Andrew Haydon kindly commends me for my director's eye view on this year's Festival. That's very nice of him, but unfortunately that's not really what I'm doing. I've a couple of posts brewing on the different processes of keeping my two shows pinging away at full power - or trying to. But I'm not going to post them. I'm a slightly different director for every actor, which makes me six different directors at this Festival. That's a pretty delicate balance to strike, and posting on it in public and in detail would only make my job harder. Maybe when the dust has settled...

So instead, I'm going to engage in the time-honoured tradition of whinging about the critics. We've had some lovely reviews for both shows, but they really mean not a jot. Let me tell you why.

The top review for either is probably this lovely one from the Scotsman. Of course, we were very pleased, especially when we learned that the estimable Sally J Stott had further honoured us with a Fringe First nomination (which, unless Joyce McMillan has the best poker face in the business, we won't win). But already the clues were there. For a start, she gets my name totally wrong despite it being quite clearly written in the programme. Then comes her final sentence: "if you only feel you can cope with one show on torture and terrorism this festival season, this is probably going to be the funniest." Well, if you only see one, it certainly will be the funniest. These are tiny quibbles, perhaps, but along with a few other clunky sentences and a lack of any sort of penetration beneath the surface (it's not a difficult show to penetrate), one starts to lose trust.

Then came her review of Man Across the Way. Having swapped around characters and events in the plot recitation that dominates the review, she concludes that the play "ends cryptically". Certainly it does: if you aren't paying enough attention to get the character names the right way around, then teasing out ambiguities won't be your cup of tea. Then one backtracks this even more egregious lack of penetration to the Can of Worms review, and loses what little trust one had.

Let me get this straight: I don't at all mind having bad reviews. I've had much, much worse reviews than this humdrum three-starring (Can of Worms has had worse this festival, of which more soon) and I've even agreed with some of them. What I mind is presenting my work for assessment to someone who's not up to the job. Every audience response is valid, and she's not the first to find the play a bit too elusive to grasp. But it would be nice to be reviewed by someone for whom it's not such a strain. Should our reviewers be a member of the audience picked at random? Or should they qualify for their authority status with a minimum level of knowledge, penetration and ability to articulate those qualities?

Our best review for Man Across the Way came from the Metro, for whom we're also Pick of the Day today. And gratifyingly, he seems to have got it. So why do I also not trust that review?

I wasn't looking forward to seeing the Metro review. As a director I may be absurdly critical of my own work and certainly I'm rarely completely satisfied. But that show was the worst we've had. It was the day before everything clicked into place and the actors got a sense of the space and the tech and how everything fitted together. That day, it was low-key, it dragged and the audience shuffled. So did the guy from the Metro, who was sitting in front of me. So I'm glad he was nice about the show - and certainly, he was right to not really say anything at all about the production, if he was so determined to make a good show out of it - but it doesn't gratify me as a review does when it's earned.

And his review of Can of Worms was a real stinker. This doesn't invalidate his response to Man Across the Way (if it needs invalidating), but whereas Sally J Stott failed to engage with Man Across the Way, Christopher Collett flat refuses to even accept the premise of Can of Worms. Given that the press release promises a show that clowns around the subject of torture, surely they should have sent a reviewer who was, at the very least, prepared to engage with that? The first paragraph could have been written before he even saw the show.

Again, I don't mind that he didn't like the show - we knew some people would take against it, and we knew some of them would have pens - but it's a little galling, for example, that he doesn't even address whether or not it's funny. As it happens, the day he was there, there were gales of whole-audience belly laughter and I would have counted that performance a success. No audience is totally unanimous and I'm keen to hear from people who don't like the show. If they've something constructive to add.

Perhaps having intuited my irritation on this point, in his latest review, of Cal McCrystal's Callate! at the Assembly Rooms, he graciously acknowledges that "a section of the audience was clearly enjoying itself" before concluding that "it was hard to see what was so funny". Bullshit. It's your job to figure out what was so funny. And if you don't agree with those who thought it was funny, it's your job to figure out why, and to articulate that.

As I've perhaps neglected to say on these pages before, I'm as happy with both shows as I've ever been with anything, and it's exciting to run two such utterly different shows back-to-back. Like Chris Goode, who's been much more badly-done by than me this year, I feel I deserve a bit more effort at engagement on the part of my critics. It's also frustrating that people keep sending the same reviewer to both shows, when they've only any interest in one sort of show. Surely people should be sent to see the sort of work they like, so they can assess it on its own terms, rather than attacking the terms?

We've a reviewer from The List coming to both shows today. I wonder which one she'll like?

POSTSCRIPT - I'd be interested to know if there's anyone on the planet apart from me who likes both shows. Announce yourselves! And if you liked one and not the other, I'd like to know why.

UPDATE - We've Lyn Gardner coming in to Man Across the Way in the next couple of days. I trust Lyn Gardner. Whether she likes it or not, I'll listen to what she has to say.

There, I've said it now.

AND ALSO - another two reviews for Can of Worms, one four star, one two star. There's something quite satisfying about splitting the critics...

On punctuality

One spends so much of the Edinburgh Festival waiting.

(Not least for one's favourite bloggers to sharpen their pens and get to work on the whole affair. In the meantime, I'll have to do. UPDATE: about three hours after this post, Chris wrote something. Excellent!)

At the beginning of every show one sits waiting to see if an audience is going to turn up. In Can of Worms yesterday we had seven people, the legendary Fringe average. It was the smallest house yet and a real endorsement of the show when several of them stayed behind to chat afterwards:

WOMAN FROM NEW YORK: Have you guys been to New York?
STRANGE BEDFELLOWS: It's our first show, actually. We've not really been anywhere.
WFNY: You should come to New York.
SB: If you book us, we will come. [I know, sorry about that]
WFNY: Have you been on the BBC?
SB: It's our first show. We've been doing it for five days.
WFNY: You should be on the BBC.
SB: Thanks.
WFNY: Have you been on television?
SB: It's our first show. We're a theatre company.

She was very nice, and she made us late for our get-out.

I can't abide unpunctuality. It's rude, plain and simple. It says "I don't care about you sitting on your own in the cold". I also can't abide how nice I am about it when people are, inevitably, late. I somehow make them feel that it's ok, that I'm not annoyed. Note to you all in the future: I am annoyed. I'm just really, really nice.

This also goes for latecomers to the theatre. Would you start a book on page four? Then get there in time for the play to start. If the play's any good, the beginning bit will be there for a reason and missing it will be like missing a few bits of what's probably sky from a jigsaw that's mostly sky. You might be fairly sure it's just some more sky you're missing, but you can't be sure.

I make a slight exception to this for Can of Worms, simply because, being clown, your late arrival provides us with meat. The day before yesterday, someone arrived, magnificently, just as Nick intoned to Paul the line "you're late". "And so are you", he added in the direction of the tardy few. It wasn't at all big or clever, but it got a big laugh. I'll explain why some other time.

Everyone knows that being late professionally is bad. An actor missing their entrance or their cue, even by a fraction of a second, disrupts the whole piece, especially if they do so consistently. Anyone who's seen more than one of my shows will know that pace is an obsession. In my shows, actors need a cast-iron excuse to pause for thought before a line: why can't they say the thing as they think of it? Very often, there's no good reason, apart from to draw attention to the acting, when everyone looks better if the cue-bite is sharp. If I'm bored in the theatre, there's an evens chance that a large part of the reason is that it's "contemplative" or whatever, which is simply another way of saying that the actors let the energy drop between every line. People describe The West Wing as unbelievable because "no-one really talks like that". But I'm not interested in watching drama about people who think and talk at the same speed as me. I want a distillation of what's true, not the truth itself; I want to see people thinking rapidly, performing remarkable feats of emotional and intellectual dexterity. I don't want to watch them torturously arriving at the place where I've already been sitting and tapping my watch for ten minutes.

But the best way of "not being late" is to not say what time you're going to arrive. Which brings me, finally, to the press.

This time last year, and the year before, and all the years before that, I remember being an unspeakable ball of tension, waiting and wondering whether any reviewers were ever going to come. Then about fifty-one weeks ago, and all the years before that, a couple had been in and I spent another week as a ball of tension waiting and wondering whether the reviews were going to be any good. In times like these one holds for succour to stories like Unlimited's: they sold Static averagely for four weeks, then won a Fringe First on the final weekend and succeeded in carrying the momentum into the following Festival.

So this year I feel like someone who's thrown a party to which everyone's turned up at nine on the dot. It's nice, and all the nibbles are ready, but it's not what I've prepared myself for emotionally. We've had the Scotsman, the Metro and some website I've never heard of in to both shows, The Stage in to Can of Worms and Three Weeks in to Man Across the Way. And the good thing about getting them in early is that the delay until publication will hopefully not quite be so long.

So have a look at this, and this, and this. They might not be particularly articulate, and one of them might get my name wrong, but for the time being I'm very happy to have something I can put on the flyer. Then I can get back to waiting for audience members with slightly more optimism.

Grind

I'd like to do an Edinburgh preview, but I'm still in monomaniac mode and can't really think about anyone's shows but mine just yet. A couple more days and I'll start seeing things and telling you about them. In the meantime:

the dash is over, and the slog begins. Both shows are open and thus commences the daily grind of building an audience, raising press profile and, most importantly, helping both shows to bed in for a long run.

The needs of both shows are completely different. With Can of Worms, it's blowing off the cobwebs accumulated over a couple of weeks in the drawer - and a much longer period since it last squinted into the glare of an audience. The first show was a mite tentative, but yesterday's, kickstarted by the support of a couple of particularly vocal audience members, really took off. There's something about the permission generous laughter gives to the performers to be daring that really helps to transform this show. Yesterday had some really thrilling sections that were completely new to us all, and several of the old sections felt completely new-minted. A couple more good days and the performers will feel sufficiently emboldened to be so daring from the first moments of the show: then that laughter will be theirs by right.

Man Across the Way, on the other hand, sailed with great confidence out of an intensive rehearsal period and is now being buffetted on all sides by the demands of a new space and a fairly complex tech plot. Not to mention a tech/fit-up that ran from 11pm-3am and thoroughly knackered everyone while nonetheless not being quite sufficient. So the show isn't exactly being knocked off course so much as taking a little time to get the wind back into its sails. It's a show with a huge amount of energy, but the space is huge and somewhat echoing, so sucks some of that energy right out again. Added to a couple of tech problems that lead to the odd bit of pausiness, the whole thing still feels just a mite heavy. But it's not so much about energising - the energy's there, it's just not quite coming through - as balancing it. Again, a couple more shows and it should be properly centred.

Ideally I'd like a couple more previews for both; two isn't really enough for them to bed in. But "press night" in Edinburgh is a fairly meaningless term, as the press come whenever they like, and in any case we've none booked in for today. So it's another preview, albeit one for which people are paying full price.

But we do have the Scotsman booked for both shows over the next week. I'm not going to say when, as the actors don't want to know when there's press in and there's a tiny chance one of them might read this. I just wrote several more paragraphs bemoaning the power of one or two pens belonging to people whose authority (a particular problem in Edinburgh, where there are so many rookie reviewers) we have no reason to trust or even recognise. But I realised I was treading the age-old path of lamenting my powerlessness in the face of the press. The shows are good. The press will recognise that. FACT.

On Ambiguity

When we did Shiver at Theatre503 earlier this year, I was staggered by the range of interpretations audience members brought to it, even at the simple level of plot. Plot is usually the one thing designed to be unambiguously understood, but I was quite pleased. I had my own interpretation, but in directing it I was careful not to cancel out two or three other possibilities of which I was aware. As a result, people came up with all sorts of crackpot theories. It was excellent. Let me tell you why.

The play turns on the arrival of Jacob on the doorstep of Christina one summer evening. She hasn't seen or heard from him for seventeen years, so this sudden descent on her threshold comes as a bit of a shock. And the last time she saw him, she left him for dead. So there are three obvious possibilities right from the outset: a) it's really him; b) he really died and this is an imposter; and c) he really died and this is his ghost. The tricky structure of the piece, in which the action occasionally stops and rewinds to a slightly earlier point, before progressing in a different direction, helps to retain all these possibilities and adds a further level of ambiguity at the level of what's actually going on.

For me and the actors, the truth was unambigously answer a), but we had terrific fun in rehearsals finding ways of maintaining that line consistently while not doing anything that would rebut those drawn to b) or c). Because of course you can't play "ambiguous", you have to play something definite. That something is, in Max Stafford Clark's terms, a series of actions or intentions - to provoke, to remind, to seduce - none of which necessarily give definite answers to the question about what's going on. (One day I'll post more fully on my rehearsal process. For the moment let me say that I emphatically don't, a la MSC, spend a fortnight sitting round a table, actioning. Nonetheless, his ideas can be extremely useful even if, as here, they're nothing more than shorthand.)

More often than not, whatever action an actor is playing will give a subtext that can either enrich or traduce the piece, depending on whether the action is well-chosen. But in Shiver, the plot became the subtext and the subtext became the plot, creating (at its best) a very powerful and productive atmosphere of uncertainty in a piece heavily concerned with memory, its retention and repression. And so uncertainty about precisely what was happening led (at its best) to meditations on the reliability of our perceptions, our memories and the idea that there might be a truth of which we can get to the bottom. None of them new ideas, perhaps, but approached in new ways and resulting in new conversations in the bar afterwards. That's why it was excellent.

But there was a slight problem: it wasn't much fun. Although the characters were likeable and thoroughly three-dimensional the whole carapace tended to get in the way a bit, making the piece seem cold and lacking a point of entry for the audience. There was some fun in there, but people were concentrating so hard on the ideas and the atmosphere that they didn't tend to pick up on it. Some didn't mind at all, but others did and I was one of them. I don't for a moment believe theatre has to be fun, but I do believe it has to let its audience in. My current way in of choice is fun. What happens once the audience are in is another matter.

With Man Across the Way, we also have a thread of ambiguity, but not as driving force, rather as central question, or rather, several questions - about the identity and status of the eponymous "man". Oh, all right, since you're so nice to me I'll tell you. It's not as if the publicity hasn't already. The man may or may not have been involved in a major terrorist attack on the city of Glasgow (much bigger than the recent one which suddenly made the piece - which was written before anyone had heard of John Smeaton - eerily topical). I hope we don't close down either possibility. But we've discovered that the best ways to keep both balls in the air also happen to be the best ways of dynamising the scenes in which he appears: ie, making him tough-willed, almost bolshy, in his exchanges with the cops. So that's handy.

Ideally, then, when it's working, the piece will cause a bit of trouble for the left's easy demonisation of the police and easy sympathy for those bullied by them. I'm not saying I don't think the police are a bunch of fascist bastards, I'm just saying it's not quite that simple. And it's not as if the show comes down firmly on the side of the police and argues vociferously for the extension of maximum detention periods to ninety days. Au contraire. Like all good plays, it gets in between the cracks in everyone's arguments and tries to create room for itself. And at the centre of that process is the fact that we, the public, very often don't know. We don't know why the police raid this house or that bookshop; we don't know why they pick up this doctor or that engineer. We don't know. They probably have their reasons, but are they good enough?

It also has jokes. Alright, "jokes" is probably a bit strong (who can think of plays with actual jokes in? Dennis Kelly's After the End springs to mind; what else?), but there are a few good laughs, which come mostly in scenes or on lines which aren't at all ambiguous. I'm realising that ambiguity is not particularly good at creating laughter; it creates a cerebral atmosphere of suspension that earth-bound laughter disappears beneath. Ambiguity can't descend to laughter - but laughter can ascend to ambiguity. The politics of Can of Worms are completely unambiguous, but the laughter becomes increasingly troubling as the piece progresses. Not being a clown show, Man Across the Way dabbles less in the dark art of laughter (I'm still holding back on the Harry Potter references) but when it does it is often of a similarly Janus-faced nature.

I worry that talking too much about what I'm trying to achieve will spoil the shows. Please forget everything I've written when you enter the theatre. Obliviate!

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

It's time for the traditional blogger's greeting: it's been a while. Sorry about that.

I'm in London rehearsing the Edinburgh shows and generally trying to make things happen blah blah blah and of course that leaves precious little time for those two givens of everyday life at home: blogging and running. The sharp-eyed among you will have read the title and spotted already what direction this post is going in.

Last week I ran in company for the first time in about ten years. When I was at sixth form I used to run with Jonny Biggs, who wasn't quite as quick as me and enabled me to feel good about myself. Last week I ran with William, the younger brother of Nick, the actor from Man Across the Way with whom I stayed the week. William's got a 33 minute 10k time under his belt and he's in pretty good shape right now. I had an operation a couple of months ago and I'm only just starting to get back into it after a layoff of close to two years. Never before has a run left me with stomach pains; I can now see how it's possible to incur vomiting through running.

So now I'm back to running alone. I'm afraid it's slightly higher up my list of priorities than blogging, but then, I'm in control of the whereabouts of my shoes in a way I'm not of wireless internet access provision. And every time I run now, I get more excited about the next show I want to make: a one-man adaptation of (you guessed, right?) The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, performed entirely on treadmill. 10k will be covered in the fifty(ish)-minute show.

If I learned anything from my run with William, it's that the unsung muscle of the long-distance runner is the one involved in breathing. (I've done enough voice training to remember its name, but it's better to remain silent and have people think you're stupid than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.) The excellent Runners' World magazine frequently distinguishes between different effort levels by considering what sort of vocal effort you're capable of. Speaking full sentences? That's a fairly light run. Unable to get out more than a syllable? Maximum effort. Hitting the top note in Nessun Dorma? You're just not trying.

So one of the interesting things about making the show will be the attempt to taper the rhythms of the text to fit what I'm capable of as a performer - as a runner - by any given point in an (admittedly fairly gentle) 10k. And to do that as artlessly as possible, to explore the rhythms of speech dictated by a given level of fatigue without trying to disguise that I'm out of breath. It's going to have to be written on the trail. And I don't think I'll be able to perform it six times a week.

We had the movement director in on Man Across the Way rehearsals yesterday and in the course of knocking some ideas about there was a period where the cast were darting about the space at a preposterous level of energy, panting for breath. Genuine fatigue is interesting, along with nudity and juggling, as an example of something which suddenly reveals the performer instead of, or at least as well as, the character. The intelligent show, when dabbling in these dark arts (and that's the only Harry Potter reference you'll get from me today) will figure out a way of acknowledging this, sewing it into the fabric of the piece. Not quite sure how I'm going to do that, but that's just part of the fun I've got planned for the autumn.

Somewhat perverse, I know, to get carried away with this idea when I'm opening two completely separate shows next week, but that's the kind of guy I am. And the other two are coming along nicely, cheers. Can of Worms is now in need of previews; it's gone beyond the point (which always comes, and comes sooner with clown) where rehearsing without an audience is of any use at all. We're ready to sprint for the tape.

And Man Across the Way seems to be shaping up, too. Today we had the lighting designer, the excellent Ben Pacey, in the room trying to figure out solutions to some insoluble problems with a key section at the midpoint of the play, and producing his normal, unusually high, level of genius. Yesterday we had the movement director helping us come up with some suitably mad ideas for the same difficult section (it's a minute long and we've spent the last day and a half working on it). And the day before was one of those lovely days when you ask a series of difficult questions of scenes, to which your answer starts out as "I have no idea", and you wind up making discoveries that transform the competent and workmanlike into the really rather good. It was one of those days when I really felt like I was doing my job. We've still got a lot of miles to cover but we're clocking up the miles at the right pace and we haven't hit the wall yet. Race you to Edinburgh!

Nobody likes a good laugh more than I do. Except perhaps my wife. And some of her friends.

Yesterday was not a good day. From mid-July to mid-September I'll be out of commission working on shows which, thanks to the lack of munificence currently manifest in Grants for the Arts, will not pay me a penny. So this month whatever frugal pittance I scrape together has to last me the next three. And because I'm, like reeeelly good at education and community work, that wasn't looking so far-fetched as it sounds. Those who rail against excessive public expenditure on arts projects in school and community settings forget two things: it's an investment in creating audiences for the future. And more importantly, that money is subsidising artists, who can't really be expected to make work for 365 days solid. And when it's good work, it's good money, and those artists get to take two shows to Edinburgh and live to tell the tale.

So it is desperately frustrating and upsetting when a school decides out of the blue that, no, it doesn't, after all, want an artist to come in to work with its kids for a few days. And they're sure he won't mind if they let him know, via his project manager, in his last week and a bit of potential earning time, on the eve of his attendance on their august institution in the middle of fucking nowhere. And no, he won't be getting the money anyway. So he'll have to sell his car if he wants to survive the summer. That's not the sort of news a chap wants to hear.

I feel like I've been mugged.

So it's in times like these that my thoughts turn to comedy, balm for the soul, or chicken soup, or whatever. I mean, seriously, whoever said comedy could change the world, when it's the first place we all go to get cheered up when the world is getting us down? Whenever I'm a bit gloomful I tend to put on Yes Minister, and the fact that yesterday Sarah somehow persuaded me to watch Panic Room instead probably explains why I didn't manage to get to sleep until I'd followed it up with three episodes of The West Wing. Panic Room's great, by the way. David Fincher is a much undersung director, considerably less well-known than any one of his excellent films, and Panic Room stacks right up alongside Fight Club and Se7en. It's less tricksy than either, and a much smaller story, but it's a brilliant conceit brilliantly executed. And it's got Academy Award Winner Forest Whitaker in it, who's super.

But we were talking about comedy, which doesn't change the world, not IMDB, which has. Just look at the success the Berlin satirical cabarets had in preventing the rise of the Nazi party for illustration of that. Spitting Image only served to egg Thatcher on and what did Beyond the Fringe really achieve aside from revolutionising the haircuts of the young?

But maybe Beyond the Fringe is a bad place to start. It should be fairly obvious that it didn't have a great deal to do with the downfall of the MacMillan government, despite the old sod being at the victim's end of some fairly unkind cuts. But Beyond the Fringe, now that I think about it, actually did achieve something. It achieved the legitimisation of a particular attitude to authority, viz, a disrespectful attitude. Respect for authority wasn't the only sacred cow it took a bite from, but that was the biggie. Consciously or unconsciously, the mainstream arts and particularly comedy had always retained a basic sense of the world as run by decent people for decent people; in its core one could always find affection and optimism. Beyond the Fringe was the beginning of savagery in comedy, the beginning of comedy as a cri de couer about the world, as an outlet for anger.

And as we trust our leaders less and less, we use satire more and more. Blair must be the most satirised Prime Minister in history, more even than Thatcher. Which is cause and which is effect? Or, more likely, is there a feedback loop here?

I should state now that I'm a great lover of satire. Yes Minister is one of my favourite TV shows of all time, Being There is the best film I've seen in ages and my favourite Howard Barker plays are the early ones. I posted about Angels in America the other day; another thing I love about that is the way it imbues satire with magic and sees politically-inspired ire take flight. Yes, I love satire.

I'm even trying to make some. Can of Worms, the clown show I'm making for Edinburgh this year, can very easily be seen as satire: if "engages" is not too strong a word, it engages with the politics of secret interrogations and the official obfuscation of such. It's all performed in the broadest possible clown/physical comedy and is frequently extremely silly, even inane, so those seeking incisive analysis and reasoned engagement should look elsewhere. It is a cri de coeur, in a long tradition of cris de coeur. Is that the right plural?

The show grew from a wish to explore clown's potential for political engagement. I've heard it said that clown cannot possibly engage with political realities because a clown will subvert whatever is put in front of him. Make a clown a socialist and he will fuck it up. The problems with this position are so obvious it seems silly to even bother pointing them out, but people are doctrinaire on issues like this, so point them out I will. A clown is an idiot, so of course he will fuck up whatever is expected of him. If you expect him to hold a political opinion, he will invariably drop it if he sees an opportunity for a laugh. So far, so good. So if you want to make a political clown show, how do you get around this problem? By taking one of two extremely deft yet somehow blindingly obvious steps.

The first and most blindingly obvious possibility is: the clown has no political position, because clowns can't hold political positions. So you put him in a context where his lack of moral engagement is a problem. All it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. This is the basic strategy of 473, the first scene in Can of Worms: simple, trusting recruit 473 is put through his paces by a maniac torturer, and learns the ropes rather too well... you get the idea. The clown's inability to engage in moral or political thought is the very thing on which the plot turns. It's almost too simple.

The other, slightly more sophisticated possibility, is: you cast your clowns in roles filled by people who, in real life, you're pretty sure are idiots. You think their positions are inconsistent and/or absurd. You think that what they think and do, their very raisons d'etre, are baffling and stupid. And you want to expose this in the most brutally blunt way possible. This is the strategy employed by Civil Servants, the second scene in Can of Worms. Bluff, crass, blustering civil servant Sir Roger is required to present the Government report which attempts to fudge the issues raised by the events of 473. Together with and thanks to his buffoonish deputy, he fucks it all up. Want to suggest the world is run by clowns? What better way to do it than with clowns? It's not subtle, but by God it's effective.

Part of our ongoing quest has been to stay away from the moment where it stops being funny. Pinter said "The Caretaker is funny, up to a point. Beyond that point it ceases to be funny and it was because of that point that I wrote it". Barker also, before he went off laughter altogether, was interested in the point where laughter sticks in your throat. And if you think of any comic treatment of a serious subject in feature films, novels, plays, you'll almost always find that point in there somewhere, the "and now kids, the message" point. It's often considerably more subtle than that makes it sound, and it's repeated use shows how effective it is. But we chose to stay away from it. Why?

It's the easiest thing in the world to not be funny. Not making people laugh is something we all achieve almost all of the time, especially when we're trying to make people laugh. And if we're trying to make a serious point and make it really count, we'll almost certainly try to make it in seriousness for fear it will sound snippy.

But what we're trying to do is make people laugh despite themselves, make them laugh a laugh that frightens them a little, that they know is complex and that they know they'll have to examine later, but that they can't examine just now - because they're laughing too much. That's much harder than simply turning off the tap.

So yes, I love satire. I really do. But do I believe in it? Not believe in it the way I might believe in God, but the way I might believe in Middlesbrough Football Club. That is, do I really believe it can work? Can transform the way people think? Can win the battle for hearts and minds?

Howard Brenton described an act of political theatre as like "tapping on the pipes". The message starts small, but if people believe in it it gets bigger and before you know it there's an enormous jailbreak. Like that episode of Doctor Who the other day where everyone on the planet said "Doctor" at the same time, and the Doctor miraculously stopped being a dwarfish wrinkle and turned into a sort of Christ-figure in a manner simultaneously super fun and utter, utter hokum. I like to think of political comedy in the same way (tapping on the pipes, not turning into Christ and being nonsense, although the hazard of excessive self-aggrandisement is ever-present). The message may not get far, but it might get somewhere.

Let's unpack that just a little a bit more. The idea of a "message" is a sicky one for me and many others and I don't want to be found dead in that trap. The message (see how bravely I resist packing that word safely in the cotton wool of inverted commas!) is just as likely to be a question as a call-to-arms. I like a piece of theatre, or comedy, or whatever, to leave me with something unresolved, something I have to deal with later. And I like it to make me mad keen to do so. Even Angels in America ( geek that I am, I keep mistyping that Angles in America) doesn't quite achieve that; all the pieces being neatly put back in their boxes at the end. My Child does; almost none of comedy ever does. Did I mention Can of Worms? Why not come along and let us know if we've managed it?

Fascism

All manner of tangential factors can affect one's enjoyment of a piece of theatre. The more honest critics every so often admit that having a headache or having had to run for the bus (or rather, their expenses-paid cab), does have an impact. Although most of them continue pretending it doesn't.

As a director there's nothing one can really do about Michael Billington's hangover short of cutting off his head, but there are plenty of environmental factors of which one can take an almost fascistic level of control. That's exactly what I'm about to advocate.

At the start of the show, the audience need to be in a receptive mood, and theatregoers, by and large, are. (This is one of the many unexamined ways in which critics's experiences are separate from ordinary theatregoers. I'm not talking about the free wine, but the fact that they generally arrive alone and spend an awful lot of time with their own thoughts. This makes it very easy to resent something that pulls you out of your reverie.) But how do we ensure they're receptive?

The event starts when people enter the space in which it's going to take place, and the pre-state should be used as unscrupulously as possible in order to render the audience receptive. Jaunty, energetic music is the first port of call. It should preferably have some sort of link with the show, but most important is that it's jaunty, energetic, and pretty loud. Loud enough for the audience to have to make a very slight effort to talk to one another, jaunty enough for them to take from it a sense of fun. If there are any laughs in the first few minutes of your show (and there really ought to be, if you ask me, but more on that some other time), they'll be louder as a result of the audience talking over the music for a couple of minutes.

And the lighting is important too, although I haven't quite figured out the optimum yet. Too bright is no good because that completely loses the sense of event, of entering a different space. There should be something exciting about entering a theatre and if everything is brightly lit it's rather harder to effect that. But too dark is no good because it overeggs that sense.

This is of course all very different if you're trying to create an atmosphere. You often see shows that have a churchy feel upon entering the auditorium, seemingly designed to provoke reverence. For me, what this does is make the audience feel awkward, feel as though they don't know how to behave. I want an audience to feel welcome in my theatre, like this is a party to which they're invited.

And despite taking very careful control of the mood of the room before the show has even started, things can still go wrong. Last night I allowed the show to start five minutes late while we waited for VIP audience members to turn up. In the meantime the rest of the audience were in their seats patiently waiting for kickoff. John and I valiantly entertained them with our loud jaunty music, but it became pretty clear pretty quickly that we were now nothing more than filler. Before long there was a strong sense of "so what the hell are we waiting for?" pervading the room. When the geriatric VIPs finally turned up they stumbled and fell at some length to their seats, prolonging the agony yet further.

The opening sequence of the show relies quite heavily on the high energy pre-state because it is slow and sombre and its effect comes in large part by contrast. The pre-state having palled, the opening dragged and it was uphill from there to get the audience on board. They managed it, but by god it was a struggle. (Incidentally this is in direct parallel with the bit in yesterday's post about the sequence before the dragon-fight in HP4.) The lesson: don't allow anyone else to control how your show starts. First impressions count.

And don't let in any fucking latecomers. I was once in a production of Howard Barker's Claw in which I opened the second half with a ten-minute monologue. As I started it I could see that audience numbers were considerably down on the first half. Two minutes in, the doors opened and fifty or so people traipsed back in from the bar. This is an extreme example, but if you let one in, you let them all in. The exception to this, as always, comes from Can of Worms. If you're doing clown, latecomers, like every other fuckup, police siren and sudden blast of music from the next auditorium along, are a gift and part of the pleasure comes from seeing the performers take control of things that plainly originated beyond that sphere of control.

This all sounds terribly cynical. "You're trying to manipulate your audience." Yes, I am. It's my job to have an effect on my audience, and the more I'm in control of that effect, the better I'm doing my job. It's no good making a great show and then pissing it away because everyone's in the wrong mood when it starts: one critic with a headache is tolerable, a roomfull of headaches is a problem. To take control is also to take responsbility.

Boredom

When I watch my own shows, I like to sit at the back, behind the audience. I watch the show through the audience, their reactions become part of the spectacle. This is the only way of telling if a show is really working: if they're still, rapt, laughing in the right places, barely breathing in others, then I know I've done my job. If they're shuffling, coughing, catching laughs late or not at all, then I know it's not working. It's scarcely rocket science, but it's stunning how easy people find it to kid themselves. Or maybe they, like me, are simply consummate liars about any show that's still running, for the sake of the performers and the ticket sales.

There are a thousand reasons a show might not be working, some of them environmental and beyond your control, but the audience never lies. Boring the audience is the only crime and it's very easy to tell when you've done so. Of course, there are degrees of boredom: everything from gawping mental catatonia to momentary remembrance of the fact that your seat is uncomfortable. All of them are to be avoided. And the way boredom works is often counter-intuitive. I met a guy who worked on the most recent Harry Potter film, and he was telling me about editing the section with the dragon chase. For some reason it was a tad boring, and they couldn't for the life of them figure out why - surely this is thrilling stuff? Eventually, they cut a bit out of the sequence directly before the chase - hey presto!- the dragon chase was no longer boring. If you're interested, but not interested enough, you can save up your boredom, and as a result the good bits don't sustain themselves as well as they should. You have to earn your highs.

Peter Brook once said that boredom is the director's most powerful tool. Am I bored? If so, why? Answer that question, the theory goes, and you've fixed the show. But to simply avoid creating boredom is a rather meagre aim in art. There's an episode of the West Wing in which Toby chats to a poet with whom he's a little bit in love. She says that the aim of art is (and I misquote, but you get the drift) "to captivate us for as long as you ask for our attention. That's it." That's more like it.

So my show last night was a difficult one to judge. It simply hadn't occurred to me that by electing to play the guitar live on stage, alongside John on violin, I could watch the show, or the audience, but not both. And watching the audience would likely cause a very odd split of focus, as well as being rather off-putting for them. So I didn't hear any shuffling, and the only coughs came when one of the cast started coughing backstage (like yawning, coughing is contagious). And certainly the performance was a better rendition of the material than they've yet achieved in rehearsal. But I can't be sure it's working unless I see it through the audience.

As a director, that's how I glean my knowledge of a job well done, where I get my ultimate job satisfaction. I'm not going to get that on this show, however much of a blast the show has been.

It's noteworthy that on Can of Worms this process works slightly differently. Because I'm in that, however fleetingly, I again can't see how well it's working. But because the provocation of laughter is so significant a barometer of the piece, it's possible to gauge its success purely from the volume of that laughter. In a show so dominantly comedic, it's not necessary to see if the audience are sitting still; their reaction is audible. We did a scratch performance last week in which I didn't have to be staring at the backs of heads to recognise that it wasn't working: the audience weren't laughing very much. It's as simple as that. At BAC on two nights out of three it clearly worked very well, on the other night fairly well, and in Bradford the first piece, 473, worked well and the rest not so well. How do I know? Because the whole audience laughed when we wanted them to, or because they didn't.

The real trick, having figured out that it's not working, is to figure out why. That's the hard part.

Insanity

So, tonight is the first night of my new show, which is why I've taken most of the day off to add friends on facebook and create a new blog. Having not had a day off for three weeks, I feel like I've earned the right.

"Wait until after the show before you say that", you cry. Quite. I'm not so much resting on my laurels as struggling to find anything else to do with them. The show is a youth theatre piece, which might cause some of you to conclude that it therefore doesn't matter a great deal. Not so. When there's talent in the room I enjoy making youth theatre pieces just as much as I do working with professionals, not least because so much of the production crap surrounding the professional process is completely cut. But more importantly, working with a group like this one where there is talent in the room, I love the opportunity to do stuff I wouldn't necessarily get away with in the real world, to try out things I don't know if I can do.

So five weeks ago we had a notion that we'd be doing a seventeenth century piece probably about witch-hunts. We had a cast, a director, and a musical director. Now we have a full-length play with a text by me and songs by John (my MD), loosely based on improvisations by the group. We worked Friday nights and Saturday daytimes, a total of about 60 hours rehearsal. As a creative process, that's clearly unworkable, consisting of little more than careering downhill in full knowledge that the brakes don't work. It's an exercise in holding your nerve. No sensible professional would submit themselves to that. It's been one of the most exhilirating rides of my career.

I should point out that the preposterous timescale is not something to which I'd ordinarily subscribe. Work clearly benefits from a period of incubation and this week's performances will undoubtedly reveal several ways in which the script could be improved radically. But in itself it's been a terrific way of incubating work. I undoubtedly would have written nothing at all if I'd not been doing the project, much less something so visually and theatrically alive. It really is the only viable way of producing a first draft. Maybe in the future I'll create work in this way, with the opportunity of redrafting... how did Anthony Nielsen first persuade someone to let him do it?

So along with the fun I'm having developing Can of Worms and the new, improved Silver Tongue development process, I'm becoming less and less interested in working on shows where we have a script before the first day of rehearsals.

If the show turns out to be shit, I'm sure I'll rethink all this. I'm writing a hasty post while I'm still optimistic.