Originally written for People United, 21 June 2014

One of the very great pleasures of my writing life occurred on Friday. Over breakfast I wrote a few stanzas, in a loose sort of metre, with half a rhyme-scheme. In late afternoon I heard them sung back to me by Boff Whalley, transformed but recognisable, raw material mined carved and polished in a few short hours. Seasoned songwriters will be yawningly familiar with this sensation but for me, a fat-fingered guitarist and toad-throated singer, it appears as nothing other than a miracle. Even more giddyingly, we then wrote another one. The pure miracle of it, though, was just one part of why I was so excited. It was also exciting because of 2p pieces. I’ll explain.

I’ve spent this week in residence at Manchester Museum with writer-composer Boff Whalley, director Sarah Punshon and theatremaker Josh Coates, exploring the extraordinary collections, preparatory to making a large-scale participatory performance called Wonderstruck, to be performed there in November. We’ll be working with (hopefully) over a hundred performers, including five choirs, to create a weekend-long performance inspired by the wonders of the museum collection.

It’s not hard to be wonderstruck by that collection. During the course of this week we’ve been meeting the museum’s curators and staff, and they are as fine a collection of humans as you could encounter. It’s hard to imagine a group of people more collectively enthused by their work and their subject. To take just one example, I never thought the time would come when I’d be excited by geology, but an hour with David Gelsthorpe, the museum’s Curator of Earth Science Collections was enough to change that. Three-hundred-million year-old fossils! Specimens collected by Marie Stopes because of an encounter with a Japanese love rat! A meteorite as old as the earth and as big as a football! And a hundred and eighty million years ago, those bones were swimming in the sea!

We started with the idea of using performance and song to amplify the wonder of the museum’s collections, but we’ve quickly realised that it can go much further than that. What is wonder for? The piece has been co-commissioned by the museum and People United, an organisation whose mission is to increase the amount of pro-social behaviour in the world. We want to broaden that, on this project, to include pro-environmental behaviour. The museum, a relatively small one with an incredibly diverse collection, makes it very easy to see connections through history – and not just between us and the humans who made the fingerprints on that 30,000 year-old pot, but also between a 180-million year old fossil fish and the frogs in the vivarium. It’s not just about us.

Can a weekend of performance ever really have an impact on people’s behaviour, however brilliantly realised it might be? I think it can – but only as part of a wider culture of social and environmental awareness. Last week we were talking about those 2p machines, you know the ones they have at seaside arcades? Any given cultural stimulus is just like 2p in a machine. A really remarkable show might be as much as 6p. And unlike the machines at the seaside, which are perpetually on the brink of emptying themselves down the chute (but never quite do), most people are a long way from their tipping point. Every so often, though, your show catches someone at just that point. Then your 2p worth might tip them into a whole new way of being.

The beautiful song Boff wrote on Friday made me start to hope this piece might drop a couple of coins at least. That was why I really got excited.

Some people use the new year as an opportunity to wrap up everything that's been going on over the last year. I'm always too exhausted to do that, and anyway I still haven't finished my Christmas shopping. Some people use the summer instead, the end of the school year.

I thought my return from summer holiday might provide an appropriate opportunity. I've been away, now I'm back, so this means it's autumn, right?

It wasn't even a holiday, exactly. We were in the Philippines, and for the first week I was doing The Price of Everything and running workshops. It was absolutely wonderful. And for the second week, yes, we were on a beach. But there was a typhoon, which, if you've never experienced one, isn't restful.

So here I am, back, jetlagged do I think it's midnight when it's late afternoon, and the autumn is, to all intents and purposes here. This is what it looks like: 

(I'm not wrapping up the first half, or the last year - nobody wants my top ten of anything. So this is my ten next things, in more-or-less sequential order.)

1. I've got a first draft deadline at the end of the month for the new show I'm making for Polka Theatre. The show runs for the month of March 2015. It's about how we know what we think we know, why we trust the people who tell it to us, and, you know, what it means to be human. It's for 8-11 year-olds.

2. We're making two more Story Hunts over the next couple of months, in Heckmondwike (mid-August) and Middlesbrough (mid-September). Doing Story Hunt in my own home time adds a particular piquancy that both tantalises and alarms.

3. I'll be creating a new piece of work with a community company at Royal and Derngate between September and March, on the theme of the aftermath of war.

4. I'm working with People United, Sarah Punshon and Boff Whalley to create a large-scale participatory performance installation in Manchester Museum. That's in mid-November, it will feature about five choirs, and it's called Wonderstruck.

5. Sarah is making an interactive piece for families about maths, and I'm working as a performer on that.

6. There'll be a new Six O'Clock News in Lancaster in early October.

7. I'll be opening a new touring solo show in Edinburgh 2015 (I'm having a year off this year). That's about the spread of disease and it's about advertising and it may or may not be called Going Viral. I'll be working with an epidemiologist as part of the early R+D later this year/early next and I'm hopefully going to be able to confirm an exciting international element to the project.

8. I'm under commission at Live Theatre, which has been one of my favourite theatres in the country since I first went there many years ago.

9. Amidst all this, I'm hoping to make a bit more time to write reflections on the ongoing, the upcoming, and the outside world, over the next few months.

10. This didn't seem like quite enough to be going on with, so on Thursday I've got an interview about a commission for a project I'm REALLY EXCITED ABOUT OH GOD I HOPE WE GET IT. Wish me luck.

This post was originally written for Fuel's New Theatre in Your Neighbourhood blog

A place you leave is never the same as the place you arrived. That’s not simply because you’re looking at it from a different angle, it’s because you’re looking as a different person. Arriving somewhere for the first time, you have nothing of that place. Leaving, you take it with you. We’ll always have Paris.

Sarah Punshon and I arrived in Margate on a windy Tuesday, to spend a week researching our show Story Hunt. On arrival, Margate was a run-down former resort, down on its luck, all empty streets and chip paper. A sputtering high street and a lot of empty buildings. When we left, it was an inspiration to artists and thinkers, the home to dozens of brilliant, driven and creative people, the site of grand guignol triumph and disaster, every building a beautiful one, every chip paper telling a story.

Story Hunt is a walking tour of the forgotten and disappeared things in a town: the buildings burned and bulldozed, the people and places now lost. We’ve made three different Story Hunts so far, in Gateshead, Stockton and Berwick, and Margate’s will be the first of 2014. This was our first foray, our introduction to the town. We spent a week walking the streets of Margate, researching the known and the forgotten history, digging through archives in the museum and reading long-unleafed-through volumes in the local history section of the library. And then we walked some more.

We learned about Turner and TS Eliot; bathing machines and lion tamers; about Karl Marx and Cobbs’ brewery. We learned that 45,000 evacuees from Dunkirk landed on Margate beach, right by where the Turner Contemporary is now. We learned about a mechanical elephant marching along the front, and live elephants swimming in the sea. We learned about the Brighton poisoner, the mad architect and the guy who strangled his mother for the insurance money. And of course we learned about Dreamland. That isn’t a pet name for the town, it was and will be the amusement park.

Dreamland is so central to the story of Margate’s past hundred years and next hundred that it’s tempting to make it a metaphor for the whole town. The name itself, Dreamland, is pregnant with that temptation. For ten years Dreamland has been an empty concrete wasteland. Its decline marks the nadir of Margate’s. Next year it will reopen and, it is hoped, bring new vigour to the town. So you can see why this fun-park-within-a-town starts to represent that town. But an empty park isn’t a town.

Most importantly, then, we met the people of Margate. Or at least, some of them. Some we managed to scrape an introduction to, others we got talking to in pubs, libraries and shops. Artists, small-business owners, librarians, council officers, teenagers, blokes in pubs – everyone had something to say about their town, what it means to them, and how it’s changed. And, from resort for the Georgian gentry to destination of choice for Del Boy, oh boy has it changed.

Listening to the people of Margate, it’s clear the town has passed its nadir and is on the up. The old town, an empty desert ten years ago, is now precarious but buzzy. The new Turner Contemporary, the bloke behind a nearby bar grudgingly admitted, has brought new visitors to the town. And Dreamland itself, the town’s pride and symbol, will open its gates again. But the town is more than Dreamland. Dreamland will help, will boost the resurgence. But it’s not a panacea. There’s plenty to be done that won’t be managed without collective will.

Story Hunt could be seen as a show that gets made in towns a little down on their luck, towns easily seen as victims of history. It’s a reflection of a town’s extraordinary people and victorious popular movements – and if you look, whatever the town, they’re never hard to find. It’s a show made in a spirit of wilful optimism, however absurd that optimism may seem at times, that things will be changed for the better, by us, by you. It’s a show about the collective will that – after this street or that street has been rerouted, after this building or that building has been closed, opened, and then knocked down, after this painter or that poet has visited, made some art, left, and died – endures. And that’s what makes a town.

It’s easy to find in Margate at the moment.

Story Hunt Margate is this Saturday, April 12; for tickets, visit: http://theatreroyalmargate.com/event/story-hunt/

This post was originally written for the British Council blog


It's a truism that every audience, in every venue is different. This is often as much to do with the kind of room you're performing in as the people gathered in that room. How close are they? Are there more empty seats than bums? Is it a raised stage, or a raked auditorium? What about cabaret-style seating? All of these things materially affect the way the show will be experienced, and in over ninety performances of The Price of Everything I'm yet to learn anything like enough about the effects of these differences to be able to divine anything meaningful about regional differences in responses to the show. All I can say with confidence is that I've never had a bad show in the south west. I don't know why either.

Nevertheless, for my first performance outside of the UK, I was expecting some performative culture shock. Having never been outside of Europe before, I was also expecting some culture shock of the usual sort upon touchdown in India. I've read A Suitable Boy and The God of Small Things. I've seen Slumdog Millionaire. Is that what it's like?

The truth of an international festival is that it's hard to really see the place you're in. Buzzing from hotel to venue to dinner to hotel gave me the sensation of being in a gated community within Mumbai; of seeing Mumbai only really through car windows at a distance. Having my first Biriani in its country of origin doesn't equate to having really experienced that country.

The show was at 2pm Mumbai time; 8.30am UK time, and it was the day after I arrived. 

Despite the old truism that the more culturally-specific a work of art, the more universally it speaks, I expected the second half, a shaggy dog story set in my home town of Middlesbrough, to be more of a challenge, so I was relying on the first half to bridge the gap. And at the request of the venue, I'd re-expressed all of the numbers in the show in litres and rupees, so I expected the first half of the show to be clear and easy and accessible.

It's not exactly that it wasn't. It's just that every audience in every venue is different, and never more so than 4500 miles away from home. There were relatively few moments that usually get a laugh that got nothing, but there were enough to be unsettling. Set alongside this were a few moments that normally get a bit of a chuckle that in this case drew a huge guffaw. There was a lot of coughing. Despite going up ten minutes late, audience members were filing in throughout the first twenty minutes of the show. At the moment when I offered the audience milk, a voice called back "is it pasteurised?" I had no idea. I don't read Hindi. The bit where I drink a pint of milk was consequently freighted with a good deal more excitement than usual. I can now say with confidence that it was pasteurised. It was also warm. They don't chill their milk.

The first half was an exercise in constant, urgent re-negotiation of my expectations about my relationship with the audience. I expected this. But expecting to be surprised is not the same as knowing when those surprises will come.

So the second half was going to be even harder, right? Except it wasn't. There were still surprisingly big roars of laughter; there were still a few usually-reliable moments that got nothing (usually moments relying on very idiomatic English; this was good; I was starting to understand what was working). At some point - I don't know when - the audience fell still; the coughing stopped. They were with me.

On balance, it went OK. I'd got the hang of it and I couldn't wait to do it again. Except I'd gone all this way for one show. That was it.

The audience were ludicrously, overwhelmingly warm and generous. People came up to me with effusive praise throughout the fest of the festival. Someone tweeted that she had "irrevocably fallen in love with Daniel Bye" (she has never met me). Two people told me it was "the best play they had ever seen".

There's talk of them bringing me back for a few more shows; for a bit of a tour. I don't know if this is just them continuing to be absurdly nice, but I do hope it happens. I felt like I was beginning to understand something about this new relationship with this totally different audience in this totally different context, and it had nothing to do with the room we were in.

Also, I'd really like to see the place.

Occasionally I'm troubled by the lack of activity on this blog. Meanwhile, all of the people behind all of the projects I'm working on, you know, all those projects keeping me away from my true calling, which is writing on this blog - all of those people keep asking me to write blog posts for them. So I thought I'd start re-posting some of those here.

This one was written for Polka Theatre:


Upon being told that I'm developing a new show for Polka by working as Philosopher-in-Residence at a Wimbledon primary school, people are mostly consumed with jealousy. Either that or they think I've taken leave of my senses. They're probably both right.

Discussing complex issues with young people who aren't normally expected to think in such ways is enormously rewarding. It also has its challenges, especially with seven-year-olds, many of whom will answer questions about whether we can be sure this isn't all in fact a dream with lengthy monologues about machine guns, and ice cream, and poo. Lots of poo. Eleven-year-olds, on the other hand, frequently operate at a level of conceptual complexity that would put many professional philosophers in the shade.

The project I'm working on is called Enlightenment, which may or may not be the name of the show that results at the end of it. It began with Jon Lloyd, Polka's outgoing artistic director. Outgoing in that he's now left the organisation, not in that he's friendly - although he's friendly too. Jon saw my touring show for adult audiences, The Price of Everything. It's a mix between storytelling and a kind of joke lecture. "Do you think", Jon asked me over coffee one day, "something like that might work for children?" Never one to miss a business opportunity, and not having made any work for children for several years, I quickly answered "yes". Fortunately I then remembered an idea I'd been playing with for a while.

I've been interested in how we know the things that we know. Why do we trust the people who tell it to us? What would you do if one day your teacher started teaching things that were manifestly the product of a lunatic brain? And would you be able to tell? Professional philosophers might call this area of enquiry "epistemology". I haven't found this a helpful term with year four.

I also became interested in how children would order the world if all of these established authorities were revealed as utterly unreliable - if it became necessary to rebuild society from first principles. At this point, professional philosophers might utter the words "political philosophy" and perhaps even the phrase "Plato's Republic". I've tended to stay away from technical terms, though, because for some reason, it appears year five haven't yet read Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy.

Over the next year on this blog I'll be talking about my adventures as Philosopher-in-Residence at Pelham Primary School in Wimbledon, and subsequently at Norton Primary School in Stockton-on-Tees. I'll be talking about the brilliant philosophical insights brought to me by years 3-6. And I'll be talking about how the show itself is developing.

So far, the script looks like this:

7: days on sale
16: bidders on the auction
43: bids
1993: page views
99: first bid in pence
360: winning bid in pounds
49: hours at £200, the longest period without the price moving
90: seconds to get from that figure to the final selling price of £360
100: percentage of positive feedback for the winning bidding

There isn't a deliberate link between the recent debates around artists making a living and my selling the 100th performance of The Price of Everything on eBay. We've actually been planning it for a while. There isn't a deliberate link between that debate and this online auction, but there is a link. What I'm doing is an explicit engagement with the market and an acceptance of the financial value it chooses to put upon my work. Some might see it as a satirical response to how poorly artists are paid. Others might call it bowing to the inevitable. The uncharitable might imagine I hope to make a packet. (Above costs, it's going to charity.)

In conversation with a friend last night I expressed a slight unease that, although selling a show in this way might draw attention to market forces in the arts, might even satirise them a bit, and might well draw attention to the fact that the market value of our work is unlikely to sustain even a modest living, it does nothing to suggest a move beyond that market. A fundamentally unproductive irony. He said that he thought selling the show on eBay was a work of art in itself. That was nice of him, but it doesn't assuage my unease. We are, have allowed ourselves to be, part of a marketplace.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The normal economic model for The Price of Everything is that venues pay £450 plus travel and accommodation. They take the risk and it's their responsibility to ensure an audience. We are extremely happy to help in any way we can, but it's their venue, their audience.

In total this arrangement means venues paying around £500-600 depending on how far I have to travel and how cheap the chain hotels are there. Of that payment, I get a fee, my producers get a fee, some money goes towards marketing, some towards admin costs. Some is spent on milk. I don't know the exact numbers - that's the beauty of having a producer - but I do know that my fee is £300. That fee recognises that I can't take much other work either the day of the show, or the day after the show, and that I might well spend a bit of time in the weeks before and after it engaged in admin, re-rehearsal, tech conversations, that sort of thing. Oh, and in every show I give £20 to an audience member - whether my fee is £300 or nothing. On performing the 100th show I'll have given away two thousand quid.

At the time of writing, the auction is at £82. This fee is inclusive of travel and accommodation, so unless the winning bidder happens to be somewhere very convenient, it's almost certain to run at a loss. That's alright, by the way. There's a tiny reserve in the budget which means that although I won't make anything from this show, I won't actually be out of pocket.

If the winning bid does cover costs, then any profit will go to a charity agreed between me and the buyer.

Secretly, I'd really like it to get to three figures. Secretly, I think it probably will. It'll need to get to about £150 to definitely cover costs, and that would be great too. £150 is either fifteen people clubbing together at about the normal price, or a tremendous bargain for a venue (who can then sell tickets and turn a profit, if they're that way inclined). I suspect it's already the latter and although there are about 20 people "watching" the auction, since £50 there have only been three different bidders.

If every performance of The Price of Everything had sold for £150, I'd have done an awful lot of work for no money whatsoever. If every performance had sold at full price then by performance 99 (Brighton, next week) I'd have made £29700 - minus the two grand I've given away - over the past two and a half years. The truth is, over those two and a half years, I've made more like £18-20000. For a start, 32 of those shows were on the Edinburgh Fringe. And lots of venues negotiated us down.

That's still a lot of money to earn from one show.

It's also a long way short of a living over those two years.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I have other projects, though. How to Occupy an Oil Rig and Story Hunt both pay me a weekly fee, of around £500 (a little less in the former case, a little more in the latter). If I earned that every week of the year without holidays, I'd earn £26k. Four weeks' holiday would make it £24k. Less than the UK mean, more than the median. A solid living.

But barely anybody is able to make money from this every day of the year, and this, I think is one of the key things that's been missing from this debate. Almost every actor works in a bar or on a temp job for the 95% of the time when they're not acting. Neither Rufus Norris nor Dominic Cooke made a living from directing until they were well into their thirties. I don't think we think less of any of these people for that.

And if you think making money in theatre is hard, you should try being a poet. I believe three of those make a living. One of them just died.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I don't think any of us went into this to make money. I don't think many of us went into it expecting to make money. If we get to do this and people want to see it and we make some money, that's a huge bonus. But if you make art because you think it will make you money, you cease to be an artist. None of us are entitled to make a living.

None of us are entitled to make a living from this, and so plenty of us do something else to make a living at all. I have a part-time job as a lecturer in theatre at the University of Bedfordshire. Jack Bennett, who's in How to Occupy an Oil Rig with me, works in a post room. He's been on at the National and he's been on in the West End and he works in a post room. That doesn't devalue his other work, it doesn't make him more or less of an actor. That's just how this works. I don't think this is the fault of the fees venues pay. They'd have to pay us a lot more per show for us to make our living from this all year round. Or we'd have to be touring 100% of the whole time.

One of the first things we have to acknowledge in working through this problem is that an artist with a day job isn't less of an artist. I once went into Tennent's Bar in Glasgow just after watching an episode of The Thick of It, and there was one of the stars, pulling pints. The last time I'd seen him was in a lead at the Traverse.

For as long as we pretend that having a day job makes you less of an artist, we're going to keep accidentally only hiring people who can afford not to have a day job, to save us all embarrassment. I've actually got no problem with working unpaid if it's something I believe in for an organisation it will benefit, so long as the requirements of the unpaid work don't incidentally prevent me from earning a living alongside it. But production companies won't make "profit" share shows by rehearsing evenings and weekends, because it makes them look amateur. If they're not paying anything, what does "professional" mean anymore? According to this model, it means, "in possession of a private income and parents with a London address".

Just because you're not being paid, doesn't mean the work isn't any good. Just because you are being paid, doesn't mean it is. If you're doing this to make money, you're not an artist, you're an entrepreneur.

Obviously I'd prefer if we could all be paid handsomely. The reasons we aren't go beyond negotiations over fees.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It isn't just the arts. In my HE capacity I spent yesterday on strike over pay and pensions. As an artist, I think my part-time HE salary a princely sum, but I can see why colleagues are alarmed at the trend represented by a 13% real-terms pay cut over eight years, and what that means for recruitment in years to come. When scholarly research and teaching becomes as precarious a vocation as being an artist, then we'll be in real trouble.

It's not just the arts, and it's not just HE. The museums sector is in the same boat. Not to mention schoolteachers, nurses, librarians. They're all being screwed by the government, by the current financial model. Everything I value is being devalued, to express which sentiment, the only words I have are words drawn from the language of economic value. It would be nice to think that we were suffering from a sectoral problem that could be solved by better conversations with each other. Better conversations, more understanding will help, but this isn't a sectoral problem. It's capitalism. This is how it works. And when it takes things away from us, we blame each other. Divide and rule. Survival of the fittest.

Well, I don't like that and I don't think we have to operate that way,

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

It would be great if we all got paid handsomely. I'd like to live in a society that values artists as highly as teachers. I'd like to live in a society that values artists as highly as surgeons. I'd like to live in a society that values artists more highly than bankers. Actually, I'd like to live in a society where there's no such thing as bankers.

I'd like to live in a society where the value placed on artists derives from something more than what they are paid. I'd like to live in a society where we all got paid handsomely, and where the concept of money is a faintly-remembered and ludicrous aberration, like shellsuits, or Kajagoogoo.

I live here.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Here, theatre venues are not to blame for the value placed on artists. It's the market. We've spent the last three years railing against the Government for their persistent drip-bleed of arts funding. It seems absurd that, as soon as those cuts start to bite, we rail against someone else whose funding is being cut. We need to work with them to fix the problem.

We've been trying to make this case to the Government, but we've also been trying to make the case to the public. And if we can't explain to the public why theatres are important as well as hospitals and SureStart centures and libraries, it's hardly surprising that the Government can get away with cutting it. And if the funding is cut, there's less to go round.* It's a bit bigger than artists vs venues.

I do feel uncomfortable with venues who have teams of producers and marketing and administration, all salaried, asking artists to work for next to nothing. Fellow artists: we shouldn't tour to those venues. Usually, I won't take a profit share gig because it's too big of a risk. But it's not as simple as hard economic facts: sometimes I trust the venue to get me an audience, or I know I've got an audience in that city, or I'd just like to go because I've never been and I'm free that weekend and so it seems worth going there on a split.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

But for any venue taking the piss, there are a dozen working incredibly hard at audience development. This is more important than artist development, because however good the performance it'll sink if there's no-one there to see it.

No artist deserves an audience, no show is entitled to be seen. Reviews on the Edinburgh Fringe and in London don't necessarily mean anything to an audience in Stockton or Barnsley or Bradford. Nor should they. Those places aren't cultural backwaters if they don't know about my show's awards. Those awards are invariably given to people a long way away from Stockton, and Barnsley and Bradford, and frankly under those circumstances it's a lot of effort to pay attention to such things. That all three of these towns and many, many more have terrific venues, brimful of terrific work is down the extraordinary efforts of their terrific programmers. And if I have an audience for my show when I get there, it's because the conversation they're already having with that audience drew me in. It didn't start with my show, and it won't end with it.

It's amazing how tied some places are to conventional models for this conversation, which is then not a conversation at all. "Would you like to come? £10 please" is most of it. But £10 is a lot of money and if you put too much effort into persuading me to part with it, I just get suspicious that what you're selling isn't any good.

Sometimes, when The Price of Everything is selling poorly in advance, we manage to persuade the venue to have a go at pay-what-you-can, or pay-what-you-think-it-was-worth. I did three shows in Dorset last month that had sold very poorly in advance and all three venues agreed to give this a go. On average, sales increased by over 400%. Average yield was higher than the price originally advertised. We're taking a risk with our money, the venues said. Will you take a risk with an hour of your time? It's not a great deal more meaningful as conversations go, but it's a sight better than begging.

We are learning that the ways we've been trying to talk to audiences in recent years have not been working. We're learning new ways of talking to them. Theatres do not thrive in a market economy and so we need to find ways of behaving as though we are somewhere else. Of behaving as though we're individuals talking to one another within a community, rather than as market nodes seeking to maximise our human capital. I'd like to run a venue where every show is pay what you can. I'd like to run a venue where you can pay in doing the plumbing, or the dishes. I'd like to run a venue where every show is part of an ongoing conversation about the world and about art, and that conversation is happening town-wide.

That doesn't happen overnight.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------

But it seems to me just possible that if we keep getting better at talking to audiences, then audiences will keep growing. And then they'll talk to government for us. And when taxpayers demand the government spend their money on the arts, rather than demanding that they don't, then arts funding will increase. And then we might all earn a better living. If that's what we really want.

It seems to me just possible.

In the meantime, though, The Price of Everything is available to buy at auction until Sunday evening, 7pm. At a price to be determined by the market.
















* (It is, as an aside, a bit absurd that artists are paid to tour work and venues are also paid to receive that touring work. It's easy for both to assume that the other will pick up the slack in their funding, which is why Andy Field's argument for transparency is so important. Which which in mind: I received a grant to make The Price of Everything more than two years ago, since which time it has been funded entirely by fees and box office. How to Occupy an Oil Rig is funded to the end of the forthcoming spring tour but the model is such that, should we decide to re-tour, we can afford to do so on a fee of £950, wages of £450 + per diems for me, Jack and Kathryn, and 3.6 shows per week, with no further investment. Story Hunt was funded by ACE this year, but the subsequent versions next year will be paid for by the host venues.)

For ten marks, please use this construction to create an analogy for the discussion of theatrical experiment in our culture. 

No, actually, one mark.

As a longstanding advocate of a more engaged dialogue between makers of and writers about theatre, there's an obvious hypocrisy in my writing a blog post under the above title. But here it is: I went through the entire Edinburgh Fringe this year without reading the reviews of my show. (I should point out before I go on that I've read them now.)

Why?

When making a show, I gradually reveal the contents of the inside of my head to an ever-widening circle of people. Lots of these people will tell me what they think about the direction the work is heading. All of these people matter. But I just can't listen to them all.

There's a large group of people, the audience, whom en masse I trust more than anyone. Moment to moment, it's abundantly clear whether what I'm doing is working for them. But if I ask ten of them about any given moment that didn't quite work today, I'll get ten different answers. They don't know where I want to go with the work; they just know what they saw.

There's a very small group of people I really trust and I listen to them very carefully. These people constitute the team working on the show and maybe three or four others who know me and my work well enough to say what they think in a way that's sympathetic to my direction of travel. Their diagnoses about what's not quite working and how to make it work are the ones I weigh very carefully.

The critics are disguised as members of the former group and sound like members of the latter. But they're not regular audience members; nor do they often behave as such. And they have no responsibility to you or your show. This doesn't mean they're wrong, or right; it just means that there's a point early in the development of a show where they won't be helpful. Nor should they be; that's not their job.

When I'm getting the hang of a new show, I don't want too many voices in my head telling me what it is and how it works, much less what it should be and how it could work. Not before I know myself. (By getting the hang of a show, I mean knowing it well enough not only to get right the words and the moves and the rhythms and so on, but also knowing, at any given moment, the function of this in the whole: how it contributes to the overall journey, movement, or argument.)

It takes a monumental amount of time for me to get the hang of a show in this sense; perhaps I never do. In the case of How to Occupy an Oil Rig I'd say I could have happily read the reviews by the last week of the festival; that's after about a dozen performances. With The Price of Everything it was probably more like fifteen, but I'd already done most of those by the time I turned up in Edinburgh. It takes this long because in doing the show enough times to gain a superficial level of control over it, it becomes clear that certain small or not-so-small moments don't quite contribute to the overall journey, movement, or argument. It becomes clear, that is, that there's something in the dramaturgy which doesn't quite click.

So the last thing I want is someone from outside of that relationship between me and the audience, someone with no responsibility to that relationship, putting pressure on elements of that dramaturgy when it may not sustain it. This can result from a rave as much as from a bashing: high praise for wringing out a particular emotional response at a particular moment can go to one's head, and it may be that that's in fact the precise moment where some wider problem means that I need to stop trying to wring out that response.

This is why I never quite get the hang of any given show. Its dramaturgy can be attended to on increasingly infinitessimally small levels, such that there's always a new problem to fix. The work on How to Occupy an Oil Rig is still at levels far from the infinitessimal This, fortunately, is also why I'm yet to get bored of any of my shows.

Of course, there are plenty of reviews, and plenty of reviewers, whose writing will help, not hinder this process. And there are plenty of makers who are perfectly able to filter out what's useful from what's not. For me, though, an ability to distinguish the signal from the noise doesn't begin to prevent the noise from being distracting. Also, I can do without the preoccupation about whether other people think the show's any good when I'm still figuring out, good or bad, how it works.

But there comes a time when the show, and my intentions in it, are secure enough to read the reviews and engage in that critical dialogue. Then you get very pleasant surprises like this one, a review that not only describes exactly what I was trying to do, inside a pretty tight word count, but is absolutely lovely with it.

Honestly, though, it's not the reviews I was talking about when advocating greater dialogue between writers and makers. It's the whole discourse around the art form. And I can't engage meaningfully with that unless I've engaged meaningfully with my own process first. Otherwise I'll bring nothing to that dialogue other than a series of half-digested remnants of things other people said about my show. And nobody wants that.

It was a big, busy festival for me this year one that would be impossible to sum up in even as bloated a blog post as yesterday's. How to Occupy an Oil Rig was the new show, but for a substantial chunk of the festival it was neither the first nor the last thing I performed on any given day. All of which is a short way of saying, here are a few more thoughts on this year's Festival.

The Price of Everything came back for the second half of the festival as part of the British Council showcase, and after the excitement and the adjustments and the learning curve of figuring out how to perform How to Occupy an Oil Rig, it like was sliding into a familiar pair of slippers. It's never easy performing solo for an hour, and the show always differs slightly from day to day as I figure out how to perform to this audience, here, now, rather than the one that saw it yesterday or last week or the one I imagined when I was first rehearsing it two years ago now. And with the combined weight of eighty-plus performances behind me, finding it anew does get tougher. So I'd thought maintaining the spark of life in it for twelve consecutive performances in the same space might be a challenge. Actually, it was as comfortable and enjoyable as it's ever been, relaxed, responsive, but with that crackle of excitement that's only possible when everyone - me included - senses the possibility of something genuinely unexpected.

It's too early to say whether the British Council showcase is going to lead to extensive international touring for the show. I do hope so, because I'm running out of venues in the UK and I'd like to keep going with it. And also: INTERNATIONAL TOURING! COOL! It'll be the 100th performance of the show at the end of this year - for which watch this space for an EXCITING ANNOUNCEMENT - and I've no intention of being like one of those batsmen who, having made his century, gets out cheaply through inattention or a misplaced sense of satiation. I'm going for a daddy. There'll come a time when I have to stop doing the show, certainly. When the current economic settlement becomes the previous economic settlement, for example. When our culture re-evaluates its relationship to capital. In the meantime, Alex Kelly, who's my lodestar in most things, is doing The Lad Lit Project at a festival next week eight years after its first Edinburgh run. That's good enough for me.

Doing The Price of Everything at 10.30 in the morning enforced a regime of sensible behaviour and early bedtimes on me that undoubtedly provides the reason I survived the festival. Performing two shows (that and Oil Rig) before lunch exacts physical and mental rigours, but it's still less time on stage than even a heavily edited Hamlet. Nevertheless, early nights, limited booze and healthy eating were essential.

The third show I was involved in this year, The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project, put paid to all that, and I wouldn't have changed it for a second. That I was booked to be there eight times and was actually there nearly twice that is testament to the joyous, warm, ramshackle embrace of it all. I just genuinely couldn't think of a room I'd rather have been in, and on any given night of the festival if I wasn't sound asleep there I was, on stage for a third time that day, long past my bedtime. The show won the Spirit of the Fringe award at the final fringe first ceremony and totally deserved to. (I am of course judging on the basis of nights where I was in the audience rather than on stage. Stop looking at me like that.)

For those who have no idea what it was, a bit of background: The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project split into two main parts. For the first part, six artists - Cora Bisset, me, Lucy Ellinson, Kieran Hurley, Alex Kelly and Chris Thorpe - were commissioned to make a 15-minute piece that responded to the idea of border balladry. For the second, each night a different guest artist added a new stanza to an epic ballad telling the tale of a foundling babe found in a moses basket floating down the Tweed on the night of the dissolution of the act of union. By the last night, this was nearly an hour long. There was also a lot of singalong. Clear? Of course not. It wasn't that kind of show.

I don't know about you, but my first reaction on seeing the list of people I'd been commissioned alongside was to think what that fuck am I doing here? And obviously, Northern Stage being a Newcastle theatre, I'm the token northeasterner. But however you find your way into such stellar company, once you're there you try to make it count.

So where any functionality in the dramaturgy of How to Occupy an Oil Rig owes an immeasurable debt to Sarah Punshon, my piece for this show, "The Ballad of Hamish Henry Densham" owes a similar debt to Lorne Campbell, Northern Stage's Artistic Director and the curator of this event. In the first instance this debt exists because if Lorne hadn't commissioned me, the piece would never have existed. But more substantially, it's because the day before I was first due to perform it, with 95% of everything I'd written so far being utter shit, Lorne and I had a good long chat.

Officially this meeting was an opportunity for me to read a fairly complete, perhaps even virtually performance-ready draft to Lorne, so that he could make a few suggestions and help me tidy it up. Instead what I had was a loose version of the story that ended up constituting the second half of the piece, so haphazardly written that instead of reading it to Lorne I instead put it aside and told him the story. Towards the end I broke off, because it was dreadful. And we had a long conversation about class and identity and about some of the places in me from where the instincts behind this story sprang. And Lorne said, tell the story, sure, it's a good story, but really you should talk about all that underlying stuff. After he'd gone I didn't move from my seat, I stayed put and wrote the whole thing in three hours. Some of the architecture remained from earlier drafts, and about a minute and a half's worth of actual text, but really, almost the whole thing was written out of the energy of that conversation.

And it was an enormous pleasure to perform. Terrifying in a number of ways, not least because it ends with a song and I'm not a singer. The second time I did it I was on after Cora Bisset, who, my word, really is a singer. And, perhaps because there's a lot of honest personal material in there, on one early occasion I had the strange sensation of looking out at the audience and thinking why are all of these people sitting here listening to me talk? But an enormous pleasure perhaps in part because of these fresh, unfamiliar terrors - an entirely different set of unfamiliar terrors to those involved in performing Oil Rig.

The second part of the evening was also a joy to be involved in. Every new guest artist added something quite different to the unfolding epic of the foundling, and each night a growing band of house artists of gathered to perform everything that had gone before. Performing other people's words - White Rabbit, Red Rabbit aside, and that's a whole other thing - is another unfamiliar terror, another unfamiliar pleasure to add to the store of pleasures with which I've been gifted this month. And while some guest artists beguiled and others bewildered, while some took the story in directions I found thrilling and others in directions I found tremendously problematic, this potential for internal wrangling was written into the rules of the game; indeed, it was written into the chorus. The epic ballad was a shaggy dog story; the epic ballad was an argument; the epic ballad was internally inconsistent and yet it cohered into one messy, ragged, joyful, plaintive whole.

Lorne's avowed intent behind the event was to improve the quality of our collective confusion about the approaching referendum on Scottish independence. And last night at dinner on this artists' residency I'm on I found myself sitting next to a man who loudly and with no discernible doubt shared his opposition to independence. I didn't buy any of his arguments, if arguments they were, but he presented them with such brisk certainty - as facts, not as viewpoints - that it wasn't worth entering a debate with him. The yes camp with which I instinctively sympathise won't get anywhere with him; it's the undecideds where the debate will be lost or won. But more than any of this, I found myself thinking, I wish you'd come to The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project. It might just have elevated the quality of your certainty into a recognition that such certainty is a horrible thing.

*

Even Kieran Hurley, the remarkable Kieran Hurley, whose own border ballad began with a direct avowal of his support for Scottish independence, then spent his fifteen minutes chewing over the complexities and difficulties of maintaining that support without ambiguity or doubt. The world is currently run by people who are certain. The world is currently ruined by people who are certain. Events like The Bloody Great Border Ballad Project might just elevate the quality of all of our confusion until that confusion itself has the confidence of others' certainty.

One of the things I found most difficult in Kieran's piece was his statement that, in the event of Scottish independence, the thing that his English friends will struggle with most is the need to redefine Englishness in its light. I don't think of myself as English, I think of myself as British. I identify more with Glasgow than I do with London. Englishness, I instinctively feel, is of the centre. Britishness is inclusive of the margins. Englishness went to Eton, drinks Pimms, has leather sofas in wood-panelled rooms, and rules. Britishness drinks pints and marches in protest against the depredations wreaked by Englishness.

The trouble with this analysis is this: it's bollocks. (It's not an analysis at all.) Ask someone outside of England how they feel about Britishness and it's more likely to connote empire than solidarity between Clyde and Tyne. It's easy for an English person like me to wear Britishness as a badge of solidarity with the marginalised of Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but actually Britishness, not Englishness, is why there are tanks in Belfast; Britishness, not Englishness, is the imaginary ideal to which unionists appeal when pro-independence campaigners like Kieran try to make proper arguments. I can have solidarity with my Scottish friends even if we don't live in the same country, perhaps more so once people like me are forced to stop pretending that we are all equal in Britishness. We aren't. Maybe these realisations will strengthen the English left. We've allowed Englishness to be claimed by and appealed to by the right. And for sure, patriotism is the first refuge of a scoundrel, but there's a history of struggle, of revolt that's far more deeply ingrained in English identity than Pimms or anything the EDL can come up with.

I'm not proud to be English. How could I be proud of an accident? But English I am, and these last few paragraphs have been my attempt to rise to the challenges of Lorne and Kieran, by raising the quality of my confusion on this point.

The enthusiastic, rambling formlessness of this blog post surely does more to sum up the joys of my Edinburgh festival than anything else could.