Pomona

In the early summer of 1968, Paul McCartney read an interview with Pete Townsend in Guitar Player magazine from  the previous year, in which Pete talks about The Who's then-recent recording of 'I Can See For Miles', describing it as totally wild, abandoned, dirty, and raw. The legend is that Paul was very excited by the description and got hold of the single - and that he was very disappointed by what he heard. 'I Can See For Miles' is a terrific song but it isn't that wild, not that dirty and raw. And, still buzzing from the idea of a piece of music that he had imagined, he went into the studio and recorded 'Helter Skelter', which isn't the wildest, most abandoned, dirty and raw song ever, but it's on the way there, and has a claim to inventing heavy metal.

I thought of this watching Pomona, because I can't tell you how many times I've been told about an amazing new play that's wild and abandoned and breaks all the rules and is totally contemporary and thrilling and instead I've just ended up seeing more of the same. But at the Orange Tree, Pomona is it; this is the real deal. This is a play that could change how we write plays. It's a play that could change our theatre. I've seen a few theatre shows that have passed into theatre history: The Oresteia at the National in 1981, The Mahabharata at the Tramway in 1988, Blasted at the Theatre Upstairs in 1995, Jerusalem at the Royal Court in 2009. I'd add Pomona to that list. It's the most exciting new play I've seen in years. It's a play that could change how we see and understand our world. 

So, describe Pomona then. Well that's already tough. I'd say that a woman goes missing.in Manchester and her identical twin tries to enlist help to find her. I think the missing woman has problems with drugs and debts and becomes a prostitute and then falls in with a gang who get her to film violent porn movies. I think she then disappears one day and her friend in the brothel discovers that their boss has their blood-type information on her computer. I think their boss then enlists two security guards to kill the friend, perhaps acting on the authority of The Girl, a mythical unnamed figure who controls everything and I mean everything. I think the guards kidnap the friend but bungle it and are forced to fake a violent attack. I think that inadvertently one of the guards dies from the wounds administered in the fake attack. I think the sister looking for her twin eventually stumbles upon an underground hospital where the disappeared are being kept, their organs harvested, their bodies used as baby farms. I think the twin escapes but her sister does not. However, some or all of this might just be events taking place in a RPG, dungeon-mastered by Charlie. It could be a dream or a nightmare or a fiction or it might all be real. I'll be honest, I spent some of the performance confused, much of it uneasy, moments of it actually frightened, but at no point did I doubt that what I was watching was somehow necessary, urgent, inevitable, and about us now. Moe, one of the guards, announces 'It's all real. / All of it. / Everything bad is real' (p. 101).

Real is an interesting word to talk about in relation to this play. It's clearly not 'realism': it has a kind of urban gothic quality that pushes beyond realism into something darkly stylised. There are scenes that clearly aren't real: near the end, Charlie (the other Guard) meets Zeppo, a man who owns much of the city, but who is now a seagull. Earlier Charlie has persuaded Keaton to play an RPG entering on a cult that hope to revive the terrible sleeping God Chthulu, who is a figure from the works of H P Lovecraft, so obviously not real, though we have met Chthulu in the first scene, sitting with Zeppo and Ollie, obsessively throwing dice (or, in the text, solving Rubik's Cubes). So is Chthulu real? Or is the first scene a fantasy? Or does the whole play take place in a liminal zone - like the abandoned urban zone of Pomona - neither living nor dead, both real and imaginary?

And what's more the rather linear account of the plot that I offer above is no respecter of the play's riddling structure which jumps back and forth in time, requiring that we mentally reorder the play in our heads. But this isn't always possible to do: where does Charlie's RPG fit in the structure? It's very hard to say. The chronological disordering has troubling and unsettling effects on our ability to understand who is who, particularly the twin sisters. Although the text tells us who is which sister in each scene, on stage this is hard to work out. In the final scene, the captured twin has escaped from hospital, but things are so murky at this point that it could equally be the searching twin who has decided to swap her life with her twin. Zeppo's reality is very questionable - as I've already mentioned, he shares a life with Chthulu and turns into a seagull, and then there's the matter of his name. Zeppo and Keaton suggest Marx and Buster, a figures from another clownishly existential world. Who is Keaton? Is she the Girl referred to at various times? Scene fifteen seems to say so; scene eight says not. The play does not know and instead offers character as ghost, slippage, people appearing and disappearing all over the city; in one stunning sequence in this production, the twins appear and reappear in jump cuts across the stage. It's thrilling and terrifying.

But realism still. This isn't just fantasy. There's a patterning of motifs and events and concerns and attitudes that play out across the surface of the play that suggests our own culture, in our own time: drugs, faddish religions, faceless corporations, pervasive capitalism, school shootings, pornography, prostitution, gaming and body horror. In its skewed and nightmarish way this is a vision of us now. The great and exciting thing about a play like this is the way that it reorders your mind; it gathers together other manifestations in our wider culture and retrospectively makes sense of them. I thought of Dennis Kelly's Utopia in this, with its mixture of brutality, dystopia, cartoon imagery, mysticism. I thought of the mixture of gritty realism and sheer surrealism in Three Kingdoms. I think of the way Philip Ridley's plays have been mixing dreams, realism and comic-book violence for 25 years. 

I thought particularly of the strain of apocalyptic political interventions in the theatre this year: Alice Birch's Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again and Rory Mullarkey's Wolf from the Door both of which suggest a furious, nihilistic disgust at the world and apparently offers utter destruction and rebirth as an answer. Here the play is filled with images of horrified nihilism, the possibilities of moral redemption virtually non-existent. Moe denounces a world in which a man like him can walk around. Ollie, the missing twin, tells her friend Fay:

I think I hate everyone
It's like a sickness I can feel in my guts.
I wake up every morning and I feel it all over.
I can't get to sleep because it turns in me,
All this hate.
I think I'd sleep a lot easier if I knew none of us would wake up tomorrow.
Do you feel that?
. . .
One day I'll come back to this city on fire.
I'll have flames pouring from me.
And I'll keep walking through the streets in circles until everyone and everything is just ash.
I'll bring the end to everyone. (p. 62).

Is this a good thing? I can imagine perfectly reasonable critics objecting to this: isn't this a kind of rejection of politics as a process of change? Isn't this an embrace of a murderous anti-humanist darkness? Are these plays not capitulating to the very horrors that they are representing? I don't think so. First, because all of these plays retain a warmth and humanity in the wit and empathy of the writing (and, in production, in the performance). Second, because plays do not have to set out a detailed political manifesto: these plays are expressing a scream of rage at the totality of our corrupt politics. They express - violently, desperately, shockingly - an outside to our current contingent politics; they force us to imagine a sheer other to the world we live in; they express the genuine contempt that so many of us have for a world that seems to value money more than people. The images of destruction are a gesture of determination to hold open the imagination, at any cost; they mark an extreme limit, to hold that limit there, to insist that things can be different. In their very different way they are like that cry from Howard Brenton's The Churchill Play, 'don't let the future be like this' (p. 108). But these writers, and this play, are saying, 'don't let now be like this'.

I hear in Moe's 'everything bad is real' a - surely unintended - echo of Hegel's 'everything that is rational is real'. Hegel is writing with the nineteenth century's huge confidence in the perfectibility of the world. Is Moe falling into irrationalist postmodern despair? I don't think so. I think this play is political, because it thinks the world is perfectible but is everywhere viciously imperfect.

Because, for all its madness, this is a crystal clear picture of what is wrong with our world. Pomona, the place, is described more than once as 'a hole in the middle of the city' (pp. 19, 44). Zeppo thinks it's what the world will be like in a few thousand years (p. 19), but I don't think the play reckons we'll have to wait that long. The city itself is empty and desolate, as if Pomona is a hole in the middle of a hole: Charlie's RPG begins in the middle of a crowded city but 'People push past you as if you're not there. It's a cold and lonely city, and you're not here by choice' (p. 42). More than one character admits to having no friends. Moe's violent streak means that he dare not touch anyone, which seems to grow into a general image of atomisation: 'I feel very disconnected,' he confesses (p. 89). But he has violent tendencies, he admits; his touch is murderous. The vision of the world is brutal: 'The whole world hates women,' says Fay. 'Maybe. Not me,' retorts Moe though he will eventually kidnap her to kill her (p. 91). The world is just 'a cycle of shit,' says Moe, 'A drowning in oceans of piss' (p. 102). At the end, Seagull-Zeppo announces his plan to shit on the entire world, to cover everything in his own faeces. Charlie's more benignly intended but still grotesque desire is to cover everything in the world with a thin layer of his own 'jizz' . He insists: 'not in a sexy way. It wouldn't be sexy' (p. 48), suggesting that a cultural imagination where extreme pornography has become normalised, almost desexualised. His belief that somehow, in doing so, he would be healing the world, spreading out his 'lifeforce' (p. 49), shows how misshapen an ordinary spirit of altruism has become. This is benevolence as bukkake.

We shift between layers throughout; from dream to nightmare, from memory to imagination, from reality to fantasy. It's extremely skilful and very precise. The writing is also extremely funny. The confidence of Alistair McDowall's writing here is remarkable. And the production - yes, sorry, I've left the production till last and will probably say far too little about it. Ned Bennett has found a shape for the show that maps hauntingly over the play and brings it to ghostly half-life. The jaw-dropping moment where Ollie appears in jump cuts across the stage is as genuinely unsettling as anything I've seen in the theatre - it reshapes the dimensions of the theatre somehow (and Elliott Griggs' lighting is key to this).  Georgia Lowe's set sinks a square trough into the Orange Tree stage, adverting to the underground world of the play but also the sense of a drained, exhausted and derelict world. The performers run at the play with conviction and precision and attack: there's not a weak link here. 

The play is disorientating, purposefully. The production is too. The ghosts of characters that layer over each other are also felt in the uncanny layering of imagined inner-city Manchester on the leafy suburbia of Richmond. It's been widely reported that there have been walk-outs, letters of denunciation, and protests by some of the Orange Tree's regular and conventional audience. Well, shame on them. They are privileged to have this stunning vision of our world premiering at their theatre. Fortunately, the new Orange Tree is trying to build another audience. Tickets for the under-30s are £10. Please support this production. It's nearly finished its run. You only have one more week to see the play of the decade,

Chekhov at School

I've written a version of Chekhov's Three Sisters for schools. Why the hell have you done that, Dan? Well, the immediate spur was my wife, Lilla, who is a teacher, wanting to direct a straight play at her school. I suggested Three Sisters and once we'd looked again at the play and thought about her school which stops at GCSE, she thought the play needed to be adapted. So I volunteered to do it.

It's been an interesting exercise and not one I've undertaken lightly. I love this play. But it took me a while to see what the fuss was about. In fact it was only when I saw the Gate Theatre production that came to the Royal Court in 1989 that it all lit up for me. The production featured the three Cusack sisters (Sinead, Sorcha and Niamh) alongside their father - and my strong impression was that they weren't getting on; this may have just been terrific acting, but they seemed to be irritated being on stage together, occasionally upstaging one another, and generally coming across a rather dislikeable. And so of course the whole play came alive. Once you realise that Chekhov's characters aren't there to be liked, the play opens right up. (I'd recently seen two production of The Cherry Orchard, one with Ranevskaya played by national treasure Judi Dench and another where she was played by Thelma Barlow (aka Mavis Riley off Coronation Street, in neither case was there any room to have anything other than sympathetic pity for the protagonist's plight.) Once you get that the play's gaze on its characters may be critical, even satirical, the plays become funnier, more politically robust, and the moments of pathos much smarter and harder-won.

So I've written a version that tries to clarify and emphasise those elements. It emphasises the humour; it moves a little more quickly than the original; the emotions are, I hope, not oversimplifies but their outlines are clearer and sharper, perhaps easier for a teenage cast and audience to grasp. I've made the decision to keep it in period, roughly. I have no problem whatever with radical updates (like Benedict Andrews's brilliant version for the Young Vic [pictured above]), but in this instance I wanted to retain a sense of the play in period for the cast. They might find ways to update it through the design anyway. But I've tried to de-cobweb the language so it feels like these are people we know speaking to us. There are a couple of swears, but these can be modified.

Anyway, any teachers looking to do a great classic play with some really great parts for girls, you might like to give this a read. No charge for use but do let me know if it's happening. Download it here.

Adam Mills

When I first met Adam Mills I thought he was the most infuriating man in the entire world. Once I got to know him I realised he was only the 4th or 5th most infuriating man in the entire world. He was also one of my favourite people, a dear and cherished friend, a sweet, funny and extremely kind man, a good man, a brilliant thinker, and one of the biggest intellectual influences on my life, and now he's dead and I miss him so much.

Yesterday was his funeral. Andy Piasecki was a colleague of Adam's at Royal Holloway in the 1980s and had left in 1989, a year before I arrived to begin my PhD. Andy gave a lovely eulogy, talking about his train journeys to and from college, recalling how Adam used their 40 minutes of proximity to mount an interrogation (the word is exactly right) about a range of topics: the value of cultural studies, the point of studying theatre, the values of higher education. I realised during the speech that after Andy had left, I was his replacement. Throughout the 1990s, we must have shared close to a thousand train journeys on which he would interrogate me about the value of cultural studies, the point of studying theatre, the values of higher education.

As I say, initially I found this infuriating. I'd only recently graduated and my head was full of the new ideas which were going to provide the foundation of my thesis: post-structuralism, critical theory, cultural studies. Adam was none too impressed with this and had, instead, been reading mainstream philosophy of the kind taught in British philosophy departments. This Anglo-American tradition was less excited by the rhetorical force of a Baudrillard, the labyrinthine paradoxes of a Derrida, or the delicate ambiguities of a Barthes. It's still only rarely sighted in British theatre studies. In those conversations, Adam would quiz me about these ideas, make me defend these positions, argue forcefully against them, point out equivocations, false steps in the arguments. This drove me mad, used as I was to being pretty much the only person who had read this stuff and had even halfway understood it; I was used to it making me feel like the smartest guy in the room. And then Adam came along and made me realise how little I understood what I thought I thought.

And at first I just understood this as hostility. Why is this man having a go at me all the time? And it was unremitting. As the train would pull in to Waterloo, I'd assume the conversation was over. Sometimes I'd breathe a sigh of relief. But then next time I'd see him, he'd pick up exactly where we left off and it would all start again. But, slowly, I realised that it wasn't hostility at all. It was a serious compliment. He genuinely wanted to know what I thought. Most of all, he just loved the argument, the ideas. Debate and argument mattered to him. He thought deeply and cared deeply about thoughts. I say he'd pick up exactly where we left off, but that's not quite true: if I'd said something that conflicted with his beliefs, or had given him pause for thought, he would chew on it, think about it, go over it in his mind. He couldn't wait to continue the discussion. Related to this, he had the smallest small talk I know. Sometimes I'd get a call from Adam which would go something like this:

(Phone rings. I answer)
ME: Hello?
ADAM: I think you're wrong about Arthur Danto.
ME: Hi Adam.

He was a dog with a bone and it was brilliant.

Because it was a key part of my intellectual training. On the theory course I would lecture in in the mid-nineties, Adam often gave an early talk on the Kantian aesthetics. He'd set a piece by Roger Scruton, which got my hackles up (a Tory? on my reading list?) and I read it one week and made a series of objections to it on our way to College, but they were random, ill-thought-out, trivial, in a sense. I was picking on phrases, not the ideas. The next week I read it again, carefully, for the moves of the argument. I worked hard at it and I had some new objections. These were rather more serious, sharper, difficult to counter. Adam couldn't have looked more pleased. I think that week, intellectually, I grew up.

Adam was a kind of Marxist, I guess, though he liked the debate so much, he'd have hated to settle on a position (where's the counter-argument? he'd want to know). Typically, he had little time for the Western Marxist tradition; instead he introduced me to G. A. Cohen's rather brilliant analytic reconstruction of Marx's ideas, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence (1978, 2000), still the most careful and lucid account I've read. He lectured on Kant and Marx. Initially, I resisted both of these traditions in the name of Derrida and Foucault. By the time of my book Theatre & Globalisation (2009), Kant and Marx were my guiding lights and I acknowledged Adam's formative role in its thinking. I still see more in the post-structuralist tradition than Adam ever did (though I did get him to acknowledge the power of Derrida's brilliant deconstruction of John Searle, 'Limited Inc a b c...'), but I've drifted somewhat analytic-philosophywards. I do look for the arguments rather than the phraseology (and no accusations of logocentrism will stop me). I came to love the debate too.

Adam and academia grew apart and in the early 2000s he left to raise his three children. We stayed in touch; I babysat a few times; I'm (a very negligent) godfather to their youngest son; he and Gina were at my wedding; Adam and I would meet every few months for a pizza near his Islington home. He'd quiz me about developments in higher education; he'd explain some philosophical idea he'd been grappling with; he'd talk about his children. It was wonderful. The last time we met, earlier this year, he was worrying away at Kendall Walton's notion that when we see a photograph of something, we have genuinely seen it. We had a fascinating conversation about it over our La Reines.

Adam was only 63. That's no age. I was expecting another twenty, thirty years of this. 

Yesterday's ceremony was at the Epping Forest Burial Ground. Adam was an atheist and it was a fully humanist service: friends and family listening to readings, memories, and music. More than any funeral I've been to, it brought his presence, his personality right into the room. There was laughter, there were memories; and when Gina chose Bob Dylan's 'Wedding Song', one of their first memories together, I was overcome with love and loss and sadness. Afterwards, his body was lowered into the ground and he rejoined the earth. He wanted to be buried beneath a tree, to help it grow, as so many other things - friendships, children, ideas, love - he helped grow.

The building in which the ceremony took place was round, wooden, with big glass walls, looking out onto the forest.

We were invited to remember Adam as we listened to Elgar's Cello Concerto, played by Jacqueline du Pré. 

It is autumn and as the music swells, a gust of wind shakes the trees. I think of Adam on this last day as a cello surges and, outside, red and golden leaves tumble in the air towards the ground.

Goodbye and thank you, my dear friend.

10 Audiences I Have Known

Are audiences getting rowdier? Weirder? Less able to concentrate? Some people seem to think so. Sometimes I hear it said that young audiences chatter and text through a performance though I've never seen it. There's always been a worry about declining standards of audience behaviour, ever since Plato in The Laws denounced the shift from respectful silent attention to 'catcalls and uncouth yelling' that he called a 'theatrocracy', a damaging unbalancing of performance in favour of the ignorant audience and against the skilled performers. In the seventeenth century, Ben Jonson was writing the rules for audience behaviour into his plays - the prologue to Bartholomew Fair announces a contract for the audience imposing limits on their dissent, right to judge, the expectations it is reasonable to have and their interpretive freedom. (I wrote more about this here, lucky lucky you.) There have been periods where audiences have been noisier and periods where audiences are quieter; there have been times when riots have been deliberately provoked and others where directors have dreamed of entirely empty auditoriums. I'm not sure we're really seeing any significant change at the moment.

What does interest me is that conviction that some people have that there is a correct audience behaviour. The Platonic ideal of silent attention seems obvious to some but it confers all the power on the stage. As Jacques Rancière said in his essay 'The Emancipated Spectator' (2004), maybe audiences know more than we think? Maybe audiences are always active, rather than passive, contributing significantly in the nature and style of their co-presence to the theatre event. This is not to say that some kinds of audience behaviour aren't to be condemned; Theophrastus, in his taxonomy of contemporary moral character types, talks about the 'disgusting man' (bdeluros) who ‘claps when others stop, and he hisses at those things that the rest of the audience watch with pleasure. When the audience is silent, he stands up and burps in order to make them turn around and look at him’. That's sheer self regard and not really a response to the theatrical event as such. But audiences collectively are worth listening to. 

Rather pleasingly, audiences often respond badly to being told what to do. I'm sure we've all had that aesthetic shudder of disgust at a play that thinks it can manipulate us too easily or assumes that we are more ignorant, less enlightened, more riddled with unthinking prejudice than it is. A fairly recent play which I won't name spent two hours hectoring its audience and then ended by implying we were all too passive (well if I could have gotten a word in edgeways...). As Tim Crouch puts it in The Author, these plays have written us badly.

One of my favourite instances of audiences behaving badly came in 2000, when the novelist and Conservative politician Jeffrey Archer opened his play The Accused. It’s a clunkily old-fashioned courtroom drama about a doctor accused of murdering his wife, but the real drama lay in the event of the play, because, for reasons known only to him, Archer decided to play the role of the defendant himself. At the time he was just about to go on trial for perjury related to a previous case where he had sued a newspaper for libel. Perhaps he thought that this was his chance, in some peculiar way, to rehearse for his court appearance, a pre-emptive strike on public opinion to correct any presumption of guilt they might have. The audience is addressed as the jury; the Jury Bailiff urges us to pay no attention to anything we might read or hear outside the courtroom (Archer's forthcoming trial has been widely covered in the press). Archer’s dreadful dialogue is painstakingly determined to explain what is proper evidence and what is hearsay. And the play constantly alludes to the real events of Archer’s original trial, most daringly in the climax to Act 3 Scene 1 when the defendant removes his shirt to demonstrate his supposed lover’s imperfect knowledge of his body, which recalled a similar legal crux in Archer’s own first trial.

For many people, though, Archer was simply offering a preview of him in the dock for those of us too impatient to wait for the official Old Bailey opening. The audience is required at the end of the play to vote on the guilt or innocence of the defendant. Reportedly, audiences, unwilling to be patronised by the disgraced peer, tended to vote ‘guilty’ regardless. And then, as if anticipating that the audience would not respond well to being told what to do, Archer created two endings: perversely, if the audience find him guilty, the ending reveals him to be innocent; if you find him innocent, a coda reveals his guilt. The public are always wrong. It's a peculiarly aggressive defence and a striking instance of the theatre's failure to get the audience to do what it wants written in to the very fabric of a play.

I had a think about some audiences I've been in, trying to think about the surprising, perverse, accidental and peculiar responses I've witnessed. I'm not including theatre that directly and explicitly cajoles active responses from its spectators. These are unanticipated responses, supplements. 

I'm also not including cinema, though I still remember fondly a visit in 1988 to the Cube Cinema in Bristol, a tiny little community cinema seating maybe 40 people, to see I forget what. What I do remember is that they showed adverts beforehand including a long one for Moosehead beer which had high production values and featured an alien spaceship landing outside on old shack somewhere in the rural American south; lights flood through the gaps in the planking walls and the door bursts open; an alien with glowing eyes walks through, ignoring the resistance of the old timer in residence; the alien is on a mission and is inexorable, walks through the house to the fridge, pulls it open and retrieves his prey: the cold bottles of Moosehead lager. Immediately from the back of the audience, in the strongest Bristol accent you can think of, a voice declared 'I've had Moosehead. It's crap.' I can't see a bottle of Moosehead beer without thinking of that voice.

 So these are 10 audiences I have known.

1. Top Girls (Royal Court Theatre) April 1991

I'd read this play, studied it at university. I'd seen extracts on TV, I think. I was very excited that it was being revived in the same theatre where it premiered almost a decade earlier and in a production by the same director, Max Stafford-Clark. If you don't know the play, its stunning first act brings Marlene, a successful businesswoman, together with five apparently successful high-achieving women from history, including the thirteenth-century Buddhist nun Lady Nijo, the ninth-century Pope Joan, the nineteenth-century explorer Isabella Bird and others. They are at a restaurant, to celebrate Marlene's recent promotion and they order and consume a full meal - and quite a lot of wine - through the course of the scene. The dialogue, which was hugely inventive and has been highly influential, has tightly choreographed overlaps and is written with a beautiful ear for ordinary talk, big and small, formal and informal. It is a staggering piece of writing and was beautifully staged. As the scene ended, I was still on a high from having seen this extraordinary theatre sequence. This was only slightly punctured by the American man behind me who turned to his companion and complained in a whisper, 'she didn't finish her avocado'.

2. Oleanna (Duke of York's Theatre) October 1993

David Mamet's play came to London with its combative US premiere behind it. It was apparently Mamet's pugnacious intervention in the Culture Wars, a blast against so-called political correctness, a playwright standing up against a feminism that had run out of control. In the play, a young female student makes a complaint of sexual harassment against her lecturer. The university is obliged to take her complaint seriously and after a series of increasingly abrasive encounters, the lecturer looks set to lose his job. At the end of the play, he snaps and physically assaults the student, shouting 'you vicious little bitch, you think you can come here with your political correctness and destroy my life?' On Broadway, apparently, audiences had responded to John's assault on Carol with cheers and shouts of 'kill the bitch'. I had liked Mamet's earlier work and so, with some misgivings, went along. I can't speak for the US production, but the London version, in Harold Pinter's directorial hands, was unrecognisable from those descriptions. It was a play about power and language in which both sides sought to establish control of meaning; it was fiercely even-handed, ironies resonating against ironies, asking deep and honest questions about our mutual existence. The initial action that led to the first accusation was masked from us: it was undecidable, impossible to say who was right. The moment where Carol hears John on the phone call his wife 'Baby' and corrects him was a moment of horror, a terrible transgression, a thrust too cruel. And when John attacks her, he had finally lost. He had made himself the brutal patriarch that Carol claimed him to be. It was, in a sense, a cathartic and tragic ending, for me, anyway. But not for the man sitting next to me. Alone in the audience, he responded to John's attack by bursting into applause. I shrank away from him, worried people might think it was me who had celebrated this assault. But why did he clap? Was this a spontaneous response to the tensions of the story that has unfolded before him? Or had he read the reports from America, experienced some 'excess' of anti-racism or feminism in his own life, and bought a ticket with the express intention to register his support? Did he want to clap because he'd seen the show? Or did he see the show because he wanted to clap? I don't know. I didn't want to ask him.

3. Oklahoma! (Liverpool Empire) December 1993

I spent Christmas with my lovely friend Alison and her family in 1993 and we went for a treat to the Empire to see Oklahoma! which has always been a favourite musical of mine. Now, I don't approve of mocking the afflicted but these were simpler more carefree times, so I will admit to finding it riotously amusing that someone in the stalls seemed to be suffering from Tourette's and kept shouting filth at the stage. The most spectacular piece of timing involved Ado Annie's first song which turned into an impromptu duet between her and the man in the audience. 'I'm just a girl who can't say No,' she sang. 'Cunt!' came the savage rejoinder. He left at the interval.

4. Look Back in Anger (National Theatre: Littleton) August 1999

Gregory Hersov's re-mount of his 1995 production at the Royal Exchange, also starring Michael Sheen as Jimmy Porter was a revelation. I am slightly embarrassed to say that when I wrote 1956 and All That, I had not managed to see a production of Look Back in Anger. I'm not that embarrassed; it was striking that perhaps the most decisive landmark in post-war British theatre had not been revived in London for over a decade. I wrote an essay in the programme for this production and was hugely looking forward to it. What's very striking on stage - rather more than on the page, I think - is the way the play draws on the old-fashioned carpentry of the well-made play, with its curtain lines, plot twists, romantic intrigues. At the end of the second act, Jimmy, the malcontent at the heart of the play, returns home to discover a note from Alison, his long-suffering wife. She has left him, after years of verbal battering and contempt. Her friend Helena, another victim of his withering articulacy, is there to crow over his loss - and she has another revelation too. Alison is pregnant. He has lost a wife and a child. The show I saw was a matinee and it had a party of American students sitting in the stalls. They were enthusiastic, attentive. But one student's response underlined for me the curious mixture of old and new in the plotting. As Jimmy reels from the impact of these two blows, he approaches Helena. We think he might actually strike her. In fact, he seizes her and the two of them kiss passionately as the lights fade. As Jimmy and Helena locked into their embrace, a young American voice shouted 'NO WAY!!!' It's a brilliant little response, precisely balanced on the edge between two responses: (a) it's entirely absorbed within the drama - and it's registering delight at a twist that you don't see coming but yet still makes sense (of course Helena falls for Jimmy; their mutual hostilities were a flirtation) and (b) it's a protest against the crude mechanics of the plot, the convenient transfer of affections just at the point of the curtain (how could Helena fall for Jimmy? It's complete fakery).

5. The Danny Crowe Show (Bush Theatre) October 2001

The old Bush Theatre was a cramped little space. You sat on steps rather than chairs; unless you were on the back row, if you leant back you leant against other people's shins. There were no clear divisions between places to sit; popular shows would mean a sweaty, uncomfortable couple of hours, pressed up against your neighbours. There appeared to be one exit; maybe there was another for us in emergencies, but if there had been a fire on the stairs, I used to wonder if we'd all burn. I don't remember a great deal about David Farr's The Danny Crowe Show. I'd liked him as a writer since seeing some kind of one-off show at the Cottesloe in the late 80s and then his brilliantly eccentric Neville Southall's Washbag at the Finborough (rewritten, retitled and slightly spoiled as Elton John's Glasses in the West End in Summer 1998 in a not-very-successful attempt to cash in on World Cup fever). I still think David Farr's plays are an interesting lost glimpse of playwriting before the In Yer Face theatre thing got going. But in 2001, a minute or two into the show, there was a slight disturbance in the audience. Someone a few people along my row slumped forward. He was making noises though it wasn't clear what they signified. After a few seconds, Mike Bradwell (I think) asked for the actors to stop; the man had suffered a heart attack. We all cleared the way and he was helped from his 'seat' and down the stairs. We waited for the ambulance to arrive, which it did after a gratifyingly swift couple of minutes. The play then restarted. This intimation of mortality has rather overshadowed my memory of the actual play. It was a real thing that really happened and, for a while, the stage seemed to be merely shadows.

6. Absolutely (Perhaps) (Wyndham's Theatre) May 2003

This was a new translation, by Martin Sherman, of Pirandello's Così è (se vi pare), more usually translated as something like Right You Are (If You Think So). It got a surprising West End outing because it had a Major Star in the cast, Dame Joan Plowright, and was directed by a Star Director, Franco Zeffirelli. The story is a typical Pirandellian riddle: Signora Frola believes that her son-in-law is not letting her see her daughter, his wife. Signor Ponza, conversely, believes that his mother-in-law is mad: her daughter was his first wife, who died, and she cannot face her loss; this woman is his second wife. Frola claims, in response, that he sent her daughter mad but has somehow married her again. The play plays with this intractable dispute, asking whether we can ever know the truth about each other. Plowright played the role of the mother-in-law, Signor Frola, and her appearance is delayed in the play for maximum effect. And on came Joan, grand, superior, furious. It was an impressive entrance, though one man in the stalls clearly didn't think we had acknowledged it sufficiently and burst into an enthusiastic round of applause, what sixty years ago they called an 'entrance round'. The Zen question about the sound of one hand clapping is one thing; in a theatre, the sound of only two hands clapping is the loneliest sound in the world. I heard somewhere that a team of Italian researchers had demonstrated that it is impossible for one person to start a standing ovation; it requires the spontaneous and collective actions of many. Similarly, it is impossible for one man to bring back the theatregoing customs and practices of the 1940s. His percussive claps stung the air for a second or two and Joan continued to walk, stately but somehow diminished, onto the stage.

7. Stuff Happens (National Theatre: Olivier) September 2004

David Hare's play was a semi-verbatim, semi-imagined account of the process that led the US and UK to go to war in Iraq. It was exactly what David Hare was born to do, use a huge national (National) stage to explain and debate a subject of recent national and international importance. I remember the audience unusually intervening twice by breaking into applause to support a sentiment expressed on stage. One came when a 'Palestinian Academic' gave a speech that reflected on some of the ironies of the Middle East and ended: 'The victims of the conflict have become the problem. We are the Jews of the Jews'. A similar round of applause greeted Colin Powell's remark to George W. Bush, 'People keep asking, how do we know he's got weapons of mass destruction? How do we know? We've still got the receipts.' I'm less interested in the particular sentiments being applauded than I am in the choice to applaud. It's unusual for British audiences at the National to interrupt a play in this manner to express support for a particular viewpoint. But in this instance, I felt that the moment had been prepared for; eighteen months earlier in February 2003, almost two million people had marched through the streets of London to voice their lack of support for an attack on Iraq. The government had ignored them - and now it was already clear that the WMD, the reason for the attack, were not to be found. And on that march, so great had been the numbers on the streets that there was a serious danger of a crush crossing the river, so the organisers created an additional loop to slow down the flow of people onto Waterloo Bridge. This loop took the marchers down to Upper Ground, to the National Theatre and then spiralling up across the National's concrete terraces before making their way up onto the Bridge. It struck me, as I sat i that auditorium, that for most people in the auditorium this might be the first time they had been back to this theatre since that earlier, ignored act of protest; and probably it was the first time since then that they had been in a crowd of people in such numbers. Even seeing these sentiments expressed on stage felt like a certain kind of protest in which the theatre connected, as the National was always intended to, quite directly with the physical and mental landscape of the nation.

8. The Small Things (Menier Chocolate Factory) February 2005

Paines Plough did a brilliant season at the Chocolate Factory in 2005, called This Other England, which offered four radically unfamiliar linguistic explorations of this country, from four distinctive and diverse writers. The plays were David Greig's Pyrenees, Douglas Maxwell's If Destroyed True, Philip Ridley's Mercury Fur and Enda Walsh's The Small Things. I went to The Small Things with my friend, the playwright Linda McLean. The play is a two-hander, a duet even, between an elderly man and woman who offer us alternating monologues, reminiscing about two childhoods that weave in and out of each other. From the beginning there were noises from somewhere in the audience. I couldn't locate the source - the audience was shallow and very wide and it was hard to look round - but the interruptions became louder and soon more verbal. After about fifteen minutes of this, Bernard Gallagher, playing the man, said to his fellow actor Valerie Lilley 'I think we should stop, Val'. The audience burst into applause. Immediately two ushers appeared. We applauded them. They persuaded what turned out to be a very drunk guy in a tracksuit, about thirty years of age, to leave the auditorium. We applauded his departure. Then Bernard Gallagher said 'let us resume' and we applauded that too. It was cathartic applause of tension and release. It was applause that marked the expulsion from a community and the restoration of order. It was applause that enjoyed the space created by the interruption of performance to add its own additional celebratory interruption of performance. 

9. Hedda Gabler (Almeida Theatre) March 2005

I'm sitting in the balcony, waiting for the show to begin. The man next to me is looking at the programme and the list of sponsors for the theatre. He motions to his friend, 'look at these names.' He runs his finger down the list: 'Jew... Jew... Jew...' I confess I am so shocked I don't know how to challenge him or what I would say.

10. Static (Soho Theatre) May 2008

It's my website, I'm allowed one of my own. Static is a play in part about music and in part about loss and in part about love. It has a speech, near the end, when music-obsessive Sarah describes her relationship with Chris, the husband whose sudden and unexpected death has set her own a process of terrible broken grieving. She's slowly coming to terms with the awful truth that he is never coming back. She tells Martin, her friend,

You know when a song starts with all the instruments playing their stuff, but it feels loose and chaotic. There's a kind of rhythm but it feels casual somehow. And then the drums come in, and everything locks into place, everything makes sense, That's what he was in my life. He walked into my life and everything made sense. He was the moment when the drums come in.

I snuck into the theatre and watched a matinée on a hot afternoon. The theatre was about half full, most people were fanning themselves with the script of the play. But as Pauline Lockhart spoke these words, a few rows below me, a woman reached across and put her arm round her boyfriend and squeezed him a little tightly.

Table

We're holding our first Table meeting to discuss Britain, politics, and the future. It will be Upstairs at The Green Man pub, 36 Riding House Street, London, W1W  7EP, 6.00pm for 6.30pm on Thursday, 6 November 2014. Everyone welcome. If you get there early I might even buy you a drink. Might.

They do food there or we could all go grab a pizza or something afterwards. 

First, could you click on this link to indicate whether or not you can make it? No binding commitment, but it would help me to estimate numbers and gather emails.

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YWMWYT

What's the context?

Scotland just went through at least 2 years of intensive thinking, debate and discussion about what kind of country they wanted. It was a conversation that almost the whole population was involved in. The turnout at the referendum was 84.5%. No General Election in Britain (since 1918 when most adults got the vote) has ever achieved that level.

Since the No vote in Scotland

• the Government is exploring restricting votes on laws that affect only England to English MPs.
• Ed Miliband is pushing for a constitutional convention to look at how Britain is governed.
• if the Conservatives win the next election, they've promised a referendum on our membership of the EU.

In other words, significant constitutional change is afoot, possibly the most important constitutional change for a century. We should be part of this. We need to engage with what this country is and could be. We should show the same care and consideration to our future as Scotland showed to theirs.

'Table' is just a start. No commitment to anything more than just sitting down and talking.

How will it work?

Absolutely no idea. I'm happy to bring some questions and ideas to a first meeting, but I hope you'll have better ideas and will be prepared to share them.

Only a couple of rules:

• let's try to keep things open and positive; let's not get stuck in pessimism or negativity or always seeing the problems with ideas. 
• the people who turn up are the right people; let's not waste time worrying about who didn't show.
• if we want to talk about something, let's talk about it, rather than wait for someone else to raise it.
• We don't need to be perfect; we just need to talk. Let's allow good ideas to stay good ideas. Let's not get bogged down in the detail yet.
• let's be imaginative, let's dream a little bit, let's remember that things can and do change and people make things change.

What sort of ideas?

I think we should try both to be practical and to take leaps of faith. The politics we have at the moment seem very narrow; our thinking should occupy a broader landscape.

Some people will be interested in economics; others in digital futures; some know a lot about the environment; some are experts in transport issues; some want to talk about the constitution; others will have ideas about reforming our legal system. This is all good. I want to find out things from you. We should all become a little bit more expert in stuff. And I'm as self-deprecating as the next person, but I'm also up for taking ourselves a bit seriously.

I really want us to come up with some new ideas.

Such as?

I've been trying to gather together some interesting articles and ideas. It's been getting too big for this page so I've put them on a new page here. I will try to update that regularly. If you find anything you think is worth our collective attention, email me and I'll add it.

Of course, there's no need whatever to look at anything before the meeting. It's just if you are interested. Please also feel free just to turn up. 

So are you in?

Thanks for reading this far - and if you didn't follow the link at the top of the page, could you just do this? It'll take a minute of your time. Just so I have a vague sense of numbers.

• https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/7YWMWYT

See you there!

Dan