73 public performances

22 performances of How to Occupy an Oil Rig
during 1 tour
across 18 venues
in 5 weeks

14 performances of The Price of Everything
Across 13 venues
in 4 countries
and 2 continents

4 versions of Story Hunt created for:
5 performances in Margate
12 performances in Northampton
4 performances in Heckmondwike
6 performances in Middlesbrough
Totalling 19581 words
4 days sitting in a tent swapping stories for cups of tea

3 miscellaneous cabaret gigs

2 scratches of Going Viral (next year's Edinburgh show)
8 months apart
10 minutes of material made for the first one, of which
none will be in the show
25 minutes of material made for the second, of which maybe
5-10 will make the cut
17 research meetings/interviews with academics and clinicians
1 grant application (successful) (to the Wellcome Trust)

2 versions of The Six O'Clock News
1 of them at six o'clock (Oxford)
1 of them at nine o'clock (Lancaster)

3 performances of We're Stuck (in which, gloriously, I'm a performer exempt from the need to make the overarching decisions)
4 days of rehearsal on We're Stuck
5 schools workshop days
2 other R&D days
1 Fun Palace

4 performances of Wonderstruck (in which I didn't perform, so don't come at me with "but that makes 77")
9 songs
11 spoken word pieces
5 poems
all of these are in separate files, so I'm going to just guess the total at around 6000 words, all of them co-written with either Boff Whalley (who wrote the songs and adjusted the lyrics accordingly), Josh Coates (who was associate artist on the project) or the performer of the text in question (very often both of the latter two)
107 performers
5 choirs
4 animal heads

3 unsuccessful pitches/interviews/applications

2 drafts of Error 404 (for Polka Theatre, March 2015)
draft one: 6424 words (way too long)
draft two: 5869 words ( a bit too long)
common to both drafts: the first 800 words, give or take
8.5 days R&D
11 days in primary schools running philosophy sessions
draft three due at the end of January

1 commissioned script, for Royal and Derngate's community and youth companies
13587 words

4 shows worked on as director, dramaturg, or similar: Renationalisation (Common Wealth), Heroes (Dick Bonham), Too Much Too Young (Jack Bennett) and Fat Man (Move to Stand)

43 teaching days
4 full-length student shows mentored/supervised
15 short student shows mentored/supervised

5 colds
1 mild concussion
1 hurricane

0 weddings, funerals or christenings (a years-old record in all columns)

1 football match attended
the first since Nick died
the first without Nick for about ten years
3-0 Middlesbrough's margin of victory

8 non-weekend days off (estimate)

7 weekends off (not an estimate)

Around a dozen moments of feeling "actually, that went quite well"

I'm coming down with something, so my voice is terribly sore. And last night I hosted a climate change themed cabaret night in a venue that can only be described as acoustically unsympathetic. During the course of the gig my voice gave out more and more; by the end I'd open my mouth unsure of whether anything would come out.

During the course of this morning a series of people at the event the gig was part of came up to ask how my voice is. It's very nice of them. But sympathy isn't usually the reaction you're looking for after a show.

Never mind my voice, what about the material?

So today feels as apposite a day as any to be launching a new podcast series. A big thank you to Exeunt Theatre Magazine for giving me the push to make this happen, and in particular to the support of Catherine Love.

The Faraway Tree is a series of conversations about theatre and other worlds. In each episode I'll talk to someone new about theatre (and the world) where they are. These will mostly be from around the UK, with the occasional foray into internationalism when I'm working abroad. Where they come from will be dictated by my travel itinerary. If there hasn't been one from where you are, Exeunt aren't giving me travel expenses, so you need to persuade your local theatre to book me.

Andrew Haydon has written before that his reviews of international work get far fewer readers than his reviews of London-based work. This seems peculiar given that it's the internationalism he's known for, and it's the internationalism which gives him his particular perspective. This podcast, like Andrew's dispatches from Europe, is an invitation to hear from the world beyond London, and I hope people will heed both of those invitations. There are several theatre podcasts I admire hugely, but I can't help but notice that most of the people on them have the same accent, and are discussing work made within the same few square miles. This isn't intended as a corrective to that limitation, but I hope it'll be a useful addition.

The first episode is a conversation with the Glasgow-based writer and performer Kieran Hurley. We spoke on the day of the referendum on Scottish independence, so we talked a lot about that. The conversation also danced to identity, 7:84, music and identity again. We probably talked about capitalism too, although I don't remember that specifically. We certainly talked about the uneasy relationship between culture and state politics. I enjoyed it immensely.

I've also recorded one with the Middlesbrough playwright Ishy Din, although I need to do a bit of editing on that before you can hear it. So the next one will be from Manchester, followed by Lancaster, followed by wherever I am next.

Hopefully by then I'll have my voice back. Especially as the first comment to roll in on this first episode on twitter was this.

And this time I don't think I can say, never mind my voice, what about the material. As I hope to have expressed above, here voice is part of the material. The different voices you'll hear alongside mine - and I don't mean voice in the farty literary manager sense, but in the sense of the sounds you make with your face - are all produced by different perspectives, different experiences, and different relationships to the business of remaining alive in this world.

Let me know what you think.

Oh, it's here, by the way.

We're in Middlesbrough working on our seventh Story Hunt, the last of this year. Story Hunt is a storytelling show, a walking tour of things that are no longer there, of a town's ghosts. The people and places no longer to be seen. The buildings burned and bulldozed.

It's always a spooky and thrilling experience. The electric shock of pasts made palpable and present always galvanises. The archaeology of past towns buried under present is mystical and each town becomes a layered set of palimpsests, where disappeared buildings flicker into presence and long-dead people flag down cabs outside Wetherspoons.

Now that we're doing it in my own home town, though, it becomes powerful in strange new ways. The ghosts we're touring are my ghosts. I remember that place. I was robbed in that alley. I once got kicked out of that pub, and kicked in in that one. I had my first kiss out the back of that cinema. Further back, the Irish navvies chased across the fields by irate locals are my ancestors, and the irate locals chasing navvies across the fields are my ancestors too.

Midway through the project, we put up a booth in the town centre and swap stories for tea and biscuits. It's a way of taking the temperature of a town, and spotting common themes. We usually end up with a couple of wartime stories and often some youthful derring do at some forgotten nightdive. This, though, is the first time someone called David Bye has come in, announced himself as a distant relative, explained that he's taken the family tree back 400 years and told me I'm Norwegian. I don't suppose that will go in the show, but it does show how research for this show is inescapably also research into myself.

Last week, following a lead, I stumbled across a YouTube documentary made by someone I was at school with. He died four years ago. Every day something new brings me close to tears. 

I never liked my school, but the news that it had been knocked down last year still came as a shock. Five horrible years, rubble. Good riddance. But also - another anchor, another of the dwindling list of things that moored me to this town, gone. And I drift a little further.

On booth day, we get lots of stories about where people's grandparents met. Seldom are more than one or two genuinely interesting. Here, the grandparents that met in that demolished dance hall are my grandparents: to me, that's inherently interesting. In other towns a school demolished, a dance hall disappeared, are of academic interest unless there's a good story attached and I can make poetry out of it. In that case it goes in the show. Otherwise, no. In this town, every little detail has that sting, that condensed heft, of poetry, before I've even attempted to alchemise it. I can't tell the piquant from the piffling.

My own perspective is always very present in Story Hunt, as in all my work. It's quite clear to the even moderately attentive audient that I'm on the side of protestors, of workers, of the oppressed and disenfranchised, and that I'm against capital and patriarchy and their attendant daemons. But that's usually an act of empathy or solidarity, a recognition of common defiance. Here, I don't feel empathetically. I just feel.

This makes the show a lot harder to write (which is also why I'm writing this instead). I don't usually have to worry about the distinction between what's of interest to me, and what's of interest full stop. I trust my instincts enough to know that if something is interesting to me, I should be able to make it interesting to an audience. Here, there's a whole lot of noise in with the signal.

The show might end up filled with a lot of stories about people I've loved and lost. It might end up as a lament for a town that no longer is, or has never been, or will never be. I might end up talking about a town only I know. It might be just like another Story Hunt, or it might be like that with added heft.

You can find out on Saturday.

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