AlBarclay

I think that this might be one of my favourite hotels. There’s one in The Azores that tops it. But… Here I am from the last time I was here: https://albarclay.blog/2019/06/12/headland-heat/ . This is my arrival:

I looked that old blog up because I wanted to remember a bit about my last stay. I never go back over these blogs but perhaps I should. I found a rush of pleasant nostalgia, and it’s a reasonably vital bit of prose. If I put my mind to it I can create decent wordwalls. The hot water works fine this time – I’m not in the tower room.

There’s a spa downstairs that I don’t believe existed last time I was here. I certainly didn’t go. And the hotel is busy, which I’m glad of because everybody seems to be lovely here. This time, when I can actually afford their £150 deposit, they didn’t ask for it. Yay.

They’ve put me in a room with a view, bless them. There’s a four poster bed. The sun sets into the window. I know this from last time. I was in a variety of different rooms last time and got to know this place. I even got to wash in one of the suites… The staff are legendary in their competence and hospitality. It feels like a rare holdover from another worldtime. I feel right at home. Plus one more ridiculously pleasant review just landed for the Bletchley gig. I haven’t been bribing them… The review has spoilers so I ain’t sharing and it’s a very clear reminder that THESE THINGS ARE SUBJECTIVE OPINION: “Dilly (that’s me!) is completely eccentric, and he just so happened to be my favourite cast member – he was absolutely fantastic.” There we go. Italics. I’ve arrived. And it means nothing. Otherwise I’ll be a gibbering wreck when somebody drops the inevitable hatchet – and they’re out there waiting to do it. It is ALL just about how you are positioned. Dilly is a free pass. I put the props firmly at the door of Christopher and Beth and the team who know so well how to make a frame for playfulness. Parabolic are huge mad wonderful creatives. Fucking good too. You should all book and see this lovely show. It’s on for three weeks and David is gonna rock as Dilly too. I’m back a week on Tuesday though if it MUST be Barclay.

I’ve arrived at my hotel.

The hotel can wait though. I’m hungry and it’s Sunday and I’m in Newquay, so off to The Red Lion for a Triple Roast and a glass of Pinot Noir that isn’t overpriced. I’ll consume this all voraciously and then I’ll wander around Fistral. I love The Headland but I’m unlikely to eat there regularly because it’s not the cheapest.

It’s an old habit of mine, and I think it might be to do with brand-consciousness, but once again I only packed a selection of suits to wear while I’m on and around set. Fuck all else. I like to arrive looking like the guy they cast, and I like to feel sexy when I’m on set. It helps the performance. I suit a suit. But it’s hot in this jacket and I can see the Newquay regulars growling “here comes London” behind their pipes.

— TIME —

I wandered the beaches at Fistral, and leaped on rocks in my suit and hat. This bright westerly beach is a smaller version of the beach at St Ouen on which I have spent many words whenever I return to Jersey. It faces out into the dark Atlantic too, and the longitude is pretty much identical to that very special beach of my childhood. This one is livelier. It’s more accessible. The water is dotted with surfers. DJs play old classics on visible outside decks. Everybody sits around outdoors talking and smiling and drinking. A few of those wankers in dry robes strut around with that face they all do: “What? Yeah it’s my dryrobe. Screw you.”

I had my big roast. I ran around. I went on the beach. Now I’m having a fish supper and a fine glass of Mouvedre Merlot from The Fish House. Last time I was here I was stone broke and wanted to eat here. I looked at it longingly. This time I’m immediately treating myself despite having just had a Sunday roast. Fat fat glory. I shall have moules. Even the rocks on the beach here are swarming with young mussels. Moules, and the catch of the day. Hang the expense. John Dorey?! Dear John. I intend to consume you utterly.

Tomorrow it’ll be the familiar rush of a movie set. Next time I’m growling about having to dance in my pants for a commercial casting with a 1 in 500 chance, I can remember the other side of this shit.

Car at 5.55am tomorrow. Yikes. Only one wine? Maybe two…

After a week at Bletchley, I now have a week off. David was in this evening with his notepad and pen, joyously shadowing my Dilly so he can remind himself of what it might mean to be Alfred Dilwyx Knox. I was ebullient after a lovely review, and was spouting ancient Greek and flouting my French to the francaudients. I was likely more full of waffle than usual. I’m looking forward to reciprocally watching David, as I suspect he will bring equally ridiculous energy but in a different direction.

David was there because a few of us are job-sharing. It means we can go off and do other interesting things. The Illicit Signals crowd are just bloody marvelous humans, so you’d be mad not to want to play with them when you’re available, but when filming calls we are helpless but to answer. David is stepping into the breach for a week and I’m off to Cornwall on an early train in the morning.

The Germans have been my enemy for a week as I’m codebreaking at Bletchley Park in London. Not from tomorrow. Tomorrow the Germans will be my best friend. Them, and Rosamund Pilcher. I love the strange thing that has happened here. Over 100 Rosamund Pilcher stories, beautifully and efficiently filmed in wonderful Cornwall over many years. I first did it in 2019 just as I felt that sense of momentum kicking in. I’m thrilled they asked for me back when I want that momentum back.

I’ll only be two nights in Cornwall, but I’m off Bletchley the whole week for safety. Filming can sometimes be jiggled around because of the weather. All my scenes are indoors, but they were indoors the last time and I ended up getting a few extra days as the weather was good so they had to catch up on some exterior shots.

I just got my call sheet through. It gave me an emotional reaction. A call sheet is a very specific document and has a certain look to it. It crystallises things. It reminds you that you’re part of a huge enterprise with so many individuals. Also it was my first call sheet since I had that lovely small role in The Crown, which we filmed in bloody March/April 2019. What happened to time? Too long. I felt I was just hitting that fabled momentum. I honestly did. Fantastic relationship with an agent that understands and supports me. Snowball of work opportunities. Things were sharp. Then … COVID.

Back on the horse and off we go again. A very different me from before the world-wedge. I love a film set. The bustle and the care. So many humans building a thing. My job is simple and refined. I have to have done enough prep to not have to search for my lines. That’s it. That and don’t walk into the furniture, as they used to say. Click out nerves, click in learning… Nerves aren’t an issue these days. In 2013 I was flown to Thailand and filmed a complicated scene with a man I greatly admired from Seven Years in Tibet – David Thewlis. We were working alongside Michelle Yeoh who I also had enjoyed in Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, and we were directed by Luc Besson – I grew up with Nikita and Leon. David and Michelle had blobs drawn all over their faces because they were gonna CGI map them younger. The whole scene never saw the light of day because of CGI vs budget. If I was ever gonna get starstruck, that was the moment. I don’t think I’ll ever be ruffled on set again as a result of that experience. Besson though – he was being protective of his work. Despite all my attempts to get some idea of what I would be doing, I never had a script until it was put under my hotel room door at 5am on the day I was filming. That was a lesson in doing it fast. I prefer two sleeps on a line learn. The voice coach, Mel, was an actor and she thankfully understood the pressure and helped me drill. I had a few hours for a reasonably long scene. I didn’t really know how freely Luc worked. I wish I could get the footage. “Hmmm and now I think you need to make a joke…” His script is a frame and then he throws things in the moment based on what he sees. Somewhere there’s ungraded footage of me with Michelle and David both sporting dots all over their faces. It would have been lovely for my showreel a decade ago, but I’ll never see it now and the movie didn’t get enough traction to pull a director’s cut. It was a learning job though, hugely. I nicked David’s grace on set. Michelle was active, as I was used to being. She was talkative and fun and personable. David just sat there and stayed focused, and was polite when addressed. My observation of him helped me save tons of energy and time on subsequent sets. Switch on for the shot, rest in between. Great lesson from a great actor.

Anyway, I’m all packed. But I’ve got to go to bed. Early train. Last time they flew me! Lines one more time. Then bed.

Much progress this morning. Many bags removed. I was lucky to have booked Jethro for the morning. He’s got past form in this flat. For a sensible hourly rate he and I work in parallel moving shit around. There are few people I trust in the way I trust him. I’ve known him for thousands of years. He understands not to question the strange attachments. “Oh no, that’s the hand of an ancient doll.” “Those are original and unique photographs of battleships in WW2.” “That’s the cage for a cat carrier I need to return.” He knows I’ll work that shit through myself once he’s asked the question. In the context of the flat I find he works with me through all the madness and the energies and everything here feels better for the work. The room I sleep in has his paint all over the walls, and sewn in.

After today my old bedroom has some floor space. It is beginning to make a tiny bit of sense in here. There’s much to do still and much to be thrown away, but a start is a start and I somehow feel like we made more progress than I thought we would today.

Books and old programmes came down from the attic. Memories, but not too distracting. Old friends in old Playbills. Rehearsal notebooks. Even a book of forgotten angsty poems some even in sonnet form, driven by impossible loves and desperate hope. I remember being that young man again now only through touching those page-explosions. I might publish some of them here, as fuck it I’m already showing you my nipples. I’ll have to build up to it though. I’ve only been able to read a couple myself right now before I find myself simultaneously repelled and emotionally charged by the memories. I was turmoil back then, and I always had a notebook and black pen with me and I filled page after page with scrawling poetry before I slept. Perhaps this odd discipline was borne out of that. I’m glad I’m not as angry as I was back then… But maybe I need to get angry again. Anger is passion though and I’m still passionate. I’m just not carrying it in my throat so much… Poetry though… That was an old outlet. I haven’t done it for a long long time. It’s a useful way of saying the hard things safely. I think that’s how I used it. Vocal spits, sometimes formally ordered but usually with nothing but internal structure – arrangements of sound and angst with no subtlety. Junk drunk hunks of mental spunk. Nothing to see here. And then the occasional sonnet just standing there asking me how I even worked out the structure of it when I was clearly off my tits. Maybe I’ll publish it. I’ll call it “Angry Drunk Forgotten Bastard: The Internal War Poems V”.

Meanwhile, bedtime after a glorious press night… I had so much fun and I honestly think the reviewers did as well. Hurrah!

Jethro found a Cupid in my bedroom and I’ve been looking for a means of hooking the cord for the lovely blind Lou made. This is a rather lovely solution. I am torn though. Should I take it off and polish it, or does the patina make it better? Thoughts on a postcard.

My friend got up at 5am to help me record for my last self tape. I wanted it to go well. I rolled round her place way too early with a case containing a foofy shirt and a regency frock coat from the – incredible – free – costume – haul. I thought hard about whether it was worth wearing it, as you don’t want to step on the toes of the costume humans when you’re just an actor saying “Hey it’s me!”

“Who is that prat in the frock coat? It doesn’t even have the right buttons!” If the wardrobe human is a bit of a douche and watching the tapes, that might happen. I was hoping for a “well, he’s made an effort. Let’s get him in to the next round.” Who knows who even looked over it. Depends how many they called for. We shall see. You can’t second guess this stuff and if you try to you’ll either get embittered or go insane. I’ve got lines to learn and will be on set early next week, and I’m in an evening show where they’ve arranged cover. I can count my lucky stars. Not many of us can say that.

Anyway, my friend got up at 5 the other day for me. I was going to make it work for her in return. I tried to help her bag something lovely. She’s great at her job. It’s been a slog for us both over the years. We are still going in this often arbitrary line of work. We still somehow carry optimism and lightness, and now we build these temporary studios in our homes so we go up against people with bigger homes and better equipment and we try to make the best of the fact we are sometimes having to contort ourselves to fit the only frame we are able to make. “Full length” is particularly the thing that makes my heart sink. I’ve had to go to ridiculous lengths to get a full length shot (It has to be in landscape with your phone sideways – try it). It’s particularly hard on your own. Why anybody who has the faintest idea of the practicalities of self taping would ask for a full length shot is beyond me. Below is a still from one of my more recent attempts – shot by a friend from her stairwell and she did it in portrait. It was the only way we could do it and light me. I ended up doing that shot again in landscape in my kitchen because I couldn’t send it looking like a giant, and everybody tells you never to send self tapes in portrait.

Anyway, yeah that was the afternoon. Then a lovely show with some strange audience. Then home to the wonders of late night wind down food. Now I’m trying to go to sleep. Hey diddly-fecking-dee.

Well, that was lovely. This evening in a crypt in Bethnal Green we had our first show. It’s about Bletchley Park, and the audience are brought in to learn some codebreaking and see the result of their work.

In an estate outside Milton Keynes, a tight knit group of extremely clever men and women gathered together to work in a radio factory. They might have been thought of as draft dodging from the outside. But the work they were doing turned out to be absolutely crucial to the war effort. The Polish cracked enigma before the war, but it took too much time to get enough useful information before the settings shifted. The folk at Bletchley Park were working on doing it faster. The famous name now is rightly Alan Turing, with his incredibly precocious “thinking machines” designed to speed up the whole business of finding the daily setting. Mathematicians and linguists were working alongside one other in absolute secret. They made D-day possible among other things. The audience for the show collectively help make other wartime events possible in the moment.

This evening I finally discovered their discovery and realised what a lovely show it is. They have to do things but they very quickly get stuck in. It’s not a sitty downy watchy watchy show. You follow your nose as an audience member and things are happening in all the rooms. So far so BAC 2003. But it’s a tried and tested frame and it works. If you’ve got a friend in the show you probably stick to them, and they won’t suddenly inexplicably just stand still facing a wall like some of the actors I shadowed in early versions back then when they had run out of the “thing we are supposed to do”…

I ended up making friends with Gilly. We had some very good conversations about the nature of secrets and transparency, and about kindness. She helped me crack a cipher and even tried to steal some things for me. We had a reasonably good audience and it was lovely to feel the piece landing. It’s good craic, and it’s clever. I’m thrilled to be a part of it. I get to channel the disordered benign linguist aspect of the kaleidoscope of potentialities that make all of us up. We’ve all got a bit of disordered benign linguist available to us, but it’s a shard of my potentiality that has been well fed over the years, so now the white noise of opening show is clearing I can settle in and start enjoying myself, and bring in more nuance and less wash.

I was curious to see how Vigenère came out if I enciphered a word with itself – whether there would be a discernable pattern. I went with “pipe”. Turns out there’s no predictable pattern but the same letter will always go to the same letter as with the E from P thing. Minutes after I did it I was asked what would happen if you did it so I showed that. No unnecessary work is wasted here, it seems. Hurrah.

Today was always going to be a day of rest before going into showtime for the rest of the week. I’m about to lose my evenings. It’s not such a long piece of theatre, but it has an interval. I reckon if I go straight home I can be here by eleven. If.

My daytimes are going to have to count this month. The daily rate for this show is a drop off from what I might be able to command doing workshops about energy, but it’s the thing I angled my existence towards so I’ll always take the hit. But I want to try to activate the days in order to finally make sense of this flat. I’ve buried myself in junk. My bedroom is still reasonably pleasant and relatively clear but the rest of the place is a swamp. I have a plan and I’m hoping I’ll be able to stick to it. Home after the show and in bed by midnight, then up in that thing called the morning, and motivating myself to work for myself for a change. I might ration my own money and pay myself as I always seem to motivate better when there’s money involved. I’m a mercenary but I keep working for other people. The next three weeks are hopefully going to be a slow motion 1980’s transformation montage. If I work a miracle I can get it on Airbnb for the Chelsea Flower Show. Right now that seems like an impossible dream.

Going to sleep after the show might be the problem. If I can learn the skill of a swift booze free wind down post show, then I’ve learnt a useful skill that hasn’t been an easy part of me repertoire of skills thus far. It’s too easy and tempting when I’m doing a show to drown the adrenaline afterwards, but then I won’t get the morning as I’ll want to sleep long enough to be back on top form at 7.30pm peak time.

Today I haven’t worked in the flat, other than to write a few prompts to think about bringing into various beats of the show. I have remained staunchly in my pajamas from morning to night. I ventured as far as the sofa, and one giddy moment in the afternoon saw me going downstairs to check my mail. There’s a letter I’m hoping I don’t get from a mobile speed trap I wasn’t caught in. It has another week to not come.

Now I’m about to make a huge mug of chamomile and drift off to sleep reading silly comics. I’m back into the 2000AD anthology that I ordered online without realising it would run to something like 150 volumes. Today’s story is a classic. Cowboys and Dinosaurs. I’ll either have to sell this lot or put it in the attic as it takes up way too much space. Fun for now, I guess. Thoughts like that are for the tomorrow version of me.

Absolutely absurd, and yet if time travel did exist and there were no laws preventing it you can bet that there would almost immediately be industrial farming of dinosaur meat and all sorts of other crap… Although would it cause a paradox and prevent itself from happening? Who knows. It’s escapism. So long as I try not to think about overfishing it’ll hopefully help me sleep. It’s not the best written piece of literature I’ve encountered this month. But I like to keep it varied.

It’s already very late at night. I left the venue early but I couldn’t wind down. My first observed show after next to no rehearsal. Lots of lovely humans in the company trusting me not to be an idiot, and a delightful character to get stuck into.

I’m playing Dilly Knox in 1941. Alfred Dilwyx Knox. A linguist out of Eton and Cambridge finding himself in a position of authority having proved himself as a codebreaker in the previous war. He’s smart as a button but distracted. He’s learnt to play unthreatening alien until he’s become habitually alien. He finds common ground in the life and works of Lewis Carroll – Lewis was introducing cyphers to children around the time Dilly was a child. There’s much encoded or to be deciphered in Alice in Wonderland. Even the trick of printing the beginning of Jabberwocky mirrored was unusual. Sterne was having just as much fun a century beforehand with some of his glorious precocious playfulness in Tristram Shandy, but nobody has really heard of Sterne these days. Lewis Carroll hit the big time and helped open the door to a strange freedom with form that would eventually make it’s way into game books and from there to game theatre and thusly into the sort of thing I’m involved in now, which we were making in 2003 for audiences that wanted to sit still and kept telling us it would never take on.

The paragraph you’ve just read is why I’m well cast. The contents of my head frequently spill out willy nilly – as you might have noticed, oh constant reader. This evening, in this lovely show, I had to try and hold it together. It wasn’t a total disaster. Absolutely nobody died. From here I can start to add detail and nuance. This evening was mostly about survival, and Wednesday will no doubt be the same. Tonight’s audience were invited. On Wednesday the audience will have paid. We aren’t working tomorrow as we have a long week ahead and they’re finishing the build. It won’t be a relaxing day though. I’ve got to organise the contents of my head. I’ve been trying to arrange all my classical references and find multiple examples that argue similar points. Dilly is a benign example of one of those educated fools who assume that everybody has had the same education they have. He isn’t trying to alienate people with his classical allusions – it’s just his frame of reference. To an extent, you can convince yourself you’ve learnt human nature via literature. Rees-Mogg. It’s not practical, but it functions theoretically. Dilly is on that spectrum. He’s widely, slavishly and voraciously read. It’s fun being him but it takes all my energy trying to remind myself of stories I’ve encountered over the years to illustrate whatever obscure points I’m making. I don’t like slipping into patterns in shows like this so I won’t. But my obsession for Roger Llancelyn Green’s potted myth cycles – that ended roughly when I was thirteen. A long time ago now.

Three weeks of messing around with classics and code. Tomorrow is my last evening off for May. I should probably go gathering nuts…

“I’ve forgotten what carnage Dilly’s desk is,” says Beth, looking at what I’ve created more or less by accident in the short space of time I’ve been there… Sometimes I listen to myself in this character and I wonder if I’m the reincarnation of the old chap. That would be my desk if I ever I had an office job – God forbid.

In December 2019 I spent two long days in a huge van moving furniture from a gym in Croydon to a crypt in Bethnal Green. I was helping out some interesting and lovely young humans who like to make theatre. I thought that would be the end of it.

They have asked me to come make something with them, using lots of the stuff I moved. They can’t afford to pay for more than a couple of days rehearsal. So we open on Wednesday with a soft run tomorrow night, and today is the first moment I’ve been given a structure of what I’m doing and even then it’s an incomplete structure. If I wasn’t ridiculously confident in this sort of thing by now, I’d be freaking out.

The first thing that strikes me is what a lovely bunch they are. I’m in safe hands. Right at the director gave a pastoral care announcement about how we should behave within our own physical and mental well-being limits. It was brilliant. I don’t think I’ve ever had it made so clear that production are interested in our well-being outside of just needing to make sure we all turn up for work.

There are lots of little scenes improvised around a bone – a little like the game we played with Odyssey but with a touch less deliberate fuckery and no songs. I met the other actors and we experimented with not being too on-the-nose. There’s still great room for mischief. I’m playing an eccentric Lewis Carroll enthusiast with a huge thirst for classical literature. I have more room than most to say things that nobody understands but me.

In a quiet moment this afternoon I began what should end up as an avalanche of esoteric bits of paper on my desk. I used Vigenère to encypher a translation of the first two dactylic hexameters of The Odyssey, using the accepted anglicised Greek as the key phrase: “Andra moi ennepe mousa polutropon hos mala polla / planchte epei troies hieron ptoliethron epersen.” I had that drummed into me through the course of The Odyssey and I wanted to have a bit of strange magic to link the two shows for me. Dilly would’ve had it drummed in at Eton so it’s perfectly in world – no classicist of the era would last five minutes without a love of Homer. Here’s my cypher, with my workings up above.

The greatest joy is, by cheating the last word “citadel” to “city” I could make the length of the message match the key phrase precisely. You don’t know what I’m talking about. One day, if you’ve got half an hour and some graph paper, I’ll teach you to decode it. Or you could come to the show. I never know if I can recommend something before it’s open but come buy tickets for this. It’s lovely people and there’s no budget. Somebody has to pay their bills. I’m not asking for much but I’m not working for chips. There’s a solid core of diligent, kind and geeky people making this, and there’s also a rare degree of faith in this company. I find it refreshing to find actors who believe in things. There’s a huge culture of atheism in my profession that always feels thoughtless and smug when mined. It’s hard to be an actor with an eye on God. Easier somehow to be Pagan or just love everything like I do. These guys wouldn’t have access to this crypt without that rare breed of properly Christian artists. Today they were talking about Riding Lights. Beautiful company. I have books of theirs on my shelves from my superfaithful days. They make good theatre from a good place.

I feel well looked after here and I want these guys and this show to do well. I should go to sleep though so all the information settles in my head.

Stalls row E seat 38. RST. To my left a very lovely ancient couple. To my right a retired family of (probably) academics. The refreshing feeling of bringing the average audience age down. It’s getting rarer as the tooth gets longer. But I was in a sea of grey. It was a matinee, captioned and “relaxed” so you can pop to the loo mid action and the house lights aren’t fully off. I had no choice but to go to this matinee. My schedule is tight.

Rebellion.

Every so often the Henry VI plays come round and we remember how thorny they are. I think that the best of Shakespeare is when he cuts into the humans who make policy. The Roman plays and the histories. You can get swamped in all the lords and the words and the lies and the shifting allegiances though. “It’s a good thing they’ve got those roses on their costumes or I might get lost in it,” says one fellow in the interval queue for coffee – and yes, it definitely helps. Rebellion is the first part of a two part condensation of the three Henry VI plays. Lots and lots of nasty two faced political types with daggers out for one another as they swarm around a king who is kind but not worldly enough to hold them in check.

Nobody should want to be in power… It’s comforting to look at the instability of the divinely anointed king back in the 1400’s and consider that today’s leaders are just as much surrounded by vultures. Who is snapping at the heels of Putin that might derail his nasty dream of acquisition? In the UK, surely now at last the final part of the trap will close around Boris. These snapping scheming lords though – we see Shakespeare writing about their big political plays, and then we see them decapitated. Time can be condensed on a stage. You can show the Brexit referendum and then the next scene can be the start of Covid. Boris can have no head by the end of Act 3 with two more acts to go. Some guy watching porn in the Commons can reduce to a single joke line.

I was giggling and sniggering a great deal but every time I laughed I felt micromovements from my neighbours making me feel like one should NEVER laugh at a HISTORY play. We could see each other because of the raised house lights. I think my neighbours just felt a little bit more self conscious than I did. The plays are FULL of jokes, and they are so macabre. This production is played for truth, but it is done so with terrific wit. There is no sense that anybody is sending up their character – the truth is bursting out of the bones of it. Even Jack Cade seems at first to be absurd until you realise he is channeling a very well known figure with a great following. Then you think about the construction of identity and the nature of celebrity and how your ego can carry you further than any true ability, and you see it for another beautifully placed performance. We are surrounded by empty souls, hollow men and women, little bags of hungry skin filled up with wind and self importance. Art can prick holes in them, and art must continue to do so, and this is why the current crop of political narcissists seem to hate any art that isn’t mummified. But … today I discovered that a five hundred year old play about medieval politics can still speak truth to power just by playing itself honestly.

This is the RSC at the heights. I don’t get to go very often as I can’t usually afford the time and the travel and the tickets. I made the time for this one – today was my only window. I am very much in the habit of slogging Bergman around so the travel went without thinking. And Min sorted me with a ticket. I’m so glad I went. It isn’t on for much longer although it feels like it might come back in some form. I could easily have gone back in and watched the second three hours, but that’s going to have to wait a whole month. But I will. And hopefully with Lou.

The costumes! The sound design! The wigs! The video projections! All the excellent performances! Man… Theatre with a big fat budget! I don’t see enough of it as they have to take the skin off you to pay for it. Minnie was – as ever – connected so deeply, rooted, a wily conduit. I was laughing and crying at the same time. “Can I get a selfie with you,” a man asks her as we walk away from stage door. She obliges. “My wife is never gonna believe this,” he says, attached to a string of compliments. She is one of an ensemble of good hearts, and now, as we are all a little older, her energy and experience is part of what will inform the younger members of the company. She’s a lead, and we follow the leads. Good. If all of them were like her, the industry and the world would be kinder and more diligent and more connected, and we would eventually filter out those bad empty lords who stand centre stage for too long.

This is my view this evening.

It’s the foyer of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre at Stratford-upon-Avon. Minnie is playing Margaret in a succession of plays here. I’m seeing one of them tomorrow.

It’s easy to be proud of the friends who are doing well. This actor’s life squeezes out all but the most dedicated. I look at my year at Guildhall and I see so many interesting actors pinched off. Minnie has another incredible run of work. I’m here to catch the first part of it. It’s great when there’s something to celebrate.

The day started later than it should have and earlier than I wanted it to, as I laid down a 6.30am self tape. I waited outside Costa in Mornington Crescent as I got there at 6.20 and there’s only instant coffee at my friend’s. Ten minutes was worth the wait, alongside a bunch of HS2 workers who mostly needed a shit.

Nobody wants to try to be fabulous at that time in the morning but it was the only shot I had for the tape. I had made a tentative arrangement with a friend for the night before but all my instincts told me it wasn’t going to work. I was right, so I bundled over to Camden at dawn and did it in one of my regency frock coats from the costume haul. I figured that since I’ve got them I might as well use them…

I sent a bunch of coat options randomly to whoever I was in contact with over the decision making period. How the hell do I have “too many regency frock coats”? I mean… They’re great… But…

Anyway, everybody I asked agreed on one particular piece of clothing for me to wear and nobody said “Al, just wear a suit, or you’ll look like a twat.” I went with the costume… I suit a period costume.

I’ve started to understand the extent to which I’ve lucked out with all these incredible free costumes thanks to Lou. I just need to lose a few pounds so I can close the button on the raw pink silk three piece. But some of the incidental pieces, like the one I wore this morning, are actually pretty damn good in themselves. Lou is a legend. God love her.

I sent the tape. I did a load of stuff about renewable energy. I drove to Stratford. Now I’m just here, next to the big theatre, with no traffic. It’s so quiet. I’ll hear the silence, sleep in it, watch Rebellion, and then tomorrow I’ll drive somewhere that I can do another blimming self tape. Get me in the room!! But I’m happy that things have woken up again. About time.