AlBarclay

This evening I was gearing up for another show. Not The Tempest. Now I’m back as a workhorse, puppeting dead mice for a single uninterested reptilian client. “The dance of the sugarplum rodent.“

I got it all ready. Mouse out the freezer in the morning. Defrost naturally all day. Warm it up in the tap. The mouse is ready. I’m ready. Marigolds on, time to open the packet and release the concentrated “essence de souris”. I’m confident it’s going to be a good show.

I get to the venue and open the lid. My snakey client is lying in the pool. He literally couldn’t give a fuck about anything mouselike or creative that I’m planning. He’s not interested. He wants to lie in his pool and soak up the waters. I know he’s just going to sit there. If I start the mouse show now it’ll go for nothing.

Fine. We shouldn’t be precious. We have to play to the audience we can get. If Hex would rather soak up the waters than engage in my food-related puppet show then so be it. He deserves a break. He’s had two shows a day for three days, plus rehearsal. I’ll get back to him in a few hours for the tasty-mouse show. Right now he can soak.

There are more shows going online for The Tempest tomorrow. It seems this weird thing we have made is vibing with people so we get to do it for a few more weeks. Maybe until this lockdown madness ends.

I went on Amazon and ordered more home studio equipment as soon as they confirmed the fee. I’m getting stuff to make it better and also so I can make fun things that I enjoy, from home, properly – not just over this crazy time but going forward. It’s an interesting world to explore, working from home like this. I might as well bone up on it now and get some starter kit. My self tapes will thank me.

The rest of the day? Nothing. Why else d’you think I spent two paragraphs on Hex not being ready to eat.

The bath is running.

The laptop is beckoning.

My Mubi just renewed and reminded me I’m still subscribing. That’ll be the rest of the night, catching up on classic movies. In fact, gonna go. The Image Book by Jean-Luc Godard leaves in 6 minutes. If I start now they might let me watch it through the big telly on PlayStation.

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https://mubi.com/t/web/global/1jfy2tz

That’s my mubi link. If you go through it you get a free month.

It’s a curated selection of movies from all around the world and different eras. One goes off every day, one goes on.

I caught most of The Image Book. 88 year old Jean Luc Godard spent ages before 2018 in his cutting room with old movies. I reckon he made a load of slates and narrated it himself. It’s made of cuttings of his selection of some of the greatest movies of the old era of film. He was at the forefront of “the new wave” in the 1960’s. 100% there’d be no Tarantino without Godard, not to mention many many other great auteurs.

He’s cut it out of film stock. He’s still at it. I hope he doesn’t get this shitty thing that’s going around.

It’s described as “an essay”. The subtitles are almost laughably incomplete so my half decent French was helpful. But God what a thing. Changed everything, he did.

Now of course he’s contemplating mortality and legacy as you would be if you were pushing 90. And delving into politics which you know you shouldn’t do, grandpa.

He’s thinking about new forms at one point, which resonated.

“When an epoch slowly dissolves into the next epoch certain individuals transform means of survival into new means. It’s the latter that we call art. (The only thing that will live from an epoch is the form of art it makes.) No activity shall become an art before it’s time is over. Thus this art shall disappear.” (Translation in brackets my own as they didn’t bother, the rest partly the atrocious Mubi subtitles and partly me adjusting them a bit in hopes of getting closer to the intention. I know it doesn’t fully make sense. I suspect that’s also intended.)

I wasn’t allowed to finish. At 1am Mubi interrupted me. Buggers. Still, I had a month to watch or download it.

“The living against the dead,” says Godard at one point.

One of the first images was from “Un chien Andalou”. Many were from great early examples of the “every fucking second of every fucking take costs a fortune” era of film. The opening character introduction of “The Berlin Express,” and fucking hell it’s wonderful but more so when you know how hard that must have been to do that in one take back then fucking hell just watch it!

These movies lose power as they lose context. As artists and makers we intellectually know what was possible in 1929 when Bunuel and Dali made something hard to make, mischievous and weird… In 1948 when Tourneur made that groundbreaking thriller on a train.

“The dead are sending the plague,” says Godard. He knows. He burnt the past and championed experimentation. He loves the new and the old too, but he seems to get that the world moves on. Still, there’s much to learn by looking backwards.

I’m glad I’m experimenting with new forms, when I hear his ancient Frenchman speak to me, and then read it badly echoed by the 16 year old subtitle intern at Mubi.

I still recommend a Mubi subscription. Frequently subtitles are not needed (either English movies or silent films.) And even when they are, it’s rare they’ve been done as incompletely as this.

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Managed to get to stream the end of it. The last clip! I’m weeping. Two beautiful happy people dancing with life and vigour, so alive, so present. But footage so old we know the actors are both long dead. And then one of them pretends to die.

Ach. He knows what he’s doing.

All we makers can do is keep on making and try not to harden into bastards if it suddenly goes well for us – and to remember it’s blind chance if it does.

A Mubi subscription is an education and now is a good time for it. Nothing is there by chance, it’s curated. One in one out every day. Next one out is a Japanese piece from the forties. They throw in modern stuff too though, rest assured. It’s a cornucopia.

And if you’re a French translator with art in your heart, there’s clearly an opening for someone better at it.

Get your free trial. Join the weird indie film Covid revolution.

It was around this time of year, only a year ago, that I drove The Soul Van up to Maida Vale full of random antiques. I parked it, paid for a few hours, and walked to my audition location. I was about two hours early. As I walked down the canal I had an animated conversation with my agent about some old sheet music I wanted to find a home for. She suggested someone.

I was wearing a grey suit of my grandfather’s, my uncle Peter’s Gucci shoes, a Rolex that granny bought me for my 21st birthday and a trilby. I was auditioning for The Tempest.

I found the location and then swore about the lack of good coffee shops on that road. I walked the streets looking like a relic of times past. I suit vintage clothes better than I suit modern clothes, and I know it. But vintage clothes don’t suit the Harrow Road.

Eventually it’s audition time and I’m in. Lucy the producer has supported my energy for years after we initially collaborated in 2012. It hasn’t worked with previous directors. My agent has said to me before this meeting “This is the last time, Al. I’m gonna tell them to stick it if they try to bring you in again.” I’ve had 4 auditions (three with the same director) and no job. I see her point.

I meet this director, and I vibe with her. She sees where I hide my mischief. There’s a collaboration here, I think. She seems to think the same. I get an offer.

That was last summer. I end up being trusted to go mental on my own in a willow tree. I think I wrote extensively about it. Hope boats and fatherhood and regrets and the responsibilities of power. The Tempest from Alonso’s perspective filtered through wonderful Zoe and with a liberal sprinkling of my brand of bonkers thrown in for free.

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They contacted me immediately when we all locked down. They aren’t rich. But they are extremely well named. Creation. They want to create work. They found a way. Today 200 or more people saw our Tempest as the third day of our Easter online pop-up. It worked, so there will be more opportunities. Watch this space.

A month from now the money-places will have caught up and will be able to send high quality halogen lamps and professional greenscreens to the homes of the same old 5 actors who get to be in everything. For this labile period we can be pioneers, and hell it suits me from back in the Rabbit/Coney days. It’s always worth remembering that constraints are the catalyst for creation.

“I feel like bits of me keep disappearing,” I ended up saying one show when I was having greenscreen light issues. But this is the point. Tech is gonna fuck up. Hex is gonna go where Hex is gonna go. The light is never going to be consistent without a proper halogen on the wall behind me. I’m gonna get booted out mid show and other people will cover my absence. Our show is live, and it exists because of the constraints we are under, and it is bringing people together despite these constraints. I see the audience a lot and I see how moved they sometimes are at this rag-tag joyous thing, because we are making light in dark times. Here’s a photo from a friend’s living room!

I guess this all means that I’m still doing my job. The Fool and The High Priestess on The Chariot. Somehow one of them has still got the reins.

And it means I don’t have to record myself doing Shakespeare in my dressing gown. Thank fuck.

I’ve just teleported back to my living room after another two shows. It’s still a mess in this living room. I’ll sort that out in one of the endless tomorrows. Now it’s just winding the show out of myself so that I can sleep properly before doing it all again twice tomorrow.

The Guardian newspaper came last night and understood what we are trying to do, which is what you want from someone who writes about theatre, particularly as a nice write-up in a national will likely allow us to extend the run. They gave us 4 stars.

It was only made with this bank holiday weekend in mind, but frankly what else are we gonna do? Chances are we can extend the run.

Nice to be in an active show that responds to this madness, and to vindicate the friendships I made over the course of a logistically difficult summer. You never know what’s going to come back to you, but for sure the more you put out the more you get back.

There’s a unique opportunity for us in this show, when we are in the wings, to peep at the audience through a hole in the flat. It’s better even than the fake mirror Jack and I used to spy from in Scrooge’s Parlour. The audience are part of the meeting so their cameras are on unless they choose to switch them off. We get to see them enjoying and participating in the playing we do. One of my nephews unexpectedly came to the matinee and I pinned his video for a bit while I was preparing, just to feel a bit more connected with him and his isolation buddy.

Often audience members talk about feeling part of a community again through this. It’s a lovely thing to hear, to know that somehow we can still bring scattered people together with a shared experience. I know one person who joined from Georgia and another from Texas. We’ve reached Ireland New York and Mexico as well. Even my nephew was up in Aberdeen.

It’s an interesting possibility. There are of course constraints in what we can do, but as a tester for a new form I’m very glad to be part of something anarchic human and fun and I think there’s a lot more to explore around what we can and cannot do and how we can keep the story live and involve the audience, but it’s sweet and it works.

I’ll likely announce when tickets go up again, if we extend, and would be thrilled to see old friends and new joining the party. I’m still reeling at the fact that I’m employed to do live theatre in this messy living room and these uncertain times. But often the truth is stranger than fiction, and it seems like decades of working at being generative and positive have started to throw me chocolates.

On which subject I went to TK Maxx before this all started, in January, and they had a load of chocolate bunnies. I bought a good number of them intending to give them out to whoever I met at Easter. Well, I met nobody but myself so omnomnomnom. You’ll need a crane to get me out the flat when this is over…

I still find it jarring when I click “leave meeting” at the end of The Tempest and remember that I’m sitting in my living room surrounded by all sorts of junk and alone. It’s probably healthy for me though to get used to this. It’s like I’ve had a teleportation device installed that pulls me back to this living room after the show when normally I’d be blowing most of my wages on another round in whatever we have decided is the local pub we like the best. I teleported back to my living room about an hour ago after the second show of a two show day. I finished my mug of white wine and realised I wanted a beer and had none. Saturday night. Post show.

I got kitted up and walked to Tesco.

My Tesco metro is always very “live”. It’s catering to the residents of a large sheltered housing, a couple of old folks homes, the Chelsea pensioners, some of the Rothschilds, whoever lives in Oscar Wilde’s old house, a peabody estate, me, and all the people who have boats privately moored at Cadogan Pier. The thing that most people round here tend to share is a loud voice and the habit of taking up space. Saturday night, and people in the queue. The guy two in front of me wants to pay half cash half card but none of his cards work. He is polite and in no hurry. He occasionally apologises to those of us behind him. But the guys outside the shop are getting restless. One of them comes in and tells the security guard he has only got four inside and he can have six. Someone else tries to just walk in with his hood up. The security guard is new, and in the most heavy duty gear I’ve seen. There are only two staff on duty on the shop floor and both of them are new.

Eventually payment guy pays and the old guy in front of me starts hitting on the checkout girl. She’s Italian, he has some Italian, oh God, and now he wants her name. He’s not reading the room very well but again just no hurry. She’s probably doing something difficult in the normal world but this guy with his cracked voice is either being interested or being too interested. She answers him in monosyllables until he pays, never encouraging, never discouraging. That fine line that you see too many young women in service industries having to tread, knowing how quickly people like him might go sour.

I get to the front eventually. I try to leave so quickly I get called back as I haven’t paid yet. Oops. Thankfully nobody punches me.

I witnessed a fist fight years ago that spilt onto the pavement outside this Tesco. It was between an old guy who wanted alcohol and a manager who had put an arbitrary 10.50pm curfew on alcohol purchases, and some other guy who got stuck in, was immediately roundly insulted and went a bit bananas. It was a full moon, a summer’s day. Me and another guy actually had to break it up. It’s a weird shop at the best of times, and it basically just sells mayonnaise crisps and beef. Today there’s a whole shelf dedicated to UHT milk. I think they use a random number generator to stock the place, the freezers are always broken, and until recently there was a manager who stopped beer from being sold cold from the fridge as groups of people would sit all day on the bench opposite and slowly get hammered and he didn’t like it.

Still, it’s open at ten on a Saturday at Easter and the staff are working hard in difficult circumstances. I didn’t like the guy in the queue getting mardy with the guard. I shouldn’t really have been at the shop just for beer. I know it. So surely doubly important not to be a creep or an asshole.

But people are starting to get restless… Let’s ramp up our kindness this weekend if we brave the outside world. These shop staff – many of the people behind checkout are resourceful local people who have found a way to support themselves and their families through this crisis, but they still have to come to work and be polite while working an unfamiliar till. Fuck knows what they might do in the normal world. “I’m just in for the day, normally I’m in head office,” said the checkout in Waitrose King’s Road last week and thereby hangs a tale I’m sure.

Be safe lovelies.

I’m gonna have my beer now.

Cheers!

I’m not sitting in the chair I’d normally be sitting in. Friday night yeah!? I might even go sit on the floor in a bit just because, yeah? Yeah.

I ate very well tonight, because of my new habit of copying an old lady’s shopping. Those Waitrose Gressingham duck breasts are very tasty alongside a spot of spinach and new potatoes – and a can of Stella. I’ve drunk all the wine. It might be Friday but I think I’ll still crash out early tonight. I haven’t got plans for a big one at home, despite the weekend. I even changed my sheets just now to guarantee happy slumber. Let’s see where the night goes though, hey? Hex might have other plans. He’s pretty active right now, so I’m letting him roam but preventing him when it looks like he’ll get himself somewhere that I can’t find him.

We open this show tomorrow, and we come together to do this strange live thing from my messy improvised living room green screen studio.

We are widely scattered over our United Kingdom, with at least one in Scotland, one in Loughborough, one in Leighton Buzzard, one in Lurgan. Only two in London.

The director’s in Port Stewart near where you could get the ferry when I was a nipper. One is in Cwmnafan, and I’m not even sure how to pronounce it. I’ve never knowingly been in the same room as him. That’s a strange thing to notice.

My Sky internet in London is extremely unreliable at the moment which is a worry. Friends of mine have imputed that it might go down entirely before long under some kind of attack, and much as I’d be fascinated to see the fallout now we are all so reliant on it, I’m hoping it doesn’t interrupt what is a sweet and silly creative endeavour by some good hearts.

The last two runs I’ve been kicked out of zoom. This sort of thing is always the thing to worry about when making a live experience with a tech angle. This is harder to solve than the players not getting a clue by text message.

If my internet goes you lose an actor mid show. I will just disappear, without ceremony.

There’s always a way to cover. But despite the deliberately fragile nature of what we are making I think we would all prefer to give the audience something along the lines of what we are hoping for, rather than an extensive troubleshooting improv session. There’s already enough improv going on considering this is billed as Shakespeare.

We had a five year old watching the test session today though and he had a good long list of things he liked – which speaks well. I think it’s rich and strange from my perspective. I still can’t quite credit it, that I’m opening a show tomorrow. That people have bought tickets and will come online and share the joy with us.

It’s a community of people in lockdown making a version of an old but remarkable and complicated story about redemption and forgiveness, about love and forgetting the past, about magic and responsibility. There’s a lot in The Tempest – the last play written by that hugely influential humanist. We have boiled it down to about an hour. When we did it last summer there were zombies. Now there’s a wilfull snake and loads of beautiful hearts in lockdown.

Zoom into The Tempest in new live interactive adaptation

So now my living room has been turned into a really weird studio, with some lights on me and others dedicated to the wall behind me. I have no bedside lamp anymore because it’s needed in here for general wash, and even with it I have to take my dinner jacket off ASAP in the show or it gets computerised into part of the background as it’s black. I need to get some better lights. My mum had a halogen, but I think it’s gone to my sister in law sadly.

I did take delivery of a load of replacement overhead light fittings a couple of days ago as part of the problem is that all of my light fittings have dissolved.

I’ve never fitted such things before and I’m concerned it’ll involve dying, but I THINK I know how to shut the power off in my flat. I’m going to have a go tomorrow in the morning. I’ve been a bit scared of it. I’m either going to learn something or I’m going to blow myself up. But I connected the oven at Christmas and I’m still alive, so hopefully it’ll be a similar application of common sense.

I’m one of the 1% right now. I’m an actor gainfully employed to work in live art. It’s so lovely, but also so jolting. We are all in a room together, we are making together, vibing together, responding to each other. And then I click “leave meeting” and suddenly it’s just me in a silent room surrounded by lights, with a snake in a box and a load of random stuff. We are all teleporting in to do the show, and once it’s over we teleport out and look around and remember that actually we are all just at home surrounded by weird things.

The show itself is plagued by possible pitfalls. We all need to make sure we clear our buffers before starting. Yesterday it was me that got thrown out mid sentence. Today someone else. It’s not preventable. It’s part of the random. Part of the “live”. If one of us gets stuck out we can still make it play, and the creativity involved in covering for the vanish will be a potential source of joy. What we are making is fragile, but it isn’t precious. So if bits get chunked off, hopefully the centre will still hold.

I found it very emotional today, as we stress-tested it with a live audience. I was frequently worrying about props and light sources and Hex and angles, but as this becomes better trodden to me I will be able to observe the audience members who choose to make themselves observable, and that’s a delightful thing. We are all just stuck in our homes, and these people have come to play with us from their homes. We all share an illusion for a while, and then when the revels are ended we all go back to the baseless fabric of the vision, and not a wrack is left behind. We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.

“How are you getting from the supermarket to my house?” asks my new elderly friend. She needs more shopping. “I tried to use Waitrose online but the queue is days. I wanted some heavier things… Like wine.”

This is something I understand.

“Send me what you need. I’ll get a zipcar.”

There are no parking restrictions anywhere in London. I kind of wish I had a car of my own. I much prefer life with a car. But cars cost money. Even the zipcar ended up costing me about £20 as I had to add an extra half hour for over nine quid because of the queue at Waitrose and the amount of stuff she had ordered. Still, as I said to the woman at checkout when I bought the bags in a separate run : “When I get old I just hope someone does this shit for me. It must be hell, being old.” It cost me about £25 all told, but I think of it as charity plus learning.

Alongside the comestibles, she wants ten bottles of wine. She’s gearing in for the long haul. I buy one of each of her bottles for myself. She’s got a lifetime again on me. She’ll know her wine.

Her shopping is generally excellent in terms of food vs price and these are cheap old world wines from Waitrose I’m buying, that I’ve always looked past. Between five and six quid each. In Tesco I usually end up with nothing but highly traveled chemicaljuice at that price so it’s a useful learn. I’ve been taking notes. She cooks her own food. She’s careful. And she’s frugal. But she likes the finer things. Frugal finer things. That’s worth learning.

I dropped her shopping off just in time to start rehearsing.

Two runs back to back with discussion in between and I’m still floored by the diverse creativity in this mad group. It’s not Shakespeare for purists, oh no, oh goodness no, TC would be apoplectic. But it’s an exploration of form, and there are friends of mine in Texas and in Georgia and God knows where else who have thrown a spot of dollar our way to be with us as we experiment. It feels responsive to the situation. It feels like the weird and wonderful Tempest with zombies that we did last summer when we could all move from place to place. When I could be in a room with four other rehearsing actors lifting each other and breathing close to each other and then I could rush into a crowded tube from Brixton to Paddington and get a rush hour train so groups of twenty people could gather closely around me in my willow tree before we all went back to a big room and danced a touching ceilidh.

Creation Theatre and Big Telly. Both great names. Both wonderful focused creative practices. I feel so lifted knowing I can collaborate with both. At THIS time, where major players are still just rolling out their greatest hits on video, these maniacs are trying to make something that is deliberately live and NOW and giving employment not residuals.

God I wish I could see and touch and be. But this is at least a connection of sorts. With our shared history and our technology use it is very easy to forget that we are not in the same room with one another when it’s running. We are in fact very very distant but we feel together. We are performing from all over the place… It’s an astonishing hymn to creative use of tech in adversity. I just hope it works in the watching. 🙂

 

 

Scheduling idiocy meant that I published yesterday’s blog five hours late and likely all the autoshares failed. I was very quickly alerted to the major fail by a worried reader, but thank you to both the concerned people who thought I might have died. As I said to one of them, “If there’s no blog it’s either because I’ve messed up with scheduling or because I’m dead. Or the whole internet is down. But it’s always always worth messaging me because I fuck up the share all the time.

There was a period of about two months starting in December when autoshare broke to Facebook and loads of people just assumed I’d stopped writing and yet never messaged me. I even had people say to my face “Guess you got too busy for the daily blog thing then!” when they should’ve said “I am under the erroneous impression that you don’t see things through and I don’t know that your personal blog site is www.albarclay.blog so I rely on autoshare through other sites.”

Know this: I will not stop unannounced. No blog at 6am GMT means someone has dropped a piano on my head or I’ve fucked up the scheduling. In either instance it is better to message me than not to. If I’m dead I won’t get angry. And if I’m not I’ll want to know something’s gone wrong. If I’m on a ventilator I’ll still get some words out. I’ll just drop the minimum. Know that.

Zuckerberg is a cunt so he has been trying to monetise hits for ages on this on Facebook and restricting what I can share and to who without money changing hands. You Facebookers can help by making his machine go *ping* when you engage. Ditto Twitter. I’m so past caring about all that bollocks but if a tree falls etc. And they pick what they show. So yeah think of this sentence like the final few seconds of most YouTube videos, but apply it to different blogs that strike you rather than just this one that thinks about the nuts and bolts.

Here we all are, locked in our own homes, wondering what the fuck is going to be left when our catastrophe of a prime minister gets out of intensive care. The UK political opposition is all gearing up to disappear up its own arsehole again.

I hope he gets well. I’m sure he will. And all of us. I hope we all do.

Half of my friends are in lockdown. Half of my friends think lockdown is bollocks imposed by “them”. You can never prove prevention any more than you can prove “them”.

The bollocksycustard lot are either going to luck out and stay well – (statistically most likely) – at which point they’ll double down on their conspiracy nonsense, or they’ll actually get sick, at which point they’ll tell us all they were injected maliciously by government agents because of what they know, or it was in the water etc. And the vaccine, when it comes! Fuck me! It’ll be a mind control death serum that turns us all into zombies with AIDS. Like with smallpox. So many anti-vaxxers lost their children after successful campaigns to avoid vaccination. How quickly we forget. “Because history is a lie, man! etc etc”

Basically too many people have too much time on their hands.

I have had the luxury and time to overthink before. It really is a luxury and it really is no help. I’m done with it. It’s dangerous and serves nothing. But huge minds that have normally been turned to survival are now going to … well wherever they are guided at worst, wherever they are inclined at best.

The whole 5g Wuhan Spanish Flu scary music thing is compelling. But with my scientist brother and my childhood alongside him I’m too careful in my approach to stuff like that. I will never be won over by someone in a nicely done video showing me science and using an “important voice”. Max is better at science and I’m better at important voice.

We have so many sources of information. We should be suspicious of all of them. Including me.  It’s only right.

Stay safe. Don’t die of the fearthing or get killed for what you know depending on which side you wear your tinfoil.

Be happy.

Lucky me. I’m in rehearsal, somehow. We open on Saturday. I will be performing in my own living room, on my laptop, alongside some absolutely brilliant and completely bonkers human beings.

Last summer, before I went to America, I was in The Tempest in Oxford. It was a few calm funny weeks before everything exploded spectacularly for me and I ended up having to commute to Oxford by train every evening and back after the show to get stuck into full on rehearsals for the lovely Twelfth Night that was to follow. I loved the guys I was working with in Oxford though, which was a problem as I wanted to stay with them and celebrate after the shows but I couldn’t because back in London the cast was changing and insecurity was rampant to the extent that I ended up getting politicked out of going to the wedding of one of my best friends.

I am so thrilled to be back in the room with them, even if “the room” is all of our own individual living rooms. We were running tech. “It’s like running 9 different techs simultaneously,” says Zoe, the director. We were all in costume trying to work out what’s possible. And today I started to see it. To sense what it might be – what it can be… Time at the coalface, and we are learning the medium, such as it is. Sinead is basically liveauthoring the audience’s eye and we are all telling a crazy living room Tempest with whatever we can get our hands on in the places where we live. And it is shaping up into something interesting and worthwhile. I’m so proud to see the company evolve into the medium. To see how Zoe the director is learning how to direct this form as she goes. How all of us are upskilling ourselves technically in this process. There’s a huge amount left to chance here. But today through all the disruptions and mistakes as people left themselves on mute or “oh shit it’s my parents home with the shopping can we wait a bit before doing our scene while they take their boots and gloves and stuff off?” – through all the madness and the chance and the things forgotten and the things remembered I saw suddenly what this is and why it is like it is, because this is LIVE on screen and that’s what it’s trying to be. We can’t just be the millions of actors who are delivering “home Shakespeare”. That’s done, done quickly and done well. We are playing, and we are playing live, and God it’s funny to watch at times and lovely to be part of.

I have so much love and respect for Creation Theatre in Oxford, this team of shitkicking women making different work for playful joyful reasons, and making it with community and care at the fore. Even if I didn’t get to hang out properly in Oxford for the time I was there last summer, doing the commute of death, I get to celebrate the bond we made now instead over the internet, trying new mediums.

I haven’t switched on the telly for a few days but I was on the phone to a friend and she told me we were about to get Her Majesty with an official announcement. Worth a punt in these unusual times.

She looks well which is good considering she’s older than God. She was consciously channeling Vera Lynn with her “We’ll meet again” stuff. Good to hear her still at work. She’s a force to be reckoned with that woman. Active shout out to the emergency services and a reminder to stay indoors. Who knows how it will pan out in terms of numbers in this country. If we prevent it then we will never know what we prevented. That’s the thing with prevention.

On the phone to my bro Rupert I said how everybody in London was walking around outside my flat, on the riverside. To illustrate it I went to the window and did a spot count. 25 people visible from the window in that moment. That never happens. Slouching along in their running gear, sitting drinking beer on the benches, strolling in pairs or in threes, some big groups, some solo. Mostly no mask but I get that they’re hard to come by. Who knows how much good they do anyway. Specific information about this outbreak is not too easy to find as it’s thoroughly swamped with disinformation. It’s probably the Russians again, taking the opportunity to further fuck with us, because why else would there be such an incredible mine of misleading science on social media? In our isolation we can’t even bounce information and sources so we all just go with the most compelling thing we’ve read. Which alternates between the voices telling us it’s bollocks and the voices telling us we are murderers if we open the window.

I appreciated seeing HRH in her natty green top sounding like she really does miss her friends. So do I. I did a WhatsApp hug with Minnie this evening and it was more comforting than it should have been. Her daughter has named my owl though. You’ve likely seen photographs of it. The hot water owl that has the privilege of me sprawling on top of it through the long hours is apparently called Ernestina. It’s a girl. So there we go. A three year old can still teach us things.

The telly going on for the Queen has started a chain reaction. I’ve kept it off for the last week entirely, but now it’s on I’m using it. I’m catching up with “Better Call Saul”. I won’t get through the lot, but I’m glad of it. The Breaking Bad guys, now with money and credibility, going towards long takes and thoughtful scenes with smart actors. Unlike a lot of the other stuff you can find, and a good watch for someone like me who would usually rather be reading a book.

It’s half ten. The bath is running but it takes 45 minutes. I’ll get through one more episode and then turn in. Look after each other. Stay well.