claytoncast

This week I am blogging from the comfort of my in laws sofa down here in Exmouth. A few days respite from London, and today, Sunday, a bit of nice weather too. I do love having weeks when I get days at home in order to catch up. Too many and I get bored but just enough and I feel in control of my life. The last week gave me three good half days at home to potter, answer e mails and achieve small victories on the domestic front that gave me an inner satisfaction. Top that off with a weekend away, even if it did take a six hour drive through torrential rain to get here, and it’s a nice Sunday feeling. More theatre last week. The divine Harriet Thorpe in “Crazy For You” in a damp yet still magical Regents Park, and “Mack and Mabel” at the Greenwich theatre presented by The Company - a peripatetic outfit of young people who come together each summer with professionals to do a musical. Choreographed by my good friend and very talented boy, Lee Crowley, it was a good stab at what is a dif...

 The last time I was at the Edinburgh Festival was 21 years ago. I was only there for a week and I spent the evenings wearing Victorian female dress.  I was doing a show, although it is by no means essential to be appearing in a theatre to don strange garb during the month of August in Edinburgh. As regular readers of my blog will know this year I've had the joy of directing “Wedding Band" a play by the comedian Charlie Baker.  I paid a very quick visit to Edinburgh at the beginning of the month in order to get the play on, but this weekend Richard and I had the joy of returning for a weekend at the festival to see the play and lots of other things besides. A hugely enjoyable time. Arriving on Friday evening around 8 o'clock we dumped our bags at the hotel (a quick phone call to reception  got us a much better room than the one they bundled us into on the 4th floor to begin with) and we were off. 1st stop was the Gilded balloon, in the same venue that my own show i...

There are some weeks when I sit down  in front of my computer and try to decide what to write in my blog when the news, both national and personal, might seem a little light. Indeed Richard made this the subject of his blog only last week “The silly season" - that time of year when new stories are very thin on the ground and we have to result to featuring Paul Daniels and Sooty in news bulletins.  It seemed that several thousand other people thought that the  summer lacked news interest, though I doubt whether that was the real reason that they took to the streets with such vehement force to commit such appalling acts of criminality as we saw in areas of the country earlier this week. I'm not going into my thoughts on this. I am known for sometimes being slightly to the right of Attila the Hun and I was appalled at what I saw on the television. The nearest it came to us here in leafy Sydenham  were a couple of youths throwing a stop and go sign from some roadworks ...

So this week we finally made it up to Edinburgh.  After 8 days of rehearsal in the rural idylls of Oxfordshire  we all headed up to Edinburgh and met up at our venue the Gilded balloon at 11 PM on Tuesday night ready to do a late-night technical and dress rehearsal. I haven't been up to the festival for 21 years and the atmosphere as I wandered round on a damp Tuesday was heady and exciting. It's a great thing to be part of. “Wedding Band" opened on Wednesday afternoon to a small but appreciative audience and judging from the tweets I've had from the cast since then it's been going from strength to strength. I'm really looking forward to the weekend up there with Rich in 2 weeks time to see it again and to catch the other 6 shows that we booked for. There was a whole load of news on the Internet on Friday about the arrival of Frank's parents in Coronation Street. Gwen Taylor and I still don't really have any idea of how long we're doing, but it...