It’s misty by the sea, and honestly a spot of rain was refreshing after being cooked awake in London this morning. In a break with habit I came down by train. Lou has a car here now so Bergie is surplus to requirements, and actually it probably works out about the same for an open return as it does in petrol and parking. Train is quicker too even though it’s pretty much the same door to door.
I found it disconcerting though, not having him. I actually had to think about things I keep in him for emergencies like contact lenses. My car is like a great big overnight bag. For a long time there was even a full set of bedding in there. Towels. Chargers. He’s a workhorse.
Leaving the flat was slow. I wanted to look at some lines and the heat was slowing me down. Had a cold shower at 11am. Finally got out at about noon.
I’ve started a new book. There’s the joy of trains. You can read. Much as I’ve been enjoying the endless ridiculous dynamic between Laura Whitmore and Iain Stirling on the prolific and palatable crime podcast “Murder they Wrote,” I am happy to have started on something a little more challenging. I’m not gonna say what I’m reading right now as its one of those books that people ostentatiously read on the tube if they want to look clever. I’m barely into it and have no idea if I’m gonna persist with it right now as it is huge and halfway through the trip a woman with sad eyes guilted me into filling in a “very satisfied” survey about national rail that wasted twenty minutes of my life only to crash in a tunnel and refuse to reload.
This evening we watched Deep Cover. Lou wanted to see it. I’m just a flash in it and it was a delight to work on so it’s fun to share it with people. It really adds to things when the dynamic on set is so bright. More like that please.
Tomorrow we can kick back together. I’m just here to see her and spend a bit of time, no plans and nothing we need to achieve so we can just roll into nature and share the late summer awhile. Tomorrow hopefully we will see some yew trees… Things will pick up again soon so I’m enjoying the fact I can relax even if I have to be careful of spending now…
Went to Monmouth yesterday. Good coffee. Pint of water first. Ah that’s better. Monmouth coffee on in the stovetop.
Pulling on clothes. Can I reuse this sock? Collared shirt or T-shirt? Shorts today. Odd socks? Expedience. Drink coffee. Oh. Wait yes ok I’m awake because self tape. Shirt off. Shorts off. Rethink.
Record a soundtrack in bed. Then record another. Shave. I’ll be doing these to myself with me doing voices. Bite me.
Director first. Playing one. Calling the shots but not actually how they would be called on film. Time is shifted on that medium. Sticky up hair. Directors wear scarves. Hmm. Barclay tartan cravat. Corduroy jacket. No need to do hair. That’s me as a director with 5 minutes prep. Haven’t got time to do it better really. Lines. Record. Edit. Send. Done.
Ok. Now this next guy. He’s an actor in WW2. Gets a job pretending to be a famous general. I haven’t a moustache. Do I even look like him? Surely it is cast already. Still worth doing it I guess. He was a bit of a boozer this actor even though the general was teetotal. He did a good job of it. He’s army, but all I’ve got is navy. One of granddad’s coats. His tie from HMS Repulse, where he was torpedoed by the Japanese. Shove a bit of water in my hair. Haven’t got time to get this perfect. Fuck me it’s hot in wool. “Pleasure to meet you sir” FOREHEAD.
Same frame. Same light. Same fucking face, these were about ten minutes apart. Oh fuck and they want an ident with a full body shot and a clean frame. We don’t all live in fucking Saltburn darling, more’s the pity. I persuaded Maddy to handhold something that will have to do. Could have cleaned up cushions from the wide shot or worn a lower half that matched the upper but this is a crapshoot. It’s enough that I put on shoes. I’ve done them barefoot in the past as honestly what are you asking us to have here? Must we all live in vastness?
Two auditions done and it’s not even morning yet really. Maddy was sitting working on Chinese visas at the kitchen table throughout and I wished she wasn’t. Made me self conscious a little but largely didn’t negatively impact things – if anything it made it quicker to film as the social anxiety aspect was present hence why I didn’t want her there. Brian was kind enough to leave.
Spot of editing – top and tail. I’ve stopped giving too much of a fuck about getting the perfect take cos it’s an absolute crapshoot these days at this stage. I remember in 2002 seeing a role I was already cast in being advertised on the front page of PCR with a casting director who had been taken off the project. She was taken off because the director was fed up of being served the same old people from the same old agencies. But a ripple doesn’t cause a storm.
These parts are one line two line parts and I imagine they go to literally hundreds if not thousands of people for tapes. I’m allowed to play these parts according to the unspoken rules of agentranking. Esta is known in the industry and I’m not alone in loving her. They could still go to friends of the director these parts, and maybe they are already cast … but if there’s anything left it is a level playing field depending on what order they watch the tapes… I wonder how big the odds are. I’m conflicted. I’ll give a shit but I’m not gonna give you a clean landscape background for the ident as you literally have to live in a wind tunnel.
It would be lovely, of course, to do what I’m supposed to be doing, and sometimes these tapes do land. All you need is one ball bearing from the shotgun cartridge to hit the clay pigeon. Thinking about it won’t help though. So I pack up the tripod and change my clothes again. I’m awake now. Day. A day. A waddadaidai.
Into Bergie on a hot afternoon. First I have to get my festival stuff out of him to make room. I’m aware that the designer I’m collecting for needs things to be just-so. I don’t want her to slam herself to the negative when it isn’t immediately possible for me to pack the car. I’ve already made it clear to her that she can’t send the costume rail intact up three flights of stairs. She wanted us to put it in a van upright.
I collect fine. Then to The Arts which has no loading bay. I reverse dangerously onto the pavement and Brian appears as if from nowhere to wordlessly start carrying this crap. This is our understanding and our deep friendship now and I hold it tight. Unloading could have been an absolute bastard, but I know it and he knows it and between us it was ok. He had a house manager who had a brilliant hairstyle and did absolutely diddly fuck tomato apart from look at me like I was in the wrong place. He walked up some stairs in front of me. He had nice hair. Useless fucker. Brian and I slung all the heavy stuff up all the stairs. I even noticed that Brian had left two bags on a landing thinking that hairstyle might take them the rest of the way. Nope. We took one each, Brian and I. Nowadays nobody does more than they absolutely have to. This is how the world dies, honestly, I can’t make sense of it. How has everyone got so partitioned that you can call it boundaries where really it’s totally just laziness?
Anyway, I went for dinner with good people. Bedtime.
Got up, rented a van, slung a load of stuff into it I want to take to Canterbury from the lockup. Drove to Shoreditch to pick up the furniture from the job. Waited.
Bought a halloumi wrap and a coffee. Waited.
Bought another flat white. Went to pret as well for some water. Waited.
Waited a bit.
Client is getting fucked over. He can’t get keys. I mention to him that my plus one can’t stay much longer as it is a 4 hour round trip to the storage. He tells me it isn’t going to work.
I go back to the lockup and load the stuff back in. Pointless going to Canterbury just for that stuff. I return the van to Kentish Town and Siwan and I go for a shandy in the garden of The Lion and Unicorn. What a waste of a day.
I’ll get the van hire money from the client. Might get a bit of money for my time too if I ask. But it feels weird to invoice for a failed attempt. I think I’m quite goal driven sometimes. It doesn’t feel like a job if it’s just my time taken. It only feels like a job if I’ve actually done some work. I should take a leaf out of the playbook of every plumber in this country.
Now I’m home and sleepy. That’s the heat and the fact that I’ve not got the curtain over the window. Sun cooks me into fever dreams at dawn and they continue until I work out which one is the one I’m pretending to be a person in. Then it goes and gets a coffee and perhaps three hours after first awareness I manage to align the brain and the body and voila *cough* c’est Al! … … *cough* … … … … *flourish*
Liney learny. Drivey drivey. Money spendy.
I’m still enraged about the latest setback. It makes it that much harder to go back to the drawing board, but here I am, getting an early bed so I can send two tapes tomorrow for tiny little parts. One of them will surely land, maybe both, but I’m gonna make a track myself for these ones in the morning… I’ve asked too many friends too often lately. Good work my agent getting me all these small part tapes. Happy to be punting. But I need one to go in the goal now. I’m not auditioning for fun here.
Sitting at the top of the hill in the sun, I’m surprised to notice a stone circle. It feels very old. I knew it when I was at school here, but largely unremarked at the time. I was still making sense of the practical observable world. Ancient places of power barely registered. Mum used to drag us to a dolmen in Jersey and it was just a fucking rock.
Eight fucking rocks in a circle, near the top of the hill but shaded. What’s the etymology of Harrow? Is it from Hare? Perhaps, I have seen it argued, it comes from a heathen shrine. Heathen Shrine on the hill.
I sat with the rocks for a while sharpening my paganism once more. I asked them their names. The Hare Stone presented itself. Marking clockwise from there I found them to be Finnstone, Beestone, Flystone, Rollstone, Shadstone, Edgstone and Boystone. How had I not been talking openly with them as a boy? They’re eloquent. Neglected. Off on a limb.
Fly bottom left, Bee bottom right
This area though was generally pretty important for stones. We are near the Weald Stone. It’s a hill in a flat area, these places have been important since people were people. They’re places where the earth power comes up and raises us with it. The school was founded when everyone was busy pretending it was all about the Jewish myth and the Nazarene prophet, which largely ignores stones. I suspect someone left it out of a vague inherited respect for the ancient, but nobody attached any great significance to it. My tiny memory of it is someone saying: “If you challenged someone to a fight, they waited in the circle and you had to jump in from the wall.” Dull. But that’s boys and I’m sure the stones would have liked a bit of blood and emotion. Gotta charge up somehow.
I lay on my back in there a while. Have just been doing the funeral oration. Friends Romans Countrymen. God it’s wonderful to do. It feels like home. Muscular, emotional, full of life and joy and pain and rage. It’s a hell of a piece of writing. Charged myself up in the stone. It’s a nice way to spend the weekend, and now with the students away I can appreciate this extraordinary old and strong place that I ignored as a teenager.
There in The Speech Room at Harrow I found myself working through the lines of Marc Antony in 3.1 of Caesar. Tomorrow morning this’ll be 3.2. Honestly they are some of the most evocative lines in Shakespeare. Trying to find a truthful build through the prophecy that lets him cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war? That’s the sort of thing that requires life behind it. I’m up for it now. But it isn’t going to be a free lunch. Antony does bollocks all in the first half. He doesn’t need to, his friend who he adores is running the show. He only clicks into gear when those idiots do him in. But when he clicks in he clicks in hard. And for a period in the middle of the play his heart is exposed by the shock of losing his best friend, and simultaneously his ambition is exposed knowing that he could lose everything he’s built if he doesn’t act smartly and decisively. 3.1 and 3.2 you see conflicting sides of a true statesman, coming to terms with a personal loss while establishing how to exploit things to his advantage.
I’ve only got a few weeks to learn this and learn it well. There’s only a few sessions to stage it. Some of the Old Harrovian Players are still actors, others have never been and never would be. There are at least two octogenarians in this show. One of them is in the House of Lords and asked if he could play the Soothsayer. He won’t have any rehearsal, but I’m sure we will all beware the ides of march.
I’m here as one of the actual practitioners. There are always a few of us. I thought I’d walked away for good but I’m sad and want something to focus on and I’ve always wanted an excuse to learn Marc Antony as those speeches always get me – the structure of the funeral oration with the mix of rhetoric and heart, no surprises it’s famous, it is made up of heart. But therefore it needs to be known by heart. So there’s an end to my spare time for a few weeks and that’s probably for the best as I’m not sure I’d be able to look at myself if I finished Skyrim by the end of the summer.
It’s going to be a nice bunch. Caesar is a Guildhall lad which helps with the easy love.
I’m home. Early in tomorrow. Weird but delightful. Onwards.
I should’ve brought my book with me. I arrived to pick up two keyboards at 11am and didn’t actually get them into my car until just after 3pm.
I went and had a coffee in The Railway Tavern next to West Hampstead, and then spent much of the early afternoon enjoying the late summer heat up in north London. Picking up so late I figured I’d wait until after six to drop off as then I could avoid paying Congestion Charge, so the whole deal took most of the day. Eventually I pulled up in a motorcycle bay opposite The Arts and had Maddy and Brian on hand to sling everything into the theatre. Home at half six and feeling the worse for wear. Not that I’ve had a busy day, I’m just tired at the moment. I think I’ll have to do that thing where I go through my diet. This isn’t getting any better and I don’t want to shuffle off from neglect at 50. I’ve had this programmed in by my health nut dad. “So long as you start really caring about your health at 50 you can live your life until then.” I’ve hit the magic number.
It’s hot in the flat tonight. Boo is hunting flies. Last night I dreamt she learnt how to clone herself so she was probably running all over me. It is the Lions Gate. 8/8 and the moon is high behind my head as I write. A good time to be making pledges to myself about a healthier existence going forward. I don’t HAVE to eat so badly. I just do.
Let’s have some good work coming up. Let’s get healthy and fit and make some money too, eh? Two little auditions came in today, both due by Tuesday. I see no reason why I can’t get both of them. And tomorrow I’m off to connect with my Alma Mater and throw around a spot of Shakespeare. Despite recent setbacks I’m gathering again. There’s still fight left in the old dog, I’m gearing up for another round.
This moon is big and bright tonight, right behind my head. It’s making me feel weird. Brian got an early bed and is convinced he’s got something contagious. I feel heavy and slow and I’m coughing again, but I’m convinced I’ve got advancing decrepitude. One of us might be right. Early bed will help, especially as it is hot and the cats are active in the moonlight. I can’t imagine myself sleeping like a log but I’ll try.
Thinking about fitness and money. I need to get some acting work soon. Day job stuff is a little thin on the ground suddenly. This might be my favourite time of year but that’s partly due to a history being lucky at this time of year, so I’ll need to get lucky, eh?
Right now it’s just me and the cats. I went and booted up Skyrim on the Steamdeck today just as it felt like things were slow enough that I could do it for a while. Skyrim takes weeks and weeks but it is the definition of a classic game, and I’ve never given it the time as I know how much time it needs. I’ll work my way slowly through this Nordic tale. One of my old friends saw on my Steam activity that I was playing it and sent me a message “I used to be an adventurer like you. Then I took an arrow in the knee.” That’s a decent enough in joke… It’s a very strange game. This evening my character went on a bender and sold somebody’s goat to a giant and now I’m trying to make things better. There are plenty of moral choices in the game but very few moral consequences. It was made at a time before people with agendas started making videos of one option as if it was the only option and putting them on YouTube: “This game forces everyone to sell goats to giants, look here is me doing it, it must be the only option.”
They’ve just released a simplified broken version of Disco Elysium on mobile, stolen from the devs and with all the interest removed. It’s one of the most fascinating titles from the last decade if you get the Final Cut, but for mobile they’ve cut the teeth out. It needs to have those teeth to be the challenging sad weird piece of story that was released some years ago by excellent developers none of whom will get a penny from the mobile port as the studio has gone full Sugarman.
Games are fascinating and broken right now. I’m happy to either play none or play old ones. There’s more character and style in most of the old ones. BG3 excepted.
But this is why I need to get fit. Games don’t build body. I’m talking to some personal trainer type human tomorrow who works in the park over the road. I’m gonna try to start going to yoga classes with Lou. Time to remember the old bod.
And time to try and make some money. The things are connected loosely. Nobody is gonna pay me to gather nirnroot and kill dragons (Skyrim), or overcome the conflicting voices in my head and my own self loathing and try and work out who I am (Disco Elysium).
A spot of driving tomorrow and I do have some lines to learn. All is well.
I’m still dealing with binmen and rats. Apparently a form needed to be lodged after I spoke to Freddie the rodent man. I have to lodge it not him. Technically my block caretaker has to lodge it but he’s on annual leave. So I had a go today.
The bins go out tomorrow and the guys aren’t going there unless they have to. Path of least resistance. The room is full again. I went off up RBKC to try and talk to someone, ended up on a dedicated internal phone line inside the town hall for half an hour. I was watching the interesting folk of the borough coming and going with their problems. One lovely old guy who was homeless for two years and is now having to do so much admin to keep the place he’s been housed in that he is almost done with it. The guy I spoke to was helpful when I eventually spoke to him. He was probably upstairs when I was down.
I’ve given loads of time to this problem that is only mine because of the habit I have of making things my problem when I know that otherwise they have been disguised by a “Somebody Else’s Problem field”. (“An SEP is something we can’t see, or don’t see, or our brain doesn’t let us see, because we think that it’s somebody else’s problem. That’s what SEP means. Somebody Else’s Problem. The brain just edits it out, it’s like a blind spot.”) Douglas Adams put it well, but I’m immune to them. Much of what I do on events – the stuff that makes people call me back – that’s because I make it my problem. “The Somebody Else’s Problem field… relies on people’s natural predisposition not to see anything they don’t want to, weren’t expecting, or can’t explain.” That’s never been me. Apart from my own mess.
I don’t want to see this rubbish problem in my block, but I can, so I’m fixing it. The flies come in through my window and they wouldn’t be breeding here if the bin men were taking the bags out.
I am paying a huge amount per month in service charge, and I’m doing most of the work right now. There’s some serious fuckery taking place here… But that’s another blog.
Glorious night this evening, with Brian and Maddy, finally seeing The Play that goes Wrong. It went wrongwrong tonight, there was a genuine understudy takeover halfway through. But it’s a glory too. It has run and run and spawned copies and with good reason.
I wonder how long that actor might have held the “ledger” thing until what happened happened. There are some really smart moments of durational comedy. This is something that has run and run now, the chaos looks chaotic but it’s tightly practiced. It still feels fresh enough. I enjoyed myself and it was a lovely way for the three of us to be social in The West End. I love this city. There’s so much variety, even if people are lazy and entitled and slow and noisy. A plumber came and serviced my boiler and he wanted to buy some of my random statues… I pointed out to him they were resin not bronze.
It is much quicker to get to Smithfield Market from mine if you go by an ebike rental than any other means. It’s summer, the first of August, high summer, the month named after the emperor who was in charge when Jesus popped up. He was another Libra/Virgo cusp. Like him, this is my favourite month.
“Everything dries up in August,” is received information.
Back when it was in person auditions, I would finally start to get seen for things in August because they needed a me type and the ones with the major agents were all up at Edinburgh so they couldn’t go to Soho and do something humiliating for the possibility of money. Now it’s self tapes, so I guess the same old same old is more possible. But I’m still hopeful. It has always been a lucky month, August. I tried to ignore the poster for Cumbers and Coleman once again reinforcing the idea that there are only about twelve actors. I’m here, there are jobs, something is going to give. Yes it’s the same the same the same forever forever forever. But we hope.
I have finally auditioned for a theatre that you’ve heard of. For over twenty years, and now having worked at the RSC, I have never auditioned for a theatre you have heard of. Last month I did. I’ve got a recall too, yay. Hopefully there’ll be some work at the end of it. Thank fuck. This industry is cruel, casual and arbitrary. I graduated in 2002. I’ve worked loads and with excellent practitioners. Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark. But …! A good theatre up north put me on the list for an actual audition. Normally it’s a straight offer or nothing. Maybe I’ll be able to go through a process and fit into a company and do the thing I am here for. That’s what I dreamed when I left Guildhall, but the auditions never ever came. Let’s see how this first one goes, twenty years too late. I’m used to disappointment as there’s been plenty of film stuff which is tricky. That was my first job, a film. Is the industry really that short sighted that film people can’t audition for theatre? I can report back with confidence: “YES.”
I went to Smithfield to hang out with James. James and I did theatre back in the day, for people you’ve never heard of. I turned down a ridiculously lucrative corporate training opportunity “you’ll never get this again” because of press night for a show where I was paid virtually nothing, up in Surbiton. Sliding doors, but I knew I wanted the performer life, I needed it. James was in that show. Now he does a proper job but he was there at the nexus even if he didn’t know about it. I turned down guaranteed big bucks for … for this and I’m still struggling.
Today we ate at St John’s though and I’m happy to be part of £200 for lunch as I’ve got so very good at dayjobberising. We had a whole crab and loads of good stuff and a bottle of wine. I am not broke at the moment but fuck, I feel the lack of that training job I turned down. Life, eh?
This evening I went to the press night of something that is part of the problem. This is the sort of thing I was swept up into, where people eat your heart and your work. Loads of wonderful clever and skillful actors who are probably on an hourly rate because it is technically facilitation, and their undeniable skill is being vampirised by production. It was incredibly well produced, for sure. It was glorious. The fault was in the execution, the creative side. Whoever is marshalling these underpaid workers hasn’t quite got their finger on what makes things interesting for actual real people. Ok, I asked lots of workers what their hourly was. The carnival people are on less than I thought anyone worked for these days. The bar aren’t on much more. It’s barely a living wage. I cannot cannot respect anyone, particularly in something trying to pretend to be theatre, when they don’t pay their workers properly, particularly when the ticket price is tiered. You get a special wristband if you pay more. That means the actors do more with you if you’re rich. No amount of enthusiasm will get you as an audience over that border it’s posh wristband or it’s steerage. That’s capitalism embedded in an industry that has always been free of hierarchy and has to be to work. It makes me sick to my stomach. And suddenly I see why this thing they still weirdly call “immersive” instead of “tiered” has appealed to all the various narcissists I’ve known over the years. It’s a new form of hierarchy: lords and serfs. It’s a fucked model and it came out of goodwill.
Home and up early to lay down a tape. Trying to keep it understated as I get the sense this one has been round and round and the notes ask for it to be understated. I was tired though. Got it in 2 minutes before the deadline and my agent downloaded it almost immediately. Just in time. Sad to miss the last night of the festival, but prioritising in person auditions have caused me far more inconvenience back in the day. I will still fly the flag for the self tape audition. I got most of the festival.
Then I had mistaken today for a bank holiday and having discovered it wasn’t, I saw no reason not to change my plans. So I watched all the highlights for the final test match at The Oval, England vs India. It has been an amazing series but the Indian team stepped up at the end of yesterday and today and they worked so incredibly hard to force the series into the third ever drawn test series in the history of test matches. They won game 5 by 8 runs. Sure, Chris Woakes came on with his arm in a sling and knew he couldn’t face a ball. It was nail biting stuff and if Woakes hadn’t taken that fall before his first innings he would easily have gotten the 8 runs over two innings that we needed, but that’s the game. Largely I’m happy to see a drawn series if I look at the quality of the matches throughout. Absolutely brilliant cricket, as it should be. I only like test cricket, I like it because it is an endurance game, and I respect both sides utterly in that match up.
To honour the Indian victory I bought a great big takeaway Dishoom for Brian Maddy and I. I ate until there was no room left and there’ll be stuff to heat up tomorrow. Even after just a couple of nights in a field it has been lovely having access to my soft comfy bed and the friendly weird cats.
Tomorrow back in the world. Today was recovery. Worst possible time for an audition, when you’re knackered, but I’m okay with what I sent – perhaps lacking in spark but these are unnamed characters, they don’t want spark, they are doing a job in the script that pushes the story. I made choices that hopefully reflected that. I’m back to the drawing board now so I’ll take all comers.
AlBarclay 