Blowing Away Some Cobwebs (With a Box of Matches and a Stick of Dynamite)

Blowing Away Some Cobwebs (With a Box of Matches and a Stick of Dynamite): Whoa.

Is… Is this a… a blog of some sort?

Like… you know, one of those things that I’m supposed to write entries for on a semi-regular basis or something?

Nah, I haven’t written anything on it for ages, it can’t be…

Ok, so I’m sorry. I apologise. I’ve been very, very bad with updates recently. As in, there haven’t been any. Oops.

I’ve been a bit preoccupied with various different things that I will explain in a moment – but also, this is really a blog about drama school auditions, and so the summer was kinda difficult to write anything about, because, you know, there weren’t any auditions happening…

BUT IT’S OK!!! DON’T KILL YOUR PETS/COLLEAGUES/LOVED ONES JUST YET!!! I’M BACK AND I’M WRITING ANOTHER POST AND IT’S ALL GONNA BE OK, OK?!?!?!?!?

…

Right. So what’s been going on? Well, as you might recall from my last post, I was in the Olympic Games Opening Ceremony in July, which was AWESOME, partly due to the fact that I managed to pinpoint myself on the iPlayer repeat and realised that at one point I’d been standing about two metres away from Kenneth Branagh without even realising it (though only I could tell that it was me – they obviously wouldn’t want anybody watching the live broadcast to actually see my face, would they…). But yes, that was brilliant, and after a spending a LOT of hours during rehearsals standing around eating Pringles in the rain (such is the nature of these big arena shows, it seems), it was all worth it in the end when I saw 80,000 people in that stadium looking down on us, cheering and applauding, which was one of the best feelings of my entire life.

Now, as you might also recall from my last post (though it has been a while, so I don’t blame you if you don’t…) I’m currently touring round primary schools in Scotland performing as Bilbo Baggins in a 50-minute, 4-man version of The Hobbit, complete with life-size puppet dragon. As I write this, I am sitting in a slightly gloomy Scottish B&B, ready to go to bed as I prepare for another week of getting up at 6am every day to drive round various different parts of Scotland, ready to assemble the set for, perform in, and strike our show, two or three times per day, in-between eating baked bean sandwiches whilst sitting on the slightly mouldy back seat of our minibus as we navigate the hostile Scottish elements en route to our next audience of underwhelmed nine-year-old kids.

Or not.

I didn’t get cold feet. Honest. It was more a case of… warm… hands…

No, that doesn’t sound quite right…

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to do the job (though I must admit, early mornings never really did agree with me) – it’s just, I found something… well… a little bit better.

By chance, I was on the Globe Theatre website, looking for a job as an usher, when I stumbled across a section entitled “Jobs and Opportunities”; tucked away there, I found the application form for a year-long paid internship in the Education Department of the Globe, helping to run their ‘Lively Action’ Programme (when kids of all different ages from schools around the world visit the Globe to take part in various tours and workshops).

A year’s not-too-soul-destroyingly-badly-paid employment at a world-famous theatre on the beautiful South Bank, with all those theatre-y people swanning about the place all day long… What a great way to fill my unexpected second gap year (and a great thing to say I’d been doing in my drama school interviews!). And so, with the knowledge that when the primary schools tour finished I would yet again be at a loose end afterwards nagging away at the back of my mind (plus the thought of those 6am starts…), I applied.

One lengthy application form and two even lengthier interviews later, and I received a phone call telling me that I’d got the job and that I’d be starting on 20^th August.

I’ve been told that my sigh of relief was heard by Maori tribespeople in New Zealand.

So, taking the coward’s way out and choosing to email my unsuspecting primary schools tours employer instead of phoning them (though I did give them about a month’s notice, which is pretty reasonable in my opinion), I found myself looking forward to another year in London and another year of auditions (oh, joy!...).

And so, that just about brings us up to about where we are now. But just to fill in the cracks of what I’ve been doing during my unforgivable absence, here are a few other bits and bobs that have been keeping me occupied:

·       A fabulous trip to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in August (keywords: sunshine, laughs, alcohol – and a little bit of theatre…)

·       A rain-swept family holiday in Cornwall (in which a bodyboarding incident could have cost me my face, but instead just cost me my dignity)

·       The commencement of a guitarist/singer partnership with a friend of mine

·       Visits to the gym along with a fairly regimented eating regime to get in shape for drama school auditions (I felt like putting my mind to something like this would mentally strengthen me up a bit for the auditions – and hopefully give me a bit more of a physical presence, too!)

·       And last but most certainly not least, obligatory drunken evenings with my friends at the pub as they all head off back to university, to leave me, once again, alone, reclusive, and friendless (ok – partly joking there…)

So there you have it. I’m here. I’m back.

And I’ll be trying to keep up posting here a bit more regularly than I have been (if I can’t beat once in five months then that’s a pretty poor effort!). Until then, you will probably find me fending off angry German teachers (there seem to be a lot of them) in the main foyer of the Globe Theatre as I try to explain to them that they unfortunately can’t actually meet Shakespeare today, because he’s a bit busy/dead.

Alternatively, you might see me painstakingly, soul-destroyingly trawling through quite literally tonnes of plays in the National Theatre Bookshop as I try to find a modern monologue that I actually like, to use for my auditions. I think the staff there recognise me now. Hell, I probably see more of them than my family, the way I’m going at the moment…

Anyway, thanks for reading; I’ll let you know how I’m getting on with everything soon enough, don’t worry. And lastly, to the four people that checked this blog today, even though I hadn’t posted anything for almost half a year – I salute you!

P.S. In the first draft of this, the bullet point section went really weird... I've fixed it now but yeah, if you were wondering what all those random characters were, sorry about that - it wasn't me just smashing my forehead on the keyboard, I swear!...