It’s 2022.

(Quick caveat – please do not be alarmed! You have not travelled back in time! It’s not really 2022. My use of the present tense to refer to a year three years in the past is a dramatic device frequently employed by clever writers to immerse readers into the setting of the story they’re about to tell. Although now that I’ve written this caveat, any momentum and immersion I’d achieved by employing this device has completely dissipated, but it’s your fault for making me do it by becoming confused).

Anyway. It’s 2022 (Ibid – am I using that right? Gotta stop interrupting my momentum here). It’s near the end of August. I’m close to the end of the Fringe run of my show Blink, which has been a great success but which has been, any way you look at it, knackering. I’ve spent the month self-producing an incredibly technically ambitious show that was physically exhausting to perform (I still can’t listen to “Roxanne” without starting to smell pickle juice and feeling my eyelid start to twitch. Those who saw it know why). I’ve shared the month with an incredible team of collaborators whose wellbeing, due to their giving up their month to work on my show, I can’t help but feel emotionally responsible for. The bits of the month where I haven’t been frantically trying to take care of my own mental health I’ve mostly spent concerned about theirs, so I have precisely nothing left in the tank at this point. To try and replenish my stock of joy, I go to watch Kathy & Stella Solve A Murder, Jon Brittain’s incredible true crime podcasting musical (since then it’s gone on to West End success and I think there are lots more exciting developments for it in the future – if you’ve not seen it, do keep an eye out for where it might be going next as I love it so much).

As I’m watching it, a thought strikes me like a lightning bolt:

God, it would be nice to just be an actor in someone else’s show the next time I’m at this festival.

“Look at these people,” I thought! (Oh, I seem to be using the past tense now. Oh well, it was getting difficult to maintain the present tense thing anyway, seeing as I know it’s not 2022. I can’t keep sitting here using the present tense, I’m just lying to myself at this point). “They’re all having so much fun,” I continued to think, “and I bet not one of them is feeling stressed out of their mind about being more or less solely responsible, and financially liable, for the commercial success or failure of the show!”

I came out of that show thinking to myself that in the foreseeable future I wanted to do more collaborating on other people’s shows and projects, rather than focusing so exclusively on my own. I wanted to be involved in more things where it wasn’t purely my own will for the show to exist that was driving it forwards. That led to lots of nice developments – I did more acting in film and radio things over the next couple of years. I directed lots of brilliant shows. When it came to returning to the Fringe with a new show, I did it with an amazing producer because I wanted to discover what it’s like to have someone else you can trust and go to with those difficult logistical things rather than shouldering it all yourself. I loved all these new experiences, they were so rejuvenating.

But one thing that didn’t happen was that I didn’t end up acting in someone else’s play, even though that had been the thought that initially sparked off this change of perspective. All that changed this summer.

Shortly before leaving for the Fringe this year I received a job offer. A theatre company wanted me to play the lead role in a play they were putting on in London in October. I read the script and really enjoyed it. I looked up the story the play was based on to work out how much of it was true – remarkably, pretty much all of it. I thought having something like a play in the diary to look forward to after Edinburgh would be absolutely lovely. I’ve written often enough about how the scariest thing after Edinburgh is the cliff edge of not knowing what to do next. It takes so much of your time and energy, and then suddenly it all stops, and it’s very rare that it immediately leads to the next thing. Even when it goes very well, there’s usually at least a few months of drinking endless coffee with people and listening to them say “So, what other ideas do you have?” before any tangible projects or jobs begin to take shape. So what better way to ease myself back into real life than by immediately throwing myself into a job where I could actually just do what I’m told instead of having to make it all happen by myself?

I eagerly accepted the job. I would spend the first half of September relaxing and recovering, and the second half of September starting to think about the play and learning my lines.

And then my show actually did quite well, and Soho Theatre booked it in for a run almost immediately after the Fringe finished. Rather than resting and recovering, I spent the first three quarters of September frantically trying to sell over 500 tickets, and to keep rehearsing the show to make sure it was in good shape for the London run. It works! (Whoa, present tense is back again, this is crazy). The Soho transfer is a big success! I start booking a tour! I’m getting pretty tired, but that’s ok, I’ll still have a bit of time to rest and recover before rehearsals begin. Oh wow, turns out booking a tour is quite stressful, I’ve barely got any time to start learning those lines. Never mind, there’s still a few days until rehearsals begin, I’m sure it’ll be fine.

Finally, after approximately one day of resting and recovering, I attended a photoshoot for the play, to take the poster image. I was so looking forward to getting stuck in! A lovely creative job post-Fringe where I could just collaborate and take direction from others, with zero responsibility, zero pressure!

“Quite a lot of pressure on you for this show,” the show’s marketing manager said in an offhand way as she took photos of me pretending to be a 19th century motivational speaker.

“Oh?” I asked, leaning on my knee and raising an eyebrow as I stroked my beard. “How so?”

“Well, you know. A 90-minute one-man show can’t be easy to learn.” I stared at her aghast. “Close your mouth,” she said. I was unable to close my mouth. She stared back at me. “You knew it was a 90-minute one-man show, right?”

I did know it was a one-man show, but until that moment the reality of that had not really sunk in. I had not realised that it was 90 minutes long.

“Well, it might be a bit longer,” she said, snapping away. “I think each half is supposed to be about 50 minutes or something.”

Right. Ok. Two fifty minute halves. That’s doable. That’s just like learning two Edinburgh shows and doing them back-to-back. Kind of like the Edinburgh show I’d just spent two years learning and finessing, but just the same amount of material again. I checked my calendar to see when opening night was. Two-and-a-half weeks away. Cool. Great. So maybe not quite the low-stakes, low-pressure, “I just have to turn up and say my lines” endeavour as I’d envisaged. But hey, how hard could it be?

Reader, I’m delighted to announce that I now know my lines and rehearsals have been going really well! Of course, it turns out it’s not a project where I can just be part of an ensemble, or throw other people under the bus by going “The scene isn’t working because Walter doesn’t know his lines!” or whatever (hmm, Walter, interesting, I wonder why I went with Walter). But it has been lovely being able to concentrate on nothing other than my own performance, and to know that all the other aspects of the show are being handled by other brilliant people, and that I needn’t outsource my own anxiety to things that don’t need it. It’s kind of like the feeling of working with a brilliant producer for the first time this Edinburgh, which was such a breath of fresh air. It’s been a lovely few months of learning how to rely on people, and curbing some of my own tendencies to try and do everything even when it’s wearing me out.

So, having told that story (and hopefully not in a way that gets me in trouble if anyone from the theatre company reads this – cannot stress enough that I HAVE now learned my lines), what is this show?

Well, from Tuesday to Saturday next week I’m playing a conman named Gregor McGregor (great name, could be a cartoon character) in Sam Went’s The Wolf Of Poyais. I absolutely love this guy’s story, it’s astonishing. A habitual liar and trickster, he lied his way into the army of Republican Venezuela, gave himself a fictional knighthood and kept repeatedly trying and failing to liberate various South American territories because he was jealous of his wife’s cousin for being Simón Bolívar. When that didn’t work, he invented a fictional country called Poyais, decided he was its king, and conned London financiers into loaning him the equivalent of two hundred million pounds in exchange for imaginary government bonds. To prove that his imaginary country was real, he sent several hundred people on ships to live there, before abandoning them all to die in a swamp. All this is true, and I’ve really been enjoying bringing this ridiculous story to life over the last two weeks.

Most alarmingly, I’ve been told by most of the creative team, who came to see You Wait. Time Passes. in Edinburgh, to pretty much just do the same performance again if possible. I can see why, because in that show I was also playing a deluded egomaniac who thought that what he was doing was much more valuable and worthwhile than it really was, but that “character” was essentially modelled on exaggerated aspects of my own personality, and now I am being asked to repeat several of those performance quirks in order to play a psychopath who planned and orchestrated the deaths of hundreds of people. A nice low-pressure, low-stress post-Fringe project indeed.

Anyway, I think it’s going to be a really fun show and you can buy tickets here. If anyone wants to come and would like a discount code, do feel free to reach out and I can offer a limited number of them. Hope to see some of you there!

A Cool New Thing In Comedy – My aforementioned dear friend Jon Brittain co-wrote the really fun Noel Fielding series The Completely Made-Up Adventures Of Dick Turpin, and sadly the series was scrapped before the second series could finish filming. However, in a nice little bit of good news, one final episode has been completed out of the stuff they filmed for series 2 and is now coming out as a Hallowe’en special! You can read more about it here.

What’s Made Me Laugh The Most – This.

Book Of The Week – I’m reading Information Is Beautiful by David McCandless, a book of unusual information presented in beautifully designed graphs. Got it for my birthday from Thom Tuck and thought “What a weird book and gift.” Turns out it’s absolutely brilliant, it’s full of such interesting stuff and it’s depicted in such unusual ways. I love it. Thanks Thom!

Album Of The Week – Luminal by Brian Eno & Beatie Wolfe, the third in a trilogy of albums they’ve released this year. This is the best one and, hand on heart, I think it’s the best thing Eno’s done since 2014’s Karl Hyde collaboration High Life. It’s not as good as High Life, but it’s the first time in decades his ambient soundscapes have sounded new and surprising to me, and I really love it.

Film Of The Week – I Swear. I really enjoyed this – it’s about the life of Tourette’s activist John Davidson and Robert Aramayo is incredible in it. Also Peter Mullan. I could watch Peter Mullan just sit and smile with his eyes for a thousand years.

That’s all for this week! As ever, let me know what you think, and if you enjoy the newsletter enough to send it to a friend or encourage others to subscribe, I’d hugely appreciate it. Take care of yourselves until next time, and all the best,

Joz xx

PS If you enjoy this newsletter and want to support my work and enable me to keep writing, you can make a one-off donation to my Ko-Fi account, and it’s very gratefully appreciated!

PPS Sneak peek at the costume fitting if you like that kind of thing:

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