Sometime into my tenth or eleventh year, I went to central London with my class to see the musical, Time. This was the one that starred Cliff Richard until he left and was replaced by David Cassidy before he left too. It also featured a hologram of Lawrence Olivier’s head which, like 99% of the things that people call holograms, wasn’t really a hologram. It was a face-shaped screen that Lawrence Olivier’s face was projected onto. In the moments where Olivier spoke, his features would move about a little. Being that he was in the last couple of years of his life, it wasn’t much of a surprise that he couldn’t keep his head entirely straight when they were filming him. The slightest deviation would result in a nostril becoming unmoored before wobbling back into place again. Same with his eyes, eyebrows and lips. He even got a curtain call, where, after all of the other actors had taken their bow, the Olivier head would emerge, offering a wry smile as we rose to our feet and applauded him – a wobbly-faced old god that had seeped through a crack in our nation’s casual Christian tinplate. I sat next to my mum on the bus back to the suburbs. She asked me something about my friends at school, and followed it up with a question about whether I was a loner. I wasn’t sure what that really meant but I said yes anyway. It must have been winter because it was already dark, with not much visible beyond the strobing motorway lights. The faint little moons of our blurred faces wobbled back at us from the wide coach windows.
2/1/26
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