Validation

Sometimes you need a day like today. We spent much of the afternoon in a bit of a funk, Nathan particularly. We’re both aware that the journey we’ve been on over the last few months has been one of the steepest uphill climbs of our lives and the little voices in the back of our heads had started to wonder if the view from the top had been worth all the bother.

Today, we learnt that it had. As soon as the show started we became aware that a group of women behind us were laughing at very specific Greenham references which had never caused a great deal of mirth in previous audiences. At a certain point, Nathan and I looked at one another, nodded sagely and said “Greenham women.”

At the interval I turned around and spoke to them; “excuse me. This may sound like a very odd question, but are you Greenham women?” “Yes” came the proud reply. My heart skipped a beat. In front of me was a whole line of the people I have been desperate to see this show, but simultaneously terrified of how they might react. More frighteningly, I suddenly realised that one of the women was Rebecca Johnson. THE Rebecca Johnson. She is perhaps the most famous Greenham woman of all time. She lived in the camps for 7 years. She was about at every major event. She danced on the silos. She was arrested and beaten up by police. She ripped the fences down after Reflect the Base. She is a legend. We based the role of Kim on her. There are lines in the show which I took verbatim from television interviews she’d given.

I am thrilled to report that she, and the rest of the women, loved the show. They cried. They laughed hysterically when Helen sailed across the stage on her roller-skates. They even accepted the central heterosexual love story. It was a truly magical moment. They were so gracious afterwards and thanked us for “absolutely capturing the spirit and characters of Greenham” and even thanked us for portraying all the arguments. Rebecca is a singer, and tells us that she used music all the time to change the mood of people. When everyone was downbeat, she’d sing rabble rousing songs. When they were angry, she’d sing soothing music. She found the music in our show moving. She even loved the rather campy song involving feather dusters, which we’d thought she might have had an issue with. She tells us there was a recent demonstration at Aldermaston, and, because the women protesters had recently been classified as “domestic extremists,” they staged a big dance routine outside the gates which involved dusters and marigolds! So we got it right. Phew! Validation.

To make matters even more delightful, Frank was in the audience from New York along with Fiona and Julian, Jill from Northern Ireland and Stef and David. Stef, who is a rock God from a well-know band, said he’d enjoyed it greatly, despite having “not seen a great number of musicals.”

After the show the women stayed in the bar and chatted to the cast for an hour. It was a genuinely magical moment. For the cast, and many of the audience, those women were instantly heroes. There was such a buzz.

On the way home, we came across a drunk trans person asleep on the tube. A man (who later turned out to be an ex-Marine) tried to wake her up at Archway, but she was unresponsive. We eventually managed to get her stirring as we approached Highgate, and, because she didn’t seem to know where she was going, we pulled her off the tube and tried to help her. We ascertained that her name was Lesley and eventually that she needed to go to East Finchley, so we all got back on the tube, Jill included, and wet there. Nathan (fiercely protective, primarily because she was trans and seemingly vulnerable) and the marine, then escorted her out of the station where I’m told she almost went under a bus and then completely flipped out. Eventually she got into a taxi and vanished in a haze. Meanwhile, I was escorting Jill back to Highgate. It was a most surreal end to the day.

Non communication

We stood at Highgate tube for twenty minutes this afternoon waiting for a train to arrive. We kept hearing the same message, namely that a "non-communicative train" at Finchley Central was causing delays. I wondered how a non-communicative train would manifest itself. An angry driver with all communication lines switched off, driving through countless stations at top speed whilst its passengers screamed and banged the windows in terror? Fortunately it turned out to be a storm in a teacup. Perhaps the faulty train was taken out of service. Or maybe the driver decided to start communicating again.

None of the Northern Line trains were going via Charing Cross, so we got a Bank train and changed at Camden where the tannoy announcements immediately sent us to the wrong platform. Huge swathes of confused-looking people were running up and down the steps doing the Camden hop like a scene from a comedy disaster movie. Meanwhile, LU Underground staff saw fit to run the somewhat incendiary message, "ladies and gentlemen, there is a good service operating on all London Underground lines" on a loop. We almost missed the start of the matinee!

The matinee audience was small but hugely vocal and laughed loudly at every joke. It was a friendly crowd as well. Mid week matinees are often the shows which industry people come to. Jake and Pippa were there. Abbie came for the second time. My friend Lisa from Chichester sat just behind us and chortled fondly. The joy about having mixed reviews is that people who have read them come in with low expectations which are then blown away!

We sat with Llio and Abbie in the little coffee bar at the theatre in the break between shows and took it in turns to spill stuff. Llio managed to knock a whole glass of caramel-flavoured coffee onto the table which inexplicably ended up in her hair. The nice man behind the counter gave her a refill. We obviously instantly tried to set her up with him!

The second show was clean and had a large, respectful audience, who watched politely rather than riotously, and then applauded wildly at the end. My dear friend Penny, a former Greenham woman, was in the audience. I guess out of everyone who has been to see the show, I was keenest to impress her. She was full of praise and said the scenes with arguments in them took her right back to her days on the camps. She pulled us up on the use of the word "girl," however, which was such a taboo at Greenham, that, thirty years on, it still shocked her when it was used in the show.

She thought the cast was wonderful and only took issue with our decision to feature a rather maternal older lady character. In her experience, the middle class older women in the camps tended to shy away from the maternal stereotype even when the younger women tried to thrust that particular role upon them. I thought that was an incredibly interesting observation. Of course the irony is that this particular character is one of the most popular with audiences, so the authenticity vs theatricality argument continues...

Jeremy and Jordan from the NYMT came, as did my old friend, Ash and the lovely Rob from Nathan's Royal Airforce drama groups. He's a proper techno-geek, so was just about as perfect an audient as we could have hoped to have.

There was a Q and A after the show which was very well attended. One man put his hand up to say he'd stayed for the Q and A because he'd hugely enjoyed the show, and only realised that there was a computer aspect when the conversation began. That was really heartening because it tells us that the show potentially has an audience beyond the circus of the experiment.

And if you have Sky Arts, don't forget you can see the show on telly tomorrow night. Coverage starts at 8pm with Computer Says Show, the second part of the documentary series, followed at 9pm by the broadcast of the full show, which I'm told is looking just lovely.

Dope

We went into Muswell Hill today to buy lots of cleaning equipment. We went to the 99p store and exited laden with everything we need to thoroughly spring clean the house. We also bought a pair of dustbins. Haringey council has finally cottoned on to the concept of recycling and, a year after requesting them, we've been provided with the pink and green bin liners we need to segregate the different types of waste.

On our way back from the shops we drove down a street where all the trees were being pollarded. I hate seeing trees butchered in this way. They always look so pathetic: so humiliated. It's a funny old time of year to chop all the branches away. There's obviously an understanding that birds nests will be left untouched, so every so often there'd be a tall branch sticking out higher than the rest with a giant nest perched perilously on top. In one of them, a pair of bewildered magpies were plainly trying to work out what the heck was going on!

I came into central London for a meeting at a swanky hotel in Seven Dials. My pot of tea came with a pair of very strange, very small biscuits which had the most peculiar flavour which nestled somewhere between very tasty and inedible!

After the meeting I hot-footed it across to Borough for osteopathy before returning to Central London where I spent ages searching for daffodils. It's St David's Day today and I wanted to give a little bunch of flowers to the two Welshies in the cast, Llio and Steffan. I finally found a flower stall in Covent Garden, bought a couple of bunches and managed to slip into their dressing rooms like a ninja to deliver them whilst the cast were warming up on stage.

Steffan told me afterwards that he'd never been given flowers before. I think it's such a shame that men don't get given flowers very often. There's many a time that I've been handed a bottle of wine whilst the women around me cradle beautiful bunches of flowers and I've felt a little sad. Everyone deserves flowers. In fact, I know a married couple who argue all the time because one of them secretly longs for a bunch of flowers from the other...

The show was fabulous tonight, and the audience loved it. There were several returnees in the crowd. One of them saw it last night and instantly booked tickets to see it again. We had a legendary MD in from the West End who said the show was one of the best British new musicals he'd seen in recent years.

The man sitting opposite us on the tube on the way home stank to high heaven of dope! It's such a pungent smell. If I were a policeman and I cared two hoots about that sort of thing, I would instantly have searched him and no doubt have found vast quantities of illegal substance about his person. Dope smokers so often forget that the smell hangs around them like Pig Pen on Charlie Brown!

R and R

It's been a day of r and r. Nathan worked at the box office. I sat on a sofa wrapped in a towel watching episodes of Frasier. I know for a fact that I have seen every episode of that show: Nathan and I got the box set and watched it beginning to end over the course of a few months. Despite this, every time I watch an episode out of context, I can't remember how it ends. It's like I'm watching it for the first time!

So I watched Frasier, had lunch in the local spoon, tidied up a bit, threw on yesterday's smelly clothes and headed off to central London to see Beyond The Fence. Reviews have been predictably luke warm, but audience reactions on websites have been extraordinarily positive, proving that, although critics might not like a formula, the general public does.

I was heartened by my Mum today who said she recognised every single one of the women on that stage, and that the show had taken her back to our long days on the CND commune. I asked if she thought the women should have been more political and whether we should have had them engaging in more political debate. "Absolutely not" came the response, "that's not how we were."

My cousin Bridg was watching the repeat of the documentary on Sky Arts tonight and sent a text to say how proud she was of us. She'd apparently been shouting things at the telly like "I was his mother's bridesmaid!" I just look at it and watch the progression of a man putting on two stones in weight!

The show was great tonight. Good and clean. A stack load of friends were there including two of the NYMT mothers, which was just fabulous. One of them, Robin's Mum, has instantly bought herself tickets for tomorrow because she loved the show so much.

Nathan had some of his knitting folk in and my publishers at R and H were also there. Dean, who was the MD on Taboo came, along with John Hay from Channel 4 and, as he put it, "loads of people I recognised from your wedding" including Amy Bird and Luke Fredericks, whose friend said he wanted to put Annie Wensak (who plays Margie in the show) on his mantelpiece! I agree.

There was a talk afterwards where members of the audience got to interrogate us about our process and look a bit perplexed at the answers we were giving. We finally got a chance to publicly thank Kat Mace, who was in the audience, who worked tirelessly behind the scenes with Clarissa the Cloud Lyricist, sifting through heaps of nonsense to pull out the few phrases and words which actually made sense. Throughout the process she's been nothing but a joy to work with... She's operated boom mics, filmed sequences, done research and smiled every single day. She's a precious ray of sunshine.

Scones

I woke up this morning unable to hear. I've felt the wax building up in my ears for some time but think the cold I had a week ago has somehow dislodged it. Noises were echoing inside my head almost as though the sounds were reverberating in a cavity between my ear drum and the wax itself. A year or so ago, Nathan, who has always had problems with his ears, discovered a rather special NHS walk-in clinic in Parson's Green where they do syringing, and fortunately it's open on Sunday mornings, so we immediately hot-footed it over there.

I turns out that my Eustachian tubes are blocked, and that there's no issue with wax whatsoever. Apparently they'll clear by themselves, which is a shame because I love having my ears syringed. The warm water. The clicking. The rush of treble as the wax and water dissipate...

Before I forget, I must take this opportunity to put the record straight on a statement I wrote in my blog last night. I rather blithely mentioned that I wished the producers of our show had invited CND activists to see the piece. It turns out they have. In fact, they've been hugely thorough in their efforts in this regard. So there. I apologise for any offence caused.

From Parson's Green we drove due East to Philippa's house in Columbia Road where we spent a much-needed, very charming couple of hours playing with my god children, making scones, eating scones, cutting shapes out of play dough, and painting. I appreciate that I tend to write about nothing other than being ill and eating on this blog, so today's entry is like a mega-cliche!

Philippa's writing career is really taking off. I'm so thrilled for her. She has two feature films which will be released next year and has so much writing work she's booked up for a year! It's time for me to get an agent. My last one didn't feel equipped to represent me in telly work, so it felt a bit silly to continue our relationship! So many of the problems we had on Beyond the Fence would have been fixed by having an agent. Everything becomes so much less personal. I've always longed to tell someone who's being a bit tricky to "talk to my agent." It's the polite version of "talk to the hand..." My mate Matt always tells me I need an agent when the shite hits the pipe!

It is blissful to have a day off. This is the first day we've had off with nothing hanging over us for four months! Imagine that?!

I've come home to watch the Voice with Nathan. My mate Harry has tipped me off that there's a trans performer singing Kate Bush on it, which, let's face it, is my idea of heaven!

Rally

This morning Nathan and I were up with the lark, and being bundled into a taxi to Isleworth where we'd been invited to talk on Sky News' breakfast show. We were the final interview of the morning, and sat in make-up whilst last year's British Eurovision hopeful talked about the two lads who have been selected to represent Royaume Uni this year. The song was chosen last night. I haven't yet heard it but have been told that Brother Edward and Sascha were in the front row of the selection show.

We were interviewed by a lovely chap from Cumbria with a blingy taste in rings which felt rather incongruous for a newsreader in a suit and tie. We exited into the cold morning light covered in foundation and looking like wax works. Why do they put make up on blokes? A bit of powder on the shiny bits is surely enough.

We were deposited back in Highgate, had breakfast in the local spoon, and then made our way into town to attend the anti-trident march, which started at Marble Arch. I was instantly taken back to my childhood as we walked through the streets waving our placards. The chants have changed. When I last marched against nuclear missiles, we shouted "Maggie, Maggie, Maggie. Out, out, out!" I felt proud to be there today. 34 years on. Still flying the flag. There must have been 20,000 people there. Maybe more. To me it was astonishing that such a huge anti-nuclear demonstration coincided with Beyond The Fence. If only the producers of our show had thought to invite some CND supporters along.

I made the mistake of reading one of our reviews today. It was passable, but, as I predicted, did what all reviewers of new musicals do and predicted that the music we'd written wouldn't stand the test of time. I don't really know why reviewers bother to comment on music they're hearing for the first time. Surely no one can accurately predict whether a song will have longevity based on one hearing. I'm also going to get rather bored of the typical "anti-computer" response which inevitably leads to the cast being praised for breathing emotion into emotionless material. Dull. I'll read no more!

There were two shows today and lots of our friends and family were in. Too many to mention. The matinee was a good clean performance. The audience were very quiet and polite, but then went crazy at the end. Lots stood. There was a huge amount of cheering.

We had tea with Nathan's family, Tina, Uncle Bill and Mezza and then returned to the theatre for the evening show. The cast were exhausted. It's unsurprising. And the audience, again, were quiet - perhaps even more quiet than they'd been in the afternoon. I could sense the actors waiting for laughs which didn't come. It was all a bit strange, because, once again, at the end, lot of people stood up.

Meriel sat next to me in Act Two and fell apart during In Our Hearts. I held her hand. I hope the experience was cathartic rather than traumatic. Philippa reported a group of girls so distraught at the end that they couldn't leave their seats. I kinda thought we'd written a comedy! Confused.com.

I was deeply proud of the cast, who came onto stage for their bows holding the placards we'd carried on the march and left backstage. It felt like such a wonderful and appropriate way to show their solidarity.

The experiment is over

So, this evening our show, Beyond the Fence, officially opened at the Arts Theatre in central London. It's been a struggle, but we made it! Tonight's performance was a gala which was filmed in its entirety for Sky Arts. The audience were hugely receptive. Many stood at the end. The applause was good and long. Most cried. My mother, sitting next to me, sobbed for most of act two. The show took her right back to her days with CND. She wore the CND logo on a pendant around her neck. The cast were well-focussed and full of energy. Everyone raised their game.

Nathan and I had mugs made for the cast and crew with the show's logo on them. We handed them out to everyone and I think they went down a storm.

The after-show party was well-attended which is always a good sign. People slope off rapidly if they think a show is a turkey. I don't think the press will be kind, however. They tend not to be particular gracious about new musicals (only time can decide if a show's score is a classic) and I think the scientific/ computer aspect will mean that reviewers will feel the need to "spot" something wrong.

The debate rages on about whether we've under-played the central relationship in the piece. This evening I felt we'd got it right. There's a wistfulness. A subtlety. An elegiac "will they, won't they" quality which doesn't undermine the Greenham Common backdrop of the show. The last image you see is the women protesting against nuclear missiles and that feels right.

I hope the show lives on. I really do.

At the end of the party, Nathan and I were taken into another room for our final camera interview for the documentary. It was a deeply emotional moment. Nathan revealed that the scientists had told him Clarissa, the word cloud lyricist, the computer system which we've battled with, hated and resented over the last four months, was being taken off line... The computer equivalent of euthanasia. For some reason the news hit me like a brick and I burst into tears. I was laughing and crying simultaneously. It's so strange. I realise that I've needed to humanise every computer system in order to be able to farm it for emotional material. Somehow, I've needed to feel that a system wanted me to feel something specific rather than merely offering me a random selection of zeros and ones which I've interpreted in my own way. The idea that Clarissa is dead signifies that the experiment is over: the experiment which has engulfed us for four months. And that's a both a great relief and a great sadness.