Category: Uncategorized

I’ve just teleported back to my living room after another two shows. It’s still a mess in this living room. I’ll sort that out in one of the endless tomorrows. Now it’s just winding the show out of myself so that I can sleep properly before doing it all again twice tomorrow.

The Guardian newspaper came last night and understood what we are trying to do, which is what you want from someone who writes about theatre, particularly as a nice write-up in a national will likely allow us to extend the run. They gave us 4 stars.

It was only made with this bank holiday weekend in mind, but frankly what else are we gonna do? Chances are we can extend the run.

Nice to be in an active show that responds to this madness, and to vindicate the friendships I made over the course of a logistically difficult summer. You never know what’s going to come back to you, but for sure the more you put out the more you get back.

There’s a unique opportunity for us in this show, when we are in the wings, to peep at the audience through a hole in the flat. It’s better even than the fake mirror Jack and I used to spy from in Scrooge’s Parlour. The audience are part of the meeting so their cameras are on unless they choose to switch them off. We get to see them enjoying and participating in the playing we do. One of my nephews unexpectedly came to the matinee and I pinned his video for a bit while I was preparing, just to feel a bit more connected with him and his isolation buddy.

Often audience members talk about feeling part of a community again through this. It’s a lovely thing to hear, to know that somehow we can still bring scattered people together with a shared experience. I know one person who joined from Georgia and another from Texas. We’ve reached Ireland New York and Mexico as well. Even my nephew was up in Aberdeen.

It’s an interesting possibility. There are of course constraints in what we can do, but as a tester for a new form I’m very glad to be part of something anarchic human and fun and I think there’s a lot more to explore around what we can and cannot do and how we can keep the story live and involve the audience, but it’s sweet and it works.

I’ll likely announce when tickets go up again, if we extend, and would be thrilled to see old friends and new joining the party. I’m still reeling at the fact that I’m employed to do live theatre in this messy living room and these uncertain times. But often the truth is stranger than fiction, and it seems like decades of working at being generative and positive have started to throw me chocolates.

On which subject I went to TK Maxx before this all started, in January, and they had a load of chocolate bunnies. I bought a good number of them intending to give them out to whoever I met at Easter. Well, I met nobody but myself so omnomnomnom. You’ll need a crane to get me out the flat when this is over…

I still find it jarring when I click “leave meeting” at the end of The Tempest and remember that I’m sitting in my living room surrounded by all sorts of junk and alone. It’s probably healthy for me though to get used to this. It’s like I’ve had a teleportation device installed that pulls me back to this living room after the show when normally I’d be blowing most of my wages on another round in whatever we have decided is the local pub we like the best. I teleported back to my living room about an hour ago after the second show of a two show day. I finished my mug of white wine and realised I wanted a beer and had none. Saturday night. Post show.

I got kitted up and walked to Tesco.

My Tesco metro is always very “live”. It’s catering to the residents of a large sheltered housing, a couple of old folks homes, the Chelsea pensioners, some of the Rothschilds, whoever lives in Oscar Wilde’s old house, a peabody estate, me, and all the people who have boats privately moored at Cadogan Pier. The thing that most people round here tend to share is a loud voice and the habit of taking up space. Saturday night, and people in the queue. The guy two in front of me wants to pay half cash half card but none of his cards work. He is polite and in no hurry. He occasionally apologises to those of us behind him. But the guys outside the shop are getting restless. One of them comes in and tells the security guard he has only got four inside and he can have six. Someone else tries to just walk in with his hood up. The security guard is new, and in the most heavy duty gear I’ve seen. There are only two staff on duty on the shop floor and both of them are new.

Eventually payment guy pays and the old guy in front of me starts hitting on the checkout girl. She’s Italian, he has some Italian, oh God, and now he wants her name. He’s not reading the room very well but again just no hurry. She’s probably doing something difficult in the normal world but this guy with his cracked voice is either being interested or being too interested. She answers him in monosyllables until he pays, never encouraging, never discouraging. That fine line that you see too many young women in service industries having to tread, knowing how quickly people like him might go sour.

I get to the front eventually. I try to leave so quickly I get called back as I haven’t paid yet. Oops. Thankfully nobody punches me.

I witnessed a fist fight years ago that spilt onto the pavement outside this Tesco. It was between an old guy who wanted alcohol and a manager who had put an arbitrary 10.50pm curfew on alcohol purchases, and some other guy who got stuck in, was immediately roundly insulted and went a bit bananas. It was a full moon, a summer’s day. Me and another guy actually had to break it up. It’s a weird shop at the best of times, and it basically just sells mayonnaise crisps and beef. Today there’s a whole shelf dedicated to UHT milk. I think they use a random number generator to stock the place, the freezers are always broken, and until recently there was a manager who stopped beer from being sold cold from the fridge as groups of people would sit all day on the bench opposite and slowly get hammered and he didn’t like it.

Still, it’s open at ten on a Saturday at Easter and the staff are working hard in difficult circumstances. I didn’t like the guy in the queue getting mardy with the guard. I shouldn’t really have been at the shop just for beer. I know it. So surely doubly important not to be a creep or an asshole.

But people are starting to get restless… Let’s ramp up our kindness this weekend if we brave the outside world. These shop staff – many of the people behind checkout are resourceful local people who have found a way to support themselves and their families through this crisis, but they still have to come to work and be polite while working an unfamiliar till. Fuck knows what they might do in the normal world. “I’m just in for the day, normally I’m in head office,” said the checkout in Waitrose King’s Road last week and thereby hangs a tale I’m sure.

Be safe lovelies.

I’m gonna have my beer now.

Cheers!

I’m not sitting in the chair I’d normally be sitting in. Friday night yeah!? I might even go sit on the floor in a bit just because, yeah? Yeah.

I ate very well tonight, because of my new habit of copying an old lady’s shopping. Those Waitrose Gressingham duck breasts are very tasty alongside a spot of spinach and new potatoes – and a can of Stella. I’ve drunk all the wine. It might be Friday but I think I’ll still crash out early tonight. I haven’t got plans for a big one at home, despite the weekend. I even changed my sheets just now to guarantee happy slumber. Let’s see where the night goes though, hey? Hex might have other plans. He’s pretty active right now, so I’m letting him roam but preventing him when it looks like he’ll get himself somewhere that I can’t find him.

We open this show tomorrow, and we come together to do this strange live thing from my messy improvised living room green screen studio.

We are widely scattered over our United Kingdom, with at least one in Scotland, one in Loughborough, one in Leighton Buzzard, one in Lurgan. Only two in London.

The director’s in Port Stewart near where you could get the ferry when I was a nipper. One is in Cwmnafan, and I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. I’ve never knowingly been in the same room as him. That’s a strange thing to notice.

My Sky internet in London is extremely unreliable at the moment which is a worry. Friends of mine have imputed that it might go down entirely before long under some kind of attack, and much as I’d be fascinated to see the fallout now we are all so reliant on it, I’m hoping it doesn’t interrupt what is a sweet and silly creative endeavour by some good hearts.

The last two runs I’ve been kicked out of zoom. This sort of thing is always the thing to worry about when making a live experience with a tech angle. This is harder to solve than the players not getting a clue by text message.

If my internet goes you lose an actor mid show. I will just disappear, without ceremony.

There’s always a way to cover. But despite the deliberately fragile nature of what we are making I think we would all prefer to give the audience something along the lines of what we are hoping for, rather than an extensive troubleshooting improv session. There’s already enough improv going on considering this is billed as Shakespeare.

We had a five year old watching the test session today though and he had a good long list of things he liked – which speaks well. I think it’s rich and strange from my perspective. I still can’t quite credit it, that I’m opening a show tomorrow. That people have bought tickets and will come online and share the joy with us.

It’s a community of people in lockdown making a version of an old but remarkable and complicated story about redemption and forgiveness, about love and forgetting the past, about magic and responsibility. There’s a lot in The Tempest – the last play written by that hugely influential humanist. We have boiled it down to about an hour. When we did it last summer there were zombies. Now there’s a wilfull snake and loads of beautiful hearts in lockdown.

Zoom into The Tempest in new live interactive adaptation

So now my living room has been turned into a really weird studio, with some lights on me and others dedicated to the wall behind me. I have no bedside lamp anymore because it’s needed in here for general wash, and even with it I have to take my dinner jacket off ASAP in the show or it gets computerised into part of the background as it’s black. I need to get some better lights. My mum had a halogen, but I think it’s gone to my sister in law sadly.

I did take delivery of a load of replacement overhead light fittings a couple of days ago as part of the problem is that all of my light fittings have dissolved.

I’ve never fitted such things before and I’m concerned it’ll involve dying, but I THINK I know how to shut the power off in my flat. I’m going to have a go tomorrow in the morning. I’ve been a bit scared of it. I’m either going to learn something or I’m going to blow myself up. But I connected the oven at Christmas and I’m still alive, so hopefully it’ll be a similar application of common sense.

I’m one of the 1% right now. I’m an actor gainfully employed to work in live art. It’s so lovely, but also so jolting. We are all in a room together, we are making together, vibing together, responding to each other. And then I click “leave meeting” and suddenly it’s just me in a silent room surrounded by lights, with a snake in a box and a load of random stuff. We are all teleporting in to do the show, and once it’s over we teleport out and look around and remember that actually we are all just at home surrounded by weird things.

The show itself is plagued by possible pitfalls. We all need to make sure we clear our buffers before starting. Yesterday it was me that got thrown out mid sentence. Today someone else. It’s not preventable. It’s part of the random. Part of the “live”. If one of us gets stuck out we can still make it play, and the creativity involved in covering for the vanish will be a potential source of joy. What we are making is fragile, but it isn’t precious. So if bits get chunked off, hopefully the centre will still hold.

I found it very emotional today, as we stress-tested it with a live audience. I was frequently worrying about props and light sources and Hex and angles, but as this becomes better trodden to me I will be able to observe the audience members who choose to make themselves observable, and that’s a delightful thing. We are all just stuck in our homes, and these people have come to play with us from their homes. We all share an illusion for a while, and then when the revels are ended we all go back to the baseless fabric of the vision, and not a wrack is left behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

“How are you getting from the supermarket to my house?” asks my new elderly friend. She needs more shopping. “I tried to use Waitrose online but the queue is days. I wanted some heavier things… Like wine.”

This is something I understand.

“Send me what you need. I’ll get a zipcar.”

There are no parking restrictions anywhere in London. I kind of wish I had a car of my own. I much prefer life with a car. But cars cost money. Even the zipcar ended up costing me about £20 as I had to add an extra half hour for over nine quid because of the queue at Waitrose and the amount of stuff she had ordered. Still, as I said to the woman at checkout when I bought the bags in a separate run : “When I get old I just hope someone does this shit for me. It must be hell, being old.” It cost me about £25 all told, but I think of it as charity plus learning.

Alongside the comestibles, she wants ten bottles of wine. She’s gearing in for the long haul. I buy one of each of her bottles for myself. She’s got a lifetime again on me. She’ll know her wine.

Her shopping is generally excellent in terms of food vs price and these are cheap old world wines from Waitrose I’m buying, that I’ve always looked past. Between five and six quid each. In Tesco I usually end up with nothing but highly traveled chemicaljuice at that price so it’s a useful learn. I’ve been taking notes. She cooks her own food. She’s careful. And she’s frugal. But she likes the finer things. Frugal finer things. That’s worth learning.

I dropped her shopping off just in time to start rehearsing.

Two runs back to back with discussion in between and I’m still floored by the diverse creativity in this mad group. It’s not Shakespeare for purists, oh no, oh goodness no, TC would be apoplectic. But it’s an exploration of form, and there are friends of mine in Texas and in Georgia and God knows where else who have thrown a spot of dollar our way to be with us as we experiment. It feels responsive to the situation. It feels like the weird and wonderful Tempest with zombies that we did last summer when we could all move from place to place. When I could be in a room with four other rehearsing actors lifting each other and breathing close to each other and then I could rush into a crowded tube from Brixton to Paddington and get a rush hour train so groups of twenty people could gather closely around me in my willow tree before we all went back to a big room and danced a touching ceilidh.

Creation Theatre and Big Telly. Both great names. Both wonderful focused creative practices. I feel so lifted knowing I can collaborate with both. At THIS time, where major players are still just rolling out their greatest hits on video, these maniacs are trying to make something that is deliberately live and NOW and giving employment not residuals.

God I wish I could see and touch and be. But this is at least a connection of sorts. With our shared history and our technology use it is very easy to forget that we are not in the same room with one another when it’s running. We are in fact very very distant but we feel together. We are performing from all over the place… It’s an astonishing hymn to creative use of tech in adversity. I just hope it works in the watching. 🙂

 

 

Scheduling idiocy meant that I published yesterday’s blog five hours late and likely all the autoshares failed. I was very quickly alerted to the major fail by a worried reader, but thank you to both the concerned people who thought I might have died. As I said to one of them, “If there’s no blog it’s either because I’ve messed up with scheduling or because I’m dead. Or the whole internet is down. But it’s always always worth messaging me because I fuck up the share all the time.

There was a period of about two months starting in December when autoshare broke to Facebook and loads of people just assumed I’d stopped writing and yet never messaged me. I even had people say to my face “Guess you got too busy for the daily blog thing then!” when they should’ve said “I am under the erroneous impression that you don’t see things through and I don’t know that your personal blog site is www.albarclay.blog so I rely on autoshare through other sites.”

Know this: I will not stop unannounced. No blog at 6am GMT means someone has dropped a piano on my head or I’ve fucked up the scheduling. In either instance it is better to message me than not to. If I’m dead I won’t get angry. And if I’m not I’ll want to know something’s gone wrong. If I’m on a ventilator I’ll still get some words out. I’ll just drop the minimum. Know that.

Zuckerberg is a cunt so he has been trying to monetise hits for ages on this on Facebook and restricting what I can share and to who without money changing hands. You Facebookers can help by making his machine go *ping* when you engage. Ditto Twitter. I’m so past caring about all that bollocks but if a tree falls etc. And they pick what they show. So yeah think of this sentence like the final few seconds of most YouTube videos, but apply it to different blogs that strike you rather than just this one that thinks about the nuts and bolts.

Here we all are, locked in our own homes, wondering what the fuck is going to be left when our catastrophe of a prime minister gets out of intensive care. The UK political opposition is all gearing up to disappear up its own arsehole again.

I hope he gets well. I’m sure he will. And all of us. I hope we all do.

Half of my friends are in lockdown. Half of my friends think lockdown is bollocks imposed by “them”. You can never prove prevention any more than you can prove “them”.

The bollocksycustard lot are either going to luck out and stay well – (statistically most likely) – at which point they’ll double down on their conspiracy nonsense, or they’ll actually get sick, at which point they’ll tell us all they were injected maliciously by government agents because of what they know, or it was in the water etc. And the vaccine, when it comes! Fuck me! It’ll be a mind control death serum that turns us all into zombies with AIDS. Like with smallpox. So many anti-vaxxers lost their children after successful campaigns to avoid vaccination. How quickly we forget. “Because history is a lie, man! etc etc”

Basically too many people have too much time on their hands.

I have had the luxury and time to overthink before. It really is a luxury and it really is no help. I’m done with it. It’s dangerous and serves nothing. But huge minds that have normally been turned to survival are now going to … well wherever they are guided at worst, wherever they are inclined at best.

The whole 5g Wuhan Spanish Flu scary music thing is compelling. But with my scientist brother and my childhood alongside him I’m too careful in my approach to stuff like that. I will never be won over by someone in a nicely done video showing me science and using an “important voice”. Max is better at science and I’m better at important voice.

We have so many sources of information. We should be suspicious of all of them. Including me.  It’s only right.

Stay safe. Don’t die of the fearthing or get killed for what you know depending on which side you wear your tinfoil.

Be happy.

Lucky me. I’m in rehearsal, somehow. We open on Saturday. I will be performing in my own living room, on my laptop, alongside some absolutely brilliant and completely bonkers human beings.

Last summer, before I went to America, I was in The Tempest in Oxford. It was a few calm funny weeks before everything exploded spectacularly for me and I ended up having to commute to Oxford by train every evening and back after the show to get stuck into full on rehearsals for the lovely Twelfth Night that was to follow. I loved the guys I was working with in Oxford though, which was a problem as I wanted to stay with them and celebrate after the shows but I couldn’t because back in London the cast was changing and insecurity was rampant to the extent that I ended up getting politicked out of going to the wedding of one of my best friends.

I am so thrilled to be back in the room with them, even if “the room” is all of our own individual living rooms. We were running tech. “It’s like running 9 different techs simultaneously,” says Zoe, the director. We were all in costume trying to work out what’s possible. And today I started to see it. To sense what it might be – what it can be… Time at the coalface, and we are learning the medium, such as it is. Sinead is basically liveauthoring the audience’s eye and we are all telling a crazy living room Tempest with whatever we can get our hands on in the places where we live. And it is shaping up into something interesting and worthwhile. I’m so proud to see the company evolve into the medium. To see how Zoe the director is learning how to direct this form as she goes. How all of us are upskilling ourselves technically in this process. There’s a huge amount left to chance here. But today through all the disruptions and mistakes as people left themselves on mute or “oh shit it’s my parents home with the shopping can we wait a bit before doing our scene while they take their boots and gloves and stuff off?” – through all the madness and the chance and the things forgotten and the things remembered I saw suddenly what this is and why it is like it is, because this is LIVE on screen and that’s what it’s trying to be. We can’t just be the millions of actors who are delivering “home Shakespeare”. That’s done, done quickly and done well. We are playing, and we are playing live, and God it’s funny to watch at times and lovely to be part of.

I have so much love and respect for Creation Theatre in Oxford, this team of shitkicking women making different work for playful joyful reasons, and making it with community and care at the fore. Even if I didn’t get to hang out properly in Oxford for the time I was there last summer, doing the commute of death, I get to celebrate the bond we made now instead over the internet, trying new mediums.

I haven’t switched on the telly for a few days but I was on the phone to a friend and she told me we were about to get Her Majesty with an official announcement. Worth a punt in these unusual times.

She looks well which is good considering she’s older than God. She was consciously channeling Vera Lynn with her “We’ll meet again” stuff. Good to hear her still at work. She’s a force to be reckoned with that woman. Active shout out to the emergency services and a reminder to stay indoors. Who knows how it will pan out in terms of numbers in this country. If we prevent it then we will never know what we prevented. That’s the thing with prevention.

On the phone to my bro Rupert I said how everybody in London was walking around outside my flat, on the riverside. To illustrate it I went to the window and did a spot count. 25 people visible from the window in that moment. That never happens. Slouching along in their running gear, sitting drinking beer on the benches, strolling in pairs or in threes, some big groups, some solo. Mostly no mask but I get that they’re hard to come by. Who knows how much good they do anyway. Specific information about this outbreak is not too easy to find as it’s thoroughly swamped with disinformation. It’s probably the Russians again, taking the opportunity to further fuck with us, because why else would there be such an incredible mine of misleading science on social media? In our isolation we can’t even bounce information and sources so we all just go with the most compelling thing we’ve read. Which alternates between the voices telling us it’s bollocks and the voices telling us we are murderers if we open the window.

I appreciated seeing HRH in her natty green top sounding like she really does miss her friends. So do I. I did a WhatsApp hug with Minnie this evening and it was more comforting than it should have been. Her daughter has named my owl though. You’ve likely seen photographs of it. The hot water owl that has the privilege of me sprawling on top of it through the long hours is apparently called Ernestina. It’s a girl. So there we go. A three year old can still teach us things.

The telly going on for the Queen has started a chain reaction. I’ve kept it off for the last week entirely, but now it’s on I’m using it. I’m catching up with “Better Call Saul”. I won’t get through the lot, but I’m glad of it. The Breaking Bad guys, now with money and credibility, going towards long takes and thoughtful scenes with smart actors. Unlike a lot of the other stuff you can find, and a good watch for someone like me who would usually rather be reading a book.

It’s half ten. The bath is running but it takes 45 minutes. I’ll get through one more episode and then turn in. Look after each other. Stay well.

Hex the royal python has started to get involved with rewriting Shakespeare. He insisted on slithering all over the keyboard while we had a Google Doc version of the script open, so everybody would have seen his edits – at one point perhaps a string of “sss” – as they went live and then were deleted. You can’t train a snake. Or at least I can’t. I need a basket and a pipe but even with the paraphernalia I reckon he’d defy me. I had to muck him out today as well, which is not the most pleasant job although he doesn’t make much mess in the scheme of things.

I had to wash out his claggy tank in my bath with him strung round my neck and pulsing. I could try to fool myself into thinking it’s an affectionate hug. He’s either after my warmth or he’s trying to work out if he’s strong enough to take me down. He isn’t, though. And he isn’t hungry either. He had no interest in the weekly mouse puppet show this evening.  He might take it when I’m not looking as I’ve left it with him overnight. If not that’s a waste of another good dead mouse. Another tiny life.

It’s the beginning of the weekend at home, and a warm day. I’ve literally never seen so many people walking up and down the Embankment and sitting on the benches down the sides of the river. I suppose normally they’d all be spread over London in various establishments – sporting grounds and pubs with beer gardens and so forth. Battersea Park was like a rugby scrum when I went last week so maybe the people who aren’t locking themselves in full time have decided, erroneously, that they’ll have a bit more room on the embankment. I went up on the roof.  Nobody up there but me, and I needed the air above me after way too long with a ceiling.

I love this time of year. The wind starting to blow warmer, the natural world waking up. All the blossom will be out on all the cherries and magnolias in London, and most of us are shut inside and can’t see it. Most of the conversations I’ve had with people involve us sharing our bewilderment with one another. A lot of people are sad. This lack of activity and sunlight can do that. Also the gradual drip of sad news. People’s dads suddenly dying, some of this virus, others of other things, but quite a few of them. Noticeably more than usual.

I’m trying to keep myself healthy spiritually and mentally within this, as I feel that if I can do that much then I can come out of it well. My instinctive disobedience has made me question the fact that everybody is doubling down on the navel gazing. But I guess this is an opportunity to hone a practice that is good for us, be it mindfulness, yoga, meditation or just writing 500 words every day and posting it. All these things are helpful…

The timesoup is thickening and people are starting to go bonkers. Not being locked up with somebody else is a blessing and a curse. I can live according to my own timings but my timings are all over the place these days. I’ve achieved next to nothing all day and actually I’m perfectly happy with that. It’s not even the weekend. I feel bollocks anyway, and I slept long hours. Partly sickness, partly just indolence. I didn’t have a target today. Even the simple aim of a zoom rehearsal is a thing for which I have to wash myself and put clothes on and attach a smile. I’m still wearing the I slept in plus socks, and it’s 9.30 at night. I’m only tired because I’m supposed to be tired. It isn’t like I’ve done anything to warrant being tired. Friday night, ladies and gentlemen. Friday night. Usually that’s the night when I walk into the bar, get hit by desperate noise heat and sweat, and remark to my friend “Oh fuck is it Friday? Shall we just sack it off?”

Right about now I think I’d get stuck in. I could manage that, being part of that shouting mess of dumb bodies as you breathe each others sweat and have entire shouted conversations about nothing with someone’s shoulder jammed into your back and then the stressed out glass collector drops a tray of glasses and the whole room cheers spontaneously and then laughs at itself for cheering as if it was one huge heaving great stupid organism. Shit Friday London and coming now to the time of year where there aren’t so many coats and scarves to lose and you aren’t going to freeze to death waiting for a nightbus so you can have another one even though there’s work tomorrow morning because fuck it, it’s a Friday, right? Yeah!

Nuclear bolognese, Dungeons and Dragons Online, Judge Dredd the Megacollection. Today, Michael, I’m going to be a teenager. And nobody can tell me not to so nerrr.

Thankfully in keeping with the rules of being an actor – (ie work at the times nobody else works) – I am in rehearsal tomorrow morning on zoom. So now I’m slipping from the miasma of my strangely comforting if thoroughly indulgent and lazy teenage day into the tried and tested bedtime routine as detailed yesterday.

Last night I dreamt I was hanging out with old friends. People from the cresta. Long long time ago friends. We were just hanging out together. An outwardly uncomplicated dream with many inner complications. The longing to just hang out. The desire to be active and outdoors under that wonderful Swiss sky. A la recherche de temps perdue. When I was really an actual teenager and my time was nothing but my own.

I can’t be shiftless for long now, ever. I’ve seen what it does when it accumulates over time. I woke up one morning and started walking again. There’s still a long walk ahead, but now there’s a long walk behind. It’s ok to rest our feet for a bit.