Journey's End - End in sight

I can't grumble can I, having been employed in London's glittering West End in a popular production and playing a part that I enjoy? Well do you know what? I'm an actor so I can. The dressing rooms are horrid, squalid, tiny affairs built for Victorian midgets and their rodent companions. It is a relief to get onto the set which is a brilliantly realised replica of a WW1 trench, dirt and all. The money (when it arrives on time) is so rubbish that I have been forced to travel by bicycle and bring sandwiches to stave off the bailiffs.

There have been plenty of up-sides of course. I have hugely enjoyed watching young actors perform and develop and being in their company. I have also relished being one of the grumbly old gits on the bottom corridoor. I have loved playing Mason the droll, ubiquitous cook. The play itself is a very fine piece of work structurally and just works. It has been enjoyed by young and old for different reasons but has never failed to press home its message of the senselessness of the catastrophic waste of young mens' lives in that conflict by providing a rich emotional context.

I realise I have written as though it is already ended, in fact it finishes this coming Saturday 28th but one has begun to disengage and look forward to making new scratches on the tabula rasa of 2006. Nothing happening so far but I am cautiously pessimistic.