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.