Still here...

I know, I know, a week is a long time in blogging...

I've been busy, with rehearsals for Clouds of Grey (reminders: show details available clicking on the second picture on the right, and tickets for the 2 hour show only £8.80 in advance online), the book business and personal life. The last is the least interesting. The Other Half and I went to IKEA on Thursday to buy curtains and curtain rods, thinking we'd have them up that evening. What we didn't reckon with was the fact we were trying to attach them to an outer wall that was either iron or concrete and which steadfastly resisted the drill. (Probably a good thing, coz we're on the eighth floor and don't want to bring the building down...) Investigating and implementing the alternatives has taken us three days and the new curtains won't be up until Tuesday at the earliest.

But you don't want to know about that, or about the lesbian classics that I bought on Friday and will be uploading to my website and Abebooks over the next week, or the time I've spent researching and responding to actresses who want to audition for Californian Lives. This is, after all, primarily an acting blog. So about acting I will write...

Which leaves me with several choices. I could say everything is going fine and the rest of the cast are wonderful and it's going to be a fantastic production that will take me first to Elstree and then Hollywood; in other words boring. Or I could bitch about the director and fellow cast members. But I'm not the bitching type. Or tell you they're all fantastic colleagues and I'm unworthy to be in their presence. But I don't do sycophancy. So I'll do what I always do, which is talk about how I am interacting with the process and in the process I may drop a comment about the others I'm working with.

Where I am at the moment is roughly where I would expect to be a third of the way through the rehearsal period. I more or less know my lines, cues and blocking, but I'm only partly (pun intended) into the part. There are two major problems. Firstly, the accent still comes and goes, but I had a half-hour session with Terry Bresson at the Actors' Centre yesterday which was very useful at identifying which parts of my Scottish accent were still coming through my Mockney; I think I will be able to be full-on London by the time the show opens. Secondly, I'm not fully aware of my character. I know he's an evil bastard (and that's on a good day), but I don't yet know him well enough to be sure of his emotions and responses on a second-by-second basis. Which means that I'm not always responding appropriately to other characters on the stage. Which means I still have work to do.

Of course there are other issues - the choreography of a fight scene, manipulating a curtain (don't ask - come and see the show), dealing with props that haven't yet materialised and so on, but overall I'm not too concerned at this point. I know director Seth Jones is tearing his hair out because the production hasn't reached the level he wants it, but he has a clear vision of where we should be and hair-tearing comes with the job. We are all, cast and musicians, moving in the right direction, even if some of us are moving faster than others.

So now it's back to promoting the show... £8.80 (booking fee included) is fantastic value for a two-act production. It's a quirky, surreal, violent drama, with live music, that just might surprise you...