If you were interested in doing some homework prior to watching my play, you could do worse than take the last overground train from Liverpool Street to Romford on a Friday night.

As the doors close, all the seats are full. 80% of those on the train are drunk, 65% are resolutely cheerful, 20% are unhappy because for whatever reason their evening has ended at 00.55 instead 6am, and 95% are carrying greasy paper bags, having just sprinted from the McDonalds at the top of the station.

This Friday I am not in the mood. I have turned the lapels of my coat up. I have a serious expression on my face, to say ‘I have had a hard, grave day at work. I am not tired and emotional. I am tired and professional’. Despite this, it is almost inevitable that some chirpy reveller is going to reassure me that ‘it might never happen’.

A tanned, richly dressed young woman next to me, on her own, is trying to gather attention and chicken nuggets from surrounding passengers. She has missed the last central line train east to Chigwell, and needs to know which of the upcoming stations she would be best to take a cab from – Ilford, Seven Kings, Goodmayes or Chadwell Heath? I suspect she already knows what she will do, but wants to keep the conversation rolling so she can legitimately help herself to the chicken nuggets of other passengers. On two occasions, she polishes off a passenger’s last chicken nugget. But this only heightens the sense of community spirit, as it is (on both occasions) a golden opportunity for the bereft passengers to proclaim:
‘Took my last nugget – that’s like taking your last Rolo!’

Luckily, I do not have any chicken nuggets.

‘So what do you lads do?’ she asks the two guys opposite. One is a carpenter, and one is in insurance. The guy in the little single priority seat is an accountant, and the drunkest of everyone. His persistence in attempting to secure her scattergun attention suggests to me that he believes his evening may not be over after all. She turns to me, but graciously decides that ‘he looks like he doesn’t want to be picked on!’ My plan is working.

The drunk accountant asks the woman what she does for a living. There is a silence, and I infer that a woman dressed like this no more earns money than buys her own McDonalds. She has houses in Chigwell and cars and clothes and McDonalds bought for her.

‘I’ve got a son,’ she says. Another silence. I think I have been proved wrong.
‘Oh yeah?’ says the accountant, sensitively.
‘He’s nine months old,’ she says, after another silence.
The accountant nods his head, before asking:
‘He work, does he?’

And if you don’t fancy taking the last train, you could always come along to LATER, at 9.45 pm this Monday at Trafalgar Studios, which is being curated by David Eldridge, and features short plays about Romford by James Martin Charlton, Pauline Hannah, David Hill, David Eldridge, and myself. We’re all connected to Romford in some way or other, and will be reading the plays ourselves.

One reason for coming along may be on the grounds that it’s interesting to hear writers read their work. And also (since all the writers will be reading parts in each other’s plays) that it’s interesting to hear writers read the work of other writers. Sometimes people point out that actors tend to make good writers (Pinter, Sam Shepherd, etc), but there may be a case for turning this formulation on its head. A friend recently suggested to me that since writers are often acutely conscious of the underlying linguistic shapes, patterns and textures of their own work, they’re quite likely to detect and clasp these aspects when reading work by other writers. So their reading may mimic the perceived ‘voice’ of the play – as if they were gently impersonating the playwright. Certainly, when reading work by established writers out loud, I’ve been influenced by my sense of what, say, Martin Crimp sound like, innately. Whereas Actors bring their own alchemy to a text and suddenly the words start operating on all sorts of strange and evocative wavelengths quite unforeseen by the writer. I’ve come into the conversation rather late, but the thing I loved about the recent NT Attempts on her life was the way it didn’t sound like Martin Crimp ‘sounds like’ (apart from the opening and closing scenes). Still, having now promised a puritanical, loyal, efficient reading on Monday, I’ll probable end up missing my cues and mumbling into a glass of water.

But speaking of trains, readings and actors, the last few weeks have been thrilling if occasionally terrifying ones for my play. Last Monday I woke at 5.30am to get the train to Manchester for a closed-door development reading of the new draft at the Exchange. The last time I had been on a train up to Manchester I had been nervously reading through the previous draft, and experiencing sensations close to those occasioned by horror – a cold sweat; a pounding heart-rate; a heady, violent sense of tunnel-vision. I had not read the play since submitting it a month before, and with hindsight I could see that bits of it were messy and embarrassing. Careless flourishes which at the time I had thought nothing of, smacked me about the face. I had written them without thinking too hard, but now people (designers, directors, casting, actors) were going to take them seriously.

The character of DANNY, for example, finds an old pair of motorcycle leathers in his grandmother’s house. Which is all well and good, until the leathers, quite unconcerned with any of the rest of the play, animate, and then start flying… Now, in case this actually sounds quite good, it’s not. In the context it just isn’t…

An embarrassing bit of playwriting is different from say an embarrassing poem. With a poem, it’s generally only you who gets hurt. With a play, there’s a production team mobilised to realise the script on stage. So if you nonchalantly introduce an irrelevant battleship into the script close to the design deadline it’s a serious business, and I have a feeling that my January draft had been somewhat alarming...

Anyway, this time I was more confident about the play – having made a stab at most of the problems of the earlier draft – and as I made my way up to Manchester early on Monday morning I was mainly concerned with drinking as much coffee as possible. By the time I was in the rehearsal room at the Exchange I was hyper-caffeinated and not entirely stable. It was the first time I’d heard the play read through, and the actors did a fantastic job. It was, often, exhilarating. And incredible to witness jokes nearly two years old finally cause laughter, and to see characters going on journeys, and generating heat. But after about 10 minutes the tunnel-vision came back and my heart started pounding – probably mainly because I’d had about 15 cups of coffee by then. The play has moved on a fair bit, but I was painfully aware that there are still some marshlands in the middle that need hardier paths through. I also found myself feeling heady and uncomfortable during the ethically-charged moments in the play – the bits where characters are making big decisions about their lives, or when they’re wearing their emotions on their sleeve. This is I suppose a good sign because it signals that there’s something at stake - both for me and for the characters.

So I delivered the new draft of Big Buildings about a week ago. This was the second redraft I’ve done on the play since it was accepted for production.

People keep on asking me about all this rewriting. If this play has been chosen by this Theatre... if they had the chance to stage all these other plays but are staging yours why on earth are you spending all this time changing it?

Well, the play I sent the Royal Exchange about a year ago was not terribly stageable. Act One was fine, and you could see that the play had some promising genes, but the final act had been written in about three days, and several of the characters were doing things I didn’t want anything to do with.

This imbalance was due partly to the way I tend to write – starting at the beginning and endlessly (and needlessly) revising and polishing as I go along – never getting to the end because the beginning is too complex to resolve. The play had started at life at Goldsmiths College, where I was doing an MA in Writing for Performance, and as part of the degree Act One was workshopped and rehearsed for a staged reading at BAC in June 2005. Later, in 2006, Act One was lavished with attention once again when it was performed by students from E15 Acting School as part of their course.

Bringing actors in brought the script on no end. You give your character to an actor to look after, and sometimes they give you privileged glimpses of this person you’ve brought into the world. Like you’re a parent who’s been placed behind a two-way mirror and allowed to watch your teenage kid in a nightclub. And though this kid’s drunk, and doing ironic dancemoves, and smoking roll-ups, and has no chance with that Uni girl, you’re moved that this is how they behave when you’re not watching them. How free they are. The actor playing LEON at E15 once said: ‘At school, Leon draws moonrockets on his trainers’. The world of the play expanded slightly.

So the world expands and becomes more and more detailed, and keeps on getting added to. I realised that in this bit I was exploring something. And in that bit there’s a charge. And while Act one was with these actors I spent a lot of time reworking it and getting excited about new bits. But at the end of it all I realised there were an awful lot of expeditions that needed to get somewhere, and a lot of circuits that needed completing. I’d spent almost no time on the rest of the play.

The play had begun to feel like one of those cartoons where the hero has really built up speed along Act One and his legs are going so fast they look like wheels and then he runs straight off a cliff, and suddenly there’s no earth beneath him.

And when in October 06 I went up to see Jo and Sarah (who are co-directing the play), the play was still half-finished. But we spent two days talking about the play, and making discoveries and thinking about where it was going and thinking about the all the little wires sticking out of Act One. I came home with lots I was excited about, deleted half the play, and, after a break of nearly a year and a half, wrote about 70 pages of new material. I hurriedly sent it off after Christmas, then went off to India for three weeks, fondly imagining the redraft to be one of the great redrafts.

I was especially pleased with the flying motorcyclist.

Anyway it was only when I read the play again, a month later, on the train up to Manchester to talk about the draft, that a strange and horrible panic set in.
(to be continued…)

I should give you a little background first. Pretend You Have Big Buildings is about a place called Romford, where I went to school.

Romford is a town half in and half out of London. It didn’t used to be in London. It had been an Essex town in its own right for hundreds of years. But gradually London spread further east, and eventually the gap between Greater London and Romford got so small that in 1965 the town became part of the London Borough of Havering.

This was controversial, and even today there are separatists who mutter that their council taxes are being spent on glassy projects in central London that have nothing to do with them.

Romford is the only place in Greater London with its own ringroad.

On a clear day, you could see the Canary Wharf tower from my school. Many people had come (from near there) to live in Romford, leaving the cramped, oversubscribed east end for the wider open spaces of the suburbs. It seemed like a sign of something – that in one of the most depressed parts of the country (where so many people around me were from), a surreal glass city was coming up out of the mud and rusting metal. I thought it was amazing. Though probably someone was being messed around somewhere.

Meanwhile, there were no architectural dramas in Romford, where the most distinctive feature of the town centre was a swimming pool called The Dolphin. It had a pyramidal roof that had won design awards. But then the roof panelling started falling in, rendering it unsafe, and, eventually, derelict. Nobody bothered to do anything about it for years. It wasn’t a heartening sight.

There are books with careless names like CRAP TOWNS OF BRITAIN that feature careless accounts of places like Romford. They use phrases like ‘chav central’ all the time. I don’t want to say all that much about the play in one go, but the play doesn’t overstate the case for Romford as a shithole. It’s about seven characters at different times in their life coming to terms with who they can be in this landscape. It’s also about lots more, but I don’t want to say too much.

When the Exchange asked me to do this blog I thought it would be interesting to do, because I’m still working on the play. It’s not finished yet. I’m redrafting right now. I’m still following leads, and exploring things, and discovering things about the characters.

For example I recently discovered about a month ago that one of the characters in the play rides a motorbike (an Enfield). This had led to an outbreak of motorbikes in the play. Very recently, two other characters have revealed a taste for them.

I’ve been doing some research. Riding pillion.

Once in Norfolk, on a Yamaha SR, at a very high speed. We were tailing another motorcyclist. At one stage we went round the same roundabout three times, leaning wildly. I think one reason for going round the roundabout three times was that the motorcyclist in front was trying to make her knee touch the ground and she wanted three goes. This wasn’t good for my nerves.

And, more recently, across North London, on a bigger bike - a BMW 1200. I think a mild obsession is developing.

The other day I just happened to be looking on Ebay for some motorcycle leathers dating from 1977 for one of my characters, and came across this ad:
ARMOURED LEATHER TROUSERS - IN SUPERB CONDITION. I’M ONLY SELLING THEM OFF BECAUSE THEY DON’T FIT ME NOW I’VE PUT ON WEIGHT DUE TO PACKING IN THE FAGS.