Flooding The Internet With Richard Williamson (Technical Director)

 Back in the Spring of this year, as all the theatres were closing, there was an awkward campaign to flood twitter with images of theatrical professionals at work, awkward because it's only the stuff already receiving attention that normally gets recorded, the stuff on stage, not backstage. I wish I'd posted this:

 Until I went looking for online evidence of Hamlet In Kuwait to accompany yesterday's post, I'd completely forgotten about our technical director Richard Williamson's vimeo channel. It hosts footage from April 2001 taken by a documentary crew hired by the show's creator Sulayman Al-Bassam, and gives just a taste of the extraordinary challenges Richard had to face, none of which I think either he or Sulayman were expecting (the first being the destruction of a giant tree representing Kuwait that the previous show left standing in the middle of the stage). We also see what looks very much like Kuwait Today's first ever phone-in quiz, or at least if it isn't, I'm at a loss to work out how they normally went...

Richard comes to Kuwait from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.

Job Dream

 The most recent one was just this afternoon: We all turned up to a basement wearing masks, invited there by Lewis to perfom the voices of inanimate objects for a Danish Museum. I'd befriended Lewis twenty years ago, on the first ever production of Hamlet in Kuwait (see below). That's also how I'd befriended Nige, and Nige was in the room too of course. Also there were Amalia, whom I'd befriended last year in Gemma's workshop of The Maid's Tragedy, Shim, whom I'd befriended a year earlier on An Execution (By Invitation Only), and Duncan, whom I'd befriended writing for Laurence and Gus back when this blog first started. We were all sat in pairs opposite each other across five tables, reading into microphones because other actors couldn't be in the room, including Fin who was now projected onto a wall, and whom I'd befriended when I first moved into his house in Brixton, again twenty years ago. And I had honestly forgotten what it's like to spend the day with friends making work, and how much the best of these jobs feel exactly like my dreams of them.

Hamlet CNN 1 from Richard Williamson on Vimeo.