The last day of my thirties

I spent a large part of the last day of my 30s booking a honeymoon. I can't believe we've both been so busy that it's taken us this long to get around to it. Our friends and family generously clubbed together when we got married to give us enough money for a very special holiday, and we have decided to take it in San Francisco. Nathan has never been. I went, with Fiona, in 2000, and found the experience truly magical. We're both ludicrously excited. We have five or so days in the city and then we're driving down the Ocean Highway towards LA. It will be a wonderful post-Brass high.

Speaking of Brass, we returned to the mad house late this afternoon after getting well-and-truly caught up in rush hour traffic around the Blackwall tunnel. There's still something very wrong with the exhaust of our car, and to make matters even more perilous, we came within a few miles of running out of petrol. Gah!

I came back for a rehearsal with young Ben Jones, who plays the lead role of Alf in our show. We were rehearsing the trumpet voluntary he plays at the top of the show, trying to shape it so that he can play it with panache. He's a wonderful player who also happens to have an astonishingly beautiful singing voice so I feel rather proud to be bringing his talents to a wider audience.

I was also lucky enough to get a sneak peek of one of the Barnbow Lassies' costumes. The lovely Emily was modelling it in the little costume department behind the theatre space we've been rehearsing in. A pair of wonderful women have sat there every day this week creating little pieces of visual magic.

We've also been sent photographs of the set being built. I'm not altogether sure where this particular process is happening but it looks absolutely fabulous.

The cast all looked shattered when I saw them at the end of the day. They've been working through transitions between scenes today, which is thankless, but incredibly important work when your tech time is limited. This show will take everything out of them both emotionally and physically, but I'm convinced it will prove to be one of the most immersive experiences of their lives.

We went out to dinner tonight. Sara took a couple of us to Cote as a sort of birthday treat, and she presented me with a very special present; a framed original painting by her father, Morris Kestelman, which is a remarkably special thing. I know I shall spend many a happy hour peering into it. The subject matter, appropriately for me, is Stone Henge. It's either at dawn or dusk. The sky is filled with orange specks, and it's a very brooding picture in greys and purples, which she thinks may have been done as a set design. It has made my little room here at Sevenoaks look incredibly beautiful.

And so, at 00.15, I can officially call myself a 40 year-old man, which feels insane really. It doesn't seem like any time at all since I was young Josh's age, working as the assistant director for the National Student Theatre Company at the Edinburgh Festival in 1995. They remain some of the happiest days of my life, and to any of the cast of Brass cast reading this blog, I say one thing... Drink it in, my dear friends. Take mental snap shots. Remember these moments of freedom, creativity, boundless energy and optimism. Take photographs. Write journals. But above all, strive to build a life for yourselves which is full of variation, colour and a million-and-one little snapshots of happiness. Don't make too many compromises but always do the thing you've agreed to do. Be loyal. Never pass up an opportunity because a better invitation comes along. Be honest and open, and if you see someone looking lonely, or sad, make it your duty to cheer them up. Talk to your grandparents and parents about their lives and listen to what they tell you. You will learn a great deal, believe me, and you'll be able to pass their wisdom onto a younger generation. Above all, live your lives. Make every new day a challenge and revel in the beauty of every sunset.

There. That's obviously what being 40 does for you. It makes you reflective!

Trees with names

It's a bit odd being in London whilst the rehearsals continue in Sevenoaks. I did a radio interview at shit o'clock this morning with BBC Radio Leeds. It was super surreal. I went back to bed afterwards so the whole thing now feels like something of a dream. They played some of the Barnbow Lassies song and then asked me lots of questions about the real life Barnbow lassies. It's slightly odd to be considered an expert.

The rain rattled at the windows through the night, and I slept really very badly. At some point I went into the sitting room and sat and stared at the computer for a while, reading an article about the cast of The Big Bang Theory earning a million pounds per episode. That's the sort of figure that ceases to have any meaning.

Young Josh called me at lunchtime to give me an update from the front line. It seems that the female cast (some of whom have learned brass instruments from scratch between the Easter and summer rehearsals) did a mini concert of brass music for the lads last night. I'm told it was rather moving. I'm also told that all music from the show has now been taught to the kids. I feel a little sad that I didn't have the chance to be with the cast when they learned the last number.

We spent some time today on the phone to Talk Talk, who randomly added £126 to our phone bill as an "adjustment." I'm not sure I would have spotted the charge, but Nathan is fortunately somewhat more keen-eyed than me. He spoke to a lad in the Philippines, whose voice kept making him laugh, but the upshot was that Talk Talk randomly added the money to our bill because another D B Till, somewhere else in the world, owed them money. You really have up watch those bastards. Keep an eye on your phone bills, folks...

This afternoon, Nathan and I took ourselves off to the parents in Thaxted where we had some delicious food and watched The Great British Bake Off, which made us very happy.

It's bad news from the parent's garden, however. Their beautiful plum trees have some kind of blight, which has pretty much destroyed every piece of fruit hanging on the tree. On the slightly brighter side, subsequent discussions on the subject revealed that my Mum actually names her trees. You'll no doubt be relieved to hear that Griselda, Benny the Pot, Harvard and Princeton are doing rather well. Interestingly, the plum trees, however, remain nameless. It's little wonder, therefore, that they're doing so badly, surrounded by their crowing neighbours with their beautiful names and long, vibrant branches.

On the way home we got stuck in a traffic jam on the North Circular in a car which seems to have developed a hole in its exhaust. Tiresome.

Day Four. A4.

I'm pleased to say that I was awoken this morning by the gentle tinkle of my iPhone rather than the shriek of a fire alarm. I walked up to the school from our lodging house and had a hearty breakfast in the great hall. Sevenoaks School is a classic example of how the other half live - or rather how the other half are schooled. The facilities are remarkable. There are multiple theatres, scores of practice rooms and a blinkin' Gamelan! How many schools can boast a complete set of Javanese Gamelan instruments?! The inverted snob in me would cheerfully burn the place down, but I realise that this reaction is largely based on envy. My own school - a Northamptonshire comprehensive - had a single music practice room, known, rather unimpressively as “A4.” The A stood for administration. I used to get sent there during music lessons because my presence in the classroom was deemed "too destructive." I’m actually eternally grateful to the teacher who used to send me there, because she encouraged me to play the piano whilst I waited. There was always a pile of music in the corner which had been copied on a carbon bander machine (an ancient form of photocopier which gave you the choice of pink or purple lettering.) This particular teacher played the piano by improvising around chord symbols and she showed me the basic configuration of a major and a minor chord. I figured the rest out along the way and managed to become a pianist without a lesson. That poor teacher woman never got much from me in return, however. She was a dark-skinned creature, with quite a lot of freckles and moles, and very brown curly hair. I remember one particular winter's day when she entered the classroom with a big dollop of snow still on her head. "Miss, you look like a Christmas pudding..." I said. Out I went to the practice room again. Ah! Those were the days.

Today, I sat in our rehearsal room and watched the wonderful Matt Flint choreographing Billy Whistle, one of the songs from our show. He’s remarkably inventive and seems to have the ability to make anyone look like Fred Astaire. The lads responded incredibly well to him, and created something which was deeply moving and incredibly exciting. I flitted next door and found Sara Kestelman working with the rest of the cast on book scenes. The joy about Brass is that the male and female ensembles very rarely meet, so it’s possible to run two full rehearsals separately, which effectively doubles the potential output of a day.

There is some genuinely fabulous work going on. Most of the cast are developing really strong and robust characters, and they continue to retain an almost obscene amount of information in their young brains. The female ensemble are more unified in their sound than most West End choruses.

The upshot of all this is that I’ve decided to take a couple of days away from the mayhem. It’ll be good for me to have a few lie-ins, a few nights in a bed with a pillow that doesn’t condense like a sponge, and more crucially, a bit of time with my dear husband. I realised how devastatingly tired I was when I reached London and sat down in a cafe. I paid the man for my cup of tea and as he handed me the change, I smiled sweetly, and instead of saying thank you, I said a hugely cheery “hello”, like I was starting the transaction all over again. He looked at me like I'd gone completely insane, which, of course, I have.

Anyway, the up-side to being in London was that I got the opportunity to go to the press night of my dear friend Jim’s production of Therese Raquin. I did this with a tiny bit of trepidation as the production manager of Brass recently had a rather nasty accident in the theatre where the show was being performed.

But what a wonderful show. Psychological. Unnerving. Daring. Sexual. Wistful. Adult. Claustrophobic. Thought-provoking. Atmospheric. Like the love child of Tori Amos and Albert Camus. Craig Adams’ score was a thing of great maturity and beauty. The entire piece was more chamber opera than musical; scored for piano and string quartet. But this wasn’t twee music. It was charging. Rolling. Subtle.  A lot of open fifths with very subtle dissonances in the extremities - beautifully performed by an excellent cast and a string quartet of recent graduates from the Royal Academy. Good string writing. Brilliant vocal arrangements. If you like scrunchy chords, get down to the Finsbury Park Theatre, lie back and simply let them wash over you. Bravo Jim and double bravo Craig.

Day three

I was awoken this morning by the grotesque hammering of a fire alarm. It was so loud and so inappropriate that it made me yell. I actually woke up screaming like a small child awaking from a nightmare. It was, of course, a special test alarm to welcome us all into institutionalised living. And when we got outside, a rather pleased-looking janitor type was smirking as all our names were read out. Fortunately we were all out of the building within the allotted time period, so we were, as you can imagine, thrilled beyond words to have passed. I live my life for these sorts of challenges. Knowing that I wouldn't have burned to death in an imaginary fire makes three Grierson nominations and four RTS Awards pale into insignificance!

And how dignified did I feel to be standing in a pair of boxer shorts in front of a field of 17 year old girls?

The sound, though. I can still hear it screaming through my head. It made me want to gouge my eyes out with a spoon and then force-feed them with a sprig of rosemary to whichever inanely-grinning sadist pressed the sodding button.

In an attempt to purge my body of violent thoughts, I spent five minutes after breakfast dancing the Charleston with our choreographer, Matt. In times of great stress, there's little better than a quick Charleston.

We worked our way through the epic prologue this morning. I like to call it the prolapse cus it's given everyone so much shit since we started rehearsing it. With a combination of great patience and a lot of hard work we managed to get through it and I'm pretty sure we're all taller and prouder as a result!

At 1pm, we stopped the rehearsal to mark the 100th anniversary of Britain declaring war on Germany. We had a minutes' silence, lit a candle, and then Sara, in her inimitable deep voice read a poem. At the end of our ritual I felt obliged to make the cast promise to keep the memory of the First World War alive. I think some of them were quite surprised that I'd actually exchanged letters with First World War veterans when I was a teenager. The First World War is to me what the Second World War is to them.

When I was their age I directed a university production of Oh What A Lovely War. Perhaps when one of them is 40, they might direct the 20th anniversary production of Brass, and pass on the knowledge they've accumulated in the last six months.

This evening's session was largely spent on one of the other mega-numbers, Letters, which was another deeply exhausting experience. Sara, was heard to utter the w-bomb at one stage, which caused much hilarity. Why is an older woman swearing so deeply enjoyable? Actually, I don't know if these young people are just better brought up than me, but I'm quite surprised by how politically correct they all feel. They seem genuinely quite appalled by some of the terms I use. Suddenly I feel like my Grandad. All inappropriate and wee-stained. I'm just not sure he was being ironic. And I'm not yet wee-stained.

Anyway, Letters opened up a right can of worms which meant I was forced to spend 3 hours after rehearsals re-scoring all the underscore passages from the song, and then reformatting all the individual parts. By the time I'd finished, I wanted to gouge out my eyes with a spoon again. Back to the beginning of the cycle!

I can't believe I'm 40 on Friday. If you ever want to feel old, turn forty in the presence of 28 people who are exactly half your age!

Day two

We've been in rehearsals all day today. 9am to 9pm. It's an utterly gruelling schedule, but we're achieving great things. It's been mostly music all day. Song after song. We throw incredibly complicated harmonies at the cast, and basically hope they'll stick. Often there are three, sometimes four musical rehearsals happening simultaneously. We have a music team of four including me.

I walked the corridors of the school at one point this afternoon and heard snippet after snippet of music from the show... It was like the Brass mega-mix! Here a trumpeter practising complicated runs, there a couple of girls running through a duet from the show. It's a little surreal, really, because in these sorts of instances, you begin to get a sense of your own musical language. The little suspensions, and intervals and runs which crop up in my writing more often than others. The cliches, if you like, of my sonic world.

Still, everyone seems very impressed by the music. Part of me feels incredibly relieved whilst the other part thinks "why wouldn't they be impressed? I've worked hard enough at making it sound this good!"

There are still moments when my heart fills with pride, however. The moments when the cast hears a new song for the first time and get excited or moved by it. The moments when they make a point of coming up to me to say how much they're enjoying the music, or the experience of being in the show. The moments when I see Sara and Matt deep in conversation about some aspect of the piece. My show. The baby I've carefully nurtured and carried around for fifteen months!

We came home this evening and the entire creative team watched an ITV documentary about Pals Regiments, which was really very moving. We crammed into a little television room and had treats and snacks.

There was a rather stirring moment when an ancient man, interviewed in the 1990s, was talking about leaving England on his journey to fight in France and how an entire ship of soldiers spontaneously burst into song. Just at that moment I could hear some of the girls from our cast in a distant room singing through the song in Brass where the women wave their men off to war. It felt like such an extraordinary moment of synergy.

Day one

The alarm clock went off like a klaxon in my ear this morning. I was in the deep sleep that only a cold can generate, and woke up not knowing who I was or where I was. All I knew was that I had to get out of bed...

There was some last minute packing to do. It's very hard to know what to pack when you're about to spend the best part of three weeks away from home, in a period which includes a 40th birthday, especially when there's a whole load of reference books and computers and cameras and stuff that you also need to find room for.

Lugging an enormous suitcase across London with a stinking cold was hell on earth, particularly when, at Charing Cross, the handle simply snapped off and I was forced to run for a train like some kind of hunchback with my computer bag around my shoulder bashing against the backs of my knees and threatening to trip me over.

The doors of the train opened at London Bridge which was a scene of utter carnage. It must be a day when a large number of families have decided to go to Brighton or Heathrow because all I could hear from the platform was the sound of screaming children. It was a constant roar. As we pulled away, an Australian lad asked me if the train went to Gatwick, which it didn't. Poor bloke was going to have to go all the way to Seven Oaks on a non-stop train.  A delightful ticket guard very carefully gave him the necessary instructions to get himself back to London Bridge, but taking this wrong train almost certainly meant that he was going to miss his flight.

I reached Seven Oaks at about ten, and limped my sorry suitcase to a taxi which delivered me to the Seven Oaks school, where we are rehearsing Brass.

Day one of rehearsals was a happy affair which involved a read-through of the show's script followed by a series of music rehearsals, which went really rather well. There's a lot of music to learn on this piece; a lot of incredibly intricate harmonies alongside huge swathes of music for the actor musicians.

The highlight of the day today was almost certainly coming across a group of cast members who had formed a miniature brass band and were busking their way through a number of songs from the show. Two of the six musicians had learned brass instruments especially for the production, and they seemed really rather good. It was also rather nice to hear their take on some of the songs. If the songs weren't catchy, they would almost certainly not have been able to busk them. I place a great deal of emphasis on trying to write memorable tunes!

At the end of the day, I was able to work in detail with one of the actresses, taking her through one of the songs in a great deal of detail, which, at this stage, felt like a really strong place to be in.

The food here at the school is really very good. Three enormous square meals a day, which have definitely made me feel a little more chipper, though as soon as this cold clears, I will need to go running on a daily basis, or try to learn not to eat the lovely-looking food.

All is good in the world of Brass.

Can't smell, can't taste...

Today's charming coldy symptoms include a complete loss of both my sense of taste and smell. I was forced to walk through a trail of cigarette smoke earlier on and braced myself for a skinful of the hideous stench of nicotine, but could smell absolutely nothing. Nothing whatsoever. We went to the cafe for lunch and mouthful after mouthful became about the texture rather than the taste of the food. Some mouthfuls seemed saltier than others. That was about all I could discern.

Going back on the tube again was a somewhat daunting experience after the peace and quiet of Derbyshire. I took myself into town to have a pre-Brass hair cut, wishing I had another couple of days to beat the cold before the intensity of rehearsals kick in, which are bound to prolong recovery by at least a week.

I saw adverts today for a new daytime Channel 4 show which advertised itself as "a cooking show with a twist." I wondered if any TV show could be more lacking in twist than a daytime cookery show? Sometimes I wonder how TV execs end up being so riskily risk-averse! Surely it's far more risky to commission show after show which slog the same dead format, than it is to go for something which genuinely breaks new ground; new ground which might actually stand a chance of capturing the zeitgeist!

I think the same about musical theatre. A formulaic juke box musical is never going to be the next Les Miserables. No one would ever have been able to predict that a four-and-a-half hour long show about a nineteenth century French student uprising (performed by the RSC) would break all world box office records... and yet it did, because it was something different.

Isn't it time we all learned to take a few more risks?

And so we've slowly rolled into the period when, each day, another 100th anniversary of the First World War passes. 100 years ago today, Britain was within three days of declaring war on Germany, and Germany (already at war with Serbia) was about to declare war on France and Russia in a tit-for-tat, he-said-she-said, deadly playground game which is so profoundly reminiscent of what is happening right now in the Middle East.

It is, of course, almost impossible to think of a solution to this particular issue, but I do think we're wrong to make it as black and white as saying that Israel is bad, and Palestine is good... And I really feel this is how the British media would have it. Yes, Israel has a powerful ally in the form of the United States, and our natural instinct is to side with the underdog, but I reckon I'd get a bit defensive if my neighbours had gone on record as saying they won't rest until I'm blasted off the face of the earth.

To make matters worse, certain born-again Christians are tragically frothing at the mouth at the thought of Armageddon happening in their life times.  Some non-sensical religious school of thought suggests that the process of the end of the world will begin when the Middle East goes into meltdown, and because they can't wait for the rapture, some American Christians are actually going over to Israel specifically to stir up ill-feeling. There are few words...