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“Tea, Sympathy, and a Fun-Size Mars Bar”

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When I’m in rehearsals with my director’s hat on, my job is simple: create a space where actors can be their best. They’ll do it differently to me—sometimes wildly differently—but that’s the joy. There’s no point in giving line readings or barking orders. I can offer tips, I can validate, I can occasionally mutter, “Perhaps try it without the limp this time,” but above all, I need to let them flourish. I have a single rule: I never ask actors to do anything I wouldn’t do myself. Which means trapeze, horseback, and bicycles are all out. I’ve attempted at least one of those in the past, and the less said the better. (Picture me in a harness, dangling like an apologetic ham, and you’ll get the idea.) It struck me recently that this is the same in the workplace. If you’re a leader in a company, you’re asking your staff to perform. But here’s the test: would you, yourself, do what you’re asking of them? This thought crystallised during my recent excursion into the seventh circle of he...
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The Waiting Game

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Most people, if they’re lucky, only do three or four job interviews in their life. A couple of shifts here, a rung or two up the ladder there, and before you know it you’re in a swivel chair with a pension scheme and a lanyard. Lovely. For actors, it’s different. We do them all the time. Weekly, sometimes daily. Except we don’t call them interviews. We call them auditions. These days, that often means a self-tape — two syllables that strike more fear into the average actor than “tax return”. Picture the scene: you, in front of the only bit of white wall in your flat that isn’t cracked, crooked or adorned with a poster of Les Mis. You’re trying to summon the emotions of a broken man while balancing your phone on a stack of cookbooks and praying the neighbour’s dog doesn’t start yapping during your big moment. You send it off, you wait, you hear nothing. Then weeks later you’re watching telly with a digestive and a cuppa when there it is — the very job you auditioned for, being play...
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Tick

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In my grandparents’ shop in the Soviet Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, debt wasn’t so much a matter of money as a sort of permanent fixture — like the weighing scales or the flypaper. Nobody thought of it as debt. It was just “tick,” and everybody had some. The shop was the beating heart of the village, and part of that was letting people have things on trust until Friday. Mrs Whittaker, say, popping in for her twenty Park Drive, would be told by my mother — or my grandmother, depending on whose turn it was — “Oh, and there’s six and seven on your slate.” If Mrs Whittaker paid up, fine. If she didn’t, my mother would sigh in the manner of someone taking on an additional personal bereavement and say, “All right, love. But I will be putting your name in the window.” I never recall her actually doing it, though the possibility was enough to keep the village in a state of mild moral vigilance. In a mining community where everybody knew everybody’s business — and some of their unde...
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On the Importance of Accounting for Oneself

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When I left the Soviet Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire at eighteen — tender, earnest and armed with a suitcase full of ambition and socks — I went to Manchester to study drama. Three years of Chekhov, Gorky, tragedy, comedy, and the occasional play that wasn’t an act of national endurance. I thought I was embarking on a life of art. I didn’t realise I was also embarking on a life of accounts. Yet here I am, decades later, still keeping ledgers. Not metaphorical ones — actual, black-and-red, hard-backed ledgers. Bought annually, with all the quiet ceremony of a religious observance, from the sort of stationer that also sells brown string and those pens you have to lick. We had a marvellous tutor at drama school called John McGregor — an actor who’d once played Cornwall in Lear and had the receipts to prove it. He taught us on Friday mornings, not about Ibsen or inner truth, but about the tax-deductible nature of fake beards. It was John who first explained that keeping track of ...
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British Airways: A Masterclass in Mediocrity

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We’ve just returned from holiday. And if you asked whether I’d go away again tomorrow, I’d say yes—not for sun or sea or spiritual replenishment, but because I’d need another holiday to recover from the one just gone. Not the destination. Madeira was, in a word, sublime. Mountains above clouds, sunsets like oil paintings, a sort of dignified warmth that didn’t singe the scalp. Even the famous wicker toboggan ride—lunacy in a linen hat—was delightful. No, the trouble wasn’t the island. It was the journey. And by “the journey,” I mean British Airways. Though if we’re being honest, British Airways has become more of a concept than a company—a sort of floating rumour of service with the occasional aircraft attached. We stayed overnight at Gatwick. Business class—our little indulgence. Not for the champagne, but in the faint hope someone might actually answer a question. At 6.25pm we arrived, to find a queue that could only be described as biblical. If Moses had parted these people, he’d...
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We're All Going On A Summer Holiday

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It’s that time again: the holiday. Or a holiday, I should say. I hesitate to make it sound more momentous than it is. Holidays for me have never been great set-piece events, carefully rationed out in annual quotas, as they are for most respectable people. I’ve always taken the view that if an opportunity for a few days away presents itself, it should be grabbed — like a reduced pork pie on a supermarket counter. That said, my partner Brayden has a proper job. You know, emails, policies, and somebody called Deborah in HR who approves his holiday requests. So we can’t just swan off as and when. We have to pick our moment, like a vicar choosing his text. This year, aside from a quick week in New York which barely counts — more an exercise in walking and ordering coffee wrong — we’ve not been away. So we’re off next Saturday. Madeira. Now, Madeira — if I’m being honest — has always existed for me primarily as a punchline in Up Pompeii — that wonderful seventies sitcom where Frankie Hower...
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Fear No More the Heat of the Sun

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Fear No More the Heat of the Sun (Cymbeline Act IV sc2) Living on a boat, as we do, you become rather more aware of the weather than your average house-dweller. They check an app and think “Showers. I’ll wear my cagoule.” We, meanwhile, live it. We hear it. We occasionally have to mop it up with an old towel and a resigned expression. In winter, we go full cosy. There’s the reliable hum of central heating, the cheer of a decent wood-burner, and the comforting percussion of rain on a cambered roof. It’s like living inside one of those nostalgic Channel 5 Christmas films—only without the snow budget or the Canadian actors pretending to be British. There’s a smugness in being warm when the world outside looks like a scene from Chernobyl: The Musical. But come spring, we begin to crave the change. A proper sunny day—deck doors open, light pouring in, shirtsleeves and sunglasses at 6pm—feels like reward for good behaviour. Recently, we’ve had a string of such days. The kind of late s...
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