edinburgh 2012, day four: paperbelle, bigmouth, as of 1.52pm gmt, a thousand shards of glass, hunt and darton/five minutes to move me + bingo with scottee, dieter roth, the curious scrapbook of josephine bean

6.36am, Wednesday 22 August, 2012. Five year old. “Mummy, I know it's not morning time, so we're just going to stay in bed.”

6.51am Five year old again. “Mummy, I need a poo.”

10.10am Paperbelle, Assembly Botanic Gardens. It's like a treasure hunt, or a game of hide-and-seek: from the gate to a building nestled within the gardens we follow a trail of paper dolls, attached to signposts and trees, beckoning us along. Inside is a giant wendy house constructed of paper, the door closed to us, which makes it triply enticing. This is how you get people excited about going to the theatre.

Inside the house is a black-and-white world, a beautiful cartoon rendering of a sitting room with a radiator and a radio, a painting and a window, and a guitarist in the corner (Ben Talbot-Dunn) playing like he's a member of Vampire Weekend. We sit on creamy coloured cushions and giggle as Paperbelle flutters about like a will-o'-the-wisp, disappearing into drawers, sliding between secret cracks in the walls. When colour starts to erupt across the room, spilling out beneath the fish bowl and beaming behind the alcove door, it's impossible not to compare it to Catherine Wheels' White, one of the best kids' shows I've seen. Paperbelle is less intricate than White but more buoyant; my littles are less hypnotised by it but more entertained. At the end, we have to leave behind the cushions, now a riot of red and blue and yellow and green, but can take away our very own Paperbelle puppets. I hope she's as cheeky when we get her home.

12pm Bigmouth, Summerhall. Hoisted on the back wall of the dreaded Demonstration Room is a chalk board – I don't at first realise it's electronic – on which are scrawled a sequence of names and dates. Socrates, Pericles, King Bedouin. John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X. Osama Bin Laden, George W Bush, Ann Coulter. It's not until two have been scrubbed off that I realise these are the speakers; Flemish actor Valentijn Dhaenens is simply their conduit. Even though I have started writing about Edinburgh, I'm still not taking notes, so what follows is mostly what I scribbled down that evening, the brightest bolts of lightning in an electrifying performance.

Socrates, embracing death, asking only that his sons, should they embrace the government he rejects, be abused. King Bedouin of Belgium, abdicating – sorrowfully, tenderly, respectfully – because he cannot bring himself to ratify the legalisation of abortion, even though both houses of his parliament have voted in favour of the new law. Snap straight from there to Patrice Lumumba declaring the independence of Congo from its colonial rulers, Belgium, in a speech whose shimmering hope, for peace, unity, a future without violence, is devastating. (And that's before I knew Lumumba was assassinated, on Belgian orders, six months later.)

Goebbels addressing the women of Germany in a voice so sickly soft it's disturbing, spliced with George S Patton's diametrically opposed, no less disturbing, assertion that all American men are fighters, ready for war.

And now it's the 1960s Americans and it's civil rights and it's civil strife and a gun keeps firing, pow pow pow. They all sound the same. Whatever it is they're saying, whatever their argument or standpoint, these men all sound the same. So by the time Dhaenens reaches Bin Laden, and he talks about seeing Israel attack Lebanon and innocent children being killed, his hatred of the Americans who support Israel begins to sound almost... reasonable. And that is terrifying.

Bigmouth's potency as an investigation of political oratory lies in its ability to be contradictory things at once: subtle yet rich, sly yet overt, light yet dense. It's an impeccable performance: Dhaenens' accent and facility with language are exquisite, the selected texts searing. But the best, the very best thing about the show is the musical soundtrack he creates between and around the words. He slides from one microphone to another, discovering a slightly different resonance with each one, looping his voice for percussive melody, underscoring it with the harsher rap and tap of fingers and knuckles on table. And when he sings, his baritone resonates across your skin and thrums in your veins.

2pm The lost half-hour. I should be writing. Instead, I'm sulking. Even though I bought the ticket weeks ago, I don't want to see Daniel Kitson. I could be seeing so many other things now. The List, for starters. I'm only seeing him because I feel I should, because people I love rave about him in a way that makes me think I'm missing something. The last time I saw him was some years ago, just at the moment when he was making the shift from stand-up to “theatre”, and all I remember was feeling bored. And before you ask – and I know you're going to ask, because everyone else has – I can't remember if it was the one with the armchair or the one with the C90 tapes or both. Either way, I don't remember him saying anything illuminating. Grump grumpy grump.

2.30pm As of 1.52pm GMT on Friday April 27th 2012, This Show Has No Title, the Traverse. Of course it's brilliant. X There's lots of sparkly ad-libbing: he spots a 12-year-old boy and asks his grown-ups, entirely reasonably, what on earth made them think a piece of self-obsessed meta-theatre would be suitable for him? He looks cheerfully around the audience: “If you're bored, have your own thoughts, that's what I'd do.”

Contrary to expectation, I'm not bored at all. In fact, I can hardly keep up with him: he races through his script, commenting on it as he goes, quoting his own reviews with a little snark each time. The whole thing ought to be horribly naval-gazing, but I find it blissful, because what it's really about is the appalling insecurity of writing. It's like the 30s chapter of Paradigm yesterday: a demonstration of being consumed by the fear of repetition, fraught with the desire to challenge yourself, yet seduced by the possibility of just cynically giving the punters what they already know. There's a big explosive speech in which he says all this explicitly, but what makes it so winning is that he expresses it throughout, in every characterisation and every small aside. And the best, the very best thing about this show is the phrase “mixed-ability tautology”: the excessive use of adjectives, some smart, some dumb. My writing suffers from it too.

4.20pm A Thousand Shards of Glass, Northern Stage at St Stephen's. It's such a delight to be back in a room with Lucy Ellinson after the joy of Oh the Humanity. But this time, I'm much less sure about the material she's delivering. She's such a gentle performer, it feels as though she's holding our hands through the story, guiding us tenderly across its fraught terrain. Which is odd, because that's not who her character is. But who is her character? A freedom fighter, a terrorist, a member of the secret service, a revolutionary, a spy? Enemy, or friend?

About 20 minutes in, I realise what I'm actually watching is an action movie, re-created in sounds (Lewis Gibson) and words (Ben Pacey). It's really exciting to see a woman perform that – better still, a woman wearing a lovely pink jumper with blue branches embroidered on it, and not a video-game cartoon with a cinched waist and a balconette bra. (A woman, Jane Packman, has directed it, too.) As helicopters hover menacingly overhead and she races from a bustling desert city to an office block I don't know where, as she passes from three dimensions to a fourth, I find myself thinking about Christopher Nolan's Inception, and how I couldn't decide if it was the worst film I'd ever seen (which it probably was, for the first half) or a work of staggering genius (which it just might have been, for the second half). I feel similarly, but not precisely, inconclusive about this.

5.30pm Outside Northern Stage are Kieran Hurley, Daniel Bye, Lucy Ellinson and Chris Thorpe. I could hardly be with a nicer group of people. But I feel so agonisingly self-conscious I run away hardly saying goodbye. For the first time in Edinburgh I have a proper conversation with Lyn Gardner, only on the phone but better than nothing. We talk a lot about Mess, and about Monkey Bars, especially how the latter makes us think not so much about children but about adults, and what adults fail to articulate. Walking across the bridges, “chup chup chup” ricochets through my head. Ouch.

7.10pm Back to Hunt and Darton to do my final 30 minutes of Paper Stages volunteering. I don't know whether it's because I feel rotten, or if homesickness is kicking in, but when Hunt or Darton asks me to help with the washing up, I think: yes, that's exactly what I want to do. Even so, it feels an absurd way to access theatre. Rinsing a handful of cutlery, I find myself thinking: the things I do for the love of Andy Field.

7.50pm As part of tonight's performance package, Five Minutes To Move Me, Rachael Clerke is running her own debating society. I propose the motion that we should be radically changing our behaviour for the sake of the planet and future generations. She argues fuck it: she loves swimming, so doesn't care if British shores go under water; shopping at Primark cheers her up; and kids don't appreciate anything grown-ups do for them anyway, so why bother? We laugh, agree to disagree, and score it a draw.

8.40pm This is why Hunt and Darton is so brilliant. I'm sharing a table with three young Edinburghians, who have just wandered in because the door is open and they can get a beer. They're busily gossiping about this person and that when Hunt and Darton join them at the table and start performing. There are poems: “Mum's getting married, Dad's getting divorced, my sister's pregnant. Hmmm....”; “Someone threw a potato at my head. Cunt.” And there's a physical piece, Jockey, for which the two women bend over like horses, whipping to the finish. The three young Edinburghians find it all deeply discombobulating, which only adds to the fun.

9pm Bingo night with Scottee. Bingo, it transpires, is stupefyingly dull. This would be, too, apart from two things: I'm sitting opposite the very wonderful Amy Lame, and Scottee is calling the numbers, from the bingo app on his phone, to the style of whatever happens to be playing on some ropey compilation on Spotify that includes songs by B*Witched and Sinead O'Connor. He's dressed in gold sequins and tosses his head imperiously and the person who accidentally calls bingo too early has their card confiscated and he keeps shouting rude things at Amy, who wins a box of Ritz crackers. I still haven't seen The Shit. But right now, this is just what I need.

Scottee finishes and Five Minutes To Move Me starts again. I can't remember what Tom Marshman called his piece, but it was dedicated to Anna Pavlova, Russian ballet dancer and, more importantly, inspiration for one of my favourite desserts. Pleasingly, there's a plate heaped with meringue, cream and raspberries on the table between us. Marshman tells me a little of Pavlova's biography, then gives me a set of headphones to listen to the Swan Lake theme while he feeds me spoonfuls of pavlova. At first I have the giggles, it's all too silly. But something about the swoop of the music and the tenderness of being fed gets me in the heart. I find myself thinking about religious ceremonies, the consuming of bread and wine in church, the body and blood of Christ. I'm having a religious experience to meringue and Tchaikovsky. It is insane, but utterly magical.

And then there's Greg Sinclair's performance, A Piece of You. Before us is a blank sheet of music manuscript paper. Greg asks me questions and starts to fill the staves with marks: a tick for how I feel, “Naughty” for my favourite word, a sun and three stick figures for a favourite memory. And these marks become the musical notes for a fragment of cello music that makes me feel, just momentarily, like I'm levitating.

10am, Thursday 23 August, 2012

This is a stupid way to see art. This is my final morning in Edinburgh – we leave on the 1.30pm train – and the plan is this: start at the National Gallery for Van Gogh to Kandinsky, swing by Collective for one more look at Paradigm, fly through the Fruitmarket for Dieter Roth, all in time for The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine Bean at 11. It shouldn't work but does, for two reasons. A lot of the art in the Van Gogh to Kandinsky show is not very good, which means it's easy to whizz round but still have time to marvel: at an odd, jittery Mondrian landscape I haven't encountered before; an unexpected, icy landscape by Strindberg; a murky Whistler. And: Dieter Roth's show either needs several hours or a few minutes. Several hours would allow you the luxury of becoming part of the life he documents on a bank of television screens, each one recording a quietly mundane day in his final year alive. You would be the silent guest at his kitchen table, the quiet observer in his studio, the companion at his bedside. The films are so immediate and tender, even in a few minutes you feel that sense of kinship with him.

11am The Curious Scrapbook of Josephine Bean, Traverse at Scottish Book Trust. This is supposed to be a children's show, for 7s-up, but adults outnumber small people by approximately 5:1. This makes me uncomfortable. Not that my children are here: they're too small. I'd thought about bringing the five-year-old but I'm glad I didn't: this is an incredibly intricate show, and I wouldn't have wanted to miss a detail.

It's sort of a detective story: Shona Reppe plays a scrapologist, someone who creates biographical histories by hunting through scrap books. What can she surmise from the scrap book of Artemus J Mood, with its collection of train tickets and seaside detritus, its peculiar photographs and solitary raisin? Is he delusional, a fantasist, a sad and lonely man? Or does his collection of flotsam and jetsam hold the key to the beating of his heart? The trail from clue to clue is mesmerising: there are false starts, misconceptions, ungenerous assumptions. And slowly, the truth emerges, of a fairy-tale, impossible love. It is the perfect end to a whirlwind Edinburgh: tender but sharp, funny but sad, and, above all, achingly romantic.

edinburgh 2012 day three: talking criticism, the price of everything, paradigm, flaneurs, mess, red like our room used to feel, amusements, monkey bars, paper stages

3am, Tuesday 21 August, 2012 I wasn't going to write this festival. I haven't taken a single note. Tonight I was supposed to see The Shit at Summerhall. Instead I sat down at the computer at 8.30pm and typed. Six and a half hours later, I'm jangling. All weekend I've been snappish with the kids, nauseous with frustration. I now know why. Oh god the exhilaration of writing.

7.13am Computer back on. Two minutes later the kids tumble in: they can't believe I've woken before them. It takes another two hours of editing, linking, music searching, for Edinburgh day one to go live. My right arm, wrist, fingers, are clenched with RSI. It's totally worth it.

10am A round table on theatre criticism, organised by Tom Martin of Fringebiscuit, with Tom, James Fritz and the 10 Fringebiscuiters, Matt Trueman, Andrew Haydon and me. For the first time ever, I experience the agonising realisation that I'm old enough to be the mother of the majority of the people around me. A fairly young mother, but that's beside the point. Worse still, when Andrew and I talk about how we started writing about theatre, we are reflecting on an alien world: a world pre-internet, pre-blogging. We sound so old, I tell him. We sound so fucking old.

Key notes from the discussion: the National Student Drama Festival is an exceptionally good place to start writing about theatre. Even though it often feels otherwise, you don't have to see everything, or write about everything you see. People scouting for new writers aren't looking for people who can copy the newspaper review format: they're looking for striking thought and precise articulation. Writing about theatre is the easy bit: getting paid for it damn near impossible.

11.30am The Price of Everything, Northern Stage at St Stephen's. Arriving at this show in a taxi feels so wrong.

It feels wrong because it's a show about money and value, about the things we are willing to pay for and the things we aren't. Are we willing to pay for the arts? Of course I say yes – but for 15 years now I've been blagging my way into theatre and gigs and the last time I bought a CD with cash money was several months ago. When I do pay for these things they are allowable expenses that I use to reduce my tax payments. I haven't even paid to see this show. My moral standing is non-existent. Is it enough to support the arts with love, and time? Certainly I value both more than money, but tell that to the artist struggling to pay their rent.

It's lovely to see Daniel Bye on stage having met him at D&D and been persuaded by him to join twitter. There is an awkwardness, a sort of gawkiness, to his performance that I really like. Some of the material comparing attitudes to the arts and the NHS feels a bit repetitive, some of the satire feels unnecessarily emphatic. And as someone quietly grateful to Thatcher for ending perhaps the greatest misery of primary school, the necessity of drinking too-warm milk lumpy with cream each day, I have mixed feelings about the gimmick at the heart of the show, in which Dan pours out a third of a pint of milk for every member of the audience – the equivalent in price of an adult's weekly contribution through taxes to the arts. Love it as multilayered protest, regretful that I actually have to drink it. (Not to would be a waste: I don't do waste. Thank goodness it's homogenised.)

Being a gullible fool, I believe every word of Dan's outlandish stories about selling preposterous stuff on ebay: the air guitar played in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure; an invisible friend. Does everyone else? I'm not sure if the piece quite works if they don't. It works for me, because in the second half of the show, when Dan spins a lengthy tale that starts with a few small acts of kindness, most of which go unappreciated or are viewed with disdain, and ends with the establishment of a free milk bar in the centre of Nottingham (maybe: I have no memory for place names other than London) (sorry), I want to believe it all but can't. So when Dan excoriates us for finding it easier to credit that people would behave like idiots than with generosity and humanity towards others, I feel horribly chastened.

X

1pm A homeless woman sits huddled outside Starbucks. Two people are giving her coffee, talking to her. I wonder if they've seen The Price of Everything too.

1.20pm Paradigm, Collective Gallery. X Paradigm's maker, BS Johnson. Albert Angelo and the terrifically disturbing House Mother Normal are on my shelf of novels I will aspire to if I'm ever grown up enough to write novels. I'm saving Christie Malry and The Unfortunates: as with Richard Brautigan, I (idiotically) want to feel there is always more to read.

Paradigm is like the prose: schematic, inventive, funny, compelling, unnerving. Its five scenes, each little more than a minute long, show a writer progressing from youth to age, speaking a language of his own devising that is unintelligible yet strangely comprehensible. In his 20s he is radiant with confidence: naked, enthusiastic, words pouring out, and only the slightest hesitation, when he momentarily repeats himself: “chup chup chup chup chup”. He shakes it off, embarrassed; he beams and expounds again. With every passing decade he wears more and speaks less. In his 30s he is abominably smug: he has found a style, a manner, an argument. By his 40s, those “chup chup chups” have become unbearable: he is beginning to face the prospect that he has nothing new to say. In his 50s, he struggles to say anything. In his 60s, he may as well be a corpse. By his 60th birthday, Johnson himself had been dead 20 years.

The whole thing is abysmally, brilliantly acute. I start watching again, this time gripped by the use of eye contact. In youth, the writer eagerly meets our gaze; the older he gets, the more he avoids it. The 60-year-old is hunched, shabby, neglected, a shell of his former self. When he finally raises his eyes, the despair in them is gut-wrenching. Walking out, I wanted to call every writer I know and tell them to see it.

1.55pm

I'm standing at the corner of the Meadows waiting for the green man and every breath is full of the smell of cut grass and I'm alone and I'm in Edinburgh and I'm high on crazy no-sleep adrenaline and I'm actually, helplessly, dancing.

2pm Flaneurs, Summerhall. I already have a badge for this: Matt Trueman gave it me. Sure enough, Jenna Watts' thesis is one I would gladly identify with: that we can be crushed by our surroundings, by every moment of violence embedded in the paving stones, by the fear of being mugged or attacked or raped that stops us walking down certain streets at certain times of day – or we can remake positive, re-map the city we live in by colouring every street with a memory of happiness and kindness. I love the idea of becoming a secret army of alt-flaneurs, people who wander the city not detached from its inhabitants, but embracing the idea of community as a human imperative, and the responsibility that engenders for others, especially others feeling vulnerable, needing help. I'm totally with the argument. But it's an argument I would happily have read on a blog. There is lovely stuff in the staging: the use of maps and projections, the little giraffe standing in for Jenna's friend, the absorbing interviews with people talking about being attacked. And I still wonder why I'm seeing it in a theatre. I suspect this has as much to do with the theatre space as anything else: Summerhall's Demonstration Room – the demonstrations involved dissection; it feels clinical yet dirty in here; the dust-streaked walls seem stained with blood – is gruesomely atmospheric but staggeringly uncomfortable, with vertiginously raked wooden benches so high my feet barely reach the floor and so tightly cramped that even crossing short legs is tricky. Forget re-mapping the city: let's reconfigure this seating.

3.15pm Mess, Traverse. I wasn't going to see this. I was going to see Curious Directive's After the Rainfall like everyone else. But then Lyn Gardner happened to mention in one of her Edinburgh blogs that she had encountered a gender divide in audience reactions – men mostly pro, women (including herself) mostly anti – and that kind of thing is a gauntlet to me. So here I am.

It's the smile that finishes me off. That unnatural rictus grin, stretching Caroline Horton's mouth so wide, each lip might split. “If you smile like this, it releases chemicals in your face, and the chemicals help you relax.” Like fuck. That isn't a smile, it's a mask. False and rigid. Like any mask, it doesn't conceal the eyes. Desperate, terrified eyes that say: I am a lost and broken thing. And part of me hopes you will never, ever know.

Mess is that rictus grin stretched across the Traverse stage. It's designed (by Fiammetta Horvat) to look cheerful and bright: there is a princess tower topped with a pink umbrella, and a flowing carpet of fluffy white bathmat, and a glitzy music corner, and the mood is silly and playful and fu... No, not fun. Painful. The white bathmat is shabby grey and no matter how far it reaches, it can't cover the cracks where sadness seeps through. Horton's character, Josephine, is a recovering anorexic. Not recovered: you never fully recover. Her friend Boris is her witness, because what else can he do? The tears of the clown are a cliche, but one that Horton and Hannah Boyde (and their director, Alex Swift) use effectively: the more gung-ho jolly they are, the sharper the poignancy.

It's probably worth saying here that I've never been anorexic, but feel a there-but-for-the-grace-of-god lurch about it. I'm sure a big reason I find Mess so affecting is an awareness of its truth. Its truth for Horton, who was anorexic herself, and the truth of everything her description of anorexia crystallises: the anxiety, the longing for control, the desire for self-oblivion. Order within the mess of life. Listening to Boris tell Josephine that “seventy percent of life is going to be average and pretty good really, fifteen percent will be excellent and maybe fifteen percent is going to be an awful nightmare” was like listening to my (pessimist-realist, rarely depressed, almost never ecstatic) husband trying to prise me from a gloom. It doesn't work. What I've always clung to is the possibility of a sense of grace, the sense of grace Josephine achieves at the end of Mess, the grace in the very existence of this show. The grace that makes it possible to carry on.

I leave Mess feeling unexpectedly wobbly and with a sharp need to talk to my daughter, my bright and funny little girl who already displays terrifying signs of emotional hyper-sensitivity. On the phone she doesn't sound like my child at all, just a generic little girl. We talk about her new haircut and the animals in the National Museum of Scotland and my heart quakes with the knowledge that it's down to me to protect her. I walk across the Meadows to Summerhall, one foot after the other, trying not to think. Inside, I fall apart.

5pm Red Like Our Room Used To Feel, Summerhall. I'm standing outside the door with Ryan van Winkle who is giving the most absurdly over-extended explanation for how his show operates and it is exactly what I need: a stream of information so banal it's soothing. Ever since booking the ticket for this show I've had a song in my head, Pink River by Retsin: “I can feel blue in my blue room.” So already at the back of my mind I'm in a slightly romantic place: in Louisville, Kentucky, a time of travel and aloneness, with people who seemed like the right people but whom I haven't seen in a long time. Entering the room feels like walking into that lost world: the details don't quite match but the aesthetic is perfect. Open shelves cluttered with books and bric-a-brac. A bed, crumpled. On the wall there's a scratchy drawing, and it's just like the drawings made by Tara Jane of Retsin, the woman I then most wanted to be. Ryan pours me port in a glass yoghurt pot and I slump on the bed between a teddy and yesterday's shirt, eat stale biscuits, wince over the port, and listen.

He's reading me poems, but I'm not hearing the words exactly, more the timbre of his voice. Which I don't hear so much as feel, like drizzle on a slate-grey Edinburgh day, or the electric charge of winter shifting into spring. I find myself drifting, to the night with Jason when we lay on my bed and I read him The Waste Land, to the heart-breaking night when David left London for Glasgow and he told me stories of Derek Jarman and read to me from Mark Doty. Any small thing can save you. By the time Ryan is reading his third poem, a small part of me wishes he'd lean over and kiss me.

He leaves and I look more closely at the room. A bag of almonds, poems by Fernando Pessoa, twinkling red lights, a hard-backed suitcase, a typewriter with hair where the ink should be. The details don't match. The spell is broken. Outside, the brightness makes me blink. I see Ryan on the patio and we chat about writing and Paradigm and Forest and Paper Stages. I decide not to tell him what I really thought of his piece.

5.45pm Amusements, Summerhall. The room is dark and everyone in it is listening to a woman's voice through headphones. Her voice is a little bit sultry, a little bit accusatory. The sound flicks from left to right. Any minute now, I think, Amusements is going to do something brilliant. Except it doesn't.

As I say, I took no notes, so this is what I have failed to forget. It's loud, too loud, irritatingly loud, but there's no way of turning it down. The woman standing before us wears a suggestive red dress and has her knickers round her ankles. She talks about sex, and rollercoasters, and how we think we're so powerful as an audience, sitting there gazing at her. She laughs at us. She can read our minds, right? She looks straight at me: you're thinking about putting your hand up my dress. Actually, I'm not. What I'm thinking is: why are your knickers round your ankles? Why is this so loud? Am I just too old for this? Am I more prurient than I realised? Do I even like performance art? Can I leave now? Please?

7pm The Hunt and Darton cafe is quiet tonight. I tuck myself at an unobtrusive side table and carve a sculpture out of pineapple, ticking off my first half hour towards a second Paper Stages book. It feels like cheating: mostly this is an excuse to eat some fruit. Before long my tongue is scorched with acid burn. I can't hear what's playing but it sounds like swing. I'd want to dance if I were less depleted. I love it here.

X

10pm I've been slowly crashing since Mess and hit the bottom around now. X I read back over what I wrote about Beats and realise how much I forgot to mention: the ricochet of the word beats across the text – the beat of the music, the beat of the policeman's truncheon, the pulsing beat of each character's heart. How much I wanted to hurl myself on to the stage and dance and dance. Nothing is ever good enough. I was going to see Beats again tonight; instead, I work on Dialogue projects. The grace of looking forward.

1.30am Resolutions for tomorrow: read Gemma Brockis' Paper Stages play at Hunt and Darton, and find someone to read Kieran Hurley's play, intended for Arthur's Seat, with me. A stranger on the Meadows, I think. Even if it's cheating.

[An aside: like most resolutions, none of that happened. In the end, it was Saturday 15 September when I read Kieran's piece, sitting on a bench outside BAC with my beloved friend Eliska, to whom I gave the second copy of Paper Stages. And it was delicious: I played A, she played B, and the whole thing might have been written for us. The street outside BAC, with cars drifting past and the light slowly fading and the glass building opposite glimmering and the billboard glaring down at us, felt like an appropriately cinematic location. A good sense of drama is very me. She was tagging along, when maybe I wanted solitude. I had a dark secret and actually, yes, it was good to have company. We held hands. We thought about being stoned teenagers. It was beautiful.]

the curious romance of howard barker

In today's Guardian I have a small piece about Howard Barker. It was originally written at just under 900 words, and I only managed that by heavily editing as I was going along. He said A LOT of stuff I found interesting. So, for reasons I cannot even begin to explain (but which probably involve wanting to avoid sending the transcript to Andrew Haydon, who will skit me for not taking him to task more), instead of going to bed after seeing Curious Incident at the NT tonight, I've stayed up stupidly late and expanded the original with significantly more quotes. As I said to him on the day: it's hard to see the difference, sometimes, between a love of writing and obsessive compulsive disorder.

For most British playwrights, having work staged at the National Theatre for the first time would be a pinnacle of achievement. For Howard Barker, it is a kind of defeat. The play selected by the National for his debut is Scenes From an Execution: written for radio in 1983 and recast for the stage soon after, it portrays the fraught relationship between a pusillanimous artist, Galactia, and her patrons in 16th-century Venice. It is Barker's most famous and accessible play – and therein lies his problem.

“It's long overdue, and I'm glad it's being done,” he says. “But I've got a lot of plays that are better than this that I'd rather have seen here.” Plays like Victory, a bold swoop through restoration England, featuring a king obsessed with bottoms and paupers liberal with the word cunt. Or The Europeans, a gory vision of 17th-century Vienna following the expulsion of invading Muslim forces, in which a raped woman gives birth on stage. These plays are harder, says Barker: to watch, and to comprehend.

“A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal,” he says. “I believe in the ordeal in theatre: I'm not interested in entertainment. [Scenes] isn't an ordeal – maybe it is for the actress, because it's a big role, but as far as the public's concerned, it's not. What they knew when they came in is more or less what they know when they leave. I believe in artistic pain, if you like: I think pain is part of the experience of great art.”

He's fond of Galactia, being played at the National by Fiona Shaw: “It's quite a withering portrait of a monomaniacal, moralistic, unforgiving individual very interested in general issues but almost oblivious to the pain of people next to her,” he says. But the suggestion that she comes across sympathetically fills him with disdain. “I don't like sympathetic characters. Theatre should be a taxing experience: the greatest achievement of a writer is to produce a character who creates anxiety. It's so wonderful to see an actor take that on without fear: 'So the audience doesn't like me: so what?' That's terrific – you don't see it often.”

You can see why this imposing figure crunched into an armchair at the National, with icy blue eyes and snow-white hair, is so frequently described as chilly. (Last week I had to speak to Shaw for another piece I'm doing for the Guardian and she said it, too.) Yet, there's something curiously romantic about Barker. He has a singular vision of what theatre should be and adheres to it rigorously. The key points were expounded in a book of essays titled Arguments for a Theatre, first published in 1989 and honed ever since. Reading it feels queasy but electrifying, because it's so rambunctious. The first piece – published in the Guardian (!), in 1986 – is a list of 49 precepts: “In an age of populism, the progressive artist is the artist who is not afraid of silence.” “A carnival is not a revolution.” “Art is a problem. The man or woman who exposes himself to art exposes himself to another problem.” The theatre must start to take its audience seriously. It must stop telling them stories they can understand.” “When society is officially philistine, the complexity of tragedy becomes a source of resistance.” All the essays that follow expand on these themes. He calls it “theatre of catastrophe”, but the word I keep tripping over in the book is “beauty”. “I like theatre to be seductive,” he tells me, “not rational. To me, it's always been crucially important that a production should be beautiful.”

Although his work – and Scenes is typical in this – is fiercely political, he doesn't believe in “political theatre”. “I don't want to hear somebody's arguments about politics, thank you. I don't want to know the author's conscience, that's his affair,” he says. “Nearly all theatre and all culture now is about projecting meaning. It's very Enlightenment. Go to a newspaper if you want enlightenment: don't go to the theatre.” He finds the idea that people might be influenced politically by theatre “transparently stupid”. “It's far too fragile, far too tentative – that's why it's not a good medium for ideology.”

What he does believe in is tragedy, because tragedy disrupts rational thought and teaches its audience nothing. “King Lear doesn't say anything,” he argues. “It doesn't say what is a king, or what would be a good king.” Although Galactia, at the end of Scenes, expresses disgust at the idea of being “understood” by her public, Barker says it's another of his characters, Machinist from Animals in Paradise, who gets closest to expressing his own view – by refusing to express one at all. He sets himself in stark opposition to playwrights who know what they want to communicate: “I write from ignorance. I don't know what I want to say, and I don't care if you listen or not. On the other hand, I also think I'm privileging you, because I'm giving you, the audience, the outcome of a lot of anxiety and struggle.”

Which is why it's so important to him that his work gets performed. Like Edward Bond, he considers himself “an internal exile”: ignored in his own country, while revered on the continent. (Amusingly, when I ask if he has any relationship with his fellow outcasts, he appears genuinely surprised that there is anyone else who shares this feeling.) Unlike Bond, he has been able to stage a new play almost every year since the late-1980s, with the Wrestling School, the theatre company he set up in 1988 with actor/director Kenny Ireland, taking over as director when Ireland left to run the Lyceum in Edinburgh six years later. The Wrestling School was funded by the Arts Council until 2007, and you can tell how much it rankles that said money was withdrawn when Barker dismisses the Arts Council as “bizarre Soviet-era ideological body”, obsessed with topicality.

Although an ensemble, the Wrestling School effectively operates as a dictatorship. “I'm not interested in collaboration,” Barker says firmly. “I'm interested in getting people to realise what I'm telling them.” That makes him sound as though he has no respect for his actors: actually, he reveres them. “Actors are not like other people. They have this amazing gift of speech which is hypnotic; when they're in that absolute state of complete fluency, they're almost like gods.” When he directs them, he doesn't concern himself with how the audience might receive the work: only with the actors' relationship with his language. “Most directors here say to the actors: 'Are we clear on this point? Will the audience get it?' And I say to the actors: 'Do you get it?'” What he wants to hear is rhythm. “Nietzsche made this point: 'If you don't understand the rhythm of the sentence, you don't understand the meaning.' Fantastic thought. Should be written above the door of every drama school.”

Everything I've read about Barker suggests he's an acutely solitary figure, and imperiousness like this only confirms that impression. He has lived alone in Brighton since divorcing in the 1980s, and traces his preference for solitude back to childhood. He wasn't an only child – he has an older brother – but they weren't companionable, and he didn't have many friends. “I was a solitary child. A solitary child invents friendships and invents his life. Maybe that habit has become fixed in me. To be solitary is to invent – and it's essential to me to invent.” He says this quite seriously: art secures his mental stability. “If I hadn't discovered, as I did at a very early age, writing or painting, I can't say what would have happened to me. I couldn't have survived in the world without that.”

His is “a very disciplined life”. He spends each morning writing, and most afternoons painting: he isn't conscious of a relationship between the two, but accepts that there must be one. “The paintings aren't related to theatre events, but they have a similar quality,” he says. “They're monochromatic oils of figures in a landscape, and the landscape tends to be the landscape of the stage. They're normally about what would seem to be an irrational relationship between figures, floating in a kind of milieu.”

We talk a bit more about his background: he grew up on a council estate in Norwood, a fairly run-down part of south London, with parents who worked in bookbinding factories - “It didn't meant there were any books around.” His mother was a working-class Tory, his father a Stalinist. “It was quite a violent household,” he muses. Just verbally? “Physically, too. That was difficult. But it was good, my background. I've no complaints.” You wouldn't guess any of this to speak to him, because he has a proper RP accent: “My mother sent me to elocution – a grave mistake on her part, because she didn't realise how things were going to be. She thought it'd be nice to have a middle-class child.” He glows when talking about his mother's speech: “She spoke a London argot, a London slang, that had its origins in the 17th century. And she spoke rhythm. She was abusive, she would swear a great deal, she would rant – and when she ranted, she ranted in rhythm. Sometimes she threw up phrases that I knew were centuries old. She also had a tremendous admiration for Shakespeare, because at school – she left school at 15 – they did a few Shakespeare plays, and somehow she got that in her head. She could do a few lines because it was the same language she spoke. That's why rhythm is important to me, I'm sure.”

Just as the voice in Barker's plays is uprooted from our own time, so are his subjects. He started his career at the Royal Court, but quickly turned against it. “I knew there was something I didn't like about the Royal Court: I now understand it was this constant emphasis on the politics. The politics was more important than the art.” He has a similar problem with the National Theatre: “A question you might ask is: what is a national theatre? It seems to me it has to be something: it's not just a big building that does a lot of plays, because then it could be anything. Presumably it knowingly or unknowingly must reproduce the contemporary political consensus.” Reproduces it, or questions it? “No: it thinks it questions it – but that's part of the consensus. We're in a world of what I believe is worryingly called transparency: everything is continually being examined critically. But by producing lots of plays which argue about society, the theatre is merely reproducing the rule of society: it's not breaking it down.”

He abhors “this appalling idea of relevant: every text has to be relevant. If you are writing topical stories with topical themes, I don't think you are thinking about character as such. You're interested in issues. I can't stand issues.” Frequently, the characters he finds himself thinking about are female, and there are an unusual preponderance of huge lead roles for women in his plays. (He looks a bit bewildered when I cheer him for this.)

Instead of the outside world, he looks to culture for inspiration for his plays. Lately, he has been concerned with Pontius Pilate's relationship with his wife and the Velazquez painting Las Meninas. But plays also begin, he says, with the desire to test a hypothesis. “I'm tryign to work something out which clearly worries me at some level, so the first question for the artist is a challenge to themselves. 'Do I really believe that we should love each other?' Let's take that as a question, that cliche which now dominates western culture. Jesus made it a rule that you must love everybody. Now ask yourself a basic question: why should I love anybody or everybody? That's your beginning, the starting point of the hypothesis. Then, for the preservation of your own sanity, you create a dramatic realisation of whether that's true or not true. From there it seems to me each play leads to the next.”

But if he doesn't care for his audience's entertainment, or enlightenment; if he believes in creating stress within his audience, why should anyone watch his work? His answer is typically singular. “If you have a soul – does everybody have a soul? I don't know – but if you do, then there's a necessity for it to be exposed to things. Theatre is a safe place to expose it. To be able to leave a theatre feeling you've experienced something, is powerful and useful to you. I never think of art having utility, but I think it does in that sense.”

Does he have a soul? “Yes. How do I know that? That's a good question. [Please note: he asked the question, not me!] It's not a rational thing: reason is nothing to do with having a soul. Nor is, in a sense, emotion. It is a capacity which probably expresses itself rationally when you talk about it; it's also constructed out of culture. In my opinion, it's not just a personal matter, so if you're not in a way immersed in certain cultural things, you probably don't recognise it.”

What he says about exposure makes me think of fairy tales, which do a similar job of allowing readers to contemplate horror. “That's not a bad analogy,” he agrees. “All my plays as I say are hypotheses and most fairy tales are hypotheses. The trouble with the word fairy tale is it makes everything sound effete and silly. But the great fairy tales go right into the psychosis of society and human nature. The Brothers Grimm – that's a great collection of great texts. Why are gold and money so important in Grimm? Why is there so much killing in Grimm? And quite a lot of sex, as a matter of fact. But the Grimm Brothers were not English – they were German. English culture is utilitarian, it's all about the practical and the businesslike and the observed.” None of which Barker finds appealing in the slightest.

edinburgh 2012, day two: dialogue st stephen's, best in the world, once in a house on fire, oh the humanity, me and mr c, the ugly sisters, paper stages, letter of last resort, good with people

[I feel more than a bit stupid publishing this. It's taken me a month to assemble. In retrospect, this is a massively self-indulgent idea. Also, it's embarrassingly long. Just to put you all off before you even start.]

6.43am, Thursday 16 August 2012. Bedroom door opens. Five year old. “Mummy, I need a poo.” I really should have gone to bed before 1.48am.

10.35am The cafe at St Stephen's has been rearranged so everyone coming to Dialogue's first live outing can sit in a circle. Disadvantages to this: when people start arriving to watch shows in the Northern Stage programme, the circle looks closed, as though they're not welcome in the conversation. Lesson one.

In the room are: Erica Whyman, artistic director of Northern Stage. Daniel Bye, Alexander Kelly, Chris Thorpe, Lucy Ellinson, Gary Kitchner, Helen and Abbi of Rash Dash, Annie Rigby, possibly Francesca Waite, all of whom are in or have directed work in the Northern Stage programme. Clare Duffy of Unlimited, here at Lucy's invitation; Amy Belson (press officer) and Joanna Hawkins (marketing officer) from Soho Theatre, and, briefly, BAC's David Jubb. Jake Orr, Honour Bayes, Matt Trueman, Dan Hutton, Catherine Love, Andrew Haydon and me, all of us at different stages of writing about theatre. Jake marvels later that we managed to create a space where a student (Dan), a theatre-writer in her very early 20s (Catherine), and the newly appointed assistant director of the Royal Shakespeare Company (Erica) could sit side by side as equals. Lesson two.

Something Jake and I talked about in organising Dialogue St Stephens was informality, wanting it to feel like a party where everyone is excited and talking but it's not just talking, there are performances, poetry – there are makers here, after all. None the less, even I'm surprised when Jake gets us started with a piece he's written called Who Am I?, celebrating the freedom in identity confusion, in piling label upon label on to yourself to create a plural not singular being.

I'm many things. I'm 24. I'm male. I'm a white middle class male. I'm gay. I'm a writer. I'm a foolish writer. I'm a blogger-come-writer-come-reviewer-come-critic. I'm a facilitator. I'm a maker. I'm a dreamer. I'm nothing. I'm confused. I'm bemused.

Dan Bye, who has less than half an hour with us, steers us next, into the topic of preparation: performers have a preparation ritual, but what do theatre-writers do to limber up for a night of reviewing? Do you address any assumptions about the work? Do you read the text in advance? What about the programme notes? Catherine talks about subjectivity, the lie that critics can be more objective if they don't expose themselves to publicity material. Jake brings up youth: not having a back catalogue of previous productions with which to compare a work. Annie talks about the effect of positive reviews – or, as Andrew clarifies, star ratings – and how they make audiences expectant in an aggressive way. Erica wishes the critics doling out star ratings were more specific about their expertise – especially when the demands on makers to demonstrate expertise are so stringent. Taste comes up, its effect on how people watch a show, and how rarely it's owned up to. Annie expresses a desire for properly critical engagement, reviews that give useful feedback – dramaturgical notes, Andrew suggests. Erica wishes feedback and negative criticism could happen in dialogue rather than print. Alex wonders where you have that conversation, and how to avoid a response to a review looking like sour grapes. It feels as though we're filling the room with bricks, cement, sand, water – but no one knows what exactly we're building or how to begin. Lesson three.

Next, a game. Annie had suggested in advance that she write a list of 10 things artists don't say to critics, and wondered whether we might compile a response. Her list is:

1. So, did you like it?
2. I know you've got a word limit, but now we're here together it would be great to talk about that sentence you wrote.
3. So you say, “Just email me. Just send me a press release.” But you never reply. And I'm left not knowing whether you haven't read it, or you're not interested, or I wrote the wrong thing.
4. Can we make some space to talk about what you got right and wrong? Like, if you could rewrite one review, what would it be?
5. I'm giving your review 3 stars. Don't be disheartened. 3 stars is a good review.
6. It's not a play. Get over it.
7. It's a real problem that you never come north. It's not just that we want the coverage. It's more about getting some decent quality criticism.
8. What made you want to be a critic?
9. Some of us are making real financial and emotional sacrifices to make our work. Do you see this? Is it useful to know?
10. How long do you spend writing a review? And how soon after a show do you write it? Are you happy with this?

A lot of this makes everyone laugh, but 9 and 10 make the writers in the room squirm. Especially 10: spending three hours on a review is such a meagre return for patient, time-consuming work spent making a show.

In return, my five things critics don't say to artists (I know, I flaked, I'm sorry):

1. I fell asleep.
2. I missed that key speech/ laughy bit/ image because I was too busy thinking about what I need to buy from Sainsbury's tomorrow.
3. My head was too full of other stuff when I wrote about your show, so what I wrote could have been written just from the blurb/press release.
4. Unlike the director, I have some really good, clear ideas for how to direct this show.
5. It's not you, it's me.

Of those, I am personally guilty of 1, 2 and 5. And I really don't mean 5 to sound flip, even though it does. On those miserable evenings when everything happening in a theatre seems to be rotten, it's so easy to blame the makers, rather than your own palate – and to forget that someone else in the room might be having the time of their life.

I'm generally loathe to talk about star ratings, yet it's me that turns the conversation in that direction. Annie and Alex are talking about the frustration of wanting critics to see their work, and the belief that critics generate audiences, which raises some questions for me. Who are the useful people to come into the show? Does it stop at the broadsheets? Does it filter down to Andrew and Matt? Catherine and Dan? Is the thing that makes a review useful the star rating?

It's a wriggly writhing can of worms, one I've seen opened during at least four Devoted and Disgruntled sessions, to little positive effect. As a writer for a broadsheet, I know that the answer to Alex's question, “What would happen if critics refused to put star ratings on reviews?”, is: “Editors would put them on for you.” Of the people in the room, only Matt says he likes the system, because he considers stars “a tool for nuance”. I think they're a tool, too: a sledgehammer.

A star is a luminous sphere of plasma held together by gravity.

Let's just leave them to be that.

That's Lucy. She argues that everyone loses out in the star system – even critics, because the stars override the actual writing. She also points out that if it's hard to be nuanced in a 200-word review, how is it possible to be nuanced in a 140-character tweet? The general feeling is that tweeting about theatre is irresponsible, unless to give an uncomplicated thumbs-up.

The discussion comes to the boil when Chris tells a story about a major theatre looking for a new artistic director, and two people who applied for that job. Both had had work reviewed in the run-up to the shortlist being drawn up, and the feeling among people connected to the building (if not the shortlist process) was that x, whose show had been given four stars, was in with a better chance than y, whose show had been given three – even though the work was very different. To prove that even the artist mindset has been infected by the star system, Chris asks the makers in the room: when you see a poster with a quote from a review, but no star rating, what do you think? The unanimous answer: three stars.

At this point, it becomes useful to have the Soho press/marketing team in the room (lesson four): for them, stars are the easiest way to get audiences through the door. Most people are lazy, says Amy. If a show has four stars, they come. If it has three, it's more of a challenge.

To which Lucy posits a let's-make-the-future alternative: what if theatres stopped using the stars for advertising, and instead of giving prominence to what broadsheet reviews say in publicity material, gave prominence to what bloggers say? How long would it take to shift the way audiences choose to see shows?

It's a big conversation, an unfinished conversation. A conversation full of holes: I'm acutely aware of St Stephen's audience members listening but not joining in, of the silence of Rash Dash, Gary and others in the space. There's a lot to digest before the Dialogue residency at BAC starts, a lot to learn for our next live outing (September 22, details here), but also from what Alex says about feedback to work in progress, and how the most useful thing about Scratch culture is not what gets said or written about the piece, but the voice in the maker's own head that gauges how the material is coming across to the audience.

Alex closes the session with his favourite piece of parenting advice: think about the adults you want your children to be, and be that person. As general rules for life go, that's pretty acute.

12.45pm Best in the World. In the library: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and a pile of self-help/motivational books. On the TV: darts champions through the ages. Research: an interview with Jonathan Edwards, who holds the triple jump world record. And memory: Ian Charleson's performance as Hamlet, weeks before his Aids-hastened death, in which he gave himself so utterly to the part that the lines between truth and fiction, person and performance, became blurred. The same could be said for Alex Elliott: “I'm going to be myself,” he tells us early on, “and I invite you to do the same.” But what does it mean to “be yourself”? Every self is a performance, modulated for an audience, be it a close friend or a bunch of strangers, the people from work or the parent who sees beneath the mask.

A few months ago, when Best in the World was at BAC, I didn't bother going, because I thought it wouldn't be my cup of tea. Wrongness. It's delightful on so many levels. Elliott is gorgeous to watch: generous, honest, funny, encouraging. He invites us to think about insecurity, inferiority complexes, the urge to brush off compliments, and offers an alternative: the possibility of a self-appreciation free of egoism. For a brief, glorious moment, we celebrate our own achievements, the moments of quiet heroism we never give ourselves credit for. (I'm not sure how I feel about the fact that, on the day I was there, most people talked about saving someone's life, whereas I drew attention to “the nights I stay up late writing about theatre”.) Our relationship with Elliott becomes almost that of preternaturally calm, attentive children and wise, gentle parent; essentially what he's telling us is to do your best, and it's not the winning but the taking part that counts, and practise makes perfect, all that soft-cushion support stuff that you find so excruciating when you're a teenager, then secretly long to hear in the big bad world.

It's a disjointed show, I heard a voice whisper in my head while I was watching it. Although every story and idea was connected thematically, the leaps between the different elements felt erratic. And something goes awry in the relationship with the audience: we participate gladly in the making of paper darts, and volunteer willingly to throw real ones, but when a party breaks out on stage everyone remains rooted in their seat, not wanting to commit a faux pas by joining in. This is so much a show about taking care of each other, being aware of each other, as individuals and as a group, an “audience”, that the fear of exposure feels out of place.

But those were quibbles, and so is this, which I mention only because it relates to a philosophical question floating around my family. Elliott talks at length about the circumstances of his father's death, which coincided with a particularly life-enhancing, challenging and absorbing job in Spain, and his decision not to attend the funeral. It's absorbing because you can't quite work out how Elliott feels, so tangled is the mixture of guilt, defiance, sorrow and gratitude. What I couldn't understand is why he didn't seem to regret not spending time with his father as he declined. As my mum says, frequently: what's the point in waiting to see someone until they're dead?

2.40pm Once in a House on Fire.

Chris Thorpe is just behind me in the queue to get in. The one thing I remember about his assessment of the morning's Dialogue session is him saying it was the beginning of something, and not some fucking Fugazi thing either. I love it when people talk punk rock.

After the euphoria of Best in the World, I found it difficult to settle into Once in a House on Fire. It's a slow-burn piece, adapted (by Sarah McDonald Hughes, a writer I don't know) from a memoir (by Andrea Ashworth, ditto) detailing a childhood experience of domestic violence, and set in a world that, despite the pitch-perfect soundtrack rooting it in late-1970s/early 1980s Manchester, feels very distant. Part of me suspects I'm betraying my poncy southerner soul in saying that: from what my friend Anne-Marie has told me about her childhood Mancunian home, it looked a fair bit like the one on stage (violence not included). But part of me thinks she might have felt a distance from the story, too, because Ashworth's youth was too appalling and unnatural for anything else. You can't know what it is to grow up scanning the heavens for the soul of your dead father, watching your mother's successive husbands and lovers beat her, hear her described as a masochist before you understand what the word means, never knowing when the blows will land on you instead, unless you've experienced something of that yourself.

You can, however, empathise, yet there is something so matter-of-fact about this piece that even empathy is kept at arm's length. The three women on stage, especially Andrea and her sister, project a profound self-sufficiency: they don't look beyond the family, let alone to the audience, for anything. Every punch is absorbed and life carries on, and that, too, is alarming. It wasn't until about 10 minutes before the end that I started thinking about my mum, and her experience of being beaten as a child by her mother, the coping mechanisms she had to construct for herself, the nightmares she still has, the impossibility of me knowing, really knowing, anything about what she went through. At the moment when Andrea escapes to university, my heart became so full of my mum, I could barely swallow.

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6pm An unexpected chat with Melanie Wilson about Autobiographer: about the different women I know who felt profoundly affected by it, and those who weren't; the difference between responding to a show and reviewing it; the impossibility of a critic speaking for everyone in an audience. Autobiographer was a pivotal moment for me this year; getting to talk to the woman who made it feels magical. It's at this point I realise just how much I love this space that Northern Stage have made. It feels like a community, but one in which I belong. One in which I'm not afraid to talk to people: Northern Stage performers, other artists just visiting, other women on their own in the cafe. I don't do this in London. I sit quietly in a world of my own. At Northern Stage, that world of my own surrounds me.

6.40pm Oh, the Humanity and Other Good Intentions. I feel a little anxious going into this, and not just because exhaustion is starting to strike. I vividly remember seeing an earlier Will Eno play, Thom Pain (based on nothing) at Soho in 2004, and feeling two things in frequent oscillation: that the writing kept slipping away from me, or rather I kept drifting away from it, unable to grasp its content, its import – except in the moments when I was gripped by the writing as if by a vice, which squeezed so hard I felt physically sick. Five minutes into Oh, the Humanity, I felt that vice again, and revelled in its familiarity. And this time I knew: pay attention. Eno's voice is so light, so urbane and casual, his writing can seem throwaway. In fact, every word counts.

I might come back to this coruscating/excoriating collection of vignettes after seeing them again in London (five days before seeing the revival of Thom Pain at the Print Room: oh, the anticipation!), but some things it's necessary to say now:

One: Lucy Ellinson is phenomenal. Utterly, mind-blowingly, brilliant. She plays four women, and gives each one a slightly different American accent, an accent that manages to convey the woman's social class, her self-confidence and her ability to cope with the more-or-less horrific vagaries of day-to-day life; while at the same time maintaining enough of her (Lucy's) own idiosyncratic inflections that each accent feels not imposed but inhabited. Not only that, but she speaks with such subtlety that you don't realise how sharp and savage lines are until blood seeps from the wound they make. In Enter the Spokeswoman, Gently, she plays a humble office worker at an airline unexpectedly charged with apologising publicly to the families of people who died in a freak plane accident, who, for one brief, excruciating moment, swerves from the point to talk about the attempt to resolve her feelings about her father in a series of failed relationships with men whose weight upon her body was scant consolation. Words cascade from her mouth before her brain has even registered that it's forming sentences, but then she recognises how outrageously inappropriate she's being and a look of pained bewilderment flashes across her face that is as agonising to witness as it is exquisite.

Two: one of the women Lucy plays describes herself as “very ingoing”. Suddenly I know what I am.

Three: I didn't realise how much I wanted to see actors on stage pretend that two chairs are a car, fail to get the engine started, and announce that the problem is “they're chairs”, until I see it here.

Four: having established that the car is in fact chairs, the couple realise a man is staring at them. He introduces himself thus: “I am the beauty of things.” I melt. Perfect.

8.15pm Me and Mr C. There's barely 15 minutes between the end of Humanity and the beginning of Me, so it's a blessing that Gary Kitchner's show is so cheery and conversational to start. The first 25 minutes whizz by with him gathering resources from the audience: a horrible job; an experience of being called something ugly by an employer (I show him the scar from the day a former boss called me a stupid little cunt); stuff we have in our fridges; a kind and wise volunteer from the audience to assist him on stage (today, a chap called Ed). The tone is light and bantering, a bit like being at a stand-up gig, and the absence of the fourth wall just feels so right.

The lengthy introduction is so enjoyable that it's almost a disappointment when the show “proper” begins. It's a condition of the character: Me is humble, bumbling, scrabbles for words, and so does Gary when inserting our material into the shell of his script. But the show's energy and focus dissipate in the character's fuzz of hesitation. Still, two things are effective: the poignancy of Me's relationship with the silent ventriloquist dummy Mr C; and the scenes in which Me attempts to deliver stand-up and we, the real audience, pretending to be an audience, crush him with our heckling. It's all done at Gary's instigation, but the brutality of it is horrible. I couldn't do it, couldn't bring myself to take part. But if everyone had done the same as me, we would have broken the “real” show – and that would have been worse, wouldn't it?

9.30pm Lucy Ellinson and I agree that our heads are much too full. After she heads to the pub I chat to yet another woman on her own; she works in Cornwall, and gives me a flyer for Mayday Mayday, which I seem to miss everywhere it plays. In return I tell her excitedly about the Hunt and Darton cafe and Paper Stages. Ingoing me is startled by how outgoing I'm being.

10pm The Ugly Sisters. I take a seat next to another woman on her own, who leans over and asks if I know a man called x, naming my husband. They went to school together, and although she and I haven't met, she recognises me from Facebook. It's a mark of how excited I am by The Ugly Sisters that this doesn't send me screaming from the room. And I am excited: because I missed Rash Dash in Edinburgh last year, but heard lots of good things about them; because there's a band on stage playing lurching chords and punk-thump drums; because Helen and Abbi have back-combed their hair and look petulant and wild. The shy, silent women huddled on the sofa this morning have transformed themselves into pussy-riot-grrrls, Bikini Kill's Rebel Girls, snarling antidotes to every prissy image of princesses and prom queens that young women are expected to aspire to. And I love them I love them I love them. I love the way they collage music, heart-pulse music, music that throbs and stalks and croons and howls, with a magpie's horde of gilded pop culture, TV talent contests and trash romances, junk fashion and junkie aesthetics. I love the way they give their story chapters, and give their ugly sisters petulant beauty, and make the affirmation of a mother's love the one thing a young woman really needs. I love their anger, humour, honesty, rawness, tenderness towards each other. Yes, I want them to be telling another story about women, finding the new stories, the untold stories, not falling back on the same old fairy stories. But there is a long and brilliant tradition of feminist fairy-tale revisioning, and with The Ugly Sisters Rash Dash gloriously take their place on it.

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting a middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story.

[Anne Sexton, Cinderella]

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1.15am The perfect end to a perfect day: reading Paper Stages in bed. It's not so much reading as hovering like a hummingbird in its vicinity, occasionally pecking at this phrase or that: there are playlets here to perform in public spaces and/or share with other people, journeys to take, phone calls to make. But when I reach Andy Field's Incidental Plays it's much harder to turn the page. The romance of them is irresistible.

Kiss Chase

Two people aimlessly chasing each other through the streets of the city

They switch roles almost imperceptibly

Ducking between cars

Across parks

Down narrow alleyways

Weaving through packed crowds of people

[Which didn't at the time, but now that I'm typing it out, makes me think of a lyric from this:]

HTTP 404 – File Not Found

People stood on opposite sides of a pelican crossing

Seemingly incapable of stepping out into the road

They gaze at each other longingly

Apologetically

As the lights turn from green to red

An indeterminate number of times

And as I close the book and turn off the light, love swells through me, for everyone who made Paper Stages, and everyone at Hunt and Darton, and everyone I have spoken to today.

6.45am Friday 17 August 2012. Bedroom door opens. Five year old. “Mummy, I think I need a poo.”

10.30am I have a ticket for Blink but have to return it to give me more time to rewrite Project 9. I knew at the time of the interviews that the organisation-producer-artist relationship I was exploring was incredibly vulnerable, and I've been remiss in squirrelling away the writing and not sharing it more. It's taught me to be more thoughtful, towards others, and their need for more and better communication, and particularly as a writer: I've extrapolated unnecessarily, for dramatic effect. It's taught me that while traditional journalism skills are useful here, they can also be damaging, in the ease with which they disregard human feeling and sensitivities. Above all, it's taught me to keep probing, keep asking questions, no matter how much more work it creates.

12.30pm Letter of Last Resort/Good With People, the Traverse. I bought my ticket for this days ago, thinking it a must-see: the reviews of David Greig's Letter from the Bomb season at the Tricycle made it sound brilliant, and I twice missed David Harrower's A Slow Air (in Edinburgh 2011 and earlier this year at the Tricycle) so felt the need to catch up with him. But by the time I arrive at the Traverse my enthusiasm has gone. As recognised the night before, at this fringe I'm not in a place of fourth-wall theatre; my brain is elsewhere. So Letter of Last Resort is very good, playful and sharp, restlessly circling, informative, challenging – but I'm just not gripped by it. The young American women next to me love it, despite the perplexing references to Radio 4 and the Archers. And Good With People is tense, tricksy, sneakily political, but it feels like a small piece in a big space, big enough for me not to share it. I curse myself for not having the perspicacity to book in advance for Bullet Catch instead.