ECHO 23/2/06

One Day’s Preoccupations:

Mangy-tailed fox, beautiful face, crosses the road 8am on the Pepys Estate heading into the giant warehouse opposite; she waits on the pavement in full view, fearless, watching the buses pull up at the stop and commuters climbing aboard – a discarded morsel has her eye and she will wait until she can slink over and retrieve it –
Natural mystic – on the tube she reads a print out about the Gospels, a call to hear them, and with a yellow highlighter pen she marks: Luke – on the front page of the dailies the image of a bombed Shi-ite shrine in Sammara, Iraq signals civil war – millenarian times –
The Itinerant – freedom at the expense of security – heading for another crossroads with dust of the road behind –
Buster Keaton, Harry Caul (The Conversation), Adrian Monk – outsiders trying to be understood, reaching out in their individual ways only to be thwarted in their attempts –
Teodoro, the character I’m playing at the moment, is the same – something protected inside which at the same time he is desperate to have cracked open and revealed –
My father’s health, my mother’s ability to cope in the long term and the geographic distance I am from them – I wonder if I shouldn’t move to Italy for a little while after the job in London, help them out, look after them both? –
Snow comes, acute –
I don’t want to use any old tricks in the production, in playing Teodoro; don’t want to rely on repeating anything easily accomplished –
I wonder who Rebecca was – her name is on a sticker stuck to a wardrobe in one of our new rooms here – was she young when the family moved in, and then grew through her teens here, watching the tree in the garden grow from her window, the occasional limb lopped off when it got too near the house? Maybe she had her first boyfriend or girlfriend during this time, sauntering over to the little park behind the house, arm in arm, to sneak a kiss and cuddle out of sight of her vicar Dad?