.

Bank Holiday Weekend in Brighton and I’ve picked Lou up from work but it’s about half past ten by the time we are outside the Spiegeltent. She used to work with Guilty Pleasures. Sean is playing the tent tonight. “It’d be nice to stop by and say hello to him,” she said a couple of days ago. At the time I pictured a nice tent, sticking our head in the back, a few people, a quick hello.

I’m not in the headspace for a club night but this is just a hello. She worked closely with him for years. I’m just there next to her in a hat and she’s on old ground.

We find a parking space just over the road from the tent. Miracle. We cross the road. It immediately becomes clear that this isn’t going to be what we pictured. This is a club at half ten on a Saturday night on a bank holiday. Oh hell.

The queue is vast.

Everyone is hammered.

I’m immediately halfway home in my imagination but Lou is determined. She gets to the front of the queue round the side, where a beleaguered bouncer is doing crowd management on all the people trying to talk their way in the same route. She has no real cards to play but she plays them all. This is only gonna be solved with a phone call but she doesn’t want to make it. Bouncer is neither helpful nor interested. There’s been police tonight in the tent, and an ambulance. There’s a guy in the same place as us trying something that looks similar, and he is so fucking drunk that he is phasing in and out of reality. All of his sentences are drawling nonsense and beer breath. We are not in the right place to get in anywhere here. We look like polite versions of him.

We end up talking to some people through a fence. Still no luck though and I’m completely over it as all we wanted to do was say “hello” to someone and he started playing about fifteen minutes ago. This is not about anything other than principle though, as the guy who is pretending to be helpful is actually not being honest with Lou and she knows it.

The extent to which I don’t want to go to Guilty Pleasures with all the drunk people in Brighton is so vast that it has broken all the scales. I’m there with Lou, kinda hoping we don’t get in so we can get the heck away from this tent full of drunk. I appreciate that she is just being sober and pleasant and wishing that the world was different. But the world isn’t different tonight, the world is a drunk mess and crowd control has had to take precedence over listening.

We give up before it starts raining. The whole interaction takes some time to wind out. Saturday nights are a stupid time to go out at the best of times, and at the Spiegel at the end of the festival on a bank holiday Saturday? It’s never gonna be anything other than hell.

We are home now and it has started raining, and mostly I’m just glad that I did plenty of that crap when I was in my twenties and thirties. The appeal has dropped off a bit, but I’m older and uglier now. And wiser? hmm

It’s bedtime and I was about to switch my head off. Then I remembered: Blog!

Brian has just randomly fucked off to Ukraine. I wholeheartedly support this. I thought he should use WordPress to make a daily blog. He solicited such a suggestion. Here’s the first one .. Read it and hopefully he’ll do more.

Why did I recommend WordPress when it has been expensive and largely unhelpful to me? Entropy.

It is functional. Maybe one day I’ll pay the extra fifty quid a year that lets me put a button on where you can bung me filthy monies.

Brian is off in Ukraine for reasons. I enjoy and connect with his thinking around it. I’m proud that he’s documenting it. I might not go back over my own noise, but the very making of it helps me clarify my thoughts within it. Brian has been moved to go to a warzone. The Ukraine is vast and the war is not yet universal, so I’m expecting some reactions to his stuff like my friend who watched some YouTube idiots drive over the border with cars full of clothes and behave perplexedly when nobody was immediately shooting. The friend used it to try and tell me there was no war in Ukraine. “Everyone was just going about their business as usual.” They’re a pattern matcher. We were in Hastings at the time, South of a tiny country compared to Ukraine. I suggested that if there was war in Liverpool we might not hear the shells.

I had posh dinner with a friend. It was nom. This morning I lay with Lou as the tide came right to our feet. I came back up for connection and experience. Glad I did. But I’m done with awake now. I was inches from going flat when I remembered this. Every day? What did I think I was gonna achieve? One day I’ll drop it, surely…

Not today.