Theatre Review 2018

Let me start with a confession. We have a two-year-old boy and, frankly, I haven’t been to as much theatre this year as I used to. Having an evening out involved either babysitters or some pretty tough couple negotiation. So there are plenty of things I wished I’d seen this year but simply didn’t manage. Principal among these Misty , The Inheritance, Fun Home, Home I’m Darling, and Summer & Smoke (though thanks to the theatre gods I may still have a chance with some of these) . There were a couple of shows I’d booked for but babysitter failures meant I couldn’t go, which included Nine Night and Super Super Close Up. All end-of-year lists are partial but this is more partial than most. Also sometimes the list distorts itself: there were glorious shows I saw this year - John, Absolute Hell and The Lehman Trilogy at the National, Rita Sue and Bob Too and Pity at the Court, Beginners at the Unicorn, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch at BAC, An Adventure at The Bush, and others - but because they didn’t so clearly connect with other things I saw, they felt orphaned on this list. I also read and loved (but did not see) a couple of things, notably the marvellous Snowflake by Mike Bartlett, but I think if I didn’t see them, I shouldn’t put them on here. So with all these caveats, here I go.

This felt like a very good year, particularly for politically engaged theatre. I saw more brilliant out-and-out feminist work than I’ve seen for years. I’ve seen some wonderful, elusive pieces about Britain, its past and future. I’ve seen one of the greatest pieces of theatre I’ve ever seen about British and American culture and its viciously entangled racial politics. I’ve seen work about fake news, the value of every kind of love, how we judge a previous generation’s moral crimes, and all of it has been theatrically sophisticated, complex, subtle, smart, funny and beautiful.

You guys know the drill; I’m all about playwriting. But I’ve seen some wonderful blurring of the edges of what counts as a play, in which that very investigation has produced some profound and profoundly moving thinking about the world we live in.

I’ve done a top ten, but you’ll see there are more than ten shows in here. Don’t trust the order. Tomorrow I’d do it differently, but maybe this is a handful of tendencies that I’ve cherished this year.

10. Mike Pearson If My Memory Serves Me Well (Aberystwyth Arts Centre)

This is a bit of a cheat. You’re unlikely to have been able to see this. It was a special performance at a theatre conference and a 4hr15m non-stop show by the extraordinary performance maker, Mike Pearson (founder of Brith Gof and other things), in which he discussed 51 randomly-ordered performance photographs projected onto a screen behind him for precisely 5 minutes. It was both a one-man history of performance art, increasingly a beautiful personal reminiscence, and, somehow, despite the random order of the images, an expertly designed structure that took us into the most profound perplexities of performance, memory and hope. We were allowed to come and go as we pleased, but I arrived in the first few minutes and could not tear myself away. It was a captivating feat of endurance and entirely convincing. It is not the most personal one-man show on this list.

9. Chris Goode Mirabel (Oval House)

Chris Goode’s latest show is a solo performance piece so it follows from his sublime Men in the Cities and the achingly, wonderfully perverse The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley. This is a different proposition, though not nearly as different as it might initially have seemed. We appear to be in a post-apocalyptic children’s story, but in reality we’re in the world of desperate hope, queer communities, environmental catastrophe and, more prosaically, friendship, and suffering, and wondering how long we can live like this. It made me think of Anthony Neilson’s The Wonderful World of Dissocia and The Wizard of Oz and a strange ITV children’s programme I saw when I was 9 called King of the Castle. And in the middle of all the uncanny is Chris Goode, a marvellous presence, an even more marvellous voice, and surely our generation’s Virgil into and out of our very particular Inferno.

8. Rashdash Three Sisters/Dead Centre’s Chekhov’s First Play/Royal Lyceum’s The Creditors/Almeida’s The Wild Duck

As some of you will know, I’m working on a book on Naturalism in the theatre. My contention is that Naturalism is so taken for granted that it is barely ever looked at. Well, this year in the theatre kind of proves me wrong, because there have been so many smart, thoughtful investigations of what Naturalism - or particular Naturalist plays - are doing that the theatre is writing at least a chapter of my book for me. Last to the party was Robert Icke at the Almeida asking some great questions about the nature of Ibsen’s commitment to truth; he’s picked the great transition work, The Wild Duck, a play in which Ibsen teeters between his previous belief that the truth should be told even if the heavens fall and a new compassion for those whose lives might be intolerable in the full glare of honesty. Icke’s contention is that these people might include Ibsen himself. The Lyceum’s version of Strindberg’s The Creditors was a wonderful revelation. When I saw this play, in David Greig’s version, at the Donmar a decade ago, I thought the play fascinating but morally reprehensible, a viciously misogynistic piece, that gloated as it fantasised the success of gaslighting and negging, with all the horror of a pick-up artist with a million YouTube followers. This new version, directed by the brilliant Stewart Laing, turned my perceptions of the play inside-out, showing finding in it a play that anatomises the faultlines and fragilities of masculinity and misogyny and does so with immensely entertaining horror. Here we had Stuart McQuarrie in the lead, brooding and complex, but someone unafraid to relinquish the audience’s love and the play came into stunning focus. More playful were the interventions of Dead Centre and Rashdash into Chekhov. The former had been around for a couple of years but this was my first chance to see it and it was an extraordinarily funny examination of Chekhov’s first play and then a slightly less funny examination of being real in the theatre and then it really wasn’t funny any more. Rashdash were funny and furious and fucking brilliant, asking really challenging questions about the role Chekhov plays in our theatre, in our canon, in patriarchy, but also somehow did it by finding all these questions in Chekhov’s work. It was fiercely funny, respectfully irreverent, punkishly classical. The person who didn’t come out of it rethinking their views of theatre has probably got no views of theatre.

7. David Edgar Trying It On/Maydays (RSC)

It could, let’s be honest, have been a disaster. Veteran political playwright, David Edgar, essaying his first one-man show, in which he stages a dialogue between him and his 20-year-old self in 1968, asking what happened between then and now. It could have seemed self-regarding, stodgy, politically backward-looking, pompous, awkward, even embarrassing. But, thanks to some surgically precise writing, it felt casual; thanks to a series of tense ironies in the construction, it felt urgent and painful in all the right ways; thanks to a smart series of staging decisions, it felt no more and no less important than it was, which was really quite important indeed, but not a grand statement, just a brilliant series of questions, perfectly asked. I saw it in Stratford at the Other Place in a double bill with Maydays, a revised revival of Edgar’s 1983 state of the nation play about how the left-wing radicals of the late 60s became the right-wing radicals of the early 80s. I’d never seen this play, being a bit too young for it in 1983, and had only read it and, let me confess, at the age of 21 thought it a bit ponderous. I feel a fool now, obviously, because I had not seen that Maydays is one of the great political plays of the post-war period: pacey, dialectical, informing, funny, challenging, wonderfully fleet-footed and entirely gripping. Martin Glass, the lead character whose agonising journey from left to right forms the spine of the play, is one of the great political protagonists of our theatre, absolutely up there with Susan Traherne and Gethin Price. It was judiciously cut and (in the last scene) brought up to date and nothing I saw this year felt as incisive and potent in its anatomy of where our politics has brought us.

6. debbie tucker green’s ear for eye (Royal Court)

Well maybe except this. Given the nervousness and uncertainty I feel about the world at the moment, I particularly enjoyed in the theatre this year confidence - artistic rather than political. green’s new play, in her own production, was a startlingly good play which brought the US and UK experiences of racial prejudice, of street harassment, and then of the effect that has within black communities and families, where the need for open revolt is both fearfully drawn away from but maybe also turned into a false god. The first act was a tapestry of scenes and groups, in which repetitions began to accumulate and eventually weave together to make a powerful, elegant and ferocious pattern. The second act, a series of conversations between a white lecturer and a black student, was acutely observed and thoroughly chastening in its skewering of white liberal privilege. And the final section, on video, placed it all in a longer historical privilege that made us doubt, though not despair, about how far we’ve come. The ensemble cast was superb, and it felt like a kind of occupation of that stage. The pacing was absolutely exquisite; the image of figures groping in the fog was heartrending. It was sensational.

5. Company (Gielgud Theatre)

This production has been so praised, it even gets a mention in another show. The camp detective in Anthony Neilson’s The Tell-Tale Heart (National Theatre) confesses that he expected to find it ‘fucking amazing’ but didn’t think it lived up to the hype and pronounced it ‘meh’. I don’t agree with him. This was a musical theatre event of the year for me. The careful transposition of the play to the present and the bold and subtle gender swaps in the cast were completely successful, to the extent that, as I watched it, I found myself not remembering how the original could have worked. The musical emerges as simply one of the most serious (‘Another Hundred People’), moving (‘Sorry-Grateful’), funny (‘The Little Things You Do Together’), painfully sympathetic (‘Not Getting Married’) and compassionate (‘Marry Me a Little’) musicals in the canon. It has always had a reputation for being waspishly chilly, hard-, even cold-, hearted, but this revival blows that suggestion away. Director Marianne Elliott and scenographer Bunny Christie have created something smart and seamless and aching. (This was a year, by the way, of boxes on stage: from Company to I’m Not Running at the Lyttelton to Dealing with Clair at the Orange Tree to The Creditors at the Lyceum (see above) and beyond, the theatre this year wanted to show us life in our silos and often to reach out to life beyond them.)

4. Mark Ravenhill’s The Cane (Royal Court)

On Twitter a few years ago, I think it was Sali Hughes who worried that the Super Furry Animals might be our generation’s Beatles and we just didn’t realise it. I feel a bit this way about Mark Ravenhill, that he really is a towering writer of our generation and perhaps we don’t appreciate him enough. Like a lot of playwrights now, perhaps on the Churchill model, he never repeats himself, but he’s taken this even further, writing panto and verbatim and historical and experimental and oratorio and Grand Guignol and adaptations and more so that he risks receding from identifiable view entirely. But he’s always good; he’s always interesting; he’s always taking risks and pushing the theatre and playwriting and the engagement of both of these things with politics and culture in new directions. So in some ways, it’s a particular pleasure to see him come back ‘home’, to the Royal Court Theatre, with a beautifully, brilliantly simple three-hander, which is also as complex and contradictory and maddening and terrifying as anything else I’ve seen this year. It’s a stunning achievement that feels both classical and contemporary, pellucid and opaque.

3. Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys (Royal Court)

I interviewed Dennis Kelly at a conference on his work a little over a year ago and I read this play a couple of months before it went on at the Court. I made the mistake of reading it on the tube and as I got to the end, I was sobbing so hard, a man sitting opposite me actually leaned forward to ask if I was alright. It felt a little absurd to tearfully admit “it’s the <sob> new <sob> Dennis Kelly play <sob>” so I just nodded and got off at the next stop. On the page it’s ‘just’ a monologue, which can feel like a simple theatrical form but the way he plays with our affections and our understanding - the main character being sometimes extremely dislikable, sometimes tearfully sympathetic, our sense of the story sometimes being ahead of her, sometimes behind - is masterful. And then the production: Lyndsey Turner is always an impressive and thrilling director and here she directs with extraordinary assurance, finding the pace of it, shaping the emotions of it, with beauty and power: there’s a moment almost exactly an hour in, after you’ve been laughing hard for almost all that time, when Kelly and Turner hit a key moment perfectly (a single line, I won’t give it away) and it really felt like they sucked the air out of the room and everything started falling vertiginously into darkness. A word too about Es Devlin’s set which somehow showed us memory, trauma, and hope in the form of a family home; the set alone was progressively more and more heartbreaking. Finally, Carey Mulligan: dear God, what a performance. She played the part with a stand-up’s confidence, toying with the audience, laughing with us, then admonishing us, then alienating us, then getting us back on side. Mulligan is usually cast in cute roles and this was very much against type, but she was breathtaking. At the end of the play, I was back on that tube train, sobbing and weak, so that I almost couldn’t join in the standing ovation for the play, production and performance.

2. Simon Longman’s Gundog  (Royal Court)

I’d not come across Simon Longman’s plays before and I booked a ticket out of curiosity more than conviction, but this absolutely blew me away. It’s a rural play, both abstractly placeless and earthily particular, and it told a story about land, migration, memory and time. I devoured Longman’s other plays after seeing this and, boy, he can write. The dialogue is beautifully funny, speakable, caustic, shapely (brilliantly performed by a cast including my current favourite actor Ria Zmitrowicz whose stage presence is mystically perfect and seems to me to evoke a whole generation and attitude). Longman also does some quite brilliant things with time in the play, Jumping achronologically around his story and also fast-forwarding in a way I’ve never seen in a play before that evokes change and its opposite before moving towards an ending that was apocalyptic but hard-won, emotional and enduring. It asked who we are and where we are and what matters. It was the great Brexit play of the year, even though it was not about Brexit in the least. I have to also pay attention to Chloe Lamford here, who designed so many of my favourite things in 2018 (John, The Cane, this); she’s a ceaselessly, restlessly inventive scenographer who reinvents theatre as confidently and imaginatively as any director or playwright or performance company. It’s not often that I would buy a ticket to a show on the strength of the designer but I did it here and I found Simon Longman. She captured the plays ambiguities in a wonderful solid muddy, earth-filled set behind which mist swirled impermanently. It was a set that was both inside and outside, here and there, now and always. This is the real deal, a great new playwright, given a great production at the most important new writing theatre in the world.

1. Ella Hickson’s The Writer (Almeida)

There was a lot of great feminist theatre this year. I’ve mentioned Rashdash; there was also the inspirational Emilia at Shakespeare’s Globe (which is transferring folks) and the caustically adorable Dance Nation at the Almeida. This was the one that excited me the most; in fact, it seemed to me the play of the year that most represented how I feel about the world; not the views I have of it, but what it feels like to observe the car crash of a world we are witnessing. The Writer agonises about whether it is possible to write a play that can interrogate power, without duplicating it, without becoming involved in it, without mimicking its features. Each scene seems to tear up the previous one; it burns with anger; it tries things out and fails; it tries things out and succeeds; it is a play that wants to bring down patriarchy and capitalism and it doesn’t manage (seriously, look out of the window, it’s still fucking there) but it captures exactly the feeling of anger and despair that has been my experience of politics for the last two and a half years. It was given a superb, slinky, puzzle-box production by Blanche McIntyre and had a uniformly intelligent, confident, riddling set of performances by its cast including Lara Rossi, Romola Garai, Sam West and Michael Gould. As the play pulled Russian doll out of Russian doll, everything that happened on stage told us we were safe in their hands and as they took us into fantasy and fakery and out again, everything here captured the horror and fury and potential of 2018. I don’t know if it was the best play of the year but I know it was the most essential play of the year; the play that captured the year and gave it back to us in blood and tears.

And I commend this report to the House.

Merry Christmas.

The Cane

Who is Mark Ravenhill? I asked myself this question repeatedly as I watched his astonishing new play at the Royal Court. He muscled his way into public attention with his first full-length play, Shopping and Fucking in 1996, becoming one of the focal figures of that mid-nineties generational change in British playwriting that Aleks Sierz has called ‘In Yer Face’. And for a while, I guess, that punkish image clung to him, through Handbag and Faust is Dead and even when his style seemed to veer away from that in Some Explicit Polaroids and Mother Clap’s Molly House (both of which conceded more ground to a previous generation’s dramaturgical forms and even to some of their political and ethical commitments), he still seemed to some the Young Turk of the nineties, the blood and sperm playwright par excellence. When he wrote a pantomime for the Barbican, some were confused that he had actually enthusiastically written a pantomime and not assaulted the audience in the guise of pantomime. And, through the 2000s, he reminded me a bit of Bob Dylan, someone whose artistic restlessness was combined with a wicked resistance to being liked, and so sometimes perversely decided to shake off his followers with sharp changes of style, moving provocatively into areas where no one would dare follow. As Dylan found God, so Ravenhill found opera. But also Ravenhill has written Grand Guignol and adaptations and translations and libretti and his Shoot/Get Treasure/Repeat sequence of 17 plays that were both extraordinarily ephemerally instant and monumentally epic, were both omnipresent and almost impossible to get to see. He wrote a deeply experimental and thrilling work, Over There, one of the most overlooked plays of this century, and a coolly minimal and classical play, The Cut, simply one of the best plays this century.

And now The Cane. Who is Mark Ravenhill, I wondered as I watched it. Here’s the plot; if you haven’t seen it, jump to the next paragraph after SPOILERS. In fact do that whenever you see that word. Edward is a teacher on the point of retirement, but plans for a celebration of his 45 years of service to the same school have been put in jeopardy because, in the course of looking back at his life and achievements, someone has discovered that he was the last teacher who used to administer the cane. The pupils are outraged and are blockading the house. SPOILERS: his somewhat estranged daughter, Anna, has come to the house, purportedly to give him a birthday card made by her parents, but more likely because she works for an Academy School business and has got wind of a devastating Ofsted inspection at her father’s school and wants to exploit the situation to her advantage. In the course of the discussion with her father (and mother, Maureen) she discovers that when corporal punishment was abolished, he brought the school cane (a venerable, almost ancient object) home and stored it in the attic. He goes and brings it down. As the crowds grow outside, Anna goads him into using the cane on her and at the end she plans to destroy him by going out a revealing her wound to the crowd.

Who is Mark Ravenhill? or rather, where do his sympathies lie? Not only is Ravenhill a theatrical chameleon, but in a play like this, he retreats rather gnomically behind his characters and refuses to let any explicit judgements of his characters shape the experience of the play. All of the characters are, in some ways, sympathetic. Anna has some helpful ideas about how the furore might be quietened down and it is hard not to feel for her frustration dealing with her parents’ complacency. Maureen is a powerful advocate of the values of a different generation, where not talking about things was as expressive and honest as talking about things. It is hard not to feel sympathy for Edward’s educational values and to feel that he is an incongruous focal point for an angry and moralistic mob. And they are all, in their ways, rather despicable: Anna’s conniving and her rages; Maureen’s emotional brutality; Edward’s petulant refusal to face facts.

There is one reading that would describe this play as a powerful, moderately right-wing defence of old-fashioned values against the hysterical moralism of the Twitterstorm mob mentality. There is another that could describe this play as a viciously intelligent liberal play about the dynamics of power, the violence of the family, the value of justice. In that sense, the play it most reminds me of is Oleanna by David Mamet, a play apparently written explicitly to criticise ‘political correctness’ but which I still maintain is far too good to be something as stupid as that and ends up being a deeply complicated and even-handed play about the vertiginous chasms of communication that can occur when liberalism fails. Like The Cane it builds to a climax where a despised figure is goaded into confirming exactly who his enemies say he is.

The other play - weirdly - that this reminded me of is The Browning Version by Terence Rattigan, another piece about a hated teacher on the point of retirement, driven to a kind of horrifying epiphany by youth. That play, like The Cane, is structured around the Headmaster’s attempt to handle the delicate matter of a farewell celebration, and finds sympathy and cruelty in an old man’s plight. And what this reminds me is that this is a play that draws on some venerable traditions of British theatre. (Note that Mamet adapted Rattigan for the screen, so the influence flows right through.) And it also encourages me to take seriously the sympathies of this play with the older generation. Not that the play does sympathise one-sidedly with them, both there are sympathies to be found there.

What it really makes me think of is Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. The book is a history of the emergence of the modern prison out of the ruins of the previous punishment system of public tortures (flogging, hanging, drawing and quartering and the rest). Conventionally, we would think of a move from publicly inflicting pain on people to incarceration as a major liberalising step. However, Foucault asks us not to be too hasty, and notes that the prison system, particularly the Panopticon design, where all the inmates’ cells are arranged around a cylindrical prison so that they can all be seen by a central guard tower, are a social mechanism of surveillance that turns human beings into ‘docile bodies’ who have internalised the rule of law, because once you become used to the thought that you can always be seen, you behave that way even when there is no guard in the guard tower.

The parallel here is with the move from corporal punishment to more ‘civilised’ punishments like detentions, learning meetings, phone calls home and exclusions. But perhaps this system of liberal punishment is, in its way, as tyrannical as what it excluded. I certainly felt a Panoptical chill as Anna describes the Eyes Forward policy in her school:

All of our Academy schools operate an eyes forward policy. Students must keep their eyes to the front of the class at all times. At all times, staff must be able to see into student’s eyes. The student must seek permission if at any time they want to turn their head or turn their back upon a teacher. Permission is of course never reasonably withheld. It’s difficult often for students whose school has only recently acquired Academy status. Where before there has been only chaos the transition to order can be very challenging. But after a few weeks - I’ve seen it happen time and time again - eyes forward becomes second nature and a great calmness falls upon the child and spreads through the school (p. 72).

While I can imagine someone reading the play as a criticism of millennials for wanting to tear down confederate statues and rename buildings currently holding the name of a slaveowner, the play is doing something much more delicate. It seems to me to be asking about the complexities of judgement. It is clearly right to criticise the past (who doesn’t condemn slavery?); but at the same time it is clearly wrong to think of the past as a stupider version of the presence (the slaveowners were not guilty modern liberals, turning away from their doubts). In the renaming of buildings and the tearing down of statues, are we trying to tear out the roots of our own society’s failings or is it also a cowardly attempt to deny the past? Where does understanding the past become excusing the past? When does an acceptance of historical difference teeter into moral relativism? At the same time, excessive humility about the possible limitations of one’s own values can lead to moral paralysis.

All of these beautiful paradoxes and conundrums are beautifully captured in this production, which is staged in a room with no apparent way out. In fact, designer Chloe Lamford (who is perhaps the most exciting person working in British theatre at the moment) has done something remarkable with this play. She places the action of the play in a vertical, almost locked room, mostly deprived of furniture. The stairs are remnants, torn away, a kind of ghostly foreshadowing of the ransacking of the house that we might imagine after the play is over. But then, as the key revelation of the play happens, and we know what is in the attic, the attic begins to descend, like the weight of history, the compress and confine the action. And the rectilinear shape and dimensions of the first act (the set is almost a parody of the Royal Court stage) are disrupted by the teetering diagonal of a ladder that is a vast cane-like scar cutting down the stage, suggesting a world askew, a time out of joint. And SPOILERS at the very end, as Edward seems to be facing off the angry mob, the skies darken and history continues to descend, as if to crush him. It is honestly breathtaking.

And I’ve made the play sound terribly high-minded. But the great virtue of this play is its simplicity and its supreme dramatic confidence. It really is a play about a family dealing with a cane; it has not a drop of metaphorical portentousness. Ravenhill observes the dynamics of the family beautifully and captures the different attitudes and vocabularies of the two generations with wicked precision. There are some wonderful bits of traditional dramaturgical carpentry - the Act 1 curtain line, for example, or a misadventure with some coffee that brought gasps from the audience. And the moment where SPOILERS the cane is brought down and revealed to us is electric. It builds to the revelation of this totemic, occult object (which is also, of course, a fetish object) though it is a mark of Ravenhill’s complete control of his play that the moment redirects immediately, becoming mysterious, bathetic, electric and unsettling. And the climactic moment of ritual is astonishing, the whole play having been a discussion of the past and then the scene of the cane becomes completely present tense and it is horribly fascinating and appalling.

The cast is superb; Maggie Steed is brittle and brutal as Maureen; Nicola Walker aches with pain and glints with cruelty as Anna; and Alun Armstrong keeps you guessing about the teacher who administered the cane. Vicky Featherstone has directed this with wonderful assurance; the production is about 100 minutes straight through and it never drags; it is always fascinating. But the evening is ultimately Ravenhill’s. Before this, I think The Cut was my favourite of his plays, but this - which feels almost like a companion piece (someone will one day do The Cut and The Cane in rep, I’m sure) - may be even better. It is electrifying and complex and both highly traditional and urgently contemporary. Who is Mark Ravenhill? The man who’s just written one of the plays of the decade.

David Cameron, Downing Street, 24 July 2016

The day after the EU referendum, at a podium in Downing Street, David Cameron described a near 50:50 vote as ‘the will of the people’ to leave the EU about which ‘there can be no doubt’. This instantly created momentum for leaving, without debate or discussion, without any chance to consider whether it was too narrow a victory to be a meaningful mandate. And then he announced his resignation and fucked off. How might it have been different? I’ve written an alternative speech for him and if one of you could hurry up and invent time travel we can get it on his desk. I wonder if this might have changed the absurd narrative in which we’ve been living for the past 2½ years?

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Good morning.

This is has been an historic day for our country. Following a debate that has been marked by passion but also by tragedy, the British people in record numbers have voted to declare to us, their elected representatives, whether or not they wish to remain in the European Union.

The result is perhaps the worst of all possible worlds. A little over half of those who voted believe we should leave. A less less than half believe we should remain. The view presented to parliament is that there are strong views on either side, but no consensus has been settled, no direction has been given. We are, on this most divisive of all issues, a divided people.

I had hoped to convince the British people that we stand to gain more by participating fully in the union of European peoples than by going it alone. My colleagues in the cabinet and elsewhere sought to argue that Britain’s future lay as an independent nation. Neither side has fully convinced the British people. Neither side has a mandate for action.

The referendum – as voted for overwhelmingly by Members of Parliament – was advisory, and what advice has Parliament been given?

I believe we have been been advised that this is a country, torn down the middle. It is obvious in areas of great wealth, the merits of EU membership seem self-evident. It is clear that in areas of greatest poverty the merits of EU membership are obscure. 

I believe we have been advised, throughout the campaign, that this is a country in which anger and fear, in too many communities, are bubbling to the surface.

I believe we have been advised that the matter of our own Union is far from settled. Let no one deny the lesson we have been taught by our friends in Scotland and Northern Ireland.

I take full responsibility for much of this. My government, over the last six years, has tried honourably to bring the country’s finances under control, but the burden of these policies have been felt too often by those who could least bear the weight. 

I think it is also clear that the European Union must make an account of itself more clearly, open some of its darker processes, actively seek the engagement of British citizens in its benefits, and listen to the message of this vote.

For that reason, I believe the first thing that must be done is for this Government to go back to Brussels and campaign for a comprehensive reform of the EU’s systems, its transparency, its lawmaking, the language in which it speaks.

But, more important than that, I believe this Government must change course. Far more important than our divisions over EU membership are our divisions from each other.

We are divided by geography and we are divided by class. We are divided by nation and by generation. We are divided by race and we are divided by how we love.

It is not enough for politicians to talk of a country uniting. We must prepare a ground on which people can walk together. We must tear down the walls, seen and unseen, that stop mother from embracing her son, neighbour shake hands with neighbour, enemy listen hard to enemy.

Make no mistake – and I want the markets to hear this – I want there to be no doubt about what I am about to say – this will entail a massive flow of money, education, culture, and resources from the South to the North, from rich to poor, from the glass and steel steeples of the City of London to the former dockyards and mining villages and steelworks of this country. 

This is not a quick fix. This is not a week’s headlines. This is a decade of hard work, knitting our country together.

Only then will our country be able meaningfully to come together.

Only then will we have a chance to talk again, quietly perhaps, timidly at first, about what country we want to be and whether we can become the best of ourselves alone or as part of a family of European nations.

One final thing: I have thought long and hard through the night about my own position. I take my share of blame for the divisions in the country. I accept that the referendum has exposed and opened wider these divisions.

It would be easy for me to announce my resignation, to walk back through that black door, with a sense of a burden lifted and a song on my lips.

But that would be a gross abdication of responsibility. I hope – if you will let me – to devote my efforts for the rest of this Government’s term of office to making Britain a country to be proud of, where those who seek to divide us with hate and fear are defeated by the promise of community and love.

If we can take any solace from this result, it is that to expose our divisions is a first step to healing them. 

This referendum has sent a message, loud and clear. This country is broken apart and we need to mend.

Thank you.

My Boy: An A-Z

Our son, Ethan Blue, is two (and a bit) and I’ve been reflecting a bit on parenthood, fatherhood, children, babies, love, death, space and time. I thought I’d share these random thoughts. In case, some of the city references are a bit perplexing, you might need to know that he was born in July 2016 while we were living in Paris and we came back to London a year ago.

Advice

New parents are surrounded by advice. Usually well-intentioned, occasionally useful, mostly not, sometimes maliciously judgmental. It comes from everyone: doctors, nurses, neighbours, colleagues, friends, family, and, if you live in Paris, people on the street who seem to think it is okay to tell you when your child is hungry or tired or too hot or too cold. (It is not okay.) Much of this advice will be entirely contradictory: never leave your child crying/always leave your child to cry; set a firm bedtime/let them sleep when they need; never let them breastfeed for more than 15 minutes/let them feed for as long as they need to. Should you let a baby go to sleep sucking a dummy? We had vehement, urgent yeses and strenuous, shocked noes. And on and on. Humans have been having babies for 3 million years, so you’d think we’d have figured out how to do it, but apparently not. And it’s not just contradictions between folk myths and medical wisdom; contradictory advice comes from different doctors; reputable books point you in entirely opposite directions; parents of innumerable babies fail to agree. And it’s some of the basics people diverge on - food, sleep, cuddling. The thing is that the unceasing responsibility for a baby is such a shock, you are vulnerably ready to fall under the sway of other people’s convictions; and then when it works, it’s hard not to generalise from your own experience. We coped by inhabiting the indifferent flow: hearing, filtering, mostly discarding, only doing things that make sense, ignoring the imperious command or the magic solution. I don’t know if that would work for you; I am not in any position to offer advice.

Baby

When does a baby stop being a baby? It’s undecidably a matter of biological change in him and mental change in me. There’s no single moment of change; when he started walking upright maybe (about 12 months), when he started stringing more than one word together (about 18 months), when he started counting (18 months) or reciting back to us bits of the books we read him (about 2): these are all milestones in the transition from baby to little boy. There was certainly a point when he was about 20 months when his limbs started to lengthen and he lost his puppy fat and his face started to look more expressive where he looked more like a little adult. But for me there was just a moment where I found I needed to look at him differently. He stopped being a baby when I stopped looking at him as a baby (and I stopped looking at him as a baby when he stopped being a baby).

I was massively unprepared for the arrival of our baby. On reflection, I’m not sure there’s anything I could have done to prepare. And I mean mentally unprepared – we had a cot and a buggy and did some antenatal classes. But I was unprepared for how little a baby does. For almost the first six weeks, our baby did very little; a bit of crying, some drinking of milk, a lot of sleeping, but he didn’t respond much, didn’t smile, didn’t show any clear interest in anything. And because of the little beak-like protruding nipple-sucking lips and big wild unseeing eyes, he seemed more like a bird than a human. And this, apparently, is all normal. And then came the slightly magical moment where I smiled at him and he smiled back. And that’s really the first time we felt like we had care not of a vulnerable new-born baby bird but that we had a child.

Babies and then children seem to have a version of what I think Richard Rorty calls the ever-growing circle of attention. Initially the baby can’t really see anything; the world is William James’s blooming, buzzing confusion. Then the eyes start to focus and I think in the first three months they can properly pay attention to things in their immediate periphery (probably less than a metre around them); then this widens and they get a sense of the room they are in; after six months, Ethan started to understand that there were other rooms in which things were happening even if he wasn’t there. Now, aged two, he seems to have a mental map of the streets around our flat. I guess this continues to grow until, at some point, he has a fully cosmopolitan sense that we are all one humanity, and perhaps even that we are all equal members of an ecosphere. Of course, this latter stage, as we are currently realising, is not a stage that everyone achieves.

This sense of attention spreads through his body too. Those wild unseeing eyes at the beginning begin to look purposeful within a couple of months and then the body, as it becomes more coordinated, directs itself more at the world and itself. Now he occasionally seems haphazard but mostly purposeful, even if we don’t understand the purposes to which he is directing himself.

Child-friendly

One huge difference between London and Paris is that in London I now expect every public building (galleries, museums, theatres, etc.) not just to be accessible to children but specifically to have thought about the experience of their spaces for children. In Paris, I am amazed when I find a building that isn’t actively hostile to children (but see Paris). Having Ethan has renewed my relationship to London. I’ve been to the Science Museum more often in the last six months than I have in the previous 40 years. Following Ethan through it I discovered it has Stephenson’s Rocket: here, in my own city! We discover the glorious central courtyard of the V&A with its shallow pool, water fountains and Great Exhibition tile work. We suddenly see all the green spaces and public parks and playgrounds (seven in easy walking distance). We peek into restaurants and if we see a couple of highchairs stacked obediently in a corner, we know it’s safe to go in. (If they have a lot of highchairs, though, we generally find them as unbearable as if we had no child of our own. There is, in the cosmic system of child-friendly restaurants a goldilocks zone of restaurants that are not child-unfriendly and not too child-friendly, but just child-friendly enough.)

The exception to this is Italian restaurants which are typically not just child-friendly; it’s like they are child restaurants that also welcome adults. A good Italian restaurant is the perfect place to take your child.

Death

I’ve always disliked – and still dislike – the idea that having children is the meaning of life (the idea just kicks the existential can down the road). In fact for me having a child has just sharpened the ambiguity of mortality. Within a month of EB being born two thoughts came to my mind with enormous force and clarity. The first was: ‘you can die now’. And then, almost immediately afterwards, ‘you absolutely cannot die now’.

I find myself thinking about my death all the time with a mixture of calm and horror. At one point I found myself reflecting that ‘all being well, he’ll be at my funeral’. (‘All being well’?)

Either/Or

Having a baby is an oddly non-binary experience. Looking after a six-month-old baby is simultaneously completely fascinating and extremely boring. Changing a nappy is adorable and disgusting at exactly the same time. The first year crawled by at terrific speed. Perhaps because everything is loved without end: the boredom, the nappy, the hours.

Food

He goes through phases, sometimes eating anything, something seeming affronted at the very idea of meals. Quite often he expresses deep suspicion of anything that isn’t beige carbohydrate. Our complacent mantra is ‘he won’t let himself starve’.

Gender

We didn’t know the sex of our baby (see Ultrasound) and one of the benefits of that is that you don’t pre-gender the child before it appears. We bought gender-neutral clothes and toys. We found a brilliant department store that does a great range of gender-neutral clothing that just looks great.

But enforced gendering is hard to avoid. I tell my son he is clever and brilliant and (sometimes) that he is brave and strong. I tell him these things all the time. I hope I would say exactly the same things if I had a girl but I don’t know myself enough.

And then there are some strange circular arguments. We noted that even though he has a range of different toys, he very quickly became obsessed with cars. Some people we know described this as the triumph of nature against nurture, his natural boyfulness leading him to cars. But there’s literally nothing male about cars and, even if there were, cars have existed for little over 120 years; that’s not enough time for evolution to have imprinted the car into masculine DNA. The truth surely is that, because he is a boy, they have gendered the cars.

Hospital

Fortunately, Ethan has had no very serious need for hospitals. He had some wheeziness which meant a few A&E visits, in part because our local GP system seems to have broken down. And then not long before his second birthday, he tripped over holding a toy with a sharp edge which cut his lower lip on the outside, while the impact meant that his teeth macheted into his lower lip from the inside. We took him to hospital, pretty much expecting them to give him a plaster and say go home. Instead they booked him, with our permission, to have stitches under general anaesthetic.

Lilla being at work, I have to handle the day with him. Even though I know the operation is entirely routine, I don’t sleep well the night before. In the morning, I take him to one of his favourite places, the London Transport Museum (seriously, go, it’s so much better than it sounds) and then we wander over Waterloo Bridge, along the South Bank and head to Evelina Children’s Hospital. I feel inexplicably guilty all morning, as if I’m tricking him into hospital. It reminds me of the day I proposed to Lilla in Venice; as the evening approached, when I’d planned to give her the ring, I felt bad that I knew what was going to happen and she didn’t.

In the hospital, the nurses and the doctors are completely brilliant. I confess my fears to the young anaesthetist and she says brightly that when she’s on the other end of these things she worries too and needs the anaesthetist side of her brain to remind the mother side that the procedure is completely safe.

When he goes up for the operation, I go with him into the operating theatre. He is going to get the general anaesthetic through gas and the way that works is he sits on my lap and I cuddle him as they apply the mask. Of course, Ethan struggles and gets upset and I cuddle him even tighter and it takes everything I have not to burst into tears right there because I’m turning cuddling my child into a form of restraint, holding him against his will, turning affection into torture. I didn’t burst into tears, because I knew it would upset and probably frighten him and it would embarrass the nurses, and of course me.

He goes limp in my arms, which upsets me further, and then they say I have to leave but I can give him a kiss and I do so saying I love you in a whisper because I don’t trust my voice to say it out loud. Outside I cry in a corner until I realise a porter is trying to change the bin I’m sobbing against.

When he comes round, he’s fine, a little disorientated but, after eating nothing all day, he wolfs down a cheese sandwich and watches In the Night Garden on his bed, taking everything, as ever, in his stride and better than his parents.

Hospitals are places simultaneously of terror and comfort. There’s a strange plasma smell in the corridors and this reminds me that blood, too, is a sign of life and death. His brief hospital stay was in the week of the NHS’s 70th birthday so that’s two extraordinary things we have created there.

I

It interests me that two things happen at the same time: developing a sense of self and learning to play-act. Purely from observing, in an amateurish way, one child, it seems that the moment they understand that they are a distinct self, separate from the world (Lacan’s Mirror Phase, psychoanalysis fans), is also the moment where they can imagine alternative versions of themselves. The sense of self is detected in his insistence on wanting to do things other than what we want him to do. The play-acting is detected in his ability to imagine and perform doing other things than he is actually doing. Certainly our boy started doing these things within days of each other.

For Lacan, the Mirror Phase - the moment where the child (mis)recognises itself in the mirror as a distinct and whole person - is both a moment of completion and loss, where we achieve a sense of selfhood through the profound loss of our intimate prelinguistic sensual oneness with the world. But is it possible also that the imagination continues to keep that bridge open and even pushes beyond just this world into possible and impossible worlds?

Jealousy

A common worry among men, I gather, is that the child will steal their partner’s affections. (Interesting that women, apparently, don’t much worry about this.) I don’t know that I worried about this to a point of seriously thinking it could be true but I did wonder what it would feel like to share my wife’s love.

It’s ridiculous of course. The love is different and new and anyway love isn’t like that. It’s not like sharing a bag of crisps. Love is the magic money tree, only better.

Kiddo

I expected – because this is what I was told – that I would instantly feel a flood of paternal feeling when he was born. I’ll be honest; I didn’t feel anything like that. There’s an overwhelming sense of responsibility and amazement and incredulity and quite a bit of fear. When he started smiling back (see Baby), that’s the point I started to feel more defined feelings of love. And of course now I sometimes just look at him and think my heart will burst out of my chest (see Love). When did I start feeling like a father, though? To be honest, I’m not sure I do – or rather, maybe I have been expecting a feeling that doesn’t happen. If I’m honest, particularly in public, I sometimes feel a bit like I’m pretending to be a father; when I’m out pushing him in the buggy, it occasionally feels like I’m pretending to push a buggy. Sometimes when I’m talking to him in public, I feel like I’m acting the role of a father and acting it quite badly. In the park once I hear myself saying ‘come on then, kiddo’ and blush at my clichéd performance.

Love

Love evolves as our baby grows. When he was first born, there’s a sort of love I have but I think it’s mostly made up of concern (for his safety), anxiety (that we’re not doing it right), and amazement (that he’s there at all). They are all, in various ways, heightened, sometimes rapturous states and can resemble, or may even be, love. But this changes to something more recognisable when he starts to reciprocate. As we begin to feel we are communicating with him and he is communicating with us, love changes entirely. As he develops physically, his personality shaping his face, his body becoming more agile and adept, we start to love the whole person (see Baby). When he walks and then when he starts to talk, sometimes I am choked up just looking at him. When he obediently says ‘I love you Daddy’, even though I know it’s mostly just repetition, it floors me. And when he eventually put him down to sleep at the end of the day, we find ourselves sitting on the sofa looking at pictures of him on our phones, and every day has the intensity of a new relationship because he changes all the time and with it he changes how we love him.

Music

I am overwhelmed with admiration for people who make music for kids. John Lithgow made a glorious album of children’s songs, Singin’ in the Bathtub. We discovered the fantastic songs of Tee & Moe. Sam West put us on to Radio Doudou, a French online radio station that pumps out non-stop radio for babies. Best of all, on Twitter Mark Hunter (@Hark_Munter) recommended Caspar Babypants; he’s the former lead singer of the Presidents of the United States who now just makes albums for kids. And what albums. The songs are power-pop, country-tinged, Beatlesy bursts of sunshine. He’s got about ten albums of the stuff. The songs are funny, charming, full of melody and wit. The chorus of ‘Bad Blue Jay’ is something that Teenage Fanclub would be proud of. ‘Baby of Mine’ made me cry. ‘Baby and the Animals’ is joyful. He’s got two albums of Beatles covers and the ‘Hey Jude’ is one of the best Beatles covers I’ve heard. There are very few winks at the parent audience but ‘Too Dirty to Love (Muddy Baby)’ pulls the trick off perfectly. There’s a whole channel of songs for kids on YouTube (KidsTV123), most of which I find unbearable (and the Solar System song is one of the most chillingly lonely-sounding songs ever), but I have to hand it to A. J. Jenkins who signs his work; for the first year EB is transfixed.

Memory

He’s two and I read something that says none of us can remember anything before we’re about three and those memories that we do seem to have are imagined or implanted by other people’s vivid descriptions. I sort of knew this already but it disappoints me to think that none of the experiences we have given Ethan in his first two years will stay with him, until I reflect that they are embedded in who he is, his boldness, his familiarity, his boredom, his joy, his endless laughter.

Other people’s babies

I used to be very bored by other people’s babies. Now I love them. I like holding babies. I like their smell. I find their antics amusing, even when they are screaming their heads off. This is not that anything has been unlocked for me; it’s just empathy for the parents and gaining experience of why babies are interesting.

Paris

By having a baby in Paris, I learned a great deal about the distinctive nature of French public space that in turn illuminated much of its political history. One is that public space is truly public and open, a place of debate and contestation. You see this in the graffiti, most of it political, or the French appetite for political posters (incredible). But you also see it in the way that strangers will come up and tell you your child is too cold or needs food. If someone said that to me in London, I would assume they were dangerously insane; but that’s because in London the public space is not really public at all; we carry with us a portable sphere of private space that should not be invaded. In Paris, if you’re on the street, you’re in the debate. This explains (or is explained by) 1789, 1830, 1848, 1871, 1968. And Paris public space is extremely non-hierarchical. That public debate is fundamentally democratic. Although French society is in many ways very deferential and hierarchical, this is not true on the streets. Anyone can speak to anyone. In practical terms, when you are walking down a pavement with a buggy, Parisian people don’t assume they should get out of your way. In London, generally, people step aside to let a buggy go through. In Italy, people seeing a buggy coming twenty metres away would step off the pavement in readiness. In Paris, every encounter is a debate.

Quiet

Sometimes, when he’s awake, I long for a bit of peace. When he’s asleep, we find ourselves going in to look at him to check he’s alright. When he’s noisy, we want quiet; when he’s quiet, we want noise.

Reading

We read to him a lot. In fact, in a burst of excitement before he was born, I ordered all of the Mr Men books and read them to him one by one over the first couple of months (boy, do those get weird); even though he understood nothing of what I was saying, the bold colours and schematic images seemed to attract his attention. Now we read him a couple of books a night and he can finish our sentences if we stop. One thing we realised very quickly is that children’s books are probably the most popular form of serious visual art; some of the books are jaw-droppingly beautiful, clever and often emotionally shattering. Sure, some books are dreadful, so when he selects, for example, The Little Train That Could, my heart sinks. But when he reaches out for Oliver Jeffers’s Lost and Found, or Marion Deuchars’s Bob’s Blue Period, or Once Upon a Time by Raul Guridi you know you and he are about to have genuinely enriching visual and emotional and narrative experience with your child. And then there are some classics – from Winnie the Pooh to Paddington, from The Paper Bag Princess to The Gruffalo – that are so full of joy that it makes the adult novel seems desiccated and mean-spirited by comparison.

Smiling

We tried to impose as little on the baby before it was born as possible. This is why we didn’t want to know the sex of the baby, so the clothes we bought were gender-neutral. But it was hard not to think ‘I hope they’ll be clever’, ‘I hope they’ll be passionate about something’, ‘I hope they’ll be nice looking’. But when the baby was born that melted away. Now we just want him to be happy, that’s all.

Television

We don’t generally let him watch TV until 5pm. A friend gave him a Woody doll (from Toy Story) which freaked him out for a few months until he embraced it again and played with it so much we thought we’d try him on the movies. And now he requests them, which is no hardship, the three Toy Story films being about as perfect a trilogy as can be imagined.

His mental development can be detected in the way he assigns some words to things and some to classes of things. So ‘Woody Time’ is ‘all television watching’ (replacing ‘Hey Duggee’ which was ‘all television programmes’), just as he seems currently to use ‘two’ to mean ‘all numbers above one’, and - briefly and a little hurtfully - ‘mummy’ seemed to stand in for ‘all parents’.

Ultrasound

We had most of our ultrasounds in Paris where having a baby is very medicalised. An upshot of this is that they appear baffled when we say that we don’t want to know the sex of our baby. The French attitude seems to be that human knowledge has progressed to the point where we can know this, so why would you deliberately wreathe yourself into the shadows of ignorance? You might as well refuse anaesthetic for having a tooth removed. And indeed most doctors found the idea of a natural birth comically absurd. When we went for an utrasound, we would have to tell them quickly about our wilful desire for unknowing before they announced it. French being a gendered language, this seemed to be quite difficult to do and we came away from one appointment debating whether she meant ‘il est bon’ in a gendered or neutral way. One doctor was very good about this and would caution us to look away from the screen when the ultrasound was about to reveal something. I couldn’t help but sneak a look and frankly could see nothing in the mock turtle soup on the screen. Another doctor asked ‘do you want to know the sex of your baby?’. No thank you, we replied. She pursed her lips a little and returned to her task, murmuring with undisguised triumph, ‘But I know’.

Voice

I always thought I’d try to speak ‘normally’ to our boy rather than that up-and-down sing-song voice that parents use. That was stupid of me, because children like the up-and-down, sing-song style just in the same way that they like big bold colours and strong shapes.

When reading to Ethan, I sometimes put on different accents for the different characters. You will be interested to know that the Gruffalo speaks in a Glasgow accent; the Highway Rat speaks like Phil Daniels; Madam Dragon is from Morningside; the bear who wants his hat back talks like Bernard Bresslaw; the Fox who searches for the Golden Wonderflower appears to be from Swansea. Sometimes, when I’m doing a new accent, Ethan stares at my mouth in wonderment as if I’ve stopped speaking and started doing something entirely different.

Work

I’ve always had a slightly chaotic work process, often working through the night on writing projects, focusing intensely on a research project for months at a time. These things are no longer possible and it’s taking a while to understand how to rebuild my work process to accommodate having a child. I find – sometimes – that I can be very focused; when he goes down for a nap, I have already been planning the work task I am going to do and I get to it immediately. I haven’t quite experienced the ruinous impact of the pram in the hall. I find that Ethan and work ground each other.

X

I find it very hard not to kiss him all the time. On the top of his head on his beautiful cheeks. I finally understand what my own parents are like. Lilla and I have agreed that, even though he’s two, we respect his personal space and when he pulls away from a kiss (or says ‘no’ when I’m tickling him) we stop. He has also started to offer hugs and kisses to us, which completely floors me.

Yours

After EB was born, it didn’t sink in that I have a baby, that I’m a father. And you know what? Two years on and it still hasn’t. Perhaps it won’t and maybe you just get on with it anyway. It’s like how you cope with work; most people I know feel on some level like they’re a bit of a charlatan whose inadequacies and incompetence will one day be exposed to the world. But then it doesn’t and you carry on anyway, realising that perhaps this is what being up to the job feels like. The most I feel like a father is when I pick him up from nursery and he sees me and runs gleefully towards me shouting ‘Daddy’ (which is my favourite moment of the whole week, no question). But at that moment I feel like ‘his Dad’ more than he feels like ‘my son’. But also it reminds me of the oddity of the possessive pronoun. He’s not ‘my’ boy in the way that that is ‘my’ book or ‘my’ dinner. I’m just looking after him for the world and for him.

Zzzzz

Before I had a baby, my standard question to new parents was ‘are you getting much sleep’? I now discover that this is everyone’s standard question. We have been lucky. Ethan sleeps well and also we were not working 9-5 hours for the first year so we didn’t feel the horror of sleepless nights so much (we could always make it up in the day). Also, we devised a pretty clever plan where I would handle any wake-ups between 10pm and 3am; Lils handled 3am to 8am. That way, each of us was guaranteed at least five hours. (Sometimes, I will admit, I would hear him stir at 2.57am and would have my fingers crossed that he wouldn’t cry out until 3am). He had a reversion at 3 months, where he started waking up in the night, and we figured that out, through a mixture of Ferberizing and then anti-Ferberizing and then some Heath Robinson version of our own invention. And since he was six months old, he’s basically slept for 12 hours a night.

So if I do have advice for you it’s this: live in Paris; have a summer baby; be on sabbatical; be lucky.

The Writer

Ella Hickson's new play is a beautiful savage mess of a thing. It is a ferocious attempt to rip apart the form of the play, for the writer to try creatively to think beyond her own abilities and her learned skill as a maker of plays. It is a piece of despairing utopianism; the play hates where we are and tries to imagine somewhere else and is really not at all sure it has succeeded or that it can succeed. In that sense, it feels to me like it captures a pretty important structure of feeling for what it's like being a progressive in England now.

SPOILERY DESCRIPTION: The play begins after a play. A young woman has come back into the theatre to retrieve her bag and encounters the director and she lets him know what she thought of the play in no uncertain terms. We then discover that scene is a work in progress of an unfinished play by the writer. Then follows a domestic scene between the writer and her boyfriend, in which they have sex and row about her reluctance to turn her play into a lucrative movie. The writer then describes a poetic journey into a wilderness where she discovers sex with a woman for the first time. The potential director of the play the writer is writing doesn't like this scene, considering it undramatic and he urges her to write an ending. The final scene is set in an expensive apartment, where the writer and her lesbian partner live. They have sex and then have sex again with a dildo, which seems to disturb her girlfriend. The play ends with an image juxtaposing creativity and brutality.

I think what I most liked about this play is the feeling it embodies. Its mixture of rage and frustration, it yearns for a better world but keeps bumping its head on this one. It proceeds by a kind of via negativa, continually undermining itself. The first scene turns out to be a try-out piece of theatre where the writing has been shaped to suit the dramaturgical preferences of its director. But the scene at home, though plausibly meant to be real, also feels rather sculptured, rather too neat, a little sitcommy - and the director prowls around the action, watching it from all sides, seemingly bending it to his will. The most liberated part takes the action into this magic realist entrance into an imagined or recollected pure femininity (see below). We slip from Goodge Street to the jungle, from work to love, from hurry to timelessness. And then that, too, seems to be a draft of something about which the Director is pretty scornful - and, daringly, she gives the director a good hearing as he attacks the very play we're watching. And so finally, we get the last scene that the Director has been asking for and its status is also ambiguous: its effectively an expensive, lesbian rewrite of the previous scene with the boyfriend. It flirts with inauthenticity, of the failed gesture, sketching out a scene in the absence of what might be represented beyond it; within the scene, it seems to ask if in our society sex of whatever kind risks tending towards mimicking heterosexual power dynamics, and drama risks tending towards  conventional play dynamics. Its another scene under its own erasure.

This could easily feel very in-jokey and the theatre contemplating its own navel. And, sure, there is an element of that. But what lifts it beyond that is the vivid articulation of the writer's fears and hopes for her writing and her demands for her own wildly free expression as a direct response to the state of her own selfhood and to the state of the world. It's a feminist play, of course, but its tone and thought shifts from the #MeToo fury of the first scene to the middle section's pure femininity, in the sense that the French feminists of the 1970s called écriture feminine: not the masculine ascription of foursquare meanings to words, organised in logical, unambiguous forms, but a feminine, pre-Oedipal maternal sensuality about bodies and words and endless shimmering meanings. The final scene returns us to an anxious working through of power and its intimacy. These multiply erased scenes, these provisional scenes, these ironic scenes, they're all tearing things down to see what lies beyond. It's a close cousin of Alice Birch's similarly provisional and self-destructive and apocalyptic Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again, a totemic play of this decade.

So is this a good play? The Writer makes that question wonderfully hard to answer. The Director says that the first scene is the best - and he says that because it engages in crisp debate and dialectic, with pretty clear psychological through-lines, and a big plot reveal two-thirds of the way through. And so, 'technically', it sort of is the best scene. But the Q&A scene that follows is much subtler and funnier in its observation of how men and women (sometimes) talk to each other. The scene in the wilderness is rich and haunting. The final scene is bleak and unsettling and questioning. And these other scenes are all interesting in very different ways from the clear debate structure of the first scene.

I wrote a blog last year about Max Stafford-Clark and the revelations of his sexually predatory behaviour, noting that his method of 'actioning' (divining the subtextual actions brought about by each line of dialogue) meant that he, more than most, would know exactly what he was doing with his mischievously malicious sexual remarks. After it appeared, the director Paul Miller (of the Orange Tree) got in touch privately to say he thought I should have gone further. For him, Stafford-Clark's 'actioning' seems predicated on the idea that we are all predators: that whatever we say is always doing something to someone else. We are seducing or fooling or crushing or persuading one another. It says we can never be honest or truthful because there's always something nastier going on. Of course there are milder and more loving kinds of 'action' but actioning tends to be most powerful in the rehearsal room when it 'reveals' a darker purpose beneath an innocent line and all too often that type of directing makes the characters prowl territorially around the stage emotionally fucking each other up. Paul Miller is right; it's a cynical and aggressive view of the world - and Hickson asks us if it's also a male view of the world.

It's a good question and one we should take seriously. Not that women can't do that too (and of course, not all men, yada yada), but it's a bantery, aggressive behaviour that treats the other person as a kind of object to be plundered. And the way our world works, most people who get to do that are men. And it's challenging for me, because I teach playwriting, and I'm always asking my student what their characters are doing in their acts of dialogue. 

Hickson is a very talented writer - and so, of course, she is good at writing those scenes. The first scene is gripping and funny; which is why she gets that over with, undercuts it, and moves on. This hasn't stopped some critics simply affirming that it's the best scene. But that's to stubbornly refuse to go on this play's journey - and I can see why you might not; the continual iteration of scenes and their undercutting make this a dramaturgically harrowing experience, the bottom continually falling out of the play. But if you do follow her across that river, you find that somehow, Hickson holds it together by, it seems, sheer force of will, and verbal power, and the heat of passion and hope and disappointment and despair.

Blanche McIntyre's production is perfectly judged. This is not, I think, an easy play to direct. It could have fallen massively on its face, because the play almost wants itself to fail, its wants the failure of our dreams to be written across its structure. It's a play that flirts with nihilism: political, cultural, sexual, dramaturgical. But by stripping things back to their dramatic  basics, by working the theatrical magic and undermining it and revelling in it again, she makes it a beautiful intricate puzzle box, the solution of which is the end of this world. The actors commit to this bright experiment of a play with absolute commitment. Romola Garai finds steel in amongst all the anguish as she longs for something sacred and perfect, just a bit of awe, in the theatre. Lara Rossi is fierce in the first scene, moodily powerful in the last, the moral heart of the play throughout. The guys - Michael Gould and Sam West - precisely identify and embody the hideous behaviour of Nice Men In Positions Of Power (I don't exclude myself from this accusation by the way).

There are moments throughout where I cringed at my own attitudes and behaviour. There were moments I felt self-righteous and moments I felt desperately moved and moments I wanted to cheer and moments I wanted to hide. The total gesture of the play is inspiring and magnificent and the feeling, the feeling, the feeling just felt like 2018 distilled. I love this play.