AlBarclay

It’s rather pleasant having a regular commute for a change. It was raining this morning, so I put on some extra layers and went in search of my Forest Bike. My area tends not to have very many of them there overnight, so in the morning you have to be quick to get one. I’ve considered clicking hire from my bed and then immediately pausing it, as twice now I’ve looked on the app to check if there’s a bike, seen one, put my clothes on and someone has rented it. This morning though I had one directly outside but it was one of the shit ones. These bikes take a beating. Some of them are faulty. My one this morning had a dicky speedometer that kept jumping to 30 randomly and cutting out the power assist. Without the power assist you might as well be pedalling a rock.

Still I made it to rehearsal in time to discover I wasn’t supposed to be in yet. It was good though to watch Jethro and Will work and to be in that concentrated room. I’ll be involved in this piece of theatre for a long time, so I want to feel as connected to it as possible. Detail and care obviates boredom. There’s always more to discover, not just in your own work but in the work of your colleagues.

Costume fitting, but not for Lodovico. For my generic “citizen” type appearances. Lodovico is being made up. I pimped out Lou and her making services to the designer again. Her parents live near Stratford. Then a spot of singing. As I thought, I am going to need to sing very low drones in ancient greek. Oddly enough I’ve done it before, in 2012, in Oxford and then London for our arty anticommercial joyful theatrical friendship group, the lifeblood of my work for years now, The Factory, in a co-pro with Creation Theatre, in the Norrington room of Blackwell’s bookshop, improvising Homer’s Odyssey. Happy weird days.

My bass is still there but it needs reminding. I’m all bunged up. I’ve been habitually pushing my voice higher than is natural. The musical director is a technical wizard though, so I reckon it’ll come back in time. Tomorrow I’ll be joining three proper opera bods to see what sort of a noise we can make.

And so to bed. I get a late start tomorrow and I think I’ll take advantage of it this time. I’m starting to wake up better now and I like travelling the same short route daily – I’ve started keeping an eye out for the same people leaving their homes as I pass.

Scattered thinking this evening though. I suspect a good sleep will wind the threads back together.

Technically a half day today. I probably would have stayed around as rehearsals are curious and delightful. But the taxman must be appeased before he consumes me utterly, and that takes more admin and, thankfully, the help of clever people. Marie. More musically talented than me, sings with greater ease, game for a laugh – (she and I danced in windows dressed as animals in lockdown). Marie. Good at maths, understands balance sheets, can do tax things. Marie. Has a small dog… You get the sense of it. Renaissance woman Marie, capable of things that make most of us flinch. Dog poo, maths, showtunes… And helping me with my tax. We have begun a process when much of my small world was thinking about the rising iambic line, and it might lead to not being fucked anymore by my own horror of numbers.

The morning was gorgeous. This large circle of good people – we are still enjoying geeking out about this play that deepens the more time I spend with it. Always so many layers with oor Wullie. We are stripping to the meaning together and this disparate group of curious individuals is carefully solidifying into an ensemble. It’s lovely to feel. Such a long time still ahead of us, but so much to do, so much ground to cover. A wonderment with his plays is the depth of character that you can find. The deeper you dig the more there is to dig for. With just a few lines I still have a good bit of mining to do.

Now it is night time again. Once again Tom to my right in the living room, Brian to my left. Once again a slow wind down ahead of me via herbal teas.

I had a big package arrive this morning of this stuff:

Todd’s Glucose Energy Boost.

This is because of the hole in my life left by the sugar tax. When I was a child in Jersey, I was often sent to the grandparents for a night so mum and dad could have fun. Grandpa kept a supply of Lucozade in the spare room at Granville. Glass bottles with knobbly bits at the top and a piece of inexplicable orange transparent plastic wrapped round the top. If you were sick you got some in a glass, and you got the orange plastic so you could look through it and EVERYTHING ORANGE Da you’re ORANGE etc

I developed a familiarity with that glucose bomb of a drink. It used to be stocked in pharmacists only. Sugar tax put paid to it though. You can still buy bottles of aspartamine and cat piss. The last real ones went out of date in 2016. I had a stash of them at home, but wolfed them in lockdown. Todd has tried to knock it off as best he can. I will gladly give my money to him. But you wouldn’t want to drink that stuff before bed. It’s a rocket ship. Useful while I’m off the uppers. Glucose doesn’t count, ya?

Detox is really kicking in. I’m not doing the crazy faddy ones where you consume nothing but what the celebrity tells you they consume. “I get up every morning and have acai and a pomegranate, and Jack’s Handy Supplements TM,” says their ghost writer while they have their Weetabix.

I’m just avoiding caffeine and alcohol, thinking about when I consume meat and the quality of the meat, being a little bit more mindful. I’m pushing fifty. We are supposed to start doing that stuff. My mum was dead at 55 and that seems impossible to make any sense of whatsoever. I have no desire to follow in those footsteps. I’ve got shit to do. Five years? I just got sent my equity pension and it says my retirement age is 75. So I’d better start looking after my instrument more carefully as I’m gonna be using it a lot longer.

The flat is full of men. Tom’s on the sofa to my right, Brian is in the room to my left. Both of them are audibly snoring. Neither of them tend to do that on a normal night. It must be because the weather is breaking. They are catching up on early sleep. I would be too but I ran myself a cold bath by mistake which set me back about an hour. Now I’m getting my head down, after processing the rehearsal today. I’m still loving it. There’s a bit more opportunity to go home though, as the rehearsal calls are being restricted to some of the larger parts. I don’t want to always go home when I’m not gonna be acting, but I’m buried in a financial disaster made of my own negligence, and nobody is gonna bail me out of this but me myself and I. A good opportunity, before I get swamped in Othello as we get closer to performance time. Application of time will maybe help dig out. And I think it’s gonna be worth an official ADHD diagnosis just in case it gets me off some of the fines. Over 2k in fines. That’s the extent of it really. But their existence has caused the ostriching that has made them grow. The fuckers know how to get money out of people in the long run. I’m with your stoned friend who thinks some nebulous “them” people are sucking our energy. If money is energy. Which it is.

So on one level, “detox” can be renamed “can’t really justify blowing money on something that will make me shitter at my job.”

On which note I’m gonna join in the snoring.

Back in the room. The days go disconcertingly quickly. We are in and it feels like it has barely started when we are finished. I tried to remember my lines in front of people and my head was full of so much noise I said Venice instead of Cyprus and then got angry with myself, but better by far to have all that noise now when it’s a new learn and everyone is still holding scripts in their hands.

The space got meticulously taped up over the weekend, so now we are sitting in a circle of chairs ignoring immaculately taped up boundaries of what the stage will be like in Stratford.

We had three singers in today but we aren’t finding the songs yet. Georgian influences though, and acapella, which I know can be extremely emotive. Once again I’m thinking I should have worked my singing muscle out. Like line learning, like acting, it is a muscle that atrophies if left unattended too long. I’ve always kept the others up, but I let the singing drop. It was never really attended to at Guildhall. Some of the best voice teachers in the world, but a slightly haphazard and unguided approach to singing when I was there, that left me with little clue how to use my voice until we did The Odyssey a decade ago.

This is my focus now though, and even if it goes quickly, right now we have time in the bank and I’m gonna make use of it.

After work I drove to Twickenham. Minnie had a self tape and we haven’t seen each other for ages. A pizza and a catch up. She’s a useful perspective on my various concerns and insecurities, just as she’s spent years up in Stratford working for the same company. I’ve slept on many a floor cushion concoction, very possibly in one of the little cottages where I’ll be staying, after seeing one of her many varied shows. She feels my enthusiasm and shares my love of craft. And good lord she can turn it on. Her tape was barnstorming and she did most of it in one take. Why waste time? Especially after all the time it takes to learn the fucker.

I’m feeling happy and rested after the weekend, although my toxins are coming out and they aren’t so much fun the second time. Another week and I reckon I’ll be feeling the benefits. Right now I struggle to get to sleep.

Two days off in a row and my first weekend since I stopped the old habitual glug. It has very much found it’s way into my habits. It’s hot, I’m thirsty, there are multiple bottles of white wine in the house. Spritser! But no, I made do with good old fashioned water out of the tap, herbal teas of different denominations and an entire pack of chocolate chip cookies.

Looking back it has been a remarkable first week of rehearsal. Very together company, lots of staff, lots of stuff. We have had meetings in rehearsals, where equity deputies have been selected, and health and safety advocates chosen from among the cast members. I’m thinking back to Rhys going through an unsecured trapdoor in Peter Pan and falling twenty feet in the dark. He landed like a cat in an empty space l space, but it could have been a very different story. We had a very shonky trapdoor in Blackwell’s and Maz hurt her fingers in it when it was closed and her fingers were in the hinge. Could have been much worse, if it had been a dramatic slam. Good to have someone keeping an eye on possibilities. I perhaps should have gone for Equity Dep, but I’m too busy trying to sort my own flat out before I go to Stratford. Plus my tax returns etc etc.

Creatively it is fertile, but I’m disappointed with myself for not keeping my singing voice in good nick. James the musical director knew me ten years ago and got good use out of my bass. I’ve let it slip. I wanted that Sowerberry in Oliver! up in Leeds for that reason – no matter if it’s a bad part, there’ll have been ensemble work and a shot at Fagin via understudy. My voice would have had a proper good long practice on the job, which is always the best way to learn.

I’m enjoying the text work. It’s about pushing us into the moment, coining it, not making noises that sound like speaking. But also it’s about rigour with text. The fixed and the flowing. It is back to that. And we are back at it tomorrow. And I can’t wait.

I’m full of chamomile, and Brian ordered a very expensive Dishoom mash up, involving all sorts of fart inducing wonders, enough so that I just got into a tepid bath on purpose and scrubbed myself pink.

Now I’m trying for an early bed and I’ve laid out juicing fruits for tomorrow and I’m enjoying working from home.

This evening I considered a night cap, sniffed a whisky bottle and was still repelled by the smell of alcohol. I think grandmother tweaked something in my strange brain. I did ask her to…

Total digital detox yesterday and I didn’t really want to communicate with anyone or do very much. Just reset. I barely ate. Had a bit of tea. Wanted some booze so was examining the shape of that one while distracting myself with old editions of 2000AD. It’s good to reapproach habitual things from time to time, particularly when the external world has shifted in some way.

Long hours of sleep have left me feeling tired though. In fact I feel like I’m hungover – all the fun none of the booze. Toxins are only entertaining when they go in.

London is still deep in late summer madness. The party boats on the river are shouting their music into my windows at night, and then periodical sirens throughout the night. I’m aware of the traffic noise more than usual. I’ve been away a long time. Yesterday was really my first day off for months if you don’t count the weekend when I went to Hereford and induced long form hallucinogenic dream state in the name of healing.

It worked though, at least in the short term. Although tidying my bedroom wouldn’t go amiss. And doing some home improvements. That’s the next stage. It’s enough this weekend to break the habits.

This blog of course partly exists to make sure I don’t do too many yesterdays. Silent days of reading and then sleep and late wake was a pattern associated with depression. Brian was concerned, but I was very open about it. “I don’t want to talk to anyone.” Spent too long in sponge mode, needed to wring it out. But I’m fine. Better for it. Working through things but not in a negative way.

Still, it’s late. Gonna get a cup of tea and post this just for the shape of things, and experiment with communication again.

First week done. What a ride.

After rehearsal, three of us went to a little dinner party held by a mutual friend, who is now running a company in Oxford very close to my heart. In fact it’s the company under whose umbrella I did the work that has very likely led to me being here. We were breaking it all down, this rehearsal week and what it is doing. Very quickly and effectively, with a good solid slice of trust, Tim is building an ensemble. It’s the best way to make theatre. It’s a leveler, and gives everyone a voice and nobody THE voice.

Tomorrow morning Othello and Iago are called, and it is as natural as breathing that their two understudies will come in as well. The work is enjoyable, and it means they’ll all be on the same page. I won’t be coming in. I haven’t stopped since Paris really. Tomorrow will be about nothing.

This evening though, it was lovely to be at dinner, in a slightly different context, surrounded by intelligent women. I was the only man, but for Helen’s teenage son who was mostly upstairs playing games. I did my best to keep my mouth shut and listen, and found it worth my while. Plenty of talking in rehearsals, plus I’m knackered. And I’m not drinking. It’s a little earlier than I planned to test my resolve in a public place, but I was perfectly happy with a single bottle of Peroni 0.0. Being out and not drinking though, I get tired earlier. At ten I made my excuses and jumped on a Forest bike.

You’ve got to be organised with Forest bikes. They’re incredible and everywhere in London, just parked randomly. You need to buy your hours in advance otherwise they skin you for it. My commute is pretty short but still … I’ve spent £20 this week and that’s including my free intro minutes. Next week I’ll buy a package in advance. It’s definitely the most convenient way to get in, but it’s another of these things where you get punished if you can’t plan in advance. There’s too much like that in the world. Chaosmongers have to spend more. The system is designed to make us want to be predictable. “They’re turning us into batteries, man”.

A really lovely week. The company is coming together. Tim is a remarkable force, and he’s assembled a delightful team. And I could sleep for England right now.

This morning we all got shown the model box. “We are looking at this psychologically.” Suggestions of an era, but largely the laser will be focusing on people, interactions… that observation that Shakespeare absolutely nails – a theatre writer that works his way step by step through complicated but entirely human thought patterns. We are working our way through them as well, as a company. We are learning the thought patterns together, we are building an ensemble that is already halfway there. We are trying to make a safe room to fail and to succeed without attributing value to either endeavour.

God damn it is fine to be in a rehearsal room again. It would have been nice to have gotten a job like this earlier in this long career, sure. The company has profile that even the most willful jerk can’t throw in the bin. Perhaps some doors would have opened as a result, some earlier confidence would have been gained to disarm the jerks. I remember some meetings early in my career – even interviews at drama schools. “What will you be doing in twenty years?” “Working as an actor.” “What if that doesn’t work out?” “Trying to work as an actor.” “There are lots of other things.” “I don’t think you understand how determined I am.” “hmm we shall see ” “Yes. You will.”

This is just one job, sure. The actor brain in me is already thinking “How do I ensure momentum?” This is a nice job, but after Bright Young Things the floor opened up and swallowed me whole, and I can’t allow that to happen again. I’ve chased this vocation long. I’ll be running until I can’t run anymore. But a few more opportunities would have been an incredible thing. Maybe my showcases at Guildhall didn’t cut it, maybe I needed to get honed in the fires of longing for a meeting, any meeting, and making/finding work for myself to improve my tool use while I waited and hoped and watched and hoped and participated and hoped. I used to write long mawkish earnest letters, but nothing ever came of them so I was disheartened. Now I show my belly here from time to time, and worry that by showing the cracks I’m taking risks. As if I have to be better than real better than real better than real, where the job is actually to be a person, to be flawed, to be honest, to be human. I care about this work. I fired myself into this work and my friends and my passion kept me in it.

This is one job, until November. Then who knows? I’m frightened my wonderful agent will retire soon, and her good associates keep on getting headhunted at the moment which is extremely disconcerting. But I feel held and understood, seen and supported. That’s a lot to get – it’s what you should get – from a relationship with an agent. Even that took decades to find and she’s 74 now.

The psychology of the piece… Yesss. A big old cast and they’re all lovely. I’m lapping this up and looking forward to the day every day. I’m at home. From time to time I find myself tearing up a bit cos I can’t believe this is happening, and not just for me, I’m surrounded by fellow soldiers and we have all been seeking the bubble reputation e’en in the cannon’s mouth. Only a few days in. A long journey to come. But thank fuck for this job. I love the event work, and it has made my life possible, but this is the counterpoint – this is what it all feeds. And maybe it’s true what I tell myself, that we need the struggle to properly value the moments when it bears some fruit. I’m definitely gonna value this.

Lou showed up in London. This is a rare occurrence and one to be celebrated. Being in rehearsal I don’t have much time to check my phone and I came straight to her on the bike so I’ve got a backlog of messages as long as my arm right now and no chance to clear them. It’s making me anxious. The show was announced today finally, and lots of people have got in touch, largely to say congratulations, but with a good weight towards the “about fucking time” angle.

But yes, hooray. I’m feeling very happy to be playing Lodivico in Othello for the RSC up in Stratford from October to mid November. Autumn by the Avon, doing something I love at a well thought of company and with loads of glorious humans. It’s gorgeous so far and I hope it continues to be so. Actors can be a funny lot and fear near opening causes all sorts of strange behaviours, but I’m hoping this will be a safe company and a happy one. I can’t smell any nastiness.

We finished and I jumped straight on one of those little Forest bikes. They accelerate themselves immediately to about 25 miles an hour, and their limiter is about 27, so they just predictably fly down the road when you touch the pedal. It’s surprisingly satisfying. I think that’s my commute sorted, although meeting up with Lou tonight means I don’t have one waiting for me downstairs tomorrow. Worth it though to see the lady. We went to The Ivy Chelsea, where they have two courses for £19.17 at the moment. With no booze it is a cheap date. Beautifully upholstered chairs, great food and it’s sadly coming up to the last month that we can sit outside in a T-shirt and eat and be comfortable. Still, winter isn’t here yet at all, and I am gonna do my utmost to tan up before we start the long journey back to the dark.

Tomorrow I’ll get stuck into all the lovely messages. For now I’m keeping this short, and I won’t be fannying about on social media, as I’ve only got Lou for an evening. Having her here is a rarety, and it’s great. Soon I’ll be so swept up in Othello I won’t have the headspace so she’s timed it very well…

A month of predictable hours whilst living at home. A strange and beautiful luxury. I have bought food for the fridge. This evening I just had a simple bowl of pasta but I’m in admin hell. Tomorrow Lou will be coming into town and I’ll meet her after rehearsal. But largely I’ll be trying to impose a good routine upon myself.

First day today, start as you mean to continue. I woke bright and early, juiced up four oranges and a grapefruit and didn’t have a cup of coffee. “Think of what you’d normally do and do the opposite,” said Natalya after the ceremony. This sort of thinking is making it easier to rejig my self medication. I’m not being a monk about it – I had a cup of black tea with milk at 11am – but I’m just trying to stop doing mindless things for a while. I drink coffee for habit as much as for addiction, as what is an addiction but a habit? I’m not gonna make myself angry and headachey for rehearsal – the caffeine withdrawal headache hit my brain at the same time the sananga hit my eyes. You can’t have a headache anymore when your face is on fire. I’m not giving up anything forever here, I’m just breaking bad habits for as long as it takes for me to know they can be safely addressed. Although right now with the medicine in my system, even the smell of alcohol is poison.

I took a Forest bike to work, which is now parked outside the flat. It flies to Clapham, and if it’s still there tomorrow I’ve got a lovely start to the day. The day itself was a tonic. What a brilliant room to be in, surrounded by creatives, making a very deep story together as best we can. I sat between Kevin and Nyasha, but it wasn’t table work or readthrough. I’m glad of that as readthroughs often cause some actors to just cement their performance and then drag it through the rest of rehearsal. And table work becomes a safety anchor that can weigh the whole show down with ideas over practicality. We were working together as a company, and people were standing and talking their lines with enough game involved that there wasn’t room to be clever.

There’s a movement teacher in the room, a voice teacher too. There’ll be songs. I’ll be back on bass duty.

It’s wonderful to be in that room, and there are enough familiar faces there that the ensemble is already half made and just needs us to be as welcoming as possible to the people we don’t know. I’m good at that. And since my guy doesn’t speak until the end of the show really, I’ve got time to just be positive and inclusive and wide and dumb and try and make it a happy place. I think it will be, I really do. I’ve seen companies go south, but it normally drips down from the top when that happens. It feels like we are in safe hands here.