O frabjous day!...

‘Callooh! Callay!’ I chortle in my joy!

Skylight is done and my life is, for a short time at least, once again my own. I will very soon be back at the theatre as I’m an assistant stage-manager on the theatre’s upcoming Christmas production of Darker Shores, but for now at least I have a few days off.

I can forget the reams and reams of lines I’ve been holding in my head for the past forever – not as easy a task as you might imagine as they are still assaulting me in my near-sleep, near-waking moments and will do so for a week or so yet I should imagine – and I can sweep the unhappy last few months under the dusty rug of things best forgotten.

I am however, a glass-half-full sort of gal, so have thought long and hard on what I can take away from the experience that is useful, and my overall umbrella realisation is that I now know exactly what not to do when Jak and I direct Irma V next year. A bit of a negative positive to be sure, but a positive nonetheless.

Despite the unfortunate rehearsal process, the run itself was a great success, excluding one performance where I dried so faked a crying fit to cover it up, and another where my opposite number dried, couldn’t hear the prompt, and I rewrote David Hare for a while in order to help him back to the script – in fact, even those two performances with their minor disasters were still good. We had some terrific feedback from audience members, not the least of which was how we’d managed to learn all the lines in the first place, and on from that, how did I manage to cook whilst remembering lines? To both these questions my answer was, and still is – I have no freaking idea!

The added bonus to the play being over, finito, done, dusted and heartily kicked to the kerb, is that my face is no longer displayed giant-size on the poster boards outside the theatre. No-one needs their head that big – literally, metaphorically or photographically.

...and so, her sigh of relief could be heard far and wide, whirling amongst the trees and skyscrapers and issuing forth across oceans and streams, and her smile, which had for a time become a stranger, once again made its home on her face.

Love this poem!

Listen by Charles Bukowski

If it doesn’t come bursting out of you
in spite of everything,
don’t do it.
Unless it comes unasked out of your
heart and your mind and your mouth
and your gut,
don’t do it.
If you have to sit for hours
staring at your computer screen
or hunched over your
typewriter
searching for words,
don’t do it.
If you’re doing it for money or
fame,
don’t do it.
If you’re doing it because you want
women in your bed,
don’t do it.
If you have to sit there and
rewrite it again and again,
don’t do it.
If it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,
don’t do it.
If you’re trying to write like somebody
else,
forget about it.

If you have to wait for it to roar out of
you,
then wait patiently.
If it never does roar out of you,
do something else.

If you first have to read it to your wife
or your girlfriend or your boyfriend
or your parents or to anybody at all,
you’re not ready.

Don’t be like so many writers,
don’t be like so many thousands of
people who call themselves writers,
don’t be dull and boring and
pretentious, don’t be consumed with self-love.
The libraries of the world have
yawned themselves to
sleep
over your kind.
Don’t add to that.
Don’t do it.
Unless it comes out of
your soul like a rocket,
unless being still would
drive you to madness or
suicide or murder,
don’t do it.
Unless the sun inside you is
burning your gut,
don’t do it.

When it is truly time,
and if you have been chosen,
it will do it by
itself and it will keep on doing it
until you die or it dies in you.

There is no other way.

And there never was.