Blog 2008

My 2008 blog will incorporate my hot cultural tips as well as my occasional journal entries and pensées...

Here I am relaxing at home and fretting about the many annoyances of daily life... (drawing by Roger Payne)

Sunday, 20/01/08: The problem of waiters on press night

Good news for anyone who cares: I am in the midst of a creative frenzy, channelling from the Planet Fargon (as is my occasional wont) a new full-length play for the entertainment of homosexuals and their friends.

They say that gay theatre has a bad name and Lord! how true that is. When I was putting on plays at Oval House in 2004/5/6, people spoke in hushed tones of the work of a company called Strawberry Theatre. Strawberry Theatre had put on two performances a night and sold out their entire run. Why? Because the actors had got their kit off. Ahem. So Strawberry Theatre made a few sheckles more, and the heterosexual theatre-going public in general, fearful of being confronted with jiggling male genitals for an hour and a half, became even less likely to show up at the next glittering homosexual comedy. That’s the theory, anyway.

My friend Ben Evans, tirelessly striving to get the national press to take Oval House seriously, advised me against “tacky” marketing (see the logo in the top left corner of this website) and begged me not to employ topless muscle-boys as waiters on press night. I kept the tacky marketing and ditched the waiters, a strategy that was not sufficiently self-censoring to prevent me from being lightly spattered with homophobia when the critical shit hit the fan.

The lesson is that there is no lesson. It is simply meaningless to require gay theatre to be less gay. The creative spirit wilts and expires when given the impossible task of writing plays about sex that aren’t sexy. The whole project of theatre is sexy, for god’s sake! Theatre is a brothel. Why should poufs have less fun than breeders? All you can say is this: gay theatre can be as sleazy as it wants, but it has to be good.

Sources of pleasure are precious few in this life. One of mine has always been the satisfaction of annoying people. It gets me up in the morning and sends me to bed at night feeling that the day has been well spent. (I wrote Bedrooms and Hallways specifically to annoy a friend). With this in mind I am writing a play about an ageing pouf who photographs willing young men in his Fulham flat that, far from avoiding the pitfalls of gay theatre, leaps joyfully into them with a glass of sherry in one hand and a copy of Gay Times in the other. There will be jokes; there will be self-loathing; there will be voyeurism; there will be titillation; there will be unpleasantness. All in all you will feel that your money has been very well-spent. As for the waiters on press-night, I haven’t yet decided whether or not they will be permitted to wear clothing, but we can make that decision nearer the time. It might depend on budget. (”Sorry, we can’t afford trousers, you’ll have to go nude.”)

Wednesday 23/01/08: Penelope Keith "quite good" in The Importance of Being Earnest shock

Phil Setren and I sweep into the rather nice Vaudeville Theatre for the first performance of Eric Gill's new production of Oscar's Importance of Being Earnest. I think Ed Stoppard might have been there, but if it wasn't him it was someone extremely handsome... The surprise of the evening is that Penelope Keith is rather good in the role of Lady Bracknell. This role is usually played by some theatrical grande dame as a cross between Margaret Thatcher and Dracula, tyrannising the young lovers as she advances through Victorian London like a stately battleship. But Miss Keith is a TV actress who, when she takes to the stage, becomes endearingly unsure of herself. Sometimes she can be very bad, but tonight the result was a Lady Bracknell who actually belonged on planet earth, rather than in the outer reaches of Hades. This gave the show a feeling of coherence, a realness that Oscar's icy dialogue certainly needs.

The Importance has for many years been a holy object for me, a kind of Mount Everest of the playwright's art. It is self-evidently the most brilliant comedy in the English language, the one play in our tongue that takes on Moliere at his own game and effortlessly trounces him. But tonight I found myself hitting my head against the play's roof, if you catch my drift. There are no men in this story, just eunuchs whose phallic drive has been converted into a Billy Bunter addiction to crumpets and muffins. The women lay claim to both the rapacity of the male and the complacency of the female. There is a devouring mother but no avenging father. The result is a landscape of complete sterility. The fact that Oscar managed to make sterility hilarious (a task that has defeated many a clever-clogs twentieth century depressive) is enough to make the play a joy... until you get to know it very well. Then the limits of hilarity emerge like an iceberg in the fog. The core of the play is fury and bitterness, a voice crying in the wilderness, cursing the Victorians, cursing society, cursing biology...

(One day I will direct a non-charming version of The Importance, a kind of Samuel Beckett version, if you will. The languid young men will be Dorian Grays rather than Bertie Woosters, and the young ladies will be portrayed as a cross between heat-seeking missiles and blow-up sex-dolls...)

What is a mystery is why The Importance didn't give birth to a whole new genre of English-language Molierian comedy. Coward professed to hate Wilde. He saw himself as radically opposed to Victorian artifice, of which Wilde was, ironically, the paragon. So he loosened things up, relaxed the steely grip of control, and allowed his creations to bound about the stage like puppies off the leash. Orton did write a great masterpiece in the style of The Importance, but it seems that nobody noticed.

The set is divine and the cast uniformly excellent. Hurry, hurry, hurry.

Monday 28/01/08: Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette "rather good" shock

Had a gander at my niece’s copy of the DVD of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette...

First things first: the design is ravishing down to the last detail. The Louis XVI look is brought fabulously to life, but not, as per usual, in the tasteful colours of the surviving paintings of the period which, let’s face it, have probably faded. No: this is Versailles with the colour turned up, and what mouth-watering colour it is! Suddenly the whole fussy look of the period makes sense — the hair, the shoes, the dresses, the interiors — the cakes! Furthermore the production manages to convey the relationship of the characters to their lifestyle. They are aware of their clothes and hairdos, mostly orgasmically so, sometimes uncomfortably, as if swamped by nonsense. They don’t just take it all for granted; they say, “Oh my god! What lovely porcelain!” This, of course, is the point of beautiful objects. Design is not meant to be taken for granted. When we sweep into the newly refurbished Young Vic theatre we don’t pretend we haven’t noticed; we say, “Oh my god! The toilets are divine!”

This is — or seems — quite a long film, and one in which very little happens. This doesn’t matter, because you know how the story ends, and what could be more exciting than the French Revolution? But Coppola doesn’t bother with scenes of poverty and social unrest outside the palace walls. All we get is the queen and her friends having a lovely, lovely time. They go to parties. They play cards. The king gives the queen a little palace of her own. She dresses up as a milkmaid. Everything, in fact, that you’d expect. The point is the texture of it. Every moment is a ravishment. Every hairdo is an epiphany.

I have a feeling that this is quite a profound film. Marie Antoinette is a mythic — or is it proverbial? — figure, the heartless, decadent queen bitch who said LET THEM EAT CAKE and met a richly-deserved, hideous end. Coppola shows her as a real woman — not such a mind-blowing thing in itself, except that it is so well done. Better than Barry Lyndon, better than Russian Ark. Kirsten Dunst is very good. The absurdity and complacency of the court is made clear, but also, more to the point, its hermetically sealed isolation. How was she to know that the people of France were suffering? She never met them. And why should she even concern herself? How inquisitive are we today about the lives of the people who make our carpets?

Underneath all the frippery and frivolity and patisserie, this film has an absolutely serious core, a seriousness evinced by the dedication of the cast and director to presenting these lives as real and human, without judgement or ridicule. These are people seduced by their good fortune. The overwhelming impression one takes from the film is, Yes, I would have done exactly the same. Dunst leave the palace (en route to her death — a scene not depicted in the film) with complete dignity and vulnerability — a woman who was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. The point, surely, is this: if there were a global revolution tomorrow, and all the affluent people in the North were murdered by the starving people in the South, history would judge us as complacent, heartless twits. Films would be made of us frittering away our lives with our iPods and organic smoothies and beautiful homes, unconcerned about the cost to others.

Friday 1/02/08: Tim Burton movie (ie, Sweeney Todd) "not very good" shock

When I started this website and blog, I swore I would only review things I was enthusiastic about, but on the other hand I do see myself as a bit of a crusader against naff musical theatre, and when one of the great movie makers of our time is brought low by one of musical theatre's principal beelzebubs, I cannot remain silent. Reader, I lasted 83 minutes of this intolerable nonsense, then crept from the crumbling halls of the Brighton Odeon back out into the so-much-more-invigorating challenge of a sea-side gale.

In my intimate private journal (a very different thing from this blog - much less goody-two-shoes, franker, nastier) I find I have written: "The level of stupidity that is tolerated in musical theatre is way in advance of what washes in the movies..." And I'll stand by that. When you write a film-script, even in England where we are relatively bad at making films, your script will be subjected to close scrutiny during the "development" process. Crap motivation will be spotted a mile off; longueurs will earn you a rap on the knuckle. Any scene in which people stand around interminably discussing their feelings (or explaining the plot) will be laughed out of court. But not in musical theatre...

On the plus side, Mr Depp, having given us his Keith Richards, now bravely gives us his stab at David Bowie in Anthony Newley mode; and indeed if you close your eyes (and you might as well) you can almost fancy it is Screaming Lord Byron himself. But not even this exciting experiment in cultural commentary can paper over the cracks for long. Nay, not even Helena Bonham-Carter's sensational make-up design.

If you are unable to resist the lure of the divine Mr D, well, see the movie on your own, because it's so much harder to walk out when you are with someone.

Sunday, 3/02/08: Reading three books at once

In Cronenberg’s great Videodrome, James Woods challenges Debbie Harry as to how she can bewail the overheated nature of modern life yet still turn up to a TV chat-show in a bright scarlet dress, and Harry replies, “OK, I admit it, I live in an extreme state of over-stimulation.”

So first, a confession. My mind has been cheapened and trivilaised by the “hectic pace” of “the way we live today.” My powers of concentration have been compromised by watching MTV in the gym. (Could there ever be a more hellish marriage than MTV and the gym?) But I am fighting back. Admittedly, I cannot concentrate on one single book for ninety minutes, but I can read three books for half an hour each, and so that is what I am doing. Here are my current reads:

To nurture the spirit: The Tenth Man, or, The Great Joke Which Made Lazarus Laugh, by Wei Wu Wei. Hardcore spiritual stuff (technically Buddhist) designed to shock the mind awake. Wei Wu Wei was an Irishman who came out with a series of books between the years 1958 and 1974. One’s first impression is that he is completely incomprehensible, but if you engage with every sentence as fully as you can, your mind slowly rises to the challenge. So if any severe intellectual ever asks you if you are familiar with, say, Plato, just say, No, but I am intimate with the works of Wei Wu Wei — and see what happens.

To nurture the inner writer: The Brothers Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. Ahem. I am still trying to work out if there is any point in writing novels. The human mind has become more intelligent in the last hundred years — by which I mean, it has been stimulated (yes, by MTV) to the point where it now makes connections faster than it did in the old days. We have also experienced the full onslaught of post-modern thought which, apart from anything else, has given us the notion of camp. Thus it is that when you dramatise a nineteenth-century novel and put it on TV it looks like a load of camp old nonsense. You can’t turn the clock back. We have lost our innocence. If you go directly to the source, you do get, in some cases, the music of fine old prose. But the ponderous rate of connection and the absence of camp remain. Most door-stop old classics subject the reader to a hundred pages of codswollop before even beginning to deliver the goods. Tom Jones (which I have read to the end and enjoyed) is excruciating in this respect; even Miss Austen’s pleasure-orgy Emma detains the reader in the literary waiting-room for quite some time. And so here I am plodding through these opening chapters by Mr D, and yes, if you can stick it out to page 100 you can begin to see that it might be worth it. But oh for an abridged version!

For fun: How To Be Idle by Tom Hodgkinson. Maybe not quite as bracing as his excellent sequel How To Be Free, which I would recommend to anyone, but essential reading nonetheless. Hodgkinson’s thesis is that being idle is itself not difficult; the skill lies in dealing with the guilt. Reading his book, I realise that I am an accomplished idler. I have perfected many of the techniques he describes. But in terms of slaying the old work-ethic dragon I am still on the intermediate slopes.

Tuesday, 05/02/08: Get ready for the Year of the Rat

Chinese New Year is on Thursday, and this year is Rat year. Rats are charming and successful. So get out there and be that!

Wednesday, 06/02/08: Finally! Permission to write porn!

Have met a guy online, as they say. An artist. For reasons best known to himself he doesn't fancy me but we are talking about doing a book together, a collection of very short, sleazy stories that he can illustrate. Excellent! Finally, permission to write pornography with no loss of status. (The guy is a brilliant artist and the product, if it happened, would be extremely high-end). I have already been spurred into action and have posted a prototype on this website. It's on its own page and is called "Ever Ready".

Friday, 8/02/08: Loop Falling Man: Filth is in the eye of the beholder

Today I went round to the studio of a young Brighton artist I have discovered who, when in his erotica mode, goes under the monika of Loop Falling Man. I found his card in the changing room of Prowler in St James St when I was trying on a leather kilt. Purchased a print of the work shown below. It's quite big and will look great on the wall. What I like about it is that it's filthy but you could hang it anywhere. The filth lies in the viewer's willingness and ability to supply details that are not included in the frame. I especially like that it's called "Threesome". The legs (Loop explained to me) belong to the blue face, which means that the third orgiast (who, the artist assures me, is shagging blue man) isn't even vestigially represented. This is very me. Filth that is only filth in the eye of the beholder, if at all. Honi soit qui mal y pense.

Threesome Series 1 by Loop Falling Man

The other thing about Mr Loop Falling Man that I relate to (and it's all about relatedness) is that he is an artist who has been driven, by the weirdness of our modern age, to split himself in two. He produces "fine art" under one name and "erotica" under another. To my eyes it is all marvellous stuff and, being the work of one man, should all be exhibited together. But no, that's not how people think these days. When they see "Threesome Series 1", for example, they fret about the gay porn element. Politics, which is never far from art, seeps in and spoils everything.

I relate to this. I resent having to split and occasionally censor myself, and know that any reputation I may acquire as some kind of pillar of the gay London post-Orton theatre scene is as nonsensical as my occasional trembling moments on the red carpets of movie-land. The split, I think, lies in the fact that audiences and consumers are obsessed with subject matter, but artists are not. Subject matter comes and goes. It is like a bug that flits across your desk: you pick it up and make use of it because it's there. It is absurd to turn down the subject matter that your mind wants to use, but equally, the subject matter is not the point. The point is your treatment of it.

So when you visit Mr Loop Falling Man's studio, what you see is a place where art is being made, where ideas are in ferment and stuff is being produced. There are abstracts, there are surrealist objects, there are prints of boys having sex. The space says, "I am so much more than you want to believe I am."

To see some more of this artist's work, click here

Look up "Loop Falling Man" at You Tube and see the artist perform a dangerous impromptu stunt that landed him in A&E.

Tuesday, 12/02/08: What self-knowledge!

I was walking in Brighton today, in a quiet street behind the station, when I was startled from my reverie by an extraordinary sound. It was a laugh, but quite unusual in its volume and quality - a bit like the giddy braying of a strange jungle animal that had just won the lottery. I looked across the street and saw a group of three schoolgirls in their mid-teens strolling down the street enagaged in conversation. As they passed, one of them remarked to her friends, with great earnestness, "My laugh is really loud and really annoying."

Saturday, 16/02/08: Bossy bottoms

In my experience, you can sometimes get into more trouble for not shagging a guy than for shagging him. I once got charged £15 for not shagging a guy in Brighton. He said I had wasted his time. £15 was the cost of two taxi rides: the one that he had taken to my place while expecting to be shagged, and the one he was going to take back to his cold and lonely flat to nurse his disappointment. Recently I negotiated a roll in the hay with a guy online, but it turned out to be just that — a languid and perfectly pleasant interlude during which the underwear stayed on. Later I received a message informing me that I had behaved disgracefully. Sometimes you can get into to trouble for not shagging even when you have done your best. I once courted a Frenchman for six months with sundry old-fashioned tokens of esteem, at the end of which time he turned me down and gave me a sound ticking off. The problem can be traced back to the well-established fact that bottoms are bossy. Why? Because deep down they believe they are doing you a favour. They are sacrificing their masculine role so that you can enjoy yours. But are they actually doing you a favour? No one knows precisely what the ratio of tops to bottoms in the urban gay world may be, because no survey has ever been undertaken; but there is one recorded instance of an impromptu experiment that took place in a disco in New York during the eighties. The DJ suggested that all tops should gather on one side of the room and all bottoms on the other. There were twice as many bottoms as tops.

Monday 25/02/08: Gay Love Spirit: Mastering Surrender

It’s a glamorous life. Just got back from Berlin after a weekend worskhop given by the ineffable Gay Love Spirit team. It was called Mastering Surrender and had a BDSM theme. When we arrived our mentor/tormentor Kai Ehrhardt was in black and in role. If anyone complained of being cold they were made to do press-ups. Unfortunately there is a confidentiality issue here, as I have sworn not to divulge details of the affiar which might be compromising to the participants. Is it OK, I wonder, to reveal that on the second day, the winning tug-of-war team had their hands bound and were then fed their lunch by the losing team? It was sheer joy. People were stuffing food into the mouth of their captives, giggling and canoodling. I turned to Kai and said, This is so perverse! He said, “Are you serious?” I said, Well, I was using the term lightly. But still, Kai is so far advanced in the adventures of the Gay Love Spirit that he genuinely cannot see anything particularly perverse about tying your partner up and feeling him his lunch. I could tell you more... but I’ll have to consult my conscience first.

There is a widespread popular misconception that SM is about pain. I think of what is for me a memorable SM scene in a mainstream film: the flogging of Debbie Harry in Videodrome. Marvelous stuff, but hey, that’s a bull-whip James Woods is using, which would surely tear the flesh from her back in real life. The truth about SM is that you are playing with sensations, and with the fact that pain and pleasure are a continuum. The idea (for me at least) is to see how far you can go while still enjoying yourself, and along the way you can strike up a marvelously gothic relationshop with your "tormentor". Thus you will find, in a good SM workshop, a wide array of flogging thingumijigs, offering a range of sensation from a soft caress to a full-on, fuck-off assault. The fact that you consent to be bound is the point, not some search for ever more exquisite sensations of torture. A well-administered flogging (I now know) is not an ordeal at all; it is something much more akin to a very invigorating massage with a strong erotic and existential angle. Afterwards, you feel dangerously centred. If you are a man you feel like Tarzan (ready to take on any number of apes). Are there marks? Yes. Do they last for more than 20 minutes? Obviously. Are they permanent? Don’t be ridiculous.

I was brought up on the assumption that the search for the exquisite in the realm of the senses is intrinsically decadent, but I now understand that this belief is just the Cartesian world-view attempting to defend itself. "I am" is in no way dependent on "I think". Thought can and does cease at times, and awareness continues, and this is precisely what all the mystic traditions teach. Those of us who were brought up to define ourselves by our intellectual achievements can be curiously obtuse in this respect. But actually it is relatively easy to achieve thought-free awareness, if only briefly. All you have to do is become fully aware of your body and what surrounds you.

And another thing: enlightenment is not to be had without balancing the male and female energies within the individual. This balance is not to be found in a state of chastity. This is why, when it comes to sex, Andrew Cohen is wrong and Alain Forget is right.

Kai Ehrhardt mastering surrender, Gay-Love-Spirit-style

The other news is that Berlin appears to be a much nicer city than London. The air is sublime and the light much better. I lived there once as a young ‘un, and although the city has changed, I can still sense the energy I responded to in the old days: clear, anarchic, stylish. After the workshop, I had dinner with a lovely young Greek guy who had been assisting, and he told me, “Berlin is a very difficult city to leave. But it’s also a very easy city not to come back to.”

cutting-edge homos and other queer people can find out more about the sublime Gay Love Spirit here

Tuesday 26/02/08: My Berlin week-end: still processing

Around Europe, those of us who attended Gay Love Spirit's Mastering Surrender workshop are lying panting on our chaises-longues, processing our memories and allowing the vibrations to resonate through our exhausted bodies. I have golden memories but I also have nagging worries. Over the years I have had few complaints about the size of my manly part. It is, I believe, exactly average in global terms, but, love being blind, or at any rate over-excited, it usually passes for large. I have known that my feet are a little small for my size (mingy little size eight-and-a-halfs supporting a 6ft frame) ever since this fact was pointed out to me by a school doctor. But until now I never thought it mattered much. Now I know better. For some men, foot-size is all. After my shoes came off my slave carried on bravely, but you could see that he was just trying to spare my feelings. At the end of the workshop we exchanged email addresses but it was a hollow charade.

Thursday, 28/02/08: Not enough nudity

My new cleaner came round today. He goes to the theatre quite a lot, so we had plenty to talk about. It even turns out that he saw Wild Fruit. He said his friend (does he mean himself?) was a little disappointed that the play didn't have any nudity. He said that in his opinion there are only three subjects suitable for gay drama: AIDS, the fleeting nature of gay relationships, and nudity. I was of course disturbed at the thought that it could all be boiled down to such a tired-sounding wish-list, but then I had to admit to myself that Wild Fruit did contain all three elements, or would have if you counted Tai Shan Ling and Jonathan Hooley showing their bare bottoms as nudity. But it seems some people won't be fobbed off with anything less than the full monty.

Saturday, 1/03/08: A gripping theatrical entertainment

OK, so Phil Setren and I take in a play and it's a real stinker. I'm not the kind of bitch who tells you which play it was — just take it from me, it was dull. So the play ends and I say to Phil, "Well, it's a very nice theatre. I wonder how many it seats." Phil says, "They say it seats one-fifty but I'd say it's nearer eighty or so." I say, "Well, I counted seventy-four seats."

Friday, 7/03/08: The Homecoming at The Almeida Theatre

Hm. If I were a rash, brash, conceited young man, I might make some silly pronouncement about the problematic nature of Pinter's reputation. The Caretaker is certainly a very good play: I have seen it done so well that it took one into a different dimension. This one — I'm not so sure. Along the way, of course, there is a cornucopia of Pinteresque pleasures: all that cockney linguistic fun that actors fall upon like grateful vampires. The only trouble is, Pinter appears to have written the play with his dick, which is not necessarily a bad thing, but it does bring with it certain dangers, to which our hero has arguably succumbed. The female character, the homecoming son's wife, is not really characterised at all. She is to the play what the rhinos are to Ionesco's Rhinoceros: a symbol, and as such, unplayable. So while the five male actors were gamboling about the stage being fabulous in that macho comedy-of-menace way, the poor actress was sitting there in the middle of it all, vacant and sphinx-like, a cross between a Stepford Wife and the amnesiac lesbians in Mulholland Drive. (Note to self: never allow an actor to base his or her performance on anything out of Mulholland Drive). The extraordinary force of The Caretaker lies in Pinter's slowing the drama right down, and demonstrating that whole worlds of tragedy can lurk in a single heart-beat. If anything was genius about the play it was the pacing. The pacing of The Homecoming is less sure-footed. The whole pimping-the-wife section at the end feels like a different play, rushed and disconnected from what has gone before, and indeed one leaves the theatre feeling somewhat cheated (a common response to Pinter, alas). What could be more exciting than a play about a homecoming son who pimps his wife to the rest of his family? And yet, somehow, this is not quite delivered. There's too much Ionesco and not enough Orton. And as one slips into one's striped pyjamas and picks up one's intimate private journal for nightly communion, one might ask oneself, exactly what was I supposed to feel? Shock? Outrage? Disorientation? These are valid provocations in art, but perhaps one would prefer them to be by-products, rather than the substance of the thing. At any rate, the play gives you a good blast of what it must have been like to be in London in the sixties, and that can't be entirely bad.

Wednesday, 12/03/08: a trip to the Tate Modern

My friend Robert is staying for a few days so we took in an art gallery. I always used to have difficulty with modern visual art but I have found that since massively increasing my meditation schedule last year I am getting more of a hit off it. Or maybe I am more conscious of the hit I was always getting. Perhaps the reason why I always fled from art galleries in the past was not that (as I thought) I wasn't receptive to the vibe, but that I was, and the vibe was exhausting me. A place like the Tate Modern is a veritable assault of vibes. How much can a boy take?

We enjoyed a pretty good lunch in the café. Today I woke up and it occurred to me that what I now like about visual art is that you can head off to the café or the gift shop whenever you like — whereas with opera, for example, you're trapped.

A sign I saw in our local S&M café - which means sausages and mash, not what you were thinking.

Thursday, 13/03/08: another holy relic for my shrine

Yesterday I continued with my daring plan to acquire artworks at low prices (nay, free) by posing for my friend Marco Livingstone. Marco is an art writer but also a very good painter whose portraits of Marc Almond are due to adorn the Tortured One's next CD. Well, Marco somehow transformed me into some kind of sex-fiend cruising the woods in the nude and called the painting "On The Heath." You may be interested to learn that I have never cruised Hampstead Heath, either clothed or au naturel, so we must assume that the artist in this case was tuning into one of my repressed desires.

The painting itself may be such as might reveal more than my gentle Reader wishes to see, so for now I shall leave it off, but I shall show you what Marco gave me in return: a sweet sketch done on fantastic Indian rag-paper, which will look ravishing when framed and added to my porno bedroom shrine.

Recently my friends have been "shaking their heads" and "saying I've changed", as the lovely old song has it. Apparently I have become, at least to outward appearances, more of a naked sex-fiend and less of an iceberg. Yes, I asked Roger payne to sketch me in nothing but a pair of white socks, but that is because I am in the throes of an Orton fixation that has lasted since 1981, and in my defense I would say, well at least I know I am in it. And yes, I have papered my bedroom with erotic art, but then, what is life without a shrine?

I was reading Jung today and he said, "As long as we are attached, we are possessed." We will never go into nirvana until our "debt to life", as he calls it, has been paid — until we have done what we want to do and have no desires left to play out. He says, better to serve a god than a mania. He says, the godlessness of our age is not necessarily a sign of mental health. Make a god of it, externalise it, honour it and deal with it — or deny it, repress it, project it... and take the consequences.

Of course, I am not suggesting worshipping some grim, nay-saying, guilt-inducing super-ego. Choose a god you feel at home with. For me it's Mr First-Half-Of-August 2007 in the Dieux du Stade calendar.

Tuesday, 18/03/08: The Discreet Charm of the Scissor Sisters

I'm a Leo, which is the slowest-burning of the fire-signs. This means I'm often late in showing up at the party, but when I get there I am lots of fun. So here I am, as usual, about two years behind the rest of Europe in finally getting round to investing in a copy of the "new" - or rather, most recent - Scissor Sisters CD. Now is not the time to attempt to put into words the Niagara of enthusiasm I feel for this marvelous band, but on the other hand it's hard to remain entirely silent when such potent magic is afoot.

Not everyone is susceptible to the charms of the Sisters. I can reveal that my friend Simon Reed, fka Mr Simon Girl, erstwhile co-songwriter and lead guitar player of the fabulous Mystery Girls, turned his nose up when he saw the Sisters perform Laura on TV. I was amazed. How anyone could not like such a pop miracle was beyond me. But a few years have elapsed, a second CD has emerged, and now we can see things in perspective. In the early videos Jake Shears does indeed come across (forgive me!) as something of a poison brat. He's trying too hard, he's nervous, he's overcompensating. He has something to prove. But by the time they've recorded I Don't Feel Like Dancing, everything has changed. The band that people wrote off as an Elton John tribute outfit now has Elton himself on rhythm piano, and have gracefully stepped into the legend that they constructed for themselves. Shears has morphed (or at any rate, half-morphed) from annoying mosquito to alarming hornet. Ana Matronic is now bona fide Leading Lady rather than token girl, Del Marquis has turned out to be an authentically heroic lead guitar (the kind that makes you thank the Lord you have a penis), and the beefy rhythm section Babydaddy and Paddy Boom are in full command of the situation and frighteningly sexy to boot. How much pleasure can a person take?

Pleasure, in fact, comes at you like an avalanche on this CD. From the scarcely-bearable gratification of I Don't Feel... we are plunged into the unexpected glam-rock orgy of She's My Man, a track that screams "who dares wins". No-one since about 1974 has dared go near the beat this song is set in, a rhythm as clearly fixed in time as a box of Biba soap-flakes. Shears doesn't have Elton's vocal depth and cuddle-factor, but he has better lyrics, and indeed listening to the Sisters one is struck by the thought that dear Elton achieved so much despite being hamstrung by such an awful lyricist. Here we are informed that "My girl eats a wounded preacher 'tween two loaves of bread," a lyric as enjoyable as anything on Aladdin Sane. We are told that "she strangles for a good time," and that the singer "loves it when she chokes me in the backseat of her riverboat." People blandly identify the Sisters as "part Queen, part Elton John," but the truth is that psychosis needs no influences. It springs fully formed from the brain. Next track up and we're being reminded that "It's not easy having yourself a good time;" but the Sisters have a suggestion: "Fuck and kiss you both at the same time." Well, yes, that would help. These are lyrics that you want to sing at parties while hugging your friends.

Try these ones for size, from the jolly knees-up "Intermission":

"When the night wind starts to turn
Into the ocean breeze
And the dew drops sting and burn
Like angry honey bees
That is when you hear the song
Falling from the sky:
Happy yesterday to all
We were born to die."

Erotic strangulation in a riverboat! Dew that stings and burns! (And there's more: a tombstone in the bed, poison birthday cake...) Pop music can be good at anxiety and good at exuberance, but very rarely combines the two with any success, and it is this above all other factors that make the Sisters the true heirs of the seventies. The one artist the Sisters never own as an influence, and whose work they never directly quote from, is Bowie, yet it was Bowie who perfected the way of anxious exuberance and made it his genre. The nightmarish landscapes of Ta-Dah!, in which (apparently) transvestite hookers prowl freak-filled towns "built on muddy stilts" that will be washed away when it "rains like Revelations" are a rock-n-roll dystopia very reminsiscent of Diamond Dogs.

But how often do we sit down with the lyric sheet of a pop CD and really give it the time of day? There is so much nonsense surrounding pop - the nude spreads of Jake in Butt magazine, the collaboration with Kylie, the gold lamé slave-suit - that it is hard to remember that this is the same art-form as Herrick and Marvell. Yet such is the case. And we would do well to take song-lyrics seriously if we want to understand where the creative energy is coming from. With all the best pop stars, a closer look will reveal that it is the poetry that comes first, not the gold lamé. It's the phoneys that are in it for the clothes. The best pop stars are quite different from glamorous showbiz troupers. Jake Shears, as far as we can make out, is a disturbed poet/performance-artist with some kind of simmering rent-boy complex who has only been able to stomach the excruciating exposure of stardom by recruiting a matronly chum (Miss Matronic) and having her onstage with him like a security blanket. In other words, he's brought his Mum along.

I have one more thing to say. This is a CD in which the arrangements themselves are of considerable nuance and sophistication. Kiss You Off is broadly speaking based on Blondie's Call Me, but there is a thrilling moment where the rhythm is stripped right down to reveal the presence of a tinkling Destry Rides Again honkytonk piano. These are the moments that make pop so very much a mirror of our deliriously overstimulated times. Without a word being said, an electric connection is established between Marlene Dietrich and Debbie Harry, and their shared mantle is grabbed by an incandescent Ana Matronic. Again I think of Aladdin Sane, how Mike Garson's echoing piano seemed to invoke the vengeful ghosts of old-world cabaret whores in his four-bar intro to Time.

Reader, in 1983 I tried to turn back the tide and usher in a new era of glam rock. I saw the way that music was going and I couldn't stand it. I did my best. I went on TV looking like Marlene Dietrich and Johnny Rotten's love-child and I sang about Muscle Beach and Berlin drag-queens. But I was King Canute. The tide was implacable. I watched, attired from head to toe in sombre mourning weeds, as pop music lay down and expired in the mid-eighties, and for twenty years I have flitted about this world like a disconsolate chimera, crying for the old days and wishing that pop groups were still interesting. Until now.

The Scissor Sisters may be bratty and brash; they may suffer from direct comparison with the much-loved glammers of the past; and they may have committed the unforgivable crime of becoming popular. But they are the first band in a whole generation to understand what pop music is and what it is capable of.

Suddenly the tears are wiped away. Suddenly twenty-five years of cautious, defensive pop bullshit is erased from memory. I can breathe again!

Me in 1984: last splash of the first wave of glammers.

PS: In the old days, when vinyl stalked this earth, it was acceptable for an LP to contain ten songs. There wasn't room for much more than that. The weaker tracks were used as B-sides for singles and then quietly forgotten. This partly explains why you got classic albums in those days: it is easier to be brilliant and inspired for ten songs than for thirteen. Ta-Dah! does not quite feel like a classic album, but it could have with a little judicious pruning... For what it's worth, my prediction is that their next album will be out of this world.

Next week I will give you my pensées on the subject of the Sisters live at the O2. It's a dirty job but someone's gotta do it.

Friday, 28/03/08: Learning to love self-censorship

I am beginning to realise that being an outsider and a rebel is, for me, not the whole story. I also yearn for acceptance and lust after respectability. I am currently writing a comedy screenplay and I just censored one of the lines, and in the process found a much funnier joke. The situation is that this guy is thinking about inviting his fiancée's favourite band to play at their wedding. He confides this to his masseur, and the masseur (originally) replied, "Do it! She'll be giving head for years!" Then I realised that the mention of oral sex was one notch filthier than the rest of the screenplay and I couldn't really justify it, so I changed the line to: "She'll be consenting to sex for years." So there you have it; the awful truth. Filthier is not necessarily funnier.

Monday, 24/03/08: It's not easy having yourself an intellectual good time

Reader, I got to I think page 289 of The Brothers Karamazov and then recoiled in horror during the ridiculous "Grand Inquisitor" section (all the dullness of the nineteenth century rolled into one giant wrecking ball and comin' straight at ya). Then last night I got to about page 283 of Blaise Cendrars' appalling To The End of The World and finally, weary of rambling 1940s modernist nonsense, cast the book aside with a whinny of frustration. Desperate for a book (ie, desperate to believe that I am at least partly an intellectual, and that my evening was going to have something to do with paper and print, rather than yet another gander at the Scissor Sisters live at the O2), I picked up Gore Vidal's slim volume Screening History, in which the venerable old codger gives us his pensées on the subject of the movies.

We musn't be horrid about Gore Vidal. He did one genuinely heroic thing in his life (the publication of The City and The Pillar, which earned him decades of blacklisting at the hands of the homophobes) and that is one more than most of us achieve. At his best he is pretty fab, regaling us with tales of dinner with JFK and Jackie-O, memories of the filming of Ben-Hur (homophobe Charlton Heston never noticed the gay subtext in Gore's screenplay) and generally keeping us perky with his elegant, upmarket prose. But he can also be very bad, partly, I think, because he is entirely a stranger to humility.

In his auto-bio Palimpsest he tells one very funny story at the expense of Barbara Cartland, who he seems to regard as the incarnation of evil — and who are we to disagree? But today it occurred to me that maybe the reason why Mr Vidal loathed Miss Cartland so much was that he is a kind of Barbara Cartland himself. With both writers, you have the feeling that the words are just tumbling out willy-nilly, although in Gore's case, of course, there is the supposedly elegant prose to make it palatable. Yet if you ignore the gorgeous classical rhythms of the words and really concentrate on what is being stated, you will find that quite often the thinking is woolly and inconsequential. Nothing is really being said except I am Gore Vidal. So in that respect it could be argued that he is the Barbara Cartland of America's super-educated political aristocracy. He's an intellectual blitherer.

When, oh when, will I find some ink on paper that actually has something to tell me?

(The question of whether reading is a prerequisite to writing is, dare I say it, an open one. Vidal tells us that Tennessee Williams never read a single book in all the time he knew him. Henry Miller, who was a bibliophile if ever there was one, advised his readers, at the end of his life, not to read more but to read less, and get out of the house and live.)

Saturday, 29/03/08: merging with the architecture at the London Lesbian and Gay Film Festival!

To the National Film Theatre for my first night out at this year's Film Festival. My date for the evening was a gorgeous young Cypriot who had never been before. I said, "It's great, you always bump into your friends here." He said, "I won't bump into anyone. I never go out and I don't know any gay people." But sure enough, he was waving and nodding to his various acquaintances as they hove into view. "Hello... Hello... Hello..." This, Reader, is the moment in our year when internalised homophobia melts away, and we glide up and down sleek designer corridors saying hi to our lovely friends and believing, at last, with complete conviction, that we deserve to be on this planet just like everyone else. It's as if we merge with the architecture, if you catch my drift. The NFT has recently been lavishly extended and the space is super-fabulous. It makes you feel modern and intelligent just to be there.

We were there to see The Walker, which was showing in the spanking new Studio. This is a little cube of a room which seats only about fifty, yet by dint of technological wizardly the image, projected across the relatively short distance, appears huge on the screen—a boon if you left the house wearing last year's glasses. Now it would be catty and unfair to say that the film was less interesting than the auditorium (I reserve such unreasonable scorn for Chinese films involving actors on wires). However, it is Saturday morning and I have nothing better to do than be breezily sarcastic, so I shall begin.

Woody Harrelson was about as convincing as you'd expect in the role of a homosexual. Presumably he was fresh from his triumph on the London stage as the drunken, defrocked priest in Tennessee's Night of the Iguana, and felt that it might be fun to be miscast again. Meanwhile the rest of the team — writer-director Paul Schrader, Pathé, the Isle of Man, Lauren Bacall — thought it might be fun to make a movie about a homosexual that didn't have any homosexuality in it, in which they play mournful Bryan Ferry tracks in leather bars, and the hero never goes within a yard of his boyfriend. My cleaner would have been very severe about this film. He would have said, "Not enough nudity."

I have been very unimaginative in my choice of films this year. I am only seeing three. The other two are Todd Hayne's I'm Not There (in which I am not expecting to find any trace of the unnatural vice) and—by way of saving grace—Bruce la Bruce's new porno zombie flick, which I am seeing with my sister's hairdresser. But hey, it's not how many films you see, or even which films you see. All that matters is that you show up a couple of times.

Wednesday, 2/04/08: Wallowing in sophistication at the gay filmfest

The cruellest month is upon us, so back to the NFT, this time accompanied by the lovely Gil, to feast on Todd Haynes’ lovely Dylan anti-biopic I’m Not There. Firstly I should state that I once had lunch with Todd Haynes. For this reason it would be in the worst possible taste for me to so much as hint that Mr Haynes’ film is anything less than tickety-boo. I leave that to the carpers and the snipers of this world who have nothing better to do than to piss on other people’s bonfires. Far better to wallow in this strange and very long cinematic treat and allow its many beauties to seep into our souls unhindered by the critical function. So what if the fun persists for two and a quarter hours without the encumbrance of a storyline? What are we—old ladies? So what if Heath Ledger and Charlotte Gainsbourg are required to play scenes of leaden matrimonial malaise that would perhaps not retain the attention of a viewer of daytime soaps? So what that the fake documentary interviews look like what Woody Allen was doing fifteen years ago, scrubbed clean of all that unnecessary wit? When we watch a Todd Haynes movie we are wafted into a nebulous cinema heaven where longueurs are the stuff of life and stating the obvious is an exciting and liberating force. I for one will be there in the front row with my crackly bag of popcorn when his next filmic conundrum is unveiled.

The lovely Gil, who had not had any hand in the choice of the movie and had turned up, as it were, sight unseen, gently enquired as we left the auditorium why I’m Not There had been screened in a gay and lesbian film festival. I said, Because Kate Blanchett bound her tits and played a man. What more do you want?—Oh I see, said Gil. Shall we have dinner?

Monday, 7/04/08: Finally a decent movie: Bruce la Bruce's delirious Otto; or, Up With Dead People

Your intrepid blogger is in bed today, not with a hot Italian SM top stud (although we live in hope) but with the consequences of not cooking his food properly. So the flag is at half-mast, but the blog must go on. Yesterday afternoon was my third and final visit to the gay filmfest, and a roaring success it was too. Take it from me: if your festival has been a little lacklustre, a Bruce la Bruce movie is almost guaranteed to pep things up.

I used to find Mr la Bruce a little annoying, but over the years I have come to recognise him as something of a treasure. Wit is thin on the ground these days, and Bruce la Bruce is witty. I think he only really came into his own with his last one, Raspberry Reich. That one had a strong flavour of early John Waters, not because of any stylistic homage but because Waters is the only other filmmaker ever to have been so angry and so funny at the same time. Bruce la Bruce has humility, an almost unheard-of quality in the snake-pit of movie-land. In the midst of his anarchist rantings there is always a kind of serenity, an awareness that life is very complex and that no political theory is really true. Where Todd Haynes uses intellectual claptrap to aggrandise himself, Bruce la Bruce is more distanced, more ironic in his use of theory.

The new film, Otto; or, Up With Dead People, is cause for celebration. It is everything we could have hoped for. The production values have gone up (lovely hi-def photography, excellent music and editing) but the fun bad acting has not been left behind. It is particularly fun that all actors are German, struggling with the sophisticated, witty English-language script. And don’t get me wrong. When I say “bad” I don’t mean that the acting doesn’t work. It’s just that it works in a way that multiplex cinema doesn’t usually allow. There is a strong feeling of silent cinema. The lead zombie, Jey Crisfar, speaks his lines very badly indeed, but as a visual presence he burns himself into your retinas. Like the more stagey Almodovar, la Bruce understands that cinema is a dream, and what really matters is the pictures. Jey Crisfar really does look iconic enough to look at for ninety minutes, which is more than you can say for many a Hollywood star.

Writing comedy is hard. Bruce la Bruce’s solution is not to bother. What we get in its place is a rambling, nonsensical art-piece packed full or gorgeous and hilarious features. A love-struck gay zombie couple blush shyly at each other over breakfast. A domineering lady film-maker, who has cast the zombie Otto in the lead role of her film, barks at him impatiently, “Come along, we haven’t got all day!” And just in case you might have turned up hoping for a zombie orgy scene, this too is thoughtfully provided.

This is not primarily a sex film. There are plenty of sexy bits, but it never happens—as it always used to in la Bruce’s films—that everything stops for a slice of porn. Erections are glimpsed but not lingered over, and nobody visibly cums. The final orgy is, dare I say it, much more about photography than sex, the sort of thing that, mutatis mutandis, you could screen in a modern art gallery. All of which leads us to the beatific conclusion—or is it merely a hope?—that our hero may one day make films that play to a wider audience. Wouldn’t it be fun to see Cate Blanchett and Woody Harrelson play Bruce la Bruce outsiders? And then again—maybe it wouldn’t.

Saturday, 12/04/08: A good play is like a fine wine: worth waiting for.

When I told my dear agent that I was going to take up my grandfather's practice of putting a new play away in a drawer for a year before showing it, she was, I think, disturbed. I softened the news by adding, "Well, that was the thirties. Things were slower then. Maybe I'll just keep it under wraps for six months." But secretly I promised myself that the figure would be nine. Reader, I have always rushed my work. Like a feeble candle in the howling gales of ambition, I have always been more interested in the effect it would have on an audience than in any intrinsic excellence it might possess. Like Bros, I have sung "When will I be famous?" as I feverishly, thoughtlessly hammered out my next would-be triumph. But the years are stern teachers and I have acquired wisdom like some people acquire corns and bunyons. I now know that objectivity is the Holy Grail, and that my capacity to lie to myself is highly developed. The only way ahead is to slow down, to disengage, to back off and, after a decent interval, to reappraise.

What I can report is that I have successfully kept a new play fully under wraps for, I think, seven months. No-one has seen in it but me and my spirit-guides. Today I decided to slowly gear up for a final tweek before unveling it to my nearest and dearest, and I read it through prior to reprinting. Well, those seven months are paying off. I am still significantly refining the dialogue, identifying weak exchanges and using them, as one must, as opportunities for new strengths. I shall tweek, reprint, mull over, then put back in the drawer for another month and maybe unveil in June.

There is a certain kind of comic style for which this kind of polish and re-polish is essential. I am talking about the Orton/Oscar tradition, where the pleasure lies in a kind of long-drawn-out sex-act between the author and the English language. Of course character and plot matter, but the real action is taking place in that part of the mind where words and images are married and divorced. The goal is to create an experience for the listener of high-octane verbal madness, simultaneously crystal clear and giddily opaque. For this to work, every line must be a part of the conspiracy.

This genre has no clearly agreed-upon name. One wants to signal that it isn't really comedy as we know it, but the word "farce" brings with it excruciating misunderstandings and punishments. As soon as the word "farce" is uttered, the portcullises of disapproval come thundering down. People these days spend a lot of time in front of the TV and relatively little time in the theatre, and get confused by these technical terms. I once wrote and produced a two-hour dramatic comedy with a bitter-sweet tone and a sober, one might almost say Chekhovian ending (Wild Fruit, Reader), and the Pink Paper reported that it was a "sit-com". One can either shoot oneself or just soldier on.

Thursday, 17/04/08: Deliciously exposed

I'm one of those women who puts the lipstick on, wipes it off, puts it back on again, if you know what I mean. I'll be noisy and vulgar and an ego-monster for ten years, and then I'll retire to a modest flat in Brighton for a decade, meditating profoundly and spurning the world. And then I'll be back, somehow re-converted to the noble cause of self-promotion and general mania. Lipstick, no lipstick, lipstick. Mini-skirt, habit, mini-skirt.

Actually I leant much from my decade as a dull person. I carry some small grain of humility back with me as I tremulously re-enter earth's over-heated atmosphere. I am aware that there is a high possibility that everything I say is complete nonsense, but that in itself should not be a reason to remain silent. This is the paperless age: I am killing no trees by blogging.

My friend the howlingly wise Darren of Nottingham came to visit last week-end, and as usual he had new pearls of wisdom with which to dumbfound me. After a mediocre dinner in a local restaurant and a quick gander at some Scissor Sisters DVDs, Darren revealed the following brand spanking new insight to me:

1. We know more than we will ever say.
2. We say more than we will ever write.

What good is knowledge if it is not imparted? We may think we impart our knowledge, but do we? Most of it just sits in our heads. Some of it spills out in conversation. A tiny fraction of it is nailed down as words on a page or screen.

There comes a point in life when you realise this, and you stop worrying about whether or not you're making a fool of yourself and start talking, or better still, writing. At first you think, I am just a humble worm! Who could possibly be interested in the contents of my brain? But then you get to thinking, well, maybe a handfull of freaks might like to tune in. In my case, my areas of knowledge are kind of specialised. I know a great deal about the philosophical underpinnings of glam rock; I hold impassioned opinions about a handful of gay playwrights circa 1890-1960; and I have first-hand knowledge of what it means to be an urban homosexual tormented by a profound and life-long identity crisis. On the one hand you could say, who could possibly want to tune in to a loser like that? But on the other hand you could say, well, it's a big world out there, maybe there's a constituency for it.

Who visits this website? Who knows? (People do, and the figures are slowly but inexorably rising). Sometimes I get feedback. This evening I was out at the theatre, and a rather gorgeous friend and colleague said, "I... er... I read your new erotic short story... I really enjoyed it..." I checked in my head which filthy tale I had posted here for April, and remembered it was the one about making a naked boy eat vegan chocolate cake from a dog-bowl, and I felt deliciously exposed.

Saturday, 19/04/08: The things they do to you when you're unconscious!

Oh the joys of watching heterosexuals playing Tennessee Williams! ... So Phil Setren and I take ourselves off to the trendy new Courtyard Theatre (in Hoxton!!!) where these people are doing four short Tennessee plays. The show has been getting lukewarm reviews, but I (naively) tell Phil, "I really don't care what the acting's like, I just love hearing Tennessee's words spoken." Little did I know. One of the plays worked nicely and one of them half-worked, but one was a stinker. It included a perfromance from a presumably heterosexual actor who apparently hadn't noticed that his character was a male hooker (and maybe junkie to boot) who was bringing home his ill-gotten gains to his girlfriend, thus driving her mad. His part contained lines like "The things they do to you when you're unconscious!" You'd think this might have got the actor (who I think was, alas, also the director) thinking. But no, he just played it as some whacky guy who went to a lot of parties. It's sobering to think that Tenn's plays were written in code to get past 1950s censorship, yet we clever twenty-first century people (who know so much about sex!) are often as dumb as the 50s squares when it comes to reading between the lines.

Wednesday, 23/04/08: Hello, Jung lovers, wherever you are!*

Holed up at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig, Monaghan, Ireland, eating voraciously and concentrating on my new screenplay. They have put me in Tyrone Guthrie's study where, I am informed, the great man actually keeled over and died. It's a gorgeous room with a panelled wooden ceiling. When I am not writing deathless comedy I am devouring "Man and His Symbols" by the divine Carl Gustav and others. My current spiritual director has instructed me to record and interpret every dream I have, which has made me rush to Jung for help and encouragement.

Jung points out that the unconscious is not "the trash-can of consciousness" (as Freud thought), not just the repository of tired old memories and complexes, but a realm in its own right, from which entirely new insights may emerge. The point of dreams is that they tell us something we didn't know before, not something that we did. Which leads me to think: surely the point of art is to express what wasn't known before. And if that is the case, then a piece of art is necessarily something that its creator does not fully understand, at least not yet, not at the time of creation. So the challenge for the artist is to choose projects which place him in an area of uncertainty which is somewhere between stimulating and intolerable, somewhere between the banal known and the intractable unknown. And this is why the artist's life can be so exasperating. It is necessary to both know, and not know, what you are doing.

Perhaps this explains a phenomenon that has bugged me from time to time: sometimes a measure of stupidity is quite helpful in art. Don't you just hate it when one of your contemporaries blunders into a project with all the energy and enthusiasm of thoughtlessness, and gets a whole lot of stuff right? Mm-hm. So annoying. The answer, I think, is to undersell yourself a little. Choose projects that are just a tiny bit trashier than your ponsy superego would like you to go for. Give yourself a break. Follow your whims. Examine your processes up to a point, and then stop. Pop the kettle on and sing along to some Lou Reed.

Trying to be clever can be exhausting. So by way of light relief I am planning my triumphant come-back as an obscure glam-rock chanteur. I have a red feather boa which a friend gave me, and I think this would go rather well with a suitably distressed wife-beater vest and one of those hats that Babydaddy wears. My friend the wise Andy Saich is mooting an all-male cabaret show at the Soho Revue Bar in July, and I (God willing) will be trotting out a couple of my party-pieces. All I need is an accompanist.

Also to come: my amazing new theory of The Meaning of Glam Rock, incorporating my mind-blowing thoughts on The Meaning of the Electric Guitar Solo. But give me time. These momentous thoughts must not be rushed.

(*The line is not original. It belongs to my friend Maxime Decharne.)

Sunday, 27/04/08: Eating well at Annaghmakerrig

Today they served up a big roast lamb lunch at the Tyrone Guthrie Centre. I am the only man staying here, and the women asked me to carve. I felt quite the alpha gorilla. But on to more important things.

Jung and his chums were quite happy to talk of the feminine as being submissive and the masculine dominant. Nowadays we hesitate to bandy such assumptions about, but nevertheless it's fertile ground. Here's my theory for today:

To succeed in the world, you need to get your sub/dom balance right. You need to know when to submit to the dictates of society, and when to assert yourself. If you are an artist, this is THE crucial question. To what extent do you pandar to the requirements of the market (if at all), and to what extent do you heroically turn your nose up at it and continue to produce your deathless work in splendid isolation (unmolested by phonecalls from the National Theatre or the Saatchis)? Submit too much and you've sold out; assert yourself too much and hey, that's terrific, but no-one's listening.

The best artists get it so deliriously right that the effect is atomic. The work comes across as both accessible and mind-blowing. We can't all be Oscar Wilde, but anyone interested in making high-quality comedy needs to fine-tune his sub-dom balance, because comedy depends on charm, and to be charming you have to play the game.

There are some makers of comedy who manage to be charming while maintaining a high degree of individualism. Bruce la Bruce is a heroic example of this type. But if you look carefully at his work (which has become increasingly charming over the years) you will find that while he is radical on many levels, he will, at the crucial moment, submit in a very profound way. He admits to being ridiculous.

Sunday, 4/05/08: Beastly headachy West End

Why is it that I always wake up with headache the morning after going to a West End show? Last night, the excellent Jamie Lloyd's production of The Lover and The Collection, two one-act Pinter plays from the early sixties. I have the programme in front of me for once so I can actually reveal cast-names. Richard Coyle! Gina McKee! Charlie Cox! All of them sexy and playing the script with the skill of concert violinists. Thank you, thank you, thank you, Jamie Lloyd, for realising that Pinter (like Coward) is not as easy to play as he appears, and that a directorial interpretation needs overview.

Our hero (the playwright I mean, not the director) did not escape the evening entirely unscathed. He seems to be a writer whose work walks a knife edge between genius and bullshit. The Lover is as fine as anything you are likely to see in a theatre, a red-hot slice of neurotic games-playing that poetically suggests the impossiblility of maintaining a unified identity and the conventions we evolve to make life tolerable. It's a great stageplay because it is obessed with language and communication. It pre-dates Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf by eight years. It plays like a dream.

The Collection is less interesting, the sort of Pinter that leaves you a little unsatisfied - what Ken Wilber would call "dinner without food." I mused, as I staggered home, that Pinter's relationship with the audience was, in good post-war stylee, somewhat adversarial, and I asked myself (trying not to be grumpy and old-fashioned) whether this were a legitimate artistic strategy or too radical an assault on the art-form. Teasing, annoying and short-changing an audience is a marvelously enjoyable passtime (if it were not, we would have been spared the work of Forced Entertainment), but proceed with caution. This road may not ultimately lead to creative triumph.

So what about that recurring headache? Is it because these venerable old theatres are badly ventilated? Or is it because one is sitting in the heart of an institution that seems to offer so much yet delivers so little? I used to aspire to have plays in the West End, like Grandad. But for some time now my spirit guides have been whispering to me to let it go. Some aspirations can drag you down.

Wednesday, 14/05/08: A reluctant poking

Before we go any further, perhaps a few things should be cleared up. I address my remarks to the General Reader. General Reader, homosexual men sometimes have sex. There are usually two people involved. Often it becomes necessary to decide who is going to be the boy and who the girl. There are a host of terms to describe these two roles. There is the misleading “top” and “bottom”. The most common terms are active and passive. Now as you may know there are internet sites where gay people go to find partners, and some of these - the ones which could loosely be described as beyond dishonour - offer the punter a selection of boxes to tick to place himself on the active-passive spectrum. The most notorious British site, Gaydar, offers these five boxes: active, active/versatile, versatile, passive/versatile and passive. Oh brave new world! All you have to do is tick a box, and you will find a partner whose needs exactly complement yours. Or will you?

I have spent a whole lifetime fretting about gay men’s attitude towards gender, but recently I have noticed that the profiles on Gaydar offer a sometimes mind-bending peek into the mind of the male homosexual as regards this point. Since the seventies, when butch became de rigueur and the era of swish was consigned to the dustbin of history, gay men have been at play in the fields of masculinity. Things have become less cartoon-like since the clone look fizzled out, but there remains a deep-seated prejudice against effeminacy. For as long as I can remember, gay men have been specifying in their (our) lonely hearts ads, “No fems.” What exactly does this mean, and what are the implications? No, I don’t have an answer; I merely fret about it.

The other day I saw a Gaydar profile where the guy had defined himself as “active/versatile” and specified that he was in search of a partner who was the same. Note that he was not suggesting a hook-up between two versatile men, which would at least have had sanity on its side. No, they needed to be both fundamentally “active”, but active men who would reluctantly allow the other to penetrate them because, well hey, how else could there be sex? If a man puts “versatile” in his profile he is already too effeminate: the word implies he might actually enjoy being poked. In such a strange and illogical world, pleasure can never be mutual and shared: it’s always one gorilla getting the better of another.

Most straight men these days are a hundred times more in touch with their feminine side than gay men, because they deal with women on a daily basis.

Saturday, 17/05/08: Unleash the beast!

Dare I report it, I have unleashed the beast. I.e, I have, after a good seven months of incubation, shown my new full-length play to my agent and to a friendly director, and we are going to have a little read-through chez moi next week, Noël Coward-style. So much for that: the fact that it is all too howlingly exciting is hardly news.

Most of the time in showbiz, writing happens too quickly. This is the first time in my life I have resisted the temptation to immediately go public with a new work. Despite the fact that I was chomping at the bit for a little action, I gritted my teeth and hid it in a drawer for seven long months. It was going to be nine; the fact that I held out for seven was a triumph.

Occasionally - maybe three or four times during that period of incubation - I took it out and had a little read. I snipped and pruned. Sometimes I would locate a little moment where I felt a stronger line was needed, and would spend days, weeks even, mulling it over and finally coming up with something I liked. I can also report that right to the end of incubating it I was finding areas to tighten, justify and polish. The lines I put in seven months after completing the play are some of the best ones.

My point is this: how can you really get things deliriously right when you've got people breathing down your neck and saying they want it yesterday (as is the case with most movie projects)? How can you find that elusive image which is simply a whole lot funnier than the one you thought of six months ago? Life is long. Why do we have to rush?

Hearing it read will now give me an opportunity to pick up on more weak spots and get a sense of what it will be like when actors sink their fangs into it.

Thursday, 19/06/08: Fretting about Ibsen with an elderly theatre dame

To the Almeida, to see Anthony Page’s excellent production of Ibsen’s Rosmersholm, featuring the feisty Helen McCrory (in a blond wig, perhaps to help us let go of her turn as Cherie Blair in The Queen) and a rather dishy Paul Hilton in the lead. But here’s my problem with Ibsen: what you get is two hours of electrifyingly intelligent, nuanced talk-theatre, followed by fifteen minutes of what an unkind critic might call melodramatic claptrap. Or to put it another way: this amazingly forward-looking dramatist staggers under the weight of his own construction, and can only resolve things by flying into the arms of old-fashioned theatrical tropes such as luridly tragic endings. In this case, the lead man says to the lead woman, (I paraphrase), “I have completely lost faith in you because you - in a passive-aggressive kind of way - encouraged my poor deranged wife to kill herself by jumping in the river. The only way I will ever believe you really love me is if you jump in the river too.” And the lead woman says, “OK.” And the lead man says, “I’ll come with you. Let’s both kill ourselves.” And she says, “Fine.” And off they go.

The elderly dame sitting next to me thought this was a perfectly convincing ending. We got talking and I recognised her as the fabulous actress who recently appeared as Prism in the Penelope Keith Importance of Being Earnest. When I revealed that I was a play-writing person, she said, Well make sure you write some parts for eccentric elderly actresses. I went home with a huge grin on my face. Meeting her was far more fun than Rosmersholm.

Saturday 19/07/07: Don't be afraid of pleasure!/The Female of The Species

The extent of my madness is a closely-guarded secret. But recent diary entries give some indication of it. In the entry for Wednesday 16th July we come across a rant about contemporary London theatre, which concludes, “My suspicion is that the next wave will be kitsch, camp, archetypal and (in the best sense of the word) sensationalistic. The new writers will write things that don’t need special pleading, things that will rampage across the stage like whirlwinds...”

In the entry for Thursday 17th July we find, in block capitals: “CONTEMPORARY ART IS SUSPICIOUS OF PLEASURE.” And yes, mad though that sounds, I’ll stand by it. Not only contemporary art but also contemporary audiences. You could drive an audience insane with pleasure and they wouldn’t thank you for it. Pleasure is what we all obsessively - guiltily - seek, but when we find it, it is never enough. We would rather have validation, and no-one finds validation in a good time. In England we get validation from believing that we are clever. This is one respect in which America is a somewhat preferable proposition. There, they get it from being rich.

On the “what’s hot” front, I can report that Joanna Murray-Smith’s The Female of the Species is an interesting and sometimes hilarious play that is getting a pretty good production down at the Vaudeville, featuring the sublime Con O’Neill as a taxi-driver with a line in masculist rhetoric. The play, funnily enough, conforms precisely to my “dogma” rules for playwriting (see the “Vow of Theatrical Chastity” page of this website) - and in fact conforms to them rather better than I could ever hope to do myself. The thing is one unbroken scene, with no interval and not the faintest whisper of post-Brechtian stagecraft from beginning to end. It’s even more classic than the pre-war well-made plays - it’s positively seventeenth-century in its single-mindedness.

The play is an intellectual farce, and as such belongs to a tiny genre that probably contains only about a dozen plays worth mentioning, of which What The Butler Saw and The Importance of Being Earnest are two. The question of exactly how to act these plays has never been satisfactorily answered, and although this is a classy production, acting style is nevertheless an issue. Eileen Atkins (in the lead “Germaine Greer” role) and the two main male role are perfect; the other two female parts are less successful, not because they are badly acted but because actresses haven’t quite located the elusive tone required for this sort of thing. It must be dramatically credible yet also a kind of mad theatrical joke in which the real laws of human behaviour are suspended. Dear Con as the taxi driver seizes his moment perfectly. He comes striding onto the stage about two thirds of the way through and, without waiting for introduction or permission of any sort, launches into his text like a man with a large pile of wood to chop.

Whether or not Joanna Murray-Smith is the new Oscar Wilde remains to be seen, but this is certainly a bold piece of theatre writing, bold in ways which most people probably won’t notice. It is extremely reverent of theatre itself - so reverent, in fact, that the writer arguably over-exposes herself (the classical unities leave you with nowhere to hide). I think it’s a good sign that it’s out there. Joanna Murray-Smith is interested in ideas, but actually she’s more interested in pleasure. Good for her.

PS: I have just read Michael Billington's review of the play in The Guardian, and it ends: "What I longed for was the cut-and-thrust of real debate, in which you find your prejudices punctured through the joy of intellectual combat." The joy of intellectual combat indeed! This is precisely what I'm talking about. Excuse me while I pack my bags for America.

Monday, 28/07/08: Neil LaBute's Fat Pig

As you know, I have sworn a vow of chastity not only as a playwright but also as a reviewer, and so I never bitch about the productions of other playwrights. However, I can report that my flatmate thought Neil LaBute's Fat Pig (currently playing at the Trafalgar Studios) was a complete disgrace, and I can see his point. LaBute is one of those writers who seems to have no internal quality control - his work can certainly be sublime, as we know from In The Company of Men, but it can also be anything but. English audiences may be baffled by this one, which depicts the terrible plight of a man who falls in love with a fat woman and gets hounded by his workmates as a result. It's a bit like watching a play about a man who suffers terrible traumas upon falling in love with someone with uneven teeth. How awful for you, I'm so sorry! Speaking as a gay man, I am statistically quite likely to fall in love with someone who is HIV-positive, which would be a real issue.

The play, which provides the lovely Robert Webb and a strong-ish cast with plenty of opportunity for nasty comedy mugging, is oddly thin. At the end it just stops. There seems to be no curve, no shape, no movement. The strange thought occurs that the playwright, who is of course a very successful screenwriter/director, doesn't actually take theatre particularly seriously - it's just something he tosses off in an idle moment. There was a sense of disappointment in the house. I overheard a woman comment, during the interval, "It's like watching TV."

Monday, 4/08/08: the wrong turd

But enough of all this fretting about what's hot and what's not. Who cares? It's August, it's my birthday month, and I took a solemn vow many years ago never to do much work in Birthday Month. Leo is the most fun-loving of the signs, ruled by the sun, and so when when the sun sweeps majestically into our constellation, we down-tools immediately and turn our attention to the enjoyment of life.

Yesterday I was strolling in Greenwich Park with my handsome friends Garry, Duncan and Sean, accompanied, on four legs, by Austin and Olive. We talked about dog-ownership. Sean fretted that picking up pooh after a dog is the bit that deters him. Garry, as a seasoned dogger, explained that picking up one's dog's doings is not such a hardship; if you love the mutt, it's a small price to pay. In fact, says Garry, in winter the pooh (once safely wrapped in plastic) can serve as an impromptu hand-warmer. Such is the bond between man and his best friend. But here's the interesting thing. Imagine you bend down to pick up the thing in question, but instead of encountering a pleasing warmth you encounter icy chill. In a moment of horror you realise you have picked up THE WRONG TURD. The excrement was not produced by your best friend but by ANY OLD HOUND. The effect is not the same at all. Dropping the pooh like a scorpion, you reel back, besmirched and weirded out. You shudder as you progress on your way. Your day is irrevocably tainted, and no matter how many lemon bubble-baths you subsequently take, it will remain the day on which you picked up THE WRONG TURD. Such are the mysterious workings of the human heart.

Friday, 08/08/08: Lick a boot for the planet!

What is the planet’s problem at this moment?
Greed.
What is greed?
The attempt to fill a sense of inner emptiness.
Where does the sense of inner emptiness come from?
From lack of joy.
What causes that?
A number of things, one of them being disconnection from our authentic sexuality.

Thinking these things over, I begin to understand where Kai Ehrhardt is coming from in his Authentic Eros workshops. The sorting out of our sex-lives is a matter of the greatest urgency.

Up-and-running, out-of-the-closet gay men sometimes come across as pesty and over-sexed, but that is perhaps because the process of coming out of the closet (if indeed we do come all the way out, right out beyond fear and shame) leaves us with a profound sense of the importance of sex. Heterosexuals need to come out of the closet too, as enthusiastically sexual people, but their issue (I imagine) is where to find a sense of their own oppression/repression to kick against.

On TV recently I saw a documentary about a Victorian couple, a gentleman and a serving woman, who had a richly sexual, very kinky relationship that lasted for fifty years. They secretly married. At one point it was revealed that the woman had enjoyed licking the man’s boots. “And this,” commented a contemporary female historian, “is the part which we today find problematic.” I thought, Speak for yourself! But I can see that it must be more difficult for a heterosexual woman to say yes to the old boot-licking urge than it is for a gay man.

But hey - we haven’t got long to sort out the planetary crisis. So get out there, plant a tree and lick a few boots! (Helpful tip: If you buff the boots thoroughly beforehand, you won't get polish on your tongue.)

Saturday, 16/08/08: Pleasure - what else should bring anyone anywhere?

Thinking aloud here. The superficial meaning of farce is that beneath our social veneer we are all pursuing pleasure, and in this sense farce is a critique of hypocrisy. But the radical meaning of farce is that the pursuit of pleasure ultimately becomes a burden, and this is what gives what you might call uberfarce its resonance and danger.

In a Feydeau farce, the engine of the action is largely the fear of unmasking and disgrace - ie, the machinations of hypocrisy. In The Importance, this engine is still working, but we have also moved beyond. The pursuit of pleasure has become shameless, endless, and futile: otherwise respectable aristocrats have taken to dying their hair blonde and gorging on buttered crumpets. The implication is that ultimately pleasure does not bring pleasure - a gorgeously decadent (in the Camille Paglia sense) concept, but one that also contains the seed of an austere spirituality. Pleasure pleases the body, but leaves the spirit fretful and starved.

Try reading Krishnamurti and a rollicking stage farce at the same time - you'll see what I mean.

Tuesday, 16/09/08: The Women!

My friend Fenton has a habit of dragging me to see the kitschest, baddest movies. He has various ways of overcoming my resistance. A number of years ago he got me an upgrade to business class when we were flying across the States, on the condition that I watched Notting Hill with him. Naturally I was desperate to be spared, and throughout the film I was crying, "Please, please can I stop watching now?" But Fenton was an implacable tormentor: "No! You must watch! Watch! That is the price you have to pay!"

Well last night he bought me a delicious dinner and then made me watch The Women. Fenton is a connoisseur of kitsch and felt obliged to view it, but needed company. Of course it was appalling. A jolly romp with Meg Ryan based on an old 1930s classic was never going to be much cop. And the film did indeed boast a script that should have died of shame. I won't score cheap points by quoting naff lines, it would be too easy. But if I may, I would like to muse briefly on certain gorgeous little questions the film raised about gender.

The film has no men in it. Everyone's a woman. When they walk down the street in New York, the passers-by are all women. Marvellous stuff! But this is no sci-fi extravaganza depicting a world after the elimination of the pesty male sex. Far from it. Men are present in the story, but they are never seen: fathers, husbands, lovers, all being bitched about, abandoned, forgiven, pursued, blah blah blah. But this leaves the filmmakers with the awkward question of what exactly is going to happen in this film with no men? Are women going to become a presence in world politics and put an end to war? Are they going to intercept Japanese whaling ships? Are they going to bring up a new generation to be free of greed and the fear of otherness? No, none of these things. The women in this movie have manicures, shop for lingerie and give fancy lunch parties. In other words, they're the Stepford Wives, but kind of self-sufficient and not too fussed about pleasuring their husbands. Reader, this film was written and directed by a woman.

I am happy to admit that I'm prickly on the subject of the genders - blame my childhood, my sexuality, whatever. But actually being prickly can be fun. Where some people blush and look away, I prick up my ears. Yesterday I was reading Shantideva's Guide To The Bodhisattva Way Of Life (an old Buddhist text) and at the end there was this marvellous chapter made up of a long string of blessings and prayers. May the sad become happy. May the poor become rich. That sort of thing. My favourite one was "May all the women in the world become men." If I had fondly imagined sexism didn't exist in 8th-century Tibet, I was put right. But it did make me think. Perhaps the equivalent modern blessing would be, "May all the men in the world become women."

Monday, 27/10/08: playwriting thoughts

Today I was talking to my agent about a new monologue I've written. She pointed out that a paragraph towards the end of the monologue gives certain vital information about the character of the speaker (self-oppressive, pessimistic). Shouldn't this information have been given earlier on? I disagreed. I felt that a good actor would study the monologue, create a character and then deliver the monologue from the point of view of this character. The later paragraphs of the piece would be his subtext from the word go.

This conversation made me realise how very different a monologue is from a short story. A theatrical text is not written for a reader, it is written to be heard by an audience from the mouth of an actor. If the monologue needs to be read twice to be understood, so be it. A playwright is not required to deliver work that "works" on first reading.

There is a huge difference between dramatic work and prose fiction. Drama is in some ways more nebulous, and hence can be hard to evaluate and judge. Have you ever tried reading an Alan Aykbourne play? They read like drivel. But reserve your judgement! Because if they are acted very well, they can be quite convincing. Reading plays is a very particular skill. To say that a play "only" works if delivered by a fantastic actor is not a criticism of the play. On the contrary. Some playwrights are very highly tuned to the needs and potentials of actors, and write accordingly.

Tuesday the Tooth of December, 08: The strange case of Harold Pinter

Ok, so off I go to the Duke of York's theatre to see Michael Gambon in Pinter's No Man's Land. The curtain rises, the set is (of course) divine. David Bradley is on top form, reprising, more or less, his role as the needy tramp in last year's The Caretaker (only this time slightly better dressed). The first half is really good, mysterious and disturbing, with Gambon electrifying as a paralytically drunk old git having disjointed visions of unnamed horrors. The second half is less good - everyone sobers up, it's time for a champagne breakfast served by strangely articulate gangsters (lovely to hear the word "cunt" and "champagne" in the same sentence), and the play limps to its close in a meaningless succession of baroque Pinter monologues, the kind that actors love and audiences quite like too. The curtain falls and we all applaud like mad. Then we all file out, feeling a little short-changed, as one does after seeing almost any Pinter play except for a couple. I'm not just being bitchy and sour. With my hand on my heart I can honestly say that I don't think anyone in the audience looked particularly chuffed. Short-changed! Short-changed! Where's the stroytelling? Where's the unfolding? Where's the resolution?

One could go on. One could moan about the playwright recycling old material, getting out of his depth, coming on like a faded Xerox of T S Eliot. "You're in no-man's-land," bleats the silly old git at the end. Well, OK. If you say so.

So much for the down-side. What's actually more interesting is the strange feeling you get, watching this play, that even though Pinter may have lost his way, he's still more interesting, and more enjoyable on a minute-to-minute reckoning, than most. Why? Because he is writing about language. He puts the theatre to good use. Language is what theatre is. Of course, if you can manage deathless drama, so much the better. But great language without great drama is more theatrical than great drama without great language.

Thursday, 11/12/08: A terrific night at the Royal Court!!

I like theatre because it has no point of view. Even if that’s an illusion, I like it. Cinema seems such an omnipotent medium, but in one sense it has its feet nailed to the floor: ie, it is forever doomed to be about the experience of looking at the world through a pair of eyes. Cinema gives us landscapes, and sweeping helicopter shots of course, but I think theatre has more of a sense of three-dimensional space. I like boxy interior stage sets because spatially speaking they don’t mince words. There are six directions in space and a box has six sides. Theatre, more than film, can convey they experience of things going on behind your back. I love the interplay between onstage and offstage. A play must be relatively economical with its characters, so that when one of them goes offstage he remains a palpable presence; the chances are he will return.

But most of all, what a play offers is the feeling of being not one individual person but perhaps four or five or six. How refreshing, and how relevant to our times! How strangely old-fashioned that makes film seem - trapped within the individual consciousness - how fifties!

Talking of the fifties, your intrepid Psychodrome theatre-whore can report that Alexi Kaye Campbell’s new play The Pride, upstairs at the Royal Court, is an excellent piece that is being given a perfectly ravishing production, thanks to the ever-redoubtable director Jamie Lloyd, designer Soutra Gilmour and a peachy cast: Lyndsey Marshal, Bertie Carvel and the lovely JJ Feild, a strong actor who happens to look exactly like the young Jude Law, which means that for just £15 you can have an experience very similar to watching Jude Law live onstage in a nice small theatre.

Joking aside, hats off to Mr Campbell (who was very much present at the event, accepting congratulations from his delighted public) for writing a play that was almost like a proper classic piece of theatre. There were no monologues directed to the audience and the dialogue had great depth and delicacy. Half the play is set in the 50s and the other half is present-day: we witness and compare the fate of homosexuals then and now. My only quibble would be that the 50s stuff was truly riveting, whereas the present-day stuff was merely good. My suspicion - completely uncorroborated - is that the very thing that got this play produced is the very thing that stops it from being an instant classic. Mr Campbell can write proper dramatic scenes, in the sense that Pinter and Tennessee write them. I, and I believe the rest of the audience, would have been happy to wallow in his sombre 50s tale of repression and self-hatred, heartbreakingly pitched somewhere between Brief Encounter and Bent. But the play’s business was to raise issues about gay identity and gay pride. There’s nothing wrong with issues, and in this case they were intelligently handled, but an issue is less electrifying than a well-written scene.

Act One of this play concludes with a scene between two men which is as authentic, painful and well-realised as anything you are likely to see in a year. (The couple sitting next to me drifted out of the auditorium, stunned, convinced that that was the end. But no, I said, there is a second act.) Act two didn’t quite have the same ferocity, but continued to deliver gripping scenes of 1950s misery. My date and I agreed that truly good work doesn’t make you feel envious, it just makes you feel good. I woke up this morning and thought, Hm. Issues versus drama. Perhaps a playwright needs to keep his head free of issues. Perhaps this is why I still have a lingering suspicion of the clever-clever intellectual life - the books, the journalism, the dinner-parties, the symposia. I could never keep up, and perhaps it was because I didn’t want to. Issues will rot your brain, will take you away from the magical fabric of life. The electrifying present moment - how rich and ambiguous it is! So very different from any sort of discussion about the rights and wrongs of this or that.

Friday, 19/12/08: Groundhog Day at the Old Vic: Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests

At vast expense, I took my Mum to see Alan Ayckbourn's Norman Conquests at the Old Vic this week. It's a set of three full-length plays that cover the same period of time, one set in the living room, one in the dining room, and one in the garden. You have to go on three separate nights. One's attention is caught: what a bold idea. Do the plays really interlock? Is each play, as is claimed, self-sufficient? And can you really see them in any order? You think, my god, this playwright must be a genius to pull that off. The reality is a little less glorious. The plays aren't self-sufficient and do require to be seen in a certain order. And the amazing feat of the the three views of one week-end is only pulled off because more or less nothing happens.

The Old Vic had been laboriously converted into an "in-the-round" situation - a configuration probably more suited to austere morality pieces than wafer-thin romps. The design, such as it was (you don't get much design in the round) was hideous, although I gleaned some fleeting pleasure from the fact that Amelia Bullmore had made herself up as Ziggy Stardust. The acting was good, although the men were more fun than the women. I have a theory about this. Ayckbourn's point of view, if you can call it that, is that men are twits and women are frigid. Your average contemporary actor is more than happy to portray a twit, but the actresses have a harder time. They can do frigid, but they refuse to make a joke of it. They play it like Lear. In the original 1974 production they had Penelope Keith and Felicity Kendall (romping with Michael Gambon and Tom Courtenay). I imagine it was funnier than the current revival (although, to be fair, Stephen Mangan is sublime as the universally irresisitible Norman).

They say the critics turned against Ayckbourn - that the man just carried on writing exactly the same stuff he always had, but was one day ejected from the West End, leaving us bereft of commercially viable new comedy. Watching tonight's action, one thought, well, perhaps they were right. There is no doubt that his stuff works, provided it is done by very good actors. Like Pinter and (heaven help us) Beckett, Ayckbourn powers his plays with a kind of vaudeville sensibility, ie, he provides his actors with what they need to produce laughter. But the same could be said for many a Coco the Clown routine. Perhaps the critics felt that enough was enough. Perhaps they ran shrieking from the theatres, shredding their programmes for A Chorus of Disapproval and Woman In Mind, crying, "Bring on Caryl Churchill! She may be a bore and she'll never tell a decent joke, but at least she's not Alan Ayckbourn!"

So now we have a contemporary theatre where everyone is terrified of comedy, lest we slip into our old bad habits and start chortling about suburban infidelity again.

What was Ayckbourn's crime? Lack of focus. Lack of toughness. Lack of point of view. Fair enough.

Saturday, 20.12/08: ... and another thing...!

Regarding my recent three evenings at the Old Vic, I also wish to add that the audience was one of the most frightening I have encountered. Everyone looked more or less the same, and unless I was hallucinating, there were a lot of rather rude people pushing and shoving at the bar - rude rich people that is, with loud voices and cross expressions, people whose money had not bought them good manners. The atmosphere was quite different from the Royal Court, for example, or even Shaftsbury Avenue, where the rude British rich are to some extent diluted by tourists. I made a promise to myself there and then that I would only write plays in which all the characters were male homosexuals. I know it's rather an extreme position to take, but frankly, anything that might keep these braying bullies away from my plays will have to do.

Joking aside, my issue is this: modern playwrights quite rightly want to signal to their audience that they are not writing for lazy, stupid middle-class people who just want to be congratulated for not thinking for themselves. So they place plenty of clear blue water between themselves and the likes of Ayckbourn. I like old-fashioned stage comedy, but I also have a mind of my own. So for now it seems that the best solution is to bring on the poufs.