Some memories are so vivid, so powerful as to remain with us for all time. Occasionally, living on beyond our own existence. Those memories involving loss go deeper, scarring our conscience and creasing the moments of recall. We are all reluctant collectors of such moments. We seek no claim of them, yet deep down we know a life without loss is like a bag of chips without salt n vinegar. Just not worth the pickle.

As you enter a performance space, more often than not, a set rushes at you with its questions. Where? A back-garden featuring an outhouse and a tennis courtyard. What? Tranquil birdsong belying a certain tension. Who? Well, exactly!

For me it’s walking. It’s when all my best ideas come. Their genesis, their development, and their resolution. It literally never happens whilst I am sitting at the PC. Something about the subconscious, I suppose. One day after watching a documentary on BBC 4, celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus opening in Weimar, I went for a walk. I think you know what happened next…

Universal evocation. Nice idea if you can nail it. Setting a play in a school gets you 100% audience buy-in. Young or old, we have all been there and have our memories of it. For some it is perhaps the best days of their lives. For most, probably not. VL, written by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair, is set in a secondary school and the ghost of that place clearly comes flooding back for a good deal of the audience.

Theatre sets are fascinating. Sometimes you enter an auditorium and wonder at the world immediately before you as it induces uncertainty. Other times, an unexpected familiarity envelopes you in its warm cocoon. On this occasion, it’s the latter. The pre-millennial décor of a 1990s living room draws the focus: an extrapolation of the room which will readily feature in the home videos. The protagonist, Rob Madge, is the absolute epitome of that generation of kids who grew up in a family where the camcorder is an extension of the parental eye: the era of affordable video technology prior to mobile phones breaching their original USP to usurp the former. Subsequently, we see Rob at the age of 12 putting on a Disney show in their living room where he plays Mary Poppins, Mickey Mouse and a host of other characters. It doesn’t quite go to plan and their father - stage manager and Goofy - gets all the blame but their grandmother is having a ball in a ‘teacup’

As the saying goes: the road to success is littered with failures. But who amongst us, lying in a rain-filled pothole, has ever thought “Ah! My greatest success lies just around the corner!”? Failure is all-consuming and leaves no room for such thoughts…and that road is all the longer and in a greater state of disrepair if you happen to be black and female.

Time-shifting is a guaranteed way of manifesting avenues for drama and comedy. Dropping characters into time-zones clearly alien to them yet recognisable to the audience is, at least, amusing. However, it requires a clearly delineated development to control the dramatic irony. Allowing the audience to always be one-step ahead of the character risks a punctured performance.

What could possibly be more reasonable than making common ground with the company you’re in? Aligning your personal view with your audience is a reasonable thing to do, right? But in theatre, we need conflict! What if we shifted the conflict a few feet from the stage into the guiding mind of the audience? That enough conflict for you?

It was a pleasure, last week, to mingle with an excellent cast for a reading of my new audio play Bring Again the Now of Then on the early years of the Bauhaus. The aim was to establish the correct mix of voices for the piece and, as ever, to ascertain whether another draft of the play is required. Happy to say only small edits are needed.

It is not easy for art, rooted within one medium, to transcend its source and achieve equal salience within an adjacent medium. The well-trod path from page to stage is littered with an unintended dialectic between literature and performance. Curatorial precision is required at all times. This is perhaps most true when considering the memoir: a medium which confers unto the reader the intimacy of personal insight.  

The cognitive dissonance between the person we perceive ourselves to be and the person others see is least for those who don’t give a shit. Blithely crashing through life, the Stanleys of this world lose not a wink of sleep on what others think of them. Whilst society can hardly be split into ‘Stanleys’ and ‘Blanches’, the latter group will move heaven and earth for others to see them in the right light, even if that means living in a perpetual twilight.

“Some are in the darkness…others in the light”

We see the moon and the moon sees us…and the shark with the teeth pearly white. One minute in and an orchestra introduces that most recognisable of songs: Kurt Weill’s Mack The Knife or Mackie Messer as it is known in its native source text; a piece on people and their amorality. A disembodied face shines as ‘The Moon Over Soho’ (Josefine Platt), suitably elevated betwixt glittering curtains. Those four world-weary yet entertaining minutes set the tone. Then suddenly, the societal structure of which the moon sings protrudes: inflexible, delineated, skeletal. A structure without sinew or tissue. A construction in progress. A machine for living…on-stage or off. Each person hierarchically valued as decreed by a strict system of rigour.

What would you do if your native country ended up at war with your parents’ native country? Where might your loyalties lie? How much love have you for your parents? How much have they for theirs? Patriotism is a complex equation wherein variables change value with time. All very well fighting for culture and values, the question is: whose?

Surviving an event where other people experience loss of life is likely to follow, if not define, you for the rest of your life. This was the lot of Yuri Yudin.

In January 1959, 10 experienced Soviet hikers set out on an expedition to the Ural Mountains. Part of this initiative was the attainment of the highest level of Soviet accreditation. An honour none of the party would attain. 9 hikers died on Kholat Syakhi and the sole survivor, Yuri Yudin, earlier succumbed to the recurrence of an ailment forcing him to abort his mission. Yudin became one of life’s guilty without guilt.

The danger of presenting the body as complete in itself is that the society which gave that body its place in a code of social relations turns on it. Sophie Scholl and her friends spent a long time pondering how an individual must act under a dictatorship. And when that dictatorship finally arrived, they were confronted with Nazis.

Keys; check. Wallet; check. Mobile; check. Checked your privileges? Perhaps you should. FlawBored - a trio comprising Samuel Brewer, Chloe Palmer and Aarian Mehrabani - are going to ask you!

Compared with French counterparts Voltaire and Comte, Scottish philosophers are perhaps less well known amongst the general public. The protagonists thrown up by the Scottish Enlightenment are, no question; their equal. Enquiry Concerning Hereafter goes some way to redress this. Duane Kelly’s play, directed by Andy Corelli, presents the friendship between David Hume and Adam Smith in their autumn years. They debate, laugh, cajole, challenge and support each other as they stave off the impending tap of Charon’s staff.

The evidence of testimonial witness is that once there was another point of view; existing beyond the critical angle of mainstream public opinion, and thus cut off. Suppressed…with force if necessary. The trick of time is always to take that which was once thought beyond the pale and veil it with incomprehension that it was ever contentious at all.

After The Act by Ellice Stevens is a piece of verbatim theatre that entwines several stories within its narrative. It begins with a group of lesbian protestors who storm the BBC 6 O’clock news on 23rd May 1988. “We have rather been invaded” utters a seemingly unperturbed Sue Lawley…

There is a poem which threads through Dance The Colour Blue, refering back to The Odyssey. A plea from Penelope to be heard. Although, thanks to Homer, we can never be sure we are hearing this enigmatic character clearly.

The poem appears here in full. The third stanza is added for completeness. It did not feature in the play.

Penelope

Once on a overcast morning, I asked the messenger Hermes

Is time a dancing boy whose legs move bright with speed?

Tenderly taking my hand, he affirmed my familiar fate

Denizens, five score men, claiming a tenure of nature that’s yours

Me; tears stain my face entering more deeply into my heart

Swiftly days pass, Odysseus, for the dark chases them away

Three years last you laid by my side, must yet I prepare for three more?

Barfly Don didn’t much care for them…but here were the sounds on the jukebox in Dance The Colour Blue:

Home At Last - Steely Dan

Counting Backwards - Throwing Muses

I Want More - Can

Monkey Gone to Heaven - Pixies

Too Shy - Kajagoogoo

Felt Mountain - Goldfrapp

Reelin’ In The Years - Steely Dan

Dress You Up - Madonna

Landslide - Fleetwood Mac

Tom’s Diner - Suzanne Vega

Lovelight - ABBA

Tonight was my first ‘first night’ as a writer sitting in the audience. Usually I’m part of the stage management. That’s the nature of fringe theatre. But as part of a professional production, my role is just ‘the writer’. More time. I’d say ‘more time to relax’ …but that’s stretching it! I needn’t have worried, for in the hands of director Olivia Millar-Ross, and actors Habiba Saleh, Rory Grant, Billy Mack, Dani Heron, Nicola Docherty and Kareem Nasif, the play was always in the safest of hands.

Today we had the dress rehearsal of Dance The Colour Blue…and…

We’re ready to go!

For the last 3 weeks, director Olivia Millar-Ross has worked with the actors in order to create a world that is caught somewhere in the mid-late 90s. It was a time of optimism: a decrepit government ready for the scrapheap, a century of conflict breathing its last; and new music scenes appropriating the past. I won’t say what happened next in the real world. Best for us to remain with Nicky, Mikey, Liz, Suzy, Pete and Don in The Everlasting Arms…where the music is good, the beer flows, and the banter is better.

It’s a new experience for me: to occasionally sit at the back of a studio whilst a play develops before your eyes. It’s a privilege too. To be the writer watching the emergence of an interpretation of your work. Director Olivia Millar-Ross is doing a truly superb job of bringing Dance The Colour Blue to life. I’m not exactly sure what I expected but I am learning a lot that will be useful when next I direct a play.

Today was the first day of rehearsals for Dance The Colour Blue. This is possibly the calmest sentence I’ll write…for it went as well as anyone could’ve hoped for!

If dramaturgy is a ‘mode of looking’, then Stephen Daldry’s production of JB Priestley’s An Inspector Calls invites us to look at the house of the Birling family as a gothic dystopia of privileged victorian living. The house on stilts tilts towards its audience with the threat that it may well fall on them. It is a manifestation of the grotesque - potted with the barnacles of laissez-faire capitalism. That this looms behind a curtain is simultaneously absurd and impressive.

A few days ago, we held another read-through of Dance The Colour Blue. I’m pleased to report that the new version of the play read well and got positive feedback from the readers. It is always satisfying (as well as something of a relief) to hear the script as you had intended it when written. A couple of edits here and there were required to tighten some dialogue…and that is now done.