I'm going to start with Game of Thrones. Sorry. If you haven't seen it, there's a spoilers-over rejoin point in bold letters below.

It seems at this point everyone has a take on why season eight does or doesn't work. For me, trying to be generous, it largely does work whilst also revealing the relationship between macro and micro plotting or, expressed another way, the difference between creating a grand plot and the pacing of said plot. The broad beats of each character arc are in there...but with less time available they've resorted to not just some fairly hefty leaps but also character change operating in a linear fashion, with direct causality, rather than something that modulates or loops, with a micro-shift within each loop building to a larger change (which Better Call Saul is the absolute king of doing) in a way that feels truthful and not led by dramatic imperative. I suspect largely people's disappointment is to do with this - a show that operated with a great degree of psychological realism in a dramatic, fantastical world has simplified both its world and its style of characterisation. This always felt somewhat inevitable to me once we moved away from the intricate politicking to the less sophisticated Big Bad of the Night King. I, for one, am glad they got rid of him and focused on the human drama but the show hasn't shifted how it's moving its characters now he's gone. 

You know what, it reminds me a little of the final season of another HBO show: The Wire. Though in my opinion that pulls it around by the end, McNulty and co make some truly baffling decisions at the top of that season just to get things to work as they need Truncation hurts even the subtlest and far-thinking of writers.

That said, a few days on, I remain haunted by the visceral effect of the razing of King’s Landing (Dany and the Dragon have always had one of the more dread-full musical scores and it really hits with full effect here) and while I think it's a mercy for the show to end, I'll watch next week still more out of curiosity than duty. 

Speaking of The Wire...
 

SPOILERS FOR GAME OF THRONES OVER, ARTHUR MILLER (??) SPOILERS BEGIN
 

This week I saw the Young Vic’s production of Death of a Salesman, with Wendell Pierce (aka Bunk) as Willy Loman. More importantly, it also starred Martins Imhangbe (who played David in my own play, An Adventure) as Happy Loman who is one of my...not favourite characters exactly...but a character I find myself thinking about often. It was my first experience of this school text as a performance. I had previously turned down seeing Andrew Garfield and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Happy/Willy in New York a few years ago because I thought a hundred dollars was a lot of money for theatre. Whoops.

Anyway! I went with my sister who had been to the Young Vic for a hen-do but never to see a play. This struck me as strange and I did a little tweet thread about it, but I remember how that felt the other way around when I just got started in theatre. I'd go to the White Bear in Kennington and enjoy hanging out in the pub, watching the football, only loosely aware that hearts could be breaking every night in the back room.

The production was dazzling and gave great clarity to the parts where the play unmoors itself from naturalistic drama and slips into Willy's memories. Something I hadn't picked up on when reading it at school was how daring that technique was and how it gives an unexpected quasi mystery-thriller tone to the play, namely setting up and answering the question: What exactly happened to Biff Loman?

Miller is both sharp and empathetic in his analyses of masculinity, especially here when it comes to the pressures of fatherhood (PLUG: A conversation to which I contribute to here with some Very Notable Folks). I was lucky enough to have caught the last night of The Crucible at the Yard last Saturday which was also the first time I'd seen that much-read play performed. Stylistically incredibly different but still an absolute bulletproof text. Arthur Miller was the first playwright I truly connected with, seeing in his stories so much that was familiar to my life, and those two productions have cemented him as probably my favourite playwright too.
 

What else? A few tidbits...

-  I’ve been writing a short story and a radio play this week, which is an interesting switch up. I’ve not written a full-length radio piece since my masters, so returning to it has been a good way of loosening up my dramaturgical muscles. I’d forgotten how atmospheric a medium it is/can be.

- A director I know pitched me an absolutely incredible idea for a movie, based on a true incident. I’d love to write it. But the racial lens through which it’s told is unpalatable. It makes me a bit sad, a bit weary - not because I think we shouldn’t have an awareness of that lens. More that I miss, sometimes, my brain thinking in terms of what makes a great story, first and foremost without immediately jumping to trying to find the most responsible and necessary calibration. This is a discussion that needs more thought on my part and a more nuanced expression than being in the 'tidbits' of a newsletter, so I think I'll come back to it another time.

- Inspired by how pathetically productive I was when my phone died for three days, I’ve decided to have one day a week when I turn my phone off the whole day. I did it on Wednesday this week and yes, again, it was pretty pathetic how much clearer my mind was and how much slower time seem to move. Phones breed efficiency in one sense but they also contribute to that sense of being constantly busy which is exhausting but seems to produce good work almost in spite of that business as opposed to because of it. At the worst, it’s like that Vonnegut (him again!) short story, Harrison Bergeron where the interruption of thought is a deliberate ploy to lower one’s intellectual acuity.

It’s tricky to keep yourself away from your phone, especially if you’ve got family you’re beholden to daily or if you’re nearing production but as I’ve got a little bit of grace time I’m going to try and keep doing it.

- Whilst recommending some books on writing for a younger writer, I realised that every book I own about the craft of writing is by a man. Is there a prominent one by a woman that I should have a look at? At best, I recall reading an essay trying to define what a female-inflected dramaturgical process looks like (but can't seem to find it now).

That's all from me. Have a great weekend, folks x

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