Bricking it like a house of bricks

I am sitting in the Fringe press office in the denim hat I got in the same skewed sales logic of “but it’s 70% off!” that got me a pair of cripplingly small silk shoes, and a bald wig. Wearing the bald wig has turned the cute hat into a Children’s Ward cliché. On the machine next to me here’s an elderly monk with Ming The Merciless eyebrows and a katana case strapped to his back. Nobody bats an eyelid, I rather want to grab his ankles and pledge him my troth.

The rest of the cast trooped up yesterday and took the news of our new and minimalist stage pretty well. We had a run-through in one of the spare playrooms lying around our gargantuan house – this one could have easily housed a Church hall – at which point it materialised that, while we were all dodgy on lines, one cast member was vomiting memory loss in hysteria-causing spades.

Charlotte quietly banished him to learn his lines upstairs. Marco, the cast adult, came back to announce even more quietly that when asked how many lines he actually knew, he reckoned “Um, about 30%?”

Ideas involving lines written on clipboards were bandied about. We ran through as much as we could, then Charlotte took her other cast off to the Baby Belly to have their tech. They got back at 2.30 this morning.

We ran through Wit at 9 this morning. Charlotte and Katie, who’s in both plays, are still somehow conscious. The cast member had miraculously learned all his lines and was absolutely brilliant.

I tried on my bald cap last night. These are not fun to do on your own and require a lot of cutting down before they stop looking like a gimp sock. Last time I had one I had significantly more hair. This time, I chopped it off beforehand, expensively. There was still too much, so I grabbed the kitchen scissors I’d used for chopping up plastic and cut a few chunks out, less expensively. I can’t see what it looks like at the back which is probably wise, but the effect from the front is something that a trust-fund hipster would probably fork out £100 for at Taylor Taylor. It’s DIY, bitches.

After my Royal Tenenbaums moment I went to bed and read children’s books and tried not to die of panic in my sleep.

It’s now about 90 minutes til the first show. I know it’s only a fucking play, but I’ve never had stage fright in my life, and right now I’m rather wishing I’d had practise because I am absolutely terrified.