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We had one of our added extra shows today, a Sunday matinee. Adrenaline post show has meant it's hard to get to sleep and Ernie still wakes up at 6am, so I've had about 10 hours sleep in the last two nights and was worried that my brain might be a bit fuggy.
It was a fairly solid show though, although I feel we lost a bit of energy at the end of the long first half. The second half was the best we've done it though and the audience seemed to get caught up in the emotion of it all. I was the most teary I have been so far.
Predictably, as is usual with second shows, it generally didn't feel quite as heightened and exciting as the first, but we're relaxing much more and trusting ourselves to know the words and we only made a couple of minor errors today.
A few friends have made it along for shows, including the daughter of the author today, who is a friend of Anna's and my old pal Mackay who played the Professor in Time Gentlemen Please. We also almost killed him back in the 90s when he was the character who was mixing the pie together in a huge vat in the Shrewsbury Pie Pie sketch (if I remember correctly it was very cold in there and he nearly got hypothermia).
Mackay is now a teacher and told me that every now and again one of the pupils realises he's the guy from Time Gentleman Please and then the news spreads round the school, only to be forgotten as each student year moves on, until someone else makes the connection. I've known him since we appeared in a production of the Alchemist together back in about 1987. In the accompanying article, Cherwell got my name wrong (as they always seemed to do) and not for the last time there was confusion over who was Lee and who was Herring.
As the conman in the alchemist I played him playing a whole host of different characters at a time when I think I could actually do accents quite well. Now I can't do them at all. What happened? Was I just doing them badly then and didn't realise, did I decide to make a joke about not being able to do accents and then the joke became real? I am really confused about how I went from this young kid, who was so confident about his abilities and willing to throw myself into things (and show his arse) to this old man who thinks he can't do anything except show his arse. I wonder if like Paul McCartney I was replaced by a lookalike. There are clues in my work if you look for them.
That show began with me showing my arse and I also had to snog Emma Kennedy (then Williams) which was an horrific experience for us both. I also had to kiss another of the actors, who I typically fell in love with and who typically didn't fall in love with me. I asked her out and she sweetly told me she had a boyfriend. I think she might have liked me as well though. Probably too late to do anything about it now. I can't even remember her name now. I am so fickle.
Mackay (who I've never kissed and anyone who says I have is lying) and his partner Cait and I discussed how intense all those experiences were and how it's almost impossible to believe they were basically four decades ago. I suppose that will be the subject of conversation most of the times I meet up with old friends now.
