Party Where You Are Party

Today marks the point 2 years ago when I received the ultimate gift from a wonderful person. It is, therefore, a day to celebrate.

Being currently ensconced up in Liverpool and far away from many of my friends, I’ve developed a slightly novel way of celebrating using the magic of Facebook and Twitter.

I’m asking anyone who wants to join me in celebration to find their own way to mark the occasion, whether it be a party, a trip to the pub or just raising a glass in their living room and to take a picture of themselves doing it and upload it to either the Facebook event page or onto Twitter.

If you’re on Facebook, search for “Oli’s 2nd Second Birthday. Party Where You Are Party” or find my profile and get to it from there. If you’re a Tweeter, simply use the hashtag #oli2nd.

Have a great day today and, if you get chance, raise a glass to me and my donor.

In Memoriam

As I wrote this time last year, I hold the 19th of November as a particularly special and reflective day for me.

I received my transplant at 00.15 on the 20th November 2007, from which I can deduce that Monday 19th November 2007 was the day one family lost a very important member.

One family, somewhere in the UK, is today mourning the loss of a beloved child. Although I don’t know anything else about my donor, they may also be mourning a life-partner, a sibling, a parent and, most likely of all, a close and trusted friend.

Today I will be remembering a person whose faith and courage saw them sign the Organ Donor Register and offer me the chance to live again, even after they had died. I will also be saluting the incredible and immense clarity of thinking on behalf of a family going through their worst of experiences in allowing the surgical teams to go ahead and follow their loved one’s wishes.

Without this generosity on the part of people I will never meet, nor likely ever know, I would not be here.

I wouldn’t be here to think of all those friends I’ve lost when their chance didn’t come in time. I wouldn’t be here to support and pray for all those friends who are waiting right now, their lives hanging in the balance waiting for a family to be as courageous as my donor’s family. I wouldn’t be here to realise the things most important to me in life and I wouldn’t be here to effect the changes I know I need to make to live my life to its fullest extent – the only real way I can ever show my appreciation for what has been given to me.

So if you’re watching down on me from above, I want to thank you. I want you to know how much your gift has already given me and I want you to know that I am doing and will continue to do all that I can to make sure that every second you look down on me, you are proud.

I can think of no greater goal in life than the pursuit of the knowledge that, this day and every day, my donor is proud. Proud of me, proud of what I’ve done and proud of what I’m doing.

Thank you will never be enough.

Eddie Izzard

As the years of my wait for a transplant slipped by and my health got progressively worse, I was more and more confined to my flat in MK unable to venture out without massive exertions. Inevitable, I suppose, this led to periods of struggle with my mood and fight to stay positive (of which long-time readers will recall this being a large part).

Another large part of that battle to keep my head above the depressive waters that threatened to flood over me was the DVDs of Eddie Izzard’s previous UK tours, most notably Glorious and Dress To Kill.

Both of these would never fail to make me laugh and would frequently result in intense bouts of coughing which, if nothing else, made my physios happy as it cleared a lot of gunk off my chest.

Last week, when scouting around the ‘net for things to do with K when she came up for her visit this weekend, I discovered that Eddie was playing at Liverpool’s ECHO Arena. Expecting it to be fully sold out, I nonetheless logged on to the ECHO website and to my amazement and joy I bought us two tickets.

After nearly five years since first coming across him and 2 years of a fight for life, following a two-year recovery period with as many lows as there have been highs, I finally got to see the man who helped me through it live and in the flesh.

There’s really no way to describe a comedy gig comfortable in writing, so I won’t try to. All I’ll say is that if you know him, if you like him, you are duty-bound to seek out his nearest date to you and go see him.

The man’s a legend and my ribs still hurt.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Everything I’ve seen about Heath Ledger’s final film has told me two things: 1) It’s Heath Ledger’s final film (he died half-way through production, to be variously replaced throughout the film by Johnny Depp, Colin Farrel and Jude Law) and 2) It’s utterly rubbish.

From watching the film myself today, I’ve discovered three things:

1) It’s almost the ultimate Terry Gilliam movie, combining the tangible, off-kilter world of a only-slightly-stylised reality with the final-given-enough-money beauty of the CGI creating the heavily surrealist world beyond the mirror that take people inside their own minds. Where his previous films have failed for me has been the difficulty in realising this clash of the real and the fantastical, but Parnassus does it almost perfectly.

2) The three actors who came in to finish the film, playing 3 versions of Ledger’s Tony who appear through the mirror did a great job. Admittedly, knowing the story behind the film made me almost predisposed to look on them favourably: all three stepped in as friends of Ledger’s to offer their services, all three fitted the film in around their other filming commitments and all three donated their fees to Ledger’s young daughter. But all three of them also hit just the right balance of the surrealist elements of a shape-shifting lead character by keeping just the right amount of Ledger’s original performance while infusing it with a spirit and attitude of their own. It never feels like 3 people pretending to be Heath Ledger, which would have been dreadful.

3) I really, really, really liked it.

So I may well be the odd one out in all of this, but frankly, who cares? I unashamedly love this movie. I love all that it stands for, I love all that it means, I love all that it’s been through and I love the end product more than any other Gilliam film I’ve seen before.

As a side note, K’s come back up to Liverpool with me today and we saw Parnassus at FACT, an amazing Liverpool cinema and gallery space which impresses me more and more every time I go. Today’s screening was in a small-ish box room with the audience all seated on 2-person sofas; a brand new experience for me, but a great one. There should be a flickhouse like this in every city.

Jonathan Pryce

The one upside of Willows going into rehearsals this week of all weeks (LIPA reading week, that is) is that I was still around to witness this year’s first Masterclass with the legendary Jonathan Pryce of Evita, Pirates of the Caribbean and Miss Saigon fame.

Once again revealing quite how aged I am in relation to the rest of the students at LIPA (or at least the majority), I first saw Jonathan Pryce when he played Fagin in Sam Mendes’ revival of Oliver! in the West End way back in 1994 when most of my classmates were learning to walk.

Thanks to the Pirates series, he’s now famous throughout the student body at LIPA and, since he’s literally just up the road (about 500 yards from LIPA) doing The Caretaker at the Everyman at the moment, he stopped in to talk to us all today.

He may have been nervous or just unsure at the start, as he was somewhat bland and struggling to relate to the audience to begin with, but as time went on he warmed up and became more and more ebullient and amusing with all of his anecdotes. Among my favourites:

• He turned down the opportunity of taking over from Michael Crawford in the title role of the original production of Phantom of the Opera
• He gave first jobs to both Julie Walters and Bill Nighy, recalling of Nighy’s audition that he thought we was either an absolute genius or absolute rubbish. He maintains (jokingly) it’s the latter.
• When he and Nighy were reunited on the set of Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Nighy performed in a lycra body suit with motion-capture markers all over his body and face. The sight made it impossible to get through an emotional scene without laughing, prompting the writer to approach Pryce and ask if everything was OK with the scene.
• He never actually read the entire script for Pirates and frequently only knew what was going on by asking Jack Davenport while the shots were being set up.
• When performing in the ill-fated National Theatre production of My Fair Lady, he remarked to one audience “This is you first Eliza, but it’s my second today and third in two days. If anyone would like to apply to play Eliza in this production, please contact Stage Door after the show.”

It’s amazing to be studying what I love in a place I can’t get enough of and to have the added bonus of people like this coming in to talk to us. After almost 2 hours at it, I think the entire audience of actors, dancers, technicians and managers left the room utterly inspired and energised.

Who’s next?