Category: Uncategorized

Finally a day down. A chance to potter around my local area in the sunshine, to do some shopping and to catch up on my emails. Also, with perfect timing, a self tape has landed for an appropriate role, and unusually it isn’t due in a huge rush, and it hasn’t landed in the middle of a busy patch. I should be able to learn the lines and find the right person to read it and the right set-up to do it well enough. It’s just a self tape, so me sending a recording of myself to the creative team. It’ll probably lead to a meeting. Unlikely to a straight offer unless they know my work. But I get what they’re after and I’ll enjoy filming it. I’ve done my basic online research and like the look of the director. And the script comes off the page very well, avoiding many of the common traps that scripts in this genre fall into. It’s surprising, modern and smart. Must be why they’ve chosen me…

God I needed a day down without having to stress about stuff after IKEA defeated me yesterday. The leasehold people in my block chose my relax day to send a rude email which I received just before starting to write this blog. It still put a lump in my stomach, but I reckon I’ll be able to sleep anyway. In the end it’s just noise.

I sat in a coffee shop and read the script of the movie. Then I went to the supermarket and got a few days worth of food, including loads of Waitrose Rösti – so cheap, so good. Then I went to The Chelsea Potter for a cheeky lunchtime six pound pint and to send a ton of emails and call a few people. Then home to chill out with the cat before bed at 9pm. It’s closer to ten now, as I found that stupid email and wrote an annoyed reply that thankfully I didn’t send. That can go tomorrow morning after a sleep. And for the next few days I can learn lines for the self tape and enjoy this unseasonable weather.

I didn’t even notice that I spent the whole day in just a jacket and waistcoat and never missed wearing my coat. The world is dying, but at least the weather is nice.

Brian and Mel are next door having dinner. It’s rare for me to go to sleep before them but today that’s on the cards. Tickety-boo. A big mug of sleepy tea.

And I’ve got the means to make a great breakfast tomorrow.

I also got a script through from back in The Isle of Man. It’s a guy out there with some equipment who wants to fly me over and shoot something he’s written. He’ll put me up in a hotel, he says, although I’m tempted to just ask for per diems if I go. I haven’t spent time with  the script yet as today was for the other one. But glad to have a few irons in the fire immediately Vault has ended. Interesting year ahead, I’m thinking now…

 

I went to Ikea, but I was so tired that I shouldn’t have. I ended up buying nothing but food and wasting ages.

Today was looking pretty chilled. I had a reasonably easy morning. A little bit of managing a dear friend who brought the work to me and is an atrocious back seat driver. I know this already but he still surprises me with it. “You need to inflate the tyres,” he says to me. “Oh shit, really?” I respond thinking those kids at Vault have taken the time to let them down after I got everything torqued up beautifully for a heavy load. I feel bad about not noticing. “Yeah mate, don’t you know that?” and I realise he’s talking generally, about vans with heavy loads, not specifically. Bless. I let it slide. If he could drive every vehicle on every road at all times he’d do it – and solve the overpopulation problem at the same time…

The morning was just watching the van while people brought stuff in to load it. That and directing the load. Taking care of the interior carpet and the interior timber frame. Nice and relaxed with occasional lifting.

Then a bit of a drive across town with a full van and Ollie, who I’ve just met. Ollie and I are both relaxed and happy. I’m imagining a great big ground floor scene dock to unload into. He’s imagining just a few lengths of timber in the van. We are taking it to his studio. Both of our imaginations are lulling us into a false sense of security. His studio is down a long narrow corridor, through a door and up a flight of stairs with a corner in it. There’s a shitload of mdf flooring that weighs a ton and is basically useless. There’s some random bits of chipboard with nails and screws sticking into your face. There’s a few big chunks of plasterboard. And there’s the timber. We got it all up there pretty efficiently but both of us felt the job by the end of it. And both of us were wryly aware that it might all come back out to go somewhere else almost immediately – Ollie doesn’t want it in his studio.

In retrospect I was too tired to go to Ikea. But I drive through rush hour and get there before six only to discover that there’s a height restriction on the car park and the van’s too tall.

I eventually find a weird lot near a garage that’s already full of vans, but has space. “Is it ok to park here,” I ask the guy to my right. “No English,” he responds. There’s another guy to my left. “Hey, mate, I’m thinking of going to Ikea but I’m not sure what this area is for. Am I okay to leave the van here?” He looks at me and shrugs with a studied lack of expression. “I’ll likely only be about half an hour…” I realise he doesn’t understand me either but doesn’t trust himself with “No English.” He throws out his cigarette and winds up the window shrugging as his eyes slip off me. There are loads of vans here though. People are sleeping in them.

I take a punt, and I walk across the roundabout to Ikea. Just as I walk in I get a text from the guy who I’ve borrowed the van from. “How’s the van?” He’s in Adelaide, but he’s still sensed that I’ve left the van in some weird van city surrounded by people who literally speak 0 English and won’t try. I haven’t told him about the tagging yet although he’s likely been told by mutual friends who read this. I tell him officially, and he’s understanding. He is more concerned with the interior, which is fine apart from the drapes being moved around a bit. But now I’m worried about leaving it where it is.

I’m in the maze of furniture, taking photographs of things, when I start to feel really panicky and weird. I guess last week and weekend, with rehearsal in the day and shows in the evening, with being whacked in the back of the head by that drunk kid in the tunnel who was trying to knock my costume hat off, with the van getting tagged, with managing audience and with money and with driving and with not knowing what’s next… I think I just hit a wall. So I bought nothing in Ikea but meatballs and a Daim Cake to help ground me. And then I went and sat in the van until I could drive home. And now I’m in the bath.

I remember one time I came off stage after the last scene of a touring show to find the backstage area already stripped down and ready to go in the van. “We thought we’d get a headstart while you guys did the last act.” I have an early childhood memory of watching the company of an outdoor show loading the van in a pool of floodlighting and thinking it romantic. Since then I’ve hauled steeldeck, huge flats and timber. I’ve packed up lights and endless cables and I’ve broken down trusses without earplugs leading to two years of tinnitus. I’ve obsessed over van packs. I’ve fitted impossible quantities of furniture into Luton vans and hauled it back and forth over the Pennines. I’ve helped load an old Post Office van with ridiculous knick knacks every night. I’ve gone around London in a transit collecting delicate sets to transport up to Edinburgh for people I’ve never met before and shows I’ve never seen. The van … it sometimes feels like a company member in a touring show.

Someone puts diesel in the petrol engine, or takes a chunk out of the side or gets stuck on a tree or hits a badger or gets five tickets on one drive and everyone knows and talks about it. I was in a show where they missed the ferry to Ireland. They had to cancel a performance. Financial disaster. I’ve done others where I had to preside over the van pack, imposing a strict and fine order to the contents, to do with weight and delicacy and movement when driving. You start to care about the van on tour. It’s the whole show apart from the bodies.

One of the first big vans I drove was up to Edinburgh. I winged it getting out of the parking space in the Sixt van lot, and took a chunk out of the pristine transit to the left of me. Thankfully I’d paid the extra insurance but still an expensive mistake. Idiot. You learn by doing though.

I remember in the Tower of London, saying “Watch out for that low bollard at the back of you. You won’t be able to see it from the cab.” “FOR FUCK’S SAKE, I KNOW WHAT I’M DOING,” replied the other driving ASM at the wheel, before immediately reversing hard into the unseen bollard and really making a nasty dent in the thing. As it hit I felt awful, almost as if I’d seen a friend take a nasty cut. My eyes were drawn to the scar for the rest of the tour…

I’ve come to care about this big old Maxity. We split the interior space for Pantechnicon and I forgot it was as big as it is in there. But today was “get-out” day. Usually that involves loading the van. But it was all in the van already. So it was about tearing down all the stuff we built in the cold about a month ago, and then unloading it. Pulling out staples and unsticking carpets. Packing random knick-knacks into bags. Working out what was borrowed from who and where it all needs to go and why. I need it empty for tomorrow. I’ve got a whole day of hauling ahead of me. The best part of a week to build, and just a few hours tearing it down. I haven’t got the figures yet but I’m thinking we didn’t lose much. Maybe a small recovery, even. It depends how many people actually paid for a ticket… We will see. Not that we did it for the money. We did it for the festival season. But we need to get those pitches out there.

Late August 2018. Mel and Al, driving up to Shambala festival to work. “The deadline for Vault Festival applications is tomorrow. Shall we try something?”

At the time the jag was driving beautifully. As we coasted through the English countryside we composed a crazy pitch. We stopped at a Sainsbury’s to buy festival supplies and hijacked the WiFi to send it. It was an unusual pitch. A vehicle outside the front, an intimate show, storytelling and tarot, as much about the watcher as the watched. To both of our surprise, the pitch was accepted.

Both of us work with tarot. We had already learnt, through collaboration with the remarkable artist Alice Instone, that people in this city crave an intimate moment. We wanted to make something that reflected that, but that was as much about the listener as it was about the speaker – to combine a theatrical experience with something more personal.

For the last three weeks the result of that, The Fantabulous Pantechnicon, has been outside the front of the Vault. The Marquis (who looks very much like me) is lost in time, lost in space, thoroughly excited about everything but jagging through dimensions and eras uncontrollably, gambling and consuming compulsively as he goes. He has an oracle in his van, (Who looks like Mel, properly using Alice’s remarkable Tarot in a very different soundscape and atmosphere but the same van, with a live snake.) He might have picked her up from Delphi. She is Pythonic for certain. She has her reasons for being there. The Marquis has no idea how lucky he is. He’s just selling snakeoil and ticking over. She is there as another timefree being because she’s realised he’s damaging the timestream with his haphazard consumption and self importance. She’s an immortal, he’s an accidental time traveler. He doesn’t understand that his adherence to old models and redundant power structures and ways of being is dragging the world to destruction by fire – despite having been extremely close to Shelley, the delightful romantic, who he helped burn at Fiareggio with Trelawney while Byron sat in his carriage. He can’t remember much of his old life. He gambled it. He has gambled memories and concepts. He’s lost his name. He’s lost the memory of how he lost it too. It likely had something to do with his romantic liason with beautiful Juan who turned out to be Death. That’s part of the whole problem, even if he doesn’t attach significance to it. Death and the Marquis were lovers, for a moment, in New Orleans. Death gifted him the uncontrollable immunity from time that spins him through eras randomly.

None of this is particularly relevant to your show as an audience member. It’s part of the absurd but beautiful background work that we do in theatre to give our characters weight. As far as you know I’m just a guy in a hat plus what I decide to tell you. You meet an excitable and confused but extremely well spoken man who knows he is important but doesn’t know why, and has recently consumed huge amounts of psychedelics. How mad the experience then becomes is to do with you and the dynamic in the van. The Marquis tells stories, gives gifts, destroys regrets, improvises rituals, shares poems and gives advice dependent on what is needed. It’s a very complete half an hour now. But we owe Vault Festival for that. You can’t rehearse audience responsive work without a paying audience. I needed to experiment with different story and ritual before I got the shape locked. The biggest thing I had was that I wanted the character to be less important than the ritual, but for both to be present. I never thought it would be possible to achieve genuine ritual with a character frame but I wanted to try. The Marquis frame works for me in terms of being truthful. He’s taken from me anyway, a version of me. I have a genuine Spanish Aristocracy. By channeling it, I got the chance to make this very strange, beautiful and layered show. We needed the first week to make it. But now it’s done and honed we can move it forward to festivals and so forth (although not with the same van probably – we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.)

A calm weekend. Yesterday I reminded myself why I shouldn’t always wait until the day is over before writing about it. I was tired and a bit drunk and I let the guy who derailed a show derail a blog. Silly Al.

At the end of the weekend I’m walking off the cliff again. It’s been a good run of work but next week the diary is annoyingly blank. There’s plenty of stuff I have to do in realworldland though, so it can be a time of admin. I can sort the car perhaps. Get my shit together, think about what I want to make next, sort the flat out, pay homage to my merciful cat mistress.

Today though is just for chilling out on the sofa with Brian, gearing up for an evening in the van where I can have the headspace to roll with weird energy if any of it manifests. There was a lot of unusual energy flying around yesterday but I guess that’s a Friday night in London. People kept banging the van. We had some taggers that got really mardy with us for parking up where they wanted to spray. I’m glad they didn’t spray the front of the van as they were angry enough to, but they hadn’t started yet. (*and it turns out I was wrong. I hadn’t noticed as it was small). They … wanted to be angry. I suppose it’s a potential identity choice if you’re drawn to be a tagger. “Fuck the system etc.” This is an official government sanctioned graffiti area… You’re not being properly subversive if you don’t tag the van… Ugh.

We had a nightmare setting up yesterday, as some guy had parked his BMW in the tunnel blocking us, and then vanished. He was eventually found and he spikily reversed, bristling with aggression. People get angry after being pushed into boxes all week. It could’ve been a lot worse, but it was pretty weird anyway and I really don’t want another night like it, despite it ending beautifully with friends.

So I’m going to get in early today so I have my calm. The rushed beginning caused me to lose touch with my usual ability to derail negativity and defuse rage. I suspect there’ll be nothing bad compared to yesterday. (*Ha)

Time passes, and now I’m in early and feeling sad. Somebody tagged the front of the van last night, and had a good go at taking the numberplate off. Not cool. It’ll take time and a bit of money to undo. “It’s a shit tag as well,” says one of the regulars. And it is. Which kinda makes it worse. Friday night in London. If I propose a van show here again it’ll be with a van that belongs to me, and I’ll encourage people to tag it so it doesn’t burn me when someone does that shit. It works for the show I guess. I can bring it in to the world. But it feels a bit like someone just casually took a shit in my bedroom. And I don’t mean Pickle.

Time passes.

I was upset about that. A little smiley face and an idiot signature. This evening they went to town.

We were inside the van running the show. It’s right outside the front door of the festival. Surely someone could keep an eye, you’d think. But there were some ragey kids in the tunnel. It wasn’t specific rage. It was general. But the van is visible, the middle class is evident in the audience, and I’m wearing a top hat. One of them whacked it off HARD and then tried to pick a fight with me when I asked him why. They were causing problems for the ushers too. Frustrating. It’s been a lovely two weeks. But the crazies are out now. I blame the weather.

It’s warmer this weekend than it has been for the last two. If you’d usually stay at home playing FIFA and cranking you might be inclined to hit the streets, nick some paint, and use a bit of it to fuck with a stranger’s van before getting busy with solvents so you can shit your pants in a railway siding while trying to tag and urinate simultaneously. They could choose their battles.

Mel said “Taggers and theatre people have loads in common. We all are marginalised geeks who find a way to take our power. We all make things that we know are ephemeral.”

True dat. Rage is fine. But don’t direct it at people who are angry too.

I lost the waking day to a hangover. The headache took over my whole being. I couldn’t think beyond it and somehow the codeine wasn’t working. I’m blaming dry January. My liver, at high efficiency, processed everything I threw at it last night. And last night I was compartmentalising the high profile job where everyone worked their socks off for a room full of indifferent billionaires. Which involved lots of booze and dancing.

I finally took myself into the light in the afternoon and started to stick myself back together as best as I was able. Then went to the van.

“You guys are like siblings,” says Jethro about Mel and I. We really are. I’m definitely the younger brother. I bitch about her but it’s because I love her. We’ve made a lovely thing together and it’s sad that we finish this wave on Sunday. Tonight was strange and beautiful, as always. But one guy used his magic drunkpower to make shit hard, and he did it on purpose too with his amdram crap.

I had an unusual audience of 4 lads. I have no idea if they paid or not. It was an unsold show and fifteen minutes into it there was a knock on the door and four people were there like they’d been waiting. I think they might have been no-shows from earlier. Three of them were into it but the nearest one to me was playing catastrophe drunk. He refused to write his name in the book right at the start which was an alarm bell. He wasn’t going to play. He was there to fuck it up for his own reasons. His whole energy was about “no” from the outset and he backfooted me by behaving like he was being let in late. Little twerp. At one point he genuinely tried to secretly pretend he was a vampire in a way that he knew I’d hear. Which sounds like playing, and could’ve been fun, but he was so utterly shut down that there was no play in him. It was just an attempt at a wind up. He seemed to assume I was precious. I did irresponsibly sent him in to Mel immediately to get rid of him for a bit so I could frame the show for his friends without him loudly bulldozing everything. I’m not precious but I can sense an asshat. She rebounded him immediately (he tried to get his balls out for her). He’d just had a vasectomy.

I wasn’t going to be precious about my content. He wanted to make it about him and that’s what his friends the audience wanted too so I let him derail most of the narrative and fed him whisky as he monologued. At one point one of his friends said to him “look, you’ve been breaking the fourth wall repeatedly” and that was the biggest disappointment of the night. That his friend thought there was a fourth wall to be broken. They were worried there was a world to break. I would’ve said “No, your friend is just behaving like a moron and I don’t like him, so I have no inclination to share nice things with him.” You can’t break the fourth wall if it isn’t. But you can be a drunk geek, and make it shitter for your friends.

Grrr. It’s for the best that he can’t breed anymore. Maybe constant pain down there stimulates testosterone production in the short term and brought about his shit behaviour. I’d like to be compassionate but he was just so arrogant and it honestly felt like he thought he was deliberately ruining a bit of trad fourth wall theatre. I hate self importance, but underneath all the amplified booze was a child who realised early that he was cleverer than his mummy and hasn’t quite worked out how to socialise that knowledge into adulthood.

Before and after him we had nothing but beautiful interesting people come through. Writing this tonight has helped me notice how the negative things stick in my memory easier than the positive. Just one guy who was compensating for something has derailed my blog tonight. Giving the twerp a platform.

The last show tonight brought five huge and deep friends, with whom I’ve made work that I’ll always be proud of. Some of my Factory family. They had been worried they wouldn’t enjoy it. They totally got it, and the dialogues within and after the show were great. It made up for that one idiot in spades. Here we all are.

The annoying guy was useful lesson. I’ve been having some thoughts about how to compartmentalise someone who comes into a show with no fourth wall and thinks he’s doing jujitsu when he breaks it. It’s likely never going to happen again, but we grow or we shrink. I could’ve managed him better perhaps. But he set out to fuck it. I don’t understand that sort of thinking so I can neither be compassionate nor effective in managing the thinker.

I’m sitting in the BFI. The guy to my left is on a string of conference calls. He has a little moustache and a tie and ironed shirt tight to the flesh under his lambskin jacket. He looks like a finger puppet.

“Unique” he says, frequently. “Head up communications in a unique context accessing enterprise market pots.” Sometimes he laughs, but it’s a dry sound devoid of meaning, like someone dragging a stone on a bit of driftwood. It involves the word “ha”, but it’s like he learnt it by rote. Usually this dead laugh is triggered by his own content.

I’ve heard a lot of people talking like this recently. It’s a sort of learnt groupspeak. Signalling membership of some bullshit club. There’s always these pockets of linguistic consensus. It’s abject. But I suppose we all want to feel like we belong. And there’s money in this language. People pay for conferences where they all talk in it. It’s an industry. But this little fool somehow catches my interest.

I moved.

Now I’m downstairs in the bowels of a hotel, dressed as a New York cop. There are plenty of real cops here as well. “I want your uniform,” one of them tells me. They have spaniels to sniff out explosives. Some of them are going under all the tables with torches, rifling through plants, checking the artworks. These burly professionals look towards safety whilst musical theatre actors pretend to kill one another with knives to a beautiful wash of sound. “Bernstein’s a genius,” enthuses a stocky police lieutenant. “The sound. The tension within it. God I wish I could do it.” He’s not wrong. This is twice in a year I’ve been a cop in West Side Story. Last time I was psychotic Schrank. This time I’m ineffective Krupke. Inspired partly by the bullshit guy at BFI I’ve shaved down to a little vain moustache for the evening. Everyone is trying to get things rehearsed. The tech guys are exhausted. But it’s coming together. It’s an ambitious call, for dinner entertainment, putting on a musical with all these big numbers. But it’s a big dinner. There are some serious names on the guest list. Some major league players selling in the silent auction lots. I’m going to have to be charming, but the uniform is an open goal. It does a huge amount of work for me.

More time has passed.

A buzz of excitement. Every corner has someone spraying deodorant or adjusting makeup. People are busy even if they look relaxed. Someone asks me which aftershave they should wear. Others are rolling their r’s, sirening, regulating breathing. “I feel much better for that smint,” says someone. The Puerto Ricans practice their accents. “Fifteen minutes,” calls the stage manager, and the director is giving notes about positioning in the fights. I’ve checked my props, checked my costume. Having a moment of calm. I glance up and there’s someone in their pants directly in my eyeline. We are sharing this room with the police and people have been waiting for them to leave before getting their showpants on. It smells strong in here. Chemical. Familiar. This buzz. This weird community. It’s what I signed up for. Helen will be at the van by now, about to be me for Pantechnicon. I’m going to get my Krupke face on…

And I did.

I know I lied to an Imam last summer, but now I’ve gone one step further and lied to royalty. “Are you really an American?” asked the surprisingly disarming heir to the throne. I had been unexpectedly put in a lineup to talk to him. I’d been briefed to remain in character as Sergeant Krupke. “Yessir, born and raised,” Krupke responded. He was very pleasant. He loves the musical West Side Story. Later on, speaking to production, he apparently said “It’s so great that you’ve even got an American actor playing Krupke.” It’s probably the ‘tache. But I was surprisingly disarmed by him.

Momentary blip accommodated, and on we go. Thanks for the messages. I always find it’s better to lance the boil.

I met some extraordinary young men in my work today. One of them had been trapped in gang culture and had to move city to break the pattern. The other was self harming and battling serious personal demons at a very young age. Both of them have risen to a leadership where they are able to mentor other people. Both have great momentum and perspective, hard won in your twenties, precious at any stage of life. They’ll be involved in the thing I’m doing tomorrow. It’s a lovely thing and I’m still not sure how much if anything I’m allowed to say about it.

I had a full day today though. Rehearsal all day and I got to try on my police uniform. I’ve got the most phallic rubber truncheon you can imagine and it’s full of wet sand so it gently leaks when it’s warm.

Nice to have a uniform. Apparently it cost a load to rent. But it looks the part. I mostly watched people sing and occasionally demonstrated how impossible it is to rehearse “immersive content” (ie being charming to strangers while maintaining a pretend world ie what tiggers do best) We have been moving people from one end of a room to another while they pretend to be insane alien children and we pretend not to notice. It’s mildly absurd and Tristan and I as the old lags are having to try to stop ourselves from saying “It’ll be alright on the night.” I was caught by the director on more than one occasion running versions of “Just get over the other side of the room and pretend I’ve done it in character I’m bored of you pretending to be insane.” I guess it’s better to pressure run these things and be prepared if any of the audience do turn out to be mad aliens. But most likely it’ll turn out to be a delightful and amenable bunch of people with just the inevitable one or two psychopaths. And the way to deal with individuals and groups of people never really becomes apparent until you’ve met the individuals themselves and then it’s instinctive and instant.

On which subject I had another vanfull tonight. It was so full I couldn’t fit one visiting friend in, which felt churlish in the extreme, especially since I’ve been trying to persuade her to come along and play sitar. Still a great deal of fun, although some friend’s experiences had to be rushed. Mel somehow managed to stretch a fifteen minute session into 25 minutes which is extremely hard to cope with when there’s a backlog. I ended up having to turf a friend into the tunnel to make room for an unexpected oversold show. It’s difficult to do the people management and the show simultaneously if timings go kablooie. It’s hard enough when they’re on track. I found I was unable to keep the world and catch the people that fell through the cracks. We need a third person, but we aren’t even paying ourselves. My friend is making more to cover one night than I will for the whole run after expenses. Ahhh theatre.

… and the bulldozer slams in.

However many times the audition doesn’t go your way, it never gets any easier. I’ve had lots of lovely people saying lots of lovely things today but it’s all to the same purpose and I don’t need smoke blown up. We actors put our heads on the line over and over again in order to do the thing that we do. It’s not about being loved. It’s about being in a position to do the thing that makes us who we are. Which is why being told they “loved” you is irrelevant if the job went elsewhere.

I realised tonight that my support network is disrupted. Both of the people I’d normally unpack my shit to to are new mums and I know they’re crazy busy. Years ago we could call each other in floods of tears no matter what or when. Now their sleep is precious. I couldn’t involve them in what is, essentially, a very minor upset. This job – it’s just a nice thing that didn’t work out and worked out for someone else. But it confirms all sorts of patterns in my imagination. The last nice thing didn’t work out too you see, for arcane and inexplicable reasons. Maybe I can’t have nice things anymore, I think. And the confirmations and patterns and negative thought spirals squeeze stupid bitter tears. And I just want to switch out for a second.

Traveling and acting are my two big delights. The chance to do them both is like Al Catnip. But for whatever reason, the universe is holding out on that joy for now, whilst giving me periodical little kicks in the dick for good measure. Somehow it’ll work out… There’s a reason why etc etc etc

I can surely make some money driving vans and invigilating exams and flaying my skin off in the meantime! It’s gonna be fine fine fine! And so we lie our way through existence.

I’m sad. I’m just basically sad. I’ve spent the afternoon with a friend who is chemically imbalanced, and I’ve been pretending to be the sorted one for his sake despite wanting to eat my own arms. Now I’m home I just want to curl up.

And I’m working two jobs. I’m rehearsing in the daytime and I’m doing Pantechnicon in the evening. There’s no need whatsoever for me to be feeling anything other than completely valid and busy. But I guess we can’t control the chemicals. Who knows what the next few months will bring. Not what I was hoping for directly. But maybe there’s a reason it went elsewhere. It’s my job to find it and seize that reason, whatever it might be, or to create it.

Bulldozers are a tool of change. Something gets smashed, something else grows. I’ll be rehearsing all day tomorrow and then in the Pantechnicon all night. I’m busy and sought after. I’m just choosing to fixate on a lost job I gave myself the best chance at, because I love to travel and I love to work. The universe will find other opportunities… It’s the availability I’ve kept by not having all these kids like my emergency friends have. I just … I just wish that occasionally my decision would be validated beyond nice messages telling me how well I auditioned.

Basically I’m just sad. And It’s ok to be sad. Tomorrow I’ll probably be resolute. It’s all so fleeting anyway.

How delightful, to be home and in bed when I’d normally still be talking to strangers and burning things. I’m having a ball at Vault Festival, but I’m also glad to have a night off and an early bed.

You’ve heard me talking about this Vault Festival, oh constant reader. But you might not know the extent of how great it is. Yes, we have to accept that they take a minimum percentage of our box office, and yes that means that possibly we would end up paying them to make the show, but it’s a very reasonable deal comparatively. Considering we are in London, they are not taking the mickey. Edinburgh Festival has long ago lost the ground on which you can experiment with things and not end up in debt. Mel and I brought a scratch performance to the Vault, and so long as we have a reasonable turnover next week it will work out loosely cost neutral. They are hosting our show on their site and pushing it out there. Their volunteers and producers have been exceptional in helping us find the right audience members. We’ve never had an empty night. We can use what we’ve learnt and what’s been written about us to confidently expand the show and pitch it to festivals in the summer, knowing we have a good group of people who can make it happen even if Mel and myself are both indisposed. I have a friend covering for me on Thursday. She’s totally different from me and will bring her own particular energy to proceedings. I could cover for Mel as could anybody that understands Tarot and doesn’t frame it as magic hoojamaflip, like some actors I’ve spoken to who clearly grew up influenced too much by a certain James Bond film.

My days are now sunk into West Side Story again. We are doing it as part of a gala night. “Immersive West Side Story”. You can’t rehearse talking to pretend audience members with any degree of truth, but we have been trying our best to prepare people for various eventualities. Here is a selfie taken by my pretend audience member “Nigel”.

Tomorrow will be another full day of rehearsal with these lovely fools, with no evening show for me at Vault. Then on Wednesday I’ll have to rush from rehearsal to show. Thursday is still baffling me. I can’t get to Vault, so how does the van get on site. Mel can drive, but she’s only ever driven automatic and it’s much easier for her to offer a problem than a solution. She told me not to take the show off sale when I knew I’d be unavailable, but she’s not helping solve it – almost like it’s my fault for having something else to do. I’ve paid a friend to cover me but she can’t drive. Mel doesn’t want to move the van in my stead despite her driving licence. She calls it “stick shift”. She learnt to drive in America where every car is a go-kart. And thinking of my mum behind the wheel of a geared car, she could fuck the engine…

I’ll have to find a way to be in two places at once I think. I’ll have to rush from the venue to the van and back again. Unless there’s someone who can take the van from Leake Street car park on a private road to the entrance of Vault at around 6 on Thursday (5 minutes work), and then reverse it back at around half eleven (ten minutes).

Nobody in the arts can drive big vans with confidence. Anybody?