In which I am put into the Jumble Bag

Sunday 14th October

Okay, here we go. This week is where the real fun begins.

Up at 5.30 and in the car just after 6 to drive up to the Historic Market Town of Much Wenlock in Shropshire, home of Seagull Theatre. We have this week only to rehearse up the first of three new productions which will go into the rep this term, and this means that I'll be up and down the M40 like a rat on Romford High Street.

In Much Wenlock live Sian and Margo, the owners and Co-directors of Seagull Theatre, although Margo, now in her sixties and less active than she was, is taking more of a back seat, while Sian is out on the road doing more than she did when they were running three teams of actors. First stop for me then was the cottage, which the Seagals now share and which is also base of operations for the company. Then on to the village hall in Cressage, which we use for rehearsals and where most of the company's actual hardware (sets, props, costumes and electrics) is stored.

The first new production, entitled Jumble Bag is actually a very simple show - as always, the complicated bit doesn't come until we get into schools and have our supporting cast of childs to factor in. So today was largely about the two of us just getting the feel and shape of the play, putting in some very basic blocking for ourselves (which very often goes to shit as soon as we have the supporting cast anyway) and trying to remember lines. Typically for Seagull, it's a play that doesn't pull any punches, telling as it does the story of a group of refugee children escaping from their village as it's taken by an invading army, and ending up in a refugee camp where one of them is suffering from the trauma of losing her younger brother on the way, and will only talk to a teddy bear (who luckily can talk back, so that's something at least). Despite this apparent bleakness and misery, it also manages to be quite jolly in places. Honestly.

As we have a show in Maidenhead tomorrow, we packed up at five and drove back down to London in the van, where I dropped Sian at Heathrow Travelodge, then went home and allowwed Brian to persuaded to go round to the local for beer. We used to be enormously fond of our local when it was an unremarkable crap pub, full of the same gnarled old Irish people on any given night, but where we knew all the staff and they often stayed open late and let us in even if we polled up just before midnight. Tonight was the first time I've set foot in there since it's suffered a garish makeover and been turned into a hideous blond-wood, red-wall rodeo diner monstrosity, losing it's entire cast of regulars, old staff and warm crap-pub homeliness in one fell swoop. Well, good luck to them. We ended up staying for four pints, which was foolish but necessary since I've just read the first draft of Brian's most recent play and had to grill him about it. And to have a proper discussion about artistic endeavour requires beer. We all know that. I'm happy to say it's shaping up to be a very good play - without giving too much away, it's about a stalker stalking someone who looks a bit like a celebrity, and has its genesis in my having been mistaken for David Tennant on a number of occasions (though to my knowledge, I haven't yet been stalked, unless its by a very skilled stalker who I am as yet unaware of). When the play is put on, I hope to have a mention in the programme notes.