Thursday 29th January 2015

I used to live near a Waitrose. And it was a Waitrose in Brighton, less than five minutes from the beach, so it was pretty bloody Waitrose. Obviously, your expectation might be that everything in Waitrose is going to be markedly more expensive than elsewhere - the Sainsburys down the road, for instance, or the Aldi. But that's not actually the case: in the main, and considering the quality, the difference in price isn't that much higher. 

By the way, a word about places like Aldi and Lidl. By now, you'll have worked out that you can get some pretty good stuff there - there's stories of Guardian readers loading up the 4x4 with cheaply priced imported meats and lobster, all under five quid. I think Aldi and Lidl are missing several tricks here. It would be a simple matter to open up a little bespoke shop, all hewn wood and exposed brickwork - somewhere in Kensington (or less than five minutes walk from Brighton beach), get a job lot of cured hams from Aldi, repackage them in wax paper , and sell it on for £8 a pop. It would be a huge success. I would say you can't have that idea, it's mine, but I'd be stunned if someone hasn't already beaten me to it. 

Anyway, Waitrose. They've always been pretty savvy about  making the customer feel important. There's doubtless a few people who will disagree with my interpretation of events, but the staff at my local Waitrose always seem pretty friendly and genuinely willing to help. A lot of this appears to be - and again, maybe some will disagree - that the staff generally seem happy to be there. This is a marked difference to many other supermarkets. 

A while back, Waitrose pulled a masterstroke, and offered free coffee to anyone who had a store loyalty card. That, and the fact you could claim a free newspaper if you were spending more than £5, meant that the shop pretty much owned you, in a very similar way to a cult. But a cult that kept you jacked up on caffeine and daily news and comment. There was a very good chance that you'd make a slight diversion from a nearer store in order to pick up a free newspaper, or, if you had only intended to pick up a tea, you would end up buying a muffin as well, as a example of your co-dependent relationship. It was fine, you both knew what you were getting into. A Fifty Shades Of Earl Grey, if you like. 

The Brighton Waitrose doesn't have a coffee shop, meaning that anyone who wants that free drink either drinks it while shopping, or takes it straight out. There's nowhere to sit down and drink. This appears not to be the case everywhere, though, because Waitrose sent out an email this morning asking (OK, stating) that customers claiming their free drink would now also buy a cake or something. This inevitably prompted an impressive slew of people babbling on twitter who ably demonstrated that they could complain, but couldn't actually read: Waitrose had to keep repeating that coffees got from a machine were still free, it was just that if you sat down in a coffee shop, you had to pay for something. This wasn't good enough for twitter customers, who, unable to see that they were screwing up a good deal by sitting for free with a coffee for six hours like a failed Hollywood screenwriter in Starbucks. ’It isn't free’, one customer sniffed. Well, maybe he sniffed. It was on twitter, it probably isn't wise to speculate too much about the bodily functions people get up to on twitter. 

I can only imagine that this is exactly what's happened: Waitrose coffee shops have been crammed by people who have claimed their free coffee and their free table and spoiling it for everyone else. This, ladies and gentlemen, is why we can't have nice things. At least the failed Hollywood screenwriter might actually pay for a coffee every four hours or so. 

At the very worst, you might think that customers would go “oh, well, free coffee was nice while it lasted, guess we're going to have to go back to the traditional methods of actually PAYING FOR STUFF and / or SHOPLIFTING now”. But, no. Like a toddler being told they have to put the action figure back on the display when leaving the toy shop, these people kicked, screamed and bawled. The last time I saw such embarrassing MINE IT'S MINE behaviour was - well, actually, back at Waitrose, on Christmas Eve, when the shop managed to annoy everyone with the controversial announcement that they were not going to reduce prices on the turkeys just before the store closed. This was met with absolute fury (I'm not kidding: fury), particularly when people were told that the turkeys were going to be donated to the homeless. This annoyed a lot of people. Especially the people holding their free coffees. 

I'll say it again. This is why we can't have nice things. 

Monday 26th January 2015

Over the past year or so, they've done quite a bit of redevelopment of Brighton train station, which frankly was pretty overdue. Train stations in England - and, I'm willing to bet, in many other countries over the world - are pretty odd places. They're meant to be the gateways of whatever city or town they're in, perhaps even representative of that town. But more often than not, you'll find that train stations quite often open out into the backs of buildings, on the edge of town. As soon as you arrive in a place, the place has turned away from you, demanding that you leave. Plus, there's been an increasing tendency recently (as there has been with the high street) to ensure that all stations look pretty much the same, with a WHSmith at the end of every siding. Seriously, I think WHSmith has only survived in business this long because people are forced to buy an overpriced bar of chocolate every time their train is delayed. It can't just be the sales of GCSE text books and misery memoirs. 

But I digress. Recently, they've been doing a lot of work at Brighton station. I think throughout the seventies and eighties, there was a lot of effort to hide the victorian structures with cheap looking metal and plastic. There then came a point where they clearly realised that the cheap looking metal and plastic looked - well, cheap. So. They've been stripping it all back, exposing the victoriana, making it look slightly more unique. They still haven't got rid of the WHSmith, they've simply relocated it, which isn't really committing to the idea. I know there are rents to be paid, and a high street business has a lot more money than the local newsagent, but I'd much prefer to see a privately owned newspaper stall at train stations than WHSmith. There's still one at Hove train station (or, at least, there was the last time I checked), and it's brilliant. In fact, I'd go further. I'm not much of a drinker, but I miss the idea of a proper old pub at each train station (not a Wetherspoons, obviously - if you have to have a Wetherspoons, you may as well do it properly and allow Burger King to sell beer). And of course, a tea room, so that Trevor Howard can spend the rush hour saving enigmatically beautiful women from being blinded. You know, like in the good old days. 

But you can't go back. Progress marches on. Technology improves. Apparently. The latest part of the improvements over at Brighton Station is to do with the ticket office. Up until now, buying a ticket mainly involved lining up with everybody else on a Monday morning, silently muttering to yourself about why none of these idiots took the time to buy a new ticket on Friday evening when there was less of a queue, refusing to accept any such criticism for yourself (you were busy that night, come on, you've got a life, right?) and waiting until one of the harried cashiers were ready for you. 

All that has now changed. Before you get to the door, there is now a monolithic steel and chrome structure, all beeps and digital read out, looking very much like the tall obelisk that terrifies the underdeveloped natives in 2001: A Space Osysdey. And so it proves with this computer at Brighton, where a crowd of bewildered commuters are now spending mornings gibbering wet-eyed and incoherent at this unexpected change to their morning regime. Now what happens, instead of lining up and taking your chances, you are prompted to take a ticket with a number on it, and wait to be called. This means that at best you feel like you're about to buy some organic ham at the deli counter at Waitrose, or at worst hoping to get a cheap flat screen telly at Argos. But with a lot less guarantee that your product is going to work.

Presumably this thing was introduced to make people's lives easier. To ensure fairness for all the passengers, so that people who rocked up late to get a ticket wouldn't simply jump the queue. But also - and I suspect this is the main draw - to ensure that passengers no longer spend their transaction time moaning and bleating about how long it takes to get served (there really is no sense of irony amongst train passengers. Occasionally no sense, full stop). In this last aim, of course, everything has failed quite spectacularly. For a start, now that everyone has a numbered ticket, there's not actually any need for them to line up. They can instead sit on any of the benches that have been provided (another result of the refurbishment of the station). But nobody can quite trust that, so everyone lines up anyway, mainly in the only doorway, meaning that everybody blocks the exit of anyone else. Plus, every second customer spends about five minutes to complain about the ineffiency of the new system, that it all seems to be taking a lot longer, and that everyone will be delayed as the ticket office has to put up with a lot of complaints (like I said, not a lot of irony). 

I do feel sorry for the staff at the ticket office who have to politely respond to each new varariation on the same complaint, and tow the party line (I suspect they secretly think its as stupid an idea as anyone else). But the deed is done, and everyone has to deal with it, at least until the monolith gets broken (I've got a fiver on mid-April). Until then, the train has left the station. 

Sunday 25th January 2015

Pretty good session at Iron Clad Improv tonight, with three new people (all of whom took a loyalty card, so in theory that's a pretty good sign). While the Sunday night sessions are for all intents and purposes drop-ins, meaning that anyone can rock up on any Sunday, or indeed miss out on any number of Sundays without losing out or getting lost, I do try to have some sort of soft 'umbrella theme' stretching over a period of roughly four weeks or so every so often, in order to focus our minds on whatever improv challenge or problem that's currently cropping up a lot in class. So far this year, in the first few sessions back, we've mainly just been doing short form stuff in order to ease ourselves back into the groove, which has been fun. Now things are beginning to click back into place, and it looks like (with not a great deal of surprise) that our focus in the first part of 2015 will be a return to basics on the so-called Three Rules Of Improv: listen/say yes/commit. 

I find these three rules of improv endlessly fascinating. They are always the same, and yet at the same time, constantly fluid. I find new things in them roughly three times a year, the more I act, direct and write. They are both as bluntly simple as they first appear, and vastly more complicated. They mean just what they say, and are always changing. Yes, I'm aware that this sounds vastly pretentious, and I'll probably be able to explain myself better once I get my groove on with this blog and write entries more regularly, but generally I think what I'm saying about improv - and by extension, writing, or acting, or directing - really, any kind of storytelling - is that you can't get to the end of learning how to do it. Once you've 'worked it out', you're screwed, because of course, once you've learned all there is to learn, you can no longer be taught. For me, teaching (and learning) about improv is much like going into a darkened library with a candle. With the light of the candle you see this book, and that book .. and you read those, and find them delightful. So you pick up a few more. And a few more. And because the library is dark, and because you've only got the candle to light your way, it takes you a while to discover (and this you will constantly forget) that the library is vast, the perimeter far far away from your reach, the candle lighting the here and now, and simply suggesting what has passed, and what lies in the future. 

This weekend, we've been getting the last few entries  for our next Cast Iron night, which will be at the end of March. This means we have to read the plays pretty damn quickly, in order to get them cast and assigned to a director, hopefully before the end of this week. All this while trying to finish my own ten minute play, this for the NVT evening of short plays, the deadline for which is this week. 

Saturday 24th January 2015

Just at the moment, right this second, I don't know what I'm doing. I should be a bit clearer about that. Usually, I've got about six projects on the go - writing one, directing another, acting in a third .. and so on. Since all of that is in my spare time, it's anybody's guess as to whether my attention and energy is actually productively used having been split in so many directions (you hush now), but I generally find that even in my exhaustion, one project very often feeds into another. 

Right now, though? I find myself with evenings off. Ridiculous. I'm not even using the time productively. I've been catching up on old episodes of 24 (season 6, even, which many - including the production team - think is the worst. I'm enjoying it so far, but then I am only four hours in). That's not to say I've been totally wasting my time. I'm prepping for the next performance of Cast Iron, the regular short play night which I curate. (yes, that clunking sound you hear is me trying to casually do a bit of promotion in the middle of a blog). I've started reviewing again, which I haven't been able to do for quite a while. I've been doing quite a bit of re-drafting on some short stories, which strictly speaking isn't new work, since I'm simply going over stuff I've already written, but it feels like work, so that's alright then. 

Having said all that, there's still a helluva lot of projects looming on the horizon, certainly enough that some are going to have to fall to the wayside. But I'm still full of the wistful naive hope of the new year to think that I'm going to better organised and get some of these things done. There's got to be a first time for everything, right? 

Friday 2nd January 2015

As is usual at this time of year, when the year is barely a few days old, a couple of people have asked me what I've got planned - creatively - for the next 12 months. And I've told them: at the moment, I have nothing whatsoever planned. And these people have laughed in my face, scoffing with derision. 

To be honest, I can see their point. I made a studious point of planning absolutely nothing for 2014: I'd been fairly busy in the few years prior, and I thought that it might be a nice thing to actually see some theatre rather than always be too busy to see anything, because I was continually involved in it. It was one of the things that annoyed me as a drama student: many budding actors (and directors, whatever) were very keen to get up on stage, but had no particular desire to see anyone else on stage. I suspect my experience is not unique. I also cheerfully suspect that this sort of blinkered vision hasn't exactly died out. 

But anyway, that was the plan. To do less, to see more. Apart from anything else, I'd been directing for the last three Brighton Fringes, and that meant I'd missed out on a helluva lot of theatre, sketch comedy, and the like. So, that was an early and easy descion: I wasn't going to be directing over May. I didn't really expect to be acting in May, either. But then I found myself in The Crucible. 

There's probably another entry to be written about my time in The Crucible, where I was surronded by great actors, great director, and great crew, but none of that helped with the almost paralysing fear I had during the run. I studiously avoided mentioning it at the time (it's not the sort of thing you need to hear from an actor who's got a fair bulk of the lines in a play), but I remember coming home from performances seriously questioning if I'd ever act again. The part is one of the most iconic, most totemic of Americian drama, and obviously I very often questioned if I was in any way doing it justice. Or if I was just torturing the accent. Obviously, I'll never really know (I reserve the right as a needy actor to always be crippled by critical self doubt) but it was fascinating to me even as it was happening just how obliterating I was finding the experience; even when I felt that I was only coming up to 50, 60% of what the role deserved. I felt like I was ... well, just getting away with it most of the time. And most of the time, my fellow actors and director chose to let me get away with it, too. 

This isn't an attempt at any kind of humblebrag, by the way: the play was nearly a year ago, and does not survive in any recording of any kind. That reminds me: there are recordings of me in Art, from about four years ago, and a ten minute play I appeared in, from last Christmas. I haven't had the courage to look at either. But it does remind me that as I get older, I'm beginning to enjoy the process (of rehearsal) possibly slightly more than the product of performance. I think it speaks to my procrastinators heart. 

Actually, speaking of last Christmases 10 Minute Play provides a nears segue, into one of the major reasons that 2014 ended up not being that quiet after all: I felt that we should have a Christmas play. Not a panto, exactly, but a Christmas play for the family. Around this time last year, I went to the National Theatre to see The Light Princess. The draw was that it was a play with songs written by Tori Amos, but the takeaway for me was that it was a fairy tale with a fircely feminist vibe. I have every faith that there will have been some six year old girl in the audience who was going to the theatre for the very first time, and that will have been a transformative experience for her. And, all of a sudden, that's who I wanted to write for. 

Now, I don't know if The Snow Queen entirely succeeded in that goal (although I've heard some very pleasing reports back), but I do know that the script is one I actually quite like. That's not always the way with things that you write, occasionally it can be a bit of a hack job, or a script bound by compromise. But I actually really like this script, and am really fond of the characters. Sure, there are a few things that need tightening up: the moral gets a bit repeptive in the final scene, for instance (thanks  to wonderful actors finding new ways to breathe new life into each new thought, audiences never noticed), but it's something that I'd like to revisit in the future. I'm still not at the point where my work has been able to have a life independently of me (terrifyingly, I still don't quite have the courage to get stuff out there), but the love and support that everybody gave to The Snow Queen has given me the courage to push on. 

Don't panic. This is just the holiday speaking. Give it a couple of days, and normal service will be resumed.

Give it a few more days, and I won't get around to doing another blog entry til about Easter.