In Lancaster last week for the Launch of The Skeleton Key, an anthology of writings to do with New Writing for, by and with Young People. The book came out of the The Lockpickers’ Ball, a conference/festival held in Liverpool in 2006 organised by the excellent Action Transport theatre company. I attended the conference while I was still Literary Assistant at the Birmingham Rep, and the experience was so overwhelming I came away knowing that at some stage I REALLY wanted to work in this field, whether as writer or dramaturg. The work performed was outstanding and various, but the thing that struck hard was the strength and the passion and the fierceness of the assembled practitioners – there was this incredible flavour of the salty kind of inspiration that comes out of early mornings and miraculous transformations in cold school halls (and indeed ‘proper’ venues around the country).

The ‘lockpickers’ part of the conference was to do with sharing secrets of practice. This was intriguing for me because talking about writing can so often reduce to platitudes about ‘just having confidence’, or ‘being true to yourself’ whereas what I like is provocative specifics.

I like facts – percentages, measurements and graphs. I like it when someone says ‘perhaps if you made that speech perhaps 25% less introspective – maybe 10% more inclusive of the audience. In The Skeleton Key, Joe Sumsion, director/dramaturg of Kevin Dyer’s The Bomb, tells us that ‘60%’ of that play’s first draft worked. As I am currently in the process of producing a first draft of a new play, this figure has been haunting me recently. What happens if only 50% of my play works?

I like drunken-heroic theories of drama – manifestos, ‘laws’, aphorisms, confident proclamations. One day I read this by Arthur Miller in his introduction to his Collected Plays: One: ‘It is necessary, if one is to reflect reality, not only to depict why a man does what he does, or why he nearly didn’t do it, but why he cannot simply walk away and say to hell with it’. It’s bold, useful, and slightly off the beaten track; it’s also an entire theory of tragedy. In The Skeleton Key, John Retallack, the writer of Virgins advises that in work for young people, ‘the choice of music is all important.’ Bold, useful, and slightly off the beaten track.

I don’t mean for a moment that writers should ever get dogmatic about any of this stuff. I don’t mean playwriting’s a real science, I’m not asking anyone to obey Aristotle, or, when Aristotle is found to be WRONG, then obey Robert Mckee. If playwriting was a proper science (of accumulating, self-refining knowledge), then by now even Ibsen would have been PROVED WRONG and left in the attic with all those eugenic studies of deviant physiognomy.

It’s just that it can be constructive and wonderful when some crazy authoritarian instruction (‘it is necessary to…’), or piquant statistic, drops into your life one day and for five minutes it makes sense of, and indeed catalyses, everything you’re doing.

I suppose, with statistics, it can be difficult to plot matters of blood and death and passion onto a graph because it’s difficult to measure dramaturgical values objectively. But there’s no point getting sentimental. Recently I tried to analyse BIG BUILDINGS by feeding statistics about each scene into a spreadsheet, mainly as a way of establishing, scene-by-scene, which parts of the play were boring. First of all I calculated the density of each scene, dividing the word count of the scene by the number of pages. So a very dense scene might be one with maybe a big prose speech, which weighs in with a high word count, but without taking up much paper. Whereas a very free-flowing scene of stichomythia would be much less dense, and probably easier to stomach. The idea being that the play probably can’t get away with too many long speeches, whereas there may be a specific kind of energy to be found in a scene of zippy one-liners. But on the other hand the latter scene could become tiring where its energy comes, for example, out of sustained aggression (nothing more awful than a load of shouty scenes strung together).  So I then went on to rate (out of ten) how FUNNY each scene was, its LEVEL OF AGGRESSION, its LEVEL OF VULGARITY and so on… Obviously this required some subjective judgments.

The spreadsheet crunched these numbers into a number of different kinds of illuminating graphs and pie-charts. And in processing the play in a different way you notice different things about the way a play works. Laid out on a chart, it was easy for me to see that a) the character of LEON brings lightness and humour to the scenes he is in, and b) that the relative soddenness of some of the middle of the play may be due to fact that LEON is not in four scenes in a row.

                        Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans

                        Pritchard, Ph.D. To fully understand

                        poetry, we must first be fluent with

                        its meter, rhyme, and figures of speech.

                        Then ask two questions: One, how artfully

                        has the objective of the poem been

                        rendered, and two, how important is that

                        objective. Question one rates the poem's

                        perfection, question two rates its

                        importance. And once these questions have

                        been answered, determining a poem's

                        greatest becomes a relatively simple

                        matter…

                        If the poem's score for perfection is

                        plotted along the horizontal of a graph,

                        and its importance is plotted on the

                        vertical, then calculating the total

                        area of the poem yields the measure of

                        its greatness…

                        A sonnet by Byron may score high on the

                        vertical, but only average on the

                        horizontal. A Shakespearean sonnet, on

                        the other hand, would score high both

                        horizontally and vertically, yielding a

                        massive total area, thereby revealing the

                        poem to be truly great. As you proceed

                        through the poetry in this book, practice

                        this rating method. As your ability to

                        evaluate poems in this matter grows, so

                        will - so will your enjoyment and

                        understanding of poetry.

Well I think it might be worth a try, but Mr Keating doesn’t.

                                                KEATING

                        Excrement. That's what I think of Mr. J.

                        Evans Pritchard. We're not laying pipe,

                        we're talking about poetry.

I had a thrilling day last week in Manchester looking at the model box for the play at the Final Design Meeting. This was the moment when all the different production departments of the theatre (Lighting, Sound, Stage Management, Workshop, Wardrobe, Wigs and Make-Up, Props, etc) gather round the model box and look at how in practise they are going to realise Jaimie Todd’s design on stage.

It was like being given membership of the magic circle - solutions for the staging of: Canary Wharf; a drainable ditch; heavy rainfall; a rain of underwear; flying aeroplane seats; LEON pissing himself, were discussed - not in the contorted, mixed-metaphorical language of dramaturgy - but with pragmatism and calm. Refreshing for once not to think about why LEON’s pissed himself, but how he’ll manage the quick costume change afterwards with such a wet crotch.

Jaimie’s set is quite brilliant, and contains some spectacular surprises. I won’t spoil them by showing the model box in its fully unfurled state, but here’s a partial view of the state of the stage towards the end of the first scene:
 
The set has loads of things that fly down from the gigantic metal web at the top of the auditorium. On Jaimie’s box, these objects ascend and descend on pieces of thread. Coupled with several other concealed interactive features, these lend the model box the pre-adolescent appeal of a multi-featured

Despite the sanity with which the team discussed the design, I get the impression that this is going to be one of the more spectacular productions the theatre has mounted. I’ve been proudly telling people that we’d run out of flylines, though I think I may have slightly misunderstood: I can’t write in anything more now that flies. Indeed, it’s getting very late to add anything drastically new to the script, certainly in design terms.

Though redrafting certainly isn't over - there’s another draft due in two weeks time. On Tuesday I met Jo and Sarah at the NT (where Sarah is directing Matt Charman's Five Wives of Maurice Pinder), and I came away with lots and lots to think about. The big thing about the last draft was about being clear with myself about the characters – their backstories; the details of their quotidian engagement with the world; the staging posts on their journey. The effect of this was to turn parts of the play into an 18^th century novel – with characters explaining themselves with uncharacteristic verbosity. Lots of discoveries were made by doing this, but the job now is to find a way of wading in, cutting the big messy river-nests of exposition out, yet releasing the emotional ripples of this background into play’s directional flow (to use a very very contorted metaphor).

The Paines Plough LATER went down a treat. People seemed to enjoy it anyway, and laughed all the way through. All five of us - David Eldridge, JMC , Dave Hill and Pauline Hannah, brought different flavours to the Romford tapas. JMC has given a neater precis than I can of the show, but despite the distinct approaches, there was much that resonated between the pieces.

And having gone on last week about writers not ACTING, it was the performing I enjoyed the most. I'd forgotten about the buzz and the adrenaline and the energy you get from an audience responding warmly.

It was also great to meet the other writers and to feel part of a club. A big thank you to David Eldridge for bringing us all together.

Tomorrow morning I'm up to Manchester for the final BIG BUILDINGS design meeting. I'm not quite sure what this is going to involve but Jo has assured me that I'm going to be able to see the model box.

This will be the third occasion on which I have seen the play imagined in a medium other than the written word. The first time was when I came across the publicity image, and the second time when I heard the play read. Now I'm going to see what the stage will look like in three dimensions.

Until recently I was under the impression that my professed fascination with architectural images and models was largely fraudulent - as it didn't appear to be grounded in any actual knowledge of (or sustained interest in) buildings. But I was reminded the other week that when on family holidays we ever went to a castle with a gift shop, I always hankered after those cut-out-and-glue build-your-own cardboard medieval villages you could buy. Then spent ages cutting them out and trying to get the little tabs into the right slits.

There's something poignant about people and objects dramatically reduced in scale - just take a look at Tom Merillion's photographs of Birmingham, as if the real buildings and people depicted were part of a planner's models.

And BIG BUILDINGS actually features two architect's models itself - one a proposed planners model of the docklands, another of an office building. So I'm hoping that hiding somewhere on the model box will be two tiny architect's models, their detail almost indiscernable.