Notebookery 1 (2002ish)

  I want to keep these posts coming, but I also feel quite like I want to take a week off, just to check on myself, so for the next few days this blog's just going to be photos of old notebooks. Today's, as far as I can tell, is from 2002. In addition to water some damage there are sketches for a book of tales I printed up, including Princess Plimsole and Fish-head and the Sibyl, and some notes for Shunt's show Dance Bear, Dance, which is how I dated it, but apart that this one turned out to be surprisingly blank. (Click to enlarge.)

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.

Sepia Footage of Yellow Longhair

 Here's me as "Morningstar", a psychedelic re-imagining of General Custer, from Tim Plester's play Yellow Longhair, which played at the Oval House pretty much exactly twenty years ago. It was the first London play I'd performed in after finally leaving home, in 2000, at the age twenty-five, and as you can see from the photo below, I was made pretty comfortable. I thought, at first, I should play the General as Klaus Kinski in Aguirre: Wrath of God, bursting with boggle-eyed territorial ambition, but after the dress rehearsal, director Anthony Fletcher approached me in the café, and explained that he'd hated every single aspect of what he'd just seen me do, and that, as far as my character was concerned, I was actually helping people, showing them the way. We were all very into Alan Moore.

 Too... Much... Neck... (and Cristina Corrazza)

 So we fixed it. It was good advice, and I often think about it. Anthony also said the poetry would play itself, and I think about that too. Tim put some snippets up on youtube years later, and here's one of them, in which I monologue to a journalist played by Sam Rumbelow, after a particularly meticulous killing-spree. Back then I was "Simon Kain", waiting for another Kane to leave Equity, and not all the hair was mine, but it is now. I got to keep the extensions. I might even still have them, twenty years later. They might even turn up in my introduction to Act One of Henry the Fourth, when I finally finish editing that, hopefully tomorrow. Someone's hair turns up anway... I was really fond of this. It was bloody lovely writing. Happy twentieth birthday, it.