I've been here before

Yesterday's rehearsal of Angel with Emma King-Farlow was dreadful. Disastrous. Disturbing. Distressful. Diswhatever.

Emma is, of course, far too polite and patient to tell me so directly, but the notes she gave made it pretty clear that I was a long way from perfection - in fact I was so far away from perfection that I'd be lucky to get there some time next year. I just wasn't in the role. The emotions I was portraying were either absent or false. The words kept disappearing. I made long pauses, thinking I was making long dramatic pauses, when all I was doing was making Emma wonder what I was doing. And so on.

I have excuses, of course. We were rehearsing in Emma's living-room and, having had one brief rehearsal in the theatre space, it didn't feel right. I leapt one second from intellectual discussion of the piece directly into character two-thirds through the play without any build up. I was tired because I haven't been having much sleep because several other things are taking up my attention this week, preventing me from devoting as much time as I should to rehearsing this play. And so on.

They're all excuses, of course. None of them should stop me from being professional, both learning the part properly and performing it adequately. The only silver lining I see is that I have been in this state of unhappiness before, particularly during rehearsals for The Lower Depths. So my performance may still be all right on the night (technically, speaking, the late afternoon). But I suggest that when you come see, have  flowers in your right hand and rotten tomatoes in your left and see which you want to throw at me.