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!

Egoism

In a cafe the other night Sarah and I played a very old and very silly board game called Ego. We never really figured out how the game was supposed to be played, but we had great fun playing around with the "angel" and "devil" cards, on which were solemnly printed "positive" and "negative" attributes. Several of the positives were sufficiently faint to be considered damning, and a fair few of the negatives were attractive at least to some demographics - "decent" springs to mind in the former category, "eccentric" or "naughty" in the latter. I think the game was designed for tipsy thirtysomethings at rebellious tupperware parties.

But anyway. After growing tired of analysing one another, we used the cards to generate characters as one might in an eighties role playing game, and one of them has stayed with me. We drew three cards and the combination that stuck was "enlightened" and "eager". Who is this person? Enlightenment is a state associated with peace, calm, stillness, but I like the idea of reaching a sort of enlightenment and being eager to go further, or perhaps to share it with others. It's nice, that is.

It's Socrates. Maybe Brecht's Galileo, maybe even Buchner's Danton, but it's certainly Socrates. The third card was something like "principled", and that's a direct fit for none of those characters. But "principled, enlightened and eager". That strikes me as a state worth striving for.

4-4-2

Terry Eagleton reckons that "there is no eminent British poet, playwright or novelist prepared to question the foundations of the western way of life." He goes on to demonstrate why Amis, Rushdie, Hare et les autres eminences grises don't fit this category - in the case of the first two, because they've become reactionaries and in the case of Hare, because he's become a tinkerer rather than a radical, the Claudio Ranieri of theatrical-political intervention.

It's a depressing analysis and one instinctively reacts against it. In the theatre, at least, surely we're in the midst of a period of unusually high political commitment? What about all this docudrama; what about the last few plays at the Court, what about the current regime at the Soho? Then, reading between the lines of Eagleton's article, one realises why nobody qualifies as a radical nowadays: it's in the detail of that phrase "question the foundations". In legal terms, today's writers get off on a technicality.

By "the foundations", you see, he means capitalism. As usual, cry the wags. So DH Lawrence qualifies for Eagleton's list of radicals because his work "denounced 'the base forcing of all human energy into a competition of mere acquisition'": i.e., he attacks capitalism from the individualist right rather than the collectivist left. Presumably because Eagleton likes Lawrence, he's able to pick up on the moments he's not just hammering on about sex and find the key moments when he's instead resenting people for wanting money rather than sex. (Just because this is a simplistic reading of Lawrence shouldn't be taken as a dismissal of his work. It's just a dismissal of the idea that he's any kind of radical.)

So no-one's questioning capitalism nowadays. This is really a variation on that old plaint, "the left lost its way after '89". And it's a load of cobblers. No-one's questioning capitalism using the old tools of Marxist dialectic, sure, but is that surprising given the drubbing that dialectic had taken by '89? Look at it this way: in 1989 a discredited and corrupt system fell and many millions of people were liberated as a result. Only at the symbolic level did this in truth have anything to do with left against right, but the symbolism, as so often, was far more powerful than the reality.

Since then the left's battles have been fought on a series of single issues; rather than challenging the system we've sought to mitigate its worst degredations. Taking on Big Pharma, the leading polluters or even PFIs all involve questioning whether the profit motive is the most suitable way of engineering human welfare: the difference is that the argument proceeds by example rather than by doctrine.

But we're not challenging the foundations, so we're not radical. Well, perhaps. But perhaps now is not the time for radicalism, but for small actions with big repercussions. Let the dots be joined gradually, rather than the whole damn thing being inked in by theorists and technocrats in advance of any attempts at action.

This may be symptomatic relief, rather than cure. Fine. You can't cure a guy who's in love with his disease. All you can do is mitigate the symptoms and gently point out their point of origin, until he's prepared to listen. That, my friends, is the sadly reduced role of the "radical" left in modern political discourse. We've the Soviets to blame for that: they had their chance and they handled it atrociously and unforgiveably. Like it or not, we have to live with their lunacy having hardened the right against good sense, with their defeat having accustomed the right to the taste of victory. This is not a time for us to be radical, angry and big. This is a time for us to be good, and right.

As regards the place of literature in all of this: perhaps literature also got pragmatic. Perhaps writers listened to the atrocious self-belief of the world-changers of the sixties and seventies and thought, I can get something done, but went for a more modest goal than the wholesale change of society. Perhaps we live in a time where grand narratives are viewed with too much suspicion to be useful tools for change and perhaps the true radicals are the people whose ideology is unswerving but whose tactics are eminently adaptable. If you're not winning at half-time, you have to make a change.

The Protocols of the Elders of Greenpeace

When not being the smug snarking git noted earlier, David Baddiel did say one interesting thing, albeit by mistake. Intending to talk about climate change deniers he accidentally said "holocaust deniers", before going on the run from his Freudian slip: of course climate change denial is not as bad as holocaust denial. But is it?

Climate change, at least from the current perspective, is much much less terrible than the holocaust. The holocaust was a planned and systematic extermination of a race of people. Climate change's victims will be drawn essentially at random from throughout humanity. No comparison.

Well, not quite. Climate change's victims will not be randomly distributed: they'll be drawn overwhelmingly from among the world's poor. The exacerbation of climate change, and its denial, is being overwhelmingly carried out by the world's rich. All they have to do to get away with it is buy a house on top of a hill, paid for with the money they made selling the underclasses the means to kill themselves.

But hold on, Dan. There has been no Wansee conference here; there is no intent to kill, no intent to exterminate a race or a class. So Esso and Shell aren't, I suppose, as bad as the Nazis. Through gritted teeth, I'll give you that one. But will that matter when there are six million dead? Or more? I put it to you: not if you lose your family.

Still, there's no equivalence between Hitler and some weasly CEO: he's pretty bad but, I grant you, not quite that bad. Drawn though I am by the call of rhetoric to suggest that he is.

But denial is a different storm altogether. At least holocaust denial, insidious and vile though it is, won't make the holocaust any worse. Climate change deniers effect a deferral of action on climate change, thus ensuring its continuation. Holocaust deniers are apologists; climate change deniers are perpetrators. It's as simple as that. The texts of the "scientists" who, in the pay of Esso and Shell, seek to quibble with the overwhelming evidence that we're hurtling towards disaster are, as far as I'm concerned, morally equivalent to The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And that isn't just rhetoric.

The Hips Don't Lie

Flipping the television last night between The Thick of It and, er, 100 Greatest War Movies, I stumbled upon coverage of the Live Earth concert. There was something exhilirating about switching on prime time TV and finding in progress a semi-serious discussion about climate change. It would have been better if David Baddiel wasn't involved - he's carved such a niche for himself as "the comedian with a degree from Cambridge University" that he's forgotten for several years that he's also supposed to be funny and instead comes across as a smug snarking git - but it was nice that it was happening.

Now obviously, the whole thing was an exercise in hypocrisy and it's immediately clear why it's been dubbed by unkinder souls than myself (oh, alright, sharper-witted ones) "private jets against climate change". But if this discussion between Jonathan Ross, David Baddiel and A Proper Scientist wasn't simply a "put the kettle on" moment, then this exercise will also have fulfilled its objective of doing more to raise awareness and understanding of climate change than any previous PR for good green practice.

Will we do anything about it? When I flipped back later, Shakira was on. Makes you wonder if the planet is worth saving.

Give me a sweetie

A few days ago on here I was nice about the National Theatre. Yesterday I was nice about Yes Minister.

I've a fundrasing drive going on at the moment in a desperate attempt to compensate for an ACE-shaped hole in my budget for Man Across the way, and as part of it my beautiful wife sent letters to 250 theatre celebrities. Yesterday I got a cheque from Nicholas Hytner, today I got one from Derek Fowlds. It is the policy of this blog, in a spirit of fitting optimism, to be nice about everyone with a chequebook.

Which in a roundabout way includes James Purnell, our new culture secretary, who everyone seems to think is so far doing a good job. What a nice man. I bet he's great with children and animals.

Oh alright, I admit it. I remain to be convinced. Just because a man likes the theatre doesn't necessarily mean he'll do a great job running the whole national cultural infrastructure. I know loads of season ticket holders at Middlesbrough, for example, who'd do a ghastly job of managing the team.

But Purnell has now given a new speech, which might help readers of this blog to forget the one to the IPPR I so cruelly dismantled a week ago. It's much better, almost as happy clappy as Blair's earlier this year, but in this case with something to say. I've had no luck in unearthing the full text, so we'll have to take Charlotte Higgins' word for it and assume she's read the whole thing and not just the press release. It's moderately encouraging.

Excellence, he says, is going to be the main criterion from now on. I'd like so see how he plans on measuring it: peer review seems the only sensible strategy, and there are obvious difficulties even with that. But still. The chances a piece of art has of being good art seems like a very good place to start when formulating an arts funding strategy. He's wrong to say that the access battle has been won, but one of the best ways of widening access is to make really terrific work that people want to see. His example, Punchdrunk's Faust, is a good one.

This brings me to the most surprising news story of the week: Michael Billington in "not talking total arse" shocker. Billington argues fairly persuasively that we do in fact have to continue considering access in the arts world. There's no point in making great work if no more than the same seven people come to see it every time.

This means creating work that will appeal to demographics other theatres can't reach, with all of the attendant problems that brings. Because of course we can't create work in bad faith; that will only lead to bad work. We just have to hope that our beliefs about what is good are shared by the people we manage to get through the door. The root problem then, is not a lack of diversity in the audiences, but a lack of diversity in the directors and theatre managers. There have been massive strides on this in the last ten years or so, but the vast majority of us are still white, middle class and university-educated. In having been working class for about the first fourteen years of my life, I'm mildly divergent from the norm, but not all that much.

So how do we get a real reflection in our profession of the society to whom we profess to speak? I have to come back to youth and community work. As I've said before, this stuff is not a waste of time or money. It's about the future.

But there's an awful lot of bad, tokenist box-tickery going on in this sector, I hear you cry. So there is. And the solution is simple. Put the emphasis on excellence. Inclusion is not a de facto good if what you're included in is rubbish. There's no merit in having been in the Leeds United squad; youth and community work can and should be encouraged to excel. I'm not a believer in entering kids into drama competitions and whatnot; I'm a great believer in doing good work with them and some of my best work is done there. If I ever hear about this bloody job in York (the board meeting to discuss whether they can afford to pay my wages was on Thursday and I'm waiting for the phone to ring: predictions welcome) I hope to continue doing more.

So Purnell may be onto a good thing in putting the emphasis on excellence. But one can't help but feel he's pouring honey into one ear and poison into the other. He's guarded where it most counts: he admits that he doesn't hold the purse strings on this one, and admits it's going to be a tough round. And of course he's right. He can sing the praises of the arts all he likes, but it will only really count when he convinces not us, who are well-known to already have a high enough opinion of our value, but the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It's all very well telling your child he's a good boy. What he wants to know is: are you going to give him a sweetie?

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?

Plays and Theatre

There's a real difference between going to see plays and going to see theatre. Plays privilege the literary. Theatre privileges nothing, refuses nothing, denies nothing. Some plays are theatre and some theatre uses plays. What the hell am I talking about, you ask?

As noted in an earlier post, I was terribly excited by Mike Bartlett's My Child at the Royal Court. Not only was it a cracking piece of writing, but it seemed to me to bespeak a new era at the Court, one that might even be called theatrically dynamic. It was a good play, but it was great theatre; the space and the design were as much a part of its success as the text, if not more.

So it was with some disappointment that I left latest Court offering The Pain and the Itch having utterly loathed it. I don't think Michael Billington is wrong when he indicates it's tremendously funny: like the rest of the audience, I laughed a great deal. (Billington watchers: go to the penultimate paragraph of that review, read the second sentence, and tell me he hasn't descended into self-parody.) I just found it completely hateful.

The problem is not the target: the "phoney liberals" who people the play, drowning in their wealth and self-importance, get my goose as much as Norris's. I have no truck with people who talk equality and liberalism before - or even while - engaging in casual racism of the laziest sort. I find such people considerably more ennervating than straight-down-the-line bigots like Bernard Manning or Richard Littlejohn. But in real life, I just avoid such people; and if I for some reason can't, then my fists start to itch. That's exactly what happened at the Royal Court last week. Listening to these terrible people behaving terribly made me terribly, terribly angry. The acting was so good I thought I was watching real people, real, terrible people. I wanted to get up on stage and give them a good kicking. In what way does the inspiration of such feelings make for good art?

And it wasn't at all interesting theatre; it was one of the normallest things I've seen in a very long time, unusual only for the lavishness of its naturalism rather for the one clumsy way in which it pretended to be daring. In a device borrowed from Six Degrees of Separation, the characters broke the frame occasionally in order to narrate the story or comment upon some aspect of it to an almost-silent Arab character, Mr Hadid. But unlike Six Degrees, nothing interesting was done with this device and it took us nowhere; it just provided a convenient way of unravelling the plot at the climax, and of pretending it wasn't just a very dull old-fashioned play.

The Court's peak in the sixties and seventies saw a series of plays of breathtaking theatricality. Bond, Brenton: they even used to let Barker in. Many of these plays and more sprang from the writers' group run by Bill Gaskill, in which he had them participating in mask workshops and movement sessions, experimenting with puppets and doing chorus work. Writers' groups today are all story, inciting incident and character arc, tools borrowed wholesale from film. Those tools are important, for sure, but there's a whole world out there that they don't touch. Why are we afraid to show new playwrights the tools of their own trade? Fin Kennedy's How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found was one of few, of very few plays I've seen recently of any real formal innovation. It took years and a John Whiting Award for it to find a home. "These aren't rules, they're guidelines", I keep hear writers being told. "They're there to be broken." Yet when writers do break them, we very rarely know what to do with the results.

There's a widening fissure between plays and theatre in this country. On another theatregoing night in London I saw Kneehigh's adaptation of A Matter of Life and Death. It's a great sign of the health of alternative approaches to theatremaking that Kneehigh are presenting work on the biggest stage of our National Theatre. But if anything the current strength of companies like Kneehigh serves only to show how far apart are the "alternative" and the "mainstream". It's absurd that an arbitrary line should be drawn. But it consistently is, and it's down to a reluctance on the part of mainstream theatremakers of all types - actors, directors and designers - to engage with this wacky and intimidating world where people play in order to make plays.

I have a madcap theory about this. In 1599, Shakespeare sacked his clown Will Kemp, no doubt irritated by practices such as the jig. What's the jig? It is something no one ever tells you about, which should give you a clue as to whether the institutional sympathies in this country lie with plays or with theatre. It was a twenty- to thirty-minute improvised act, featuring a lot of dancing but also lots of flummery and fun, performed by the clown from the play. So at the end of Romeo and Juliet, Peter the clown (remember him? He's there) takes the stage, sweeps aside the corpses, and buggers about for half an hour. It was phenomenally popular, and audiences would often creep in at the end of the play just to catch the jig. The "nasty, bawdy jig" irritated many a playwright, not least because those creeping in at the end for it avoided paying the price of admission.

So Shakespeare sacked Kemp and took his company off in a new direction. The jig was done away with, and the new clown, Robert something-or-other, was required to perform much more cerebral stuff, the kind of jigging with words seen in V.1 of Hamlet. It was a big artistic risk, but the audiences, seeing that he was doing good work, continued to come.

Shakespeare's was a good artistic decision. It was also the thin end of the wedge. Pretty much since that time "plays" and "theatre" (or perhaps we might say "performance") have existed in two separate traditions - often overlapping and frequently cross-fertilising. But separate all the same. The same fissure never occurred in Italy, whose performance tradition of commedia dell'arte survives in one form or another into the plays of its best-known writers - most obviously Dario Fo, but no less so Pirandello if you read him carefully. Meanwhile, in this country, plays are as close in sympathy to poetry as they are to performance.

Other traditions have related pecularities. I met a French playwright who announced that for him, plays are essentially poetry, explorations of ideas through language. His play was terrible. Utterly inert, undynamic and untheatrical in every respect; more like an arch Socratic dialogue than a dramatic text. Yet both the French and the German playwriting traditions have a superabundance of this sort of thing; plays of situational and linguistic verve but lacking completely for the dramatic. Those playwriting traditions have gone way beyond our own divergence from the theatrical. But they make up for in (after a fashion) with a performance tradition which survives in their utterly (sometimes brilliantly so) batty directors. There is no onus on the playwright to provide dramatic or theatrical spectacle; the directors will do that, and in any case the writers write the sort of thing that seems to get put on. Loads and loads of our writers get done in France, and especially in Germany - and by the time they get performed they look as mad as anything written in the native language. I heard about a Dutch company who commissioned a new play, developed it with the writer, then once the rehearsal period had started (and all publicity had been done), chucked out the text completely and devised something new instead. And David Greig tells a story about going to see a production of his play Europe in the former East Germany, during a particularly poignant scene of which the characters were seen chucking a giant inflatable carrot around the stage. "What did you think of the show?", the director asked him afterwards. "I liked it", David replies, ever polite. "There was one thing though. The carrot? What was that all about?" The director gives him an uncomprehending look. "The carrot: it is communism.

We're lucky to have a tradition in which writing is accorded respect. As Sarah Kane said about the Germanic tradition of mad productions, "it's all very well doing that with Shakespeare: you can't ruin his chances of a second commission." Writers can create theatre with directors and actors, rather than providing material for those people to either fuck about with crazedly, or do the same old thing they always do. But writers are hemmed in at the moment: they're being developed left, right and centre, and the result is the same three plays over and over again. They should go to the theatre more often, rather than just going to see plays.

There are, of course, exceptions. Anthony Neilson has his faults, but he writes theatre, not just plays. Chris Goode not only makes fine work of this sort but also articulates exceptionally well the process by which he does so. It's a shame the first two examples that come to mind happen to be writers who direct their own work; for whom writing and directing are part of the same process. Anyone got any good examples of writers who write the sort of thing I'm talking about, then hand it over to someone else to direct? I hope Man Across the Way fits the bill to an extent, but we haven't finished it yet so now's not the time to push it forward. There must be some, but the mind's a blank.

To end though, an exemplary exception from across the pond. A pair of theatre trips in London saw me taking in Tony Kushner's epochal Angels in America. I have several reservations about the production, about which perhaps more another time. But the play seems to me very near the apotheosis of the playwright's art. Kushner has written into it not just character arcs and inciting incidents and good jokes and invisible exposition. He's written into it theatre, and even in a production that falls short of several markers, it's an extraordinary, exhilirating spectacle and a resounding experience. It's seven hours in total and barely a moment wasted. Reminds you of why you like plays. And theatre.

Business as Usual?

Another politicky one today, folks. But hey, it's a politicky time, what with a whole new Prime Minister and everything. It's the first change of Prime Minister of my adult life, so if I can't commemorate it with a brace of blog posts, what can I commemorate?

So, Gordon's new cabinet. Surprising? Not really. Most of it was leaked wholesale to the papers over the last couple of days - either that or they're just very good guessers. Milliband as Foreign Secretary might be quite surprising if it hadn't been in the news yesterday. Straw as Justice Secretary was a conclusion likewise foregone, although his bonus post of the Lord Chancellorship is quite surprising, given that he's not a Lord. So with one exception, the surprises mostly take the form of people in the smaller jobs who arrive at unexpectedness by being hitherto unheard of.

The one exception, of course, is Jacqui Smith at the Home Office. Creating the first ever female home secretary neatly gets Brown off the charge of having an excessively male cabinet, especially as he's got rid of four senior women in the reshuffle. It could be observed that one of these senior women, who tried to hold onto her job with her gritted teeth, happened to be the first ever female foreign secretary, but there's no point in trolling so early in a premiership I announced myself optimistic about only yesterday.

So, good old Jacqui Smith, who at 44, is also pretty young for such a senior job. Brown has a history of surrounding himself with Bright Young Things, so it's hardly surprising to see the so-called Primrose Hill set liberally adorning the cabinet table, but I'm a bit sick of not being surprised so I'm going to be surprised. Wow! A really high-profile woman in government! Take that in the teeth, equality-doubters!

Although the cabinet is, with the sole exception of Baroness Scotland as AG, entirely white.

And one has to feel sorry for any new home secretary. However popular they are to start with - and Smith certainly has her lovers on the Labour benches, despite having been Chief Whip - the job inevitably turns them into ravening bigots of the hang 'em and flog 'em sort, usually within a couple of weeks. One must be seen to be tough on crime, and if one is seen to be tough on the causes of crime instead - well, that's just another way of saying "soft". Perhaps this is part of the reasoning behind splitting the Home Office up - Smith might in fact turn out to be the first popular Home Secretary in history. Meanwhile at Justice, Jack Straw gets to be desperately unpopular all over again. Talk about a poisoned chalice.

Speaking of which, what do we think to Alistair Darling as the new Chancellor? He's reckoned by the Guardian to be Brown's "safe pair of hands", but anyone outside of the Westminster village is going to find it hard to judge on that from his wonkish performance at DWP. And I suppose a wonk is exactly what Gordon wants at the Exchequer, so he can drive policy on what is effectively home turf while letting Darling do the detail. Let's not forget that for the last 24 hours Brown very briefly emulated Gladstone by being Chancellor and PM at the same time. I bet he's never been happier. Although I don't suppose he'll follow Gladstone in hoping to abolish the income tax (introduced by Pitt the Younger as "a temporary measure" to help fund the war against France, fact fans).

And peaceniks might be pleased to note the presence of David Milliband at the Foreign Office: he's known to have opposed the war "in private", which means in cabinet. Coupled with the return of John Denham, who resigned over the war, might we see a shift in policy, Iraq-wise?

But it is inevitable on this blog that we finally get to and chew over the real surprise: James Purnell at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. A surprise because I for one have never heard of him. But fear not! Your intrepid reporter has scoured the internet for goodies! Read on, and all will be revealed...

It's a pleasant surprise to note for a start that he lists his interests as "film, music, theatre and football" - and at the time of writing he hasn't even updated the page to include his new job, so at least we know it's not a sudden and recent addition in the light of his new job, like the new Milkybar Kid hastily taking his support of the Nestle boycott off his blog. With the exception of theatre, it might be noted that those are everyone's interests, but then we don't yet know what sort of music he likes; it might be the Arctic Monkeys, it might be Schonberg. Most politicians say jazz, don't they? Let's assume he likes jazz until we learn the sorry truth.

Still, most people don't say theatre, so let's further assume for the time being that he actually does like it. He was, for a time, on the board of the Young Vic, so he probably does. And it'll be nice to have someone at DCMS who actually likes the arts, and his earlier track record, including a stint as Blair's special advisor on Culture, Media, Sport and the Knowledge Economy, suggests that he might not only like them but even actually know something about them. He might even survive the inevitable moment when a radio station throws him unprepared into one of those embarrassing quizzes, asking him who plays up front for Spurs and how much a ticket costs at the Royal Court. He'll get special kudos if he knows about the 10p standing tickets, even more so if he's a regular purchaser thereof.

An aficionado holding the brief hasn't happened since Chris Smith and he's now widely considered to have been A Good Thing, so there may be reasons to be cheerful. And hilariously, Tessa Jowell remains in cabinet as minister for the Olympics, so she'll get all the flak for that and Purnell can get on with doing a proper job. It'd be like having kept Mandelson on, but solely as Minister for the Dome. A hoot. Poor old Tessa.

But hold your horses. His voting record is much less encouraging: pro ID cards, foundation hospitals and bombing Baghdad, against investigating the circumstances leading to war and determinedly agnostic on the transparency of parliament. He's emphatically a partyliner, perhaps due to conviction, perhaps due to his admiration for Chief Whip Jacqui Smith, who's persuaded people to vote for some pretty preposterous things in her time. James Purnell has been one of the persuaded.

But (he says charitably and with gritted optimism) a voting record tells us very little about how a person would adminster a department like this one, and Purnell's administrative record is marginally more encouraging. He brought in the legislation on the relaxation of the licensing laws which, after an appalling hoohah in the conservative press, I think we can all agree hasn't led to the end of civilisation as we know it. If anything what it shows us is that the licensing laws should be relaxed further - and I say this while firmly ensconsed atop the wagon. He is considered, I learn, to have stewarded this legislation, and others, very effectively. But that still doesn't tell us if he's going to get a better deal for the arts, which is, after all, why we're all here.

So perhaps we should listen to what he has to say: try this speech to the IPPR (for whom he used to work) given in 2005. It's a very predictable speech giving the arts the usual instrumentalist support and using some very distasteful examples of British creativity: Coldplay? Reality TV? Euch. But as ever with these things, it's difficult to tell whether he does this in order to get the speech maximum coverage or because he's an idiot. I'd rather it wasn't necessary to look like a philistine idiot in order to get arts funding better priority, but if it works I'm happy so long as I don't have to strike the same pose myself.

There's a great deal of distaste in the arts world for the instrumentalist argument for subsidy - ie, the argument that we stimulate the economy above and beyond any subsidy we receive and so indirectly, we punch our weight or above. And it's right that we should resist this argument to some extent, because that risks the implication that art's purpose is to stimulate the economy, and by extension the implication that art that does not do so should not be supported. Art's purpose is to be good art; the economy is irrelevant. But with that caveat, why not use this argument? As Alan Bennett said in rather a different context, to a man crossing the desert, the question "Perrier or Evian?" is moot. So long as I don't accept funding granted on the condition it stimulates the economy, I don't mind accepting funding won because someone thinks it might. It might. It probably won't, but it might.

But pleasingly, Purnell acknowledges in the speech, once you've got past the really guffy bits, that "not every bit of the value created by Nick Hytner, JK Rowling or Gilles Peterson is captured by the economic transactions that relate to their work. I believe in art for art’s sake, and creativity would still be central to our lives and the role of Government if it didn’t generate any revenue." That's good to know. How are you going to support it?

Well, he hammers on at some length about competition, but he's talking about broadcast and telecommunications by this point (his definition of "creativity" is large), not the arts as supported by the Arts Council. He's got nothing to say about those, and really, it's a rather depressing speech. It's wonkish in a way that might be useful for the chancellor but I'm not sure is so much so for the DCMS. He seems to have unlimited faith in agencies, councils and bureaux. It's New Labour to the core. And it hasn't got a spark of passion or belief anywhere in it, unless you were to count the desperately weak Shaun of the Dead joke.

The stocktake, then: likes theatre, or claims to, but exhibits no discernible love for it apart from serving on a board. Likes music, but it's Alan McGee who makes him tongue-tied, not Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. Likes films because every pound invested brought three pounds at the box office. Has Brown only given him the job because [edited on grounds of good sense]?

So it looks like it's going to be business as usual. And this is the only logical conclusion one can reach when one considers that really, no arts minister fails to make an argument for greater arts subsidy. All they fail at is convincing those who need to be convinced: the Chancellor and the Prime Minister. It seems unlikely that Brown will suddenly change his mind now he's moved one door down. We're all just as fucked as before.

But then. Purnell's journalism is regular and fairly appealing. What little I can find on his radio appearances seems very positive about his sharpness and appeal. And given the echoing appearance of the odd phrase "core script", to indicate where the arts aren't quite and should be, in both this IPPR speech and Blair's recent and far superior (if utterly disingenuous) speech to arty types earlier this year, perhaps we can detect the guiding philosophy of one James Purnell, Supporter of the Arts. Perhaps he really does want to see the arts as part of the core script. Perhaps he really does believe in art for art's sake. Perhaps the poverty-stricken language and thinking of the IPPR speech can be diagnosed as wonkishness solely for delivery to an audience of wonks. Perhaps we can give him the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps. At least until he's done something.

Brown is well known for being utterly intransigent - until at length persuaded, when he becomes utterly intransigent on the flipside. And once he's stuck on something he'll go at it all guns, be it PFI or (perhaps) proper subsidy for the arts. Blair, on the other hand is easily persuaded into saying anything that will please his current audience. If Purnell means it when he says he values the arts, rather than just being a well-informed apparatchik, he might be able to persuade Brown to act on it where he could only persuade Blair to say it. Perhaps.

Let's be optimistic.

UPDATE from a proper journalist

The Arts Under Socialism

So today's the day. Blair is finally off, and not a minute too soon, to be replaced by a real politician, Gordon Brown. And the last couple of weeks have been excellent demonstrations of the view of politics as a branch of the entertainment industry, with cliffhangers agogo: what will happen next? Will Tony set up his preposterous face-to-faith forum, since he's done so much for the good name of Christianity and good relations with Islam? Will he recover from his "frank" drubbing from Pope Benedict, hardly a moderate himself? Gosh, no, it looks like he's off to bring peace to the middle east. (Surely that's meant as a joke, as though the Fonz disappeared to a monastery?)

Meanwhile we have all the humming and ha-ing about who will compose the first Brown cabinet. Will there be a deputy Prime Minister? How can Jack Straw's loyalty be rewarded without giving him a brief he might fuck up? How to deal with David Milliband, the nearly-challenger? Or Harriet Harman, who one can't help feeling wouldn't have been Brown's first choice as Deputy? (The latter has been neatly dealt with by doubling up the deputy leadership and the party chairmanship: no dangerous cabinet brief for moderately disloyal Harriet.)

And now we have one final twist in the tale: Quentin Davies' splendid resignation of the Tory whip and defection to the government benches. It could hardly be more timely for Brown, or more cutting to Cameron, who is indicted on a bewildering number of charges: vacuity? check. Superficiality? check. Hypocrisy? check. It's lovely, and I hope Blair saves some of it for Brown rather than using up the whole lot in his final PMQs today.

But this resignation is pleasing for more reasons than mere entertainment. It's about time someone stuck it to Cameron or, more to the point, about time people started to realise that being a nice young man with his heart in the right place is not a suitable qualification for the highest office in the land. So he deserves everything he gets and it'll be nice to see the Tories start unravelling again. That is satisfying, in the way it's satisfying to see the judge don his black cap when passing judgement on the man who killed your children.

Perhaps through the principle that a change is as good as a rest, I'm feeling oddly optimistic about Gordon Brown. Admittedly you can't put a fag paper between him and Blair in terms of policy. But Brown's a details man, so perhaps he's in a position to make some of the admirably-conceived reforms of the last ten years actually work. (Before you deluge me with comments: not all of the reforms have been admirably-conceived.) And Brown actually believes in them, whereas change the name at the top of Quentin Davies' letter and it could just as well be read to Blair. Let's hope the one thing Cameron doesn't learn from his Labour alter ego is the teflon trick.

The one thing I don't feel particularly optimistic about is the future of arts funding. The comprehensive spending review due later this year is unlikely, whoever the new chancellor turns out to be, to deliver even inflation-level rises to ACE, and nor is it likely to address the losses suffered by the smash-and-grab raid recently effected on behalf of the Olympics. It's these losses that are most damaging for me personally, as they manifest themselves as a 33% cut in Grants for the Arts, the scheme making grants on a project-by-project basis, and through which all of the public funding I've ever had has come.

Brown was recently full of praise for the arts in Britain, almost as fulsome as Blair was earlier this year. But it's utterly meaningless. Screwing the arts is politically low-cost and so it's all too easy to smile, and smile, and be a villain. But no-one will ever resign a whip because of little white lies like these.

-

I've spent the last couple of weeks in London working on Man Across the Way, and trying to watch as many shows as possible, so apologies to my readers (both of you) for the extended absence. I'll fill you in on all my adventures over the next few days. In the meantime, here's one meditation. Finding myself with an hour or two to kill before a show at the Soho Theatre, I wandered into the London Review Bookshop and browsed my way to JB Priestley's essay The Arts Under Socialism. In it he lambasts the confusion between means and ends that he sees as besetting much of left-wing art. Art under capitalism is not a means to the end of socialism; art under socialism is not a means to the end of the maintenance of socialism. Such a view of art impoverishes art immeasurably, as good art is an end in itself, not arguing for this or that case of affairs, but rather pushing us, or dragging us, towards greater understanding or greater awareness of our lack of understanding. Art is good under whatever system of governance and the enlightened system will support it. What do you reckon, Gordon?

Space Cadets

"Space" is one of those words that's used an awful lot in theatrical discourse, drawing almost no attention. I've used the phrase "a really nice space" countless times to describe theatres I like. I caught myself doing it this evening. And yet if I said it to my mother she'd have no idea what I was talking about. "A really nice space?" A really nice emptiness, one might just as well say. A really nice nothing.

Because what we're actually talking about is the moulding of that space, what surrounds it and what encloses it. The context in which space is found, the angle at which you look at it and how many different places there are to stand, are all-important, but space itself is, well, space. That's it. It's what makes you look at it that counts. A good theatre will make you experience that emptiness and the filling of it with immediacy; a good show will fill it and sculpt its interruption with beauty and dynamism.

In my own practice I'm fairly neurotic about finding plenty to fill the emptiness. In the last week I've seen two things that have made me think about that afresh - neither of them theatre pieces.

First up, Anthony Gormley's Event Horizon, a collection of 31 casts of the artist placed on rooftops in central London. From the south end of Waterloo Bridge, standing alongside the most earthbound of the statues, I could count eighteen. And it has quite a dizzying effect, like the way you feel when seeing something utterly different through a kaleidoscope while knowing that the materials making up the image remain identical. How many of us, even those of us who think ourselves attentive to the city's landscape, have ever really stood and just tried to absorb it all? That's what this piece asks you to do. There's the fun of spot-the-statue, for sure, but added to that is a new sense of awe with each one. "How the hell did he get it up there?" "God, that building's massive." "And I've never even noticed it before."

The attention it demands forces you into a whole new relationship with the cityscape, with its space and with what mediates that space. Every new interruption by one of these bronze men is a fresh and satisfying surprise. And even more impressive is its unforceful but unavoidable insistence on the scale of the human in this city. It's astonishing from how far off you can spot the statues once you've got your eye in, but it's equally astonishing how tiny they are when, for example, on a roof just opposite St Pauls. It sounds banal to say that human beings look insignificant in a city the size of London, or small next to a building the size of St Pauls. But what Gormley has achieved is something that makes the viewer feel that afresh, in a manner akin to Schklovsky's notion of defamiliarisation.

And what's really beautiful about it is the way, in focusing your attention on these distant figures, it suddenly makes individual human beings appear less insignificant. Perhaps that's a trick of the light, but the piece is magnificent, and it's really good fun too. I'm looking forward to catching the rest of the Blind Light exhibition at the Hayward.

But it's fairly average compared to Andy Goldsworthy's new exhibition at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. This really marks the point where my very limited vocabulary for visual art begins to crumble, if it wasn't already doing so. So first, the facts.

The main part of the new exhibition consists of four large underground rooms, each containing a large-scale installation constructed out of materials found on the site of the sculpture park. Before you even go in, you see three large stone archways each constructed from perhaps thirty individual pieces of stone. Each is a pleasant, almost classical interruption to the landscape, until the moment you realise that each of them is entirely free standing and self-supporting. Suddenly walking through an archway is a terrifying experience and building one an awesome feat. And that's just the start of the warm-up gig: in the entrance to the gallery, but before entering any of the spaces, there's a twelve-foot pine cone constructed from piling and intertwining large logs. Again, it's entirely free-standing, an impressive testament to patient and laborious craftsmanship and a terrifying prospect to stand alongside. What if it falls down? What are the health and safety implications?

There's nothing about the spaces that will sound as impressive as they look and feel, so I'll keep it relatively short and just stick to the best one. The most impressive room has been transformed into a hut, again constructed of free-standing logs; going through the entrance you walk straight into something from the Viking era and the smell of sweet timber grabs you by the nose. The roof curves up smoothly to the centre of the room, where logs give way to twigs, and since the only place light can come in is the way visitors do, it's dark enough to give the sense of dim light flickering in the centre. One thinks of hunter-gatherers clad in animal skins gathered round a fire, giving off more smoke than winter warmth.

And if the giant pine cone was terrifying, this adds to that a sense that, if it were to collapse, one would be buried alive. It's truly awesome, in the Edmund Burke-eighteenth-century sense of the word; terrifying in scale yet also inspiring a delighted astonishment. And somehow the reflections it provokes are not on the great achievements of Andy Goldsworthy (well, not entirely), but on the achievements of Mother Nature (unforgiveable anthropomorphisation purely for rhetorical effect: sorry about that). Because we're never afraid that what she made might just collapse: while marvelling at them, one is simultaneously forced to confront the frailty of human achievements when compared with Scafell Pike, or Derwentwater. Whatever we might think about the awesome nature of these installations, the renewed sense of astonishment at the landscape and its sculpting over the millenia has produced something of considerably greater sublimity. One leaves the gallery into gawping sight of the magnificent vistas afforded by the YSP landscape and it feels as though the whole world is part of the exhibition, that everything has been put there for our delectation.

There is, of course, an extraordinary arrogance about such reflections if we allow them to centre entirely on ourselves; it makes the whole world appear like something from your latest hypomanic episode. But to simply revel anew in the natural landscape strikes me as a very worthwhile thing to do and it's also utterly thrilling. And although I drifted not for a moment to fearing for the future of our planet and its glories, that's something subsequent reflection taken me back to several times. Human figures can have an impact on the landscape, but the landscape is both more beautiful and more terrifying than anything we can muster.

How this relates back to my own practice, I'm not sure. But the question it presents to me is: how can we, in the theatre, most powerfully present to our audiences the sense of human scale in the world, of the fragility and beauty of individual lives against this vastest of backdrops? If we want to present great reckonings in little rooms, how do we compare this prison where we live unto the world?

Doin' it for the Kids

I'm in a steaming distemper today, which could be for any of a dozen reasons, so let's just discreetly blame the weather. It's oppressive and it needs to rain. It's making me hate.

Yet it's rather ungrateful of me to be in such a foul mood, given that I was rather flatteringly offered a job last night. "Are you going to advertise?", I said. "Not if you want it", they said. Aren't people nice?

The job is as Artistic Director of the youth theatre company with whom I did The Apple Harvest a couple of weeks ago, which is to all intents and purposes a producing theatre with an ensemble company whose performers all just happen to be aged under eighteen. As The Apple Harvest was one of the most enjoyable and satisfying experiences I've had in the theatre for ages, and the show was really rather good (though I do say so myself etc), I'm well minded to take it. It's a part time position so I could carry on with all my other activities and the solid bedrock would save me having to scrabble for other work. What's not to like?

And given that they have their own theatre, there are loads of possibilities for a kind of creative mission creep. Why shouldn't the theatre start receiving really good professional work (funding permitting blah)? Why shouldn't it form a de facto home to Silver Tongue and Strange Bedfellows, and for that matter the handful of other ideas I've been knocking around in my head for yonks but haven't had the opportunity for because of the aforementioned scrabbling about for work - or, more to the point, for cash to fund work? Given I've made a resolution to cease being a producer from this autumn onwards, this could be the beginning of a brave new world.

(Warning: extremely lengthy parenthesis.

I didn't mention that resolution, did I? Well, I'm sick to death of scrabbling around for cash like a beggar looking for the last 34p towards his bed for the night. I was brought up not to go round asking people for money and quite apart from the indignity of it and the fact that, consequent to my perception of it as undignified, it's not my metier, it means I spend considerably less time than I want to thinking creatively about the projects I'm trying to make.

As I said a week or two ago, one of the reasons I was able to enjoy The Apple Harvest so much is that it involved none of the crap usually thrown my way during the making of a production. In the professional theatre that crap is irreducible, but there are people called producers whose jobs it is to deal with it; they do so creatively and with pleasure and they probably shouldn't be the same person as the director if he wants to stay sane and free of a heart condition all the way into his thirties.

So someone else does it, or I retire early. I'm not quite sure who that is yet, but frankly if no-one wants to pick us up after all the work we've done and the successes we've had over the last few years, then we should probably be left to die quietly. Man Across the Way is going to be our calling card to producers. Jolly good news then that it's going to be an extremely fine piece of work. Though I do say so myself, etc. Interested parties, apply here.

I've never believed anyone will go about producing for Silver Tongue with more commitment than I bring to it myself, but I've naively assumed commitment in equals success out. But I've effectively been charging with my head down for four years, and it's time for someone with more finesse to step in. Then I can get on with being a proper theatremaker poncing about making art like I always intended. How the hell did I turn into a producer? I used to be so much fun.)

Even now I get a great deal from working with young performers whose energy and enthusiasm haven't been dimmed by this very sapping profession. Not to mention the fact that the work is very good: there's a prevalent belief that community and education work is consistently second-rate and unartistic, partly because it's encouraged by admittedly unappealing Arts Council priorities and partly because too many people simply think they're above it. But good work can be done in all manner of contexts so long as there are good people doing it. (And yes, I'm trying to smuggle in the implication that I'm good - but if I didn't think that, I wouldn't bother, would I?) Anyone who thinks good work can't be done with youth groups doesn't know how to work with youth groups. If Anthony Neilson can work with untrained performers, why can't I?

The problem is with a funding system - and a theatre culture - that sets up a dichotomy between "art" and "the other stuff artists have to do". But approached properly, the two can enrich each other hugely to the extent that they are at some points identical (I heartily recommend Fin Kennedy's blog for his frequent more temperate thoughts on how so). Because any dynamic theatre is a fully engaged and engaging part of its community and its culture - BAC is, Live Theatre in Newcastle is. The Royal Court suddenly, spectacularly is again: look at how many writers in the new season have suddenly burst out of its young writers programme, speaking directly to precisely the audience Dominic Cooke identified in his opening press conference. This to me bespeaks a sudden refinding of trust in the areas of its operation that aren't dedicated to immediate production. A nervous Royal Court sees the Young Writers' Programme as a way of maintaining certain funding streams, hitting arts council targets and maybe, just maybe, finding some writers who'll maybe one day do something good - but not yet. An adventurous Royal Court, looking for renewal, draws heavily on all this resource, treating it as an integral part of a producing theatre's armoury and - hey presto! - an excellent theatre is born again.

Such young writers' programmes, or community programmes, or whatever, are too often a part of a theatre's programme of work as a result of some funding priority or other. This more or less guarantees that they will be effected in bad faith and thus be half-arsed and yield no fruit. But - whisper it - these priorities exist because enlightened theatres should be doing such work. Not because it's good for those people lucky enough to be selected to participate. Because it's good for the art. Now and forever. Amen.

Think of it as a football club. The short-sighted manager, in fear of his job, wants to buy a Ghanian today, not train fifteen local kids for some distant tomorrow. "You never win anything with kids", said Alan Hansen. But the visionary manager invests in the kids and proves Alan Hansen comprehensively wrong, winning the treble in the process. But more to the point: it shouldn't be one or the other. Sir Alex Ferguson can afford to invest in the kids and buy Owen Hargreaves; why should we in the theatre be denied the same sort of opportunities just because we want our subsidy from the government rather than from some dubious foreign billionaire?

Unfortunately no artistic director in a panic and in search of a quick fix can be forced to believe that the youth set-up is anything more than an expensive lottery, an enforced tax on hope, any more than they can be forced to believe in God the father, the son and the holy spirit. He'll always resort to the safe, to the tried and tested. This, then, is the central idiocy of the fundingocracy: they haven't got their priorities wrong. They just shouldn't be trying to bribe people into sharing them. Chris Goode once said that, when at university, he thought he'd invented devising. As artists, we like to think it's our idea: even if the government body happens to have got it right, they won't make us believe they have. We need to find it out for ourselves.

So I exhort you all: look to the kids! Which in some contexts, includes me!

And apologies for the intemperacy/inarticulacy of all this. It still hasn't rained.

Films

To Mike Bartlett's My Child at the Royal Court on Saturday. I was particularly amused to note in the programme that "this is Mike's first play for the stage". Well, I was at university with Mike, I saw two or three of his plays then, and I know of several more since. It's odd that whereas actors' programme entries will say "this is x's professional debut", those of writers seek to deny that any work whatever was done before fully-formed arrival in a blaze of professional glory. More than odd, it's rather damaging to all the young writers who read the entry and are thus permitted to believe in the myth of such an arrival without years of student and amateur hard work before it. Mike has worked incredibly hard and deserves his success, which is built on the solid foundations of having learned the lessons of the seven or eight prior plays, rather than on beginner's luck.

And my word, the boy done good. It's a really terrific piece of work, a real statement by Dominic Cooke's new regime at the Royal Court and a real credit to that regime. Mike is only the second or third playwright in Royal Court history to have his debut play on in the main theatre downstairs (Blasted debuted upstairs, for example, which excessively intimate placing of such an expansive play may have had something to do with its lack of success on its first run), and designer Miriam Buether has been given permission to completely remould the space. Entering the theatre, one steps into an upscaled tube carriage, with some seats around all four sides, but mostly with standing room only. It takes the capacity of the venue down from 500ish to about 200, and with a cast of eight and a running time of only forty minutes, it's quite a big call for an Artistic Director to make.

But my word, does it pay off. The configuration of the space makes for a level of immediacy rare even in the smallest studios: you're right on top of the action, a sensation augmented by the way the actors disconcertingly emerge from among the audience and melt back into the throng throughout the action. The pat logic behind this staging decision is that it shows that everyone is complicit in the events shown - during the climactic fight, for example, one could quite easily step in. I hesitate to endorse this interpretation simply because it sounds so pat. But there's a difference between a play saying, and a play making you experience this feeling of complicity. My Child does the latter.

But it's been a long time since my reviewing days: what is the play about, I hear you cry? It's about a guy who finds himself gradually eased out of his son's life and, at his wits' end, winds up in desperation abducting his son, and hunted down by his ex-wife's tough, rich new husband Karl. It's an incredibly taut, driven piece of work that allows very little time for contemplation of the Alfie sort. But the very end widens the lens just enough. Reflecting, bruised by Karl's beating and Karl's greater success as a man in the contemporary world, on the creed of kindness and selflessness he has inherited from his parents, he is forced to conclude, "it doesn't work. Does it?" It's a blast that coruscates the pretence underlying much of contemporary social morality and it's still ringing in my ears two days later. It's really terrifying, and it's a brilliant piece of work.

And one of the things that enables it to be so successful is the way it strips everything to its bare essentials, with no dramatic waste whatever. The pace is blistering. The staging is a part of this, enabling instantaneous cutting from one scene to another by the simple expedient of starting scenes while one or more characters are still in their place among the audience. No unwieldy scene changes, not even a lighting shift, just straight through without time to blink. It's a stylistic choice that, though incredibly theatrical, owes a tremendous amount to cinema.

My generation and those around it are now so steeped in cinema that it's idiotic for theatremakers to ignore its implications and possibilities for our less influential art form. One of those is quite simply that you can't afford to drop the ball, that if you want scene changes you must find ways of doing them as quickly as can cinema, or you must find ways of filling the gaps. Audiences are used to not blinking, so to give them a chance is to give them a chance to get bored.

Way back in 2005, Bella and the Beautiful Knight's cinematic influence manifested itself in short scenes and quick cuts more stylised than those in My Child but equally rapid. It kept the pace and the intensity right up high and allowed the piece to turn on a sixpence from fury one second to strained silence the next in a way that is certainly possible in a more conventional piece, but not so consistently or so often. This among other things led to people occasionally describing the show as filmic, and certainly it took this aspect of film as a conscious influence. But I think both us and Mike found a version of this technique that made our respective shows distinctively theatrical. How so?

At the risk of overlapping too significantly with Alex Ferguson (no relation)'s most recent post, the significance lies in one of the key differences between theatre and film, although one that has nothing to do with the audience. It's the common sense fact that, if you cut to another scene in film all traces of the previous one remain only in memory, whereas an instantaneous cut in theatre must necessarily contain physical and visual traces of the previous one. The guy in the previous scene who's not in this one can't simply disappear in an instant. So his presence becomes part of the new scene, too; a physical memory, a reminder of the previous scene and a haunting of this one. In Bella we used this very deliberately, having the actor who's not in any given scene actively watching it and powerfully present, only cutting people out with light during monologues. My Child does something similar, to the extent of very often having two scenes going on at once. It's a brilliant theatricalisation of a language borrowed from film. Because in the theatre, we can be in two places at once in a way that, as Alex quite rightly says, the concreteness of film forbids.

And we must take that language on board: it's now part of how audiences understand stories. It doesn't reduce theatre to borrow from film. On the contrary, the language of film can be used to augment theatre for contemporary audiences. David Mamet talks about Eisenstein's policy of leaving out all the in-between parts, cutting to the quick. More on this later, but film's great ruthlessness with the chaff is only the beginning of what we can learn.

I had great fun with this on The Apple Harvest in York a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to see if a filmic montage sequence could work in the theatre. The montage is that bit, shortly after the mid-point of the film, where the protagonist is either at his highest or lowest ebb, music plays and we get a sequence of shots of him walking sadly down lonely streets, or joyfully driving a series of expensive cars, or whatever. It's the bit in Karate Kid in the funfair, the bit in Shrek where "Hallelujah" gets played, the suicides sequence in Groundhog Day. In film these bits are often pure emotional candyfloss. But they're useful staging posts and there's no reason they can't be intelligent just because they so often aren't.

So John and I wrote a song broadly in the "Hallelujah" category and made a "dark night of the soul" montage that cut together about eight different short scenes very rapidly. And whereas in film these scenes would rapidly supersede one another, in the theatre we were able to have most of them overlapping, with several running as presences all the way through the sequence and frequently cutting through into whatever else was going on. The traces of all being present in any one part of the whole, it became much richer than these sections ever are on film, an exploration of the creation of atmosphere and the juxtaposition of experience. It was lovely.

And My Child managed to use something from film I've never seen before in the theatre, at least not in quite the same way: the jump cut, that is, a jump ahead in the story that leaves the audience to fill in the gaps. The classic example is: shot of man taking woman by the hand and pulling her up from her chair, followed by shot of man and woman falling along the same plane onto a bed. The audience fills in the whole story in between the meeting and the lovemaking, so the film doesn't need to. This is the bit of Eisenstein Mamet gets so excited about.

In My Child, for example, there's a scene where the man and his son discuss watching a DVD:

CHILD: Let me see it.
MAN: All right. I'll put it on now.
The video comes on.
CHILD: This is shit. It's just a video camera in a cinema.

All the rigamarole of putting in the disc, switching things on, trailers, and all the rest of it, is cut away and we are simply asked to believe that all of this has happened. That's fine. It's not what's interesting or important about the scene, so why should we be shown it? Because that's how it would happen in real life? Well, theatre isn't real life, it's theatre. And by these means My Child tells us a great deal more about real life in its forty minutes than many a two-hour piece of straight-down-the-line naturalism.

There are plenty of other ways in which the theatre can borrow the successful bits of film: the best theatre-makers are always magpies. How do we take on board underscoring, for example, while bearing in mind the demands of our own medium? How do we make rain, or run through the airport, without cheating or resorting to cheap tricks? When watching films, I'm not just looking at what makes for successful film, I'm on the lookout for what I can steal for the theatre.