5382/18302
I can’t see me getting the rewrites on my sitcom done this week. Today after popping out for breakfast and going to the shops, I returned home and vegetated. I watched some telly and found the new episode of Rick and Morty on YouTube (I will also be watching it many times legally, buying it on DVD, buying merch and promoting the shit out of this brilliant series) and couldn’t even build up the energy to go up the hill to pay the Scope money into the bank. And I ate too many Minstrels. And played on line poker (I won, before losing my money at roulette).
But it felt like the right choice to veg out today. We have been pushing ourselves pretty hard and I have learned to listen to my mind and body in these circumstances. It was great to do nothing of any importance, something that is pretty hard to achieve when you’ve got children. Phoebe got back in at 5 (I don’t know where she’d been, but she’s old enough to look after herself now) and I made her her dinner, whilst cooking a bean pie for us. At least that was some kind of achievement.
I bumped into Simon Evans on the walk up to the theatre and we chatted about Fringing in your fifties and Twitter. I am writing this in a cafe on Tuesday and he’s just walked in. I think Sarah Kendall has sent him to stalk me to take the heat off her.
Numbers slightly down on yesterday - maybe 140 in, but that’s more expected on a Monday. But man, they were a great crowd. A few of the performances in the middle of the run didn’t quite buzz like the early ones - maybe I was too tired, or we were all put out by going up late (a 15 minute delay can ruin people’s schedules and it’s hard to put that to the back of your mind), but the last few have found that mojo again. The crowd has lifted my performance and my game and I’ve massively enjoyed being on stage, which is incredibly rare by this stage of the Fringe. Tonight I over ran by 7 minutes because I messed around and found new ways of doing stuff. It didn’t matter (beyond messing up people’s schedules) as James Acaster was taking a day off. But that’s a good sign for the tour version.
It’s amazing to me still how the same material can go so differently from one night to the next. A couple of performances have been a struggle, but tonight everything fell into place, buoyed by an audience who were up from it from the start.
And afterwards Toby Hulse was in the queue. He was the director of the very first Fringe show I was in (as well as some subsequent plays in Oxford). The years have treated him well and he looked almost the same as he does in the photo in my show programme. He was with his son, so some things have changed. But great to see him again. I remember auditioning for that first show, Old King Cole, a knockabout, slapstick kids show written by the genius Ken Campbell (not expressly for us of course). There was some clowning and gurning to be done and Toby said he was going to blow air at me and I had to imagine it was a hurricane. I entered the spirit of that and flew over on to my bum. Afterwards he said I was the only person who did that and that’s why I got the part.
What fun times they were (though I contrived to be lonely and miserable throughout some of that Fringe, as I would with so many others). Once I was home, after a whisky and an episode of Game of Thrones, I felt content. I don’t think I’ve ever felt this happy in the last week of any Fringe, even in the years where stuff has really gone my way (not saying it’s not going my way this year). Usually you’re counting down the shows and desperate to go home. And I am looking forward to settling into our new place (if it’s habitable by next week, which it still might not be). But if the audiences are appreciative as they were tonight and I continue to make improvements to the show (though won’t get away with an over run like that again) then it’s going to be an enjoyable last few days.
And how different to the 2014 experience.
