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I wasn’t there to see it, but the first “I Killled Rasputin” run-through took nearly two hours (we have an 80 minute time slot). Thankfully this is partly down to people forgetting lines and coming in late with cues, but even so, it’s clear we have to lose even more stuff from the play (for Edinburgh at least). This morning I edited the first 16 pages down to 11 with some fairly brutal slicing. I had been half hoping we might be able to reinstate some bits before this, but for now at least some funny sections are going to have to go. We still have nearly two weeks to sort this out (though first previews are at the Riverside from Thursday) and it will be fine, but my work is not quite done.
I was too tired to do much useful work today. So I wandered down to Hammersmith for a quick swim. On the way I passed a baby’s carry cot (or maybe just the top part of a pram) discarded in the street. Inside it someone had thrown a used condom. Not only was this my sexcrement routine apparently come to life (is my 4400 power to make my crazy comedy notions visualise themselves in reality?), but it also looked like some clever piece of street art. The Shepherd’s Bush Banksy or Tracey Emin had come up with this comment on life and death, birth and birth control. It certainly made me consider existence in a new way. If you’re going to an art gallery you expect to be presented with stark juxtapositions like this one, but it was more effective on the streets as the art jumped up at you and surprised you. It was probably worth millions. I thought about picking it up and taking it home with me. But then again.
If it wasn’t street art, then what the Hell was it? Had someone been having sex in broad daylight on the streets of West London and then happened to see a receptacle that they could use to dispose of their unwanted gametes? It seemed unlikely. Had a person got both a carry cot and a used condom to get rid of and thought they might as well dump them at the same time? It had to be a work of art, right? Nothing else makes sense.
The world was turned upside down further for me when I got to the gym. Because the female changing rooms were having some work done on them and the builders were all men, for one day only, the female and male changing rooms swapped gender. I went into the women’s area to get into my trunks. It was like all my dreams had come true. i had been given access to this magical and mystical wonderland where all kinds of amazing things have happened in my imagination. The most surprising thing though was how confusingly laid out the female changing rooms are. It was like a labyrinth in there with no real indication of where the showers, toilets or door to the pool was. Confused old men wandered around caught between being enchanted to have been given access to this inner sanctum of wonder and being terrified that they would never escape.
And the artistic nature of the day continued when I did my preview in Tring tonight. The organisers and left platicene and play dough for the acts to make little models to put on display. some had done self-portraits or cartoon snails, but using my new Morph skills I decided to represent my comedy with a pink phallus. I am sure I can get it a part in my Morpheus in the Underworld stop frame animation series. You’d never guess that I made that in under a minute. It looks especially good amongst the other characters. We’d really been made to consider gender and procreation today. It’s nice when your life turns into a temporary art exhibit.
