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History ensemble member Nick Asbury on extra weight and the prospect of unemployment...
Dead weight
Rehearsing fights this morning, Juliette, one of our Stage Management, brought in a set of scales and had to weigh everyone who enters on the metal bridge which gets flown in at various intervals throughout these eight shows.
 Just in case there's been any massive weight changes which will put the bridge out of kilter. The cheek! This made Michael start musing about how an opportunity was missed on measuring the differences in us from the start to the end of the project. Measuring our weight, our right arms from lifting a sword and rope climbing, our legs from the weight of all those costumes, our hippo campus which carries the weight of all our words we keep in our heads. Our sense of time would be an interesting measurement too. One of the fights to rehearse was the Somerset/Richard fight in Henry VI Part II. It's always been a problem because we've wanted to tell a clear story with it in the sense that the fight shifts so that Somerset ends up winning and then through Richard's cunning - i.e. grabbing Somerset's dagger which is in a holster on his breastplate and stabbing Somerset with it once Richard appears beaten - he wins the fight and kills Somerset in a really nasty horrible way. We've shifted it around a bit now and made sure that the knife can really be seen by the audience. I still get to cough and spit blood all over Jon's face so it's still very gratifying. So a fight which Jon and I rehearsed first in April 2006 is still changing, living, breathing and refined. Time is not an obstacle and it should never let us become jaded with the passage of it.
One of the many very strange things about this extraordinary job is the way time shifts not like any other job. For most actors, to be told you were doing a four month job with many performances in Stratford and then transferring to London to the Roundhouse for two months, which is what we are now faced with, they would bite your hand off in accepting it. Such is the nature of this job, because it is so long, that the icy hand of unemployment and the search for work has begun to finger our collar even though we still have a long and very hard working way to go. I spoke to my agent for the first time in a year and a half the other day. What happens next? How am I going to earn some money? Make a living? For so long, we have had the wonderful privilege of living and earning and working and it feels strange to have to think about returning to that default position of the actor - the insecurity, the terror, the letter from the bank, the rejection. And also the joy, the acceptance, the chance to lead a different life, the chance to scream. The whole roller coaster gamut of experience that is being an actor. For the first time I find myself thinking of it even though we have a long, but comparatively short, way to go. And it fair makes me shrivel up inside.
But we have time. To quote Dylan Thomas: "Listen. Time passes." And it's my birthday tomorrow so time can pass away. Another year notched on the sickle and another year to LOOK FORWARD TO! And who knows, I might get a job after this. Stranger things have happened. At least I could say that my hippocampus is extremely large.
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Watch extracts from the Histories
 View scenes from Henry V and behind the scenes in rehearsals.
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Latest blog posts
- Listen. Time passes. Listen.
- I feel alive
- Things happen to you
- Sleeping on ladders
- Battle of Barnet
- Buckets of blood
- Hamming
- Three and a half weeks
- Letting go
- Unforgettable
- Lighting grids
- A new stage
- Gloriously
- The men in black
- Really listening
- Making history
- Happy birthday!
- Bleeeuurghhh!
- Dead weight
- Card sharks
- Tomorrow I scalded myself with tea
- You stink
- Turning to slush
- The threshold point
- Holidays!
- All change
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- Corpsing
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About blogger Nick
Likes: Cricket and music. Fields and dark pubs with no music
Dislikes: Lager, crowded streets and light bars with music |
