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I keep a flask by my bed. It is impossible to adjust the aircon in this hotel. You can switch it off by the panel, but the panel is a lie. It’s controlled centrally. I’m dried out and frozen as I sleep. Room service have stopped taking the winter double duvet off my bed. I found it in the wardrobe. They won’t put a cover on it. But they leave it there at last. It’s hot outside. I want to live in reality please, not expensive bullshitland. But I have to live in this aircon con.

There’s a water purifier in the gym downstairs. I fill my flask from it every night, as I utterly detest American tap water. Sure it’s safe and clean. But it tastes like it was squeezed from your armpit hair after a long day in the public swimming pool. I drank enough chlorine in Jersey when I was six and my swimming instructor kept ducking me. I can do without the memory in my tap water.

Last night I went, at about this time, to fill my flask in the gym. I found one of the company members dejected at reception. His door had run out of battery. The night porter couldn’t get him in. But let me just run that by you again. He couldn’t get into his room because his DOOR had run out of BATTERY?!? “Does this happen a lot?” I ask. “More than you’d think,” the night porter replies.

What fresh hell is this? What’s wrong with a key? I had to renew my card every day because the thing demagnetised in my pocket, principally because I’m carrying quick change magnets most of the time. My fault for carrying them maybe? But my friend can’t sleep in the room where all his stuff is because the DOOR has run out of BATTERY…! And the night porter can’t change the battery. So, after the first night of the show he had to sleep in another room that they opened for him. He did it with good grace… But…

I stuck with him for a bit to make sure the night porter gave him a toothbrush and toothpaste. I know how easy it is when you’re discombobulated to forget to ask for the things you need.

“How was the room?” I asked the next morning – “Did they give you the penthouse at least?” “No. It was on the ground floor near the car park.”

He shrugs. And then he goes off to teach his first ever solo class. He’s been worrying about it for a while. I have no doubt he aced it. But I remember my first few classes five years ago when I did this tour. I was nervous as hell. Paul had to help me out to get my mind into understanding that my life has been adequate training to teach these smart and inquisitive kids what they need. Now I’m doing Paul’s job from my first tour. I have to be supremely confident about classes and offer advice and be organised and active and helpful. Weird. But hugely powerful to understand how much I’ve shifted in five years.

This summer has been about seeing what I’m capable of. All of us are capable of more than we thought we were. Turns out I’m no exception. I’m going to keep raising the bar…

And on the subject of bars, next up is a 32 bar musical self tape that has to be in by Monday so will come from my hotel room in Chicago courtesy of iPad and gaffer tape. As a self taught musician I don’t even know what 32 bars means. I’ll just have to play something for a bit and not be shit. That’s hard enough, frankly. It might make Chicago a bit less fun, but it might make January a lot more fun. Balance…

 

I’m in a trail of happy people as we make our way through Notre Dame. 150 years ago this was in the middle of the biggest fenland in America outside of the Everglades. It was drained eventually for farming, but the wet air and the chirring of the treeborne insects helps connect me imaginatively to that time.

We have just emerged triumphant from the theatre. First night, at long last. We played to an audience that marked every moment, vocally joined us in the rollercoaster, laughed at the weird little gags we forced in, cared for the journeys of our unusual characters, got the show, got our gags and all stood up at the end, God bless them, and did the old standing O. American audiences, perhaps. But this difficult process has been validated utterly in one evening.

“We made this!” I find myself saying in the wings as we exit from the bowing, shot full to bursting with neat adrenaline, finally able to express the extent of it to the little portable village that we have formed.

Not many other processes can allow that feeling of “We made this” to be so owned.

We were given the means to make it. We were given time in a big room in Brixton. We were paid well. We were respected and trusted. We worked fucking hard. And now we have an uncut Twelfth Night, all parts played by this little band of five. And – thank God – it works and it works in detail. And it is incontrovertibly going to be a joy to do it for the next couple of months.

I barely had time to be nervous before the show. I’m having to make sure that lessons are well coordinated and spread evenly among the company, and that nobody is feeling worried about their work in workshops. It’s an aspect of this company that we are asked to teach all kinds of things in the daytime. Usually performative. Katherine is in tomorrow to teach confidence in public speaking to managerial students. I had to go in today to teach 21 people to improvise about climate change, and tomorrow I’ll be teaching about how to make verse work in your favour as a performer, and what it means when you shift from prose to verse. All grist to the mill for academics, all par for the course for performers conversant with the idiom. But that’s the joy with this company. You make a show with five actors that can fit in a suitcase. You fill all the roles that need filling. You create a company. You come together. Then off to Notre Dame, where you play to the home crowd and those of us who have never taught before get to break the back of the fear and responsibility that teaching carries.

Then into the world.

For now though, two more shows in Notre Dame. Chicago calling, and then Texas. My cowboy boots are sitting patiently in my hotel room for next week.

 

Five years ago I went to Westville Penitentiary. It was at exactly this stage in the process. Scott brought us all into the prison, and we did Much Ado About Nothing with none of the props or chairs or gewgaws to a bunch of medium security American prisoners. It was our first performance and it was a remarkable experience and made it impossible for us to ever be nervous with the show again.

We were asked if we wanted to come in and do a workshop in the prison this time. Three of us could do it, and we did so despite a hectic schedule.

Ricky picked us up at 8.30 and drove us across the county line to the prison. We left all our bits and pieces in the car, and walked into the unit with only some printouts. Through the x-ray and a thorough patdown. Through the very solid iron airlock doors. Past bundles of razor wire and electric wire and into the dilapidated shuttle to spin us over the sunny concrete to the run down stone unit.

There, once again, the big men in beige prison smocks – some with gang tattoos some with visible old injuries. Men you might feel threatened by in other circumstances, but in this instance hungry to learn, curious, starved of input.

Much of the work brought to prisoners over here is on a voluntary basis. As a result, I’m told that a lot of what is available to these people exists in various fundamental religious spheres. The zealots want to have a go at redeeming them.

Shakespeare is a perfect example of something secular that works in this context both in theory and in practice. Morally complex and ambiguous, open to interpretation, responsive to the individual, dealing with basic human needs and desires but old enough and established enough for someone to rubber stamp it, people do Shakespeare in prisons all over the world.

“Since you were here five years ago, they’ve relaxed security for us a little,” Ricky tells me. “Students on our course have a 3% readmission rate. That’s down from over 30%” The power of education. They only take people with at least two years left inside, as they get a degree out of it if they have the time. We got to come in on pretty much the first day of their work on Twelfth Night. So we did a lot of ensemble building work. Stuff that we would do in the first week of rehearsal. We were getting these guys to relax, to breathe and stretch. Then to focus together as a group. Some basic theatre games including Grandmother’s Footsteps, which was electric. And then onto working with simple bits of text.

Towards the end I was pulled out of that class. There was another class going on across the way on romantic poetry. I got ferried in to do work with them on verse and heartbeat and intention and delivery pertaining to romantic poetry – specifically Shakespeare’s Sonnets. It’s a lovely way to come into any lesson – as a practitioner. “All I can do is teach you how we would approach this piece of work for performance.” I got them speaking sonnets to me. Typically they then asked me for a famous speech. I ended up doing requests in a room in an Illinois prison to a bunch of guys with teardrops tattooed on their cheeks. I had a few tears of my own by the end, but thankfully less ominous in meaning and less permanent.

Just east of the golden dome of the basilica in Notre Dame Indiana is Washington Hall. It was built in 1881. It’s relatively old for this area. And it’s riddled with ghosts.

Just 8pm, but we are in a pool of light, sitting on the stage doing a speed run. Vital to identify the bits of bad learning and a speed run will find them. But it’s cold in here. I’m already on the edge of shivering when I look to Claire mid scene. She is turned at ninety degrees to the stage, utterly still, staring defiantly at something in the wings. I turn to look. “Don’t,” she shoots, barely moving. It’s like she’s holding something at bay. “Oh no, the ghost?” I ask her. “Sssh” she responds. My character has just been talking about Satan. I go cold.

Actors are a superstitious lot. It’s well known. I’ve escaped a lot of the superstitions but ghosts… Oh go on then. I get a shot of full body goose pimples. The whole speed run crashes for a few minutes while we all quietly lose and regain our cool. Then we get back on track despite the fact that there’s somebody else in the room. A strange shifting notion of a presence. An observer. Nice to have an audience I guess. I find myself relieved that we’ve outlined our stage space with a circle of light. We sit there, huddled in this huge hall, under the scrutiny of this idea of a dead person among hundreds of empty chairs, and we make another dead man’s words come alive in a ring of warmth and brightness and life.

I remember five years ago when I first walked onto this stage with Scott. The theatre was dark, but there was one strange light standing alone in the middle of the stage. “What’s that,” I asked. “Don’t you have those in the UK?” He said. “It’s a ghost light. And we need it here.” “Does it attract them or scare them off?” “I think the idea is that it keeps them off the stage…” No ghost operas on our stage overnight then. That’s something. But the presence of the light brings the presence of a presence into the tense present. Suggestion is a powerful thing. We are cold from air con. We are tired at the end of the day without much food. We see a ghost – in so much as anybody has ever seen a ghost. I see it through Claire seeing it. Now I have a frame of reference for “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” I can still picture the expression on her face. Challenge mixed with horror. Stillness.

Coming from London, having spent time in York and having lived in a room in Oxford that was certainly haunted (so far as you CAN be certain of that bollocks), this relatively new building is a prime candidate for one of the spookiest places I’ve ever worked in.

It’s an amazing auditorium though and the five of us will fill it with light and joy for three nights this week. We will either banish the ghosts to the edges of the darkness, or we will give them a bloody good show.

Here’s three of us, watched by a ghostly audience. There’s the ghost light and Sydney who gave her time up to be on book for us, and is generally awesome. And who I promised I’d shout out. And who could be a friendly ghost, considering we’ve never seen her outside of the building. But if so she’s got us fooled.

We have been here a week. Last night was one of the rare occasions where I just couldn’t write a proper blog. I could barely remember the start of the sentence by the time I was in the middle. Tequila, I lay the blame firmly at your door. We got awfully drunk after the working week, and then we got upsold the expensive tequila and ended up very happily drinking up a chunk of our paycheck in a beer garden in Mishawaka.

Laundry. Laundry and chill. That’s been the order of the day today. We drove to CVS to get detergent and Tylenol. We have a very large vehicle. I was almost sick in the parking lot.

I realised I hadn’t eaten. I put some pasta into me and went and read a book until things settled down.

I’m back in my hotel room, waiting for the laundry to go round, very seriously contemplating the earliest of early beds so we can get up and do two runs of the show tomorrow before meeting some academics and establishing what they want from having an actor come into their classes. It’s not going to get any less busy, I can tell you that much. But I’m learning to take my time when I can get it, even if today four of us kind of lost our day to the night before.

Jonno represented. He managed to pull out of tequila night early, and got a good night’s sleep while we all crammed into an Uber at 3am.

He got up and walked into South Bend and explored the local sights. He sent photos of his findings to the four of us as we blearily pinballed between the shower and the bed and the coffee machine. We could vicariously do the sightseeing through him. Normally I love to see the sights, to find out about places I’m working in. It’s why I love to travel for work when I can. The world is too damn big. I’ll never see it all but I’ll see what I can see when I can see it, and if I can do that and act at the same time then it’s perfect. It’s just the booze that gets in the way… Overdo it and you lose the next day. Damn.

The show is landing. We need to pace it up. We are trying to do it complete and uncut just so we can say we are doing it complete and uncut, but a little part of me wants to get out the big scissors and snip fat now. But I reckon we will manage to tighten it and pace it up. We are a close knit unit now, the five of us, and we want to make this the best we can. It’s why we haven’t stopped. We choose the time we work and that time is most of the time.

First show is on Wednesday. We need to run it a few times. We also need an audience but not until we’ve run it those few times. It’s gonna be great but there’s a mountain between us and the first show. After next week, barring travel, it’ll settle I think.

 

Indiana is excellent at brewing it’s own beer. We did well from that.

We have kept working, piecing the show together. I accidentally introduced one of my characters as a courtesan instead of a courtier in the associates showing. Oops. Semantics and gender. We are all playing multiple characters and that sort of brainfart can expand. We all must introduce ourselves and the characters we are playing.

This evening the five of us hung out with Scott and Christy and learnt not to put too much on a tab when we got hit with $67 per person in an impossible bill situation. We were basically skinned alive. And we all had such a good night that we allowed it to be a thing. Now I’m just writing the words I have to write to get to the end. Felix Mendelssohn is doing me a favour tonight. I’m enjoying my nightly orchestral music thing.

This week has been extremely positive in terms of finding a place. I’m open hearted. I’m ready to see what comes.

This morning i went shopping. I got stuck into the huge vehicle we have been given and I went to a party shop to buy loud party blowers. We are wedded to a gag where the representative of sensible behaviour goes for nothing.

We will be excellent. I usually exceed my allocated 500. Chances are I’ll leave it short tonight.

Too tired. Sorry. I’m literally gone.

It’s telling that I think of South Bend as a small town. It has 30,000 more residents than the Isle of Man. I haven’t really got out of the little bubble that is the campus of the major university where we are all rehearsing. But somewhere nearby is a seething town.

I’m knackered. We just did a showing to the associates. The people who have made it possible for so many actors from London to explore America for decades. I wasn’t about to  phone it in, so I threw energy at three people with notepads – as much as I would have thrown at 220 people who have never seen Shakespeare. Working on stage is kindest when your energy is sent back to you. I feel like a wrung out sponge.

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We all decanted to O’Rourke’s, the Irish pub on Eddy Street, which is the only street we have available, and largely the only pub after we had a dire experience at Brothers on our first jetlagged night, trying to get food. We ate pure salt and were actively punished with delay by the staff, just because we were tired and in a rush.

We are getting notes from Scott who knows this game so well. He watched us work and he has seen so many companies work so many shows over so many years that he can deftly say things about the stuff we aren’t thinking about that are extremely helpful and positive. Before this we got notes from Peter, who knows Shakespeare backwards and forwards and inside out, and Grant who has watched these for twenty years and more.

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Someone decided it was a good idea to have tequila during the notes. I’m not sure if it was me. I think it probably wasn’t. I don’t usually think it’s a good idea to have tequila. It isn’t usually a good idea to have tequila, generally, in my experience. But tequila we had. It was lovely but there was a noticeable side-effect in that it made each one of us considerably more drunk than we might otherwise have been. This is the particular skill of tequila. Makeydrunkenfaceness. All six of us magnified. We are all pretty extreme anyway. It got pretty intense, but always positive, as we all got properly drunk in the same room for the first time. We will travel well together, this band of weirdos. Very well. We are different enough to keep trying, and similar enough to keep understanding.

I’m in my peaceful hotel room again, listening to Rachmaninoff with half an ear, and the wet sounds of the four by fours as they squelch past on the main road to my left with the other. I always need to close the door at some point. There are some people I can have on the inside when I close it, but it’s rare to find them. Mostly I recharge solo. That’s the way of it. But we are on the way to something with this show. We still need to tighten. I need to remember that as well as being Toby and Antonio I’m the clock that upbraids Olivia with a waste of time. If the clock doesn’t upbraid Olivia, Olivia will upbraid the clock…

Every day I switch off the air conditioning. Every day the cleaners switch it back on. Irrespective of whether or not it’s off at the thermostat it goes on with a bang early in the morning anyway so I don’t know why we bother. We have been in a work / sleep cycle right now, putting the finishing touches on the show, and that air con burst is how I wake up every morning whether or not I want to.

We are very used to being alone together now, the five of us. We have found a dynamic. It works. From the start of rehearsal we have made time for games and warm-ups together and this has gradually knit us into a tight community that understands one other and looks after one another. It’s a very loving room, and a talented bunch.

But we haven’t had time to look at the scenery. Every morning we bundle into a huge vehicle and drive the short distance to Washington Hall. We climb three flights of stairs into a pillared rehearsal room. We practice our instruments, warm up, play four square, and start to dig in to the detail of this remarkable and complicated play, Twelfth Night. We work with just the five of us, stepping out to offer helpful insights when available.

By now we have so many in-jokes. It’s like we’ve been stranded on a desert island together for years. Language has started to change and devolve into all sorts of shorthand borne from necessity and ease of use. All of us love a durational joke. We have so many now. By the end of the tour we will have invented our own unique incomprehensible dialect. It’s already absurd and delightful. And so much of it is inspired by the language of this ancient dead playwright. His mischief. His facility with meaning. His light in the dark. His dark in the light.

I fancy seeing a bit more. The memorials of the town. Every night we finish pretty late but in the evenings we go to Eddie Street and eat in one of a very small number of outlets in walking distance from the hotel. We are in a sort of enclave here, removed from South Bend itself and attached to the university. The campus is truly remarkable, filled with art and sculpture. Eddie Street has two bars and a bunch of eateries where you walk down the line and they try to make you pay extra for guacamole.

Until the end of this week though, we will be working. No time for sightseeing. Tightening moments that need tightening, examining moments that haven’t been examined yet, really plumbing into the depths of what this play with this bunch of minds attached to it has got to say now. And laughing. Lots of laughing.

“You’re English,” said the guy in the lift just now to Kaffe and I. “Is it in a shambles, or a shambles?” “It’s an absolute shambles” we both responded reflexively, jolted back to the slow motion car crash that is taking place with Bojo the clown thousands of miles to the east of us. But embarrassingly it turns out these guys are just asking about grammar. They look sheepish. “There’s an English guy in our team who uses the word is all…” I try to win it back by telling them about The Shambles in York for a bit of etymology, but the lift goes bing. Oh well.

One of my duties out here is to work out who is going to lead which workshop. We do quite a number of workshops in the daytime starting next week. It’s part of the deal… We go in as actors – I’ll start each workshop by making it very clear that I’m a visiting practitioner, not a teacher or a lecturer. Then I get them on their feet and get them to do work practically with text. But as Captain Education it is part of my schtick to make certain that the company lead workshops they’d be interested in leading. That makes for better workshops! There’s one on The Iliad, for instance. Jono has told me many times that it’s the best book in the world. I’ve reminded him to be practical with his workshop and get them on their feet, but even if it’s just an afternoon with Jono reading Homer it’ll still be the best afternoon for a thousand miles.

You know me well enough to know I always say “yes” to stuff before thinking, oh constant reader, so it will come as no surprise to you that I just said I’d be willing to lead a workshop for 25 prisoners in Indiana in less than a week. I’ve been to the prison before, five years ago, to do a show. It’s a dark place, and we brought light in with us. I’d like to bring more light in, even knowing that the darkness falls again quickly while we go back to our easy freedom. But it’ll be another of those growth moments for us to go in with the responsibility of running a workshop for people that desperately need light and thought and an outlet – and making it lovely. I’ll have Katherine and Kaffe running it with me so I’ll have their different brains and the thread of trust and connection we have spun already. We will fly and it will be ace. But forever and always the unknown will be unknown. We just have to look at it when we find it. And we will.

I’m in my orange sarong from Camino, sprawled on this huge hotel room bed, listening to the ambient noise and writing. Cars pass by down and to my left – all these huge vehicles, muted by the glazing but still … huge. Things are bigger in America. 

I feel strangely peaceful. I didn’t think I’d be doing the education, but things changed and suddenly logic took me that way. Katherine is perfect as tech. Jono is perfect as travel. I was not going to do blog no matter what, as then I’d be writing two blogs, and besides that, Kaffe is brilliant. Education had been pre-allocated to Anna and when she was unable to come to rehearsal we never really rethought it. Until yesterday.

My previous duty had been social – piece of cake, by mistake. I swapped with Claire as she has enough on her plate and I have space in my head to organise the workshops and make sure everybody is happy within it. It just means … more emails and if there are any horrible sounding workshops I’ll probably end up leading them. Hey ho.

We are here in Notre Dame for a couple of weeks. The campus where we are rehearsing is in walking distance from the hotel we’re staying in so we have only got one big car between the five of us for this fortnight.

Three of us love to drive. We love it. We always want to be driving. Even when we aren’t driving, we are still driving. Noisily. Oh dear.

On the first day Kaffe made a rule that we aren’t allowed to talk about anybody’s driving unless we’re in the passenger seat navigating. On the second day he broke his own rule when I was sitting in the back with him. The driver’s seat is going to be coveted between three good natured boys that just… prefer to be behind the wheel. And are still driving when they’re not driving.

Neither Claire nor Katherine have shown any desire to join the mix. I can tell why not. “Put your left foot to sleep!” “This is how turnpikes work!” “Watch out for that car pedestrian dog tree chipmunk.” / “You ran a red light!” “No, it was amber when I went through.” “Not when the back went through.” “What’s that got to do with it – rules of the road!” / “You have to stop at the stop signs.” “There was nobody there!” / “You’re on the wrong side of the road, Al!” …

Yeah Ok. That last one was a useful one. I was so invested in the fact I’d just clipped the kerb and lost some alpha points with the driveyboys that I was in my backwards head worrying about losing driving privilege so I pulled out nice and smoothly on the left hand side into more flak, catalysing people in the back demonstrably belting up. As always there’s a kernel of me making it harder for me to do the things that make me happy. Take the first night drive at peak exhaustion, that’ll be the best way to guarantee they’re comfortable letting you drive lots.

This genial company have found a little good natured squabbleground. Frankly the best solution would be to give the keys to Claire and Katherine and have done with it – take all the testosterone out of the equation.

This company makes me happy though. For five very different humans we roll along very well. We still haven’t stopped working enough to appreciate the fact that we are in America. It’s obvious we are though – you just need to  look at the size of the portions. In England it’s polite to finish your plate. Over here, if you can successfully eat everything you ordered then the restaurant hasn’t served you enough.

We all got driven to a restaurant by Deb tonight, our company manager – we went for a shared meal at The Crooked Ewe. Deb doesn’t drink so she offered to drive us all there and for once we driveyboys weren’t squabbling for keys because alcohol was going to be involved.

We had incredible food in one of the many restaurants that brew their own beers. The breweries don’t have such a hold here as they do in the UK. So many restaurants brew on site over here, with huge custom made breweries visibly working behind the seating area. They smoke their own meat and fish too. And serve huge portions. Everybody had food left over. The Americans didn’t think about leaving food. The British apologised. “It was wonderful,” said Jono, “But I just couldn’t manage all the fries.” “Yeah you couldn’t!” responded the waitress in a celebratory tone. She’d have been disappointed if he had.

Which is all very lovely but WASTE. So much waste here.

We eat hotel breakfast with plastic knives and forks and spoons on plastic plates next to a sign that says “Make a green choice and skip room service for extra hotel points.” Surely washing knives and forks and plates is better than not letting someone turn your sheets over?

Anyway. Here’s a photo from earlier. Katherine takes incredible photos almost habitually when we aren’t paying attention. The knock on effect of that habit is that we will have a beautiful stock of memories.