Seven Drunken Nights

I did a show once where the accent required was standard American, and yet one cast member arrived on day one with a broad Southern Belle accent which remained undimmed from the first rehearsal until the last performance. This was on the fringe, where you're sometimes quite lucky if people can speak at all, but you get the point. It was just awful.
So I'm throwing myself wholeheartedly into mastering the Galway brogue. Except there doesn't seem to be one. Every video on YouTube with a Galway tag seems to have a bloke in it saying "Sure, no such thing as a Galway accent is there, now" or a scene from Riverdance.

So I approach the Zen master of the Galway accent, Alan DeVally, who plays Ray (Pato's brother) and actually hails 20 miles from Leenane itself.

"All your vowel sounds are right there, they are..." he breathes, in a melting tone. I'm listening so hard to his accent I find it hard to hear the words, "...and I suppose Pato would be likely to have met a good number of Dubliners over in London on the sites".

On Book

In Hamburg we had someone on the book for a week, and although we made an audience announcement every night they still reacted as thought someone had farted audibly in a pause when the "on-book" actor entered.
Last night, Thursday, was our first without an announcement. Theoretically this put me on a level field with everyone else, which is a good thing but still, it's a significant step and the stakes seemed higher as a result. Like it's been rehearsal up to then.
Act 1 goes off without a hitch, but when I sit down with the letter there's an audible mutter, a faint chunter of disbelief that one of the actors clearly doesn't know all his lines well enough. Not at all pleasant.

I run into Kevin Shaw, the Coliseum's artistic director today. He's wonderful about the first night's show, and mentions that it must be like the old actor's nightmare of being thrown into a show where you've hardly read the script.
I wish I could say it wasn't. I felt as though I was an automaton, merely reproducing the rehearsed blocking and barely able to invest the lines with anything but the most basic colour. The best bit was the letter, which I read wholesale.
He doesn't mention the huge dry in Scene 4. He doesn't have to. You can still see the tyre marks on the stage where the truck drove through it.

Just One of the LCT Boys

Elizabeth, my landlady, makes me bacon and cheese on toast for breakfast this morning and tells me how much she enjoyed having John Dorney (Felix in the LCT tour of "Humble Boy") to stay. Again. I've been here two days and she must have told me about his short pyjamas half a dozen times already. That nightwear certainly made an impression.
The impression I make is of someone who gets up and buggers off early. And of someone who mumbles an as-yet-unlearned monologue to himself at 6.30am. Le Dorney's status of favourite lodger is not under threat...

New Moves

We're rehearsing again this morning. One of the things that bugged me last night was that Pato was two people, or rather a half-formed new person still limping around in blocking that didn't suit him. This is what Michael wants to repair.

We started talking about the character in terms of damage and distance, but the few notes I've made don't correlate with this at all. There's loneliness, loyalty and poetry in him - he's a flirt and a charmer, too. He stays close.

We re-block it again. Now Maureen and Pato move in orbit, never exceeding a couple of feet or so. It starts to feel flirtatious and gently erotic. The final close contact becomes the inevitable end to the slightly halting pas de deux of the courtship. I really, really like this scene now, but Alice is playing her cards close and I can't tell whether she does.

Only if the Cap Fits...

I remember when we started re-rehearsing "Abigail's Party" we strictly and consciously avoided mentioning details of the previous production unless absolutely necessary. And that was a great idea, the new show was totally different and equally valid in a way I never would have thought possible.
Here though, I find myself asking "what did he do?" or "what was his physicality like here?". Surely the only way we can get this on by tonight is if I replicate as exactly as possible what has gone before. It's not ideal, but as Blackadder says, "Needs must when the devil vomits in your kettle".
It becomes abundantly clear very quickly that he and I are very, very different. What came before feels odd to me, like wearing a pair of shoes which don't fit, but otherwise it means going barefoot over the hot coals.
Michael suggests a change, and it's Pato's distance from Maureen which catalyses it. I can't get the changes of gear from intimacy to separation, but as soon as M. suggests I abandon it and play an intention to remain close to Maureen, I feel instantly better. Instantly he becomes a man I begin to understand.

Beauty has her Way

It's confirmed the following afternoon. The current incumbent will do tonight's show and probably won't continue into next week. Which means I have 48 hours to learn the part which is, well, not a lot really.
At least I have a copy of the script, "The Beauty Queen of Leenane", which I bought when I first heard the show was being planned, intending to possibly put myself up. But it wasn't the right time. Ironically I went to see the show in Chipping Norton a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed the bittersweet experience of watching someone else do a part which I knew I would have loved to play. Tangled webs and all that.


Down to work.

A Phone Line of Beauty

Ol' Cap'n Cabot can has a very individual way of presenting things. I'm especially thinking of the phrase "I think what this scene needs is better acting from you, Dineen" in a notes session, but there are others, I'm sure.
I know something's up when he calls on Friday night after 11pm. Something he describes as "a situation" has arisen on his latest tour. We think the conversation went something like this:
"I may need a fortysomething actor with a flawless Galway accent to step in at very short notice - do you know anyone?"
"No, not really. But what about a fortysomething actor who has watched a lot of Father Ted?"
"That might work. It's not you, is it?"
"Yup".

The Husband Obedience Trials

They've been making a feature film in my village lately, which goes by the unlikely title above and which, I gather, has just wrapped. A local journo wrote the script and, so the story goes, the whole community came together to raise the funds.
Of course, it's a little more complex and commercial than that - you don't raise over £100k by doing sponsored silences and bring-and-buy sales. But I'm delighted to see that the locals have responded to the film crews with the British public's traditional cocktail of cynicism, stonewalling and sabotage. They seem to totally resent the idea of anyone making a living without using yorkshire joints, plasterboard or harmonised wiring.
I've made a couple of films in Weston-Super-Mare, where the attitude to filmmakers borders on the actively hostile. As though putting the place on the map might unbalance some delicate equilibrium or something. When we were filming "Folie a Deux" (which is almost out of post) we had it all - beeping horns, irate passers-by, stroppy cafe owners not to mention a car park full of dog shit. And yet it's precisely that hideous abandoned down-at-heelness which made it such a great location for a film with suicide as its central theme.
Oops. That ruins the ending a bit.

Off Air

Last time I was interviewed live was on BBC Radio Solent during Abigail's Party - with Paula Jennings and Helen Johns. One of the benefits of doing live radio as part of a cast is the thinking time you get - I remember doing most of the talking, but it was pithy and quite interesting, and anyway, you can bang on about that play until the cows come home.
On your own is a different matter entirely.
I found it disturbing that the conversation was repeatedly being brought back to my life story - I suppose one has a natural aversion to boring people about that subject. But of course that was the entire point of the interview. Jo Thoenes stuck to her subject, too, and there was no obvious segue into future projects, for example, and I only mentioned Chalky and "Chop" right at the end.
What's hilarious, though, is the way I sound. Sort of chubby and rotund and chuckly, not how I imagined. Whereas Chalky sounded light and intense, not the big bear character he is in the flesh at all.

An Altogether More Sedate Music Video

I've just added a couple of links to videos my good friend Graham Instrall shot a year or so back to the great music of Ottorine Respighi's "Pines of Rome". Music Video for the Classic FM crowd...

Local Hero?

It's all gone quiet since the Vienna gig, by which I mean it's the usual mad round of trying to entertain Jakey (it's the holidays) and catching up with tiresome domestic nonsense. What I used to fill my time with, heaven only knows. I believe I used to read occasionally, and I had hobbies.
Anyway, Chalky emails me to say that he's been interviewed by Radio Oxford about film-making, and that he mentioned me and that they might be calling. Fair enough. Might.
But he's not kidding. Less than an hour later there's an email from "Jo in the Afternoon" suggesting an interview and asking a whole bunch of questions about "...how you got where you are..." and the like. Are you kidding? Talk about me? It's my favourite subject.
By the time I've finished the precis of my life it sounds impossibly glamorous, which is because I've employed a process the Germans call steigerundenstendenz or leaving out the crud and only mentioning the funky stuff. It actually looks as though there has been some grand plan to the whole procedure rather than the random lurch which has usually characterised it. Whether I can convincingly continue this deception on air remains to be heard - on Thursday 6th August!

Austria Calling

So the role-play has come off, which my bank manager will be happy about. I'm currently doing some preliminary learning and getting my tongue around some of the trickier medical terminology.
It's extraordinary how much you pick up in these corporate videos and what-not. There's not much I don't know about Fujitsu retail technology, for example, and my awareness of sales incentives and benefits at Marks and Spencer is second to none.
This one's for a new Alzheimer's drug, a topic which is pretty close to home as my 100 year-old grandma has it in its advanced stages - and we're naturally wondering if our genes make us susceptible. Of course, there's a certain amount of comic paranoia about it - what most people call "senior moments", our family now see as proof positive of early onset Alzheimer's...
I don't envy the actor playing the drug company rep, though. Butylcholinesterase? Acetylcholinesterase? Goodnight, Vienna!

Role Play

I have an interview today for some corporate work (which has been set up by my agent), and since touring looks a little thin on the ground at the moment, I'm hoping this comes off.
The last corporate role-play job I did involved flying to Frankfurt to do some crisis training for the Foreign Office shortly before the 2006 World Cup. By some planning disaster my first flight didn't leave me enough time to connect, and I missed my connection and was forced to take a train instead. As the deadline for arriving drew ever nearer I was forced to shave, wash my hair and finally dress in the loo on the train. I arrived only moments before the exercise started and was then dropped at a deserted football stadium in the persona of a German detective, with a German student as my sergeant.
The diplomats had no idea what was going on - they thought they were there for a jolly; but it was kinda fun being difficult and Teutonic and only revealing tiny snippets of information every half-hour or so. They dealt with it really well, unlike their boss, the British Consul, who apparently started screaming at people in the "crisis centre" in downtown Frankfurt and who presumably got a D-minus for the exercise.

Hard Being a Bard

I'm going to the One Act Plays Festival tonight - well, actually, to the gala evening on which the three successful plays from the week are invited back - with Susi Dalton, who is the chair of the Oxfordshire Drama Network and the busiest lady I know.
The last time I was at this festival I was performing - in a play called "The Inspiration of G'utor Glynn" - playing the titular sheep-herding poet musician hero. Afterwards, the cast all joined the audience for the adjudication, which was always delivered live after the show for these events.
All I really remember him saying was "...moving on to the cast, the actress playing G'utor was clear and..." and then pandemonium broke out. WHAT? ACTRESS! HE-LLO! I even had my arm around Sian Fiddimore (I think) at the time to reinforce my 15 year-old masculine credentials.
I've played many effete men since, but never actually a woman.