Good morning from the Suffolk Express! Well, Express might be pushing it but Friday finds me on a train towards Ipswich, trying to get this newsletter done within *checks watch* an hour before I have to change and get myself to Aldeburgh.

I’m lucky enough to be getting away from London during this last gasp of summer and off to the seaside for HighTide Festival, where The Shores will be recorded for its BBC Radio 3 broadcast. I’m mildly terrified by this one-shot, one-take method of capturing something I’ve spent months on but the actors and director are astonishingly good so I’ve faith that it’ll be fine.

My first HighTide Festival was 2012, when me and a bunch of kids (or what felt like kids) piled onto a bus at Liverpool Street and trundled out to Halesworth. As someone who’d come to theatre late and hadn’t been to anything like Edinburgh, it was like nothing I’d ever encountered - turning up at a town so far removed from my life experience and theatre being crammed into every possible space. I liked most of what I saw, though my abiding memory is sitting in a performance of Ella Hickson’s Boys on the final day of the Premier League, desperately thumbing my phone to life in the interval to see if Manchester City or Manchester United were in pole position for the title that had gone down to the wire. Yes it was that day, the “Aguerooooooo!” day. Look, I liked the play plenty, but I felt gutted to miss what was clearly the most theatrical moment of the day.

I also seem to remember that when we were meant to be leaving, I was sat on a bus for close to an hour because a reading was overrunning. What was this reading that had overshot so much? Turns out it was an early run of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins Neighbors. The (entirely white?) audience stumbled onto the bus, looking a bit traumatised by what they had just seen and nobody seemed to be able to explain what exactly had happened. A year later I was back in Halesworth, watching that play in a church hall in front of an (entirely white?) audience and…well…I got it. Not quite "Aguero!" but definitely an experience that will live long in the memory.

Anyway! 2019 will be an odd year in terms of my output - this radio play and a short story for the Doctor Who Target Story Book are my most prominent contributions and they’re both mediums I’ve not written in before. I'm proud of both and I hope they turn out ok since I think broadening the fields in which I work will keep my head in writing even when I’ve eventually moved out to directing which is the Plan.
 

I've had a hectic couple of months in my personal life, with the result that I've badly fallen out of habits. The anxiety it's left me with has been palpable and signals to me that while I am trying to be flexible, I will do that best within the structures I've created for myself rather than just blowing out entirely for big chunks of time. My response to that anxiety has been to consciously and aggressively push myself back into habits this week to set me up for what looks like quite a hectic end to the year. I'll have written a pilot, a show bible and the draft of two new plays by the end of September. Yikes! Lots of disparate ideas, lots of work pulling them all together in a way that will satisfying. Need to be on top of myself in order to manage that feat.

Speaking of new plays, my primary work this week has been background research for The Experimental Filmmaker (my George Lucas/70s filmmakers/Star Wars play) and most of the time has been taken up by my making my way through all eighteen hours of Ken Burns' Vietnam war documentary, rather definitively called The Vietnam War. I nearly watched this when it was on BBC4 and I’m glad that I held out because the Netflix versions are a whole eight hours longer than the truncated BBC versions. 

It's hard to know what to say about such an expansive work, except to say that it is exactly as exhausting and astonishing as you'd expect. It's one of the few pieces about war (Dan Carlin's first world war podcasts being another) that really create that sense of weariness through the sheer marathon created by the form. Not that it wasn't riveting - quite the opposite. It was the constant stimulation that eventually wears you down. The last episode, dealing with the fall of South Vietnam, was particularly harrowing and kind of leads you to believe that the only thing worse for South Vietnamese citizens than American presence was what happened when they left. Not a conclusion I thought I'd get to. 

Of all the many harrowing stories you'll hear in this documentary, there’s one told by Vincent Okamoto, an officer in the 25th Infantry Division (and now a judge) that I'll never forget. Okamoto was born in an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during WW2 and seems to grow up with a need to demonstrate his love for a country that has treated him with suspicion before he was even out of his mother's womb.

Okamoto arrives in Vietnam and remarks that being "in country" is the first time that he's not had rice every day in his whole life. While searching a village for Viet Cong with his troop he finds no enemy but does find an old woman cooking rice and - feeling a great need for this home comfort - offers her his rations and cigarettes for some of the rice. It's so good that he asks for seconds, leading his interpreter to comment: "Aren't these people starving enough without you eating their food?". Okamoto insists that they've got plenty of rice to go around. You hear this story emit a small, dark laugh. You hear this story as a moment of a foreign soldier finding some solace and connection in a war zone. Your heart swells a little.

And then.

Okamoto says "wait, why is there so much rice?". His unit make another scout around and find a tunnel. Okamoto himself grenades it, killing eight or so Viet Cong. They see which villagers are crying over the dead so they know who to question further. It's all told in a matter-of-fact way but when I heard that 'twist', I felt the bottom fall out of me.
 

This week, I also had the pleasure of seeing Tanika Gupta's adaptation of A Doll's House at the Lyric. I've run out of word count to talk too much about it (I will say it's smashed reviews and Anj is astonishing in it), but it reminded me that this play contains of my favourite scenes in theatre. I first studied A Doll's House at school and most of it felt dreary and old to a seventeen year old boy and then there's this scene between Helene (an old friend of the protagonist, Nora) and Krogstad (a man trying to blackmail Nora). 

You discover that Krogstad and Helene were old lovers and they reignite their thwarted romance here. As a young man, I found this display of love having a second chance in older versions of yourself incredibly moving. It also blew my mind that when Krogstad offers to save Nora from her fate, Helene tells him not to. She sells her friend down the river - but not out of malice. Out of love. She knows it's what Nora needs. That's what a real friend is, right?

Vin xx

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