Delusions of grandeur...

Followed the Larkin-themed night at the theatre with a drink in one of his old haunts (and subject of a poem) - Hull's Royal Station Hotel. I really like the place. Mainly because it has ridiculous delusions of grandeur and is frequented by shabby, equally deluded, clientele. A great place to people watch.

Much of today I was in a daze. Which was great given that I was lecturing and young people were staring at me waiting for 'the answer'. The crash has left me in pain and thoroughly exhausted. At lunch I headed across town to lunch with M. Although, when I got there, she was in a meeting so we were unable to sit together (I'm rude but not that rude). A sandwich arrived at M's table which she had ordered for me. M indicated I should take it, which I did and then, bearing in mind that I needed to dash back across town, quickly cleared the plate. It was only at the end of the day that I was informed that only half of the sandwich was mine to eat. Oops.

This be the chairs...

Tonight I went to the theatre. The seating comprised hard plastic seats and I sat next to a man who was so large he occupied half of my seat too. Which, as if my current injuries aren't bad enough on their own, was hideously uncomfortable. I tried to move the chairs apart at the interval only to discover that they were bound together. The man smiled at me but didn't move. He suggested the bondage-style seating arrangement was, in some way, Larkinesque (the play, Something Hidden, is about Philip Larkin and the women in the poet's life). Which, of course, it wasn't. They f*k you up, those seat hogging audience members.

I'm on a diet...

Today I was mostly in pain of the whiplash variey. People telling me how many thousands of pounds I can claim for the injuries I've suffered is getting quite boring. As are the endless monologues about other people's car crashes. On advice, I'm on a diet of Ibruprofen and Paracetamol, although feel something stronger might be in order.

Tonight, Thinspiration returned for another one-off performance in the studio at Hull Truck. All went well. Lots of interest in our post-show Q&A. Mother didn't come to the show. Her excuse: "I've seen it before."

Mediocrity has always been praised...

"I hope people write better plays. That's all I can hope. But I doubt if they will. Rubbish is always being produced through the ages, mediocrity has always been praised. That's simply what happens and most plays are only really liked in retrospect and hindsight.

"Formally, I'm trying to collapse a few boundaries as well. To carry on with making the form and content one. That's proving to be extremely difficult, and I'm not going to tell anybody how I'm doing it, so if any of you get there first I shall be furious."

Sarah Kane, interview by Dan Rebellato (1998)

Aware of this paradox...

"...writing remains private and theatre remains public. I'm always aware of this paradox that I am somebody who likes to do something private but is actually quite addicted to public exposure - the risk, perhaps ... When we're talking about risk in theatre, we're not talking about serious, life-threatening risks. We've got to keep this in perspective."

Martin Crimp, interview with The Guardian (2007)

What the mind can think of...

“When you dramatise mental states, your limits are only what the mind can think of. You can have humour, and surprising shifts in tone. You can have songs. You can have dance.

"My shows are very accessible. I’ve never believed that experimentation means unpopularity.

"...what you want to see is something that moves you, that provides spectacle but also food for thought.”

Anthony Neilson Interview with The Times (2007)

Without other people...

"All writers are ecstatics, which is why we can be seduced by the siren calls of addiction or extremism. Sartre said that there are three kinds of writers: writers who write for God, writers who write for themselves, and writers who write for other people. I write for other people. The play doesn't reside in heaven, or in a library. As a dramatist, that's your instinct: without other people, the play doesn't exist."

Howard Brenton - A life in theatre (The Guardian)

Find a play...make a show...

Just seen this from The Guardian the other day. Hull Truck founder Mike Bradwell speaking the truth. Great stuff - can't wait to read The Reluctant Escapologist: Adventures in Alternative Theatre

"...the biggest single area of growth in theatre has been in the relentless expansion of the administrative and entrepreneurial classes. Indeed it seems that the history of the last 50 years of British theatre forms a perfect arc. The first 25 years were devoted to the struggle of artists and practitioners to get their hands on the means of production. The second 25 were spent watching management and executive claw them back.

"I want to remind theatre-makers that it is possible and even desirable to make their theatre outside the warm embrace of the theatrical establishment.

"...I would still like to think that, lurking in a dark alleyway round the back of every new £15m glass and steel culturally non-elitist Shopping Mall Playhouse and Corporate Entertainment Facility is a gobby and pretentious 20-year-old with a passion for real theatre, a can of petrol and a match."

So, what are we waiting for?

Catching up...

With the redraft redrafted I've been catching up on the dreaded paperwork. It's inevitable, in the heady freelance world, that the attention does need to be occasionaly turned to some admin. But knowing that doesn't make it any easier, nor ease the feeling that time might be better spent staring into space dreaming up some other insignificant cock and bull story that I could waste my time on. When Richard Eyre took over at the National Theatre - nicely documented in his diaries National Service - the cartoonist Raymond Briggs issued a warning, via letter, against taking up the post. The warning included the following:

You are a creative artiste and
must not become a boring civil servant.
All artistes who get anywhere are
in danger of getting SUCKED OFF
into Administration.
IT IS DEATH.

So, with that in mind, I'll crack on with the paperwork.

Post Loot...

Went to see a preview of Loot at Hull Truck Theatre - which was excellent so by the first night audiences will be in for a real treat - and, afterwards, having grabbed a quick chat with Truscott of the Yard (Chris Connel, outstanding as one of the Water Board's finest officers), we headed over to The Old English Gentleman. We forgot that the Rocky Horror Picture Show is also in the city (at the New Theatre) and, almost as soon as we sat down with beer in hand, were entertained by an endless procession of outrageously dressed (and outrageously drunk) guys and gals that streamed by. In our Orton frame of mind this freaks' roll call seemed a rather fitting end to the night.

Beautifully written...

"Of all the compliments I've come to fear, 'beautifully written' is the one I've come to fear most. A play shouldn't be beautifully written unless, for dramatic purposes, there is a character in it who speaks beautiful writing, so to speak. If it's to be any good a play can only be truthfully written, which means the characters speak as the characters would have spoken in this or that situation - from time to time they may find the resources within themselves that enable them to speak as if from beyond themselves (the prerogative of fiction) and therefore beautifully, but the resources must be recognisably, even if astonishingly, the characters', not the writer's. With luck and at his best the writer will pass unrecognised through a play, only identifiable at the end in the effect of a whole experience - if he's lucky, and been at his best."

Simon Gray

Old golden words...

"Most playwrights at rehearsals are of as much use as a father, all masked-up and sterilized, at the delivery of a child. 'All you want to do is sit there fretting over your fucking old golden words,' Tony [Richardson] would say to me. It was an unjust accusation, but many writers do it in the stalls drooling over their precious syllables, inhibiting and even antagonizing the faltering actors with their proprietorial scrutiny...My own view has always been that a play that is susceptible to crucial rewriting in rehearsal should never have reached that stage."

John Osborne in Almost A Gentleman 1955-1966

Dropkick Murphy...

"There is a rage in me which I think is a natural thing. It was in me when I was 24 or 25, scribbling with my stub of a pencil. And it's still there in everything I do. Rage not against the unfairness of life – life is of course unfair – but against the inequalities, the arrogance of power."

Tom Murphy

Full interview in The Observer

Grappling with the questions...

"I'm at a place in my life where I am very focused; I've pared a lot of the noise out of my life. I don't have a lot of time to write, but I feel an urgency to write, and I feel an urgency about where the writing lands. The stakes are higher now. I want the work to be sustaining and surprising and mysterious. Am I grappling with the questions I need to be grappling with? I bring the best of myself now."

Naomi Iizuka

Interview and preview of Concerning Strange Devices From the Distant West

Being political has changed a lot...

"Well. I'm really interested in what 'political' is," said award-winning screenwriter and playwright Jack Thorne in last Sunday's Observer (yes, you're right, I should have blogged this earlier). "I think there's something generational in the type of political playwright we have," Jack goes on. "My mum and dad went on marches, my mum went to jail for the CND, they were very active political people."

Jack's touted as a political playwright. His mum and dad went on marches. Did he ever go on marches? Does he intend to go on marches? Be very active, politically? I don't know. But it seems unlikely; this feature lends you to believe he's happy that his mum went to jail because it's saved him the bother. "But the boundaries," says Jack, excusing himself from marching duties and getting him thinking about food, "of what political is have changed a lot: you can now be political as a consumer, for example – changing what you eat. Younger playwrights tend to pose questions more. I want to write stuff – and I haven't yet – that goes, 'This is the problem, I don't necessarily know the answer.'"

Don't expect to see Jack down the front of the next demo that you're on, then. I don't have this trouble, writing flippant comedy, of course. I just have to laugh a lot. Much easier.

Enter the new wave of political playwrights at The Observer

"Theatre isn't church. There's nothing innately good about it. Most theatre is still really bad," Mike Bartlett has told The Observer. "It has to appeal to people who do jobs and have lives. Theatre about theatre is the most awful, terminal nonsense."

Precisely. It would be nice if all playwrights thought the same. The full interview is here.

A career???

I was asked to speak at Hull Truck's Careers Day today. Which is either a sign of how far I've come since this blog began when I was attempting to work out myself how to make a career out of writing. Or everyone else was busy. There were other speakers too, who, and I'm sure the participants were pleased by this, have forged very good careers for themselves - actors, directors, technical folk, a very, very interesting man from Equity. After we spoke, by which time we'd all whittered on so much that the whole shebang was running late, I was involved in the delivery of a writing workshop which, amongst other exciting moments, involved me emptying a bag onto the floor in a dramatic fashion. I think they all enjoyed it!

Truck, 2009 model...

When I trotted around the new Hull Truck last week I took some photographs but agreed to respect the press embargo, not that this 'ere blog is a member of the press, nor has any readers. Besides, the pix were mostly for my own benefit, so I could keep reminding myself of the space I'm writing for. In all honesty, my snaps were pretty lousy. If you want to get a real glimpse of the innards, Ian's got some nice ones on his flickr pages.

Killing less time than I used to...

I will be around a little bit more now. I am in the midst of seriously redrafting big play. So I will need a distraction and will be slipping back into my tried and tested procrastination techniques. I could be rewriting the opening now, which involves a flag and a scaffold rig, but am I? No, I am here, blogging. Just like old times. I apologise for not being around on a regular basis over the last few months, save for my Sunday Night Feeling efforts. I have been caught up in the most peculiar world of marketing, design and public relations. Stroking people's egos has taken up far too much of the time I would otherwise spend stroking my own ego. In addition to redrafting big play, I am also gearing up, along with my Single Span friends, to make a short film about Ted Lewis, the chap that wrote Jack's Return Home, upon which Get Carter was based. The screenplay is by Nick Triplow and Lozman and I will be directing. Life has become one strange round of meetings at which we discuss trains, guns and multi-storey car parks and our never-ending list of outstanding actions. I should also be revisiting the shot list but, well, here I am. The good thing about the short film is that we have received funding from our heroes at Humber Mouth to make it. It will be screened at the festival as part of a bigger 'event' of our own making. Which adds a bit of pressure. But that is a good thing because, without it, I would be on here, blogging. The bad thing about the short film is that we're scheduled to shoot on the same weekend that I could have been pitching some ideas to WarpX and Rollem. I found out the other day, amongst the spam, that I am one of the lucky bleeders to be selected for Page One, an intense three-day ideas 'hothouse'. But I can't do it because I am making a film. I am happy to be making the film. But Kay Mellor may like my ideas for drama. But that will have to wait. I am also, along with M, avoiding co-writing another, slightly smaller, play, also for Humber Mouth. Us and Humber Mouth go way back, which is nice. We've both been festival critics. And without it, I probably wouldn't be here now avoiding writing plays (the hardly seen by anyone but friends and family early writing workouts Store Me Whether, Off Their Trolleys and Worst Seat in the House are all a part of my Mouth experience). I'm proud to be a part of the festival again. And the play should rear its head in Hull Truck's shiny, new and currently unopened studio space, which is something else to be proud of. I suppose I should go and crack on with some of this stuff. Or at least pretend to (next stop: the fridge).

See you on the other side...

We trotted along to Hull Truck last night to say au revoir, ta-ra and goodbye to the old place and catch up with a few Truck faces 'n' friends. The beer flowed a little too quickly, due to some pleasantly silly prices that proved impossible to resist. There were lots of people there with an emotional attachment to the building and one last Bouncers and all that ale was a fitting, if alarmingly drunken, farewell. Exciting times lay ahead, as Hull Truck and its audience moves from this:

To this: