Flagrant self-promotion

Need I say more? I hope this helps us sell out tonight's show.

Today's fleeting thoughts and impressions

When spring rain falls on the dusty tarmac streets of this city, the city of my birth, a very particular smell is released. I can't compare it to anything - it is both dusty and fresh, not at all unpleasant. It triggers memories in me older than words. It proves, in a way, that I am indeed in the city of my birth - these are the streets I have learned to walk on, inhaling this smell.

I went to pick up a parcel from the post office local to my home (from which I am a plumbing-renovations exile until the autumn). Sent from the other side of the planet, I knew the parcel contained photographs from my childhood and that of my teenage sons. The weight of the parcel on my hip felt a little like carrying a baby, but also I felt I was carrying mad sad Solange, the unloved-till-breaking-point theatrical character I am currently playing. Three more shows as Solange, then I, too, shall leave her. Sorry Solange... It is strange how the characters one plays become real, at once part of oneself, and another person intimately known, and yet all of it is illusion.

While I walked, I got a sudden urge to listen to my scarcely-used iPod. I played my friend Rebecca's song on repeat, over and over again. It is beautiful - I remember when she played it to me for the first time, I knew she was a singer-songwriter but I had no idea of how shockingly talented she was. It completely blew me away then, and still does. Dear Reader, these are your instructions - go and listen to her singing "Isadora's Alice Party" - the other songs are good too, but Isadora is very special. Listen to it and imagine the scent of the spring rain.

Busy weekend

It's wish me breakaleg time. We are on tomorrow with The Maids, finally.

The photo is one of fabulous hannamime's, showing the stage set for us. Picture me kneeling upstage, pawing through Madame's wardrobe (=pile of clothes on the floor) with love and hate and envy and lust and passion. Even trying on The Red Velvet Dress. That's how we open.

Luckily we are opening on a matinee, because in the evening, it's time for the Eurovision song contest, brought to the kitsch-loving public of the world (well, Europe) from my very own Helsinki. I hope we get a table in the pub after the show - not for the drinking, but for the rowdy dorkiness of it all. For those of you who care about such things, my friend Arabella is working behind the scenes of the kitsch-fest, and has some really rather juicy photos you won't see anywhere else but on her Flickr site...

(I know, I know, this post is pure trousers. But what can I do. I need to rest the brain for tomorrow.)

The time has come to unleash the maids - another non-commercial commercial break

So here they are: Claire, Madame, Solange. Taken by the esteemed keltanen, a press photo for The Maids. Again, if you are lucky and privileged enough to have the opportunity, we would feel most lucky and privileged if you'd come and see us (me) acting very dangerously and in the fashion of homicidal maniacs.

Please note I have specially painted, with my actor's make-up kit (well, the group's, really) the horrendous bags around my eyes as well as heightened the very faint lines that naturally occur around my mouth. I do NOT look this bad in real life, I don't. Or this homicidal.

Grey hairs from grandma. A self-portrait of sorts.

My maternal gran was a tiny lady. At ten, I was the same height and weight as her - I am five six, and reached that at fourteen. No idea what I was at ten, or my gran all her adult life.

She was a dink, no doubt about that. That Sami look was all over her, the almost-cliché one, with cheekbones out to there, slantish eyes, snubbish nose, dark hair with an un-Finnish strength, almost like horsehair. She came from Eastern Finland, but had traced her father's family to the 1600s, where the tracks disappear into Norwegian Lapland. I am not just an incurable romantic when I call her my Sami gran.

I have her high forehead and strong jaw - a source of much self-loathing when younger - and something similar about the eyes and cheekbones. But alas, not the hair. Mine is the soft fine stuff Finns have. Mostly; as here and there, I have the odd black horsehair strand. Except that now, with the big four-o looming in the Autumn, the black ones have started to go silver (not to say grey), with increasing rapidity. The first ones appeared some five years ago. Initially, I'd pluck them out, or give the job to my long-suffering younger son. Now, I'm not convinced what to do with them. Plucking them out is futile, they grow back silver, there's nothing for it. I could dye my hair of course. But somehow, I almost like them. I am this age, I am this shape, I am who I am. And also, although round about the big four-o, it will be twenty-four years since my gran died, these grey (silver!) hairs are still from her.

A haircut is nevertheless in order. I am too old to have caveman hair for much longer, and besides, I am sick of it. Pageboy cut, here I come. As an added bonus, it'll be easier to backcomb for mad Solange.

Love, hate, murder, & rubber gloves: in a word, theatre.

It is a well-known, oft-quoted cliché that actors like doing baddies, that the roles are somehow meatier. This may be so - I haven't really been cast as one before, although I have done my fair share of unhappily-married middle-aged women (oppressed and not). They have been great roles too. I confess, however, to having had a bit of a hankering for trying my hand, as it were, at someone really mad, bad, and dangerous to know. Well, careful what you wish for, missus. I am Solange in Jean Genet's The Maids. I'll attempt to give a quick synopsis of the storyline: two middle-aged sisters, Solange and Claire, are housemaids to a young and beautiful Madame. Their love for each other is twisted and peculiar in a number of ways, and apart from it, the only content of their lives is Madame, they love and envy her with all the unspent passion of womanhood. They spend their time acting out a fantasy of turning against Madame, of humiliating and ultimately killing her, taking turns at being Madame, the other sister then playing the one "cast" as Madame. (Confused? You won't be, if you come and see it. Or perhaps you still will be.) Arguably, Genet has written the maids as the protagonists, but they - particularly Solange - are scary and murderous. I am not quite off-book yet, so might miss one or two, but offhand I can recall four incidents of Solange either attempting to strangle someone onstage, or speaking of attempting it, or claiming to have finally done it, in the hour-long play. Genet's play is based on a true story (I have linked to a related site in a previous post, but please don't read if you are easily or even medium-easily upset by violence) although it is only a foundation he's built upon, something that has rattled his intelligence in possibly the way the true story Equus is based on did to Shaeffer. I wish, in some ways, that I hadn't read up on the background case .

A couple of my good friends have spoken about the horror of doing a "bad" character - one did the Scottish Laird in the well-known Shakespeare play that carries his name, the other the incestuous Stepfather in Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author (in which I, incidentally, was the oppressed unhappy elderly crippled wife). I haven't understood why they've felt it so heavy, not really (I mean, the roles are brilliant, so why not enjoy?), but I'm getting an inkling of it now. I am only a self-taught actor so won't pretend to know all the names of Stanislavskian techniques etc, but I go into the process of creating a character with the idea that all of us carry everything inside of us, every human possibility and emotion, and that "all" you need to do is to just tap into it. Which is scary when you start to feel you've a half-developed Solange inside you, that it could be you, under some circumstances -

And yet Solange is sad. Sad beyond belief. And at yesterday's rehearsal I suddenly felt that she was really doing this, she was going to murder Madame not only because she couldn't bear the oppression - in particular of her sister - anymore, but also because she couldn't allow her sister to commit the murder herself. She was - is - doing it out of love.

So - the box in the picture contains some rehearsal props and some actual bits of costume. Visible are e.g. the alarm clock that will warn the sisters, mid-strangulation, of Madame's return, the teapot for the poisoned tea, and Solange's rubber gloves.

Beware, I'm going theatrical again

We started rehearsing our spring production yesterday, Jean Genet's Maids (I am Solange). The play is based on a true story - two pious little maids went berserk in France in the 1930s, and got rid of their employers in a fairly graphic manner. Given my habit of in-character face-pulling actions when reading/going over my lines in public, I hate to think what this'll make me look like. Glad I won't have to sit next to me on the bus this Spring. (If you do follow that link, be warned, it's really rather harrowing.)

Afterwards saw Ville Valo in the pub. I nearly asked him for his autograph (for my son, I hasten to add - I know about his handshake, remember!) but then bottled out. An endearing side to Finland is how our big celebs and politicians actually drink & shop with us plebs. Of the four presidents we've had in my lifetime (one was in forever, hence so few) I have seen three amongst his/her subjects, pretty much casually minding their own business. I once saw the current pres Halonen shopping at my local grocery shop, with one female minder only. Apparently Halonen also goes to the same belly-dance lessons as my friend Arabella.