Fighting the fatigue

OK - I am feeling my age here! I was on campus from 3.00 to 11.15 yesterday - I'm so glad I don't have to work at a job as well...

The Steig Larsson event went well - room packed, and they seemed interested in what I had to say. All the technical stuff worked, and I even remembered to take the thumb-drive out of the machine at the end...

Of course, as usual there were people in the audience who I recognised but could not place or name - especially embarrassing as one of them came up to me at the end to ask if I had got the email she sent me. A frantic working of the brain and 'yes' - you are the lady with the lovely house where we sometimes go for parties, and you sent us an invitation to another party soon, but I'll have to wait to see if I'm free that night because....

We had dinner with Mike, with whom I taught last term, and then off to merry old rehearsals. We did what the director calls 'table work' for quite a while: this means we sat, read the scene, then went through talking about what each speech meant. 'Table work' could be a standard term in theatre for all I know - I have never taken a theatre class, so I don't even know the names of the curtains, so I'm trying to pick this all up as we go along. We have tremendous support: one person works exclusively on textual issues, another chart moves and gestures. Barry (Lear) was not called last night, so I fielded questions about pronunciation and meaning, many of which were really intriguing. We came across some of those words which may have been invented by Shakespeare but which never caught on - who ever uses the word 'cullionly'? (OK, I haven't looked it up and it may not be a Shakespeare invention, and many people may use it ever day - what do I know?)

We got rather hung up on the very beginning of Act Two, and I suspect that will really come together only after the fight captain works on it (she starts with us tonight, and I could be blinded by Friday evening...). So we made rather slower progress than we expected. I'll need to spend some time today firming up what we did last night, before a photo call at 6.30. I now have a schedule for the rest of the week - 7 to 11 every night, plus Sunday afternoon. This is theatre! This is theatre? 

I had a nightmare in which I overheard some of the members of the cast complaining about how boring I was, and how my stories were tedious... come on Freud, what is that about?