Ah, Ullared!
Such a name, brimming with promise and redolent of exotic spice. Like distant Samarkand or Marrakesh, a thumming hub of commerce where merchants vend their wares with a flourish, producing magical lanterns or bales of finest silk from the tea-scented depths of their vibrantly-coloured tents, ready to haggle over an ivory chess set or a crystal hookah as they match wits with equally cunning customers.
A mad scrum of pensioners with trolleys. Cut-price velour tracksuits and bulk-buy crates of deoderant, fought for tooth and nail by families driven psychotic by the low-ceilinged fluorescent lights and smell of over-heated diner kebab. An endless maze of aisles. The lowest circle of hell, the one Virgil chickened out of showing Dante round.
For two hours, I lay at the bottom of the slide in the children's play area, cradling C as she angrily tried to get away and follow F. Every two minutes, F would first throw Bunbun down to me and then crash into my thigh moments later, cackling like a fiend. Similarly dead-eyed parents littered the nearby benches. When the zombie apocalpse begins, it will start in some urine-streaked ball pool, where the border between half-life and brain death is already so weak.
We needed Christmas presents, so we borrowed Mormor's car and made the two-hour drive out. Ullared is nestled in a set of low wooded hills out in the countryside. The view from the Lekland window, when not obscured by screaming toddlers, was something like the landscape in Deliverance.
Returning to the carpark at five thirty, we discovered the battery in the car was dead. Had I left the lights on? I was pretty sure not, cars are such hostile territory to me I'm more than usually careful about my dealings with them. Was it the arctic gale howling over the carpark, freezing the acid? Was it the sheer perversity of Ullared, determined to keep us there forever in obediance to F's wishes? She wanted us to sleep in the playroom, and cried when we said no.
V found a man who could recharge the batteries with a portable generator, five minutes before he would have gone home for the day. The cost was her stress levels, already high after I'd asked to keep the time spent shopping shorter than optimum.
That set the mood for the drive home, V and I mostly silent except to growl unreasonably at each other about food (I don't count hotdogs from a crap grill as dinner, but I'd also forgotten to pack enough hot water for C's third bottle, so my bargaining position was a little weak).
Swedish cars are mirror images of a normal UK car. Whenever I change gear, I automatically punch the door next to me first, groping for a stick that isn't there. I mutter a constant mantra of 'drive on the right, drive on the right' as I go, terrified that I will forget. After F, sitting in her child seat up front next to me, tries to fill my ear with unwanted fruit salad on a narrow corner, I lock down totally into a driving trance, eyes and mind only for the road.
About half an hour later, a drunk man ploughs into the back of the car at 200 kph.
Saturday, December 5, 2015
Friday, November 27, 2015
Just a Trim
So I had a vasectomy last week.
Funny thing to write about on a public blog. I found myself feeling slightly defensive. Why write about it? Why wave the poor clipped buggers about in the public domain, where nobody wants to see them?
Various reasons occurred. Some of the same reasons I was having it done in the first place - men taking reproductive responsibility in the modern age, brag brag, I'm middle aged and have quite enough children already, oh, I don't know, have you seen the list of side-effects on the male pill? Reading that made me consider sawing the little chaps off by hand as a viable alternative. Honestly, hormones, don't mess with them.
But mostly I'm going to write about it because it's funny. A funny thing to go through, at the very least. And I'd never miss a chance to write self-deprecating snark on the best of days. The worst of days are always getting posted.
- Hello, I'll be your surgeon, lie down, whoops, there we go, that's the worst bit done, said the surgeon in one smoothly-flowing introductory sentence as he flipped me on to my back, whisked away my clothes and rammed a three-inch long needle into both sides of my groin and nutsack. And then he smiled nicely and trotted out, leaving me lying in stunned agony. Although in (vas) deference to his skill, the agony receeded very quickly, and I didn't even notice I'd bled all over the bed until the nurse came in to slap a label on my wrist.
He was a glib man, alright. All through the proceedure, he kept popping up over the curtain they'd erected over my nethers to grin and ask me questions about acting. Disjointed isn't the word. One minute he'd be wondering who my favourite director is, the next he'd be rummaging around with the exasperated air of someone trying to find car keys in a crowded handbag and coming up with half a pack of gum for the third time in a row.
And all this in Swedish, I might add. The Swedish word for scrotum is the rather beautiful pung (fully, testikelpung, lit. a testicle pouch). Beautiful but misleading. Onomatopoeiacally, it sounds like a bronze potato, something that will bounce resiliently with a metallic chime if dropped. Do not be fooled, real testes do not possess this quality. Onomatopoeia is a dubious concept on the whole, I reckon, as might be expected from a word that sounds descriptive of the place my semi-house-broken toddler occasionally urinates.
I reeled home. Still entirely numb, my testicles felt like they reached my knees. It was like walking with a large velvet pouffe in my trousers. Later, as the drugs wore off, I discovered the large velvet pouffe had been stuffed with broken glass. Optimistically, I was booked to teach an evening drama class to some teenagers. This, I cancelled. You can't improve someone's acting whilst lying curled up on the floor cradling your crotch. Not with much aplomb, anyway.
Obviously, both my children wanted nothing but to sit in my lap and bounce up and down for the next five days. And they both cried when I wouldn't let them. Rather you than me, my dears. The excuse I settled on was that I had sore legs, and the doctor had told me to rest. F appreciated this, C was less convinced. A daddy that cannot dandle you is a poor sort of creature, a sort of beakless toucan. Without the main attraction, it seems cruel to keep the remainder alive.
In the week before the op, I was wondering if I was going to have psychological fall-out. On top of any potential hideous scarring, operational mispractice, etc, etc, you know. Like any idiotic near-forty-year-old male, I was of course most concerned with my percieved masculinity and whether it would be dented. Sterilisation, not being able to have children, that's a touch drastic, isn't it? One of those vital definitions of life, removed from the list.
Meh. I've done my bit for my selfish genes. Hair shirt spartan that I am, I actually feel more manly for having had it done. Yes! Behold, I'm still this macho despite having neatly scissored testicles! GASP IN AWE! Or so shouts the brute in my hindbrain. The rest of me is quite happy to move quietly on and not mention it again. That's clearly not the rest of me writing this blog and linking it to Facebook, is it, eh? Good old hindbrain brute. He's handy with the old social media.
I don't know. People don't seem to talk about vasectomies very much. We're either too polite or too scared. Moving to Sweden has made me far less of either of those. Or possibly made me a lot more stupid, which could be mistaken for rude bravery in the right light. Apologies if you're finding this terribly distasteful. And then well done for reading on this far. It's okay, there aren't going to be any pictures.
Anyway. Scarely a week later, all was back to normal.
As normal as bald balls can be considered, that is, especially when still rather colourfully pigmented from the bruising. Peachy, let's say. A testament to the skill of that sunny surgeon. Now, the only reminder of that brief pain is seeing F sporadically hobbling down the hallway, playing the 'sore legs' game, mimicking my now-vanished tender gait with a precise eye.
If only she knew.
Funny thing to write about on a public blog. I found myself feeling slightly defensive. Why write about it? Why wave the poor clipped buggers about in the public domain, where nobody wants to see them?
Various reasons occurred. Some of the same reasons I was having it done in the first place - men taking reproductive responsibility in the modern age, brag brag, I'm middle aged and have quite enough children already, oh, I don't know, have you seen the list of side-effects on the male pill? Reading that made me consider sawing the little chaps off by hand as a viable alternative. Honestly, hormones, don't mess with them.
But mostly I'm going to write about it because it's funny. A funny thing to go through, at the very least. And I'd never miss a chance to write self-deprecating snark on the best of days. The worst of days are always getting posted.
- Hello, I'll be your surgeon, lie down, whoops, there we go, that's the worst bit done, said the surgeon in one smoothly-flowing introductory sentence as he flipped me on to my back, whisked away my clothes and rammed a three-inch long needle into both sides of my groin and nutsack. And then he smiled nicely and trotted out, leaving me lying in stunned agony. Although in (vas) deference to his skill, the agony receeded very quickly, and I didn't even notice I'd bled all over the bed until the nurse came in to slap a label on my wrist.
He was a glib man, alright. All through the proceedure, he kept popping up over the curtain they'd erected over my nethers to grin and ask me questions about acting. Disjointed isn't the word. One minute he'd be wondering who my favourite director is, the next he'd be rummaging around with the exasperated air of someone trying to find car keys in a crowded handbag and coming up with half a pack of gum for the third time in a row.
And all this in Swedish, I might add. The Swedish word for scrotum is the rather beautiful pung (fully, testikelpung, lit. a testicle pouch). Beautiful but misleading. Onomatopoeiacally, it sounds like a bronze potato, something that will bounce resiliently with a metallic chime if dropped. Do not be fooled, real testes do not possess this quality. Onomatopoeia is a dubious concept on the whole, I reckon, as might be expected from a word that sounds descriptive of the place my semi-house-broken toddler occasionally urinates.
I reeled home. Still entirely numb, my testicles felt like they reached my knees. It was like walking with a large velvet pouffe in my trousers. Later, as the drugs wore off, I discovered the large velvet pouffe had been stuffed with broken glass. Optimistically, I was booked to teach an evening drama class to some teenagers. This, I cancelled. You can't improve someone's acting whilst lying curled up on the floor cradling your crotch. Not with much aplomb, anyway.
Obviously, both my children wanted nothing but to sit in my lap and bounce up and down for the next five days. And they both cried when I wouldn't let them. Rather you than me, my dears. The excuse I settled on was that I had sore legs, and the doctor had told me to rest. F appreciated this, C was less convinced. A daddy that cannot dandle you is a poor sort of creature, a sort of beakless toucan. Without the main attraction, it seems cruel to keep the remainder alive.
In the week before the op, I was wondering if I was going to have psychological fall-out. On top of any potential hideous scarring, operational mispractice, etc, etc, you know. Like any idiotic near-forty-year-old male, I was of course most concerned with my percieved masculinity and whether it would be dented. Sterilisation, not being able to have children, that's a touch drastic, isn't it? One of those vital definitions of life, removed from the list.
Meh. I've done my bit for my selfish genes. Hair shirt spartan that I am, I actually feel more manly for having had it done. Yes! Behold, I'm still this macho despite having neatly scissored testicles! GASP IN AWE! Or so shouts the brute in my hindbrain. The rest of me is quite happy to move quietly on and not mention it again. That's clearly not the rest of me writing this blog and linking it to Facebook, is it, eh? Good old hindbrain brute. He's handy with the old social media.
I don't know. People don't seem to talk about vasectomies very much. We're either too polite or too scared. Moving to Sweden has made me far less of either of those. Or possibly made me a lot more stupid, which could be mistaken for rude bravery in the right light. Apologies if you're finding this terribly distasteful. And then well done for reading on this far. It's okay, there aren't going to be any pictures.
Anyway. Scarely a week later, all was back to normal.
As normal as bald balls can be considered, that is, especially when still rather colourfully pigmented from the bruising. Peachy, let's say. A testament to the skill of that sunny surgeon. Now, the only reminder of that brief pain is seeing F sporadically hobbling down the hallway, playing the 'sore legs' game, mimicking my now-vanished tender gait with a precise eye.
If only she knew.
Monday, November 16, 2015
Red in Gum and Nail
C can nearly walk, talk and sleep overnight. How did this happen? I've barely blogged about her at all in the last three months, beyond glancing referrals in the background of the ongoing war of potty training. She ought to have the common courtesy to stop developing when I'm distracted.
Mind you, I'm relatively secondary in C's order of things too. Mummy is ahead of me, she gets coos and smiles where I tend to get furious screams because I'm slower with the bottle deployment.
Top of the list is big sister F.
F tells it like it is. She plays the headbutt game properly, where you lean in and bump foreheads and say "bump!". Mummy and Daddy are all cotton-woolly about that one, they don't commit to the bump.
F waves slices of cucumber during dinner and says "Greeny greeny greeny greeny!" Mummy and Daddy are all, "hey, no, sit quietly and masticate your gruel correctly." They don't understand how it is in the real world. They don't get the problems that a baby faces on a day-to-day basis, not like big sister F.
She's learned, from F, that parents need to be bullied in order to function at peak efficiency. Take no nos for an answer. If ignored, redouble your howls. A sleeping parent deserves neither sympathy nor mercy. It's a dog-eat-dog-or-possibly-formula-until-you've-got-teeth world out there, and only the stroppiest survive.
I have tried to learn from F's example. If I too could receive looks of unconditional love from the recipient of a poked face or yanked forelock, I reckon life could be so much easier, Perhaps if I steal peoples' toys, I'll make more friends and get more jobs.
Or maybe C is just waiting to declare an all-out war of retribution until she's cracked independant walking.
Mind you, I'm relatively secondary in C's order of things too. Mummy is ahead of me, she gets coos and smiles where I tend to get furious screams because I'm slower with the bottle deployment.
Top of the list is big sister F.
F tells it like it is. She plays the headbutt game properly, where you lean in and bump foreheads and say "bump!". Mummy and Daddy are all cotton-woolly about that one, they don't commit to the bump.
F waves slices of cucumber during dinner and says "Greeny greeny greeny greeny!" Mummy and Daddy are all, "hey, no, sit quietly and masticate your gruel correctly." They don't understand how it is in the real world. They don't get the problems that a baby faces on a day-to-day basis, not like big sister F.
She's learned, from F, that parents need to be bullied in order to function at peak efficiency. Take no nos for an answer. If ignored, redouble your howls. A sleeping parent deserves neither sympathy nor mercy. It's a dog-eat-dog-or-possibly-formula-until-you've-got-teeth world out there, and only the stroppiest survive.
I have tried to learn from F's example. If I too could receive looks of unconditional love from the recipient of a poked face or yanked forelock, I reckon life could be so much easier, Perhaps if I steal peoples' toys, I'll make more friends and get more jobs.
Or maybe C is just waiting to declare an all-out war of retribution until she's cracked independant walking.
Saturday, November 14, 2015
Changelings
I don't have a daughter F any more. She's gone, vanished and replaced by something new.
Before I startle anyone into panic, this isn't a sudden dark turn for the blog. No developmental illnesses, no terrible accidents. No, this is far worse. This is Disney.
If I call F by name at the moment, she tells me "No, actually, I'm called Tristan." Tristan refers to himself in the third person, suspiciously similarly to F's general habit, and doesn't do things like eating up all his food at lunchtime, tidying his toys or sleeping in his bed. Tristan sleeps in the Pixie Dust Tree (F's castle) on a sheepskin rug.
Tristan isn't even called Tristan in the original movies. Disney's Fairies series, starring Tinkerbell, also feature a Dust Elf who makes sure the other elves get their daily dose of fairy dust. He's called Terence in the English version, Tristan in the Swedish. Not sure why that translation got made, V says Terence would be harder for Swedes to say. No great loss, it's not perhaps the most whimsical of pixie names. Up there with Nigel the Cleaning Fairy or mischevious tax sprite Arthur Jones.
But it gets worse, worse than having an alter ego F can hide behind when she feels ornery (95% of the time).
As a child, I was hooked on Disney too. I was Mickey Mouse. Similar woes betided those who felt I might not actually be that entity, I'm sure. Chief of those was that I decided everyone else in the household needed a Disney Character to be referred to as, and Dad got the roughest end of the stick when I decided he was Pluto the dog.
I am well served. I am now Tinkerbell.
Before I startle anyone into panic, this isn't a sudden dark turn for the blog. No developmental illnesses, no terrible accidents. No, this is far worse. This is Disney.
If I call F by name at the moment, she tells me "No, actually, I'm called Tristan." Tristan refers to himself in the third person, suspiciously similarly to F's general habit, and doesn't do things like eating up all his food at lunchtime, tidying his toys or sleeping in his bed. Tristan sleeps in the Pixie Dust Tree (F's castle) on a sheepskin rug.
Tristan isn't even called Tristan in the original movies. Disney's Fairies series, starring Tinkerbell, also feature a Dust Elf who makes sure the other elves get their daily dose of fairy dust. He's called Terence in the English version, Tristan in the Swedish. Not sure why that translation got made, V says Terence would be harder for Swedes to say. No great loss, it's not perhaps the most whimsical of pixie names. Up there with Nigel the Cleaning Fairy or mischevious tax sprite Arthur Jones.
But it gets worse, worse than having an alter ego F can hide behind when she feels ornery (95% of the time).
As a child, I was hooked on Disney too. I was Mickey Mouse. Similar woes betided those who felt I might not actually be that entity, I'm sure. Chief of those was that I decided everyone else in the household needed a Disney Character to be referred to as, and Dad got the roughest end of the stick when I decided he was Pluto the dog.
I am well served. I am now Tinkerbell.
Friday, October 30, 2015
Pit Boss
"Mummy, did you cook this food?"
"No, Daddy did."
"Daddy, I don't like you anymore."
Just like that, the reign of Daddy as favourite parent is finished.
F has learned a number of new skills over the last few months. Chief amongst them is the way you can play two parents against each other. She didn't want to put her winter boots on this morning, she wanted her trainers.
"You can't splash in puddles with those, they aren't waterproof," Mummy told her.
"Daddy says they are," she said. True enough, I did say that. They are mostly waterproof, too, just not as much as her boots are. Mummy and I had a nice discussion about this, with F standing behind us both rubbing her hands together and saying "good, good!" like a tiny blond Emperor Palpatine as she tried to put the trainers on again.
And she lies! She lies like mad. Who taught her that? Is that on the curriculum at förskolan? She's supposed to sleep with all the other kids after lunch, and she's been fairly resistant to playing along. That's meant having snoozes when she gets home, or she gets catastrophic around 1600.
Half a minute after her teacher told me she hadn't slept again today, I was officiously informed "Daddy, I have already snoozed just now so I don't need to snooze at home, so don't worry about it." She adds 'don't worry about it' quite a lot to statements at the moment. It makes her sound even more like a Mafia boss than usual.
"I am closing my eyes," she'll tell me when she's supposed to be sleeping, even when I'm looking directly at her and can see that she isn't. I suppose I should be glad even if she fibs like a politician, she can't yet do it efficiently.
Parents who balk her demands are told not to look at her, or sit next to her, or talk to her. Or she goes to another room to (e.g.) pick her nose, so that we can't see when she carries on heedless. She's outright triumphant when she gets her way and cripplingly miserable when she doesn't.
Not that we're any better, really. We flip between bribes and threats, cajoling and bullying just as much as she does, so it's not that hard to see where she gets it from. Best of all is seeing that C has already grasped the basics of these modes of behaviour. As I type, she is on the floor by my feet in her bouncy chair, cooing and grinning when I look at her and growling and shouting if I break eye contact for any reason at all.
That's the parental mode, right there. Obey or face my wrath, but treats if you obey quick enough. Good to know the lessons are being picked up.
"No, Daddy did."
"Daddy, I don't like you anymore."
Just like that, the reign of Daddy as favourite parent is finished.
F has learned a number of new skills over the last few months. Chief amongst them is the way you can play two parents against each other. She didn't want to put her winter boots on this morning, she wanted her trainers.
"You can't splash in puddles with those, they aren't waterproof," Mummy told her.
"Daddy says they are," she said. True enough, I did say that. They are mostly waterproof, too, just not as much as her boots are. Mummy and I had a nice discussion about this, with F standing behind us both rubbing her hands together and saying "good, good!" like a tiny blond Emperor Palpatine as she tried to put the trainers on again.
And she lies! She lies like mad. Who taught her that? Is that on the curriculum at förskolan? She's supposed to sleep with all the other kids after lunch, and she's been fairly resistant to playing along. That's meant having snoozes when she gets home, or she gets catastrophic around 1600.
Half a minute after her teacher told me she hadn't slept again today, I was officiously informed "Daddy, I have already snoozed just now so I don't need to snooze at home, so don't worry about it." She adds 'don't worry about it' quite a lot to statements at the moment. It makes her sound even more like a Mafia boss than usual.
"I am closing my eyes," she'll tell me when she's supposed to be sleeping, even when I'm looking directly at her and can see that she isn't. I suppose I should be glad even if she fibs like a politician, she can't yet do it efficiently.
Parents who balk her demands are told not to look at her, or sit next to her, or talk to her. Or she goes to another room to (e.g.) pick her nose, so that we can't see when she carries on heedless. She's outright triumphant when she gets her way and cripplingly miserable when she doesn't.
Not that we're any better, really. We flip between bribes and threats, cajoling and bullying just as much as she does, so it's not that hard to see where she gets it from. Best of all is seeing that C has already grasped the basics of these modes of behaviour. As I type, she is on the floor by my feet in her bouncy chair, cooing and grinning when I look at her and growling and shouting if I break eye contact for any reason at all.
That's the parental mode, right there. Obey or face my wrath, but treats if you obey quick enough. Good to know the lessons are being picked up.
Sunday, September 27, 2015
The Saga of the Saga
When I was a teenager, I went on an outdoors activity holiday with the church youth group. One of the activities we got to take part in was a raft building challenge. The lakeside youth supervisors put us in groups, gave us a big pile of raw materials and oars, and told us the winners would be the team who paddled their raft the round the buoy in the nearest bay in the quickest time.
"That looks awesome," one of my teammates told me as I constructed flotation hammocks out of empty water barrels and blue plastic twine. "That looks really solid, we should win no bother."
He was wrong. I couldn't really tie knots. I was just winding the rope round itself into impressive-looking gnarls. As the barrels popped free and floated off mid-way round the course, my teammate took me to task for their weakness. "But you told me they looked awesome," I said, aggrieved. "It's your fault you didn't check them."
The relevance of this to my recent acting job, Njal's Saga, is what I learned on that holiday, namely that it is pointless throwing blame around when your raft is already disintegrating.
The premiere would have been last Sunday. It got postponed. The last minute crisis meeting earlier this week which was set up to try and get the fractured cast back and talking about how to fix the show got repurposed, also at the last minute. Instead of discussing the next step, it was announced that the meeting would actually be a rehearsal of some of the original material we'd had to abandon weeks ago, and that anyone who didn't like it didn't need to show up.
Half the cast gave up at this point. I'd been trying to keep an open mind, but that was the last straw for me, and I gave up with them. Not gave up, technically, seeing as I'm released on full pay, but that's splitting hairs. It feels like I gave up, a bitter feeling, although I'm probably justified to have done so.
I don't really know how to start explaining how we got to that point, really. I got the job about seven months ago, after auditioning for it. A fairly elaborate audition, in Swedish, for which I sang, did stage combat and learned an Anglo-Saxon poem. I was very excited that I got the job, not least because I love the Icelandic Saga that the play was going to be based on. I also had got a job in a foreign language, and would have (finally) some kind of showcase to invite casting people to.
There was a two-day workshop earlier in the year. One of the actors who came to that fell mysteriously ill after the first day, after we'd worked on some pretty bizarre material. He never came back. Someone else got drafted in a couple of weeks before we were due to start, before anyone had seen a finished script. He asked for one and got one, and told me later he looked at it, had no idea how it could be performed, and said as much to the director.
"We'll improvise our way through it," he was told.
Rather than try and list all the subsequent amazement of the rehearsals, here are some highlights.
It mostly sounds funny, reading it back. It wasn't at the time, I can assure you. Even for Fringe theatre, this was chaotic and broken in a way I've never experienced. And I've worked on some shitty gigs, let me tell you - the Hamlet with Two Hamlets, The Albuquerque Dust Storm Macbeth, the pilot episode of Man Versus Monster Truck. A four-hour George Bernard Shaw play that he never intended to be performed on stage, just read aloud to educate his Christmas guests, of whom I can only imagine there were none.
This was a new level of bedlam, the kind that leaves you dazed and doubting your own abilities to comprehend the world, as though you've just been hit by a tornado and haven't quite realised you're now four hundred miles away with a length of copper pipe transfixing your skull.
Actors are lovely people, on the whole - generous, cheerful and hardworking. They also generate drama, that's one of our functions. Put us in a calm and empty room and you'll eventually get the root of all drama, conflict. Putting four of us into an imminent catastrophe and hoping that we'd sort it all out on our own, well, that's like trying to pacify a psychotic tiger by slapping it with raw steak.
Strangely, for all the fury and horror the job brought, I now feel fairly calm and empty. There is no point in staying angry or trying to hold people to account. It would take too much energy, energy I now lack, and this isn't the right forum for it anyway. The raft collapsed, we all nearly drowned, some of us made it to various shores. Better to get on with enjoying life than dwelling on the disaster.
Today, I watched the actual premiere. It was oddly like attending my own funeral, seeing a show I'd worked on for six weeks open from the front row. It was also pretty good - strange, abstract and stark, and certainly not the same as the last time I'd seen it. Two of the original cast have stuck it out, in the end, and I have enormous respect for them. Also for the Icelandic composer, who had endured seeing his score mangled by incompetents for two months before coming back and taking over. Even a leaky raft benefits from a good helmsman, I think. See it if you're in Gothenburg and free for an evening, the cast and composer deserve your support.
As for me, I'd been questioning my staying power in terms of a career in acting even before this started. Funnily enough, though, I feel a new resolve. There's no point in stopping trying to be an actor that I can see, although I am certainly investigating other lines of income right now.
I am, however, utterly certain that my acting career cannot possibly sink any lower than this, and I shall eat not only my own hat but the entire hat section of every costume department the world over, before I ever admit to being proved wrong on this.
Excelsior!
"That looks awesome," one of my teammates told me as I constructed flotation hammocks out of empty water barrels and blue plastic twine. "That looks really solid, we should win no bother."
He was wrong. I couldn't really tie knots. I was just winding the rope round itself into impressive-looking gnarls. As the barrels popped free and floated off mid-way round the course, my teammate took me to task for their weakness. "But you told me they looked awesome," I said, aggrieved. "It's your fault you didn't check them."
The relevance of this to my recent acting job, Njal's Saga, is what I learned on that holiday, namely that it is pointless throwing blame around when your raft is already disintegrating.
The premiere would have been last Sunday. It got postponed. The last minute crisis meeting earlier this week which was set up to try and get the fractured cast back and talking about how to fix the show got repurposed, also at the last minute. Instead of discussing the next step, it was announced that the meeting would actually be a rehearsal of some of the original material we'd had to abandon weeks ago, and that anyone who didn't like it didn't need to show up.
Half the cast gave up at this point. I'd been trying to keep an open mind, but that was the last straw for me, and I gave up with them. Not gave up, technically, seeing as I'm released on full pay, but that's splitting hairs. It feels like I gave up, a bitter feeling, although I'm probably justified to have done so.
I don't really know how to start explaining how we got to that point, really. I got the job about seven months ago, after auditioning for it. A fairly elaborate audition, in Swedish, for which I sang, did stage combat and learned an Anglo-Saxon poem. I was very excited that I got the job, not least because I love the Icelandic Saga that the play was going to be based on. I also had got a job in a foreign language, and would have (finally) some kind of showcase to invite casting people to.
There was a two-day workshop earlier in the year. One of the actors who came to that fell mysteriously ill after the first day, after we'd worked on some pretty bizarre material. He never came back. Someone else got drafted in a couple of weeks before we were due to start, before anyone had seen a finished script. He asked for one and got one, and told me later he looked at it, had no idea how it could be performed, and said as much to the director.
"We'll improvise our way through it," he was told.
Rather than try and list all the subsequent amazement of the rehearsals, here are some highlights.
- Hearing the play described as a 'Rap Opera' based loosely on the Sagas, rather than the sword-and-axe renactment I'd sort of hoped for
- On being presented with the musical score, finding out that half the four-man cast couldn't read music and that one of us couldn't really keep time
- Being told on the first day to recreate the opening scene of The Magic Flute as a basis for later improvisations. Not any old Magic Flute, either, the Ingmar Bergman film
- Being asked to set fire to full boxes of matches on the plastic-coated floor of the stage as part of an improvisation
- Reading the script, along with the writer's introduction, where he explained he'd started by taking some of the most violent bits from the saga, stripped them of any characters or descriptive narrative, and then decided that was actually all he needed to do and stopped working
- After the first week, learning that the guy designing the costumes and set was going to be doing a directing course in Oslo instead, at a point where the set and costumes had yet to be announced
- After the second week, hearing that we were going to be wearing liederhosen and performing Njal's Saga on a set suggesting German submariners
- Not seeing the director in rehearsal for more than about four hours during the first two weeks
- Realising that after those first two weeks, almost all of which had been spent working on the music, that we still couldn't sing the highly stylised and abstract score
- Never having more than about four hours sleep a night for the first four weeks, thanks to baby C back home
- Watching two of the actors actually waterboarding each other in lieu of working out blocking for a scene about violence, and then watching the director agree that this was useful work
- Being asked to attend a marketing meeting in which we were asked to produce marketing ideas, seeing as the production team didn't seem to have any
- Watching the daily changes to the rehearsal schedule, but never either sticking to the times or getting a breakdown of what we were expected to rehearse on a daily basis
- Spending three hours at home trying to learn a song which had neither notes nor text, but in which I was to raise and lower a spear (later replaced with a frying pan, later replaced by just my arm) in time to an irregular but horribly precise rhythm for five minutes, and realising I still couldn't do more than fifteen seconds of it accurately
- On the return of our costume and set guy, the announcement that the set would be a golden kitchen bench and our costumes would be just boxer shorts, because the play was now set in Valhalla
- The foodfight (which some of you might have seen on Facebook), and the three hours it took to clean congealed flour, eggs and milk off the floor afterwards with tools including coal shovels and fish slices. Because we're actors, dammit, not
bricklayersjanitors. - Once the kitchen was installed, the four-week struggle to have any of the kitchen knives properly blunted, during which we worked with them anyway
- The answer 'we'll prepare food' being used by the director as a catch-all answer for every single query on blocking, textual analysis, underlying thematic concept or request for emergency work on any scene
- Hearing that despite being nearly naked, we'd be preparing food with the working stove on the set and then feeding it to the audience in the interval, even though they'd have watched us writhing about on the hob and slapping each other with the ingredients beforehand
- After four weeks, trying to do a runthrough of the play and managing about twenty-five minutes of hideous, unperformable, unwatchable garbage, most of which consisted of marking the beginnings and ends of scenes we hadn't yet adequately rehearsed, during which one of us cut a toe on broken glass that had been left on set
- The many, many tearful and miserable arguments about what could be done to redeem this mess
- The discoveries that pay was late, or not quite what was originally advertised, or already paid out to other cast members (all since resolved properly and surprisingly amicably, it must be said)
- The astounding introduction, with two weeks until the premiere, of a second and entirely new director
- Delaying the open dress rehearsal so that the design team could finish stapling the set together
- The exit of the new director, three hours before the premiere, on being told that the now-functional piece she'd managed to salvage wasn't going to be performed on the grounds that it the production team didn't feel it was appropriate for the theatre
- Knowing that I loved the source material, but not a single recognisable scrap of it was going to be included in this play
It mostly sounds funny, reading it back. It wasn't at the time, I can assure you. Even for Fringe theatre, this was chaotic and broken in a way I've never experienced. And I've worked on some shitty gigs, let me tell you - the Hamlet with Two Hamlets, The Albuquerque Dust Storm Macbeth, the pilot episode of Man Versus Monster Truck. A four-hour George Bernard Shaw play that he never intended to be performed on stage, just read aloud to educate his Christmas guests, of whom I can only imagine there were none.
This was a new level of bedlam, the kind that leaves you dazed and doubting your own abilities to comprehend the world, as though you've just been hit by a tornado and haven't quite realised you're now four hundred miles away with a length of copper pipe transfixing your skull.
Actors are lovely people, on the whole - generous, cheerful and hardworking. They also generate drama, that's one of our functions. Put us in a calm and empty room and you'll eventually get the root of all drama, conflict. Putting four of us into an imminent catastrophe and hoping that we'd sort it all out on our own, well, that's like trying to pacify a psychotic tiger by slapping it with raw steak.
Strangely, for all the fury and horror the job brought, I now feel fairly calm and empty. There is no point in staying angry or trying to hold people to account. It would take too much energy, energy I now lack, and this isn't the right forum for it anyway. The raft collapsed, we all nearly drowned, some of us made it to various shores. Better to get on with enjoying life than dwelling on the disaster.
Today, I watched the actual premiere. It was oddly like attending my own funeral, seeing a show I'd worked on for six weeks open from the front row. It was also pretty good - strange, abstract and stark, and certainly not the same as the last time I'd seen it. Two of the original cast have stuck it out, in the end, and I have enormous respect for them. Also for the Icelandic composer, who had endured seeing his score mangled by incompetents for two months before coming back and taking over. Even a leaky raft benefits from a good helmsman, I think. See it if you're in Gothenburg and free for an evening, the cast and composer deserve your support.
As for me, I'd been questioning my staying power in terms of a career in acting even before this started. Funnily enough, though, I feel a new resolve. There's no point in stopping trying to be an actor that I can see, although I am certainly investigating other lines of income right now.
I am, however, utterly certain that my acting career cannot possibly sink any lower than this, and I shall eat not only my own hat but the entire hat section of every costume department the world over, before I ever admit to being proved wrong on this.
Excelsior!
Thursday, September 24, 2015
Top Five Top Five Lists
Things C Currently Likes
1. Sitting upright so she can see things
2. Mango paste, of the 'secretly mostly rice paste for tiny infants' variety
3. Chatting to people so long as they hold their faces 30-50 cm away
4. Her big fluffy apple rattle with the caterpillar inside, a flea market find of V's and therefore (typically) the cheapest thing we've ever bought her
5. Big sister F
Things C Currently Hates
1. Being tired
2. Being put to bed when she's tired
3. People who move away when she's chatting to them
4. The noise of daddy blowing a raspberry (new today, provoked instant tears)
5. Not being put to bed when she's tired
Things F Currently Likes
1. Tingeling. This is Swedish for Tinkerbell, if you've ever wondered. V and I must read the entire hardback book version of the Disney cartoon about said fairy every night without fail. I have come to believe that every time I do so, the psychic backwash annihilates two to three hectares of Never Never Land.
2. Daddy's ridiculous beard. "It makes you look fluffy, daddy!" Yes, that's precisely why I grew it. To increase my fluffiness. Bah.
3. Trainers. "I can run really really fast in trainers, because I'm really good at running."
4. Saturdays. Most days, F lies in bed when she wakes up at 0700, calling one of us by name repeatedly until that person cracks and runs screaming out of the flat, leaving the other parent to fix breakfast. On Saturdays, the day of the week when F gets to have sweets, she lies in bed shouting "Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!" perhaps on the grounds that then Saturday will fix her breakfast and it will consist entirely of gummi worms.
5. Little sister C. "She's puking on Daddy!"
Things F Currently Hates
1. Sauce. This is a catch-all for any kind of interference with the purity of her pasta. Plain pasta, a dash of olive oil and a touch of salt in the water when cooking, and that's fine. Or macaroni stewed in milk. Anything else will be carefully picked off each fusilli by hand before consumption, even if you try calling it gravy instead.
2. Loud noises, which is apparently one of those things that half raises a developmental red flag for midwives. C can sleep through the hoover, F can't abide it and never has. It's a slightly erratic phobia, though, I think to do with remembering being upset by deafening roadworks or unexpected DIY drilling in the middle of snoozes and how you get sympathy by holding your hands over your ears and looking sad.
3. Having her hair washed, because water sometimes gets in her eyes when you rinse. She loves baths, but starts a screaming tantrum every time we get to this stage. So far, shower caps, use of the shower head, use of an elastic head protector that looks like a rubberised choir boy's ruff, getting her to look at the ceiling, covering her eyes with a flannel, getting her to close her eyes and buying her swimming goggles have all failed to clear this hurdle. V won't let me shave her bald, either, so I don't see how we're getting round this other than with filthy hair.
4. Daddy's ridiculous beard has been trimmed. "No! I didn't want that to happen," she said tearfully on being presented with something actually resembling a human face rather than a lot of brown water weed in a strong current. And it's true, I'd been telling her it was going to happen for over a week and she kept telling me not to.
5. The end of Saturdays. "It's not the end of Saturday yet," she says anxiously every so often during Saturday, one hand protectively clutching her sweet tin. And then she weeps inconsolably when it's bed time and the beloved day is done. Dentists are going to love her when she's older.
The Best Things About Njal's Saga, the Viking Play I've Been Working On
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
More on that ominous silence soon...
1. Sitting upright so she can see things
2. Mango paste, of the 'secretly mostly rice paste for tiny infants' variety
3. Chatting to people so long as they hold their faces 30-50 cm away
4. Her big fluffy apple rattle with the caterpillar inside, a flea market find of V's and therefore (typically) the cheapest thing we've ever bought her
5. Big sister F
Things C Currently Hates
1. Being tired
2. Being put to bed when she's tired
3. People who move away when she's chatting to them
4. The noise of daddy blowing a raspberry (new today, provoked instant tears)
5. Not being put to bed when she's tired
Things F Currently Likes
1. Tingeling. This is Swedish for Tinkerbell, if you've ever wondered. V and I must read the entire hardback book version of the Disney cartoon about said fairy every night without fail. I have come to believe that every time I do so, the psychic backwash annihilates two to three hectares of Never Never Land.
2. Daddy's ridiculous beard. "It makes you look fluffy, daddy!" Yes, that's precisely why I grew it. To increase my fluffiness. Bah.
3. Trainers. "I can run really really fast in trainers, because I'm really good at running."
4. Saturdays. Most days, F lies in bed when she wakes up at 0700, calling one of us by name repeatedly until that person cracks and runs screaming out of the flat, leaving the other parent to fix breakfast. On Saturdays, the day of the week when F gets to have sweets, she lies in bed shouting "Saturday! Saturday! Saturday!" perhaps on the grounds that then Saturday will fix her breakfast and it will consist entirely of gummi worms.
5. Little sister C. "She's puking on Daddy!"
Things F Currently Hates
1. Sauce. This is a catch-all for any kind of interference with the purity of her pasta. Plain pasta, a dash of olive oil and a touch of salt in the water when cooking, and that's fine. Or macaroni stewed in milk. Anything else will be carefully picked off each fusilli by hand before consumption, even if you try calling it gravy instead.
2. Loud noises, which is apparently one of those things that half raises a developmental red flag for midwives. C can sleep through the hoover, F can't abide it and never has. It's a slightly erratic phobia, though, I think to do with remembering being upset by deafening roadworks or unexpected DIY drilling in the middle of snoozes and how you get sympathy by holding your hands over your ears and looking sad.
3. Having her hair washed, because water sometimes gets in her eyes when you rinse. She loves baths, but starts a screaming tantrum every time we get to this stage. So far, shower caps, use of the shower head, use of an elastic head protector that looks like a rubberised choir boy's ruff, getting her to look at the ceiling, covering her eyes with a flannel, getting her to close her eyes and buying her swimming goggles have all failed to clear this hurdle. V won't let me shave her bald, either, so I don't see how we're getting round this other than with filthy hair.
4. Daddy's ridiculous beard has been trimmed. "No! I didn't want that to happen," she said tearfully on being presented with something actually resembling a human face rather than a lot of brown water weed in a strong current. And it's true, I'd been telling her it was going to happen for over a week and she kept telling me not to.
5. The end of Saturdays. "It's not the end of Saturday yet," she says anxiously every so often during Saturday, one hand protectively clutching her sweet tin. And then she weeps inconsolably when it's bed time and the beloved day is done. Dentists are going to love her when she's older.
The Best Things About Njal's Saga, the Viking Play I've Been Working On
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
More on that ominous silence soon...
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