It’s been a hard day. Sometimes they just are.
That’s not to say it hasn’t been fun, quite the contrary, i’m directing at the moment and loving every moment of it, but today, in a stickily hot rehearsal room with melted chocolate biscuits fighting the tiredness that’s been threatening to engulf me I have to admit it was a little struggle more than normal. I was chatting to Simon (the brilliant actor in the show) about how I thought all directors should be fat. He wisely noted that while they do tend to do lots of sitting, drinking of tea and eating of calorie laden biscuits they balance this, not with exercise, but with vast amounts of stress and worry. Apparently those sleepless nights can keep you thin. And give you a heart attack.
Anyway, that’s not the point, it’s been a hard day. Ticket sales are slow at the moment – that killer combination of hot weather, a world cup and hundreds of beer gardens so I feel a bit of pressure to try and save shows without necessarily having the resources to achieve it. It’s been said by many a theatre bod that the graveyard shift is June and July and January. Anyway, some of the shows are okay and I found myself wondering if England get knocked out of the world cup early will sales pick up. Who knows – Spain are out now so it’d be just my luck they’ll win it now.
But that’s not the point. I’ve hit tired. The last 4 months of late nights, behavior verging on the obsessive have left me a little drained. I fully expect that once the curtain comes down on the first show I shall burst into tears and sleep for a week, ideally in a beer garden. The problem with tiredness is you lose some of your sharpness around the edges. As a case in point, I’ve not done any comedy for ages, and, unwisely, did a little gig last week. It was, it is fair to say, pretty horrendous. Lots of acts tend to blame the audience, which I’ve always thought is a little unfair, and again, this one was all on me. I’m not going to lie. I was shite. But it was tiredness, the inability to think outside of the small scope in which my undivided attention is going. Part of it is the pressure of multi-rolling on the show. I am producer, director, sound, set and av designer, stage manager and production manager. I thank god that Julie and Simon are so brilliant to work with otherwise I suspect I’d die.
Yet even that is not the point. The point is that as a result of my hard day, stress from poor sales, obsessive behavior, crap standup and multi-rolling I need a beer. I need one real bad.
And so I approached my house’s beer fridge (yes. I know.). And so I took out beer #1 – 1664 bottled as it happens and cracked it open. The beer shot out like from a cannon, a big cannon, and inside was a frozen beercikle, a lolly of beer, surrounded with glass. So to beer #2, Guiness, I took it out and discovered it’d been leaking, thus fucking up my perfectly arranged beer fridge. There was only one beer remaining, beer #3, the scally youth of beers, the STD of the beer world. Carling. Yes I’ll say it again. Carling.
The long and the short of it is that the Carling was no longer Carling. It had morphed into Carling Slush which against the odds had a little bit of fizz. Turns out this is the nicest drink in the entire fucking world.
Or maybe I’m just too tired to care.
Night. x