O, Poor Robinson Crusoe!

2011-06-04T17:02:00.002+01:00

Sitting in the Pret a Manger by Leicester Square tube station, watching the tourists/visitors go by. And the occasional Londoner. It's a warm day and colourful-informal is the uniform. With sunglasses. T-shirts with Union Jacks on them. Guy in his fifties, Londoner, with a rockabilly look, said something about the devil on his tee. Everyone's in a good mood, it seems. Saturday shopping in the lazy sun. Nice breeze. Not sticky.
I'm cycling home shortly to dig around in the back garden and listen to the cricket. Might get the Janelle Monae cd before I do so.

Poem

2010-07-14T15:48:00.002+01:00

I've been rooting through some old boxes of work. Scraps of plays, ideas, letters to artistic directors, old programmes, that sort of thing. Some of the script stuff is old enough to have been written on an electric typewriter rather than a pc, and - get this - some of it's in LONGHAND.

Anyways I found this old poem - 15 years old? I wish I'd stuck a date on it - and rather than stuff it back in the box I thought I'd make a digital imprint, right here.

Jupiter's Moons

I would observe you, nightly
your complex orbits
your features so very well defined

the moonshine went to your head
haloed and enhanced
the image resolution

eye pressed to the rusted telescope
above the clifftop cafe
below the boundless

you narrowed the parameters
navigated galaxies
drank in the Milky Way

my naked eyes swam
across space, tracing the sea-lanes
playing naughty join-the-dots

'I can see Jupiter's moons!'
you whispered disbelievingly
like a butler at a key-hole

and swooning stepped aside for me
to focus on the fantastic system
the Satellites, light-minutes away -

no Io, no Ganymede, no one.
just blinking Jupiter, impossibly
distant, disdainful cat's eye -

'made you look!' you laughed

2010-01-25T18:45:00.005Z

I admit I wasn't quite prepared for the brilliance of this novel, which was Pamuk's debut according to the cover but I seem to remember this was contradicted by the article I read in the LRB and which persuaded me to get hold of this particular book in the first place*. Whatever the case, debut or simply early, The White Castle is powerfully imaginative and seductive. Even more so for me perhaps in the present moment in that superficially some of its aspects dovetail with some of my current research. I'd best leave off talking about that here as I'll tie myself in knots trying not to give too much away. Forgive me, I'm rusty at this. Point is, read Pamuk's book, it's really very remarkable.

MEANwhile I realise I forgot to record here that I had an operation last week. I mean, I'm out of the habit of diarising but I just wanted to set it down. It was nothing too worrisome or drastic - a double hernia repair. I like it that they call it a repair. I took the bus very early on a freezing Monday morning last week, to Homerton hospital. By 8.30 or so I was prepped and ready to go. B collected me at around 1.30 I think it was. The memory is very hazy because of course I was high as a kite on anaesthetics and analgesics. While I was out they repaired the inguinal hernia (in the groin, that is), and the umbilical. So I am repaired. Nine days on it is still somewhat tender in the vicinities. But I am able to get around. I write from Charing Cross Road in fact, the revamped cafe on the first floor of Foyles (bookshop).

*The White Castle his third book apparently but first to be translated into English.

2010-01-13T18:52:00.002Z

The pleasures of hibernation in a big city. Holed up all day playing with Buzz, washing up, sleeping. Glimpsing the garden wearing its fresh white mantle. Then heading out into the damp dark, buttoned and booted, to take the tube to town for a spot of reading. Wintering in the metropolis has much to recommend it. Incidentally I am still enjoying The White Castle but once again I find that in the act of reading literature in translation I am more than occasionally put off my stroke by inelegant constructions in the prose. I don't have Turkish and so cannot know, but I'm guessing Pamuk's style must be smoother, more musical, than the English version published by Faber and Faber.

Hello

2010-01-11T18:44:00.002Z

It's been ages. I am glad to be back. This is something of a tokenistic post to remind myself how to do this. Since I last posted I have had a show on, and written half of another, and started plotting a third. So all is well on that front. Miniaturism has been on a little hiatus but should return in the spring.

I am reading Orhan Pamuk's The White Castle. And have been watching the darts, avidly.

2009-09-01T23:06:00.003+01:00

I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of books I have read more than once. Not of course counting set texts, or stories I've adapted. Actually Lord Of The Flies is a special case, yes it was the set text, 1983 Ordinary Level Eng Lit, but I became a fan of Golding's in the process of failing my exam (the shame), and read all his stuff later on, including a revisit to the island of LOTF. Incidentally I think my fascination with Golding's prose style - it had me quite mesmerised - was a contributing factor in my Eng Lit calamity. While I was absorbed in trying to understand the profundities of WG's dark poetics, I omitted to memorise the sequence of events of the narrative, and when asked to comment on specific plot points was simply at a loss. (Something similar went on with me and the drama set text, The Crucible , if I remember rightly). I thought about retaking, as I had wanted to study English at university, but for whatever reason, a cocktail of embarrassment and inertia most likely, signed up for Greek, Latin and French A levels, with a General Studies chaser. Sixteen months after the LOTF debacle, on my eighteenth birthday if you please, I arrived in Oxford for two days of interviews to see if they'd let me in to read Classics. They did, and I became one of a type - the boy from the labouring classes up at Oxford, trying to keep his head, trying to keep up, among the sons and daughters of the moneyed and entitled.

All of which serves as a prelude to my simply recording - I am rereading, not just one of my favourite books, but one of my favourite things ever, Generation X. And looky. Just saw this. Mr Coupland has an announcement to make.

2009-05-21T23:38:00.004+01:00

I am reading more fluently at the moment thank you, my relations with books have always been a little rocky but I have raced through a few things lately and am limbered enough to attempt something that's been on the list for a long time, going at Proust again. It was maybe a decade ago I got halfway through the second volume of what was then a new revision of the Scott Moncrieff-Kilmartin translation, by DJ Enright. At the time, I fail to account for how, I had the six volumes in two different designs, in the Modern Library edition, even numbers had Impressionist reproductions on the cover, and sat easily in my small hands, and they alternated with pink and orange, less compactly formatted odd numbers, and that all seemed just fine back then. Coming back to the shelves after going round the Sun another ten times it seems the height of idiocy and waywardness. So I have set about acquiring the Impressionistic set, and I am much obliged to Abebooks in my search for just the right copies of the 1998 Modern Library Marcel. Except when I took delivery of Volume One yesterday (price £1.00) I saw straight away I had ordered a 1992 where I meant to have a 1998 - the muted silver and gold trim, and the photograph, fine though it is, of a rumpled pillow, could by no means take their place alongside my Volume Two, boasting this as it does

which is almost a discouragement to signing away all those hours and weeks to Proust's prose, when painting can do this for us in a matter of minutes, quarter of an hour tops. But but. There are miracles in great prose aren't there, the mystery and hilarity of communing with a great mind, that has so much to tell us. All six volumes of it.

When I ordered the Volume One, I was assured by the vendor that in spite of its cheapness, its only blemishes were as follows

Cover worn, marked and creased. Inscribed.

If I'd known it had been 'inscribed' with a hand drawn map of Europe, I might have paid a little bit more for it.

2009-05-17T20:41:00.003+01:00

Brief Encounter a joy from first minute to last. It is glorious theatre, brilliantly funny and inventive, great work from the below-mentioned Mr Murray and of course the whole thing is such a juggernaut of a romance, the lump in the throat at the end was a frightful nuisance. Thinking about it after, it put me in mind of Emma Rice's exuberant, helpless, hilarious Tristan show. The eternal triangle, I suppose, leavened by the choric/comic secondary characters. I'm sorry I missed the original cast (especially Tamzin Griffin) but was thrilled to see my pal Christopher Price enjoying himself so much in the role of Stanley, and two-time Miniaturist Milo Twomey in the plum(my) role of Dr Alec.

Two nights later, another treat, Erica W's Northern Stage production of Look Back In Anger, at the Richmond Theatre. I shan't go on about it or I shall have to retitle the blog The Old Pals Act, or something. But I did think it was pretty brilliant. And Bill Ward - whom I've never met! - was, for me, pretty damn close to a definitive Jimmy.

2009-05-12T17:22:00.009+01:00

Newcastle, bright fine day. The city sparkling. I enjoyed my meeting with my colleagues and look forward to this evening, Kneehigh´s Brief Encounter (designed by one of said colleagues, Northern Stage associate Mr Neil Murray) has pulled in at the Theatre Royal. So much of the life of your correspondent is in flux and shift but the blog remains, and Newcastle. What else? What doesn´t? Meeting me again for the first time since the winter another colleague, quizzically, ´Have you lost weight?´. Is the correct question.

We did a Miniaturists on Sunday just gone, number nineteen. I had hoped to air my ridiculous play about Will Shakespeare and Will Kemp, ridiculous in the sense that what was I thinking? To write a play about theatre´s god. I have though, and even though I read Edward Bond´s Bingo first, by way of preparation. Again, what was I thinking. The play, Bond´s, insanely good. There must be a revival soon. My shortassed piece couldn´t quite make it to the stage this time but hopefully next. That´s on July 12. Declan Feenan stepped in with his as ever beautifully judged miniature, Building Site. Thanks for coming, by the way - I know at least one of you did! Several of you did. There were good houses for both shows, which is not ever taken for granted, especially on a Sunday like Sunday, bursting at the seams with the promise of summer. The writers - besides Declan, there was Susan Mulholland, Diane Samuels, Rhiannon Tise and Mark Homer - all seemed to have as good a time as the audience, which is to say there was a pleasing equilibrium achieved, just the kind we like.

____

I now find myself upstairs at the Tyneside Cinema, in the Tyneside Coffee Rooms - ´a local legend is reborn´ - no, not Shearer, or rather, yes him too - forties music in the air, to complement the decor. There are little union jacks and period teapots on the mirror-backed shelves behind the bar. And an anachronistic poster of Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. Devilled kidneys on toast is 3.95.

2009-03-24T16:33:00.008Z

Much about Germany, and the War, of late. There´s been an interesting confluence of things. As a jobette I have been working on translations of teenagers´ diaries from the Second World War, truly amazing documents of experience written by young people living through the conflict in Japan, Britain, France, Germany, the US, the USSR. My job has been to polish up the literals, hopefully to make them read nicely, give them more in the way of flow. The material is really eye-opening, jaw-dropping, stomach-churning and all-round affecting and moving, and when the book comes out (it´s being co-edited by a good friend) it´ll be a valuable addition to the mountain of WW2 literature. For a prospective job, a thing in the offing, I have been delving into Brecht´s anti-Nazi writings, and for bedtime reading (!) there is Anthony Beevor´s gripping, frightening Berlin, The Downfall 1945. Then there was Dr Atomic, last Friday. I was admittedly dazed after a long day - I had woken in my mum´s house in Cumbria, and gone with her to a hospital appointment in the morning, before taking the train. But by the time I staggered home on the tube at 10.30 or so I was dismayed at what I could only see as a terribly wasted opportunity. John Adams´s opera, with Peter Sellars and Alice Goodman, the one that goes by the name of Nixon In China - well to me that is as close to dramatic perfection as I´ve seen, an opera that qualifies as great theatre, with a stunningly original libretto (hate the term, it´s a script isn´t it) by Goodman that has such breadth, height and complexity that I don´t know where to begin. The scenario for Dr Atomic, and the libretto, to my mind, suffer greatly by any comparison. The production is excellent, can´t be faulted, and the music is - though with Tom Green I feel unqualified to pass any detailed comment - consistently incredible. All the more reason to ask then, what is going on with that script / scenario? As most people have said, the close of Act One, where Oppenheimer sings the John Donne poem Batter My Heart, is sublime and powerful. But it is an isolated incident, in more ways than one - nothing in the characterisation theretofore even hints at the explosion of anguish and longing expressed in Donne´s lyric. I´ll stop now.

Anyway here is Oppenheimer himself. I saw this clip a long time ago, it´s the sort of thing that stays with you. (The quote is not used in the opera, by the way. But enough!)

Meanwhile I had a short play on in this. I was extremely pleased with how they did it. They being Ross Armstrong, Jo Herbert and director Gordon Murray. It was a real pleasure to do a little something in the new Southwark Playhouse, too.

And I have written ´additional material´ for this. Which opens tonight. Blimey, how tempus fugit.

2009-02-08T12:13:00.002Z

I was going through some books and I came across this

I was in my second year at Oxford and had imbibed enough institutional cockiness to go up to the dynamic duo of British art at a book signing. I'd been an admirer since I'd seen footage of their living sculpture works on telly when I was still at school. I just thought they were unbelievably funny and interesting and strange. No great insight, I just instinctively liked them. I correctly surmised they would have no problem with a student coming up to them in Blackwells and asking if they would sign something other than their book, as he couldn't afford it. I was doing Plato's Symposium that term, I just opened it at a random page. Don't ask me what the text is saying here, the old Greek is pretty rusty. I might be reading lots later in the year if one of my plans comes off, though.

2009-01-28T18:46:00.003Z

There´s a student production of The May Queen tonight and tomorrow, at Bridgwater College in Somerset. Delighted they´re doing it and looking forward to the promised photos. Meanwhile nothing continues apace... I am beguiling the time with rereading Robinson Crusoe, and watching season 3 of Lost. Surely deliverance must be at hand.
Last night at pub quiz we won a disposable camera, so there may be some overexposed mugshots of the team on here, in time, permissions permitting...
Now I´m off to see Dominic Leggett´s play at the Tristan Bates Theatre, thence home for Match of the Day.

In a word, as my life was a life of sorrow one way, so it was a life of mercy, another; and I wanted nothing to make it a life of comfort, but to be able to make my sence of God´s goodness to me, and care over me in this condition, be my daily consolation; and after I did make a just improvement of these things, I went away and was no more sad.

Gretel and Hansel

2009-01-22T18:11:00.015Z

The old old story of the children lost in the woods in some pre-industrially forbidding forest, prey to dangers natural and not so, a tale about consuming appetite, survival drive, the perversion and denial of the maternal instinct... well it´s hard to know where to start in telling you about the play I wrote for Northern Stage, if you didn´t see it. I suppose you could read the reviews, but though they are pretty positive on the whole, they never really quite bottle it, do they? In the sense of capture, not the colloquialism for a failure of nerve. Of course it´s not ever exactly their job to do so. But more than usually with something I´ve been involved with, there was a particular and peculiar atmosphere about the piece, something uncanny, that evades description. Not all the time in every performance, this is theatre after all, but I mean to say that when all the elements came together, that happy collision of performances, writing, lighting, music and so on, the play was quite beguiling and fantastical, and I´m very pleased about that, looking back, but it´s hard to convey after the event, perhaps as should be. In a programme note I played with the idea that H and G is the Christmas story par excellence, in that it is so completely about the two things that dominate the festival, for most - food, and family. But there is also in the play a strong interest in dreaming and sleep, a nice confusion of realities, a dream logic. I so enjoyed writing it - I enjoyed even more the experience of watching Erica and the company show it. Because they ran with it, trusted the characterisations and the text in general, and took the bits in italics, my tentative, speculative ´stage directions´, and made a proper big show with the kaboodle. This is most easily demonstrable at the end of the first act, the bit where I depart from the usual telling of Hansel and Gretel´s encounter with the Witch and have her eat the boy. The script is pretty perfunctory:

The WITCH

I shall dress for dinner. Get everything ready.

The WITCH leaves and her minions ready the scene for supper. A ritualistic sequence. The sense of a nightmare, where a terrible travesty is taking place and everyone but the dreamer thinks it is perfectly normal, routine even.

GRETEL watches on as the WITCH eats HANSEL, whole, in one go.

BLACKIE can be seen covering her eyes with her paws.

As Erica would tell you, there was an astonishing amount of work required to dramatise those few suggestive lines. Eating Hansel became this enormous set piece, during which the poor boy was carried aloft in procession by chorus members acting as kind of pallbearers, the Witch took her seat in a high-backed chair, and to the inappropriately dainty strains of Tim Dalling´s music for strings, Hansel is consumed whole, tipped into the Witch´s waiting jaws by the impassive chorus (her attendants, sort of nasty wood fairies), she crunches and swallows his twitching body, until at last he is inside her bulging belly, and she gives the most disgusting belch, as the light fades, for the interval. Blackie, I should tell you, is the Witch´s cat, in fact a lost girl called Susan, shapeshifted against her will, and Susan Blackie helps save the day in Act Two... also covering her eyes at the sight of Hansel´s demise is The Moon, characterised as a slightly loopy girl of indeterminate age, who comments on the action throughout, and finally intervenes in the story to show the children the way home. The director had a lot of fun with The Moon, I think, who was entrancingly played by Vicky Elliott, and pointed out to me that I seem to have written an awful lot of gods and monsters in my time.

2009-01-14T19:01:00.002Z

How´s things? I am just popping my head round the door to say hello and assure you that this blog may seemingly be down but it is emphatically not out. And where I may have been seized by a kind of midwinter paralysis, compounded by B´s shockingly heavily involving encounter with a cloying virus (five weeks and counting), thereby keeping me busier than usual on the domestic engineering side, I have still managed to have a big show on, the aforementioned H and G, and I will share with you some thoughts on that, not to mention some pictures.

Workwise, the first few weeks of Twenty O Nine are all about plots and plans and proposals, and unhappily it´s in the way of these things that I can´t tell you much at all about them. But the main one this week, I will say, involves peer review of a proposal I´ve made to a university, and this week I have a window in which to respond to the review, and so it will go on, until the decision is reached and communicated to me, in late March. How long can one keep fingers crossed before they lock like that?

I´m off to the second sitting of Every Good Boy Deserves Favour in a short while. My second visit to the NT already this year. I saw Oedipus on the third, which I found very moving. I only wished we could have all reconvened the next day for Oedipus At Colonus.

Back soon, anyway. Honest.

2008-11-27T12:16:00.002Z

Posting this from The Flying Scotsman, approaching Darlington from the south. Dress rehearsal one this afternoon, dress two in the morning, and first preview tomorrow at two. I am dying to see how it looks - Ian Scott is lighting it, Ian lit The May Queen for us so I know we´re in good hands. Also I have not yet seen a single costume in the flesh as it were, on the flesh maybe, as all the fittings etc were done elsewhere, not at the rehearsal space, so you know as much as I do, if you saw the pics in last Friday´s Guardian G2 that is (they´re not on the website, but one of them is on the Northern Stage one). Neil Murray´s designed the set and costumes, he´s having a busy old week is Neil as he won Best Design at the Evening Standard Awards for his work on Brief Encounter. Which is nice. Well done that man.
Looking forward to arriving in Newcastle, now. For one thing, I need some lunch... Nearly there.

2008-11-19T16:35:00.003Z

´What have you been thinking about?´ Tom Hodgkinson, idler extraordinaire, suggested we ask this of strangers we meet at parties etc, rather than the time-honoured ´And what do you do?´. Well today, in addition to the seemingly compulsory constant merry-go-round of familiar preoccupations and anxieties with which I will not detain you, I have been thinking about electronic patient databases, my mini play Porno Girl, my big play Hansel and Gretel, Shakespeare and Kemp, and the Baby P case. Porno Girl is due for an outing Friday week in Liverpool, The Miniaturists are taking part in the Cornerstone Festival at Liverpool Hope University. The show coincides with first preview of H&G so I will be in Newcastle, sorry to miss it, but a crack team of Miniaturists are on the case, they will also present Death Of The Small Independent Retailer by Mr Glyn Cannon and The Circulatory System by Mr Laurence Wilson.

Also today I am troubled by the trivial fact that although I correctly predicted the skin on one or both of my heels would break, in these new shoes, and the idea bubbled up that I could do myself a favour by bringing a couple of plasters out with me to work, I didn´t take heed of the insight and so am hobbling around the place in my stiff Doc Martens brogues, a limping admonishment to myself.

2008-11-17T18:45:00.003Z

In lieu of any more considered kind of writing, I'm just going to set down that I am very excited about Hansel and Gretel at Northern Stage, they're into week five of a five week rehearsal process, into the theatre next week. I have been visiting of course, working on bits and bobs, ironing, patching, and I will be up again the end of this week to see the last couple of runs in the rehearsal room. But so much happens without me, and when I see the cast again I feel like the uncle who visits every six months and is unfailingly shocked at how they've grown. Also exciting is the research I am doing into a possible Brecht project next year. These two parts of my current existence have only their Germanic provenance in common, and as I have practically no facility with the German language this sometimes seems peculiar. I do have a dictionary, however, and some skills transferable from earlier tussles with Greek, Latin and French. Also I was in love with Mahler's settings of those poems, eg Das Lied von der Erde, and thereby know the odd word.

We did another of those Miniaturists shows last week, and it was a hoot. It was the sixteenth outing, but the first wherein I had not collected all the mini biographies for the programme and shovelled them along on the Friday afternoon to Prontaprint in the Borough for Alan and the team to wrestle with when they had bigger, more lucrative jobs to do. Ah, the joys and sorrows of delegating.

2008-11-03T19:18:00.002Z

I am coming back to this, yes I am. I have been having difficulty keeping on top of things of late, being the sort of person who carries neither diary nor wristwatch. And the blog was, I lately realised, acting as a sort of mental carrier bag, holding all those scraps of ideas and contacts that more together people keep about them in other media.
Anyway I am moved to post this second to lament, O, poor Robinson Crusoe!, as my favourite copy of my favourite book is soaked in coffee that leaked from my thermos. Yes, I said thermos. Look I´m 42 in a few weeks, I´m absolutely allowed.

Of The Georges Steiner and Steinbrenner

2008-09-28T20:52:00.009+01:00

I have started reading Mr Steiner's The Death Of Tragedy (1961). It is dazzling, of course, and its light might have changed the way I saw The May Queen* had I been exposed to it when I was writing that play. But it never occurred to me till just lately that I might read Steiner, knowing my intellectual limitations as I do. I read Eagleton's Sweet Violence, and kept my nostrils above the waterline, just. But GS's reputation had me in thrall. Now, it's his writing, speed of thought, wit. He is mesmerising, not intimidating, in analysing the tension between the neo-classical drama and the "open" form of tragic plot forged in the hurlyburly of Elizabethan London. And he is very cutting already, in the first forty pages, about writers who attempt later reinvention of the works of those who mastered the genre. In a passage evaluating John Dryden's relationship with Shakespeare he says: "After the seventeenth century the art of pastiche will play an increasing role in the history of drama. Barren of invention, poets start pouring new sauces over old meats. In dealing with Dryden, we are still worlds away from such miseries as Mourning Becomes Electra or Cocteau's Machine infernale, but we are on the road."

Come on George, get off that fence.

*Not too coy to link to this now, don't ask me why.

Meanwhile Yankee Stadium has breathed its last. I have been an arms-length armchair baseball fan for a good while. Channel 5 have been providing middle-of-the-night coverage for years, and they give on-air shouts of Hardcore! to viewers who text in while watching live. I have always, apart from the odd bout of insomnia, been softcore, and my knowlege of the game's immense lore is shallow. In the park a couple of days ago, for instance, I asked our New Yorker journalist neighbour Michael (who works on this, among other things) if he was Mets or Yankees. Taking a pause to ride over the idiocy of the question he replied, "Giants." His team moved to California in 1957, and became the San Francisco Giants. Which makes the brouhaha about Everton's proposed move from Goodison Park to Kirkby look a little silly, really. The last time I was there, Kirkby was full of Scousers - and Evertonians - in spite of its being technically just outside the city boundary. But I digress. Here is Mr George Steinbrenner, legendary and controversial owner of the Yankees, as lampooned (affectionately, sort of) by Larry David in Seinfeld.

2008-09-04T15:59:00.001+01:00

This is slightly mindbending.

space is there

2008-08-19T00:13:00.011+01:00

The below is a contribution to a project called space is there, and we're going to climb it. It's run by Andy Field up at Forest Fringe , Edinburgh. If you can't get to the page, the idea is to pay tribute to the history of human spaceflight by recreating or interpreting individual missions in whichever medium comes to hand or mind. (Just noticed the link on the FF website.)
So I drew Apollo 9 out of the hat, and here is my bit.

Spider, Flies

A spider in the corner of the living room.

My son Buzz

turns two and a half, two weeks today.

I do not think this is funny.

Buzz Aldrin is many things, but he is not an unevolved man.

The recipient of the blow is Bart Sibrel, a member of the fraternity of Apollo hoax accusers.

Two weeks before I turned two and a half, this happened.

Sometimes stuff really does happen, Bart.

Sometimes spiders fly.

Liverpool (part one)

2008-07-26T12:11:00.004+01:00

Coming to the end of one of the most interesting weeks. I arrived in Liverpool last Sunday and have barely had a moment to stop and think. But here we are on Saturday lunchtime, and I am ensconced in a corner of the FACT cafe with its delicious coffee and free wifi. Here´s a rundown of the week, in instalments. Sunday I was kindly hosted by Suzanne Bell, Everyman´s literary manager and Everyword Festival supremo. First thing Monday I met Flavia at the theatre, Miniaturists producer, and we embarked on an all day technical rehearsal in the space, with hour-long slots for the five plays (see my last entry, below). This went so unusually smoothly that by 6pm Flavia and I were nicely perplexed. But the credit goes to Suzanne and her assistant Lindsay, who worked with us last year and had briefed everyone exceptionally well. I did some props buying in the afternoon and found myself at the Tesco´s checkout with the following in my basket, Take A Break magazine, a packet of ginger nuts and 20 Richmond Superkings. Hey ho. So at 6.40 I was outside the Everyman on my phone, chatting to B about how it was going, wondering aloud about where I might grab a bite before going down to the Playhouse to see Once Upon A Time At The Adelphi. And B says, ´So what time´s your radio interview, have you done it already?´ Ah. I get her to log into my email, check the message from Radio Merseyside, eleven days previous, long enough ago for me to have clean forgot. ´Um, says you´re to arrive at 6.40 to go on air at 6.45...´
6.41 Cab.
6.42 Cab driver taking the mick out of me for poor time management.
6.43 Cab driver calling me a lucky so and so, every light is green.
6.44 Cab driver chuckling at my disappearing hide.
6.45 Reception.
6.46 Calming down, drinking water.
6.47 Remembering sitting in same chair pre-interview last year, May Queen production week.
6.48 Into studio, chat with presenter Lucinda while record plays.
6.49 A little more chat about what we are going to chat about. The slot is an ongoing series of interviews with fifty of Liverpool culture´s ´movers and shakers´. I am flattered and not a little disbelieving, but I am of course very happy to talk for ten minutes about my playwriting. Determinedly shutting out the vertiginous idea that there might be thousands of people listening.
6.50 Lucinda (sitting in for Claire Hamilton) asks me to tell the listeners what got me started as a writer, and off I go.
6.59 What seems like two minutes in, Lucinda uses the immortal ´Í´m afraid that´s all we´ve got time for´.
7.00 Off air, I thank Lucinda for making the whole thing easy.
7.01 I´m back on the street, and on the phone to B. What the hell just happened??

2008-07-14T13:29:00.002+01:00

The Miniaturists are gearing up for a couple of away games. One is at the Latitude Festival in Suffolk, this very weekend. We were kindly invited by Arcola to represent them there, and we are delighted to do so. We´re taking three of our best:

Time Spent On Trains
by Elizabeth Kuti

Death Of The Small Independent Retailer
by Glyn Cannon

Match Play
by Frederic Blanchette, translated by Christopher Campbell.

Hannah Eidinow is directing all three.

The other is in Liverpool the following Tuesday. For that I am resurrecting Hell and High Water, the one I wrote for the first show way back when. Serdar Bilis directing. The other four:

Liar, Liar
by Judith Johnson, dir. Gemma Kerr

Bark
by Kellie Smith, dir. Elli Johnson

The Circulatory System
by Laurence Wilson, dir. Matt Wilde

The Ducks
by Michael McLean, dir. Adam Cross.

So that´s all very engaging. I have a further two pieces on at the Everyman that week, all part of the extraordinarily jam-packed two week festival of theatre and writing that is Everyword. Kicking off tomorrow, in fact. On the second Friday is the BBC Docks Project event, and my play Trucking Sugar will be one of nine given an airing. Three Ev writers (me and Kellie Smith and Jonathan Larkin) plus three each under the banner of Live Theatre, Newcastle, and Paines Plough representing the capital. On Saturday I´m on a bill of plays loosely interested in / inspired by the question, What Does Europe Mean To Me? My thing´s called You Can Be With Me.

And did I mention I´m writing a Hansel and Gretel? First draft deadline fast approaching... Bye for now.

2008-06-29T16:34:00.003+01:00

Yes, ***** from me, as in many other slightly more widely read verdicts. B would take off half a star for the music, which is a bit harsh. I think it was the Barbican sound system that was at fault on that score.

Of course, does it go without saying?, finding the play absorbing and admiring its thrilling execution is not quite the same as endorsing the entire history of the Black Watch. They are at root a killing machine in the service of a country with a long history of using such machinery for its own interests, dark as well as enlightened, whatever the cost to other nation states or tribes. The play treads a very interesting line, lauding the courage and camaraderie, while pointing up the essentially atavistic nature of their business. Men as warriors, fighters, bullies.

Very interesting appreciation of Gregory Burke's play today, from one of the Iraq war 'embeds'.

ps Mrs S now says she's taking a full star off for the 'faux Nyman at ear-splitting volume'. I've said it before, she's a tough crowd.

2008-06-27T12:52:00.005+01:00

Happy Friday. As a Gooner-by-proxy I was of course delighted to see Cesc Fabregas take the game by the scruff of the neck last night. Except far more elegantly than the phrase might imply. I can now forgive him for reminding me of the truly wicked Sylar every time I see his mug.

I have discovered the wonderful world of the pub quiz, after an invitation from a playwright of my acquaintance. I´ve been the last three Tuesdays and am now hooked. I earned my spurs by identifying the letter of the alphabet that occurs only once in the names of all football teams playing in the English and Scottish leagues, and naming the club. It´s amazing what pleasure can be derived from getting a point for your team by pulling such arcane knowledge out the bottom of the bag. What´s the only English anagram of persistent?* Name all eight actors who have won Best Actor Oscars twice.

Meanwhile the boys´ grandpa hosted an event at the House of Lords this week and here they are participating in parliamentary democracy.

Off to that Barbican tonight to see that Black Watch. There's been a lot to read about the show, on the web, in the papers, I almost feel I've seen it already. But I'm guessing the 'live-ness' will kick in and away I'll be swept.

*for those of you arriving here from Googling for the answer to this: prettiness.

2008-06-15T20:17:00.007+01:00

So I'm watching a lot of football. Euro 2008 - or the European Championships to old timers like me - is proving very entertaining. Group A comes to a head tonight with a decider between Turkey and the Czech Republic (or 'Czechoslovakia', as David Pleat would have it) for the second qualifying spot. Now my usual modus operandi is to record the games and watch them last thing, remote in hand so I can zip through the injury stoppages and the more annoying punditry, naming no names Mr Allardyce. Tonight, alas, this strategy will avail me naught as there will be no avoiding the result come 9.30 - either Green Lanes and environs (including our little offshoot) will be resounding to several hundred car horns, trumpeting a Turkish triumph, or... they will not.

Meanwhile I am working on the Christmas play for Northern Stage, Hansel and Gretel. It's a very pleasurable job, already. The Brothers Grimm (as distinct from the Brothers Grim) are fascinating source material, all seven pages or whatever it is according to which edition you pick up. As with last year's Christmas Carol, Erica (Whyman) is directing and Neil (Murray) designing, so that's a head start, getting the old band back together. We're starting earlier than we might have done because Neil is working on his own production of a new piece for September, a Bryony Lavery version of Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber. So that'll be bloody exciting.

So it's Christmas in my head, albeit of a starkly different sort from the Dickensian goings on last time round. From a mechanical point of view, the source material is brief to the point of insubstantial, compared to the prolix and effervescent Charlie D. There's an almost biblical ghostliness to the characters and action in the Grimms treatment. But they are of course, precisely for that reason, a gift to people like me who come along after and set about fleshing them out. I'm adding some shall we call them variations to the story, some inspired by my reading, majorly of this literally wonderful book

and a significant one from a chance remark by a director friend during a quick catch up.

What else will I tell you? Cloudcuckooland got a mention in The Seoul Times, Edinburgh fringe preview (about halfway down). I've seen one of the best new plays for yonks, The Pitmen Painters (featuring Mr Michael Hodges who was our Scrooge last year), and one of the best versions of a very old play you could wish for, Roger McGough's Tartuffe. Mostly though I have been sitting and thinking about stories. When the footie's not been on.

2008-05-14T21:06:00.004+01:00

These past few weeks I have been gorging on some fine writing. Three plays by Henrik Ibsen, for a start: two in vivid versions by Frank McGuiness (A Doll's House, The Lady From The Sea) and one very strong one by Rebecca Lenkiewicz (An Enemy Of The People). Then there was Fram of course, with Tony Harrison at his eccentric best, and round the corner, Simon Stephens's soulful Harper Regan. Martin Crimp's play The City had the quality of a nightmare and resembled, for me, the darker work of the great Paul Auster. At the Bush, I enjoyed Lucy Kirkwood's sweetly insane Tinderbox, and next evening over at Soho I loved Static, by Dan Rebellato. Today I saw the wonderful (and unexpectedly touching) big splash debut by Polly Stenham. I've already written about Jonah and Otto here. What I didn't tell you is that I attended a recent rehearsed reading of Robert Holman's Rafts And Dreams, that knocked me over. Then at last Sunday's Miniaturists there was fine work from Christina Balit, Rachel Barnett, Declan Feenan, Hilary Bell, and a debut from Paul Chadwick (our first professor). I make no apology for citing the writers alone here. Needless to say, great work was done on all the above by directors, actors, producers, designers, etc. But I'm wanting to big up the people who dreamed up and wrote down the words, the scenarios, the blueprints, the rubrics - hell why don't we call them the scripts and be done with it, for these life-enhancing, spellbinding entities and say, hey, thanks. And respect.

2008-05-07T15:06:00.006+01:00

What do Damien Hirst, legendary cricket umpire Dicky Bird, and poker superstar Dave "The Devilfish" Ulliott have in common?

Answer: they "love their snooker". During the final session of this year's World Championships, the camera picked out the above luminaries, and in those beyond-parody (though Mitchell and Webb have made a very good fist, witness the fact that a spectator was wearing a t-shirt bearing the legend 'Ooh and that's a bad miss') cliche-ridden hushed tones, the commentators informed us, proud as Punch, that the famous umpire/artist/poker player "loves his snooker". Moments later a streaker, er, streaked on to the stage, divesting himself of black tie and dinner dress before dancing around the table bollock naked; I can't begin to do justice to Dennis Taylor's panicked demeanour, resolving to stoicism, as the director cut to him in the commentary box to spare us the delicate pink in the middle.

I shall so miss the whole Crucible thing when the Championships decamp, as they surely will in time, to China. It'll be on the box still, obviously, but will it be so unselfconsciously, gloriously eccentric?

2008-05-02T15:13:00.005+01:00

Today's the last day of my NT attachment. It's been a sincere sensation. There's that old quote, which for the present purpose I shall gender-transpose: "What my husband doesn't understand is, when I'm looking out of the window, I'm working." Eight weeks of looking out the window. Marvellous. There's a particular atmosphere here, very conducive, and that's down to the staff, artists and others, who are without exception as hospitable and supportive as an incomer could wish.

In memoriam, here are some notes I took, towards some scenes for something I'm not now going to write, having since taken rather a different tack (all that looking out the window you see). But I like the list as a thing in itself (and some of the ideas persist).

James Joyce introduces

Crusoe and Moll

A Garden in Newington

The Queen Goes To The Toilet And Washes Her Hands

The Pillory (Dead Kittens)

Anyone in from Colchester?

A Tempest Off Great Yarmouth

Mary Goes To Nottingham

JEHOVA PROVIDEBIT

Bricks and Fire

Sophia and the Lip Reader

The Invention of the Guillotine

Robinson and the Moor

____________

Also in memoriam, eighteen years ago today I took the bus up to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford, to be told that the results of my scan were very encouraging and that by the end of my course of chemotherapy I should certainly expect to be free of the disease. Hodgkin's, that is. I remember the feeling very well, as I left the building and looked up at the blue spring sky.

2008-04-24T14:34:00.002+01:00

Taking the link down, I thought I'd record it: I miss David E's "One Writer and His Dog", the passion and erudition, the cooking, the Rascal news and all the rest of it.

2008-04-20T22:37:00.005+01:00

While rummaging for Tony Harrison's Oresteia I dusted down another (academic, annotated) translation of the middle play of the trilogy:

featuring Dame Diana in what I'm sure you'll agree is the mother of all Clytemnestra costumes. The photo isn't credited in the volume, for shame, but I asked Dr.Google about it and she directed me to this page, recording the existence of a Frederic Raphael/Ken MacLeish adaptation for the telly. She even made the cover of Radio Times, look.

2008-04-18T22:26:00.005+01:00

It's Friday night, I've put the boys to bed, cooked and eaten my mushroom omelette and now I'm listening to Jessye Norman's voice, married to The Four Last Songs, Richard Strauss. I used to listen to a lot more classical music and opera and so on than I do these days. The Fall and Pink Floyd are the two names currently most heavily represented on my iTunes '25 most played'. Funny how things mutate.

It's been an interesting week workwise. I wrote virtually nothing but had one of those real lightbulb moments on Monday, which has illuminated the rest of the week's reading and thinking. In and around Daniel Defoe and his work, but you could have guessed that.

Also on Monday I saw Fram, Tony Harrison's new work for the National Theatre, directed by himself and its designer Bob Crowley. I found it enthralling, bewildering, beautiful, touching, funny, strange, baffling, frustrating, majestic, prolix, self-mocking, and quite unashamedly challenging in its piling up of a tottering tower of weighty themes. And there were fart jokes, and vomit. Video, dance and what at one stage I thought was a Mighty Boosh tribute sequence. Quite wonderful. Of course it goes without saying, the man's a legend in his own dinnertime. And yes I have seen him in the canteen. But no even if I had the courage, I wouldn't still. Never meet your heroes, don't they say (though I did hear he came to Northern Stage to see A Christmas Carol, and if I'd been there at the time, who knows..). As an actually not very spotty teenager in Liverpool, I watched the video of the NT's production of TH's Oresteia with the rest of the A Level Greek class, and was awestruck. No translation had ever before come close to generating the heat and power of classical Greek, but as soon as the watchman opened his mouth, we knew Aeschylus had finally found a mouthpiece for the age of English. Sorry, Gilbert Murray! At least you have lovely Jeff Rawle bringing you to life on stage.

(Half) A Night At The Opera

2008-04-08T16:24:00.004+01:00

What with all the scribbling, childcaring, penury and other constraints too nebulous to mention, it's not easy for yours truly and his crew to be proper spontaneous, like this guy. Hell, I didn't even notice when the passport expired two years ago. Little things like last night help, though. Seated here at the desk in The Cut at 7.05pm, I decided to see something. But what... Bliss at the Royal Court? Sold Out. Ibsen at the Arcola? Yes, but not tonight... At 7.25 I was climbing the stairs at the Royal Opera House, to take my perch in the Lower Slips, misnomered for sure, as I had to fight creeping vertigo to concentrate on the half a stage I could actually see from my standing berth, priced at a reasonably reasonable £7. It was Eugene Onegin (in a production by the late Steven Pimlott), a work I only knew (past tense operative, as I couldn't remember anything about it) from reading the Pushkin, decades ago. But I warmed to the score, the performers were endearingly committed to the barmy enterprise of recreating romance among the pre-revolutionary Russian bourgeoisie, and there was even a comedy accident in a scene change that would have had the Whingers jumping for joy. The first act of three was enough, I'd had eighty minutes of lush orchestral loveliness poured into my ears, I'd assured myself this whole world of the operatic repertoire still existed, I'd witnessed the rich at their extraordinarily innocent play, and so ambled off into the Covent Garden night well satisfied with the improbability of it all.

2008-04-01T20:57:00.004+01:00

I have a new place to work. Temporarily anyways. I'm on an 'artist's attachment' at the National Theatre Studio, which simply means I have a room in the building for a few weeks, and the use of a decent coffee machine, and a little roof garden (it's brand new so not yet very lush), and interesting neighbours. Also - and this is the really good bit - I get to use the NT canteen. I love institutional food. It's cheap too - today I had salmon and two veg for less than a fiver.

At lunchtime today I beetled over to the canteen early as I wanted to be in place to see this:

the Red Arrows streaking over the city as a not too modest tribute to the RAF on its 90th anniversary. Still, they did largely on their own save Britain from Nazi rule, so fair play. The RAF that is, not the Red Arrows. I was quite emotional at the sight, in fact. I have a distant memory of seeing them when I was little and being somewhat overwhelmed. But then thinking about it later I wondered if my memory was haywire (again) and my young self had in reality thrilled to the exploits of these chaps instead.

It's getting on for two weeks since I saw it but Robert Holman's play Jonah and Otto is lingering long in the mind. I saw it on a freezing day in Manchester, horizontal rain, the city itself felt like it was in despair. But entering the Royal Exchange your mood lifts, your eyes can look to the heights, you can breathe in the space. RH's play is a piece of magic, a yarn spun, a sleight of hand, and like the best such things it makes you laugh and not care to know how it's done, you just enjoy. You believe. But read what David Eldridge has written about the play and the man here, and also Simon Stephens here.

Meanwhile I'm off back to the early eighteenth century, reading the definitive biography of Daniel Defoe.

Tate Rage

2008-03-07T16:37:00.008Z

The annual budget of Tate, the self-styled 'family' of British cultural leviathans in the field of the fine arts, is £Squillions per annum. Why oh why then, can they not seem to swing it so that their gallery staff pay mind to the fact that those funny people looking at the paintings are every bit as deserving of consideration as those thronging the bookshop/giftshop/caff/members room? Say you're in that lovely restaurant at the top of Tate Modern, sampling the fare, chatting to your companion, enjoying the fine view of Wren's masterpiece. And then, a pair of waiters come and stand next to your table and start discussing their work/life balance, or something equally important to them but of no remote interest to yourself. Would you put up with it? No. But then it would never happen.

While in Liverpool last week I had the third of three brain-splittingly frustrating experiences while trying to appreciate work in a Tate gallery. Each time I have been propelled to complain to the higher-ups about the plain stoopud, thoughtless, unfit-for-purpose conduct of staff they have hired to watch over the rooms in their galleries. And believe, I never complain about irritations - on the rationale that once you start, where do you stop? Modern life is not actually all that bad, but it is jam-stuffed with petty annoyances, some of which are pointoutable to the culprits, or often more pertinently the people who are responsible for their training and levels of job satisfaction. The situation in Tate Liverpool was rather like my fanciful Tate Modern example above, with the crucial difference that I was stood motionless in front of work in this room. I like abstract painting. I get a lot out of it, I find it challenging to what intellect I possess, it sometimes makes me laugh, sometimes puzzles me to the point of bewilderment, and it sometimes even moves me to tears. I can, however, have none of these reactions if I am one person of three in a room, and the other two - the staff responsible for looking after the gallery's interests, and those of the visitor - are having a work-related moan-fest a few feet away.
And don't get me started on the total inadequacy of the response when I tried to make a complaint on site. Tellingly, though, the immediate reflex was to agree that the staff's lack of good sense or whatever you'd call it was unacceptable, and to ask me to point the finger at the attendants involved. As last time, I refused, as my point was that the levels of staff awareness and sensitivity are surely the managers' responsibility. Grrr!

And no, of course, it hadn't escaped me that all of the above is in interesting relation to the below, the work diary of a man who might have been my grandfather. Education and culture. For what? All we need is love and shelter, I know.

2008-02-29T16:20:00.007Z

I took a trip to Liverpool yesterday to try and find some research material for a short piece I'm writing. The day started auspiciously, with me bumping into Serdar on the train, he was on his way to work at the Liverpool Theatres, where he is an associate director (regular readers will remember he directed my play The May Queen up there last year). When we landed I walked with him to the Playhouse to say hello to my friends there, then I headed off to the Maritime Museum at the Albert Dock, more in hope than expectation. But I got lucky. The extremely helpful archivist-librarian Lorna dug out a document that was absolutely perfect for my purposes - a transcript of a docker's work diary for the first few months of 1923. Written in a prose that is at once mundane and vivid, the diary details the crappy working life of the dock labourer in the days before unionisation had properly begun to improve pay and conditions, and when "health and safety" was not for the likes.

15/2/23 Thursday
I had a bit of luck this morning and got on at a boat discharging a general cargo. We were getting rice & I was at the door landing & helping to put 5 bags on each truck in their separate marks for which I get 6d a day extra. The job is hard enough when there are a lot of different marks to be turned over. However it is a bit better than walking the streets so I suppose I must be thankful for it.

Thankful, because he knows the following can happen...

22/2/23 Thursday
Went out again this morning, but after being on 3 stands & failing to get on I went to the Clearing House & signed on for unemployment pay and went home, wet through. Same again in the afternoon.

23/2/23 Friday
Same experience as yesterday. No work.

24/2/23 Saturday
No work.

26/2/23 Monday
No work.

27/2/23 Tuesday
No work.

28/2/23 Wednesday
No work. this being 6 continuous days of unemployment I am entitled by the generosity of the government to 20/- to keep my wife and I from going into the workhouse, where it would cost them 30/- each for us.

1/3/23
No work.

2/3/23
Got on this morning at a boat discharging cotton trucking over a floor thick with dirt and slime. A heavy job all day, but better than walking round the streets.

Hard times. To think, my Dad's Dad lived and worked in that world.
I found this entry particularly touching...

6/2/23
Got on again this morning at the same job as yesterday. The ship being nearly out, a lot got broke at dinnertime, myself among the number. I tried another stand at 1 o'clock but failed to get on, so being a cold wet day I went home & settled myself down to read.

I wonder what he was reading?

Fame At Last

2008-02-26T13:21:00.007Z

Like most playwrights who've not got there yet I dream of seeing my name in orange neon on the facade of the Royal Court, or in massive dots on the NT billboard. Until that dream flowers or dies, however, I have the West End Whingers review of Cloudcuckooland to keep the fires of ambition stoked. I was sitting just three down from Andrew in the front row, reminiscent of the night I sat in close proximity to Michael Billington scribbling away during the Euripides I'd done for the Gate. On this occasion though, any latent anxiety had no time to rise, as we were all too busy blowing up balloons, calling out the names of dinosaurs and pledging allegiance to the city state of Cloudcuckooland (complete with actions). But I was sorry Andrew didn't have time (or enough hands) to whip out a notebook, as I'd primed Spike to march up to him and demand to know "What are you writing?".

E is for Eventually

2008-02-21T19:57:00.005Z

It's with some degree of shamefacedness that I acknowledge and accept the award of an E For Excellence plaque from Ova Girl. Since I started blogging almost three years ago I've been through some ups and downs, some lean patches and some purple. But I have been less than prolific for some time now, and marvel at the consistent brilliance of the likes of The Whingers, Helen Smith, etc, and of course Ova G herself. I still like posting, though, still get a buzz from getting the odd comment and I shall endeavour to make myself a tiny bit worthier of Vanessa's accolade. Onward!

The kids musical comedy version of Aristophanes is up and running. It's at the Riverside Studios this week and got itself a nice little review from Daily Info when it opened in Oxford last week, at the North Wall Arts Centre. I was very taken with this new-ish theatre (after an initial feeling of being trapped in a world of brown, my eyes adjusted, and under the theatre lights - as opposed to the working lights - the brownness is transmogrified into a comforting, warm browny hue). I saw two dress rehearsals on the Tuesday in Oxford, and was back for the Thursday perf, which was attended by Professor Oliver Taplin (who helps run the Onassis Programme with director Helen Eastman) and his daughter Charis. Charis is just about the target age, so it was a huge relief that she seemed to have enjoyed herself a lot.
Daily Info by the way is an Oxford institution - when I was a student at the university you'd see it pinned up in every caff or bar or common room, the ubiquitous daily digest of Oxford student life, an A3 version of Time Out, and its theatre reviews were widely read and influential. Well like the rest of us it's gone digital - can anyone tell me if the A3 version still goes up? I have half a feeling I saw it in my old college when I wandered through, but that could just be the nostalgia playing tricks on my aged brain. Incidentally my first play Mahler's Unfinished was favourably reviewed in Daily Info and the bullet of pleasure I got when I read it posted up somewhere is lodged in my heart forever. It was actually my second play as I'd worked with my friend Michael on an adaptation of The Picture Of Dorian Gray in 1989 that played at Balliol College then went to the Edinburgh Fringe. I wrote about that elsewhere in the blog, I realise. Must try not to repeat myself. But here's something new - starring in both Dorian Gray and Mahler was Claire Hoult, and in true blast from the past fashion Claire reappeared in my life at the Riverside Studios on Monday, she is now Head of Classics at a school in Oxfordshire and was bringing a class of her pupils to see Cloudcuckooland. Wonderful to see her.

2008-02-04T18:36:00.000Z

After a day fussing about behind the scenes yesterday, and the usual relief post-Miniaturists show, and a morning with Bernard, it was back to the keyboard this afternoon for some rejigging of Cloudcuckooland.
Amazing how rehearsals make the play.
Now I'm packing up to head off to the NT, seeing War Horse at last.

2008-02-03T13:13:00.000Z

A despatch from the front line, haha. As if putting on a night of short plays in Dalston were ever at all by any stretch comparable to an actual front line.

Third play is teching at the moment, two more after lunch, doors open at 4.30. Frantic rigging this morning by our valiant crew. Angie and Simon, Paul, Ruth and Emma working well and with admirable focus for a Sunday morning. No one on f.o.h. ergo none of the usual caffeine facilities available... till Gemma clocked on at noon and all was well. I was just told that Vanessa Bates's play At Sea, fifth in our line-up so going up at about 6.30 this eve, again at 9.30, is also, this very day (give or take a dateline), on at the Short and Sweet festival in Sydney. Well I'll be.
Okay time to go see how Gordon's tech is going, should be winding up soon...

All Better Now, and Miniaturists 11

2008-01-30T11:43:00.000Z

I got seven solid hours and a cheque in the post (I'm so cheap), couple of nice comments, and the sun is out, and the boys were delightful this morning, and the laptop is in the pink again thanks to the good offices of the fellas at Get Digital, and the Miniaturists show on Sunday (5pm and 8pm at Arcola, book early!) is looking shapely:

Still
by AL SMITH
directed by Will Mortimer

At Sea
by VANESSA BATES
directed by Lucy Skilbeck

A Change in Partners
by STEVE HAWES
directed by Gordon Murray

Running Backwards
by CLARE BAYLEY
directed by Tom Wright

and

The Twenty Three Greatest Moments of Dave
by GLYN CANNON
directed by Rob Crouch.

_________

2008-01-29T17:39:00.000Z

Somewhat stymied by a confluence of poor sleep, tyrannical small people, a temporarily trashed laptop and all the usual impediments to productivity, viz. fear of failure, lack of self-belief etc. Throw into the mix the numbing realisation - upon doing the annual tax self-diagnosis - that I really did earn that little, and that's a leaden cloud louring over proceedings. What can I do to chivvy myself out of this mood? A reflex response is to check in at the Guardian theatre blog and see what the tribe is up to, but honest to god... I mean even if the blogger is sweetly reasonable, you can bet your life some bile has been smeared in a comment box. God knows, to whinge is human, we all do it. But today I would just wish for a moratorium on moaning (funding threats excluded - there the shouting is honest and justified) and some persuasions toward solidarity and mutual support. Even if a person is working in the field in a way that differs from your own, it does not follow that that person must therefore be inimical to *your* way.

Great documentary on BBC4 last night, in which culture rock band Eels frontman Mark Everett decided, with a sigh and butterflies in his heart, to try and find out about his father. Hugh Everett was a quantum mechanic, "an unrecognised genius" who idolised Einstein, scrapped with Niels Bohr and developed the theory of parallel universes. He lived with his son for 19 years but the son could not remember touching him until the day he found his father dead of a heart attack. Anyway the film is a thing of beauty, Mark Everett a deeply lovable subject and I'm pleased to say the thing is downloadable for the next few days at the BBC iPlayer site.

2008-01-20T23:10:00.000Z

Rehearsals kick off tomorrow for Cloudcuckooland. Looking forward to meeting everyone, and hearing the latest on how director Helen Eastman plans to tackle the massive strategic bird-poo aerial bum-bardment sequence.

2008-01-18T16:16:00.000Z

Bit of a bitty week, truth be told. Had a tooth out on Tuesday, so that was a day down the Swannee. Then on Weds a blissful day hiding away in the theatre watching Nicholas Nickleby. While agreeing with some of LG's quibbles I had a cracking time (Sam Marlowe's praise for the actors is not overdone) and shed a tear for poor old Smike, yet another ghost of the lost boy the author had been for a brief but incandescently formative time. Perhaps I'll just watch Dickens adaptations and nothing else for 2008. Christmas Carol finished its run last Saturday and that has left me in even more of a January mood. I was meant to make a weekend of it in Newcastle for the last perfs but an extraordinary thing - as I was leaving the door on the Friday morning to head for King's Cross, Spike erupted - he hadn't realised the show was going to end. He'd seen it the week before (twice), and fancied he could pop up and see it anytime - or at least any Christmastime - he liked. Now of course no one would be more pleased than me if the play was seen again, in Newcastle or elsewhere - Alfred Hickling's neat objections to festive repeats duly noted - but I couldn't guarantee it to the boy, there, on the spot. So on with his coat, family railcard pocketed, and away he came. And I'm so glad he did. It meant I couldn't stay for the last night carousing, though in truth I was not sorry to dodge the more melancholy moods that such occasions always bring in their wake. So here he is, in the boys' dressing room post-show, in the hat and wig that Michael wore to play Dickens at the top of the show before becoming Ebenezer Scrooge.

2008-01-10T15:42:00.000Z

Of course I couldn’t omit to mention some of the fantastic work by mates, colleagues, fellow bloggers, and people I’m generally friendly with, in the year just gone. The Gate produced Ben Yeoh’s award-winning translation of the Noh play Nakamitsu, and it was eerie and exhilarating. Ben Ellis’s play at 503, The Final Shot, was a heart-on-sleeve piece of writing that I’m guessing was in part inspired by this documentary but was also very much its own thing. David Eldridge teamed up again with Michael Grandage and a stellar cast to make a version of Ibsen’s John Gabriel Borkman that will be hard to trump - icy clarity in the storytelling, heat and storm in the hearts of the protagonists. Aside from his contributions to the Miniaturists, I loved Glyn Cannon’s play The Kiss at Nottingham Lakeside, and also the piece he devised with his students, Nineteen Ninety Eight Nissan Micra. Ellen Hughes co-wrote and directed a fascinating double bill of medically-themed plays at the Old Operating Theatre, where once an audience would gather to watch dissections. Erica Whyman’s directed six things by me - and none of them miniatures, by the way! - but her work on other people’s plays at Northern Stage this year (both designed by her associate, the estimable Soutra Gilmour) has been different class - Ruby Moon in the summer and later the Newcastle epic Our Friends In The North, which comes back for a tour in the spring. At Liverpool Everyman, a space very dear to my heart after The May Queen and a very exciting Miniaturists adventure, Lizzie Nunnery made a sensational debut with Intemperance - Alfred Hickling doesn’t exaggerate here. Lizzie was on this Royal Court thing with me, The 50 - and to my shame I missed work by fellow 50ers including Duncan Macmillan, James Graham, Tena Stivicic, Tom Morton-Smith, Ian Kershaw, Oladipo Agboluaje... Mea culpa. I did however catch a reading of Samreen Masood’s I Will Find You (at the Minis we produced her wonderful Blaggin’ Bread), and a tantalising excerpt from Rachel Barnett’s Perfect Sandcastle at Hampstead. Leyla Nazli was in that group too, and when not exec producing at the Arcola she wrote the blinding Silver Birch House. Richard Bean’s play In The Club was a comedy highlight for me, as he put his stamp on that trickily formulaic thing, the sex farce. Lucy Skilbeck directed Gabriel by Moira Buffini at RADA - great work by the Orstraylian, detailed and dynamic - and MB is one of my favourite writers, can’t wait to see Marianne Dreams.
Then there was The Rose Tattoo at the Olivier - Lucy was associate on the show, working with her friend Steven Pimlott, when he suddenly relapsed into illness. After the terrible shock of his death, the NT and the company took Steven’s production forward, and when I saw it I swooned at its generosity, colour, romanticism, and inherent sense of fun, qualities I gather its director had in spades.

2007-12-31T20:04:00.000Z

New Year's Eve. Aside from watching 24 through my fingers during the gory bits, the only excitements I'm signed up for are checking in on RandomActs as he reports in from the frontline, Trafalgar Square and environs. I've been reading this exceptional blog on and off for a while but have been too effing lazy to link to it myself, until now.

I've just sent Buzz off to La La Land. Spike and Becca are out a-visiting.

It's been a good year for yours truly, lots of interest and excitement, we're a sickeningly happy little family and I've had a great deal of luck with getting work on, two shows for two great theatres, and things lined up for next year - the tour of CloudCuckooLand of course (inc stints at Riverside and Greenwich) but also something I've not mentioned here, I've been asked back by Northern Stage so will be writing a Hansel and Gretel for them next Christmas. Yay for that.

Here then, as has become customary for me to note, are some of the shows I loved in 2007.

Waves
devised by Katie Mitchell and the Company (2006)
from the text of Virginia Woolf's novel, The Waves (1931)
Cottesloe, National Theatre
Breathtaking work, formally daring and exquisitely beautiful. An experiment achieved with consummate style.

Satyagraha
by Philip Glass (1980)
words by Constance de Jong
directed and designed by Phelim McDermott, Julian Crouch and Improbable
ENO
Improbable bring their poetry to bear on Glass's meditative epic.

The Caretaker
Harold Pinter (1960)
dir. Jamie Lloyd, des. Soutra Gilmour
Tricycle Theatre
Pinter's purgatorial masterpiece, David Bradley magnificently Beckettian.

Antony and Cleopatra
William Wotsit (?1607)
dir. Gregory Doran
Novello Theatre
Sex, and the classical world conjured before your eyes - what more do you want?

Dying For It
Moira Buffini (2007)
after The Suicide by Nikolai Erdman (1928)
dir. Anna Mackmin, des. Lez Brotherston
Almeida
Buffini's riotous reimagining of the funniest play about the Stalinist nightmare.

The Emperor Jones
Eugene O'Neill (1920)
dir. Thea Sharrock
Olivier, NT
The Little Play That Could. O'Neill and Sharrock get expansive.

All About My Mother
Samuel Adamson (2007)
after the screenplay by Pedro Almodovar (1999)
dir. Tom Cairns
Old Vic
Touching, intimate, rude and sweet - in the Old Vic? Yup.

Meetings
Mustapha Matura (1982)
dir. Dan Barnard
Arcola Studio 2
Caribbean history, tradition and food explored in wry kitchen comedy.

Mojo Mickybo
Owen McCafferty (1998)
dir. Jonathan Humphreys
Arcola 2
The Irish Troubles as child's play.

Molora
Yael Farber (?2004)
after Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus
dir. the writer
Oxford Playhouse
Heart-stopping and extreme. The war between Electra and Clytemnestra played out before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Lipsynch
Robert Lepage/ Ex Machina/ Culture Industry/ Northern Stage/ Theatre Sans Frontieres (2007)
Northern Stage
Lepage marshals extraordinary forces in work-in-process exploration of the human voice.

_________

2007-12-11T23:13:00.000Z

The last two or three weeks have been fun, fazing and full-on, with a radio play going out on the 3rd, a Miniaturists show on the 2nd, a press and guest night for A Christmas Carol (pictured) in Newcastle on the last day of November, turning 41 on the 9th (a prime number again thank goodness), marking 15 years of my attachment to B on the 10th, and Spike's first school play last Tuesday (Whoops-a-Daisy Angel). Also: workshop days on Cloudcuckooland at St Gabriel's Boys' Club in Pimlico, in the shadow of the block where B and I bought our first flat; Lucy's production of Moira Buffini's play Gabriel at RADA (absolutely spellbinding), and an early evening drink with two senior playwrights beforehand; preview of Much Ado About Nothing at the Olivier (highly enjoyable, with possibly the funniest coup de theatre I've ever seen).

So now here I am at the library on a Sunday afternoon, for the last time in the long year. I'm mucking about with some lyrics for the Cloudcuckooland songs. It's going to be a bit of a riot, this show, if all goes to plan. Slapstick, scatological sing-a-longs, and satirical cameos by the likes of a football WAG and our dear Prime Minister. But let's not get ahead of ourselves! - back to work. Meanwhile I'll note my random iTunes playlist as I go. And if I get the chance later on I'll try and give a bit more detail about all the above. It's been quite a whirl and I've felt the lack of regular blogging, not that I'm under any illusion that there's a public out there hanging on my every word, emphatically not, it's just that I'd like to diarise for myself and also for those friends and family and other bloggers and colleagues who I know do look in from time to time.

Any Colour You Like, Pink Floyd

Rock Star, N.E.R.D.

Titanium, Kraftwerk

Protest (from Satyagraha), Philip Glass

Cups, Underworld

Room 208, The Future Sound Of London

Psycho Killer, Talking Heads

Anarchy In The UK, Sex Pistols

(Jung Neys) Antidotes, The Fall

Can't Get You Out Of My Head, Kylie (Soulwax Rock Remix)

Dig Your Own Hole, Chemical Brothers

No More Tears, KLF

Standing In The Way Of Control, Beth Ditto / Soulwax

2007-11-10T21:52:00.000Z

The Secretary-General of Amnesty International gave my wife some flowers last night. And no, it wasn't in a dream. Staff at Amnesty gave a one-off perf of The Cherry Orchard, and B was playing cello in the band. She was roped in by her mate Tom, double-bassist extraordinaire. The band were excellent, and used far too sparingly, he said uxoriously.
B's out at Cloud Nine as I write. She was at school with the director so likes to keep an eye on her progress, old girls' network and all that. I caught up with her monster production of The Emperor Jones just before it closed and was blown away. What a great show.

Later... Mrs S has asked me gently to point out that she's not stalking Thea. In fact Cloud Nine which she enjoyed hugely is the first Sharrock she's actually seen, implausibly. But she has been pleased to note TS's rise in the papers.

Meanwhile back at the ranch, I was supposed to be at J's birthday drinks but owing to a clerical error we are lacking a sitter, so I'm on watch, whiling the time by doing this and also reading the most harrowing book, The Road by Cormac McCarthy.

2007-11-05T14:36:00.000Z

I never called 999 before. Even with the baby boy imploring me with fierce, frightened eyes to DO SOMETHING, there was still that reluctance, is it really necessary? Are we supposed to call the CamiDoc, the out-of-hours GP service? But actually no, he can't breathe.
Which service? Ambulance.
Genial Irishman showed up, couldn't've been more than three minutes, seemed a fair bit longer naturally. Oh yes, that'll be the croup. He glanced at the beer I'd just opened.
"I've just opened that."
"Looks nice."

Croup's a bastard. Or rather, it's a harmless nuisance of a virus, relative to the terror generated by its onset. The bastard. Buzz? he's absolutely fine now, if a bit snotty.

Radio play got recorded, in other news. The cast laughed and corpsed even, so that was a relief, it seems to work.

A Christmas Carol lost a cast member to a torn ankle. Dashed bad luck for the fella. Erica's drafting in an actor from the Our Friends In The North company, finished the first leg of its run on Saturday night, in Sheffield I think. It's back for a tour in the spring, coming to Guildford so I'll be taking B over there to see it.

Everton have won their last four games - first time that's happened in 17 years, apparently. We seem to be getting quite good at beating the teams we're supposed to beat - Larissa, Derby County, Luton Town, Birmingham City. Though the Brum were unlucky.

2007-10-30T14:58:00.000Z

Just had lunch with L at RADA. Actually L ate lunch and I drank coffee. She's directing a Moira Buffini with final year people there. Cycled to town, through Highbury (past the Emirates) and the dusty busy streets round the back between Camden and Euston, with their half-decent cycle lanes.
Pleasantly befuddled about what exactly I'm working on. I mean, it's clearly CLOUDCUCKOOLAND, in the middle of writing that. But many miles to the north my Dickens script is in rehearsal. Wish I could be there more often, going back a fortnight tomorrow to see them running it before they get into the tech rehearsals the following week. (Can't wait to see it in the theatre, Neil Murray's design is to die for.) And this morning, got the studio script through the post, KEPLER'S MUM'S A WITCH gets recorded this weekend. I'll go in for the readthrough Saturday morning. It goes out on Radio 4 early December.
And what then? A bit of thumb-twiddling. A bit of a reading list. I've got a posh attachment to a theatre in the spring, more about that anon, and the Aristophanes will no doubt need polishing up before it goes on in February. But beyond that there's a whiff of unemployment in the air... Have had a great run recently, no grumbling, it's probably only right by the laws of the freelance universe that I have a lean period coming to me. And it'll actually be good to have some thinking time, free of deadlines. But not too much of it. Eyes and ears will be open and when not typing the fingers crossed for what in the poker universe they call an ace from space.

What else? Our Buzz got expelled by his childminder this morning. Hope it's not a sign of things to come, delinquency and all that. Only kidding, it's just a touch of the old separation anxiety. Happens to the best of us.

Congrats and well dones to our colleague Ben Ellis, by the way. I caught his very fine, sensitive, moving (but with a lightness) piece, The Final Shot at 503 on Friday night. Worth the saddlesoreness - 3 and a half hours round trip by bike!

2007-10-26T12:33:00.000+01:00

List 5 things that certain people (who are not deserving of being your friend anyway) may consider to be "totally lame" but you are, despite the possible stigma, totally proud of.

Such is the urging of the meme Lance has sent this way.

1. My high break at snooker is 73 (ten reds, nine blacks).
2. I can (still) read Greek and Latin in the original (albeit with a dictionary at my elbow).
3. In 1990 I went to the Edinburgh Festival as a stage manager - slept on a floor for a month, caroused a lot, changed girlfriend, etc - okay that last bit was a bit eeky - a few weeks after finishing a course of chemotherapy.
4. The evening of the day we got married, B and me and our families went to my soppy Georgian rom-com version of Cinderella at Southwark Playhouse and it was very memorable.
5. I listen to Five Live a lot.

I'm tagging Ova Girl, David, The Whingers, Harriet, and JMC.

What Is Up? Whatever Could Possibly Be Up?

2007-10-18T22:09:00.000+01:00

I'm cycling again, after two and a half years' accident-related hiatus.
Listening to David Bowie right now (Let's Dance).
Working on silly songs for Cloudcuckooland, my version of Aristophanes's's Birds.
Going to Newcastle at the weekend to catch the last night of Our Friends In The North, rehearsals for A Christmas Carol kicking off on the Monday morning, and Newcastle United versus Tottenham Hotspur kicking off at 8 o'clock.
Went to Mustapha Matura's play Meetings at Arcola last night. Absolute gem. Lovely production directed by Dan Barnard.
Okay back to the play. What sort of thing is it? well... The last song I wrote included the lines

We can confirm there are white streaks on the White House
And Air Force One is grounded by our plops

2007-09-18T17:49:00.000+01:00

It's a beautiful late summer's afternoon scene here in London's famous West End. There's a stillness and the light is fine but fading, no more sunny eves for us for a while. I'm perched on a stool in Foyle's cafe, aka Ray's Jazz Cafe, where somewhere behind me a geezer is tuning up prior to giving us the benefit of his musical wisdom. I'm off home though as I've promised Spike we'll rig up the little telescope he got given for his birthday on Saturday - he really is 5 now, and a schoolboy to boot, started last Tuesday.
Walked here from Bush House, where I had a meet with Liz about the radio play, tidying up some odds and sods. Still thrilling to pass through those security screens and into the territory of the British Broadcasting Corporation.
There's Blood Brothers over the way. Wonder if I'll ever get round to seeing it.

In The Club

2007-08-28T13:23:00.000+01:00

Went to Richard Bean's Brussels farce for the Saturday matinee at Hampstead, and again found myself having a thoroughly marvellous time in the company of RB's writing, with its characteristic swings between acerbity, sagacity and tenderness. This time of course it was accompanied by a barrage of door-slams, switched suitcases, growling Turks and Yorkshiremen, and various plastic appendages. The whole shebang was incredibly likeable, funny and daft. Baffling and irritating therefore to recall the wilfully po-faced reviews. The one piece I read that came anywhere near describing the play I saw was Andrew Haydon's on the Culture Wars site. (Oh and I just looked up the one in the FT , that was pretty good too.)

Meanwhile I'm headed back to 17th century Germany today after a restful holiday weekend, starting on the next draft of the radio play. After that it's draft two of A Christmas Carol, in which I get to write a Christmas carol.

2007-08-20T12:34:00.000+01:00

Morning everyone. I'm currently wading my way toward a draft of a radio play, it's technically overdue as of today but my lovely producer Liz has given me a few days' grace, so yet again I'm writing this when I should be writing that (hello Dave). But I thought I owed you people a post, I know there are a (countable on fingers) number of you who look in regularly, and it's only right and fair that I give you something to read.
B went to Edinburgh for four days last week, so I was full-time Dad for the duration, and lovely that was too, if a trifle exhausting, as I was a bit nervy about my deadline and got insomniac. But all in all it went gratifyingly well. Spike missed his Mum a fair bit and there were a few tears but we had a Grand Day Out at the Science Museum on the Wednesday, the anticipation of which helped keep his pecker up, and baby Bernard, while initially a little perplexed at his mother's sudden not-being-there-ness, soldiered on manfully and was a delightful bean, albeit one that emitted masses of noxious slurry from his rear end, must have been something he ate.
At the Science Museum, we saw this

which bowled me over. Not literally, it doesn't work anymore. But I remembered it did bowl over poor old Huskisson, the first ever railway fatality.

Other things: reading Harriet Devine's interviews with many brilliant writers in Looking Back: Playwrights at the Royal Court, 1956-2006. Essential and riveting. And I caught the last night of Philistines at the NT. Even from the back of the circle I managed to become besotted with Ruth Wilson's Tanya, and also Rory Kinnear as her brother Pyotr (but in a different way). And yes I suppose they really could the pair of them (the characters, I mean) do with a kick up the backside, as their father intimates in no uncertain fashion - but then couldn't we all?

2007-08-05T13:49:00.000+01:00

Friday I finished a draft of Xmas Carol, with a feeling of something like exhilaration as I did my best not to make a mess of the already-quite-dramatic-on-the-page resurrection of Ebenezer. It's marvellous stuff, and I'd gently urge anyone who hasn't read the story to give it a look. It's more Gothic and fantastic than you might suppose from the Muppet version - which has many fine qualities - or even the Alistair Sim. When he wrote the thing Dickens was still only 31 and more in thrall to Smollett, Defoe and Arabian Nights than anything we might call 'Victorian'. And while yes he is forever tainted by association with the paternalistic moralising of the exploitative, rapacious Empire, an embodiment of that Age almost, there is a helpless drive in his work toward redemption, fraternity, empathy between people. So in his life he was a tireless advocate of provision for the poor, for sanitation, housing, and education, for the consolidation and enlightenment of the growing middle class, the advancement of the working class, and the relief of an underclass who suffered privations and rates of mortality we can scarcely imagine among a western European population. He was a man of his time, but among the greatest and most generous of that time, a prodigy from his youth, world-famous by his thirties and a driven, singular, prodigious artist till the end. I know he has been in the limelight recently for his secret - not any more - relationship with Ellen Ternan, and the abrupt and callous way in which he ended his marriage to Catherine Hogarth. All that is interesting - Peter Ackroyd in his mammoth biography (finished it yesterday, incredibly moved at the end when he died) is convinced, by the way, that Dickens's intense, obsessive relationship with Ellen Ternan was never physical, and I'm looking forward to reading Claire Tomalin's book and Simon Gray's play - but a writer's personal life is seldom blameless.

The final something daft, then. Here's Mark E Smith reading the football scores live on the BBC. You've got to wonder about people turning on the telly when Smith was in full flow - how many Fall fans must have thought they were losing their sanity.

2007-08-01T23:24:00.000+01:00

Stave Four done, to my relief. Only the resurrection scene to go, the iconic ending with the turkey and the 'intelligent boy'. Looking forward to finishing with a flourish tomorrow, but not till later in the day as I'm parenting. B is going to a funeral, sadly. A friend's father.
The something daft comes from one of those Jeeves and Wooster episodes set in Manhattan. But which central London building plays the part of Bertie's midtown apartment block?

Shut Up And Dance

2007-07-30T14:05:00.000+01:00

I don't recall ever before buying a piece of music based on a reviewer's rave recommendation. But so I did, and lo, it was transplendent.

You Wan A Piece A Me?

2007-07-29T16:11:00.000+01:00

Alright, Stave Three of Christmas Carol drafted. The famous Cratchit Christmas dinner included. I've switched a few things around and written some new things for them too. But of course as we change the bathwater we need to be careful the baby's safe and well.

Anyhow, here's something daft, an outtake from Seinfeld.

Reviews

2007-07-25T20:51:00.000+01:00

Oh, the tedious business of waiting for reviews after press night. The early morning texts telling you not to buy this or that paper. The staggering about after reading your work described as "genius" (it happened once, thank you Jonathan Myerson, dramatist and critic). The nice ones fluttering through the hazy air of recollection, the stinkers still staining the nostrils of regret years down the line.
Yesterday I read a just glorious passage in Peter Ackroyd's monument to the amazing life and work of Charles Dickens, concerning reviews. Then a little while later I clicked into JMC's place to find he'd reviewed The May Queen. I know a couple of teachers who've used bits of my work in writing classes - exempla of how not to, possibly - but James's short piece is the first public critical appraisal, to my knowledge, of a play text by me. He's very kind about it, for which I thank him.
Here's that passage from Ackroyd. Dickens is 45, globally famous, something of a juggernaut, monstrously healthy ego, and has just published Little Dorrit...
'Blackwood's Magazine called it simply "Twaddle" (a reference which Dickens saw by accident and which upset him for at least a moment). And one of his first biographers, writing a sixpenny pamphlet which was published in the following year, said of Little Dorrit and Bleak House that they "have not been greatly relished by the public any more than they have been praised by the critics". It was in this period that a handsome Library Edition of Dickens's novels first started to be published, and one of the reviewers of that edition suggested that "it does not appear certain to us that his books will live..." But what did Dickens make of such criticism? A few weeks later he was walking with Hans Christian Andersen, who had been hurt by the reviews of his latest book (in fact he had been found lying face down, in tears, on the lawn of [the Dickens family home] Gad's Hill Place) . "Never allow yourself to be upset by the papers, " he told Andersen, "They are forgotten in a week, and your book stands and lives." They were walking in the road, and Dickens wrote with his foot in the dirt. "That is criticism," he said. Then he wiped out his marks with his foot. "Thus it is gone."'

2007-07-23T23:30:00.000+01:00

The caretaker put the papers in his pocket. The barrow had ceased to trundle. The mourners split and moved to each side of the hole, stepping with care round the graves. The gravediggers bore the coffin and set its nose on the brink, looping the bands round it.

Burying him. We come to bury Caesar. His ides of March or June. He doesn't know who is here nor care.

Now who is that lankylooking galoot over there in the macintosh? Now who is he I'd like to know? Now, I'd give a trifle to know who he is. Always someone turns up you never dreamt of. A fellow could live on his lonesome all his life. Yes, he could. Still he'd have to get someone to sod him after he died though he could dig his own grave. We all do. Only man buries. No ants too. First thing strikes anybody. Bury the dead. Say Robinson Crusoe was true to life. Well then Friday buried him. Every Friday buries a Thursday if you come to look at it.

O, poor Robinson Crusoe,
How could you possibly do so?

Poor Dignam! His last lie on the earth in his box. When you think of them all it does seem a waste of wood. All gnawed through. They could invent a handsome bier with a kind of panel sliding let it down that way. Ay but they might object to be buried out of another fellow's. They're so particular. Lay me in my native earth. Bit of clay from the holy land. Only a mother and deadborn child ever buried in the one coffin. I see what it means. I see. To protect him as long as possible even in the earth. The Irishman's house is his coffin. Enbalming in catacombs, mummies, the same idea.

James Joyce

Ulysses, ch.6

2007-07-23T12:16:00.000+01:00

While we were away a friend left a message saying there was a photograph in the Saturday Guardian Weekend mag of Colin St John Wilson in the British Library, showing off the place that he built, and wasn't that me in the background?
So this morning I fished a copy of the mag out the recycling at our building and yes, there I am! Having lunch. It must have been taken pre-May Queen because there's a script in the clear plastic bag at my feet. Would post it here but alas can't find it on tinternet (yet).
Here's a very interesting, and touching, tribute to Professor Wilson, who died in May.

2007-07-22T14:17:00.000+01:00

Uncanny resemblance, today has, to a day last year. Back from the Isle of Wight, SeaView, lovely time, boys tremendous fun, much niceness, mountain of work waiting when I got back. Unlike last year though I'm not feeling sudden crisis-y and my general wellbeing is, well, well.

I confess.
I'd never read or seen a play by the extremely well-regarded writer Robert Holman, until yesterday. RH's work has elicited sighs and purrs of admiration from many a theatre person I look up to, and my secret ignorance of the talent that inspires them had been weighing me down. So I've made a very belated start, on the protracted journey back from IOW last eve. (The protraction, and the fact I was travelling sans famille, is a whole other quite uninteresting story.)
Other Worlds is set among the fishing and farming communities in North Yorkshire at the end of the 18th century (as you probably already know, but bear with me). Stylistically, the writing is light on its feet, the dialogue true and full of intention, they are really speaking to each other. In this play at least - I don't know if it's typical of his work - Holman has no truck with the shadow-boxy kind of playwriting, or the drama of isolation, and while yes people do have secrets and tell lies, the principle at work is that people want to be true, they want to love and be loved, they want to speak to each other, they're just finding it tough, and the reasons why, the obstacles, are the engine of the play.
I found it all very moving, in the sense that I felt for the characters and responded to the action, sure, but also that it sparks the imagination, it reaches the critical mass of imaginative force that only the truly talented writer is capable of, tipping the spectator, auditor, reader into another state, such that he is alive to that other world, feels its potentialities and its sorrows. What can I say. I loved it, and as with so many other things I'm discovering in my early middle age, I'm only sorry it's taken me this long.

The Gallery

2007-07-12T16:53:00.000+01:00

Finished a draft of Stave Two, and since today is the occasion of Richard Herring's 40th, what better daft thing to post than a sliver of Fist Of Fun? Magic and hilari-oust. (And Stewart's quite funny too.)
Mud in your eye, Mr Herring.

2007-07-08T14:47:00.000+01:00

Right, finished a draft of Stave One. Poor Marley!

So here's the something daft. Well not daft, exactly. It's pop music of the purest, dance music of the most contagious, and there's a kind of irresistible mania to the performance, they way they ride the euphoric waves of noise, seriously focused, under the spell of repetition... lovely. Ladies and gentlemen I give you, Hot Chip, giving a recital of Over And Over at this year's Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Arts.

Update... The Glasto link kaput so here's HC in NYC. And if you Just Can't Get Enough you can revel in the studio-fied track and video over here.

Stephen is...

2007-07-07T14:12:00.000+01:00

...in the library, listening to African music on Resonance, working on the first stave of A Christmas Carol, struggling with a head-cold. Yeah I was supposed to head off to Bristol on Thursday, just as soon as I checked out Spike's primary school - he starts at Grazebrook, across the park, in September. A couple of politicians and the fashion editor of a national newspaper are among our fellow parents, it seems. What comes of living just east of Islington, I guess. Anyway in Bristol I was to settle myself in at B's parents' holiday flat and unplug all communication devices and just write. Adapting Dickens. What a lovely job. But instead, as I say, I've been kept on a low energy setting by this stoopid common-as-muck cold. Don't want to stray too far from home. It means I get to see the boys and hang out with B in the eve, of course. Productivity is currently, however, not as stratospheric as I'd been planning for my Brizol sojourn.

So instead of nosing around Facebook I shall go back to the play.

Oh and after I finish drafting each one of the five staves I'm going to post something daft here as a present to myself (which you can share with me, if you like)...

Acknowledgments

2007-07-05T19:51:00.000+01:00

The Miniaturists show this Sunday gone was tip top. Thanks very much indeed if you were among the very discerning, appreciative and distractingly gorgeous audience. The plays took us on an even more varified tour of Storyland than usual, from the playfully disturbing nowheresville of EMBODIED (Glyn Cannon), to an adolescent's eye on the world in FROM BOMBAY TO SANTA FE (my contribution), detouring into a land of grief and sibling intensity with KIND OF DARK (Lance Woodman), before popping in to the twistedly funny REASONS TO SETTLE FOR LESS (Nancy Harris), then finally grabbing a hotdog and a grandstand seat for the almost illegally hilarious MATCH PLAY (Frederic Blanchette).

So many people to thank, as ever. Sarah Jane Shiels and George Dives were last minute recruits to the tech crew and were faultlessly on it. Marilyn and Roger from Arcola beavered away behind the scenes. Tash and Ruth, legendary SMs. Suzanne Bell did terrific work with Lance's play, which was satisfyingly dark and had echoes of Electra (my favourite nasty story). Team Woodman were a joy to work with. Director Elgiva Field took to Miniaturism like the proverbial thing that goes quack, as did her writer Nancy, whose piece, like all the best shorts, was a complete tale in itself but reverberated long after the blackout.
Glyn put together an unusual little number, a ten minute audio piece at the top of the show that begins with the ringing of mobile phones, in the way of those little warnings you hear in theatres to turn off your own. Then an announcer speaks. And away we go. I happened to be sitting next to an Arcola person for the first show, and their momentary disorientation when they heard the ringtones was priceless: 'Is this ours?' As for my play, what can I say but cheers to Lucy and the actors (especially the newly cast Stephen). It was supernice to have another go at it after Liverpool, I made a few tweaks here and there that seemed to work, and I'll be damned if playing in the round at Arcola didn't help our little story get told. Frederic Blanchette's Match Play brought up the rear and was quite simply, to borrow a favourite Stephen Fryism, bowel-shatteringly funny. Lucy (yes her again) did a wonderful job, it was beautifully performed (take a bow Gareth, Ben and Robin), it brought the house down. Job done. It was also a great relief to me personally, finally to see the thing staged. Chris Campbell sent it to me aeons ago, whereupon I showed it to Lucy, who snapped it up and then became too busy to direct but refused, quite understandably, to let anyone else have it. So Chris has had to be the soul of forbearance, for which I thank him, over and beyond the thanks owed for a smooth and witty translation.

And not least. Thank You F.

(Besides running the whole thing with me Flavia took some fine pics, some are over here - click a pic for a gallery view - and there's this one of the writers below... O yes that's right. This is what some playwrights look like. And before you start with any pc musings, we've only had a 4m/1f combo once before, and the last time I wrote one - Miniaturists 3 - I was the odd man out...)

l-r, Lance, Nancy, Glyn, me, Chris

For goodness sake, it's Miniaturists 8

2007-06-28T20:09:00.000+01:00

These are the days, my friend, these are the days.

Nibbles with attitude. A new ruler. A day in A&E with a scratched cornea (I'm bearing up, thanks, but it does smart). And my boy Spike taught me a new song which seemed entirely apt:

Little Nat sat on the wall
Feeling very jolly
Till he had a little fall
Now he's melancholy.

There's nothing like an intimation of mortality to set cats among the flying rats. Scrooge said to Marley, You may be an undigested bit of beef, but in my case the night terrors and acute headaches were the work of a never-seen bit of grit in my right eye. By lunchtime today I was wracked and wrecked with it. Thank Christ for the NHS. Moorfields Eye Hospital, an oasis of professionalism practised with good humour, calmness and civility. Sure I had to wait a bit but hey.

So yours truly, though sporting a half-closed right peeper, is picking up and getting all tingly about the imminent show. I've not had a piece on at Arcola before, yet another reason to be cheerful. And I'm very glad to be working with some of the May Queen company - Mark, Suzanne, Leanne (pictured in rehearsal below). All in all it should be a good'un. So roll up to the Arcola on Sunday for the following:

EMBODIED
by Glyn Cannon
with Charlotte Aspery

KIND OF DARK
by Lance Woodman
directed by Suzanne Bell
with Mark Arends, Raquel Cassidy

FROM BOMBAY TO SANTA FE
by Myself
dir. Lucy Skilbeck
with Leanne Best, Dominic Carter, Stephen Rahman Hughes

REASONS TO SETTLE FOR LESS
by Nancy Harris
dir. Elgiva Field
with Laura-Kate Frances, Charlotte Gittins, Sarah Ogley

MATCH PLAY
by Frederic Blanchette
translated by Christopher Campbell
dir. Lucy Skilbeck
with Gareth John Bale, Benedict Sandiford, Robin Weaver.

ARCOLA Studio 1, 5pm and 8pm July 1st.

Book tickets (£9 / £7 concessions) at arcolatheatre.com or on 0207 503 1646.

Hot Chip

2007-06-24T16:25:00.000+01:00

I am completely head over heels with this lot, after catching their set on the John Peel stage at Glastonbury.

No I wasn't there, more's the pity. Watching at home on the idiot's lantern. Anyway I just loved it, their brand of soulfully poetic electro-pop was just the ticket after wrestling all day with words, words, words. And their anthemic track Over And Over is quite simply one of the best things I've ever heard.

You can watch their set, for the next few days at least, by going here and clicking on the name of the band.

2007-06-18T22:51:00.000+01:00

Depressed and depressing, violent and blighted. Last week's Newsnight film in its series Broken Society, recorded almost entirely in the vicinity of the bus stop I use to get home from Manor House tube station, dealt with the so-called 'postcode wars' in NE London, the alarming rise of the gang mentality whereby youths in Tottenham will challenge and attack Hackney counterparts who dare to stray into "their" territory. And of course vice versa. The familiar, gallingly so, cycle of poor education leading to drift leading to crime leading to prison leading to more crime.

Emerging from the tube at Manor House tonight, however, you could be forgiven for thinking it was all a bad dream, or a joke in poor taste played on the Newsnight viewer, or a ruse to crash the property prices in the area. Sure, there were one or two crazy people about, there always are, it's a metropolis. But there was no moral panic in the air, no one skulking or stalking. None of the shops have installed the cage-like fittings you see in other inner cities (Liverpool, for instance). At the bus stop, a young woman was reading a book. Another asked directions from a guy who responded with a cheerful smile and a half-decent attempt at a chat-up, but she took off with a laugh and a wave when she knew the way to go. Meanwhile I looked up at the summer sky to see Venus and the Moon in twilit conjunction, a pinky quilt of cloud sailing north on the southerly breeze, and a swallow, jinking its way over the kebab shop.

I'm A Jealous Husband

2007-06-17T12:24:00.000+01:00

B was at the NT last night with her friend Vesna and afterward they were checking out the Festival Hall refurb, and dammit if Motorhead weren't blazing away, part of Jarvis's Meltdown Fest, aren't they. So it was near the end of their set and B and V were able to wander in and witness the full glory of ACE OF SPADES...

Pushing up the ante
I know you've got to see me
Read 'em and weep
The Dead Man's Hand again

Chicken Himmler

2007-06-16T15:26:00.000+01:00

Oh dear, I used to think of myself as an okay cook, able to improvise in the kitchen, half-decent at putting together simple tasty fare. But I served up for myself and my loved one a dish that put us both, after we laboured to ingest the stuff in increasingly alarmed silence, no not in hospital thank god, but in mind of Woody Allen's priceless:
"Well I was sure it was heartburn, y'know? I was married at the time, and my wife's cooking, with her Nazi recipes..."

MOLORA

2007-06-13T16:59:00.000+01:00

Tish Francis, artistic director of Oxford Playhouse, and The Onassis Programme, under the directorship of Helen Eastman and Professor Oliver Taplin, have joined forces with acclaimed writer-director Yael Farber to bring over from South Africa Farber's production called Molora, which is a retelling of the Oresteia, with elements from other versions of the legend of Orestes including the Sophocles Electra and Jean-Paul Sartre's The Flies (which I don't know, to my shame, but there you go, nothing new). But I'm telling you. It's astonishing. Molora (it means 'ash') will come to the Barbican next year and tour the UK, all being well. I saw it last night, I'd had a rotten journey to the Oxford Playhouse, arrived at the theatre in a foul mood. Two minutes in my jaw dropped, my eyes widened, and I shifted to the edge of my seat, where I stayed for the hundred minutes' duration.

Some notes and production details from the recent run in Johannesburg here.

In imagining the agon, or formal argument, between Clytemnestra and her daughter Electra as given before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, seated behind plain wooden tables, leaning in so the mike can pick up their words, Yael Farber's version acquires at once a significant resonance for the culture it sprang from, while at the same time underscoring the mutability of the myth, the staggering ability of these mythical characters to transcend their origins and translate themselves across centuries, cultures, languages.
I'll never forget Dorothy Ann Gould's performance as Clytemnestra. It was terrifying, as she used the crudest tortures to force Electra to tell her what happened to the infant Orestes. It was heartbreaking, as she pleaded for her life before the raised axe. Farber gives her speeches that ring with poetry, a muscular eloquence born of her terrible suffering. I don't have a text before me but I can hear in my memory Clytemnestra's evocation of the corpse of her husband after she struck him down: "a masterpiece of justice".
I was honoured to meet Gould after the play, and told her as best I could how very impressed and affected I was. Of course she must hear it all the time - at least I should hope so. In any case she accepted these compliments from geekily enthusiastic me with warmth and grace.
Nor could I help bending the ear of the actor Jabulile Tshabalala, whose performance as Electra was also moving and thrilling, taking in the explosive and the pathetic.
I told Jabulile about the line used to mock Theresa in The May Queen - "That's right, you're immortal aren't yer." And that actually I would sometimes say to myself Yes she is, because Leanne Best's stunning portrayal of the avenging Daddy's girl in Liverpool, and Jabulile's in Oxford and Johannesburg - these are just yet more manifestations of Electra, the girl-woman who will live forever, or at least as long as there are people to tell stories.

Magic and Appetite

2007-06-09T19:31:00.000+01:00

So if you take, then put back good
If you steal, be Robin Hood
If your eyes are wanting all you see
Then I think I'll name you after me
I think I'll call you Appetite

Ah, Prefab Sprout. I heard the song the other day on 6Music in my little flat in Liverpool, and it stuck. And so by the magic of wifi, I pull it from the ether while sitting in my (booked ahead therefore cheap) 1st class seat, Newcastle to London. I was up to watch and hear Ruby Moon, Matt Cameron's work in a production by Erica Whyman at Northern Stage. Erica directed his play Tear From A Glass Eye at the Gate a few years back, and I have to say it was one of my seminal nights in the theatre. I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing - a contemporary play that had the force of fable, the poetry of Beckett, a proper experience that put you through the mangle. I'd been feeling a bit jealous of Cameron as Erica had seemingly only ever worked with two writers, Shakespeare and me. Of course it wasn't true but it felt like it. And I didn't mind so much her going off sitting in a tree with Billy Bard. But after seeing Tear I was quite awestruck and smitten, and did that thing of going up to MC - he was over from Australia - and mumbling thanks and praise. Ruby Moon felt by comparison quite hard , in the sense of restrained in its treatment of big emotions, that was my first impression of it. But of course the paradox is that those emotions are generated by Cameron's story, so... Like Tear the play deals with loss and recovery, but it feels like the writer knows his own powers better now and is somewhat shrewder in their use, there's a control and an authorial distance there. But still the kind of stage poetry and intensity I loved in Tear, allied to perhaps a greater confidence, on reflection, in himself as a storyteller.
Erica and her associate Soutra Gilmour have wrought, as ever, a production to die for. Soutra has radically rethought Stage Two of the theatre so that once you pass the usher you're passing a kitchen window in suburban Australia, as you do so falling under the mournful gaze of Ruby's mother, whose agonies we are about to witness. Then you find yourself walking into her living room and taking a seat, never able for the next two hours to forget that she and the missing Ruby's father are living a hell.

Lyn Gardner's review pays proper tribute to the play, production, and the performances of Tilly Gaunt and Nick Haverson.

And for the record here is Mr de Jongh's review of Tear From A Glass Eye, which resulted in the play's nomination for an Evening Standard award, though he can't resist a barb or two, natch.

+++

A couple more things.
The Miniaturists played the Everyman on Wednesday last, did'n dee. About twice as many people showed up as I was expecting, bloody good house, including the artistic and executive directors of Liverpool Theatres, assorted commissioned writers, Mike Bradwell and David Eldridge. No pressure, then.
But we pulled it off, I reckon. There was our trademark variety, largely speaking, for Liverpool to see. And if actually the first half was by turns tragic, heartbroken and enraged, Glyn brought the house down after the interval with his comic bookshop story. I brought up the rear, Dominic and Leanne playing dad and daughter under Lucy's (fine and felt, as usual) direction. Unusually for the Minis, there was just the one performance, so no second bite at the cherry for the bits that went pear-shaped (one of our actors, naming no names, inverted a line and so appeared to be claiming the Sun goes round the Earth, an old-fashioned view to be sure...). But safe to say each of the plays will pop up again on another bill in the not too distant.

Some rehearsal pics of Miniaturists on tour on the website (go to 'previous shows, click on Minis 7).

2007-06-03T14:49:00.000+01:00

Somewhat improbably I am back in Liverpool, in mourning for The May Queen but gearing up for The Miniaturists show here on Wednesday night, which the Everyman is hosting as part of its magnificent Everyword Festival.

It's quite a special thing to be bringing The Miniaturists to Liverpool, our seventh show but our first outside London and the first to benefit from material assistance from a theatre like the Ev.

Here's the bill:

Wicked Women
by Lizzie Nunnery
directed by Serdar Bilis
with Annabelle Dowler, Julia Rounthwaite

Unfinished
by Samantha Ellis
dir. Joe Austin
with Steven Cartait, Laura-Kate Frances

Sunburn
by Rachael McGill
dir. Serdar B
with Steven Pinder, Michael Ryan

Death Of The Small Independent Retailer
by Glyn Cannon
dir. Joe A
with Steven Cartait, Laura-Kate Frances, Alan Stocks

From Bombay To Santa Fe
by Me
dir. Lucy Skilbeck
with Leanne Best, Dominic Carter.

+++

It's not there now. The powerfully evocative design Colin Richmond did us for The May Queen. I went into the auditorium today and there's not a trace. Which is as it should be. But here below, a shot of the set just after the play came down one night in the last week. And below that, a detail.

Silver Birch House

2007-06-02T20:43:00.000+01:00

Leyla Nazli's first play is running at the Arcola till next Saturday and it's an absolute beauty. I'm not going to ape the ladies and gentlemen of the critical persuasion and write about plot and character and all that, I'm not going to use the perennial 'promising' word. And if anyone's tempted to think, oh he's only saying it cos he's mates with the theatre, well stuff 'em. I absolutely loved Silver Birch House, it's got more heart and passion and wisdom than a hundred other first plays put together*.
LN's play is about family, and roots, and the ties that bind unravelling, and the forces that can rip a man's life apart in a day and how he can spend the rest of his life trying to repair the join, and how sometimes he might even nearly succeed. It's about so much. And it has a poetic energy that's rare and vital and to be celebrated. And almost by the by, the playwright wrote it in her second language.

*(Including mine, 1992, it was called Mahler's Unfinished, a sort of sad comedy about the composer in a weird sort of afterlife, did very well in Oxford then had two nights at the Cockpit Theatre in Marylebone for its London showcase, and was described by no less a personage than Christopher Reid, then head of Faber poetry - his wife was in the play - as 'slight'. My own wife was in the Cockpit audience, though I wasn't to meet her for another five months. When I discovered, as we courted, that she'd seen the piece I was naturally eager to hear what she made of it. 'Was alright, I suppose', or somesuch, was her review.)

Checking In

2007-05-29T15:10:00.000+01:00

In a minute I'm headed to a meeting in town about a radio play Kepler's Mum's A Witch but I thought I'd stop by to say hello, still alive, still physically and emotionally wrung out and hung over after the closing performances of The May Queen and all that entailed. I was doing alright on the Saturday until I read what some blogger wrote about the play, pushed me over the edge (the sod) and I had a little unmanly moment, release of tension I suppose and I felt all the better for it and was able to watch the last performance sitting next to Mr Serdar Bilis the director and mostly not fret about how it was the last one but enjoy it, in the moment, listening to it and drinking in the sights and sounds of the production. For it's been said a million times but these are butterflies, fleeting things, the insubstantial pageant.

Come On You Mighty Reds, An Honourable Defeat This Time?

2007-05-23T16:50:00.000+01:00

Well I'm not in Liverpool for the Big Match, which is probably just as well really. Delayed travelling up till tomorrow, mostly because baby Buzz is under the weather, teething we think, the back ones coming, but he's rather going through it poor love, high temperature and all sorts of digestive issues, best not go into them. But the upshot is I'll be watching the game at home, possibly on tape cos I'm hoping to get to see Leyla Nazli's play at Arcola tonight, been itching to see it, had some very good notices and she's a great woman and a Miniaturist, as well as being Arcola's co-founder and exec producer.

Blood

2007-05-21T10:22:00.000+01:00

I cut myself shaving, careless, nicked the earlobe. I haven’t scratched an ear with a razor for – well, many years. Only ever done it once before I think. So I’m standing looking in the mirror at the crimson blob gathering itself, like a drop earring. Then it falls and hits the bowl of the sink. It looks impressively dark as it snakes its way toward the shaving water. Then there’s another, thick and cold on my skin. I lean over so the plashes hit the water, and watch as the blood twists and writhes, smoke-like. I watch this over and over, till the water is full crimson, and soon enough the coagulants have done their job and the bleeding’s stopped.

I’ll surely never write a bloodier play. And no, I haven’t developed a taste for it. The opposite, if anything. I find the violence thrilling but shocking. It’s necessary to the story, a wartime tragedy after all. It’s so well staged, it’s truly repellent. I’m only glad there is tenderness and mercy in the play, to counterweight it.

Watched with Serdar Friday night, we’d not been in together for a while so that was great. And funny as it may seem, I think it’s true nevertheless that I really felt the play, the whole of it, for the first time since I stopped work on it. There’ve always been bits that have got to me, even in rehearsals, but it’s been hard to disengage the technical, writing bit of the brain and just watch the thing. My ambition for The May Queen was always that I should dare to write a piece that would pay homage to the Greek masters while telling a story rooted in the place and culture I was born into. Such a buzz it's been to have the Everyman share that ambition and put their energies behind realising it.

I’m heading back up on Wednesday, for the final few days of the run and the madness that will be Liverpool in the grip of European Cup Final hysteria. I did wonder whether I’d be better off travelling on Thursday instead, until it was pointed out that if Liverpool FC win the Cup for the 6th time there’ll be even more mayhem around on the Thurs, due to the inevitable hundreds of thousands flocking into the city for the victory parade.

2007-05-12T11:56:00.000+01:00

Shattered. B and the boys were with me all week in the flat I've rented for the duration, which meant much family warmth around me at the right time but also little sleep. They went back yesterday and I was slightly overcome hearing how delighted and beside himself was Buzz (14 mths) to be back among his own stuff again, he padded around the place apparently incredulous and thrilled that everything was just how he left it. I may no doubt feel something like that myself when I pop back to London tomorrow for a couple of days. But I'm loving being here in Liverpool, and the play is very well thanks for asking, and press night was an absolute blast, I was proud of the work, and very proud of Serdar and the company. Above all pleasures was that of sitting watching it with B, her first look at it and though of course she knows the play rather well having been its first dramaturg she was seeing the production for the first time and her satisfaction in experiencing it as a dirty great big piece of theatre was, well, great for me to see.
Writer friends came too, Miniaturists all, and it was lovely to share a table and a dance with them at the party after, which was held in a super-cute cult-tv-themed bar in Hope Street called F.A.B.

You'll forgive me if I don't talk about reviews here. Not because of their content!, I do care about that of course, but here's not the place, hope you don't think that weird of me. Though I can't of course resist mentioning that the picture above (Mark Arends as Michael, Alisa Arnah as Liliane) was in the Times Online, above Jeremy Kingston's piece.

Family came last night, from Dad's side. Tonight there's a veritable invasion of people with whom I share genetic material, most notably my Mum. But don't worry she's been thoroughly briefed about the 'strong language, loud gun shots and scenes of a violent nature'. And me an altar boy, n'all...

2007-05-10T16:22:00.000+01:00

Press night last night. The production roared, and the people were there to hear it, that heady pressnight mix, the quarter there for professional reasons, the quarter there for love and loyalty, the theatregoers who bought tickets and were perhaps weirded out by the brew in the air, if not by the incense (Serdar's idea, nice one). Technically the show hit the sweet spot, as for the rest it's hardly for us to say, but I put the thing out there with the blessed help of Serdar, and Gemma, Suzanne, Deborah, Dan, Ian, Scott, Colin, Marie, Roxanne, Sarah, Helen, Alisa, Niall, Paul, Leanne, Mark, Michael, Cathy, Denis, Emma, Dave, Marc, Howard, and with the backup of quite a few others mind, so that it's underlineably true to say, I brought them a script five weeks ago and together we've made a play.

2007-05-04T13:24:00.000+01:00

Here comes the first preview then. This week, yes, much gnashing of pencils, scratching of heads, squinting of eyes trying to read the script by the light of an everchanging design, and splitting of ears as bombs land everywhere, when you least expect them. Characters floating about looking glorious or menacing or pitiful.
The play is doing its warm up, stretching and breathing, concentrating, remembering its cues, going through its rituals and routines. Second dress this afternoon, then people are coming in. The May Queen meets an audience - I knew it was going to happen but I never knew it would.

2007-04-30T09:14:00.000+01:00

I'll get back to you later on this, but if you're at all interested you can hear me ramble about The May Queen here, in a tone I hoped was approaching sage but came out inevitably lugubrious. With a hint of renascent Scouse? It always comes back a bit after I've been hanging out with hometowners.

Click the link, go to Listen Again on the right hand side, then 'Claire Hamilton on Sunday'. I'm about 46/47 minutes in, you click the fast forward button if you want a shortcut.

More Aristophanes today, then back to Liverpool tomorrow, into the theatre with MQ, and she's ready. First preview on Friday, far away so close. Much grinding of pencils and gnashing of LX tape before then, I shouldn't wonder.

2007-04-24T21:43:00.000+01:00

Hats off to the West End Whingers for hosting such a cracking do. I'd come straight from the Court, pondering the devastation mental illness wreaks on its sufferers, and the shame and stigma still heaped upon them. The second half of Anthony Neilson's play dramatised this with masterful dignity and discipline, an extraordinary contrast with the excess and abandon of the first, a Lewis Carrollesque trip to The Wonderful World of Dissocia. Gotta love that singing polar bear...
Anyhoo after digesting all that the party in "London's fabulous, fashionable West End" was just the tonic, and such a pleasure to see some of my fellow bloggers: JMC, Fin, Natasha, Ben Y, Lance, Ben E, and of course Andrew and Phil!

Back to the May Queen rehearsals tomorrow, but not before a workshop in the a.m. and a telephone interview during the train journey. Then in the evening one for the radio, and a new place to stay. I'll also try and catch the Liverpool v Chelsea semi-final. I expect there'll be one or two pubs in Liverpool showing the game...

2007-04-17T17:24:00.000+01:00

To paraphrase the mighty Windass, I'm writing this when I should be writing that, when in fact I should be at this. Sorry Richard, it's not good form I know, and I expect it means my application to join the Monsterists will mysteriously disappear down the back of the sofa. But I've got songs to write you know, and a miniature play for our show at the Everyman in June, and though I want no sympathy for this I'm behind, having spent most of the past 24 hours trying and failing to set up a wireless interweb connection between my pc and the laptop whereon I write, research and sometimes even blog, effortlessly wirelessly, at the Library. But in spite of the fact that I can breezily connect with the flat upstairs's wireless and so surf in bed when they're online, my own kit's unfathomably duff. Of course all that really probably means is I'm incredibly dim. All that remains is for me to toss a coin - heads I take the wireless router thingy back to the shop, tails I try and get a net-head in to sort me out.

In other news, I rounded off a very exciting week of shows by catching the last night of Owen McCafferty's Mojo Mickybo, a play so full of heart and bite, makes you glad and sad to be alive.

Also I should report that Scott Graham, he of the awesome Frantic Assembly, is movement director on May Queen and has been up at the Playhouse working with the company on one particular scene... can't wait to see the results.

2007-04-11T16:01:00.000+01:00

Trying to get some work done. The work in question is fifteen or twenty pages of BIRDS, my bash at a musical version of the Aristophanes. So the pages will include some songs. Such a world away from The May Queen, which is no doubt a good thing. Occasionally my phone will buzz and I get a question from the rehearsal room. I'm trying (that word again) to set aside the tragic mode and write silly. Not so easy though. Unbidden these words came to me at the desk -

Beloved son
Share your wounds with me
I have always carried you in my heart
And looked after you.
Speak to your mother, make her happy
Though you are already leaving me, my cherished hope.

The death of Christ, the suffering of the Virgin - in 15th century lyrics set by Gorecki in his Symphony No.3 and then used to devastating effect by Robert Lepage in Lipsynch. It comes back to me now, part because the Virgin is central to my play, part because I visited the cathedral to see the statues draped in mourning purple on Easter Saturday, and part, no doubt and rather bathetically, because I just waved off my sons and their mother at Euston, they've gone up to Cumbria, to visit my mother.

Saw Attempts on Monday, off to The Caretaker at the Tricycle tonight, and Satyagraha (omg) on Friday.

2007-04-07T21:32:00.000+01:00

Well as you can see I didn't get around to blogging while in Liverpool for rehearsals, partly because my head was so full by the end of the day that even this kind of mild cogitation was beyond me and I craved a cold beer, a plate of something precision-engineered for the microwave, and the cricket highlights. The night before I sent the final, final text off to the printers I had to burn the midnight oil and it was very hard going, I must say. Sitting in my little flat with all sorts of distracting thoughts swirling around my head I nonetheless, amongst other tasks, had to search for a substitute name for a merchant ship mentioned in the play. I had called it The Western Approaches but Alisa correctly called me on this, saying that people would be confused because wasn't that the name of the fleet headquarters? I eventually found a good replacement, but by bedtime I was proper beat. The rehearsal room, if it's run properly and it is, is the most creative of times for a playwright, up there with the eureka moments of the very early days of a play. In that room, minute by minute, ideas and memories are aired to the group, energies are crackling, the words begin to sing. What were 'lines' are now living things, accompanied by flashing eyes, or low authoritative brows, or a telling twist of the wrist, or a giveaway catch in the voice. During a break there are people swapping experiences in the corner, buzzing off each other, and in the throes of improvisations around the story, the author, if he's half-awake and I was, marvelling at the metamorphosis yet again, the conversations the characters had in his head, fleshed out and in that process by some strange alchemy, no longer his but everyone's, reflected back to him, changed for the better.

I stayed in a comfy place, very central. For the first week the May Queen company were in the annexe at the Everyman, essentially the attic space of 13 Hope Street which houses the theatre's engine room, so to speak, or at least some of it - finance people, press and marketing departments, and in the capacious basement, wardrobe. As of next week proceedings move down to the Playhouse in Williamson Square, pictured below.

2007-04-01T10:00:00.000+01:00

The train is booked, the play is fully cast - now it's time to see if we can dance.

Yes up to Liverpool soon, rehearsals start tomorrow. Well there's a meet and greet in the morning and then your guess is as good as mine. A readthrough I suppose but one never knows, do one?

My sister's away this week so I'll be the only Sharkey in the village, which is odd.

I've got broadband in the place I'm staying, so look out.

I've also got one of those tender spots on my thumb (I'm a nail-biter, for my sins). Someone, you know who you are, blogged about this sort of thing recently and I was fascinated but now it's been edited out. Or did I dream it?

Much to catch up upon, not least Miniaturists 6, I'll try and scratch out something about that very soon, pm's thoughts about blogging and busyness strike a chord but I so enjoy reading everyone else's stuff and besides how could I show my face at the West End Whingers party if I grind to a halt?

Till North, then, pinch punch and more fools us.

Now There's Posh

2007-03-24T15:53:00.000Z

Chuffed and delighted am I to be able to tell you the casting news from The May Queen. Follow this link 'ere for the all the gen. Obviously I won't be blogging reports from the rehearsal room, it's all far too intimate a process, but I will tell you I'm jolly well bricking it in advance, a mix of the excitement of putting the play on its feet at long bloody last, trepidation of course about how it's going to go down, and a fair amount of giddiness from the sheer electricity of working in collaboration with such a theatre as the Everyman, and all the talented, dedicated and so on theatre nuts that comprise the team. One of whom is, quite unexpectedly, just asked him on the off chance but didn't think he'd have the time, a wonderful composer called Dan Jones, an old friend from university (or just after).

We Made Our Excuses And Left

2007-03-23T16:51:00.000Z

I must just tell you about this. I was with Spike at lunchtime, in the toy shop in Stoke Newington, and we caused the Eastern European lady behind the counter, and her one customer, also a young woman, some amusement by entering the shop in the midst of a lively debate about how many pounds we were going to spend. But that's not the funny thing. The funny thing was this. The young lady customer was, she said to the EE lady toyshopkeeper, after something for a three month old. And off they went perusing the staggering array of trinkets, baubles and objects furry and rattly, shiny and jiggly, beloved of the infant. Then just after me and Spike had settled on a pop-stick (a bit like a pop gun but we don't like guns so that's what we're calling it), and paid for the thing (£3, agreeable to all parties), we heard EE lady say to customer lady -
Ah! Now!
We have these vibrating rabbits!
Have you seen the vibrating rabbits?

And I catch customer's eye at the exact fraction of a second when we both think - did she just say what I think she said?

Porridge Face

2007-03-17T16:59:00.000Z

Who's That Girl? Anybody know? Actually we should draw a veil and spare her blushes. I hope she got the job, anyway.

This is just one small example of the wonderful work Harriet's been doing in the blottosphere for quite some time now. I met her once, quite by chance, and she's every bit as engaging as you'd expect. Love the misspelling of Almeida too, deliberate or otherwise...

Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me About This

2007-03-16T17:53:00.000Z

They didn't, and now I've hardly got enough time to get excited and sick with anticipation before it'll all be over.
I've got to get me some new (opera-going) friends.

2007-03-13T18:58:00.000Z

On me Jack Jones this week, B and the bairns lingering in Bristol where we had a get-together of her side of the family last weekend, in honour of Richard's 70th. Nice innings, well played, and I reckon he's on for the ton.

Tomorrow I head up to Liverpool for the press night of Michael McLean's new play The Electric Hills, looking forward to that very much. Michael's come out of the Everyman's young writers' programme, and has been on attachment there, and with it being his first press night type scenario I'm glad I'll be able to buy him a drink and say best of British. Got to stick together, haven't we.

Daring myself to watch Fire Walk With Me on my own late tonight. That film's ending frightened me so much when I saw it at the pictures, my bones are stained with it. All the promos for Inland Empire are reminding me of Lynch's genius, not least for the unsettling ease with which he switches a story from sublime horror to silly comedy, and back again.
I'll probably chicken out and watch the cricket*, I expect.

Just to give you the heads up (I've always wanted to say that) here's the line-up, and possibly the running order, for Miniaturists 6 at the Arcola on the 25th:

06/07/05
by Steve Waters
dir. Hamish Pirie

Mike's Wishes
by Benjamin Yeoh
dir. Hannah Eidinow

Evenings
by Rachael McGill
dir. Merv Millar

Road Rage
by Dominic Leggett
dir. Hannah Eidinow

Catherine Medbh
by Declan Feenan
dir. Ciaran McQuillan.

Dec's play title rhymes with 'crave', he tells me. All of which reminds me yet again how shocking is my ignorance of Ireland and its culture. I'm supposed to be descended from there, and I don't know jack (or patrick).

* postscript: Well played, the Windies

2007-03-08T12:29:00.000Z

Auditioning this afternoon: priests, and villains of the piece. Every so often I catch a glimpse of this play I've written and think, How did that happen?

I had a reply to a request I sent to my Auntie T in New Zealand, I wanted some details about the Sharkey family's movements during the war. Absolutely fascinating. My long-held suspicion is confirmed - my Nan's house in Parbrook Close, Huyton, where I spent my first eighteen months or so (Mum and Dad moved in with his mum when they got married), had indeed been part of an internment/POW camp in the early years of the war. Hundreds of foreign nationals, including many Germans of Jewish origin, were rounded up when war broke out, and this half-finished housing estate in Huyton served as a camp - they just threw a barbed wire fence round it.

Later in the war ('43 or '44, my auntie isn't sure) the prisoners moved on, the estate was finished and my grandparents moved in with their children, including my 7 or 8 year old Dad. Their neighbours were hundreds of other people made homeless, like them, by the bombing.

England Expectorates

2007-03-05T16:38:00.000Z

So beleaguered was I by the flu Friday last that I missed baby boy's first birthday party, absolutely all of it, unless you count bumping into one of the guests outside the loo. Oh and Dad-in-law the ex-GP came to check that I didn't have meningitis. He did this by running the blinds up, saying "does it hurt when you look at the light?" and on my reply of No he was satisfied I didn't need rushing to hospital.
But of course half the country is stricken with one thing or another just now. Impossible to get any sympathy!

Glad to say I spent some him-and-me time with Bernard this morning. He took me for a coffee at the Arcola and as usual he made a bee-line for the big glass doors, he loves to stand there looking out watching passersby and leaving mucky little handprints on the glass. Being at the Arcola of course I couldn't but be reminded that the next Miniaturists show is less than three weeks away now, Sunday the 25th. Have a look at our website for the lowdown on that. The plays are coming in thick and fast and they'll be a terrific watch, I dare promise.

Gatecrashed Serdar's meeting this afternoon with Adam Cross, Liverpudlian studying at RADA who will be assisting him on The May Queen. Very exciting talking about the whole business of production, design, research, all that. I pinch myself, as usual.

Your very good health.

2007-03-01T14:34:00.000Z

I've been shy about blogging what I'm working on. I do want to tell you, not that you're waiting with bated breath or anything, but I get excited and want to tell as many people as possible. Of course if I start writing here about other people's plans, the people I'm working with, that'd be unfair on them and I'd get a bollocking from my agent quicker than you could say Robinson Crusoe. But I'll venture to say I'm writing a version of Birds by Aristophanes, and planning an adaptation of A Christmas Carol for a production at Yuletide. I've also got a commission in the pipeline for a play to be written before the end of the year, about one of my heroes, the astronomer Johannes Kepler (and his mum). So the plate is nice and full and it's time to start tucking in...

Also meanwhile this sort of thing is going on, which is frankly hard to believe.

Talking of Robinson Crusoe, the rehabilitation of Virginia Woolf continues... I read her short essay on Defoe's novel and it praises with perfect clarity his genius for descriptive prose, for fixing the ordinary in language so as to make us see it, to the effect that his larger drama - a man, alone, for twenty-odd years, away from the world of people and things - is for all its extraordinariness utterly real to us:

...by reiterating that nothing but a plain earthenware pot stands in the foreground, [Defoe] persuades us to see remote islands and the solitudes of the human soul. By believing fixedly in the solidity of the pot and its earthiness, he has subdued every other element to his design; he has roped the whole universe into harmony. And is there any reason, we ask as we shut the book, why the perspective that a plain earthenware pot exacts should not satisfy us as completely, once we grasp it, as man himself in all his sublimity against a background of broken mountains and tumbling oceans with stars flaming in the sky?

There's a nice thrum of activity in the ****osphere just now. Besides the incredibly interesting post by David E on the state of the political left (inspired by Nick Cohen's new book), I've been delighted, amused and inspired by old friends like Ova Girl, Richard Herring, pm and Harriet (In The Aquarium), and people I've caught up with relatively recently, like James Martin Charlton, Ben Ellis, Lance Woodman, Emma Rosoman (Now, how did that happen), Phil Porter, Natasha Tripney (Interval Drinks), Morgan Rachel Sproxton (Are Words Enough?), and City Slicker.
To everyone on my blogroll, happy March, pinch punch!

Day Trip

2007-02-25T16:50:00.000Z

I went to Northern Stage in Newcastle yesterday to see the work-in-progress show that will become Robert Lepage's new work, Lipsynch. It will come back to this country in 2009 I think, as a 9-hour piece. Yesterday things kicked off at 2pm and my friend Paul and I had to duck out before the last of the seven parts, at about 6.30, so we could catch the last train back to London.

It was quite a trip.

I won't attempt any kind of precis or review here. My hold on the thing is quite tenuous, I didn't take notes and I became very emotionally involved in the first half hour, so much so that I was like a wrung-out sponge by the first interval. Luckily for me the second session was more comedic and playful. By the time we left the theatre my head was spinning like a top.

The company, comprising the north-east based Theatre Sans Frontieres working together with Lepage's Ex Machina people, displayed that distinctive mix of bravura technical skill and artful emotional range. Wagner used to talk of his endeavours as attempting an evolution toward the Gesamtkunstwerk, a synthesis of the arts, or a 'total' work of art. So many decades on, the form Wagner worked in, though highly loveable to many (myself included), looks pretty limited next to the epic theatre engendered by this unassuming (by all accounts) French-Canadian theatre worker.

Lyn Gardner wrote a preview for the Guardian.

2007-02-20T14:12:00.000Z

Really enjoyed The Conspiracy Files the other night on the Beeb, first in a series and it was a beautifully judged, fascinated look along some of the wilder shores of the so-called "9/11 Truth Movement". Particularly gripping was the moment when Dylan Avery, the 23 years young director of Loose Change
and the enfant terrible of the conspiracy world, realised that the crew from England's BBC had not, after all, come to pay homage and play along, but had come armed to the teeth with balloon-bursting logic.

On a lighter note, did you know that the KLF invented Pete Doherty?

Had the most horrendous head-cold over the weekend, and insomnia to boot, so it's all been a bit dazed and confused. Sunday I just about managed to get myself down to the Old Operating Theatre in London Bridge to a pilot reading of Ellen Hughes's two new plays, one an adaptation of RL Stevenson's The Body Snatcher, the other a contemporary piece called The Gift. There's good strong writing in both and very impressive for what E herself calls her 'first plays for grown-ups'.

Then last night B and I beetled down to the Donmar for a preview of John Gabriel Borkman, Ibsen's late play in David Eldridge's new version. What can I say but that it was a great evening in the theatre, marred only by some f***ing idiot who decided to wait till the transcendently peaceful, graveyard stillness of Borkman's farewell right at the end before coughing his guts up. Yes it was me, and I was sitting right in front of David, who afterward took it all in good part, but had it been press night he would've had every right to kick my ass.
I actually fled the auditorium and watched the dying moments of the play on a telly in the bar, through rheumy eyes. This reminded me of the evening last year when a full bladder forced me out of Motortown, and I had to watch the terrible murder scene on a screen in the foyer. That was a very unsettling thing. I was allowed back into the theatre as the company cleared the blood from the stage ritualistically, to the sound of an aria from I think it was Dido and Aeneas. Anyway uncannily enough - or not, perhaps it was to do with the properties of that great play - David told me he had a similar experience, only his was written up in the papers - Charles Spencer mistook his loo-dash for the action of a revolted punter.

Thinking about David's work on the play and Michael Grandage's direction, and the work of Ian McDiarmid, Deborah Findlay, Penelope Wilton, Rafe Spall, Lolita Chakrabarti, David Burke... This is embarrassing but I could only be reminded of aphorisms, tenets, cliches, from the world of football, specifically, the chestnuts about doing the simple things, creating time and space, showing great awareness , and creativity in the final third.

2007-02-14T12:05:00.000Z

I hardly know where to start. The choking incident in the early hours of this morning, turning normally sanguine parents into gibbering wrecks? The unbelievable three hours I spent last night running round an abandoned warehouse in Wapping? Cheering my fellow 50ers as they took to the Royal Court main stage with their gorgeous devised pieces on Monday? Commissioning a miniature musical from one of the said 50? No, let's start with the news that the beautiful people at Encore have revamped their site and through some administrative oversight no doubt there's a link to this place on the front page! A feed, indeed, no less. I am thrilled. I'd like to thank my agent, my wife, my personal trainer...
This is a very nice thing though, I'd gotten used to not being linked to by 'specialist' theatre sites, I guess because I wander off topic a fair bit of the time. And though I expect to be rotated off the front page soon I'm chuffed to've been on there at the unveiling of the new design. So thanks, Theatre Worker. Here's mud in your eye.

2007-02-11T15:42:00.000Z

I have conceived a mad, strengthening desire to stage a particular Philip Glass song as a sort of miniature opera/dance/piece of performance/live art/whatever you're supposed to call it. I suppose it's a measure of the paucity of my experience in such matters that I don't rightly know what it would be billed as. Chris Goode's recent barely-controlled impatience with us fusty old crusty old playwrights on his brilliant blog (end of the post, and comments) - we're so not with it, it seems, and it's all our own fault for being so li'erally li'erary - has acted as a catalyst. The song is called Changing Opinion and I've become a bit obsessed by it. The lyrics are by Paul Simon. The other song - if it's worth the name - I'm currently deeply in love with is the KLF's What Time Is Love? - don't get me started.