Fear and loathing in my head: doing what you like, saying what you think

Friday 12 April

Day two in the perfect breakfastariam means that we are both very happy and relaxed.... except for me. I am not relaxed and only mildly content: we are about to do a lecture to a group of students. We are up against a rather successful and well-known theatrical practitioner who will be doing his thang in the theatre auditorium; we will be in a much smaller lecture theatre..... thank the gods in whom I do not believe, all of them.

I have been bothering Bartelt for some kind of structure for our lecture, for which I constructed a title with Anna our wonderful producer, while Bartelt was in Namibia seven weeks - and a lifetime - ago. He basically titters and refuses to discuss even the idea of discussing what we might say, or even the structure of what we might say, in advance. He is infuriating. He cares not about my nerves or my need to prepare, he does not want to, it would be foolhardy for him to do so: he will work off the cuff and the energy of the room and the people therein. And so I am awake and tense, as if I have not revised for my exams because I hung out with my brilliant mate who did not *need* to revise for his exams. It's a bit like my recurring dream of realising that today is the day a show I did not know I was in goes up, that I have not learnt my lines, and I have to step out into the blinding light and fail in front of an audience, letting down friends and colleagues alike.

Argh.

I have to play a part which we play all the time in our lives: the part of the person who knows what they are doing. And I am, today, the person who gives lectures to young people about making campaigning theatre, or autobiographical theatre, or whatever it was Anna and I agreed.

Some students come to our lecture theatre, quite a few, predominantly girls. And I start talking. Luckily, I am a consummate talker. And Barty talks to. And the students laugh, because we're funny, okay? And then they ask questions which we attempt to answer.... as if we're in any position to answer any questions. We can't even answer the everyday questions, like what will your next show be, how we are going to pay the bills next month, which continent does Bartelt want to live on? Somehow though the questions they ask, about death, acting, writing, are easier than those.

Afterwards several girls gather around me and I give my barnstorming speech: I tell them not to waste their time worrying if they or their work are good enough, I say that's one of the reasons men still run the world, I tell them I have been enormously privileged and have spent far too much time wondering if I ought do this or that, Just Blinking Do It, I say: do not waste what my generation have wasted, what the next generation are currently wasting, just do it*.

They like me. Of course they do: they don't know me. One asks if it's okay to write an assignment on me. I hold back my disbelief and say of course she can, and that she does not have to ask my permission to do so. She asks if she an send it to me. I say of course she can, I'd be delighted, at which moment I realise the acting that began the lecture has totally vanished and I'm just little old me talking to little old her and feeling so flattered I am almost certainly floating a few centimetres above the ground.

Finishing up the day is sad, saying goodbye is hard, driving out of the school past the friendliest gate staff ever is ridiculous. We have arranged to meet some of the other performers in the pub, the meeting room of choice amongst so many actors, and we have a gas. Our hitchhiker is there, our hitchhiker who had the previous day told me he'd not come to our show because he couldn't be bothered to get out of bed. And I kind of admire him - I hadn't even asked him if he'd seen it, he'd just volunteered the information. I am so aware, as an actor, that I need all the contacts I can get I regularly go to shows I suspect I won't like just to see whom I might meet or whose work I might encounter. And not only am I impressed by the fact that he didn't come, but it's quite something that he goes on to tell me that he didn't come because he couldn't be bothered. He didn't have to tell me, but he did. I suspect that in the pub that night, while we were getting along very nicely with the others there, he was liking me and Barty less and less.... though I could be wrong.

And he is almost certainly right to do so. Sometimes people just don't like us, especially as a double-act, and I think they've got a massively valid point. Sometimes I don't like us much either, sometimes especially Barty but mostly especially me.

*Of course, I still do not manage innumerable things: I am racked by guilt and self-loathing and doubt about my creative voice, my right to even show my writing to someone else, let alone put it on in front of anyone else, but I'm not going to mention that to these pearls, forming as they are, and full of potential.