The peculiar satisfaction of "making" something.

Rehearsal tonight. Foul tempered would be putting it too strongly but there were places I'd've rather been.

But I got there just after 7 and there's "probably going to be late but I'll try not to be" Brutus parking his trusty steed. Two minutes later and there's Cassius and I can't get enough of looking at her most beautifully bone structured face at the moment so that makes me happy.

We trot upstairs and make tea / weird poor man's latte and start on the homework exercise and Brutus has excelled himself. Cassisus has done what Brutus would normally have done. And Casca, when he trots up, still early, has done something in between.

Fine work (director's delusion?) with the three of them on their characters. A slink through scene 2. A skip through scene 3. A brief raid on a tiny portion of scene 4 (thanks, Portia). JC and the Sunshine Band thrumming away next door.

And the scene 8 lot have all turned up and are waiting, docile as pigs ignorant of their fate, in the waiting chamber. The tiny only surviving room that isn't being occupied by the people "making" stuff. And I try and persuade someone please god someone anyone to kneel down at some apposite point in it and they all wisely (director's delusion) ignores me. Mark Antony makes about 14 sensible suggestions about how we might do things differently, Claudius weeps and punches the air and scene 8 gets better.

And by then, it's practically the middle of the night. (Like - not Mark Antony's middle of the night but my middle of the night for sure.) And they all slide off into the dark still streets, clinging colds and other lives encroaching n' all.

Honoured.