the end of the world, or else the beginning

Note added 9 July 2021: following the discovery that, through all the years I was working with him, Chris Goode was consuming images of child abuse, I've returned to a self-evaluation process rethinking the work I did with him. That process began in 2018 and some of what it raised is detailed in this post from December that year, in which I acknowledge that I was complicit in some of the harms he caused, for instance by erasing the work of other women who worked with him, fuelling a cult of genius around him, and consistently asking people who criticised his work (particularly the sexually explicit work) to see it in softer ways. A second post is now in process in which I look in more detail at the ways in which Chris coerced and abused particularly young men who worked with him, using radical queer politics to conceal these harms and police reactions. I hope that any other writing about his work on this blog, including the post below, will be read with that information in mind.

Further note added 27 July 2021: that new post is now written and undergoing an extensive rewriting process as it's read and commented on by people who appear in it (that is, other people who worked with Chris in the seven years when I did). It could be up to a month before it's ready to share publicly, but I'm happy to share it privately in the meantime.

vanity project 4: mike bartlett

Every play Mike Bartlett writes is powered by the same question: “What is the nature of this event? Because these days,” says the 30-year-old, “it can be anything. You should open the door of the theatre and you should say: what is this?”

That's how audiences of My Child, his 2007 debut at the Royal Court, felt when they entered a scaled-up model of a London Underground train carriage, and witnessed a vicious tug-of-war between a father, his ex-wife and her boyfriend over a heartless nine-year-old boy. Two years later came Cock, an excoriating examination of a gay relationship under stress, staged within a cock-fighting ring. Earthquakes in London, his debut for the National Theatre last year, was more radical still: the entire Cottesloe was gutted and filled by an acid-orange catwalk, across which Bartlett's ambitious story, which dealt with the impact of climate change, snaked from 1965 to 2525.

The scene directions for his new play for the National, 13, indicate that it should be “performed with a circle”. Bartlett's meaning is both literal – the Olivier's stage is round – and metaphorical: the play is a ritual (his word), exploring religious belief and moral structures, and how they inform our decision-making day-to-day. He started writing it in January, as he began a year-long residency at the National, hoping to answer another question: “How do you put a properly contemporary play about late-2011 on the Olivier stage, considering it's normally programmed long in advance?” An extended rehearsal period has allowed him to respond to the news happening around him – including the riots over the summer, which, he says, not only affected his own writing but will colour his audiences' responses. In one scene, he depicts a pensioner smashing a bank window: “When you've watched the riots,” he argues, “that image changes from a moment of outrageous magical realism to being something we saw last week on the telly.”

Not that Bartlett has a problem with putting magic or fantasy on stage. “We have been constrained by social realism, the worry that in order to tackle a subject seriously the form has to be realistic. But our life is full of weirdness and imagination.” Where Earthquakes spiralled into a crystalline future, the plot of 13 is built upon coincidences and bad dreams, finding equal inspiration in the films of David Lynch and the more surreal passages of the Bible.

He takes issue with the suggestion that the National has brought out the old-fashioned state-of-the-nation playwright in him. “That implies my only focus is to dissect the state of us politically and socially. But state of my emotions, or state of my psychology, are as important to me.” He feels more concerned with investigating, at a personal level, “the play between modern morals and traditional morals, and one generation versus another, and lessons of the past, how relevant they are now and whether they still apply”.

Love Love Love, which toured the UK earlier this year, embodied that conflict within a single family – and found both generations equally at fault in their thoughtless dealings with each other. Bartlett doesn't favour one-sided argument in his plays: instead he presents a clash of extremes and the murky areas between them. The last thing he wants is to bolster the cliched idea that “all new writers at the National Theatre are going to be slightly woolly lefties. Increasingly subjects are more complicated than being left and right anyway.”

So he works hard to inhabit opposing points of view – and frequently ends up questioning his own beliefs. “In the process of writing 13, friends were asking if I was OK, because I was saying things about religion, or about intervening in other countries militarily, that I wouldn't normally spout over dinner,” he says. “In the moment of writing the play I genuinely changed what I thought.”

It helps that he's had a lifelong training in assessing how other people think. His father worked as a psychologist, “so I grew up with him saying: 'Look how that person's behaving. Do you think there's a reason behind that?' So as a five-year-old you think: 'Oh, OK, people have brains and they make decisions and their decisions are affected partly by genetics and partly by...'.” Add the instruction of his “very moral” mother, a teacher and the daughter of a minister, and it's not surprising that Bartlett was “a bit right-on” in his university days. He says he's since learned not to take himself so seriously.

Whereas his earlier plays honed their argument with devastating precision, Bartlett's recent plays can feel messy – as reviewers of Earthquakes in London were quick to point out. The play is touring this autumn, and Bartlett took the opportunity to revisit his script. He's tweaked the final act to make it less convoluted: in the original production, one character fell into a coma, woke up in the future then returned to the past to die, resulting, Bartlett accepts, in “too many twists and turns”. But, he says, “I haven't made it shorter, I haven't tidied it up, because the gesture of the play was always 'too much'.” In other words, Earthquakes surveys the excess of our times by being excessive itself – and if it feels flawed as a result, Bartlett doesn't mind. “I don't want it to be the best version of a play,” he reasons. “I want it to be itself, and not to lose its distinctiveness.”

His great goal in the theatre is to achieve a “coherence of gesture”, whereby “the writing fits with the design, which fits with what the actors are doing. The play is just a starting point for collaboration.” He spent his teenage years in Abingdon, near Oxford (he describes it as “an old market town that's very nearly beautiful, only there's always something ruining it”), not writing but directing. At Leeds University, where he took a degree in English literature and theatre studies, he focused on devising, making “all sorts of weird shit theatre”. Is that weird-shit theatre, or weird, shit theatre? “Both, but mainly shit,” says Bartlett cheerfully. “We used lots of puppets and gauze and paint and the Smiths.” What it gave him, he says, was an invaluable knowledge not only of how a stage works, but of the possibilities of theatre – possibilities he continues to explore and expand today.

After graduating in 2002, he attempted to make his way as a director, but came unstuck while interviewing to join new writing companies including Out of Joint and Paines Plough. “You have to come in with a huge amount of charisma, which I didn't have,” he says. (It's a fair point: Bartlett is smart, forthright and friendly, but not exactly suave.) So he transferred his energy to writing – and with his first proper play, Not Talking, the same new writing companies suddenly found him an exciting prospect. The Royal Court invited him to join its young writer's programme, by the end of which Bartlett had three new pieces: a “social-realistic play about a kid in a school doing terrorist acts”, and “a magical-realist fantasy set on the island of Iona featuring Prince William”, both of which, perhaps unsurprisingly, were rejected by the theatre. The last, My Child, was staged – and Bartlett hasn't looked back.

He worries about being seen to be climbing a ladder: from the Royal Court's studio space to its main house, up to the Cottesloe and now the big one, the Olivier. “I'm not interested in that, and I don't want to feel like that's how it works,” he says. “I don't care more about 13 because it's in the Olivier than I did with Cock in a 100-seat studio. They both matter because it's still a person sat there watching your play. And the play has to be good enough, because there are a hundred other plays and writers out there who deserve to have their play on instead.”

vanity project 3: conor mcpherson

To say that playwright Conor McPherson is fascinated by the supernatural is something of an understatement. He's best known for his 1997 play The Weir, whose characters narrate a string of spooky stories featuring fairies, a ouija board and a mother haunted by her dead child. Before that he taunted reviewers with St Nicholas, about a debauched theatre critic who falls under the spell of vampires. No less a creature than the devil stalked the stage in his last play in London, 2006's The Seafarer. Since then he has made a film, The Eclipse, in which a widower who fears he's seeing ghosts falls in love with a writer of – you guessed it – ghost stories.

His latest play, The Veil, which he is directing at the National Theatre, pulses with paranormal activity: one character hears disembodied voices, another talks dreamily of meeting “a man who had mirrors where his eyes should be”, and a third unleashes chaos by conducting a séance. So far, so McPherson – except in most other respects, The Veil is unlike anything he has written before. For a start, it has five female characters, which is practically more than you'll find in the rest of his work for the stage put together. Plus it's a period piece, set in 1822, opening very precisely on the evening of Wednesday May 15 and ending in the afternoon on Friday 7 June.

An internet search on those dates doesn't bring up much information – which is why McPherson chose them. “I'm not a historical playwright, so I had stick it in somewhere, and I could get in there without any baggage,” he says, apologetically. “Also, it's just before photography, so we sort of know what it looks like, but not exactly. And you can argue with someone about what happened 100 years ago, but 200 years ago?”

It wasn't just canniness motivating this decision: it was a lack of confidence. When I last met McPherson, five years ago, he likened himself to a “nuclear reactor of anxiety”, and, at least where work is concerned, little seems to have changed on that score. He has been writing The Veil since 2008; in the year since the National committed to staging it, he hasn't stopped tweaking it. “It's a different time, a different way of speaking,” he explains. “It made me very wary.”

In his 20s, he thinks, he had a lot more bravado – but he was also prone to drown self-doubt in alcohol, refusing to accept that he had a problem until he was hospitalised with pancreatitis and almost died. That was 10 years ago; these days, he feels a greater sense of responsibility, and not just for himself. “As I get older – I turned 40 this year – I care so much more about the audience,” he says. “I really want them to have a positive experience.”

There was another compelling reason for setting The Veil in the 1820s: “Apparently it was very similar to now, in that there was a big economic crash following the Napoleonic wars,” says McPherson. “So a place like Ireland, which was very poor, was just on the floor.” Still resident in Dublin, where he was born and brought up, he was particularly sensitive to this modern resonance. “When I look at what's happened to Ireland in the past few years, I kind of think: where did this awful dysfunction in our psyche come from that we've destroyed our own country?” he rails. “On one level you can say it's just post-colonial corruption and mismanagement – but on another level it's like an echo of a long, violent trauma. For hundreds of years, to be Irish and Catholic meant your life was just shit. You were not allowed to go to school, you were not allowed to own land, you didn't have any rights. If people suddenly get that power back, of course they fuck it up.”

Witnessing his country's fall from economic grace has politicised McPherson – and made him rethink his own identity. “Before that I'd say: I was born in Ireland, but I'm not an Irish writer – I'm a writer. Now I realise, of course I'm an Irish writer.” He senses the same struggle in the work of James Joyce. “Joyce left Ireland, he wanted to have nothing to do with it. He wanted to become a citizen of the world, and to an extent he really achieved that – but he always just wrote about Dublin.” Even Beckett, he adds, who didn't set his work anywhere, still comes across as Irish. And if they couldn't escape their background, McPherson sighs, nobody can.

Joyce had a direct influence on the writing of The Veil, particularly his novel Finnegan's Wake, widely considered one of the least comprehensible ever written. “The premise of the book is that it's a family asleep and dreaming,” says McPherson. What appealed to him was Joyce's representation of “the timelessness of dreaming: years can go by in a dream, all time is eternity. I wanted to create a play in which time was somehow crashing in on itself, so that what people might think is an echo of the past is in fact a premonition of the future.”

McPherson found yet more inspiration in the German transcendental philosophy of the early 19th century. “It's so out there,” he beams. “The idea that people think that human beings are the part of God that is awakening and coming to know that he is God, it's crazy stuff. I knew I couldn't put it in a play because nobody would want to go and see it and it would be impossible to understand.” What he has done, however, is create one character who has published a book of transcendental philosophy – and another who wonders acidly why philosophers bother inventing these unreal worlds for themselves.

Although McPherson studied philosophy at university, his interests 20 years ago were “very dry, very logical”, and focused on ethics. These days, he's more inclined towards the mystical. Although he abandoned Catholicism as a teenager, he retains its appreciation for the mysteries of existence. Writers such as Richard Dawkins infuriate him: not because he doesn't agree with the idea that there's no religious God, or that religions cannot be proved, but because this argument extends to a lack of belief in the supernatural. “We don't know anything,” counters McPherson. “We're just tiny little mice trying to survive in an unknowable universe. We don't understand the nature of time or space, and the more science finds out about all of that, it only reveals more questions.” This is partly why he loves ghost stories: “They remind us of the limits of our rationality and our reason.”

There is mysticism, too, in McPherson's discussion of his future plans. The past few years have been mapped out with a variety of projects (filming The Eclipse; directing revivals of The Seafarer; writing and directing an adaptation of Daphne du Maurier's The Birds in Dublin), and The Veil marks the end of that busy period. A lot of that time was also spent attempting to adopt a child with his wife of eight years, painter and composer Fionnuala Ni Chiosain: four months ago they were finally successful, and the couple now have a 20-month-old daughter from India. “I have a feeling that what's coming next is very different and I don't know what it is,” says McPherson. “It's the right time to move on.” In what way? “I don't know: to go into something else, deep into somewhere else,” comes the cryptic reply.

Alarm bells ring when he repeats: “It could be something entirely different.” Could The Veil be the last we see of McPherson on stage? Is the lure of studying obscure German philosophical theory too great? Time will tell. For now, McPherson is preoccupied by the demands of directing The Veil, and a desire to make the production the best it possibly can be, not just for his audience's sake, but because it's taking him away from his new daughter. “I want to be able to say: that was good, that was worth it. Now let's get on with our lives.”

vanity project 2: emily browning

Emily Browning spent the spring of 2011 ricocheting from one controversy to another. Sucker Punch, a hyperactive video game-influenced fantasia in which she starred as the scantily-clad Baby Doll, was released at the end of March to a barrage of dreadful reviews deriding its “rancid lubrications” (the Observer), “chaotic and nonsensical” plot (the Independent) and “pervasive ugliness” (the New York Times). Then in May, she went to Cannes for the premiere of Sleeping Beauty, to hear a ruffled audience greet the film with as many boos as muted cheers. Reviews were similarly divided, between those who thought its stately depiction of fetishistic prostitution amounted to “psychosexual twaddle” (the Hollywood Reporter), and those who found it a “strange, ensnaring achievement” (the Telegraph).

At least in the case of Sleeping Beauty, the response was much as the 22-year-old Australian expected. “I knew there was no way everyone was going to like it, and I'm OK with that,” she says. “I'd rather make an interesting film that gets people talking, that maybe some people hate, than make the kind of 'entertaining' film that everyone feels ambivalent about.”

The scorn in her voice as she says “entertaining” is acidic. She spent much of her childhood appearing in easy-going Australian telemovies, soaps and kids' programmes, and with her innocent doe eyes and rosebud mouth, she could quietly charm the world for years yet. But a tattoo under her arm reading “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching”, a quote from choreographer Martha Graham's manifesto for alternative artists, indicates where her heart lies: in “fearless work that challenges me”.

The challenge that made Sucker Punch appealing to her was physical: as someone who has “never been a particularly physical person”, she was hooked the moment director Zack Snyder told her she would have to do martial arts training. But she also liked the premise of the film: that Baby Doll, locked in an asylum by her abusive stepfather, dreams up an alternate reality in which she and her girl gang kick a whole lot of ass. Although she was disappointed by accusations that the film, far from communicating a feminist agenda, titillates its audience by slavering over a female cast dressed in skimpy Playboy outfits, she understood where they were coming from. The problem, she suggests carefully, lay in the difference between the script and the final edit: “Maybe because of interference from the studios, the female empowerment message that I was hoping to send got muddled up.”

There was less chance of being misled by the script for Sleeping Beauty: Julia Leigh, who wrote and directed it, is also a novelist, and Browning says her debut screenplay was not only beautifully written but extremely detailed. Which is just as well, because Browning's character, Lucy, spends a lot of the film naked, and a goodly portion drugged into a stupor while elderly men do with her body what they will, on the understanding that there will be “no penetration”. Even reading the script, says Browning, “made me uncomfortable. I read the first scene and had a panic attack – I had to leave it for an hour to catch my breath.”

It's easy to assume that it was the prostitution scenes that unsettled her, but Browning shrugs: “Nudity doesn't bother me. Mainstream media and society seem so frightened by sex, but it's really not that scary.” Apart from requesting that the set be closed while she was naked, she didn't seek to tone anything down: if anything, Sucker Punch left her feeling “so confident, so strong and mentally stable” that she felt able to make her encounters with the men even more intense, by remaining eerily still while they manipulated her body.

What really distressed her was penetration of a different kind. Lucy also earns money as a medical research guinea pig: we see her in an intimidating white lab having a probe pushed down her throat into her innards. “I'm really squeamish, and I did say if this tube has to be in my chest I might faint.” So a bit of trickery was used in the scene, although the gagging noises Browning makes, including a rather fruity burp, are real.

Other than that, she requested just one change to the script: that the bikini wax administered to Lucy left her with “some semblance of coverage”. In fact, this is one of her favourite scenes in the film: “I love that Lucy starts laughing, because the idea of getting a bikini wax is ridiculous. What we do to ourselves to look a certain way is crazy.”

It's these little details, Lucy's defiant self-possession, her disregard for the absurd trappings of female sexuality, that give the film a feminist undertone – and for Browning this was another of its attractions. She herself is a feminist, in favour of sex work and rights for sex workers, and argues that the sleeping beauty scenes are more concerned with “the sexuality of older people, which isn't visible in society” than with the exploitation of young women. To her mind, Lucy isn't exploited at all: “Obviously the fact that she's asleep means that she's objectified to some degree, but she is completely willing to submit control to others and see what happens. I don't think it's a healthy attitude for someone to have, but the film isn't about portraying a character who's going to be a role model for young girls. It's about the choices we make as humans, and the battle to find control while living in a society that wants to objectify you and commodify you.”

Control over her life is something Browning sought from a young age. Growing up just outside Melbourne, she was bullied at two primary schools before her parents moved her to a parent-run co-operative, where the 40 pupils spent their time not learning maths and English, but painting, going on nature camps and putting on plays. It was here that another parent, an actor, spotted her on stage and suggested that she audition for an upcoming telemovie, The Echo of Thunder. She was eight at the time, and says: “My parents were a bit freaked out – they're as far from stage parents as you could possibly get.” They're not even involved in the arts: her father is a computer systems analyst, and her mother owns and runs a cafe. Browning insisted they let her audition, and continued to insist. At 10, she wouldn't even allow her parents to accompany her on set.

She spent the next few years happily combining school and filming, until she won the part of Violet Baudelaire in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Adventures. She had to move to Los Angeles for nine months and: “I hated it. I was 15 and thought I was punk and that Hollywood was crap. I wanted to be back at school – I actually missed homework, which was weird – and be with my friends and do normal things.” When the film ended, she stopped acting for three years so that she could finish school in Australia.

Her return to work was tentative, so much so that she turned down the lead role in the Twilight movies, and it wasn't until Sucker Punch – the filming of which, at least, she thoroughly enjoyed – that she decided to commit to acting as a career. Chiefly what puts her off is the idea of fame, particularly the scrutiny of gossip media. Her ideal for the future is to “work pretty steadily, without ever getting to the point where I'm super-famous, but just to the point where I can make a film every two years and write and cook the rest of the time”. She's already writing, working on a couple of screenplays, but she finds it nerve-racking, and insists: “It will be 15 years before anyone sees them. And if I ever do get to the point where I make my first film, I definitely won't be in it.”

Sucker Punch transformed her life in other ways: it was while she was in LA doing press for the film that she met her boyfriend, Max Irons (son of Jeremy), and ended up moving to London. Although happy here, she exists “in a permanent state of homesickness”. She frets about her two teenage brothers, sending them lengthy emails instructing them not to follow other people but forge their own paths, and knows that deep down her parents wish “I was home doing a normal job”.

Her father is under strict instruction not to see Sleeping Beauty; her mother, aunts and grandmother all went to the premiere in Australia, however. What on earth did they make of it? Browning giggles: “Mum was hilarious. She said: 'I thought it was great, but I really don't want to see your tits again for a few years.'”

vanity project 1: this isle is full of noises

As an experiment, the next four posts will be the full versions of pieces I've written for the Guardian recently that had to be cut to fit the print page. Truth be told, I'm slightly appalled by my own vanity in republishing them here, but then, the whole concept of blogging still strikes me as impossibly vain, so what the hey. But it's not as simple as that: I don't labour under any illusions of being a great writer – and if I ever do get ideas above my station, the comments my work mostly attracts, that I sound as if I'm shacked up with the person I'm writing about, or that I make them sound staggeringly annoying, or that I've failed to take them to task, or that I've written a “puff piece”, are pretty effective at knocking that ego back down to size. Nor do I have the slightest belief that people would comment any differently if the longer versions of my pieces were published: more words just means more to criticise. What I do feel is that there's something depressingly arbitrary about the necessity to fit pieces around adverts: sometimes the axe is wielded, sometimes it isn't, and you never know when you're going to feel the blade. And since I'm here, in unlimited space, I might as well put these pieces out with limbs intact.

First up: the bonkers Nick-of-Franz-Ferdinand Tempest, which I never got around to seeing, because I got into a domestic muddle (I managed to miss Handspring's Woyzeck at the same time, what a ditz)...

As rehearsals for The Tempest go, the scene in Sausage Studios in east London is a little peculiar. There's hardly room to move between the amplifiers and stringed instruments – 15 guitars, a bouzouki and a double bass – that line one wall, and the keyboards stacked in towers two or three high along the other. Shakespeare specifies that Prospero's island is “full of noises, sounds, and sweet airs”, but there isn't much sweet airiness about the indie-rock caterwaul being conjured up by the two performers.

But this is no ordinary Tempest, something that's reflected in its mouthful of a title. The Isle Is Full of Noises: The Tempest Puppet Music Show is a collaboration between German puppeteer Philipp Pleßmann and his old friend Nick McCarthy – guitarist with Franz Ferdinand. The pair met two decades ago in Bad Aibling, in Bavaria, where McCarthy grew up. “We did everything together: a lot of drugs, playing music, all those teenage experiences,” says McCarthy. An air of teenage mischief still clings to the pair: any time they mention Miranda's speech “I do not know one of my sex”, the word sex sets them sniggering.

It was Pleßmann's idea to turn The Tempest into a solo puppet show. While studying at the Ernst Busch drama school in Berlin seven years ago, he wrote an essay detailing how he planned to do it, although, he says: “When I read it now it's very funny, because I didn't do any of those things.” When he finally staged the first act of the play three years later, as part of his diploma course, he realised he wanted to set Shakespeare's text to music. So he travelled to Glasgow and spent five days with McCarthy working on a soundtrack.

Or rather, five nights – at the time, McCarthy was recording Franz Ferdinand's third album, 2009's Tonight. Listening to the plangent setting of Ariel's song Full Fathom Five, the clattering guitars backing Miranda's sex speech, and the propulsive keyboard riff behind Iris's call to the nymphs in the wedding scene, you can hear how Franz Ferdinand fed into the Tempest soundtrack. But the influence wasn't only one-sided: McCarthy was so pleased with the music he wrote for Caliban's “the isle is full of noises” speech that he played it to his band-mates and – with Pleßmann's approval and a tweaked lyric – the track became a song on Tonight, Dream Again.

Since then, McCarthy has been too preoccupied with other work to return to The Tempest. He spent two years touring Tonight with Franz Ferdinand; when the band went on hiatus for a year, he started focusing on the second album from Box Codax, the band he started with his wife, Manuela, and another friend from Germany, poet Alexander Ragnew. After meeting the artist Martin Creed through a mutual friend, he ended up producing an album for Creed, scheduled for release in the new year. “I've never produced anything else before but it worked out really well,” McCarthy says. “His music is really simple, just one note going up and then back down again, so that's the way you have to record it.” It's not just restlessness that drives him: it's also a recognition that Franz Ferdinand need external stimuli to remain fresh. “There's only a certain amount four people can do until it's just empty,” he says. “Then you need something else to come in.”

It was up to Pleßmann to flesh out the Tempest show, working with designer Hank Schmidt-in-der-Beek, who has created projected images for every corner of Prospero's island, and director Kalma Struen (who is also Pleßmann's partner). The trio have given several festival performances across continental Europe, but the showings at Wilton's Music Hall in London next week will be the first with McCarthy performing the music alongside Pleßmann. McCarthy will rove the stage, swapping between guitars, keyboards and drums (which he still can't play, more than a decade after telling Franz Ferdinand frontman Alex Kapranos that he would be the fledgling band's drummer). “Right from the beginning I said I don't want to be that theatre musician standing in the corner doing sound effects,” says McCarthy. “I hate that. I hate hiding behind my instrument, the way so many musicians do.”

Mccarthy admits the show is exposing. “We can improvise a bit, but with just the two of us doing it, if there's one wrong note you can really hear it.” Even so, the mood of the pair is light-hearted, especially as regards Shakespeare. “We didn't grow up here, so we didn't get that whole Shakespeare stuff at school, which must really mess a lot of people up,” he says. “We got it with the German writers.”

“Faust,” chips in Pleßmann. “Every German student hates Faust.”

“We wanted to make The Tempest quite easily understandable,” continues McCarthy. “We're using Shakespeare and if we want to change it, we change it. We have no respect for it, I suppose.”

Everything about the show registers that lack of reverence. Sly in-jokes run through Pleßmann's text: his Prospero is adamant that German modernisations of Shakespeare are preferable to the original; at one point, the character Ferdinand nods to McCarthy's band's name. Musically, McCarthy says his reference points were big 1970s shows like Jesus Christ Superstar or The Rocky Horror Picture Show. As for the combination of music and puppets, Pleßmann says: “You see it in The Muppet Show – it works so good!”

In some respects, Pleßmann's puppets are just like the Muppets: their faces are slashed from ear to ear to create gaping mouths. But they are otherwise realistically human, with textured skin and googly eyes, which makes them look eerie to the point of terrifying. His main puppet, Prospero, has no body: Pleßmann can hold the head to one side and engage it in dialogue, or place it in front of his own face for one of Prospero's monologues. “It's like a very flexible mask,” he says. “It's much more interesting when the puppet can be free.”

He laughs uproariously when McCarthy tells him that one Glasgow newspaper has reported that the pair are working on a children's show: Pleßmann works primarily in adult theatre and doesn't find this suspicion of the form in Germany. McCarthy's tastes in puppetry are definitely adult: a few months ago he saw Complicite's Shun-kin at the Barbican and found it mesmerising. “The puppet in that was unbelievable: she was sado-masochistic so there were really weird sex scenes. I had bad dreams that night. But I think it's fascinating, that you can go that far with a puppet. You can show more with puppets than you can with actual actors.”

time for you to put yourself on

I've spent an unusual amount of time this past month at Sadler's Wells, which is a bit dangerous with an Actionettes show coming up (Night of the Shimmying Dead, October 29 at the Buffalo Bar – come!): I'm prone to feel frustrated by our myriad shortcomings as an amateur group anyway, and watching dance fills me with a painful yearning to over-reach my meagre capacities and push my body to do the unexpected and transcendent. I interviewed Emily Browning recently and tattooed under her arm are some words by Martha Graham, “a blessed unrest that keeps us marching”, culled from this stern yet tremblingly beautiful letter to Agnes de Mille. I'd never encountered the letter before, but oh God do I recognise the unrest, and I don't usually find it that blessed, either.

One of my favourite things about watching dance is trying to figure out what emotion or story is being communicated: I'm too much of a cheapskate to buy programmes, and maybe I prefer the thrill of the interpretative chase. At Tezuka, the impossibly sweet new piece by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, all the exposition you'd find in a programme was delivered from the stage: potted histories of Japan and the atomic fallout, of Osamu Tezuka's youth and politics, of the radicalism of manga and the philosophical import of his characters. For reviewers, most of whom were a bit sniffy about the show, this was one of its umpteen drawbacks, but I loved the earnest, burbling quality of these verbal interpolations, the fanboy flood of information. I loved, too, the way it shifted constantly: one moment it was childish, showing us a boy rolling around with excitement reading his manga book, or a paper robot-monster stomping up the stage; then darkly, erotically adult, especially in the grappling duet between a priest and a half-naked gamin; or serenely abstract, with groups of dancers weaving and curling in exquisite physicalisations of the Japanese script.

If Tezuka was all about inviting you to share an obsession, the Sylvie Guillem show 6000 Miles Away kept its audience somewhat at a distance. Or maybe I just needed to read the programme to understand the thinking behind the knife-sharp, cracklingly tense moves of the first piece, Rearray: without it, the duet felt impressive technically but emotionally cold. I preferred the other piece, Bye, which has Guillem bursting through a white doorway dressed like a frowzy 1950s librarian (one of my favourite looks), escaping to dance and enjoy herself while members of the family arrive one by one to peer at her quizzically. If I'd grasped that the piece is about the daily tug-of-war between self-fulfilment and social responsibility, between art and family commitments, I probably would have watched it through a blur of tears. As is was, I was more gently amused and moved.

The same struggle is explored in Quarantine's Entitled, an absorbingly odd show, playful yet painful. What it deals with, as Lyn points out in her brilliant review, is the chasm between what we think we want out of life and how we feel about what we have. We watch technicians set the stage up and dismantle it again without the “show” ever really happening. Because what is the show? What is it that makes all the humdrum architectural, organisational activity that life requires – the endless cooking of meals and washing of dishes, brushing of teeth and buttoning of coats, paying of bills and dealing with emails – feel worthwhile? There is an extraordinary moment when one of the dancers, Fiona Wright, steps forward and asks us directly: if I haven't had children, is my life worthwhile? I wanted to tell her that “children” are not a simplistic solution to doubt and anxiety and confusion, but a terrifyingly complicated amplification of that doubt and anxiety and confusion. But someone's mobile phone went off and broke the spell. And anyway, I had already done my bit of participation: I'd jumped on stage and tried to learn Sonia Hughes' brilliant routine to Jump to the Beat so I could teach it to the Ettes, once again failing to realise that what my mind wants and what my body can do are not the same thing.

For me, the answer to that worth question is making stuff, although I'm constantly frustrated by my inability to settle on what to make. In that sense, I felt a wistful twinge of jealousy of Akram Khan: if I could devote myself to one thing long enough to make something even a fraction as beautiful as Desh I'd be ecstatic. The piece deals with ethnicity, how we come to terms with who we are and what made us. In an early scene, Khan itches and quivers across the stage, tearing at his skin, trying to remove something embedded there. This is probably a misinterpretation – judging by reviews, he's attempting to negotiate the hustle and bustle of Dhaka – but it looked to me as though Khan was buffeted by and struggling against the Bangladesh that's lodged in his own body. We don't want our parents' country (in my case, Cyprus) itching at our bones; we don't want to deal with this other culture and language and folklore and national pride, all of which seem so alien to us. But that other homeland has been given to us in our genes and one day or another it will assert itself, seeping through our blood to erupt from our mouths and claim our fingers.

Scenes in which Khan argued with his father (whom Khan embodies, adorably, by painting eyes and mouth on to his own bald pate and balancing his forehead on his arm as a chin), then struggled to interest his own daughter in her heritage, felt so familiar to me. As a child I refused to learn Greek; since having children, I hear Greek words spilling out of me – far more with my son than with my daughter, which is frightening, as Cypriot women are dangerously soppy about their sons. Like my parents before me, I want my children to feel this foreignness inside them. I want to fill their heads with other words, with stories of Persephone and Demeter, Orpheus and Narcissus, Aphrodite and Arachne. There is an unspeakably beautiful sequence in Desh in which Khan, narrating a folk tale to his daughter, begins to inhabit it, digital images surrounding him with a forest of bristling trees and fluttering fireflies. If we have to turn into our parents, at least let's do it in a way that feels magical.

Most of the making I do, inevitably, happens in the kitchen, and it's here, too, that I connect most with my heritage. I can't communicate with my grandmother but I can cook like her: fasoulia, koubebkia, magarounia, kofte. A few years ago at my auntie's house in Greece, I tasted her home-made baklava for the first time and it was a revelation: crunchy, sticky, sweet but not sickly. I finally prised the recipe out of her and the two times I've made it myself it's been a small triumph. So here's my auntie Era's recipe, with a few wee tweaks of my own.

Auntie Era's baklava

I use a Pyrex dish, 30x22x5, for this: you take a knife to it, which is why I don't use a metal tin. Pre-heat the oven to 160 or thereabouts – it wants an hour in the oven to become golden, so use whatever temperature will allow it that length of cooking time

filo pastry – I use Jus-Rol, because it's all I can find in Sainsbury's and I'm not yet insane enough to make my own, and need about a packet and a half

butter – roughly 50g – melted

400g nuts – I use 200g pistachios and 200g almonds – roughly chopped

to which you add: 1tsp ground cinnamon; half tsp ground cloves; 2 level tbsp sugar; 1 tbsp dry breadcrumbs or cracker crumbs (I crush up two cream crackers, which seems to do the trick)

Brush some melted butter over the tin, then start layering the filo, brushing butter between each layer – I use about six sheets here. Sprinkle over half of the nuts mixture, then do another four filo-butter layers, sprinkle over the other half of the nuts mixture, then do another six or so filo-butter layers.

Now you have to cut the baklava diagonally, first in one direction, then the other, to make bite-sized diamond-shaped pieces – make sure the knife goes all the way to the bottom of the tin. Push a whole clove into each piece to hold the pastry in place. Sprinkle it all over with water, then bake it for an hour until golden brown.

15 minutes before it comes out of the oven, make the syrup: you need a glass (approx 250ml) of water, and the same glass of sugar, which you put in a saucepan with a stick of cinnamon, three cloves, the rind of half a lemon and a squeeze of lemon juice. Put it on a medium heat, stir it to dissolve the sugar then boil for at least five but more like 10 minutes.

The very second you pull the baklava out of the oven, pour the syrup over and listen to it sizzle. Leave the syrup to soak in for at least half an hour before tucking in. It will keep for a few days just with a tea-towel to cover it.

Incidentally, as long as you have suitable breadcrumbs/crackers, you can make this vegan by substituting the butter for Stork margarine – I've tried it and couldn't tell the difference.

all the beautiful things in the world

I went to the Edinburgh festival this year buoyant with good intentions to post here every day with little reflections on what I was seeing: Mission Drift, Audience, The Table, I Hope My Heart Goes First, Your Last Breath, Future Proof, Alma Mater, Steal Compass, 2401 Objects... And of course it didn't happen; why did I even think it would? The one piece I started trying to write – about The Frequency D'Ici's Free Time Radical, a show so gentle I didn't register its impact until several hours later, when I was suddenly engulfed by sorrow for the two male characters – refused to formulate itself, and after that I became too caught up in the excitement of haring about town and the guilt of spending hardly any time with the family. And then there was holiday and then a lengthy visit from my mum and suddenly I have a glut of deadlines and not enough hours in the day to write the real work, let alone effervesce about Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Tezuka or the new Baxter Dury album or the new Jens Lekman EP or Kneehigh's The Wild Bride. I've only managed to write this because I sat down to transcribe an interview I'd done with Simon Stephens (oh I do adore him), but discovered that I'd plugged the phone cord into the earphone socket of the recorder, rather than the microphone, so all I could hear of him was a ghostly murmur. That's kind of how life is at the moment. On the plus side, I spent a large chunk of Saturday re-creating a white chocolate cheesecake and raspberry tart from Ottolenghi, with which I'm somewhat unhealthily obsessed, and baking vegan baklava, both of which went a bit too well, recipes to come if I ever get any time. And I'm having a melty teenage moment with Caged Animals, particularly their song Teflon Heart, whose chorus makes my veins itch and will not budge from my head. So here it is...

i can't tell you where we're going

As someone unashamed to call herself a feminist (and I know a lot of people who wouldn't dream of doing such a thing), I'm often dismayed by my failure to register the subtle diminishments of women in the culture around me. Spending time with Miss Velvelette Actionette is invigorating, because her feminism is forthright and astute where mine is meek and woolly. She glares at the things I glaze over, interrogating and challenging assumptions about women that I, not entirely consciously (at least, I hope not), accept, even uphold.

It's surprisingly rare that a work of art should fire up the feminist in me, let alone that it should happen three times in the past three weeks. Things began mildly, with Belarus Free Theatre at the Almeida. I've wanted to see this company since Mark Ravenhill wrote about them in G2 but, in that infuriatingly haphazard way that I have, didn't get around to it before now. Unfortunately, Eurepica. Challenge didn't feel like the place to start. Among its scattershot collection of 12 short vignettes was one rivetingly visceral piece, in which a student protester is interrogated by the authorities: what made it so effective was that the student was represented by a watermelon, which sat, mutely pathetic, as the interrogator showered it with abuse. Its decimation was no less shocking for being inevitable: the sight of its head being sliced off made me squirm, and when the interrogator stuck her hand inside and pulled out its juicy red innards my stomach churned. It reminded me of a production of Pere Ubu I saw years and years ago, I think at the Young Vic, in which all the deaths were devastatingly enacted by a lugubrious chap at a table using cheese graters and tomatoes and other innocuous foods and kitchen tools, a warped appropriation of foley effects that remains one of the best pieces of theatre I've ever seen.

The rest drifted between intermittently involving and drearily awful. I liked the unsettling use of foot puppets to depict child drug addicts in Turkey and the incongruity of a Latvian immigrant rapping his letters home from Ireland. The argument between a Romanian playwright hoping to craft something free and true about his country, and the theatre agent interested only in perpetuating violent cliches, demonstrated a dry, if not exactly subtle, humour, as did the tale of a Swedish woman harassing a beggar on the underground for failing to consider the environmental impact of photocopied leaflets. But as the evening wore on – and it is wearing, watching one satire after another not quite come off – my general disappointment was sharpened by a specific annoyance at the quantity of bare female flesh on stage. The nadir came with a shrill piece from Poland about a priest and a prostitute – and that alone tells you how old-fashioned some of the work was – that never allowed the woman to be more than a squawking object.

The group are already fighting for so much, I feel mean criticising them at all, let alone criticising them for lapses in their representation of women. But it rankled, and left me in an unforgiving frame of mind just as I caught up with The Social Network on DVD. For every positive female figure in the film – Zuckerberg's self-possessed ex-girlfriend, the attorney working with his estranged best friend, the plain-talking junior lawyer – there's a scene of nauseating female subjugation. There's the frat-boy parties, where female students strip off and cavort to animal cheers. There's the two women who throw themselves at Zuckerberg and his best friend, one of whom disappears from the film without trace, the other of whom is revealed as an intolerable jealous hysteric. There's the Facebook celebration party where – and this was the final gratuitous straw – people snort cocaine from a teenage woman's bare stomach. Yes, the dialogue is whip-sharp; yes, the competing legal shenanigans make for entertaining drama; yes, it's brilliant that the characters are so complex, remaining sympathetic no matter how reprehensible they appear. But the casualness of the sexism appalled me so much, I couldn't truly enjoy the film.

A few days later, feminist-me was taxed again by The Village Bike at the Royal Court. I dithered about seeing this play, because I want nothing more to do with any of the writers who contributed to the unnatural disaster that was Greenland at the National, with the possible exception of Moira Buffini, whom I've worshipped for so long that I can't stop now. Penelope Skinner went some way to redeeming herself: The Village Bike is lemon-sharp in some places, quietly moving in others. I laughed when Becky – pregnant, furious at the negation of her self that the invisible foetus has already inflicted on her, desperate for sex – rages at her well-meaning, decent-thinking, infuriatingly self-righteous sap of a husband that their child is in her womb, not her vagina. I gasped when John rails at Becky for shopping at Tesco, expecting him to demand to know why she bought condoms: instead, what shocks him is the appearance of contraband brie on the receipt. I cried when Becky's neighbour Jenny, the beleaguered mother of two young boys, cracks with desperation at her husband's absence, his easy ability to leave the family home for more “worthwhile” endeavour in developing countries, the expectation that she will be kind and supportive and calm even as her children infuriate and insult her. “I'm just stupid old Mummy,” she rails, and my heart bled for her.

And yet. I have serious problems with a play that purports to explore women's sexuality but steadfastly punishes women for indulging that sexuality. Rejected by her husband, Becky starts an affair with a neighbour widely deemed eccentric: together they play out pornographic fantasies in which Becky likes to think she's in control, but never is. She allows herself to be hurt and abused and still comes begging for more. And when she's rejected by this man, she throws herself at the local plumber (a neat pornography in-joke) and feels like a prostitute. By the end, Becky finds the very thought of sex revolting: in a stage direction, Skinner emphasises that she lies on her bed and “stays very very still. As though, if she moves, something will break.”

Here and there, Skinner raises properly interesting questions: about the effect getting married, having children, has not only on a woman's sense of self but on her sense of self-determination, the extent to which motherhood erodes a woman's sense of freedom to act as she chooses and put her own desires first. (And yes, these are questions I face every day.) About the myriad tiny ways in which men, husbands, take advantage of their wives. About the relative ease with which men can enjoy their sexuality and the near impossibility for women of doing the same. But Skinner ruins it all by humiliating Becky, punishing her for wanting sex, having sex, using sex for something other than procreation. What could have been an engaging and provocative feminist argument feels instead as primly cautionary as a Victorian morality tale.

The result of all this infuriation is that, after finishing the biography of Mrs Beeton – whom Kathryn Hughes, persuasively and winningly, depicts not only working alongside her husband as an equal at just the moment in time when those prim Victorians were shunting middle-class women into the confines of the household, but working to reassure the women newly trapped at home that their endeavour there could be worthwhile, as long as they applied themselves to mathematics and science and appreciated the skill required to run a household, not least financially, smoothly and efficiently – I've been drawn back to Adrienne Rich's book Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution. I tried reading it a few months ago, but stopped when I realised that the introduction had washed over me: clearly I wasn't ready to engage with such scrupulous feminist thought. Reading that introduction properly now, part of me feels exhilarated at the parallels between Rich's thinking and my own, but another part of me is pained by how little appears to have changed since she wrote the book in 1976 and revisited it a decade later. At heart, her feminism is anti-capitalist humanism, as captured in this paragraph about the fight for abortion and birth rights in the 1970s:

A movement narrowly concerned with pregnancy and birth which does not ask questions and demand answers about the lives of children, the priorities of government; a movement in which individual families rely on consumerism and educational privilege to supply their own children with good nutrition, schooling, health care can, while perceiving itself as progressive or alternative, exist only as a minor contradiction within a society most of whose children grow up in poverty and which places its highest priority on the technology of war.

I read this travelling home from David Hoyle's spirit-lifting show at Soho on Monday night, knowing that nearby Brixton and Battersea had been attacked by looters, half-expecting any minute to walk into a riot. It was exactly what I needed: a wise, calm voice reminding me that the root of any problem lies deep and must be excavated if real and lasting change is to be effected. Hoyle was brilliant on the subject of the riots, slyly suggesting that we all pop down to Bond St after the show and “have a fun time” helping ourselves to designer goods, provocatively arguing that the looters are simply doing their bit to bring us to a state of communist bliss, in which we wake each day to pick only as many apples from the tree as we need. Add his assurance that today's children would be much improved by being injected with acid at school, that when you're depressed doing something avant-garde instantly makes you feel better, and his astonishing cover of New Order's True Faith that shone a dazzling new light on the song, and yes, it did feel worth risking the riots to be there.

My own thinking on the riots is an inchoate tangle of fury and sadness and bleak optimism (my husband has read that the gangs who live around us crossed territories and forgot enmities to smash up Brixton and Battersea together, proving that some sort of ceasefire is possible), and rather than attempt to unravel it here I'll just direct you X, which is more powerfully articulate and brave than I'm ready to be.

What links X, Adrienne Rich and David Hoyle is otherness and a celebration of otherness, not least the potential for otherness to reject capitalism and forge new social models. As opposed to the old social models that Sam Holcroft, in her scintillating contribution to Double Feature at the National, Edgar and Annabel, craftily argues that we adhere to, script our lives by, almost despite ourselves. Holcroft places Edgar and Annabel in a repressive police state that doesn't quite hold up, but it doesn't matter, because the surveillance under which the couple exist functions brilliantly as a metaphor for the way we survey ourselves: we self-censor and rein ourselves in, controlling impulses and extinguishing desires, not simply respecting but maintaining conservative notions of normalcy and pernicious financial systems, no matter how inimical these things seem to us in theory. Holcroft's characters feel constrained by the roles allotted to them by society, but to break free would be to risk their lives. How different is that from Penelope Skinner's Becky, trapped in a genteel village in nice, safe, democratic England, condemned to play a role that doesn't suit her? Becky isn't a firebrand revolutionary, she's not constructing bombs, she's not rioting. But she is trying to escape the boundaries of her existence, and for that her spirit is broken. Another protest silenced by the forces of conservatism.

if i could just focus on one thing long enough to...

Among the plots and plans that clatter incessantly in my head is a long-cherished dream of writing a cookbook, almost certainly focusing on cake recipes, almost inevitably modelled on How To Be a Domestic Goddess (despite my deep-seated antipathy to Nigella Lawson, it's one of my favourites) but more indie-punk in spirit: How To Be a Domestic Riot Grrrl, perhaps. I doubt it will have much appeal beyond people like me who find it essentially impossible to follow a recipe without tweaking it in some way, who use them not as lists of instructions but starting points, sources of inspiration. I've just finished reading Kathryn Hughes' biography of Isabella Beeton, which is absorbing, enlightening and infuriating in roughly equal measure; in one of my favourite chapters, she describes how Mrs B fought against the snobbery implicit in much of the cookery-writing of her day, by setting out her recipes clearly, precisely and methodically, thus making them equally accessible to practised chefs and those who didn't know a skillet from a griddle. It's not that I can't see the usefulness of being prescriptive in this way, more that I personally chafe against it.

There is a cheering suggestion of egalitarianism in Hughes' Beeton, something you don't get from, for instance, this opening line in the “Essential information: the golden rules of baking” section of Julie Duff's book Cakes, which makes me fume whenever I read it: “Baking is something to enjoy, but unlike a lot of cookery, it cannot be stressed enough how important it is to follow the recipe.” No it's not! What a pernicious attitude this is. It assumes that only one kind of cake – the kind guaranteed to win awards at competitions run by village fetes – is worth making. It suggests that baking is a daunting, rigorous scientific process (not that I have anything against rigorous scientific processes) to be approached in a spirit of caution. And it's preposterously egotistical, denying other people the opportunity to be creative with their baking, giving the impression that a cake will taste good only if you endeavour to replicate the divine writer's cooking, when in fact – as my friend David is so good at reminding me when I have my occasional baking flaps – it's quite hard for something containing vast quantities of butter and sugar not to taste good, however you go about boshing it together.

I frequently feel a sort of amazement at being friends with David: he's the kind of person I'm more used to worshipping from afar. He's a staggeringly good writer; for a long stretch of time he wasn't well enough to write, so it's thrilling that he's started working again, for The Quietus. He's dazzlingly smart: pretty much every time we're together I learn something from him about music or books or pop or queer culture. He also has a magic ability to befriend people who make the art that he likes: what I find remarkable about this isn't that they should adore him, because on top of everything he's funny and kind and intensely interested in the brilliant things people do, but just that he should have the confidence to form those relationships (I don't, hence my awe). A few months ago I opened up an email from him that he was sending to his nearest and dearest, and when I realised that my name was nestled alongside Mark Eitzel's and John Grant's I nearly fell off my chair.

As well as having impeccable taste in all things music and literature, David has the sweetest of tooths. He's a dab hand at whipping up a cake or jam himself: I savour memories of his iced lemon and pistachio cake, his tangerine and brown sugar marmalade, and the thimbleful of his elderberry jam I hid from the rest of the family, which ranks among the most exquisite confections I've ever eaten. A while ago, he told me about a cake he had eaten at the best deli in Glasgow: a lemon, olive oil and rosemary cake that had been unspeakably good. Since then, we've set about trying to make our own version, using recipes from the internet as rough guides. His was delicious, but the Glasgow one had been quite dense and crunchy and his was more spongy, which made him wonder if it ought to have polenta in it (he had used only flour). I made one for an Actionettes tea party in May that was also good but not quite rosemary enough. I've been meaning to post up the recipe ever since, but – typically – didn't write it down. So I made it up all over again the other weekend, put in too much baking powder and ended up with a sunken cake. None the less, it was yummy: dense but moist, good crumb, crunchy from a bit of demerara sugar I mixed in on a whim, fragrant with rosemary. And this time I remembered to write it down, correcting the baking powder quantity as I did so. So here it is, for David, with love.

Lemon, olive oil and rosemary cake

150ml olive oil

3 eggs

150ml sour cream

juice and rind of two lemons

125g caster sugar

50g demerara sugar

30cm stick of rosemary, leaves stripped off and cut into tiny pieces

100g flour

150g polenta

2 tsp baking powder

half tsp bicarb of soda

There are two ways of doing this. Method one: put all the wet stuff in a bowl with the two sugars and beat them together until they're amalgamated in a luscious, sweet and runny mayonnaise, stir in the lemon rind and rosemary, then fold in the flour, polenta and raising agents. Method two: separate the eggs, put the yolks in a bowl with the lemon juice, olive oil, sugars and sour cream and beat until luscious, stir in the lemon rind and rosemary, fold in the flour, polenta and raising agents, then in a separate bowl whisk the egg whites until they form sturdy peaks and fold those in. I've tried both ways, both come out well, but I probably have a preference for the second method, even though (and possibly because) it's more work. Either way, pour the batter into a 18-20cm round cake tin (I lined mine with greaseproof) and bake at 180-190 (again, I've done both, depending on what else was in the oven, with equally good results) for 45 or so minutes. It's good with lemon icing, either the kind the sits crisply on top or the kind that melts into the cake; it's even better with lemon sorbet on the side. Oh, and don't forget the raspberries.

A coda: I gave up using Julie Duff's book when none of the recipes – and for once I did make an effort to follow them to the letter – had good results. Her dough for raspberry buns was a sticky disaster, whereas when I followed the Mrs Beeton recipe (at least, the recipe in my beloved 1960 edition of the Book of Household Management) they were, as they ought to be, very fine indeed. So there.

excuses, excuses

My head is swimming with stuff I want to write about here: X the Hofesh Shechter show I saw at Sadlers on Saturday night; the lemon/rosemary/olive oil cake recipe I'm tinkering with; my slow surrender to Deerhunter (Halcyon Digest plays as I write). X I feel rather guilty for not buckling down, but all available time, and even a lot of unavailable time, has been consumed for the past few weeks by two things: preparing for the Actionettes' gig at Vintage on Saturday 30th July and the art course I've been doing at Morley.

Actionettes first: we're making new frocks for the occasion and so far mine is going disastrously. Tonight I cut out my third attempt at the lining: thank the stars I didn't go straight in with the actual fabric (spangly black paisley – looks better than it sounds) because I'd have run out by now. I just can't seem to get a bodice pattern right any more; or, as my husband gently pointed out, I've simply become fussier about fit since doing a pattern-cutting course earlier this year. We're also learning a new dance, the brilliant work of Miss Silhouette, to this song:

So that's all busy busy. And then there's Morley. I've been aching to start painting again for years and finally hit a point of such agonised frustration that I signed up for their pre-foundation in art course. Essentially it's a portfolio builder/introduction to the basic disciplines: I went thinking I might get stuck back in with oil paints, but instead have been wrestling with chicken wire and discovering what effects you can achieve by mixing charcoal with PVA. It's been exhilarating, infuriating, challenging and absorbing; I haven't much liked anything I've made, but it hasn't mattered because – cliche alert – I've loved the process, passionately.

The final two weeks of the course are going to be spent preparing for and mounting our debut exhibition, open from July 29-August 4, in Morley's Landing Gallery, which sounds almost grand until you visit the space itself: two corridors separated by a flight of stairs, in the characterless depths of the building, with no space for 3D work and a sterile glare to the lighting. Still, we all have to start somewhere. Not that I know what I'm starting, or where I'm going. Until my smallest small person is a bit less small, I don't feel I can carry on with the studying; I have grand plans to continue making work at home, but fear that without the imposition of structured deadlines it might fall by the wayside. Ot maybe it's the validation that the course provides that I need. One thing I do know is that I don't want to feel that agonized itching in my heart any more. Starting to write here calmed it a little; Morley has soothed it a little more.

Before I go, here's something lovely from Deerhunter: