Fool for Love

I've started casting for the remaining Western roles. Sadly, Peter Kenny, who was so exciting as Julian in Orientations, isn't available, since he's already committed to Henry VIII with A&BC as part of the RSC's Complete Works Festival. The really galling thing is that he actually checked with me if this would work before he accepted the job: that was before our dates changed. So I start phoning agents for interesting actors in their 40s. The first day yields little fruit (mainly because I'm trying to get somebody a bit starry - all useful for Box Office). This will need a serious session beavering through programmes of shows I've seen in the last few years. Also looking for two women (PK and Marie): this should be simpler, since there's far less work for women in their 40s. But they have to be just right. I spend much of the afternoon before the Nixon performance in the office of Spotlight, checking faces and agents' names.

Pop out for an hour and a bit to see the matinee of Fool for Love. This is a West End show, which has gone down the starry route with Juliette Lewis and Martin Henderson. It's strange and wonderful for me to hear this text again - because this (with Faith Healer) was one of the two shows which launched Border Crossings over ten years ago. I kept hearing the voices of Maria Gough and Miles Harvey. Fascinating to see how different a play can be, even though both our production and this one stuck pretty close to original stage directions. Juliette Lewis played May with a deliberate intense flatness, which was disconcerting and oddly powerful. Way different from Maria's incredible elemental force in that role. Galling then that Michael Coveney's programme essay lists only the National and Donmar productions as having preceded the current one in London: particularly since Time Out reviewed the Donmar show by saying the Border Crossings version had been "definitive"! People forget...... and probably should - theatre is an ephemeral art.

I leave at the end of the performance, and go straight back to casting.