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.

Night Shoot

The great advantage of true pros in a situation like this is that they are happy to tear the camera to bits and fix it themselves. And in doing so they undoubtedly save the film, because we couldn't have worn a three-hour loss of time. Aside from serious wrist grazing from the manacles and the constant dribbling of film blood - which NEVER dries - into my eyes, the shoot is efficient and relatively uneventful.
The final shot of the day is the car chase, which is a first for all of us. The producer, Rob HD, has lent his funky 4x4 for this, and he hands the keys to me with a moist eye but without actually crossing himself.
I had no idea how exciting this would be. I mean, we're guerilla shooting which is always good for the heart rate, but driving up and down a deserted stretch of dual carriageway with Toby flashing his lights behind me is quite alarming - and we only ever get up to about 50mph.
The final shot, when I pull up and get out, then Toby pulls up behind me, leaps out with a baseball bat and clouts me seems almost ridiculously pedestrian in the shooting. Watching the results back is chilling, though. The best bit is Toby's almost silent, ninja-style running with the bat, and the gravel scrape of his shoes as he swings it. Fantastic.

Chop Stop

We're on location near Blenheim Palace today, and it's blisteringly hot. Toby, who's driving me, has the most amazing job - he's a product developer for Vtech, the kids toys manufacturer - a job he literally fell into from temping. I'm always amazed at those stories, and I'm tempted to say something like it sometimes, but the truth is I pretty much hated everything I've ever done except this so it's more a question of falling out of all the other jobs until I ended up here.
Anyway, the 9.30 am start is looking ambitious as Becky is held up on the M40 in a bus and won't be here for ages, so we all set about catching a few rays. Only our Aussie AD has the real sun-bug though, so I examine the superb manacles and fake machete. The set is great, too. A bleak empty industrial barn with a huge rough table in the middle. It's all very convincing.
My hand, however, is not. I've somehow contrived to move in the mould, and the bloody thing won't lie flat on the table. It looks a bit like one of those hands in religious paintings when a pope of whatever is giving his holy benediction. Awful.
Just as we're putting the gruesome object away, Becky shows up. We do a rehearsal and shoot an establishing shot over the table before lunch, and just as we're unmanacled to go eat, the camera breaks. It's 3pm and we have one shot in the can, and even that may be useless.

Rolling

The first film I ever made was shot on a Hi-8 camera that I borrowed from Tessa Gibbs, and my strongest memory is of my good friend Sean Martin doing a tracking shot of me over a polished floor using a wheelchair which had bandages wound round the tyres to stop them squeaking.
Well, Sean's just finishing his fourth feature, "Folie a Deux", so things have moved on a bit. What never changes, though, is the frisson of a the new film project, and it's as strong arriving at the location tonight as it was in Weston all those years ago.
What's evident at once is how professional this is - low budget but high standards. Mike and Martin (DOP and sound) are so slick in their set-ups that we complete interior shots in only a couple of hours. Mike's using a jib in place of tracks - a huge counterweighted arm which gives great variety of movement and superbly smooth action. A glance at the rushes for one of the close-ups tells me that this is going to be a breeze.

The Cowley Road Film Club

"Chop" - the film we're shooting at the weekend - is not actually the project which is closest to the director's heart. It's a pragmatic choice of first film to showcase the various talents of the cast and crew, and so that the production team can cut their teeth before committing themselves to either a more ambitious short or even a feature.
I've never been very good at the long view, and consequently admire this approach hugely. It's just a shame that shorts are such an undervalued genre. Yes, they do well at festivals and exhibitions but there's limited opportunities for general release.
I love them for a number of reasons. They aren't so long that you lose track of where your character is going, they're completed quickly (both shooting and edit, in theory) and they demand a tense, compact narrative with a distinct situation and perhaps a good twist. Here's hoping.
Anyway, I'm taken at high speed tonight to Maidenhead to the producer's home to have my hand cast in plaster by Paul Robbens, who's worked for Spielberg on Indiana Jones and heaven knows what else. Someone's been on a charm offensive because he, like the rest of us, is working for cost, and for props guys that is UNHEARD of. Anyway, after 15 mins in clammy dental alginate it's done. Just the machete and manacles to finish!

In Shorts

I've been cast in an Oxford-based short film called "Chop", which is due to start shooting on the 22nd May. There seems to be a whole film collective which has sprung up around the Cowley Road lately, mainly centred around the house of the director Martin Chalk, who is a master networker and all round good egg.
I haven't made a short film for a couple of years (bizarrely enough, I normally do features) and the last one never saw the light of day, despite being professionally run and having all the hallmarks of potential success. Hitchcock Award winning script, full crew...all came to literally nothing. Not even a screening of the rushes.
Prior to this I did one for LIFS which was madly ambitious and in which I played the lead, an obsessive optician who invents a pair of glasses that can see people's emotions as a distinct entity. This was great except I wore welding goggles for 90% of the action, which tends to muddy things a little. Let's just say it's tricky to convey the full gamut of emotions over protective eyewear.
And before that, I made "Bob" - a film about a fishing trip which was shot over two days, but those days were a year apart. During this time some of the cast had filled out more than a little, the boat had sunk twice and was in dry dock and the lead boy's voice had broken.

Some, you should approach with caution...