AlBarclay

Back to the self tape frenzy and I really should stop insisting on learning all my lines and just read them off an autocue like some of my friends recommend. I won’t though. I tell myself the learning and specificity will make me better at my craft, that it is helping keep my learning muscles flexed. Learning lines is a crucial skill for work where the lines are set in stone. That’s about fifty percent of the work I do.

I once wrote a letter from the heart to a major theatre company. I wrote a few back then, young and optimistic, thinking that my delight in my vocational medium would be enough on its own to recommend me. It was before I caught on that many of the gatekeepers to the jobs are not practitioners and never have been. I was talking about how I felt I was moving from apprentice to journeyman, but I needed to raise the calibre of my collaborations in order to secure the edges of my craftsmanship. Who knows what became of that letter. I’ve never been considered by that company. But I still think in those terms. This making things up stuff is a craft. Learning a craft takes time and practice. I was apprentice, learning to journeyman. Now I’m journeyman and looking to master, but for that shift to come I’ll need much more time at the coalface. I know some apprentices that tell everyone they are masters, and I’ve watched people believe it. But I’ve always played the long game, in every aspect of my life.

Right now it is really helpful for me to be in a collaborative process with someone as positive as I am but utterly different in priority. Sammy is fab and very different from me. I’m learning again and I’m never happier than when I’m learning. Theatre is community. We all have different skills and needs, but if we push together we can make live art that has some kind of a truth at the heart of it, hopefully.

I was supposed to have written something today but I had an audition with a hard line learn. I chose to prioritise that. There’s time. Not much, and I forgot that everybody doesn’t work like me, so suddenly someone needs a script in a small immersive experience. I just learnt a tricky script and played it back with every word in place for a self -tape. That’s one thing. Immersive theatre is the opposite craft and needs a very different head, in my opinion. You cannot be responsive with a script. It immediately makes everything all about you. And this actor is meant to be in a healing room. Eek.

I went on a date once where the lady was working through a “date script” – (if you were a colour what colour would you be and why aaaargh) – and by the end of it I had actually eaten both of my arms. I can’t bear that shit in dates or in immersive theatre context, and they are both similar in intention. Find points of contact, push a narrative, seduce or charm. But … my audience preference be damned, she’s gonna get a script, but not today, and I’m sure she’ll be able to respond within the frame of it. Her imagination is excellent and she doesn’t need the crutch. But which of us can say we haven’t relied on crutches from time to time, he writes, with a glass of lovely young Ferreret from delightful José Ferrer vineyard in Binissalem just hitting the spot as he finishes writing.

Bedtime now though. Much to do, much to do. Script? Humbug.

Hurrah. We found the button. I do worry. We gathered the collaborators today and we talked through the thing we are making and I think I know more clearly why we are making it now. I think I might have been credited as Al Beverlay on the printed literature and there is a huge power in not giving a fuck. I’m not making this to push my name to the front of anything. It’s just another of the things I have made over the years where it’s about the thing. Big old life. I’m still in it, being ridiculous. I’m still hoping I’ll hit that vein of consistent work, but it comes with being known and the older I get the more I feel the lack of those early chances as I’m gonna have to be the late arrival now. But I’ll still be doing this when I’m ninety, cos I love it when I’m allowed to work. The industry is cruel and selective and contact-based and arbitrary. But the work and the people working? Glory. Apart from the inevitable plague of egomaniacs.

The guy in the coffee shop this morning was wondering. What’s the place you’re at? That building over there? I’ve often wondered what it is.

It’s a huge building housing a “universal testing machine”, where they would have to stop the traffic on one of the main thoroughfares in the area in other to pull or push huge girders. Bertha, the vast hydraulic machine, would pound and pull and twist and crush the best efforts of the world to make solid steel. She still sits, sleeping and hungry, likely craving another girder to destroy but ultimately starved in this new world. We have satisfied ourselves that we know the capacity of materials. We build higher and bolder because of what we learnt through that one man’s rigour.

What of the new tech? The latest revolution? The industrial revolution has overtaken us and there are too many voices making new things for a Kirkaldy to try and make sense of the breaks. There will be another Tay Bridge disaster as AI gets ahead of us, egged on by all of us who are only interested in what it can do and are failing to take into account how it might break.

With luck, in another 150 years we will still be growing and caring. David Kirkaldy was exactly the kind of pioneer I’m usually annoyed with. He was a man who wanted everything measured and quantified. He was almost certainly out of the same Scottish Presbyterian “wee free” stable as my paternal grandfather, who was held up throughout my childhood as an example of everything that was wrong with the world. Excessive care. Measurements. Facts not opinions. “He’s like a cult leader,” Sammy observed, when I tried out some of my written bits. And yeah, certainty can be intimidating, because there is almost no foundation available to us. We base all our notions on blancmange. It’s just about who insists that their blancmange is concrete.

Thoughts flowing more freely today and words following, but still obstructed just because nothing is ever easy, least of all the process of creating something from scratch. Thankfully I’m not alone in this and my collaborator is more ordered and less inclined to trust the universe.

There are pricks on a page now. I made them. I’ve started to write on iPad and to make things more easily transferable to others as I still can’t find some of my early notes for this project which were scribbled in one of about eight identical yellow notebooks I saved from the bin on a set break.

Making work transferrable… there’s a skill I need to develop. I like to develop and respond, but in much of what I do the stuff comes out of somewhere squealing into the light. I pull it and dump it steaming in front of you. Then I immediately forget it cos I’m scraping for something else. So I’m trying to write a script for myself even though I’m 100% certain I’ll never come close to the words on the page when it comes to delivery. The points will carry. The pertinent information and facts. But this show I’m making is billed as “immersive”. My grandmother is billed as”immersive”, the loos in the Cirencester Rotary Club are likely billed as immersive. The word lost all meaning long ago and just became a shorthand for “we want you to buy this”. But I want to be able to respond if the audience does anything, and I know from experience that the tester audiences will be the only ones that do nothing honest. So I want to keep the frame loose, but I know that I’m probably in the minority as someone who is happier when I can’t control things.

I’ve been thinking about different ways of breaking things. Twisting and punching and bulging and crushing. The language of destruction and measurement is rich and lively in this project, and ripe for the plucking. I just want to make something fun in a remarkable place, but we also need to make something that has meaning. Something that hangs together. This place is about breaking things and so much has been broken recently. The edges and the limits – we have learnt much more than we expected about ourselves under pressure after what some might call an extended campaign of fear and isolation. Two years, we lost.

I still haven’t found the button. There’s a bit of time left, but without a button we are just showing off in an interesting place but in a way that’s ultimately empty and pointless. I trust my collaborators though and we only have a week of rehearsal which hasn’t even started yet. There’s a heart to this thing and we will reach in like Mola Ram and pluck the thing out and hold it up to be seen, somehow. We just need to know where it is.

With all these bouncing thoughts, I unscrewed my head and replaced it with my Factory head, and went off to walk the verse on Julius Caesar for a few hours in the evening as Mark Antony, as plebeians, as myself.

Joy. Now once more the heated bed. A varied day of thinking. I’m exhausted.

I wonder if anyone else felt obstructed today. Being alive felt a bit like wading through soup. It’s the last day before the equinox so perhaps it’s just the clinging fingers of winter. Wet and cold, uninspiring. I was trying to write and the thoughts were like mud. I found myself wanting to just go to sleep at about 4pm. My wellspring was dry, and time is running out.

It would help if I wasn’t too tight fisted to put the heating on. It would help if the government wasn’t favouring the oil companies over the idiots who voted for them. It would help if a dying Russian lunatic hadn’t decided to try to make the USSR great again by imitating his genocidal forbears and murdering as many human beings as possible in pursuit of a delusion.

Nothing in the world is really making sense. Even the Hot Cross Buns are flavoured with blueberry and lemon. I bought them by mistake. They are… incorrect.

I’m hoping that a night of dreams and rest will help reset the general feeling of dread and horror that has dogged me all day. It’s totally irrational, but we are irrational beings. I’m dreading collapse. I’m dreading life. I’m dreading everything.

Aries new moon though, and equinox. So we have an excuse to look to new starts. A beginning time, and a time when the light is getting stronger. Even if you think its all hooey, the days are going to be longer than the nights now. We can all do with a bit of freshening up, and but for the temperature, all the signs point to spring. Crocuses. Snowdrops. Tulips on sale in Tesco. Daffodils.

I’m approaching my old nemesis, March 23rd. Perhaps the looming sense of dread is rooted in there too. It’s a hard time of year for me every year, this little week. New life inextricably linked in my memory to the death of both my parents. Falling down memory holes. Sad. Not alone though. Held by friendships. Held by memories. There’s love still there. Time is still proving unstoppable, but there’s joy to be found.

I’m setting an alarm and falling into dream. Writing tomorrow. Lots of it.

What a glorious day. A Sunday. A time to settle and relax and slough the weight off before going back into the fray.

Lou teaches a Sunday morning class. It’s at 9.30am, and its candlelit meditation. I normally sleep through it, as I’m often pretty knackered when I’ve slung myself down to the seaside. That has been foolish of me, because of course it is wonderful. It’s a new studio in an old performance venue. We were in an upstairs room where no doubt there has been decades of cabaret. Now the purpose has changed to peacefulness. A touch of morning sun was firing beams of light through the gaps in the blinds. Loads of women and one other man, and we all sat and were guided into peacefulness and care first thing on a Sunday.

I gravitated to the mat by the heated mirror. Nobody sneered at me, which was pleasant. A long time ago I went with Minnie to a Vinyasa Flow class in Chalk Farm with Triyoga, again where I was very much in the minority as a man. At the time I was used to Bikram so I came in basically speedos and nothing else, and the instructor appraised me like a Christmas turkey in the corridor outside the class, and had no qualms about making it clear they disliked my outfit. This time I was perhaps more appropriately dressed, and the instructor was deep enough in her practice that my presence wasn’t going to excite any judgement positive or negative.

It was beautiful to be guided in a group into peacefulness. I find it very hard to shut my head up. There are ways.

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Sunday lunch, seaside for a moment more, and then the frantic slog back up to London town and the fray and the smoke and the roadworks and the rage. Back again. Much to do.

Morning Sunday yoga. It’s a great way to start the week.

Down to the windy coast. Stanmer Park again and mud. It has been raining. The roads are flooded, huge puddles along the riverside out of London. Still too cold for my tastes, but things are improving. This is a rushed visit this time. I last saw Lou in Majorca. I’m about to be very very busy until the end of the month. For one night, a moment to switch out and down. To unpick the confused longings and concerns that constantly fight each other in my disordered head. To align with the sea and the silence and peace. To breathe out again without talking.

All the thinking and moving things and worrying about detail and writing and making up and ordering and laughing and talking and improvising and auditioning and learning and operating and booking and offering and emailing – that can all switch back on with the week. Here now it is peace and wind and cat and good food.

Mud at Stanmer though, but still we walked, sliding through it as we yomped towards equinox in a wind a bit less icy than it was a month ago. Then back to this seaside flat, with a characterful and eloquent cat and the chance of food that is mostly green and no incredible bottles of cheap Bordeaux screaming “You could open me!” The wind is still up, battering the window directly from the sea, but we are warm and companionable. We tried to watch some mawkish Braveheart tribute but we ended up switching over to a more predictably happy movie about some overoptimistic Pole in Pennsylvania stumbling into a multi-million pound Ponzi Scheme. Jack Black can’t really help but be charming, and it’s a very kind account of a man who must have accidentally attracted a great deal of hatred from people who were perhaps a bit too greedy. The power of the way a story is told… I’m sure there’s a documentary that paints a darker picture of the man but I was happy to get my facts processed through a bright and colourful and mostly kind telling of The Polka King.

Now it’s bedtime. It isn’t bedtime at all, it’s just gone nine. This always happens when I’m here – I get sleepy early. Lou has the lights low while my place is always studio bright. My brain goes into night mode. I’ll sleep soon and feel better for it.

I’ve got so much to think about, so much to do. Jobs are piling up again. Even through this mess, I find myself tangled about an audition I sent too rushed, where I didn’t challenge myself as much as I should have. Letting go is hard when we desire we desire we desire. This strange obsession of mine has deep roots into my heart.

But I can stop for a night and a day. And I will. And I am.

“I have a heart condition,” Ali tells me. “I’m sixty five. I have three grandchildren. I am told I must not work, but still here I am, I’m working. My friend who normally does this, he is on holiday. So here I am.”

This is Jaflong. It’s a little place in Ham. It’s very much geared to takeaway but they have a few tables beautifully appointed to catch diners. No licence to sell booze. This is just good quality Indian food at a good price in London. And Ali is great.

My friends have had another row. It’s a bollocks row and they both look foolish to me in it. One of them expected the other one to remember something but they forgot it. Rather than sending reminders and easily preventing it they let it happen so they could sink into the sweet sweet feeling of being right. The other half of it then realised they had fucked up and reacted like a teenager instead of taking account. It’s doublebullshit. We aren’t fifteen anymore. I went for curry. “Keep the places made up,” I said to Ali. They might show.

They didn’t.

I’m home now. Off to bed. Earlier than usual but I’m still on continental time. I start to get sleepy earlier than I’m used to these days. Likely that’s helpful as I’m just about to go to Lou’s and she is early bed early rise.

A proper weekend beckons, with a proper week thereafter, pushing this strange thing into reality in a museum in Southwark. There’s still work to be done. There’s maybe some writing to be done too. We are making up a thing but we need to know we can fill the time. There’s a lot put on the creativity of the individual humans, and we can’t afford to book them for more than one week so it’ll all be made at last minute.

But we work with the constraints we have. Ali has his heart condition, but there he is helping people like me to have tasty food on a Friday night. I am healthy. I can hopefully find a way, with a good team, to bring some form of joy to the people of Southwark.

I’m a bit tired and a bit bilious. I’m off to bed and a long long sleep. Nothing but weekend for two days. Oh joy.

zzz

Ahhh man. I’m tired again. I’ve been shifting energies. I’ve been putting stagnant things into flow once more. Maybe with them, I have moved internal things that needed moving.

I’ve got the hoarding gene. They say it’s neanderthal. Wherever it’s from, it makes it hard for me to chuck things out. I’m better at it by far than I used to be. I learnt via doing it for other people, and then applied my learning to my own loaded stuff. There’s this sense that the things that other people handled somehow carry those people. It’s not the case. The things are just things. The people…? When they are gone they are gone. I am currently in a flat surrounded by absolute shit connected to memories. Give me five minutes and I can tell you the things that have actual meaning for actually me. The things that have value? I’m not sitting on any million pound surprises here. There are a couple of things that a good dealer might be able to get a few grand for given a month or two. Mostly though it’s showy things that were valuable once perhaps but currently are just pleasant to own. I don’t want to throw them all into fire because they are better than that. But I’ve done the work, and I can tell you that there’s enough distance between selling price and specialist buying price that even the best stuff here is honestly just gubbins.

And yet I sit on it.

I’ve been moving energy for people I love again. It has become part of what I do. Even the Majorca drive was part of that. Both times up and down, I took stagnant items and put them into flow. There are wooden giraffes, knick-knacks carpets and shelving units that might have gone 50 years and more gathering dust, but are now once more on display, visible and loved. I’m no shinto, but I do think that these things have an energy. Generations of stuff has overtaken generations of people. Right now we don’t want the well made old thing because culture tells us the dogshit Swedish flatpack is better. At some point this idiocy will flip and then the few who have kept hold of these lovely things will be validated, but that kind of cultural shift takes time. Right now, most people look to estate agents to tell them where and how other people want to live. Right now most estate agents have a generational lack of creativity, imagination, humanity and colour. It’s not their fault, it was a lie-based profession for decades before Boris made it acceptable for EVERY profession to be shamelessly duplicitous. They think they are helping by making the world beige like them. The market responds. Second hand furniture dealers should be much more appreciated. People who mend things too. We gave enough good stuff – even appliances – that we can function now for decades if nothing new was made. We aren’t plundering resources anymore for necessity. We are burning the world because somebody watched an advert. Maybe I was was in the advert, I’m not out of this cycle by any means. But fuck we need to stop being so short term in our consumption. We can reuse. We really really can.

Just down the road from me, the National Theatre Costume Hire is a veritable treasure trove of wonderful things at a far more reasonable rate than the likes of Angels. It’s one of the ways that our “National” theatre stays National. They are reasonable and affordable, if excoriatingly peremptory.

“I literally don’t want to give any money to that nasty woman or anyone connected with her,” we find ourselves saying having just been talked down to quite astonishingly by our “expert”. As a result, we got some ideas, but we saved ourselves some budget. The appointment had been made by my production partner in this while I was away on a jolly in France. I see how she needed to know that something was happening. My flat is full of men’s costumes but I didn’t get anything for women out of the costume haul, and it looks like our cast will be largely female. I can sort people out with frock coats aplenty but you’ll have to go elsewhere for actual frocks.

It’ll be easier to costume things once we know exactly who we will be costuming. It’s still not cast fully. We were gonna use Mel, but she’s in New Orleans and it’s more than our budget to get her back in time.

I drove back through the tube strike. Absolute delay, the whole way down. Twenty minutes stretched into well over an hour and by the time I got home I was stretched thin. Just two weeks to go, and two of us are director writer producer actor casting costume etc etc. The people we hire will get a much better bang for their buck. But this is a friendship job. I love and respect the humans at the heart of it, and they have been light in my existence.

We are nearly sold out though. I’m still not certain what I’ll be doing. Thank the lord I’m a very very happy improviser.

We were slightly taken by these flying goggles. Any steampunk friends got some they can lend?

Bedtime. I’m working office hours on this from now until it’s on. Great that it’ll be mostly sold but it means we have to give them something reasonably coherent. Two weeks is not a long time in theatre. But I’ve made wonderful things from scratch in less than that, so we will be fine.

Bedtime. Today I was essentially an office person, but working from home. It’ll be the same tomorrow. This whole business with zooming around all over the place has been time consuming and expensive and fun. It has left me needing to recover funds.

I’ve got an old commitment that I now need to show up for. I’m playing catch-up by making it my job. Just one day of it and I can see why the office lot think of their evening as being this sacred space. I didn’t want to do anything.

This has been a powerful journey for me, down and up again. A strong yo-yo. All the way down to Binissalem, and then slowly puddleducking back up with Tristan. A job but a holiday. A chance to catch up with family.

Sending a theatre audition for Tristan from the tiny village of Néré was a game changer. First round and now they are okay with a tape. It makes the world possible for actors in a way it hasn’t been for decades. Holidays were horrible risks beforehand. “What if there’s a casting?” Now, so long as there’s internet, I can be in the arse end of nowhere. If they want me for a recall, that’s a more realistic pitch and worth the plane fare. First round they might see hundreds. Now with self tapes they might, of course, see thousands and never even watch the tape you send. But fuck it, at least you aren’t sitting next to the phone anymore. A recall is still a recall. So long as it isn’t on zoom like the shite I had to do in lockdown where nobody knows what anyone else can see.

More office work tomorrow. Tonight I’m done. I’m finally home. My bed. My home. At last. I am frequently nomadic, but this feeling of home is real. I can shift it easily. But I know I feel relaxed right now in a way you can’t feel in all these pimped up rooms. This is my random gubbins. These are my sheets. mmmmm zzzzzz