Yes so if you're a regular reader you'll probably have noticed I've been away for ages. No terrible calamity befell me, I just got very very busy all of a sudden - a collection of things including the FIRST WEEK OF REHEARSALS (more another time), READING THE PROOFS of the playtext, LOOKING FOR A PLACE TO LIVE (which finally seems to have sorted itself out with a surprising Royal Exchange-related connection), MY DRIVING TEST (which is tomorrow), MY OTHER PLAY (more another time), DOING LOADS OF SCRIPT REPORTS (for the Rep's 'Write Live' attachment scheme), SEEING LOADS OF PLAYS (including 7 brilliant hours of Angels in America on tuesday), and LIFE, GENERALLY seemed to take priority.
The fourth week of rehearsal begins on monday, so hopefully I'll have a chance to catch up more fully before then.
But thanks for sticking with me.

A quick one as I’m off to Manchester tomorrow for the first week of rehearsals. I’m really looking forward to it – and especially to meeting the actors properly and meeting the city properly – as I haven’t yet been up for longer than a day at a time. But also – inevitably – anxious to know that the play will withstand and support the pressure of reading and rehearsal.

Since, until recently, I was working in literary departments (most recently at the Birmingham Rep), I’ve felt like I’ve been reasonably aware of what would be expected of me as a writer in the early stages of producing the play. In the past I’ve been to script development sessions and rehearsed readings, I’ve been to design meetings and liased with marketing departments. But I do not have much experience of seeing writers operate in a rehearsal room, and I’m a little unsure about my role, and how I should behave there. My feeling is that it’s best to be as silent as possible and channel any thoughts I have about through the directors rather than blurting something out.

I’d be interested to hear any thoughts on this one (writers, directors, actors). Thanks, by the way, to those who’ve left comments on the blog already – it’s nice to know that people are reading it.

Despite the excitement of the trip, I’m not especially looking forward to the journey itself, which, in the wake of engineering work, is going to take FOUR HOURS on one of those stupid Virgin ‘Pendolino’ trains. The designers of the Pendolino clearly working on the assumption that since people find FLYING exciting they will find TRAINS exciting if they reproduce the discomfort and claustrophobia of the in-flight cabin.

So the rehearsal draft of BIG BUILDINGS is now trundling towards the doormats of the actors, and I'm quite pleased with the way the play has moved on in the past few weeks. Spurred on by the meeting with Jo and Sarah a few weeks ago, there has been an intermediate draft (which was quite a significant rewrite), and then a 'final' draft of the play (which tidied things up and tried to solve a few problems). The aim of these drafts - to put it esoterically - was to rethink the energy-points of the play - to let the story flow without being stressed and blocked by dense exposition. At the same time I think there's now a lot more between RUKHSANA and DANNY.

There are also a few completely new scenes, which seemed to emerge naturally enough from scene-sized holes... I was worried that the sudden appearance of these (both of which are quite WEIRD) might have quite been alarming so close to rehearsals - which start next week. But talking to Jo and Sarah, it seems that the play has turned a corner now - that it has found something that it had lost in previous drafts. It's been a sign of the brilliance of their stewardship of the development process that a) they've never appeared to be worried about the play's future; that b) they've asked questions rather than issue statements about what 'needs to happen', so I've always come to my own conclusions; and c) that they've encouraged me to be inventive right down to the wire.

I should mention - as I haven't yet - that the play is now fully, and wonderfully, cast (and has been for a while I just never got round to mentioning it). Here's a list of the cast, and the very very accomplished production team:

DANNY: Sacha Dhawan
LEON: Jonathan Bailey
RUKHSANA: Shobna Gulati
ROB: Steve North
KAREN: Tanya Franks
STEVEN: Billy Seymour
ANNIE: Susan Twist

DIRECTORS: Sarah Frankcom and Jo Combes
DESIGNER: Jaimie Todd
LIGHTING: David Holmes
SOUND: Ian Dickinson

COMPANY MANAGER: Nick Chesterfield
STAGE MANAGER: Lee Drinkwater
DEPUTY STAGE MANAGER: Tamara Albachari
ASSISTANT STAGE MANAGER: Julie Davis.

On Thursday I went to see Steve King's brilliant play Yellow Lines, a play which 'tackles head on the risks we take the dreams we nurture and panic on London's crowded streets'. The play is also about Urban Planning. The hero, COLIN, has a brilliant, if manipulative idea for the management of individuals in public space, and takes it to FRANK, the CEO of BayesBernstein, a company that sells peace of mind (from networked burglar alarms to high-concept software that determines the location of emergency exits in shopping centres). Together, they struggle with the implications and challenges of taking Colin's frighteningly 'Total' application onto the market.

The professional language, imagery and paraphernalia of ANY occupation can most likely be intoxicating and transporting, (though lawyers, cops, and doctors seem to get all the airtime), but Steve King finds something incredible in the universe of PLANNING. The characters access an elegant pure world, a world of airport terminals and emergency exits, of carefully angled bollards exerting subliminal control on panicking crowds. I could get lost here for hours. I've seen and read the play at various stages of its development, and I always get a fix from it. Partly, it's the pleasure of enjoying the furniture and diction of a detailed universe. The image of a white architect's model glowing like a platonic idea.

As I mentioned in another post, there's something unnerving and poignant about architect's models - these objects that reduce humanity to anonymous plastic figures facelessly describing a functional (if idealized) trajectory. What's fascinating in Yellow Lines is the way the human position is found, the human negotiations (struggle, love, power) as humans navigate the cold-compassed, contemporary grid.

I want to see more drama about PLANNERS - there being as much at stake for humanity in an engagement with the built environment (in terms of politics, identity, sex) as in an engagement with the Law, or the Underworld or with the failings of the Human Body.