Okay it took a while, but at last I really like Kate Bush. No pretending.

I've always liked Kate Bush in theory. I wasn't ever going to like Wuthering Heights. Not when I hated the book so much.  Not with all the other stuff I was listening to. But later. Running up that Hill. The Red Shoes.  Hey, there Micheal - something about swinging on a chair in Abbey Road?  I almost got here.  Liked that she'd recorded them, liked that they existed, but not actually, as it were, to listen to.  Admired her. Respected her talent. Just didn't listen. I tried to because I thought very highly of what I thought she might be trying to do - Hounds of Love - went back to that several times, couldn't do it.  I wanted to like Kate Bush, I really did, I was the kind of person who should like Kate Bush. Only I didn't, so I obviously wasn't.
This Christmas I bought 50 Words for Snow for my wife, and because she hadn't got it, The Director's Cut. Played them on Christmas Day out of a sense of duty.  And listened.  And heard them.
Now I don't think it's all my fault.  Everything's a matter of taste.  But I loved Snow. Then I played Director's Cut.  And I loved that too.  It' isn't all my fault.  I heard them because they are so simple. So paired down. So undramatic. So unlike Wuthering Heights perhaps? No, that's not the point.  They are so bloody good.  The songs breathe.  Her voice so subtle.  The lyrics so clean.  And not so many notes, and, alright, I'll say the unsayable, not so much screeching.  Whatever it is, I promise I will go back to the other albums and try again. And if it doesn't work?  Who cares?  50 words for Snow and The Director's Cut will do for me.  Happy Christmas Ms Bush. You (and Private Eye the First 50 Years) have made mine.

Harry Perkins - the best fictional Prime Minister we never had.

I began this year reading Chris Mullin's diaries and twelve months later I've just finished A Very British Coup his thriller about what happens when a Labour government with socialist principles gets an overwhelming majority.  It's such a good read that it would be unfair to give anything away other than what we already gather from the title  - Harry and his colleagues are never going to be allowed to succeed.
I have always wondered why men and women of integrity, ideals, and conscience ever go into politics  when they can only look forward to sliding from one frustrating compromise to another, notching up more defeats than victories.  But reading Mullin makes you glad they do. 
His thriller is amazingly prescient.  It's exciting but it's so sad because the obstacles that prevent Harry Perkins getting closer to the world he's striving for are not a million miles from those that frustrated Mullin himself.
But the message of the diaries and the novel are the same.  It may not be possible to make much of a difference, in a world that seems bent on protecting the vested interests of a few (cf Cameron walks away from Europe to protect the City which is of course in all our best interests.  As  in - Is it fuck.), a society based on freedom, equality, and justice may be out of reach, but that shouldn't stop us trying to put our small shoulders to the wheel.
A reasonable thought for the New Year.

How does an ordinary mortal get tickets to see Bruce Springsteen?

Saturday morning.  Eight fifty five.  I'm sitting in front to the computer waiting for nine o'clock. The time that tickets for next year's Bruce Springsteen concerts go on sale.  At nine o'clock I click on.  All I'm offered is two at the very very back and at the very very highest point of the South Stand at Manchester.  I try other sites. Nothing. Eventually I get a ticket for Hyde Park. Only one ticket as my wife is just over five foot and gets understandably fed up at paying good money to stare at somebody's back.  So I'm going to see Springsteen.  Not with my wife.  Not at my venue of choice.  Maybe I was just unlucky.  Hundreds of thousands of people clicked on at exactly the same moment.
Yes, but hang on a moment.  I've just been on e bay and they're log jammed with Springsteen tickets.  6 for Sunderland. 8 for Dublin. All about to change hands at huge prices. And then I went on to look for tickets generally and the sites that said they'd sell tickets on Saturday and didn't have any now suddenly have stacks of them at prices up to £1398.
Oh, and on Friday I went on the same sites and they were offering pre sale tickets - that weren't officially on sale yet - for inflated prices.
So it wasn't just bad luck or bad timing that prevents me and God knows how many others from buying tickets.
It's a huge fucking organised scam. 
This is disgraceful, but it isn't news.
The ticket agencies either have inadequate security or they collude in the process.  Because they can make even more money by allowing the bulk pre purchase of tickets that they can re sell at huge prices and take a rake off from that sale too.
I have one question and I haven't the faintest idea of the answer.
How can it be stopped?

More thoughts on Matilda and Giants in the Earth performers and the musical theatre.

Went into the Watermill today and members of the Giants cast want to know what I thought were the highlights of Matilda.  Obviously there are some bits that stand out, some excellent individual performances but for me it was the coherence from beginning to end that made the show.  Coherence of intention, quality of performance, production values. They batted all the way down the order - not a weak link.  They were a company, not a group of adult actors who worked with a different team of kids each night.  The respect they had for each other was obvious.
And that made me think about the performers we're working with this week. And to start with I have to say that I'm not used to working with actors whose background is mainly musical theatre, and also I gave up being an actor, I'd like to say because I recognised my limitations, but really it was because I hated being out of work and at that stage in my life I couldn't handle rejection.
Okay. So between them our actors, and those I worked with on the previous development weeks, have been involved in a large number of the most popular musical. 
Okay.
I do get irritated by what I see as the high level of drama that some of them bring to everyday events. Because I'm an impatient sod and I take no pride in that.
But.
And I think it's a large and mitigating but I do understand why some appear to live every moment of their lives at hyper intensity. Vulnerability. At every stage of the process they face rejection. They are too tall.  Too short. Too thin.  Not thin enough. They're the wrong size for costumes that already exist.
And.
They have to be the best.  The voice. The dancing. Every move.  Every note.  Has to be right on the money. Every time.  All the time.  Every audition  or they don't make the cut.
How do you erect the defences  to cope with that?
God knows it's tough to be an actor but to be a performer in the musical theatre...
Okay.
It's a job.  It's not coal mining. Or working on a deep sea trawler. Or being shipped out to Afghanistan with your regiment.
But, come on.  We should applaud all those who face the vulnerability of human existence in whatever way it presents itself. So chapeau! To all those who are working with us. To all those who make the cut.  And to those who don't make the cut but keep on hanging in there.  Because that's what we're all trying to do, isn't it?

A musical week - Giants and Matilda

Working in London and at the Watermill Newbury on the second development week for Giants in the Earth.  Yesterday Matt and Neil the MD worked with the actors securing the music, today we'll start be doing more on the new sections in Act Two.  When I'm working on a scene even if it might appear to be a mess I know what I'm aiming for and what the process is that will get us there.  Can't do that with the music, not when it's as complex as this so in the afternoon  left Matt and the others and went for a walk and by the time I got back the disconnected sounds had come together and I could see where we were headed.  It's the same for him when I'm messing about. We trust each other's work and that's what matters.  I loathe offering up hostages so I'll go so far as to say that it appears that what we have written may very well not be complete rubbish.
On my walk I passed the Cambridge and got myself a ticket to Matilda. Top tip - £25 next to the sound desk, and only a restricted view in the strictest sense.  Brilliant show.  Loved it.  Go and see it - you don't even need a tame child to take as an excuse.

Crossed Purposes

The concept of the past being a different country where they do things differently has never been so clear to me as during the last few weeks working on the Eastern Angles cross generational project Crossed Purposes.  Together with Kate Hall, Mark Grist and Year 10 students from four Peterborough schools we have been collecting memories from elders in residential accommodation of their teenage years for those students to turn into pieces of theatre. Mark and I are shaping the material and Kate will help the them get the work up and on its feet.
The stories have been flowing almost too fast for us to record.  They have been funny, heartbreaking, brave and absurd.  Children running through the London Blitz with only saucepans on their heads for protection, a father rescuing two small children from where they lay next to an unexploded bomb, small tales of heroism, all shared with rare generosity.  And it can't be easy to talk about your most formative experiences to a group of fifteen year olds you've never met before.  The students have been magnificent, any initial nervousness disappeared, and old and young talked together with mutual respect realising that they shared far more in common than, I believe, either group suspected.
A woman who was born to an unmarried mother spoke quietly of the first time she met her father at the age of thirteen and how she used to meet him in a park on Sunday afternoons until her stepfather stopped.  And how she didn't she him again until she had a child of her own.  'The last time had my first child with me and we bumped into each other in the street, he was living in one room he told me. He would have liked to have come to my wedding, I'd have liked him there too, but it wasn't possible then for that to happen.  He said that if we bumped into each other again we'd make a proper arrangement to meet, but we never did, and I never saw him again.'  Her only moment of anger coming when she said 'That's all I saw of him, but never once, although he tried to make me, did I ever call my stepfather, dad.'
As part of a generation that ,unlike my parents and grandparents, never had to be part of a war, I wonder how I would have coped. I sort through the memories we've collected, shaping them into a dramatic form and I pray to God I would have been able to muster a fraction of  dignity and humour and honesty and sheer bloody resiliance that shines through our elders' stories. I have been very moved, very heartened by the humanity and compassion I've found, but at the same moment when I feel only a step away from weeping at the courage and pity of it all, there's that part of my writer's brain that won't stop sifting for material  even through the most inappropriate events in my own life, muttering, 'This stuff is brilliant, there's got to be a play in here.'

Juggling.

Back to work and no excuses. I've just started a project with Eastern Angles in Peterbrough linking school students and older people.  Stories are gathered from the elders and are passed onto the kids to use in creating a piece of theatre. yesterday we were with a 92 year old lady who told us her experiences of being a WAAF - she had total recall, was very lucid and we felt moved and privileged that she's agreed to share that part of her life with us.
I've just finished writing up what she told us from my notes and next is act two of Summer. It's almost all there in my head so now I've got to write it to see how it works. Another couple of weeks and it'll be ready to send off.
A couple of days ago I went through the new act two of Giants in the Earth the musical I'm writing with Matt Marks.  Matt liked it which is always a good start.  Now it's over to him to have a think about how the music's going to work. That's got to be ready for the end of the month in preparation for the two development weeks with Oxfordshire Theatre Company what have commissioned the piece.
So the rest of October is going to be trips to Peterborough, Act Two of Summer, and, mustn't be forgotten, the adaptation of Haroun and the Sea of Stories to finish for Kazaliste Virovitica. Oh, and my birthday present, an afternoon roaring round a race track in a Caterham.