AlBarclay

Lou is here! I kept forgetting she wasn’t watching tonight and wondering what she was feeling about various moments in the play. We are rolling into the run now.

Two shows today. Before the first one I went and concealed a small stone somewhere in the theatre, as has likely been done by generations of people before me. The key is trying to find a place where it won’t be in the way of anything and it won’t be changed. A little bit of sympathetic magic, maybe to try and encourage circumstances to bring me back over this way in the future.  For now though I can settle into the run, deepen the work and the company feeling, keep exploring and alert and alive, play the game.

These two show days are tiring though. I’m knackered. This evening though a change from the normal wind-down, as I just … rolled over the road and lo and behold Lou had the means to cook an easy meal. She has inevitably made things a little cosier in the cottage. Nourishment and no booze, a camomile tea, and I’m actually feeling pretty sleepy. We had a small evening walk by the river. Tomorrow she might go to The Duck, but it’s pretty mental on a Friday night.

Years ago she found a kimono for me and it has always been in Brighton on her rail. I forget it exists. Now that I’ve walked Kumano-Kodo I feel a little bit less of an impostor wearing it. I expect I’ll be strutting around this cottage wearing it after the shows in the next few weeks.

Not drinking and sitting in low light and camomile and I’m actually tired at half twelve so I’m gonna take the opportunity to fall asleep next to my lovely lady while that’s a possible thing.

It’s just midnight. Lou comes tomorrow!!! These late nights are gonna shift, as midnight feels really early still. I just had supper and I’m gonna get myself to bed.

It looks like tomorrow morning is tidyhurricane time, hopefully. I’ve been working through things but I let a lot stack up.

Glad I wrote when I did last night. Things almost took a pass that would have led to me playing Lodovico with a black eye this evening. I can’t be taking that kind of risk on this job or any job really, so it’s a person I’ll be holding at arms length from now on unless they give up booze entirely, and even then probably. The last message was still attempting to justify the behaviour. As they say though: “Not the FACE.” That rings for me in this part. “Lodovico is a proper man. A very handsome man.” A black eye, a thick lip, a broken nose? Right at the start of the run? What an incredible lack of care from someone I thought I could trust to be considerate at least that far, no matter the provocation or perception of such, to try and punch my face at the beginning of a run where I’m playing an aristocrat who speaks well… And then continuing to try to justify it the behaviour. Friends have been warning me for years. I’m slow to give up. But time is time and it seems I’ve learned something over all these years.

Graham might have got to come on as cover which would have been lovely for everyone as he’s such a delight of a man, but … reputation is a fragile thing – as the play talks about. I would never have forgiven them if that punch had connected. This is a powerful job in my life and getting myself into the way of that punch is a bad enough look for me. I trust too much and too long, it seems. But … this job is a phase shift.

Thankfully last night, which was lovely right up until just before bedtime, has actually taught me something. It takes time for things to get through my thick head. Sometimes the best thing you can do is walk away.

But yeah, we are into the run now, and Lodo even notched up in status this evening. I’m exploring the ceiling of high status while still being audible. There’s a certain point where you’re so important you put no care into if you’re understood or not because you know people will be hanging on your every word. I wanna get to just before that, so the audience can hear me in the Gods.

We sang “Ae fond kiss before we sever” to the magical bundle yesterday. We were literally singing it as my punchy friend arrived in town and tried to ring me. Magic is magic and that ritual had power. We had ae fond evening, the two of us. And now we sever.

It’s 2:23am. I’m sitting in a terraced garden alone outside a party. I’m wearing a three piece suit. It’s cold.

This afternoon we all stood around a sheet in the Ashcroft Room. It’s a powerful room. Wood and sunset, windows. It’s the most charged room in a very highly charged building.

We threw flour into the sheet for the moon. I’m wearing a moon amulet at the moment. Moon is instinct. Polenta for the sun. That’s all the masculine male fuck you stuff I walked away from but I’m channeling in my character. Roses with messages. Personal things. Entire bottles of wine poured on the floor as libations. A bottle of Glenfiddich. I put in a hagstone of chalk, a sliver of my Kumano stick, and bark of a coastal redwood. Then I put a small amount of my mum’s holy water and a large amount of Florida water. I had been stealthily running around with Palo Santo smudging everyone. Jules was running the ceremony, channeling. The room charged up. We bundled it all up.

I love the bundles. We love the bundle. People sometimes hate the bundles. It is a thing Mark Rylance used to do when he ran The Globe. I remember years ago someone being overly exercised. “It’s disgusting, there’s chocolate and wine and all sorts of things and then they leave it there. It’ll bring rats.” It won’t. The thing with ritual like that is that it is everything but it is nothing. If you are proud to be logical, it is completely fucking pointless. If you are happy to accept the possibility of magic it is the most powerful thing you can do. But these worldviews have become binary to many people.

Ideally we will have it under the stage, but for now it is hanging in The Ashcroft Room. I tied the knots, an easy bowline to start and then moored it like you’d moor a boat. My message was “To heal old wounds”. There are many old wounds to heal, not just for me but for us all. This Othello, this gorgeous ritual of a show, this teaches us we can do it. We can heal. But the knots were a surprise because one of my old wounds is about a boat company with atrocious HR who stuck the knife in right when I needed a hug.

I went to see the bundle a few times during the show. I sung to it once. This is a powerful thing because I want it to be. After I sung to it something in my nerves dropped away.

Friends old and new, my agent who is my friend all were there. Many aspects of this life I’ve strived to do as well as I can. Wonderful to have such support, both in and out of the cast. I am absolutely blown away by the company feeling, and the support I feel from my friends in this. I’m the kind but alpha male at the end of a messy tale. We’ve trusted Tim and he’s borne it out into something rich and strange.

I’m going to rejoin the party as it is fucking freezing here in the yard despite the stars. It’s late…

The early hours of this morning I started coughing. A tickle in my throat, just where the masseur had been working. It woke me and kept me up. Immediately the thoughts were into tomorrow and “will I lose my voice for press night?” I struggled to get back to sleep. I was up and down for ages. Thankfully no morning call.

This morning I went to Holland and Barrett and spent over fifty quid on vitamins and supplements. Fish oil for my actingbrain.. Immunity stuff, mostly though. Zinc and C and all that stuff and something made by bees which will probably help with hayfever… Vitamin D as it’s getting dark and screw you, winter. I’m gonna have a daily pill box like my dad. Fuck it. You go on the advertising for these things and every single model looks like they’re on death’s door. I’m surprised they aren’t selling pill organisers to younger people.

Then Lou helped me think about it. I had a monster of a four week cold in rehearsal. I’ve got my tonsils. I reckon a bit of something unpleasant was hanging out having a party on my tonsils and then the massage brought it to the attention of my immune system. There’s nothing now, so it’s dealt with I suspect, just in time for a Tuesday which is just the same as every other show but for the fact that clever people are gonna crystallise it in words and make it like it’s the only time it has ever happened. Oh it’s good though.

I went to a Q&A by mistake this afternoon. I just rolled in to the theatre early as is my habit, so I can make my body less stiff and my voice more free. There were chairs on the stage and Tim was mid flow, eloquent as you could ever be, talking about this process from his point of view. He is so clear. He really knows what he’s made and why. I’m really really happy to be part of it for that reason. The stalls were packed with people who look like they could be in ads for pill dispensers.

Here in Stratford, where the works of this magical brain have been charging up for hundreds of years, we are telling again a well told story. Tim has a clarity of vision that he has tried to transfer to us all. I know to trust him. I’ve seen the positive results of people trusting him just as I’ve seen the less positive results of people not trusting him. He’s a stupendously clever man who loves actors because we can bring the heart. Like many great directors, trust brings reward. There’s no ego with him, he’s just looking at the work, so you know that everything he suggests is worth pursuing as ultimately it’ll make you look better. I’ve gone with his process, I’ll still be working until the last show, I’m not here to tell myself I’ve nailed it – there will always be something to strive for. That’s life.

Bedtime now. This is an early bed and it’s still nearly one.

Tracy just ironed me out.

Loads of the lads and lasses went home this weekend. I stayed up in Stratford. No way I wanted to go haring off round the place just because it’s Sunday. I get it if it’s a child’s birthday, as it was for Scott and Jethro this week. But the trains are terrible here, and it’s a storm. So I stayed put and I put myself into the massage lottery.

Those of us who are here in Stratford can ask for a massage from Tracy. It’s a sports massage with her own aromatherapy blend of oils. “Client is not a salad,” I told her, in reference to Lou’s Ayurvedic training when she said “do you mind if I pour oil on you”. It opened a conversation. It was a very good massage, focusing on my neck area. I’m using the opportunity of a free massage to push Lodo into the most relaxed physical place possible. Obviously not as good as the massages Lou can give. If you’re in the South Downs and want something powerful relaxing and cosmic I can maybe hook you up with something, but it’ll cost ya. I left my massage floating, which is what it would be ideal to be able to do as Lodo. Air Earth. Like me. But earthier than my habit.

The show would be on as I’m writing this. I’m not on stage. I’m in my pajamas and I’ve just poured a glass of red wine to eat with a steak I’m about to fry up. I’m honestly considering having it with Mac and cheese as well as the pepper sauce I’ve bubbled so thick it’ll blow my face off. I did enough washing up to make all this possible but it just means I’ll have to do more washing up later. Dishwashers make you lazy. I hate washing up.

I just sent TC a mildly angsty email related to a style choice we both back in the playing of Lodo. I’ve noticed a degree of kickback. Lodo brings on lots of letters and information, and I think he is often used as a slightly comedic “I’ve got this lovely trick where I’m juggling all the letters” type turn. He speaks last. He is immediately known. He speaks for Venice, but can confidently make decisions way beyond the remit of a messenger. If academics have styled him as such it’s them missing the signals from the writer. He’s an extremely powerful dangerous man, who has his own boat and happens to want to see his cousin. He agrees to bring some letters with him for his mate the Duke, as a favour. He’s not gonna be funny postman. But I think that’s what he has been time and time again. There’s much in the telling that is non literal. Maybe it’s as simple as a click of the fingers…

I’m just happy to have a quiet night. Before long, clever left brain humans will construct thoughtful paragraphs about it. I never like it when that happens at it crystallises how things are thought of. Art is subjective. That’s the point. If you think need someone else’s brain to tell you what to think of art that’s your confidence issue to be dealt with.

Steak time.

A bunch of old friends showed up this evening. Factory friends, but therefore friends who know they can be as negative as they like with me if they think I’m being a twat in my work. They seemed to get it thankfully. I’ve started to really love Lodovico. He’s a kind man, a bit of a gossip, activated by privilege instead of stunted. Over the process we have been moved to some heightened gestures and vocal choices that totally fit the arena we are working in. Old school Factory detests trickery, so I was nervous seeing them afterwards. Spike (movement) and I have created a physical world for Lodo which, if you choose to cling onto the past is “not Factory”. (Repeated choices, gestural things, allowing Spondees) But thankfully we aren’t running a museum. Loads of the old guard got sniffy about The Odyssey back in the day and really their objections were the same as their problems. They had created a shape for themselves in the work and decided it was the only correct shape and thus disliked it that the work was breathing because they didn’t want to breathe right now thanks so “that thing is wrong cos it isn’t me shaped”. Like all the people who want their country to be “great” again, with “great” meaning “when I had decided things were just as they should be”. We all want desperately to be able to stop striving. We forget that entrenchment is suicide. The conversation always shifts and breathes. We breathe with it or we stop breathing. We will all stop breathing eventually. We can choose the cultural death, just not the other ones.

I had Ally in this evening from Scene and Heard so couldn’t catch up properly with the Factory friends- hopefully tomorrow. She’s a ray of light. The lads and Leila, they’re all staying in Jethro’s flat even though he’s gone home for a family birthday. I could probably have slung someone on my sofa bed but the conversation never arose and right now my cottage is a warzone. But I want to see them. I rarely if ever do. I’m just not having them in my flat. I had a man come and test my appliances and my kitchen looks like Withnail’s. I’ll be doing something about that tomorrow, on my day off. Probably. I’ll be doing a lot about it before next Friday, as I’ll pretend I’ve kept it nice and clean for Lou. I won’t blow it in my blog. Leila lives in Brighton now for fuck’s sake. I’m there all the time and we are supposed to friends.. I’m shit at this. Hi. How are you? What’s going on? Tell me things.

Right now it is LATE. I just ate an entire jar of Pea and Ham soup from Marks and Spencers and I’m in my pajamas. I’m gonna wander upstairs and hit the hay and please don’t try and communicate with me until late morning as I’m not planning on being much use. And then it’s a DAY OFF Wooooooo. Chilltime. Setting my alarm for 11:11.

Two out of three tonight. Women. Big fucking personality women. They came to see the show. We were children when we last new each other.

My mum had a brief period where she was a lady who lunched. One of her most frequent lunch buddies was Pam. She lived up the road, which helped. Mum wasn’t big into driving and public transport was a foreign country. She had the number of Augustus, from a local minicab firm, who respected the eccentricity and vulnerability of my glamorous mum. He would move her around in emergencies. But largely she kept to her patch. Chelsea. She had a car but… no.

Pam had three daughters. Actually four but that’s another story. “Oh that’s marvellous, I’ve got two sons”.

“Go and play with Yara!” I was instructed one day. We were twelve. I was the youngest, Yara was the youngest. That’s childcare sorted. Neither of us particularly felt like playing with each other that first day but we worked it out. We improvised with a ball and a wall as I remember, and actually enjoyed it and decided we were friends while mum and mum were lunching. Perhaps in mum’s head we should’ve immediately fallen in love, but we will defy our parents. For me, friends was a big thing with a GIRL. That was a huge win. Starved of feminine company at Harrow, that ball game started a whole track of being easier friends with women than with men my age. I started making female friends only, or younger or older friends. That pattern didn’t shift until my mid thirties when I finally started to learn to trust men my own age again post Elmfield (the house I was in at posh school, hi I went to posh school etc) My Elmfield contemporaries suffered from craphuman. Some have recovered. Others have entrenched. But as examples of men my age, they mostly fucked my trust.

Anyway. Yara is a couple of years younger than I am. Georgie is my age. Lisa is a couple of years older. I lost track of them when our respective mothers both died much much earlier than they should have, both at 55, about a year apart.

Two out of three? I’m referring to the sisters. Yara isn’t in the UK. Georgie and Lisa came to the show. We snatched lunch before notes. Georgie and I got hammered a few weeks ago, processing. Lisa and I haven’t seen each other since everyone was alive. She’s teetotal and a techno DJ.

I’m so thrilled they came to Othello. I think this is a fine piece of work, and I’m enjoying my place in it. I’m taking risks, challenging myself, and I think it’s landing. This is all we can do, make it land, tell the truth, tell the story. How gorgeous though that they chose to come so early in the run. “Your mum would be proud,” they said. She would. Mum … she’d already know everything about everyone in the cast by now if she was around and they’d be bemused they had told her but they’d have somehow got swept up in it anyway. “How are you feeling about the thing with your brother and that rugby ball?” They’d be involved in random conversations with her about things going on in their lives that I had no idea of, but she had effortlessly prised from them. She’d probably have booked a club somewhere on my fiftieth and insisted everyone came and chased up people who weren’t there and given them notepads to write things to each other in and then made me do a speech. Somehow, everyone she had asked would have come, not to celebrate my fiftieth but because there was no way they would ever let Thérèse down. Half of them I would be surprised were there. She frequently became better friends with my friends than I was.

One time when she lost track of me for a weekend she familiarly rang about fifteen people I hadn’t seen for a decade and got us all back in touch while trying to track me down. I realised most of them had a relationship with her that I knew nothing about. Still when she died, Melody was better friends with her than with me, and I walked her down the aisle a few years later. I’d been crap friend to Mellie for years, caught up in my stuff, but she and mum totally got each other and mum provided the support I didn’t.

I miss mum. She was too big for this world. She was a great mother, off the scale great. I miss her terribly and I wish I could share this with her as it’s a great show with lovely people.

A time for beginnings. Full moon, bright and clear in Aries. The baby of the zodiac. The fire. The ram. Time to say bye bye to old cobwebs.

I’m very happy to have this ram that left its golden fleece celebrated tonight in this hesper – this evening – as we sing hesperinos to a handkerchief.

TC has never struck me as a mystic. But the timings are aligned. And he keeps using the word “ritual” about this story we are making. So yeah, let’s lean into that. The stars are in order. We are beginning our run at a time when the astral light is highlighting the start of the zodiac once more. Round and round we go, in this one, out of this one, in something else, whatever, wherever, Aaaaaaaaa, yay, ping, SCABLUTZZ. It’ll be like that until we manage to arrange it to die in Varanasi which currently is the only option that scares the shit out of me as I’ve got things to do. If I can avoid it I will literally never go to Varanasi, but that’s because I’m not ready to end my karmic cycle. If you die there, as far as I understand, that’s it for the round and round. People go there to die on purpose. They must be so sure that all the ends are closed. I’ve been round and round and round and have no sense that it’ll ever be finished enough for that. If I got booked for a movie lead shooting in Varanasi, no matter how many stunt doubles there were I’d assume it was a setup by the ORDER to bring things back to quiet. Nah. There’s chaos to be sewn, life to be l/o/i/ved – here, right here on this bank and shoal of time.

Othello the character is very Aries. I wanted to dig into the source material, as the Henslows wanted to make money and this Shagspar writer/actor they found was gonna do better if people already knew the story. Back then stories were more central than identities. Now we are swamped in story so we look at the the people making it. “Gerlok Fuck is playing Hamlet! I must attend.” Back then it was “The tale of Capitano Moro is being related in a new more detailed telling than ever before.” Shakespeare took an idiot’s polemic and gave it his unique treatment. He shaped it up as a human story, and arguably recrafted a source material with a bad agenda into a play that shows us step by step how we can trust our way into madness. It isn’t a play that does well with cuts, as the more you lose the harder it is to empathise with his journey, but Iago is so unnervingly bad for so little reason… No wonder lovely Lodovico makes fucking sure that he is not just tortured but kept alive through it for as long as possible.

Two shows today and I’m finally not pushing so much but still on a journey. It’s hard to take the pressure off, finally being here at the RSC. Here’s part of my journey here – apologies, it carries old wounds now dealt with:

I’m happy to be sharing a dressing room with Scott and finally feeling the end of that twenty year old mess of feelings.

I’m very very happy to be here doing this show with these humans. It’s funny how morale can be higher in tragedies. What a glorious group of actors we have, here. No showboaters, no baddies. The morale always trickles down from the top and John is an actor’s actor, as are Will, Juliet and Annie. TC is the gubernator who cares about the ship he’s guiding. James is a musical genius, Spike is Tim’s Lou. A movement director, a physical eye, someone to bring the brain and body together. I’m so proud to be part of this team. With the naiveté of the Aries full moon, I’m gonna put it out there that this can be the START of something glorious. Aries is the start of the zodiac. Here so go. Somewhere things are clicking into place.

Our first two show day tomorrow so I’ll be warming up on stage at half eleven. That’s less than twelve hours from now. Ben was in the house. One of the only Factory members to have actually met Lou so far, and that’s just by coincidence. She was at Glyndebourne with him and I had clocked he might be there. She met him on a staff bus and made him guess who she was going out with. He inevitably reeled through all the glamorous and attractive men in The Factory and eventually got down to me about six months into the interaction, and then covered it by insisting that he associates me more with Guildhall as that’s where we met. Nah. I’m just punching above my weight.

Another show tonight. The tide goes in, the tide goes out. I didn’t feel as aligned as yesterday but I’m still chasing the devil.

Tiny tiny movements magnify and gain significance on stage. There are actors I love when we’ve had to have someone lying on the floor holding their feet in rehearsals to stop them making unnecessary meaningless steps and then they still do it as soon as someone isn’t holding their ankles. It makes the actor feel comfortable but steals their power. I got in command of that one, and the devil immediately shifted up my body.

There are actors I love whose hands twitch with neurotic energy as they work. I got in command of that early too, after making a “withered hand” tension offer playing Richard III at Uni which I then carried into my next few roles as if I could only act if my right hand was clawed. Now my hands are relaxed and I’m not stepping back and forth meaninglessly. So where did the tension go?

Wendy my movement teacher taught me all that time ago that you absolutely have to chase that nervous tension around. You think you’ve moved it in and then it comes back somewhere else. On stage everything you do is magnified with meaning, so the game becomes physical and vocal tension chasing. You squeeze it away from one place, it comes into another.

Right now I’m very very relaxed compared to old me, but there’s a new old devil in the back of my neck I’m chasing. My warm-ups are working on killing it. Once I’ve done that it’ll show up in my eyebrow or my left foot, and round we go again. But this is a long run, and that’ll help me refind all of that complete awareness.

It’s harder work than you’d imagine, this Shakespeare. Thankfully we’ve got resources. A very clear movement and voice team, aligned completely with TC. It’s a rare treat. There’s been nothing but support across the board. This is a damn fine show and I’m a a damn fine small part of it.

And tomorrow we’re doing it twice. So I’ll have to see what it’s like to go to bed now. It’s not yet 1am, but that’s late for people who aren’t on late work.

Downstairs they’ve just arrived in Cyprus. I’m in my Elizabethan jerkin up in the dressing room listening to it on the monitor and it occurred to me that I can write this now and then warm up again. I tend to sit and chill at this point anyway.

My first half starts in a lift, and we all have a little sing song. Then a touch of slow walking and I get to watch the Brabantio scene and get a sniff of the audience. Tonight everyone was momentarily plunged into darkness on stage and they valiantly continued. It was only for a moment but I’ve written already about time on stage. Everyone in that magic box would have experienced eons in the dark. That’s the live thing, the thing that it must be all about. All of us in a theatre breathing a story together that is fragile and just for tonight. The fragility adds to the beauty.

Iago and Roderigo are on now. The drunk scene is coming up which will be my cue to start getting back into my body and voice. It’s a tough one to hold, Lodovico. I warm up long at the start, but I need to crank up and be authority right at the end here in this big theatre.

It has grown on me this stage. Tim is using the thrust largely but it can go really really deep. I like being on the thrust, in among the people, but vocal clarity is essential and that doesn’t come without work. Daily warm-ups and then topping up mid show.

It also means I need to be careful how I wind down. There’s always someone going to the pub but I think I’m gonna start avoiding it unless there’s a friend in the house.. We’ll see how that goes, eh?

Anyway, I’m gonna shake my booty and make sure my resonators are resonating. Cassio has just said how he has poor and unhappy brains for drinking and it’s telling how the action of the play unfolding has affected my thinking as I write. Oh dear, there’s Cassio getting drunk. He’s gonna turn nasty soon…

—

And now the show’s over. Largely my focus today was technical. Keeping my head still when I speak. You’d be surprised how hard it is. But if you’re after a high status trigger, that’s your monkey. And I figure I’ve done enough work on the calophonics and unlocking the potential ways in which a thought can be expressed that I can be present and responsive and let that work rest whilst keeping my head still.

TC gave me a cunt of a note about what I was doing with my head this morning and I was thrilled because it means he knows I can do better and will move towards it. I knew exactly the avoidance activity he had lasered in on. Old shy actor stuff mixed with obedient actor imperative to cover the whole audience with my face. Taken to extremes it can look like a twitch. Burnt away like the faces in some Venetian portraits.