The beautiful kingdom of games

10 past 11 on Wednesday evening, the house is quiet but for a beautifully lilting french monologue swimming across the room from the radio in the corner. The actors words lap into my ears.
Francois has just thrashed me at chess again and has now retired to bed. He is really interesting man, apparently he has written one letter a week to his mother for the past 10 years, over 500 letters, mainly stories about his girls, he thinks it could be interesting for his daughters grandchildren to read. I picture this mountain of memories and wonder if there is something in this image that could be the starting point for a piece of theatre. Over dinner he tells me of his time in London in 1981, how he turned up with no money, walked into a B&B asked for a job and was taken on as the night porter. He worked for only his room and board and when several months later he wanted something that paid he went to the job centre telling them he was a waiter. 2 hours later he was hired by a restaurant in Kensington to begin his first shift that evening. He had to carry the plates up his arms and 3 times ended up dropping them one after another. The manager calle dthe boss and siad Francois had to come in the following day and was likely to be fired, there was an old Spanish guy that worked there, who Francois said was a fascist fan of Franco. the guy took pity on Francois and that evening taught him for 3 hours to carry plates. the following day when the owner came and said to Francois we see how you carry the plates but if you drop even one you are fired, he didn't drop a single one, so then he worked as a waiter in London. He told me of the Polish pot wash who back home was an engineer but was out of the country when there was a coup and a the yugoslav chef who smoked when he cooked, flicking the ash into the dishes, how the pot wash was a chess champion and he and the chef would go out, the chef getting rich by betting on the pot wash's skills but the pot wash never saw any of the money.

Come on, there's got to be a play here, non?

je digress...

Movement; no silks today, i was secretly glad as ity still seems well out of my grasp and  my arms and stomach muscles ached ( I didn't realise I had any).
Instead, endurance training; forward rolls, backward rolls, crawling accross the floor like a cat, leaping a 2 foot pole, exercises for the abs, exercises for the biceps, triceps, hips and thighs, leaping up onto one another from infront and behind as well as weelbarrows and a slide across the floor exercise that confused the hell out of me.
I'm very sweaty by the end of it.
Francois refers to us comedians, with the silks I couldn't understand why, it felt more like a circus coures and I'm  sure that we will be back on the silks tomorrow however today I felt that with this kind of training physical comedy, good physical comedy could well come within our reach.

Jeu avec le monsieur.
Todays games: Samuel says, dancing with patner to find the joy of the lie, grandmothers footsteps in groups, a brilliant game for complicity with 5 chairs and the ball in the rope game.

The liars voice, he picked on myself and George.
"Mak yoo are facking bored wiv you partner!"
" What? No, no no, Philippe that's not true, it's it's it's....... blah blah blah"
I won't bother boring you with the rest of it because this is about as interesting as it gets but what I did notice was a good initialimpulse followed by a load of crap as I tried to come up with witty ideas and clever things to say however I'm neither clever nor witty so I was doomed to fail travelling that path.
There was some very slight eye contact between myself and George but nothing even approaching complicite.
When will i remember to breathe on stage.
It is best summed up in Philippe's comment after we finished.
" But zees, it was awful."

The voice, the voice of the liar it has to be fun amusing, full of colour and life not the voice of a castrated cat who says " ay,ay,ay where are my balls?"

exercises to play with the voice us ea market sellers voice, the fish seller, the poptatoe seller, the guy who shouts "Meevenin Mew" along Piccadilly.

An exercise between 2 students demonstrated not only voice but how we have to be comfortable with who we are as actors.
 How our bodies direct us creatively, you take 2 students, 1 big the other slim we listen to their voice for sure the slimmer 1 looks and sounds posher, maybe we have a lady Macbeth, the other she is shorter, rounder and her voice louder, maybe we have Ma Ubu.

We took the same 2 students and he asked who would be Queen Anne in Richard III, for sure the posher looking one, why because in our imagination she is closer to Anne, her body leads her that way.
Does this mean that the other will never play Anne? No, but it would take an imaginative director.

What is the lesson here?
Learn who you are.
Learn what you have to work with.

Clown

Pleasure pleasure pleasure.
The exercise was simple.
Enter in a funny groucho nose/ mask and you have to make silly voices for your family who are in the audience.
Rather than talk you through class I'll just put a load of quotes from class

"You are not with your family, you are withyour shitty idea"

" It has to be for the fun darling, for the fun!!"

"Too much character, not enough with the family."

" You don't show your pleasure, we hate you."

"A clown never says I don't understand."

"If the clown is sent off he tries to find a way to come back. If he finds a way we think he has spirit."

"In the pleasure there is something magic. We love to see people with pleasure."

" The pleasure after doing something idiot is a big part of the clown. The best part."

Did I find my pleasure?
Nope I did find about 3 seconds of the naughty boy entrance but that was it.
Tomorrow I go in search of pleasure, if the best clowns are the ones who have the best pleasure then that is what I have to have.
Where does it hide?