Having written a play about it, I now find myself drawn to any story about Thatcher's death.

The report in The Mail on Sunday yesterday that "Margaret Thatcher is to be given the ultimate accolade of a State funeral when she reaches the end of her days" is certainly a new development.

Back in 2006, Downing Street explicitly denied that any such plans were in place. Now, however, according to the Mail: "plans are under way for her funeral, when the time eventually comes, to take place at St Paul’s Cathedral...

"[and] the Queen has also given her permission for Lady Thatcher to lie in the Chapel of St Mary’s Undercroft immediately beneath Westminster Hall on the night before her funeral."

Apparently "Overall arrangements for the funeral are being led by Sir Malcolm Ross, the Queen’s former Master of the Royal Household" and Gordon Brown has given his approval.

I wonder if Mrs T gets consulted. 

Is it wrong to enjoy another writer's bad reviews? (And also here)

Of course it is.

But is it possible to make an exception if that same writer is also a critic who gave you a review like this?

Notes on the use of pre-show music - part 3: Black Watch by Gregory Burke (currently at the Barbican) is preceded by very loud pipe and drums and sweeping spotlights - apeing a military tattoo. It worked for me, but, when the show started by immediately going into another sound effect, I  found myself wishing there had been a nice long silence during which I could have slipped into the world of the play. Silence is at the heart of theatre (even in a show as ear-bleedingly loud as this) and, given the chance, pre-show music can actually emphasise it. Great bagpiping near the end, though.

"Rarely have I felt less inclined to clap at the end of a play. Not because Relocated (written and directed by Anthony Neilson at the Royal Court) didn't merit appreciation - far from it - but because as the house lights went up it was like emerging from a dream. And applauding your own dream feels like a very odd thing to do.

I really like Neilson's work. He wrote an article a while back about the playwright's imperative to entertain and he certainly does that - even when, as in Relocated, the material and production is profoundly unsettling.

I don't know how big a part improvisation plays in his (he starts the rehearsal process without a text) but the end result is remarkably polished.

Relocated also benefited from being in the theatre upstairs at the Court rather than the main house. Very claustrophobic and a great use of sound and light (or, more accurately, dark).

If you go, try to avoid reading about it first. More than many plays, I think, it will work best when it creeps up on you.

Update (25/06/08): I really liked Neilson's response today to Michael Billington's one-star review in The Guardian. (What he was too modest to mention is that almost all the other reviews were positive.)

"Billington speculates on my play's "general thesis" and finds it wanting. He also had "intellectual doubts" about my play The Wonderful World of Dissocia, which he took as an argument "that there is something life-denying about the curative treatment of mental disorder". In fact, I am unequivocally in favour of clinical treatment, and for good reason: I have seen it work. Dissocia sprung from an impulse to understand patients' resistance to medication. I saw no need to dramatise my own opinions, precisely because they are so widely held.

This is the great danger of the play-as-thesis. It assumes that the play is an expression of the playwright's character. And, since playwrights desire approval as much as the next person, it leads to dishonest and complacent work. A play should reflect life as the playwright sees it - not as they, or anyone else, wishes it to be. If one sees a world in which there are no permanent truths, it is dishonest to fabricate them for the sake of approbation. Worse, it is a dereliction of duty. A play-as-thesis is by nature reductive, an attempt to bring order to the unruliness of existence. But bringing order is the business of the state, not the artist."

There's a moment in Michael Frayn's Afterlife, when, moments before the opening of his new play, an anxious Max Reinhardt grips the hands of his actress mistress and exclaims, "Why do we put ourselves through it?!"

Well, if Frayn himself shares similar nerves he hides them well. He was sat a couple of rows behind me at the Lyttelton tonight and looked as calm as anything. Perhaps he was saving his sweaty palms for press night tomorrow.

The play, a superior theatrical biopic, has all the craft you'd expect from Frayn but didn't seem to take the audience with it in quite the way you might hope.

I pretty much agree with John Morrison's assessment on his blog.

"Telling a life on stage means chucking out the unities of time and place and plot in favour of a structure which is more narrative than drama.  Some people like nothing better than episodic novels and biographies turned into stage plays, but for me they never really work.  The minor characters tend to buzz in and out like flies and too much hangs on the central protagonist, who often seems to have little inner life. The relationships that develop are too fleeting and one rarely gets the sense of a single dramatic choice or decisive moment that provides a hinge for the play."

This year I've accepted defeat in the battle against snails and have planted nothing. Fortunately brambles continue to spring up all over the place, so we should have plenty of blackberries. Maybe I'll get some nettles, too.

Why don't more productions use music before the play starts?

Perhaps it's seen as a rather cheap device, something best left for the fringe, but personally I'm a real sucker for a well-chosen soundtrack blaring our while I wait for the houselights to dip.

The Soho Theatre  seem to choose their music particularly well. Piranha Heights was preceded by a stirring sequence include The Automatic's Monster and what I think might have been Hercules featuring Antony Hegarty (it was certainly his voice). The previous show I'd seen there, A Couple Of Poor, Polish-Speaking Romanians, had fantastic East European heavy metal before curtain-up, taking me back to a trip to East Germany in 1990.

It can backfire, I suppose. When Happy Days was played at the interval of Beckett's Play of the same name at the National recently it really annoyed me. Set the tone, yes. Cheap gags, maybe not.

Keith Washington, who directed my monologue Katherine, used calypso music to set the scene. And then At The River as the lights went down. I heard it in a cafe the other day and it sent a shiver down my spine, taking me back to those spine-tingling moments as the audience starts to hush.

For The Death Of Margaret Thatcher I suggested using a recording of her reading the Gettysburg Address set to music by Aaron Copeland. Quite strange to hear that voice saying things like "Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history." But June Abbott, the director, decided in the end that silence suited the production better and she was probably right.

On the whole, though, while I'm a big fan of silence during a play, I think loud music before it starts is almost always a good idea.

There was a real atmosphere of anticipation at the Soho Theatre last night. Happily, Philip Ridley's new play Piranha Heights more than delivered the goods.

I don't often laugh out loud in the theatre but from about the halfway point I could hardly stop myself. In fact, several other people in the audience really couldn't stop themselves and more-or-less had to jam their fists into their mouths to maintain decorum.

Apart from the black comedy what impressed me most was how Ridley sustains a 90-minute drama so effectively in a single location (a small living room) in real time. I was also struck by how, as with Pinter, though the action and dialogue are not strictly naturalistic, it all feels very truthful. That, I suppose, is why (also like Pinter) it's very funny - even when you're wincing.

This was my first experience of Philip Ridley. Given the controversy surrounding Mercury Fur, it will be interesting to see how critics respond. I'm pretty confident, however, that most people who see Piranha Heights will, like me, still be thinking about it the next morning. And they'll still be smiling.

Update (20/05/08): Just looked up the etymology of 'piranha' and see that it comes from the Portuguese pira (fish) + sainha (tooth). More interestingly, it's described in the OED as both 'gregarious' and 'aggressive' - an unusual combination in an animal (other than men)?

Update (27/05/08): Reading the (mostly positive) reviews of this play makes me realise once and for all that I lack the powers of high-octane précis be a critic. Here's Lyn Gardner (take a deep breath before reading):
"...the actors attack their meaty roles like hungry tigers, and beneath the bitterly funny black humour is an almost wistful sense of the human need for kinship and family, and a recognition that fantasy is both a refuge and a weapon for the mortally wounded in a world built on lies."

And (another deep breath) Sam Marlowe:
"The extravagance of Ridley's dark vision suggests a dangerously confused society in which individuals seize on random gobbets of semi-digested information and use them to construct their own personal narrative. And, having chosen to believe their self-constructed myth, they defend it with all the blind determination of the religious extremist, regardless of how crazy it might seem. It's an environment in which faith is paramount, and yet it can be placed in anything from a conspiracy theory to a fairytale, and where violent stories are absorbed from infancy."

You can't beat good writing. Right from the first moments of The City by Martin Crimp at the Royal Court the words, the characters, the play all lived.

It helps when the actors are as good as this - especially Benedict Cumberbatch, who is fantastic - and, even though the narrative wasn't straightforward, the audience seemed to be enthralled. I know I was.

Sadly some of the critics seemed put off by not being able to work out what the play was 'about'. It's a common problem with certain drama critics - anything that strays from the obvious is deemed to be either poorly drawn or wilfully obscure.

Fortunately, audiences don't seem to have the same need to have things pinned down.

A play like The City defies simple explanation. But it's well written. And, therefore, alive.