Good News?

Good news, I think. It's always difficult to penetrate the minutiae of Government funding strategies, and judging by the slapdash grammar the BBC writer hasn't spent a great deal of time doing so either. But it appears that, despite DCMS receiving only an inflation-level increase in its budget, the department has been able to announce a slightly above-inflation increase in the budget for ACE. It's not whooping and tossing of hats into the air stuff, but it's good news - not least because it goes some way to proving the thesis that James Purnell is a genuine friend to the arts.

Of course, a fair chunk of that money must go into funding the Cultural Olympiad. But artists needn't feel particularly threatened, as it seems increasingly likely that those responsbile for disbursing the cash will use it to fund the sorts of projects that would have got funded anyway. And I predict that in the next round of ACE policy reviews, the criteria will be re-adapted to place a much bigger focus on excellence. Call it a hunch.

But we're not in the sunlit uplands yet, because there'll be an election in 2009 which, the way Brown's going, the Tories are in serious danger of winning. And how do you think they'll fund their massive cut in inheritance tax?

The Dreaded Accordion

The music in devised theatre is always the same, isn't it? I went to some of the Light Night entertainment in Leeds library and art gallery earlier this evening, and there was a super burlesque-cabaret-bunch of stuff going on. But I've heard it all before. Chris Goode's mooted moratorium, mentioned earlier today by Andrew Haydon really ought to incorporate the whole musical aesthetic implied by the dreaded accordion.

Don't get me wrong. There are episodes of The West Wing that I've seen a dozen times or more without my geekery thinning out. I like this stuff. But will someone please create a piece of devised physical theatre using something else?

Who's to blame? Brecht? Shockheaded Peter? Answers on a postcard.

It must be possible to create a piece of theatre using a different musical tradition as its pulse. I'd like to see a show soundtracked by Vin Garbutt, if it has to be folksy, or maybe, radically, something involving neither guitar nor accordion. My next show for Strange Bedfellows is going to be a sort of life of Will Kemp. Part of its artistic mission, I've now decided, is to make the lute cool.

Staring at the Coalface

There was a time when novels were written predominantly for those with sufficient time on their hands to read them. Tolstoy might have been an emancipator in spirit, but do you think War and Peace was read by even one of the 80% of Russians who ploughed out their existence in the serf-and-peasant-ry? Alright, maybe one. But not many. And as literacy started to climb, so more and more novels were written in instalments, in a generous acknowledgement that the idle rich were thinning out and the not-so-idle middle-classes who formed your boom market didn't have time to gobble down all eight hundred pages of Bleak House in one sitting.

When did that start to change? When did it become de rigeur to deliver your novel all neatly packaged between conclusive covers, as if we can be trusted to read responsibly and not let it interfere with our other responsibilities? There's a point, maybe a hundred or two hundred pages into a really good novel, when the world of that novel permeates the real world utterly, and the only way to resolve or collapse the resulting confusion is to get the damn thing finished. This is fine when the novel's only three or four hundred pages, you can usually knock it on the head on a Sunday, but when it's War and Peace you're saying goodbye to anything constructive being achieved for the best part of a month, assuming you're still obliged to clock in and out and can't just plant yourself on the sofa and guzzle it down like Mr Creosote. Instalments, like rationing, would keep everything under control if, like me, you can't be trusted to behave responsibly when caught in the magnetic field of a good book.

Aside: just because The West Wing was released in weekly instalments doesn't mean that I haven't lost weekends - weeks! - tearing through the DVD box sets of seasons I didn't see the first time round.

I'm currently devouring John Banville's The Sea which, though short, has the added problem of being the sort of book whose sentences you frequently want to read again. It has no chapter breaks. Putting it down is almost impossible, so giddy are the pleasures it affords. I succeed in manfully tearing myself away to do some work, write 500 words or so, then find I'm stuck in a terrain determined by Banville, attempting to write a thesis on his terms, when who knows, he may never have read any Brecht and certainly has little interest in clowns. So I've come here instead to get some of it off my chest.

The range of temptations the modern world offers to put dents in one's productivity are endless. I'm in the midst of endless games of scrabble on Facebook and have somehow also got embroiled in three games of chess, a game I've no taste for. I regularly check some twenty or so blogs on theatre and politics, not to mention actively participating in the Runner's World forum.

I've written about productivity before, and I suppose by most external measures I count as a fairly productive person. Inventory: I just had two new shows on in Edinburgh, both of which I produced as well as directed. I'm currently running projects in Oldham, Sheffield and York, alongside various one-off freelance engagements in Leeds, York and elsewhere. I'm writing two plays and a PhD thesis, I'm going to Newcastle this weekend for meetings and to see two shows and I'm moving house next weekend. Meanwhile I'm trying to get and stay fit and yet today I'm sitting around reading novels and writing a blog on the internet for the benefit of a readership the majority of whom I'll never even meet. What am I playing at?

I have a fantasy life in which, yes, I'm creatively busy and fulfilled, making work in various media as and when it takes my fancy, but in which I am perfectly able to keep up with my reading. The defining question of each day is "what do you want to do today?", not "what must be done today?" Yes, my life's ambition, as a chippy working-class boy from Teesside, is to be a gentleman of leisure.

I also notice that I've been more positively productive and taken more pleasure in my work in the last couple of weeks than for much of the past couple of years. Sure, I've done work in that period and some of that work has been good, but the pleasure of it has been drowned out by the grind. A brief look at the balance sheet quickly reveals what's been missing for the last couple of years: regular running. And the reason I feel a slowdown this week is because a knee twinge prevents me from pounding the trail of a morning. There's nothing like flushing the system with oxygen before getting on with one's work, there really isn't. The resultant rise in energy levels and productivity is astonishing. I haven't been out since Sunday, no wonder I'm languishing.

Go running, people. It's the only way to create time to read more novels.

A Gloria Gaynor moment

I've occasionally been the among the first in the theatrical blogosphere to bemoan the latest degredation to arts funding, but I have to say Lyn Gardner's trounced me this time. There was me still plashing about in the shallows of what information I could find. Meanwhile Lyn's waded right in to the deep and said everything I was going to say. But with less semantic gallimaufry.

In my earlier post (below) I urged Brown to be bold. I expect he's pondering my words as we speak, wondering how best to take my medicine. What I didn't mention then was the arts, which are, quite frankly, skint. A bold move would be to give them a huge booster injection of cash and see if it's true that we stimulate the economy like Will Hutton says. Even I don't expect that to happen.

As Jon Spooner says in his comment at the bottom of Lyn's blog, it's going to be an interesting month. Guaranteed, though, is that the emerging companies, the ones you haven't heard of yet, will be the losers. I emerged at just the right time, in a period of unprecedented feast between one biblical famine and the coming period of Herodesque child murder. The big organisations currently receive the sort of funding they could only dream of ten years ago, and rightly so: we need healthy standard-bearers, and I don't propose to advocate redistribution. But if we want the bold artists of today to be the standard-bearers of tomorrow, we need to support them, and that's what standstill funding (especially as it's standing still having been cut back) doesn't do.

So it's going to be an interesting few years. Companies who are just starting to establish themselves, companies who are just out of college, even some more well-established companies, are going to fall off.

Unless we are bold. To survive, companies are going to have to estalish new models, new frameworks in which to create work. They are going to have to form partnerships with universities, schools, corporations. One of the more idiotic statements made in that Work Foundation report (linked to above) is that "Shakespeare required no subsidy; his work was self-supporting and arguably the stronger for it." No it wasn't. His company was The Lord Chamberlain's Men and subsequently The King's Men because the gentleman in question paid handsomely for the company to perform for him; the equivalent of a benefit gig or a testimonial. On top of that, Shakespeare wasn't alone in anonymously penning doggerel for mooning lovers desperate to impress their beaux. Of course he needed subsidy. It just wasn't paid for by income tax, which wasn't invented for another two hundred years.

I predict that companies working in intelligent partnerships with larger institutions, and with one another, is going to be the future. Witness the wonderful things being done between the Bolton Octagon and Bolton University. Masses of students are gaining experience in all departments of the theatre, the theatre has become an increasing part of its community, and audiences are up. Thanks to a generous initial investment from the University, the Octagon has been able to upscale its ambitions, and thanks to the spirit of friendship between the two the University has been able to trumpet all sorts of successes.

On a much smaller scale, touring companies can bring great kudos and valuable expertise to any number of institutions, and those institutions can be a valuable life-support machine to the companies even without pumping in the sort of cash Bolton University gave the Octagon. The lowering of the overheads alone would be enough to keep some from going to the wall. But of course, the worry is that this affects the kind of work done by the companies: if Unlimited were to suddenly take up residency in a hospital, wouldn't they end up making a moribund series of shows warning us to give up smoking?

Of course it will affect the work. If the partnership is the right one, it will affect it for the better. I for one can imagine Unlimited, whose previous shows have tackled teleportation, quantum physics and the science of coincidence, making some magnificent, provocative work about the ethics and sociology of human health. It'd be a farsighted PCT that took them in, for sure, but the opportunity to have a theatre company working with its patients could benefit everyone. Surely it would be healthy, and not just financially, for any number of companies to plant good firm roots in any number of community settings?

And if there's not enough money to go around from the central pot, it's in our interests to go out and make the case that we can really bring something of value to whatever institution we happen to find ourselves in. Because yes, art does stimulate the economy, and yes, art needs money to survive. But no, art is not reducible to economics. There is another way through.

Brown is the new Yellow

So Brown blinked first. I fear that if he wanted to win, it was now or never. Let's assume he wanted to win.

David Cameron played his first good hand in months by saying "bring it on" and making us believe it. In folding when he did, Brown lands himself with a hatful of "bottler" tags and ends up on the back foot. If he'd played out the hand and called an election, he'd have had to hold on through fearfully gritted teeth, unless he'd managed to find a way of re-raising Cameron. But how could he have got the stakes any higher? He'd've had to declare that the election would be decided by unarmed combat.

So he has to convince us all that he's not a ditherer or a bottler, and the first thing he does is present us with a grab-bag of diluted Tory fiscal policies. That trick worked for a couple of months, when he could steal Tory policies simply because no-one noticed they'd had them (and that, in any case, "policies" was a bit strong). But when a massive part of the Tory turnaround is based on their "policy" of taking less money in tax from those who've loads of money anyway, then stealing that might be a bit obvious. It's all very well me nicking your new jumper, but if I do it just after you've said to everyone "do you like my new jumper?", they're going to notice.

What's Brown's tactic to be, then? When we've noticed that he was the chief architect of New Labour so can't dissociate himself all that much with the last ten years, when we've noticed that his (delightful) injections of cash into ailing institutions like the NHS have been fatally compromised by PFIs swallowing that cash, when we've noticed that he voted for all of Blair's most hated activities and has ceased, um, none of them, that his famous stability just led to the first run on a British bank in 130 years and that he might not even be the strong leader we all thought he was, what can he do?

He has to be bold. Tactically and strategically he has no other option; politically a change of personality is not proving sufficiently refreshing; and crucially the country's governance needs a rethink.

He says he's a conviction politician but he's not prepared to tell us what his convictions are. Conviction politicians risk their popularity on their convictions. Lincoln risked losing half the country. Brown's only conviction is that the people want a conviction politician.

So why not do something that will actually make a difference, instead of Ranieri-esque tinkering? Why not renationalise the trains or knock PFIs dead and have the NHS run by an independent trust like the Bank of England? Why not abolish grammar schools and introduce a whole new practical and vocational pathway in secondary education? Hell, why not re-introduce the death penalty or have a troop surge in Iraq, declare war on France rather than face them in the rugby or just abolish democracy altogether? Why not do something that will wake us all up?

Why do you think?

Sound familiar?

And just in passing let me add: If anyone’s
Not for me he’s against me and has only
Himself to blame for anything that happens.
Now you may vote.

- Bertolt Brecht, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Time for Blogging

So, where the hell have I been for the last six weeks? At least George Hunka told us all he was going away.

Well, like Alex Ferguson I spent a while feeling a bit down and like I didn't have much to say, and like Chris Goode I am unutterably, spectacularly, broke (although unlike Chris my album collection is too much like everyone else's to be able to sell any of it). All of these things are, of course, down to Edinburgh, which was a great success, but when you follow it with a three-week London transfer and subsequent Yorkshire tour, it went on too long and I was tired. Fortunately the indefatigable Andrew Haydon has been posting enough for the lot of us.

So I've spent the last few weeks trying to get body, mind and credit card back in serviceable shape. I'll tell you about that in a bit, but like Bill Hicks with social comment and dick jokes, I'll butter you up with some thoughts about European theatre first of all. So.

European Theatre

If you're interested in European theatre, you must go to see Don Quixote at the West Yorkshire Playhouse. You may hate it - a shuddering majority has done exactly that - but you must see it. Why?

There's a lot of guff spouted about European theatre on these shores, some of it on this blog. The broad argument, which I endorse, runs like this: ours is too much of a text-bound tradition and we could benefit from a more imaginative approach to space, visual effects. We can, in short, be a bit more crazy.

Don Quixote is utterly bat-shit crazy. If a book falls from the sky, the relief at such a normal thing having happened is palpable. There's a scene on space-hoppers. There's a bit where they do a cover of Natalie Imbruglia's Torn, with a bloke dressed as a wizard among the assorted finger-snapping backing vocalists. If you want to see Greg Hicks gyrating to Madonna's Like a Prayer, this is the show for you. It's nuts.

And this is what European theatre looks like. I've seen contemporary theatre on main stages in Austria, France and the Netherlands, and read texts from a good handful more countries. This is what it looks like. It's properly mental. It is not about storytelling. It is not about sustaining dramatic action or tension. It is about a quasi-choreographic agglomeration of more-or-less surprising coups-de-theatre.

I saw a show in Austria, which I later directed in an English translation. There was a bit in the Graz production where everyone threw noodles at each other for a bit, and a bit where they projected some cartoon porn for a few minutes. When I was studying the text for my own version I was trying to remember when all this had happened. The cartoon porn was easily discoverable, as there was a bit where some porn comes on the telly (if only for a few seconds) by mistake. But the noodles were nowhere. All I could figure was that it must have been one of the bits where everyone shouted at one another. Fine. But I'm not sure that was reason enough to leave one of the characters festooned in noodles for the remainder of the show.

Every time someone complimented me on the craziness of my own production, with its gradually inflating airbeds and repeated duckings in various buckets of water, I giggled inwardly at how much less bats it was than the premiere in German: at least all of my stuff was inspired by an image or occurrence in the text. Don Quixote is as crazy as the stuff you get over there, and we've no stomach for it over here.

I quite liked it.

So hurrah to the Royal Court for its current season of European plays. Due to the aforementioned credit card situation, I won't get down to London to see any of them. But I like the sound of The Ugly One, and I like the sound of Ramin Gray's production. But I bet they didn't do it anything like that in Germany.

Credit Card

If you're not interested in what's going on in my life, in those thoughts of mine which don't look for the wider issue, stop reading now.

In by far the worst state of my body, my mind, and my credit card, is the latter, which has taken some hammer since I last earned in early July. Compounding that is my bank account being well over its overdraft limit. No, not well overdrawn: well over its overdraft limit. I went to give blood a couple of weeks ago and they had to stop, because my BMI is so low I don't have any blood to spare. That's what my financial situation was like about a month ago, and they haven't stopped the pump and given me a biscuit.

It didn't help that my car died last week, or that I'm moving house in a fortnight.

So I'm working every hour god sends, in order to pistol whip my accounts into shape. I spent last week running endless workshops on The Merchant of Venice. I'm running a weekly devising class in Sheffield and a writing class in Oldham. I started work at the weekend on my latest show with my fantastic youth theatre in York, a new adaptation of The Trojan Women. It doesn't leave much time for blogging.

Mind

I'm also trying to finish my PhD. It'll be news to lots of you that I've even started one, as I don't tend to advertise the fact very widely. Lots of the blogosphere during my hiatus has been preoccupied with discussion of the relationship between bloggers and critics, which itself grew out of a discussion about the proper relationship between critics and practitioners. I've a post brewing on the relationship between academia and practice in the theatre and it's going to be a humdinger.

So there'll be a good deal more on this subject over the next few weeks: if I don't finish the thing by the turn of 2008, I'll be shot, so I'm trying to get a serviceable first draft done for the end of this month. There, I've said it in public, I'll have to do it now.

And with the help of that, I'm starting to feel mentally fresh for the first time in - I don't know - over a year. I've been on a bit of a treadmill hurtling past one major production and the next for some time now and I've not been able to really capitalise on any of them as a result. Having given myself permission to slow down for a wee while and plan some bespoke productions, rather than setting everything up along the same lines as the last one, you can expect a quiet couple of years from me in terms of big splash - just a few pebbles tossed in the pond here and there - before I empty it of water completely sometime in late '08/early '09.

And the freedom afforded by not being a producer means I'm writing again, developing a few little bits and pieces which will constitute the abovementioned pebbles. It doesn't leave much time for blogging.

Body

And finally, if that diet of post-Edinburgh restoratives makes me look like I'm slacking, I'm trying to get into shape again. Before a nasty injury in 2005 that finally got operated on in February, I was doing some pretty good times on the old pins: 37:40 at 10k and 85:51 at 1/2M, for example. I had a feeling there was plenty more in the tank, but then my leg burst open in a game of football and I had rather a long enforced absence. So I'm now following a long, slow training programme to build up my mileage again over the winter before starting some serious training in the spring. Last week I managed just over 30 miles, with a long run of 9, which is peanuts when you consider Paula was doing 140 in the buildup to her GNR comeback last weekend. So I'm gunning for 50/week by January.

But now my knee feels a bit dicky, so I'm going to be doing all this week's miles on the bike (at a ratio of about 4:1 that means I need to cycle about 120 miles this week) to make sure it doesn't get any worse. It's a long, long road back. But Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will feels cocky today, so considers it appropriate to set some targets in public, so as to remove the possibility of somewhere to hide:

In 2008 the 10k time will go under 35 minutes and the 1/2M time under 80. In 2009 a marathon will be run in under 3 hours and 2 1/2 more minutes and five minutes more will come off the other two respectively, at the very least.

For the moment, though, I'll settle for not getting injured again immediately. It doesn't leave much time for blogging. But I'll try not to neglect y'all so badly in the future.

Back to Earth

Being deeply pre-occupied with one's Edinburgh ventures cloaks out the real world. It's one reason I'm glad the Festival takes place in August, when there's very little news anyway. Then every so often something happens to pull one forcibly back to earth, to remind one that, actually, all this preoccupation with reviews and run-times is pretty trivial.

Something in the papers? No. I got a call from the Anthony Nolan Trust. I've been found to be a partial match for someone in need of life-saving surgery, and can I come in for some further tests? So I'm going in next week when Man Across the Way is in London and I'm there too. "How will you fit it in?" asked my mother. Yes, I'm pretty busy - and I've a fun-packed autumn lined up that I'll tell you all about soon. But the opportunity to prevent someone from becoming dead is worth putting a show temporarily on hold, no? Surely a far far better thing I do today, etc?

Reviewing and Criticism

Leo Benedictus, writing on today's Guardian blog, makes a distinction between "reviewing" and "criticism". I've a terrible cold and a billion things to do for next week's London transfer, so I'm going to do little more than applaud the distinction: "A review is a practical tool designed to help people choose a show. Criticism is an attempt to describe the way a show works and analyse why it works well." Yes. But a review without criticism is like a frame without a painting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There, I've said it now.

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

On punctuality

One spends so much of the Edinburgh Festival waiting.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Grind

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Ambiguity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Loneliness of the Long Distance Blogger

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?