The tour of Instructions for Border Crossing starts this week at the West Yorkshire Playhouse, then Bristol’s Tobacco Factory on Sunday, then more.

In a newspaper, that sentence would be in italics at the bottom, to explain why you’ve just read a lengthy thinkpiece about my experience of performing the show in Edinburgh, but I want you to buy tickets, so I’m getting it in up front.
 
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On the morning of my final performance at this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, this wonderful review appeared in the Scotsman. (WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS, SORT OF).
 
It’s one of those rare reviews that not only loves the show but also seems to really get it and the intentions behind it. However much we might kvetch about reviews, when one really connects with what you thought you were up to, that’s satisfying. And Joyce MacMillan, incidentally, has gone two for two, having done the same with Going Viral two years earlier. Thanks Joyce! See you next time!
 
But my immediate reaction wasn’t this, so much as MAN, I could have done with this a fortnight ago. Joyce saw the show on its fourth performance, two and a half weeks earlier. During the course of the run, the show was seen by six separate critics from the Scostman. (Or, perhaps more accurately, press tickets were booked in the names of six separate individuals on behalf of the Scotsman.) I’d fully given up on a review ever appearing and I don’t expect ever to solve the mystery of why so many people booked only for a review to appear at the very end, written by the first of them to come.
 
Last time I was at the Fringe I’d had four-star reviews in several national newspapers by the time I went on for my second preview, and it was only a few days later I learned I’d won a Fringe First. The show sold extremely well for the rest of the run. I was very spoiled and it was – at least on the surface – a much easier time.
 
This time, the reviews were more restrained. They were warm but not ecstatic. Despite being seen by up to half a dozen people from the panels of various awards, no awards were forthcoming. The show sold extremely well some days and more slowly on others, yo-yo-ing crazily from day to day according to no pattern I could discern. It was a normal experience of the Fringe and it was – at least on the surface – a tougher time.
 
In fact, I had a much nicer time this year. Although by all external markers Going Viral was going extremely well, it was almost the end of the run before I was really enjoying performing it. For at least two weeks there was a massive disjunction between my experience of performing the show and the show I was reading about – even when the reviews were good, even when they were good and discerned the intentions behind the show, I didn’t feel the show was really achieving those intentions until the last week. That feeling was exacerbated by the fact that barely anyone I wasn’t friends with ever told me in person that they’d enjoyed the show, and social media was largely silent.
 
Instructions for Border Crossing changed radically from the first performance to the second, and more gradually throughout the rest of the run (This is for another blogpost). But that first performance and one or two outliers aside, I thoroughly enjoyed performing this show. And more people than with any previous show (including The Price of Everything) came up to me in the bar to tell me how much they’d loved it. Importantly, a sizeable proportion of these people had stories about how they’d been directly affected by some of the subject matter of the show. Many people tweeted their enthusiasm.
 
But somehow these experiences weren’t finding their way into print. They weren’t part of the mainstream narrative around the show, which I guess, based on the reviews, was that it was pretty good, some great bits, interesting, clever, but maybe doesn’t all quite tie together or isn’t quite satisfying in the final analysis. (Which sounds like plenty of shows, actually, but certainly isn’t the peak of anyone’s ambition.)
 
And that affects audience figures. And smaller audiences make it harder for a show to really land hard, especially one that asks quite a lot of its audience. It’s no coincidence that the strongest shows were those with most people in the room. (Another subject for a future blogpost.) I should stress again that I'm not complaining about any of this. It's the normal experience of the Fringe. If anything it's even smoother and more pain-free than that normal experience, which is of no-one really noticing or caring at all.
 
So although the experience of doing the show day-to-day was immensely rewarding, I was getting a little worried about the tour. The autumn tour of this show is tremendously exciting. If five years ago you’d asked me to write a list of all the venues I really want to be touring into, it would have looked a lot like this tour. And they’d booked it before it existed, which is a tremendous and humbling vote of confidence.
 
But watching from afar, would they worry that they hadn’t got what they’d hoped for? Had they been banking on another award-winning box office smash? Would they be able to sell the show; would they be invested in selling the show when they’ve also got salt. and The Believers are But Brothers, two bona fide sellout hits that also happened to be the two shows directly before mine in the same room?
 
This sort of worry suggests a profound lack of faith in the brilliant people at all those venues, but that’s the sort of thing the Edinburgh Fringe makes you worry about when you’ve no real things to worry about. Of course they’ll be able to muster the enthusiasm. The show’s good and plenty of people have said so. Also, it’s their job and they’re good at their jobs. But my god that Scotsman review made a difference to my ability to not just know this but really feel it. Man, I could have done with it two weeks earlier.
 
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Honestly, though, the real reasons I had a better time at this Fringe than two years ago were my friends and my running, and if you’re more interested in the theatre industry than my life, I’d stop reading here.
 
Two years ago, very few of my close friends were around during the Fringe. I’d come off stage after doing Going Viral and be at a total loss about what to do. I’m pretty good in my own company but at times I became seriously lonely, the kind of loneliness that makes going to the Summerhall bar to see who’s around a gauntlet of anxiety. If I talk to people and it’s awkward, that might be worse than not risking it at all. Maybe I won’t risk it. And then when I do, this anxiety guarantees it will be awkward. For much of the Festival I was living in a flat on my own, so going home never seemed particularly thrilling.
 
This year I had people in the flat and enough good friends up (and through, and down; not everyone heads north to the Festival) to be confident of someone with whom to pass a happy hour. The difference that made to my mental health for the month of August was immense. Doing what you can to be sure of this is going to become my #1 tip for solo artists heading up in future, unless you’re almost frighteningly robust.
 
My #2 tip for everyone is take up running. (And although it definitely puts me in a better place mentally, that’s not why. Being told to go for a run is one of the more exceptionally annoying things doctors say to people suffering from depression.) Edinburgh is a beautiful city and running is a great way to see more of it. On the first Sunday (after finishing that first huge rewrite) I ran down to Portobello beach and back along the Brunstane Burn path. The next Saturday I went to Edinburgh Parkrun along the promenade at Cramond. The following day I was taken on a tour of the route of the Seven Hills of Edinburgh race. I’d never been to Portobello, or Cramond, or along the Brunstane Burn path, or up any but one of the seven hills. And sure, I could have walked any of this. But I wouldn’t have. I’m now looking forward to my next trip to the Festival in order to do these routes again, and also to get the train out to Linlithgow and run back along the Grand Union Canal, and a trip to the Pentlands.

And the longer the run, the less time there is to worry about when the reviews will come out, about which you can do nothing, however much difference, in hindsight, they might have made.

There's a lot of new work coming up in 2017. Over the next few weeks I'll write posts about each of the upcoming and ongoing projects.

In the meantime, though, in keeping with annual tradition, here's a somewhat delayed audit of last year.

Public performances given: 98
of which:
Tiny Heroes: 8
We're Stuck: 32
Error 404: 13
The Price of Everything: 4
Scratch performances towards the making of Safe House: 3
Miscellaneous collected short pieces: 1

Public performances of work I wrote but wasn't in: 5
of which:
Talking Statues: 1 (although this was an audio piece, so you could say it was as many performance as there were people who downloaded it. Unless they all listened to it at once.)
We're Here: 3
Nice Walls: 1

Panel discussions and that sort of thing: 7

Weeks of R&D on Thinner Blood (Dick Bonham's new show which I'll be directing this autumn): 4
Amount of material to show for it: a full draft in good working order

Weeks of R&D on Safe House (my own new show, which goes into rehearsal in a fortnight): 4
Amount of material to show for it: some decent ideas which don't hang together

New writing word counts:
Tiny Heroes (10837)
We're Here (1090)
Nice Walls (584)
Talking Statues (388)
Why I Don't Wear Shoes (1256)
Safe House (countless discarded drafts)
Plus a handful of short pieces that will never see the light of day and unquantifiable attempts that didn't come out.

Successful applications submitted: 3
Unsuccessful applications submitted: 13
​
Performances cancelled: 6
of which:
because of poor administration: 1
because of poor sales: 2
because my wife went into early labour: 2
because of rioting: 1

2016, not being a sentient being, didn't deliberately kill all those celebrities. Nor did it rig those elections or intentionally embolden the far right. So if you're expecting 2017 to swagger in with a whole different vibe, you're setting yourself up for a mighty disappointment. I can't remember a moment in the past when the onset of January arrested prevailing historical trends. That's on us.

You can't stop your favourite celebrities from dying. You're getting older. I expect the attrition rate of people who've been famous since the seventies and eighties to continue, if not to increase. (I don't imagine many 20-year-olds thought this an unusually bloody year, although of course I haven't asked any.)

The fascist drift, though, that we can affect. 2017 will be better, but only if everyone who wants it to be actually does something about it. Join your local antifa, support migrants' rights, campaign, organise, debate. Love. And, where necessary, fight.

Hoping 2017 will be better won't make it better, unless that hope gets you out of your chair. Fearing it will be worse won't have an effect either, unless that fear gets you out of your chair. The only effect you can have is positive. Get out of your chair.

Personally, 2016 has been a pretty amazing year. I became a dad. That's hard to top.

Professionally it's been pretty good, too. One new show and a lot of touring of existing work, including the last six weeks of the year in India. And if you think we've got it bad politically, you should take a trip to Modiland.

Politically of course the year has been awful. It's also been my most politically inactive year for quite a while. I wonder how many other people, depressed by prevailing trends, also let their energy slip this year?

There's some truth in Ed Vaizey's observation that a decent majority of people working in the arts are left wing, but really, there's a surfeit of right-wing art. Andrew Lloyd-Webber does quite well, for example, and I expect Ed Vaizey has heard of him. Tom Stoppard does ok too. The Lion King is the most conservative thing I've ever seen and Billy Elliott is such an incredibly rare example of a West End musical with explicit leftist politics that I can't think of another one.

And his examples of plays whose failure to exist somehow proves his point that theatre is "relentlessly left-wing" are just weird. I don't know of a single anti-Brexit play either (not least because there hasn't been time), although I do know that the NT are planning a fence-sitting verbatim piece that will please either no-one or everyone. I must have been on paternity leave when all the pro-unionisation plays were on this year. And are there dozens of pro-Venezuela plays that I'm somehow missing?

​As a theatre-maker whose work actually *is* relentlessly left-wing, I resent the implication that everyone else is at it too. Most of the main stage work I see is politically horrible. I expect Vaizey would like it a great deal.

The first week of the Edinburgh Fringe is probably not the best moment to announce I'm making a new show. But this is, at least, peak time for reading about theatre, so I'll take my chances and let you know something:

I'm making a new show.

The material is already different to what I said it would be before I started work, and it'll be different again by the time it's finished. But here are some sketches of what I currently think it's about.

I'm instinctively sympathetic to independence movements. I'm instinctively hostile to borders and particularly to the creation of new ones. But new independent states inevitably lead to new borders, new checkpoints, new illiberal immigration policies. It's hard to see this contradiction being resolved. So the show as I currently understand it is an attempt to pursue this argument between two incommensurable positions, both of which I hold.

It's a made-up story set in a tottering oligarcho-fascist sort-of Britain, run by an oppressive President who is absolutely definitely not Theresa May, no, nothing like her. From this crumbling country micro-states no bigger than villages are declaring independence left right and centre. Will everyone please stop declaring independence, says the exasperated President, who in no way resembles Theresa May, why would you think that.

It's also a really-happening sequence of events taking place in this theatre, relying heavily on the presence and activation of its audience. Some of you will join me on stage and play a game of jenga to the death. You will collectively play the oppressive President. Some of the words in the show will be different tonight because of things you said or did. If you want you can have some toast.

Many of these ideas may well not make the next draft.

If I had to write the flyer copy right now, I would describe the show as "the exposed gearbox of a political thriller". The image would be me clutching an AK47 and the stuffed toy mouse I had as a child. Had, and - full disclosure - still have. If I had to write the flyer copy right now, I would have to come up with a title.

These crumbs of content and form are an evolution from the starting point of the process, which was an investigation into notions of "security" - the things we do to make ourselves safer, many of which end up making us a good deal less safe. The walls we build. The fears that make us safer as well as those that don't. For the moment these starting points continue to inform what I think the show is - maybe this will remain so; maybe it won't.

The most consistently difficult and frustrating question continually asked as artists is "where do you get your ideas from?" This question fundamentally misunderstands the process of making work as I understand it. I don't have ideas. I map out territory that seems of interest, and I keep exploring it until I find something surprising - a story element, a counter-intuitive fact, a theatrical moment. Enough surprises put together in a sufficiently satisfying order and you have a show. Which makes it sound easy, but I know I'm going to need the full year between now and the show's opening.

First though, a week off, walking in the Lake District. Then I'm going to start a new draft and hope to finish it before my daughter is born in early September. At that point I'm going to disappear from the face of the earth before re-emerging to do a half-hour scratch at the West Yorkshire Playhouse on the 5th of October. By that point I hope the show will have a title. And indeed half an hour's worth of scratchable material. PLEASE COME.

The show will premiere in Edinburgh almost exactly a year from now - whereupon I hope one of you will attempt to distract attention from it by announcing your own show for 2018. And although as of this moment very little of my new show exists and it doesn't have a title, it does have generous support from Arts Council England and a string of brilliant commissioners as long as your arm. So I can't really back out of making it now. Those commissioners are: Harrogate Theatre, HOME Manchester, Norwich Arts Centre, Oxford Playhouse, Unity Theatre Liverpool and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. Producing, as ever, will be the extraordinary Annabel Turpin and ARC Stockton. These are wise and generous organisations that present, produce and support terrific work. They can't all have called this wrong. The only conclusion available is that my new show is going to be a remarkable work that changes the face of theatre as we understand it. So that's a load of my mind.

Fortunately I have a creative team the envy of the western world. Director Alex Swift has two shows in Edinburgh right now - Heads Up by Kieran Hurley and How to Win Against History by Seiriol Davies. Both shows are doing ridiculously well so it's good of Alex to set me up as his hat trick ball. Dramaturg Sarah Punshon spent Friday with me on this project, as a result of which I have any sense at all of what this show is. Hannah Sibai is designing and Katharine Williams is lighting. They're all awesome.

I haven't got anyone on board for sound yet but for that half-hour scratch at West Yorkshire Playhouse as part of Furnace on 5 October, I'm more than a little delighted that joining me on stage will be the incredible Steve Lawson, who will improvise a soundtrack to whatever I'm doing. PLEASE COME.

I've put the full video of The Price of Everything up online. It's embedded below.

I don't know why I didn't do this before. Inertia, I suppose.

It seemed sensible not to upload the full show while it was still available for touring. It's a year since I mothballed it, so it was about time.

But why don't we put these things up while they're still going concerns? Obviously we're worried that once someone's seen the video, they won't come and see it live. And hence won't pay. But I wonder how true that is. People still go to gigs even though they've bought the album.

In a few weeks I'll put up the video of How to Occupy an Oil Rig too. But should I put up Error 404? And Going Viral? If I do, will you still come?

​

I've just had some good funding news. Tiny Heroes, the new show which I'm developing with the Bike Shed in Exeter and Beaford Arts in north Devon, has got a grant from the Arts Council. There's a person in an office somewhere in Manchester to whom I'm very grateful.

This completes the trio of shows that will be my core activity for the next year or two. Between them they represent two years' work so it's pretty exciting to imagine a time when they're all in repertoire together. Going Viral is now on the road after the Edinburgh run in August. It's in Lincoln on Thursday and will be touring for most of the next year at least. Error 404, the show for young audiences I made at Polka Theatre earlier this year, re-rehearses next month and will tour in shorter bursts over the same period. And we're making the first version of Tiny Heroes in February in Devon, then polishing it up in July before offering it for touring from autumn next year. It will primarily - although not exclusively - go to places that either don't have a theatre, or just don't get much theatre.

The show is a sort of development of the Story Hunt model. On that show we met a series of people, both in curated meetings and by setting up an elaborate tent in the marketplace, in order to gather stories of things that are no longer there. In each town we then created a seventy-minute walking tour of the town in which I told some of these stories in the present tense. In each town it was an entirely new show.

Story Hunt was mostly targeted at towns that are reputed (often by themselves) to be a bit shit. There wasn't necessarily a theatre there, or any significant record of engagement in the arts. We had to keep costs low. So we ended up researching, writing, rehearsing, learning and performing it from beginning to end in as little as a fortnight. Then the show was done - none of the seven Story Hunts lived on in the repertoire. It was exhausting, and it was unsustainable.

Tiny Heroes is a slightly more sensible model. The show is a search for heroism, and for whether there is such a thing. In each place we do it we'll spend a day, or a few days, or a week, looking for heroes. Each performance will feature a mix of new and old material. It'll be a bit like a gig with tonight's set list taped to the mic. And some material from each place will stay in the mix. It'll be a different show every time, but we won't have to create a whole new show every time. It'll be a mini-repertoire all of its own.

I've become fascinated by repertoire lately, as in six months time I'm going to have at least four shows in my head - Going Viral, Error 404, We're Stuck (which I'm working on in the spring as a performer, for Sarah Punshon and China Plate) and that rolling roster of Tiny Heroes. There are also a couple of one-offs and at least one mooted revival. I'll occasionally perform three different shows in the same week. This is a brilliant stupid idea.

I don't know how to do this yet. I'm constantly astonished by Chris Thorpe, who seems to have about five or six different shows in his head at any one time. Alex Kelly must come close. But I don't know how to do it yet. I don't know how to keep them all in my head.

Fortunately, shows don't live in your head. They live in your body. When you've done a show enough times your mouth knows the words better than you do. You can be surprised by your own thoughts the way they surprise you when they first come. You run the lines on the journey to the theatre and they won't come. Not without reference to the space. The words only exist in the room with the audience.

I occasionally worry that I'll walk onto the stage and accidentally start the wrong show. This is my version of that about-to-play-Hamlet-haven't-rehearsed-the-play stress dream, especially since the first word of pretty much all my shows is "hello". But when awake I'm sure this won't ever happen, because I'm only ever in the right space for any one of them at a time.

As I write, at home we're just getting out the projector screen to watch some telly in our new house. It hasn't been up anywhere since the last time I did The Price of Everything, almost exactly a year ago. That performance was itself about four months after the previous one, and yet I instinctively want to start pouring milk. Maybe I should bring that show back into the repertoire too. Or maybe there's enough to be going on with.

I've got a new flatmate. The party animal, August, has moved out taking all his friends with him. The newcomer, September, has brought nothing so far but a rhinovirus and a to-do list. Life is all adjustments from now on.

In a strange way, though, the last couple of months have been an unusually focused affair. Since the end of May I've been almost entirely focused on Going Viral. Party animal August may be, but he's also a monomaniac.

The autumn is much more scattered. Here's what it holds:

- touring Going Viral. I had one day off between the last show in Edinburgh and the first show on tour (in Glasgow), but basically it's straight on with it, with eleven dates in the autumn and plenty more coming up in the spring.

- re-rehearsal and touring of Error 404, the show for children aged 8+ which I made for Polka Theatre earlier this year. I can't wait to get the robot back out of its box. It's a short tour in October and November, but there'll be plenty more of this in the spring too.

- writing the words for The Deal Versus the People, a co-production between Common Wealth and the West Yorkshire Playhouse. This is happening terrifyingly soon: all of the writing is being done out of what happens in rehearsals, which start in just over a week.

- R&D on a new project in the Story Hunt family: Tiny Heroes. This is a co-commission from Beaford Arts in north Devon and the Bike Shed Theatre in Exeter. We've made seven Story Hunts now and every time we build it from scratch in little over a fortnight. Given the target audience - places with low engagement in the arts, places which may not even have a theatre - we have to keep costs low, so the rapid turnaround makes sense. But I'm exhausted and can't make any more shows in a fortnight for a while. Tiny Heroes is a variation on the model, where we will still have considerable local engagement - but the show will feature a rotating roster of material, topped up in each new place, rather than being made entirely afresh. It'll also be a two-hander. I've spent too much time on stage by myself lately. Speaking of which:

- the final stages of R&D on Sarah Punshon's We're Stuck, on which I'm working as a performer along with Seiriol Davies and a fabulous team. This is being finished at Shoreditch Town Hall in spring 2016 before a short tour. And it's produced by the excellent China Plate.

- the very early stages of a new interventionist choral project with team Wonderstruck (Sarah Punshon and Boff Whalley). I'm not sure whether I'm allowed to officially announce this yet, so I'd better keep schtum. Suffice it to say that something will enter the world in summer 2016.

- the first draft deadline on a seed commission for one of my favourite theatres in the world. If they like it, it'll go to full commission by Christmas. Now that would be a nice present.

It's a day off Going Viral here in Edinburgh and so I've finally read some of the reviews. I don't tend to read them early in a run while the show is still settling in. There are quite enough voices in my head already. Even apparently positive reviews can unsettle a show early on, as you try to do the thing they liked, rather than the more important thing that it enables.

This self-protection was doubly important in this case because most of the press were in on the first preview. Eat your heart out, Cumberbatch. The show was still being made and I was some days from really feeling like I knew how to get the best out of it, but there they all were. Why?

Two days before the official start of the run, Northern Stage do a preview day to which the press are invited and a whole bunch of other people. So slightly perversely, I had press night, then a day off, then two previews, and then what would normally be the "official" opening night. By which time I'd already had about six reviews published.

This "press preview" day is either utter folly or strategic genius, depending on whether the show is well-received. So in this case I have to thank Lorne and Katie at Northern Stage for their persuading me that it was the latter.

(I did a couple of previews in Newcastle and was surprised by how many reviews came out even then. Not necessarily in a bad way, although of course the show wasn't ready. But as Meg Vaughan has said on twitter, if I buy something I reserve the right to say what I think about it on the internet. That's fair enough - when you acknowledge, as for example Andrew Latimer did in this brilliant piece about one of those Newcastle previews, that what you've written about is a prototype, not the finished thing. I'm not going to get into the total failure of e.g. The Times to understand how radically a show can change over even a short preview period. Not that it necessarily will, but it can.)

The press for my first preview in Edinburgh were invited, so they were entitled to treat it as though it was the finished product. Of course, it wasn't. It continued to evolve for several days as I got further under the skin of it. It continues to do so and in the coming week will be reworked some more. It's never finished, although there usually comes a point where you can't figure out any more about how to improve it. "Press night" is a totally arbitrary date by which you hope to have fixed most of the major problems.

Lorne and Katie are strategic geniuses, because the Edinburgh reviews for Going Viral are really good. Not just in the sense of being broadly positive about the show, although that is largely true. They're good in the sense of being really good pieces of critical writing. We're fortunate to live in a time where the standard of critical writing is unusually high.

There's often a disparity, particularly on the Edinburgh Fringe, between reviews in broadsheet newspapers and reviews on websites and magazines. It's easy to observe a little bit of grade inflation amongst the websites and magazines. Put crudely, you'll get a higher average star rating from Broadway Baby than from the Guardian. But this year all of the writing seems to be good, clear-sighted and astute.

With Going Viral, if there's grade inflation it's the other way round. There are four-star reviews in the Guardian, Scotsman, Independent, Herald, Telegraph and Stage. The show has also won a Fringe First. Meanwhile in What's On Stage, Exeunt, the List, Time Out etc, it's consistently three stars. I am not about to attempt to explain this phenomenon, but it is unusual, no? Has anyone else observed this? Is this a sign of shifting sands or is it just the quirks and tastes of the particular individuals who came to see my show? It's probably the latter.

There's an old cliche on the Fringe: "it reads like a four". But reading them blind, I think you'd be hard pushed to sort my reviews by star rating, so you could equally say that some of the fours read like a three. In any case, critically I can hardly complain. Even the three-star ones are very warm about the show. It's almost as though star-ratings are largely meaningless and arbitrary.

I can't really disagree with many of the reviews. Of course there are loads of little things that I find inexplicably irritating. But that's as often because they're right as otherwise.

The main reservation people express about the show is that there are too many ideas in there for it to cohere satisfactorily. That seems fair enough, although I'd argue that there is a particular set of lenses viewed through which the show does cohere. But even though I'm long since through previews, there's still more work I want to do and part of that involves clarifying those final moments a little further.

In the final analysis, though. I'd rather stand accused of having too many ideas than too few.