AlBarclay

And Brighton again. The Fantastic Human Spring!!! Marvel as it boinggs all over the country – nay – the world!

I’m sick. Throat is hurty. Feeling run down. I’m trying not to cough all the time, and I’m feeling a little bit sorry for myself. Usually after a show I sleep for a bit instead of running all over the place. This thing has been stalking me a few days in the cold oily dampish maschinehaus of the Kirk. Post show slump. All the accumulated late nights and deep breaths of dusty air and shouting. A couple of days down? Just the ticket. I just had to get as far as Brighton and now there’s a warm soft bed, a fluffy cat and a Lou.

I have to stop myself from obsessively testing my voice as is my habit when I’m laryngeal. I’m not in the middle of a long run outdoors so actually I can just be silent and careful. I’ll likely not manage the silent bit but I’m sure Lou will be delighted if I can keep it buttoned. She’s surprised when I can do it long enough not to interrupt her.

Around Chessington on the M25 Lou began in her yogic way to remind me how pain and discomfort is a response that can be observed and converted. I’m aware of this but it’s also nice to have a good whinge.

Rest is the best thing now and its likely possible. I haven’t seen my diary but I’ve a strong feeling I’m done with everything but nuts and bolts until after Easter. I’ll be shuttling up and down London to Brighton and making sense of where I’ll be earning my crust come summer.

Early bed. Snooze. Everything better in the morning…

A Premier Inn in Stoke. The Purple Palace. It’s where I’m sleeping. It’s great. Occasionally for this job we’ve been in an Airbnb that has been picked for price. In fact, the last one I had no towel and the bathroom was shared with everyone else. I couldn’t wash myself in the morning.

The young men and women I’m working with are excellent. They likely have a strong future ahead of them. All I can do is facilitate their learning and help expand their understanding. There’s a great deal left for each of them to explore, and they all need to grow in different ways to make the best of themselves. I’m proud to be part of the mentoring team. I think they’ve assembled some pretty excellent humans for them to be mentored by, with rich lives. I’m stoked to be part of a team that is training people to this level. It’s an American company, and you can feel the America, because everything seems possible! Hoo-Ahh it’s the American Dream!!

The youth did hold up some extremely suspect human beings as “Entrepreneurial heroes”. Elon Musk, one of them said repeatedly, as if that was a badge of quality. As if they were trying to say something worse, another one said Andrew Tate. If you’re a decent human you won’t know his name. Sadly I do. Don’t Google him and add to the hits. He’s a chinless bald liar who thinks he’s alpha because he’s reworked the whole concept of “Alpha Male” to take out the science and replace it with ideas that can be followed by the legions of terrified men who look for his videos online. He’s a posturing wimp.

Then they name Donald Trump. And so we realise how the people who make the pursuit of money their primary motive are just ugly ugly people. Roly-poly ancient decaying Strumpf who has persuaded the desperate of America that he speaks for them, when really he just speaks for their self-protection instinct translated through himself.

And fecking Elon who doesn’t understand humans or nuance, who has made a ton without needing to care about how satire works, who has bought one of the biggest social media thing in order to destroy it.

I am trying to mentor these guys and that’s what comes out when they are asked? There’s definitely work to do here on compassion, even if I’m pointedly and deliberately keeping politics out.

It’s harder than it should be now, as someone gave them my surname and they found me online. That has humanised me to whoever might have found this link and it means that now I can’t write anything that I wouldn’t feed back to them in person, until that particular cohort is out into the world. Tricky. I already have much to juggle. I will never know how they got my surname. I think they just asked someone on the team but why they gave it out is anyone’s guess… I usually prefer to go by Alex in these circumstances anyway just to obfuscate. Who knows. I’m much more interested in the students and their education than the politics around it. You know this, oh constant reader. I do all the things. I do them and I do them well. I’m not a specialist. Acting is my primary. But… Jack of all trades. Master of one? Given a few more years and a couple more good cracks of the whip…

Lying on this big Premier Inn bed in Stoke, I’m finding it hard to fully process that it was this morning that I walked into a huge empty lecture theatre with no desks laid out in it shortly before I was supposed to be invigilating an exam in it.

Maintenance had forgotten to put the desks out. There were only four of us instead of five. 100 desks had to be laid out, and then all the papers and then the candidates to come in and settle… Also there was a partition wall down. We needed that out. Plus it was touch and go as to whether the desks would all fit. Chairs were stacked in the corners. The desks were all wheel locked and folded.

Different people react to things in different ways. One of us started panicking. Two of us immediately announced that they had bad backs / shoulders and couldn’t actually do anything and anyway it’s not their job. I took a deep breath and started laying out the fucking desks with an eye to making sure they all fitted etc. Panicky got a bit better, but he’s too organised for this sort of thing. He needs to know how things are gonna be done and by who but this was a time for doing first and thinking about the details second. Yes it’s not our job but fuck it, I’m not an invigilator and honestly I’m just ticking that job over in case my leg suddenly falls off and I have to make scratch money from somewhere other than running all over the place doing random crap.

The students had a nice calm room with only one mistake in it, easily solved. They had no idea the extent to which I had been haring around moments before. Maintenance showed up en-masse just before kick-off and took down the partition wall just in time. We nearly got driven off a cliff. Idiocy but I thrive when things are on fire.

So then I drove up to Stoke. Staying in a Premier Inn but rather than eat stinky burgers in some “gastro” pub I went to The Upper House. Former stately home for one of the Wedgwoods, then old folks home, then ruin, now in loving hands serving expensive but tasty food with a beautiful garden. I had venison for £35 and it was marvelous. Now I’m getting an early bed so I can be bushy tailed for tomorrow’s Engineering Masterclass that I am, of course, helping to run.

Life’s rich tapestry, eh? Blaaaaaarrggghle

I’ve been thinking back over the thing we made at Kirkaldy’s Testing Centre today. “Here’s a great big room full of dormant machines. Make a thing.”

Sammy and I have been at it for a long time, and we have learnt how to collaborate. She’s a brilliant individual – positive and forward moving. There’s a lot of stuff in my brain that I kinda know might be fun if it was out in the world. It takes the faith of a Sammy to allow me to extrude it. She’s brilliant and together we made a strange thing work.

We showed audiences that it was okay to play by dressing them up but taking the pressure off them immediately. It goes back a long long way this sort of work in my life. Back to Simon in the workings of Tower Bridge, just after I left Guildhall. Permission to Play. We didn’t have a clue but we learnt by doing, making little interactive gamey type bits at various events for humans. There was enough money to keep us coming back, just. We upskilled without really even understanding that we were doing so. We had to play with strangers. We learnt quickly and it was hard. Now it’s a skill I can never unlearn.

We all made something last week, and it seems that some of the thoughts I really wanted to be there made it through to the people who experienced it. The idea of giving your time selflessly for the safety of others. The feeling that we are so easily pulled away from being entirely honest by the prospect of profit. Short-term profit outbidding long term functionality in the modern world.

This man David Kirkaldy was obsessive about testing things, but it seems a very pure obsession. It wasn’t for profit or recognition. It feels to me like he built his testing empire purely because he liked to know all the answers. He wanted very much to truly understand what materials were capable of withstanding – so we could build our ambitious projects, but more thoughtfully, rigourously and carefully. A Henry Higgins of material testing.

When someone has that forensic collector brain, they can be served and they can serve the world when they find an early obsession and follow it through. Some just collect stamps or bottles or cards and vanish into sweaty obscurity. Others expand the boundaries of science through pursuing a detail deeper and longer than anyone before. David Kirkaldy was one of those. An obsessive with a helpful obsession, of knowing exactly how and why things break.

Bertha, his huge machine, echoed in an eighties children’s TV programme. Lovely Bertha. You are a lovely machine. And everyone who works with you will know just what I mean.

Bertha smashes and measures.

Bertha murders your girders and rends your rivets. Pulling or pushing. She needs hydraulics and a team of people. In modern terms she’s too much work to operate as even to reconfigure her takes manpower and time. The world is too fast for Bertha now. She has played some small part in her own downfall, by helping speed industry. So now she sits, painted racing green but very still and oily in her unusual wooden housing draped with chains.

I might not see her for some time now but she will rest in my imagination as I return to unusual dayjobbery, and the inevitable who knows what acting giggery. I’ve sent some cracking self tapes lately (and one I’m less happy with). Something is surely coming. Meanwhile back to the random.

And done.

Bergman is full to bursting. Moleskine capes and waistcoats. Dresses and bustles. A collection of Virgin Mary icons. Cow is dead sadly. Victorian theatrical periodicals. Stuffed animals. Curtains and sheets and cushions. A lamp. Paddles with “Fact” and “Opinion” written on them. Actually both in the plural this time as we had no quality control. My frock coat. Campbell’s costume. So. Much. Stuff. Just a fraction of what I have. But already so much. Enough.

We filled a dry building with bodies and we gave them a very mixed up creative response. I think we filled the brief. It was a long long time in the making but we can go home happy in the knowledge that we did the thing.

My brother Rupert showed up unexpectedly for the matinee where Lou was there too. There were also family members of a close friend. I walked out in character as Mister Kirkaldy, about to improvise my face off, and immediately looked into my own brother’s eyes. To avoid it I looked aside and saw Lou. I have no idea whether the sentences I subsequently uttered had subject object verb and all that stuff. I was mister WHY ARE YOU SENDING UP YOUR FATHER? Despite being half Scottish, “doing” Scottish has never been particularly natural. The other half is Spanish and until I started working in South America I couldn’t even really pass the time of day in that language.

Nevertheless, I saw it through. He’s a decent enough fellow, Mister K. The rigour and the passion for testing things properly… it’s a step away from this guy who just likes to pull things out of a hat and then try and persuade everyone it was magic.

The team? Sammy. Poor brilliant Sammy, putting up with my bullshit with compassion and kindness. She’s a worker and a fighter and a believer. I’m extremely glad to be her friend. We were essentially partners on this, but the way she coped with my vanishing and distraction? She deserves medals. Judith used to run The Nursery and host The Factory for shows. We put her in a tricky room downstairs. With the help of Cow it was made delightful. Siwan stuck into the lab, with all the peculiar vigour and wit that she brings to the Halloween tour, and brought her incredible craftiness to bear. Multitasking. My nephew Campbell? I made him do immersive acting when he literally hasn’t ever done anything close to that before, or seen much of it. If I wanted to maximise my weird uncle points, then I did just that by roping him in. He was game for it. David was the character time-keeper – the most rigorous of us all. Then Jude, Omar, Noah – giving their time to dress in big capes and hats and serve punch or tear tickets.

Good people. I will miss them.

It’s bedtime now. And it’s all done. Tomorrow I’ll have to empty Bergie. But this has been glorious. We are better together. Always. This has been a team game. And joyful.

I’ve got very good at making that punch now. Considering how incredibly potent it is, it is astonishing how much the audience seems to enjoy the taste of it. We could make it much weaker, sure. If this was a commercial theatre show, they’d be getting a lump of dogpoo on a washable metal slab. We couldn’t sustain the level of generosity we have if we were doing “The Bible” live on stage every night, but we could easily rework the running costs with profitability in mind and take out the boozy luxury.

Tickets are basically free, but I’m making this stuff from Kraken rum and Courvoisier VSOP. You might have read the quantities yesterday. Lucky lucky audience – but also they know it, so there isn’t even the tiniest sniff of dissatisfaction about the show. I could make the punch from much worse ingredients and it would add the same. The cost of a glass of that punch in a high end bar? You would be happy to pay twelve quid. You’d expect to pay seventeen. If you paid twenty you would mumble a bit before someone reminded you you are in London.

Time to start to bedtime. Caroline pointed out that we wouldn’t have time on Saturday to party as we had to do the break. She bought pizza and beer and we all stayed on to be positive about each other via booze augmentation and adrenaline post show. Caroline is our producer, the one who builds the teams. She comes out of the rave scene, but with a sense of order. She knows how to govern anarchy. I feel totally seen and understood by her in a way that is rare for me when mostly I feel people magnify an aspect. We collaborate well. She can help me order my chaos.

She was right to make the end of show party for us all happen today. We all got the “I love working with you” out of our system. Campbell and I then got a black cab home and they are cheaper than Uber now. After tomorrow it is over.

I have always loved to do work that is written on the wind. I’ve got this blog and maybe one day I’ll go over it… but the crap bit of the brain that seeks to look exciting can go swivel. I’m here. I exist. What’s next?

And I forgot to post this. Oh ethanol, the things you do.

Two cups of rum. I’m using a paper cup but it’s not ideal. I might bring in a china one tomorrow. You need to use the same cup across the board, but you’re gonna put boiling water in there and it’ll hurt your hand with a paper cup.

Dickens invented this punch, or so I’m informed by the internet. That internet though – full of shit it is. Still… it might be true. He wrote the recipe in a letter to his niece. He neglected to say about the paper cups but he was likely too involved with reinforcing the patriarchy to think about it.

Cup. Start with three lemons. Peel them and put the peel in a bowl. Then throw in three quarters of the CUP full of Demerara sugar. So you’ve got sugar and peel in the bowl, and three peeled lemons. Now you can put your costume on. You want to let the sugar infuse with the peel.

Once your clothes are changed and you’ve opened up your vowel sounds a bit, that’s when you start with the rum. Two cups, as I said, and a cup and a bit of Courvoisier VSOP. Did I mention that this stuff is lethal?

Now you’ve got 3 peeled lemons. Are your hands clean? You could just munge them in your fist to get all the juice out and into the mixture, but if someone is watching you or you’ve got tiny little cuts on your fingers then maybe improvise something that looks more hygienic. Back of a ladel in a cup?

There you go. All the booze, bit of lemon and sugar. Now grate in some nutmeg as every good punch needs at least one allergen. Stir a bit and boil the kettle. Then make sure all your resets are done and nobody stole your hats etc etc.

You can leave this one until then minutes before the audience come in, but when they are about to come, go wish everyone a good show, make sure the water is HOT and dump four cups in. Give it a good stir. Cover it and do most of the show.

In snatched moments, give the punch a stir. If you tell your audience you are making punch it is easier. They can smell it anyway so lean into it and then you can help the sugar dissolve.

A touch more hot water at the last minute. Then get Noah to walk out behind you after the birthday song. PUNCH.

This is why it is named after getting hit with something.

Don’t have too much or you’ll forget to write your blog and have to do it the next morning.

And so it is completed.

I remember giving someone this advice about an immersive show they were in as an actor: “If there’s something you need artistically, make sure it’s in place before the first tester audience even if you have to get it yourself. If you do without it for that first show, even by breaking character to explain its absence, you will NEVER EVER get the thing you need if you don’t get it yourself, because the show has played successfully… the money is in the bank… the team has moved on – even if they don’t tell you they have.”

Today I’m the producer. Part of it.

Fuck its hard.

Yeah, great if you’ve got actors who provide their own stuff then it’s golden.

We did a show. It was full of the dignitaries of Southwark. It happened.

Who the hell knows how it all went. But I hope and believe that nobody was left stranded.

My extensive wardrobe really added to things. The audience dresses up in glorious absurd things. I’m very happy to play dress up, and it’s pleasant to play with strangers as they put on these interesting garments I’ve managed to scavenge. Even tonight we had someone wanting a pattern cut from the capes. I love the capes. We are only using five now. We could manage more capes, but ideas are often harder than realities. This is a well bonded creative team. We had the right amount for what we needed. And there’s a dry cleaning bill to add to the budget. A fraction of the hire cost though.

I’m home, slightly addled with booze. Once the show ran clean, I fell into the trap of mollifying stale adrenaline via substance. Boozy boy. Don’t call me tomorrow morning unless you’re a sadist. There’s not much insight I can offer in this state, other than gushing about my collaborators…

I’ve been an ASM before but it’s not my calling. Still, today, a team of us helped with the build. It was optional, but surprisingly well attended. Sammy and I started at the bitter start and pushed on until the…

Uxbridge first, to rainily pick up some printouts before fighting through rush hour to pick up all sorts of crap plus Campbell. Then into the space. Caroline lets me put Bergman into her lockup, which means that Campbell and I both get to go in to work for £15.00 the pair of us plus fuel. The tube is so pricey that, since we don’t have to pay for parking, it’s the best option considering we can carry armload after armload of set dressing etc. I’m made aware by doing this how curious and bizarre and wonderful the random things I have at home seem to be. But also I’m happy to bubble wrap and box the fuckers and label them and put them away with knowledge.

Campbell and I played dress-up this evening and now we have mister Kirkaldy and his wannabe musician son William. He’s the same shoe size as me. I’ve put him in the snake skins, and a gorgeous tailcoat. He won’t get to keep them, as they are story-clothes and I know they will continue to be handy. If I give all the best stuff away I’ve only got the crap stuff left, but I’m very happy to see the extensive wardrobe being used. That’s why I have it, and why I was given it. Bits are scattered hither and yon, all across London. At heart its made to be used and loved, and it fell to me for that purpose. I still think of how we went to The National Theatre wardrobe and pretended not to flinch. Lou was incredible lending her ladycostume bits, and doubly incredible hitting me up with the contacts for what I still think of as the costume haul of a lifetime. It’s gamechanging having so much stuff to hand. Siwan too has brought wonderful random objects. Everybody is generating.

We looked at tech. I don’t really have much to do as an actor in this. I’m holding my status by doing very little. It’s lovely and unfamiliar. And I’m not freaked out about having to do stuff in front of an audience tomorrow, I’m looking forward to it.

We laid out lights etc. Nothing is set in stone. But I’d better go to sleep now as my sentences almost coming out backwards are sentences my og peels

It’s world theatre day. Everything is something day. But today (or yesterday if you’re reading this) is/was World Theatre Day.

Fuck I love theatre people. I love the community of the lost. Thousands of highly intelligent people who frequently have to jettison themselves into other professions where the money is better and where they have the advantage of being intelligent, hard working and unruffled. The shit we have to put up with in theatre. The hours. The pay. Ach. I went to the National this evening, to the Dorfman to watch Romeo and Julie, out of Sherman CYMRU with Rosie Sheehy and Callum Scott-Howells. What a piece of theatre! Not the Shakespeare, as I feared. A new play and so tightly thought through, about ambition and family and love and responsibility and pride and change and respect. It’s a really deep smart contemplation of some edges of humanity that intersected strangely with my journey through this madness of life. It’s so clear and yet so layered. Every moment was charged, no scene went for nothing. Tight scripted theatre. The medium at its best. I genuinely think there’ll be something for everyone in it.

It’s harder to achieve that as the budgets drain down. It CAN still be done. I think back over my twenty years in theatre – there for the love and the community. I am proud of so much of the work so many of us did with so little money. I am happy to have made many of the things we made. The community of it. The joy of it. Yes there were people and venues that manipulated us and our goodwill. I spent a good decade trying to make sense of things via pub theatres, mistakenly thinking that people would come and see me work. “exposure” HA. Sometimes though… A barely seen job in a stately home in Norfolk – in the hunting lodge of David Rocksavage the Marquis of Cholmondely – Victor in Private Lives and so long ago my whole cell structure has changed… That show led to friendships and connections that still vibrate now.

We are webs of connection. Actors have to cross a lot of webs. I have snags now in my web. People who, mostly because of their own shit, seek to dislike me. None of us can be all things to all people. Mostly my web is pretty pleasant, although it is frightening how many people have fallen away in the last few years and put their skills into more lucrative pathways. I get why. In my experience, actors are very much the opposite of idiots, but we frequently get treated as such.

I’m still here, with gaps in my web that will NEVER be filled. The dead, of course. And some who quit and I never knew why. For all actors there are other actors who just … do the thing we admire. I’ve seen too many of them quit. I’m always sad to see them go but I get it. One of them put a deposit down for a law conversion and then hit the big time. But mostly they drop like flies. It’s hard. You have to find and work a flexible day job for decades to even stand a chance of meeting rent. I thought I’d found one with the ribs and then BOOM. But… well my mother was the last of my parents to go and she went just before my early career launch collapsed. Some might say the two things were connected. I was just living, but I got this flat to do the living in however I chose. And I literally chose to do a decade and more of badly paid theatre. Big up to all the people I met in that period. I stand by that decision because fuck me it was fun and I made good friends. But also, what the fuck? We all thought that would help our careers. hahahahahahahaa

Now, again, I’m in the business of badly paid theatre. I’m never happy with what I’m doing until it’s over, sure. But we can try, and I love everyone on the team. Sammy and I are the only ones suffering. We are trying. And again it’s the old familiar push and pull between the “tell me what to do” and the “let it fall to chance”. There are many words that have been written down. There are also shapes and ideas in rooms. It will be what it will be. Thankfully the woman I’m collaborating with is a genius with the patience of a saint. Likely there’ll never be a full accord between the improv and the formal. We are trying to make it happen.

Happy world “theatre” day. Let’s make something live, together. It’s rare these days that we can say “hi” with strangers in a live experience without everyone demonstrably sanitising every two minutes. I hope this turns out to be a nice thing…