Dear friends,

This week, I’m away doing the most rapid part of my writing sprint so far. I’m in the Cotswolds, staying with a group of friends who are all writers, running a kind of informal, DIY writing retreat.

There’s something really special about going away to write. I get a version of this feeling when I’m in Margate - but being surrounded by my home can be distracting. In the midst of that challenging crunchy scene, doing the laundry or watering the plants becomes ever more seductive.

But here - distraction is almost impossible. This isn’t my home so there’s nothing I need to do. When I need a break, there is blissful countryside for runs and dog walks on the doorstep, and swimming in the lake available every day. I’m here without a car, so I can’t just pop further afield.

I’m planning a real stretch goal this week - completing a whole second draft of my Big Play. And I’m not going to lie - I feel kind of nervous about it. I have a hard external deadline for the end of August, but next week I am workshopping a new musical, so the draft has to get done by this Friday - 21st - and there’s a lot to do.

But I’m in the perfect place, and I’m game. Here are the things I think will get me through:

• Meal planning: no car means we already have all our food. I love cooking and I find it so relaxing, so I’m hoping I’ll be doing most of the cooking for our small group. A great way to get ideas to percolate over the Aga.

• Swims: I wouldn’t be surprised if I end up doing two a day! The natural swimming lake here is alive with wildlife and is completely magical.

• Dog walks and runs: as ever, my whippet Pan is my greatest inspiration.

• Other writers: we’ll get together for walks and meals, and we’re having a shared intention setting tonight before the retreat begins. Community and accountability work so well for me - after all, I’m a collaborative artist, so having this in the midst of writing alone is really valuable.

• An unarguable deadline: I have to submit something by Friday, and I want to be able to be proud of it. Eek!

So, this week’s J Mail a little shorter and a little earlier than usual so I can have all this week with a clear head to write. I’ll see you after the deadline - I’ll share a full reflection on the whole process.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant.

J x

Dear friends,

Next week, I’m heading to the countryside with some friends to do a co-created retreat. We’re all writers and we’ve been away together before - one of the group is hosting us at their family home. We are all different types of writers - a journalist who is writing a novel, a playwright, a screenwriter who is writing their first piece of creative non-fiction. It’ll be very informal: meeting for meals, chatting over our ideas, and then heading off to write separately.

Now, I’m in the second half of my current writing sprint, working on my Big Play. And I’m very much hoping this week away with these other writers will give me the final burst of focussed creative work I need to take this project over the line.

Last week, I was busy directing the reading of Happy Baby, JJ Pálka Johnson’s brilliant show exploring queer parenting and fertility. So, there wasn’t that much time to write. My aim for the week was simply to ‘cast the spell’ every day - not to expect anywhere near the same level of writing as I would on the other weeks of my sprint, but rather to maintain connection and commitment to the piece.

I asked myself each day, what was the ‘1% version’, the very smallest step I could take to move the work forward, whether that was redrafting a scene (on some good days) or simply reading through and making a few notes (towards the end of the week).

And you know what? It worked.

I wanted to ‘cast the spell’, to maintain commitment and connection to my writing, and I really managed to do that. Which felt much better than writing off the week to other creative work - and has meant I’ve been able to dive in much more quickly this week.

All the tools I share in this letter, I’ve tested on myself. I know how well they work for me, which is why I can speak honestly about them. And I started wondering - would this be something I could do in person?

Sharing this particular journey on here has got me thinking:

If I was to run a creativity retreat, would you come?

It’s something I’ve never done before, but I have thought about it. In some ways, leading a retreat is like directing: curating an experience for a group of people to have together in a space. In some ways, this newsletter is intended as a kind of mini digital retreat, a space to think about creativity, compassion and care.

Alongside my work as a writer and director, I’ve had a portfolio career that is really the reason I am able to be a full time artist today. For years, as an emerging director, I facilitated workshops using the MG Taylor methodology - which borrows from architecture and Montessori to create stimulating, playful learning environments. Basically, helping large groups of people in business contexts solve complex problems, quickly.

During the pandemic, I was a designer in a wellness tech startup, delivering mindfulness programmes to all kinds of different businesses, from Accenture to Pizza Hut.

I’ve coached professors and advancement officers, business leaders and composers, translators and playwrights and influencers. It’s something I love doing, and this letter is a way of me gauging if it’s something I should spread a little more widely than I do now.

A number of you have reached out recently, asking me if a retreat would ever be something I’d consider. And so I wanted to share some ideas within this community, and gauge interest, to help decide if I should explore it more seriously.

It’s super early days - so everything feels possible at the moment - from a single day retreat (brief intervention), to a weekend, to perhaps a full five days together. I think each day would follow a similar structure, something like this:

• An opening circle where we check in together, sharing where we’re at

• Accountability: an opportunity to set intentions and declare goals

• Movement: yoga, running or swimming, depending on the needs and desires of the group

• Breakfast

• Morning writing session (3 hours)

• Lunch

• Walk and opportunity for reflection and sharing in pairs

• Afternoon writing session (2 hours)

• Closing circle evaluating the day

• Sauna

• Dinner

Initially, I would imagine this running with quite a small, intimate group - say three to five people - and could scale up down the line.

I’ve designed this rough structure to reflect how I like to work - a substantial amount of writing time each day - five hours - with option for that to be solo intensive work or more structured with writing exercises, depending on where you’re at in the process.

The movement, sharing, reflection and sauna is all built into the shape of the day because these are tools I’ve found radically improve my creative brain, and I’d love to share them. All of the phases would, of course, be opt-out-able if you’re not feeling it. It’s a structure, not a boot camp - though if you’re really stuck with a project, a boot camp may be just what you’re after!

In terms of location, my dream would be to run these in Margate eventually. I find it to be such an inspiring place to write, and sea swims and saunas are a really big part of my creative process. But in the first instance, I might run them elsewhere. A dear friend is currently piloting a retreat centre on a farm which is less than an hour out of London - spectacularly beautiful and super accessible - so it’s possible that would be an option.

I know in person retreats in the UK aren’t for everyone, so I’m also thinking of offering one to one creative coaching. These would be an hour, in person or online, and wouldn’t just be for writers, but for anyone who needs support with their creativity. So: actors, entrepreneurs, leaders, thought leaders, composers, professors. This is a formalisation of what I already do for a whole range of creatives. We could look at things like:

• Beginning an idea or launching a project

• Getting unstuck or navigating a challenging creative time

• Thinking through the stages of a project

• Getting something over the finish line

• Working with yourself with compassion

I’d offer these one to one sessions as one offs, or as part of a longer relationship: perhaps if you’re thinking of writing a book, launching a startup, or writing a play, we could co-create your own creativity programme. Accountability, compassion and connection, all in one regular session to give you the support you need through the project.

So - I’d love to hear from you! Is a retreat led by me something you’d like? How about creativity coaching? Reply to this email, or let me know in the comments, I’d be so curious to hear.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.

J

Dear friends,

Last week, I chickened out of sharing in this newsletter about my writing sprint. Why? Because it was going badly.

Generally, I’m much more inclined to talk about the good than the bad. And this isn’t totally toxic. I really believe in the power of celebrating publicly - thanks to my brilliant coach, Maisie Hill - and I much prefer, when I’m writing about culture here, to share about work I can easier give a rave review than a hatchet job.

But it feels more honest to share my crappy week last week because it’s what really happened. And I think it happening in the early weeks of my writing sprint - kind of week one, really - has helped me feel more confident and committed for the rest of the experiment.

I shared three weeks ago that often, when I’m working alone on a piece of writing, my inner critic gets LOUD. And I committed over this writing sprint to trying to work with my own brain as I would with an actor in rehearsal. If you missed it, check it out ⬇️

The J Mail

What I'd never say to an actor (but say to myself all the time)

Dear friends…

Read more

2 months ago · 9 likes · Jess Edwards

And, almost like my brain wanted to test my own theory to the hilt, what happened last week? My inner critic only went haywire. I thought it would be useful to share an overview of what happened, why I think it happened, and how I’ve pulled myself out of the well of deep despond this week - and I really have! This week has been So. Much. Better.

First: time optimism

This is something I really struggle with. I’m trying to cultivate in myself the feeling I can write anywhere, in any patch of time - some of my writer friends who are parents are really good at this, for obvious reasons - but I’m a long way away from that yet. One writer I know who is a parent has written seven plays in the last six years while also juggling a full time job and an outside-of-London commute. She told me for her, writing is a ‘lifestyle’ and I honestly can’t stop thinking about it. I hope to get there one day.

So - last week, I didn’t have a clear week, but I did have clear mornings. So far, so good. I had meetings every afternoon throughout the week - and they were meetings I was excited about. Meetings with serious theatres, and great people, who I wanted to work with.

And the trouble with meetings? They need prep time.

I had told myself I had mornings, but I didn’t really. And expecting myself to squeeze a full writing day into the morning, as well as prep for the meetings, was setting myself up to fail.

I went to my beloved London Library every morning. I was there for a good three hours. But the writing I produced? It wasn’t flowing. I found it hard to concentrate. I couldn’t shut down the extra-loud voice of the inner critic. So, I just ended up doing other work. And beating myself up for it in the process.

What might have worked better?

Taking inspiration from my friend the ‘lifestyle writer’ (put it on a t-shirt) if I’d given myself a tight hour each morning with no distractions, and modified my expectations accordingly, then given myself proper time to prep for the meetings, I probably - ironically - would have got more done. I definitely would have felt less shit about myself.

Second: taking care of the basics

Sleep, food, movement. Alone time, time with friends. Time to let your nervous system settle, and catch your breath. All the basics. These, I did not take care of last week!

I was all adrenalised from the meetings I had - a great feeling, but something like an addiction for me. I rushed, I pushed, I threw myself onto public transport and crammed in too many - really brilliant but too many - social engagements. I was so sick of listening to my inner critic while I was writing, I tuned out my internal landscape altogether.

My coach Maisie (she’s so good, did I mention?) has this brilliant phrase that she in turn has borrowed from another great coach, Maggie Reyes:

I love it. I think it’s the word ‘exquisite’ that is so compelling to me. Not ‘just enough’. Not ‘scraping by’. Exquisite. Delicious!

It’s important to say that what Maggie doesn’t mean by self-care is bubble baths and candles. These are both fine - great, even - but even better is managing your mind and taking care of your internal landscape.

And this is what I did not do last week. I didn’t eat in a way that nourished me. I skipped meals. I pushed myself into intense working out to try and shift things. I basically barrelled forwards as fast as I could and felt disappointed when that didn’t work. I totally deprived myself of recovery time after running a charity 10k on Sunday morning and ended up all out of sync.

What might have worked better?

Just taking a moment to stop and listen to my body. I weirdly find this easier when I’m in Margate. The slower pace lets me tune in and see what’s really there - not always a comfortable experience.

Third: environment

On the subject of Margate - I honestly feel like it’s the most perfect place in the UK right now (sorry Londoners) - the sea is deliciously cool and the sun is gorgeous. And look - I still love London, I find it an incredibly inspiring place - particularly the London Library, where I was working last week. But I found myself constantly distracted by rabbit holes - other possible research, plays to read that might have pulled me out of my funk, a deep dive into Jungian core principles.

What might have worked better?

I think not leaning into the shame of wanting to research more, and letting my brain go there instead of beating myself up - which is twice the effort. My inner critic was convincing me that I was ‘hiding’ in research (not totally untrue) but since I was finding it so difficult to write, it might have been better to just fill the trout pond a bit - put some more fish back into my creative landscape, rather than continuing to fish!

How about this week?

Truly, it feels like night and day. The week ain’t over, so it could all still go wrong, but these are the things I’m doing that are working:

• Daily sea swimming - even if it means I start a bit later. That full immersion in the water just makes everything feel more possible.

• Incredibly structured meals and proper breaks - things that I know are really nourishing and don’t give me a bad tummy; but are also delicious and fun.

• Rolling around on the floor with Pan.

• Letting the inner critic say their piece: writing it all down so the voice can get quiet.

• Sitting with the hard work: just because it’s hard, doesn’t mean it’s bad.

• Sleep. Proper, deep, no-alarm sleep.

I always internally groan when I realise how simple the things to get you back on track actually are: eat nourishing, sleep good, move your body, play. And then get to it - do the hard work. You’ll be surprised by how much resilience you can cultivate through gentleness. Even though I do this with actors all the time - take the gentle approach rather than the harsh approach - I’m always astonished when harshness doesn’t work on myself.

How do you deal with terrible creative periods? Any tricks that are certain to get you out of a funk? Let me know in the comments.

That’s it for this week. Don’t forget: I’m directing the reading of Happy Baby next Thursday at FormaHQ at 7.30pm - I’d love to see you there.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant,

J x

Dear friends,

I’m in my late 30s, and I don’t have children. And I’m not unusual in my wider friendship circles. I often wonder if this is partly to do with being queer - and the fact I wind up often sharing my time and my energy and my life with other queer people.

My friends who do have kids have almost all done so from within a heterosexual set-up. Actually - all but two: one is a donor for a heterosexual woman doing it alone (I celebrate this hard), and he is the baby’s godfather; and one queer couple who have just welcomed their first baby.

Many lesbian couples are expected to spend thousands on fertility treatment themselves before being granted access to IVF on the NHS - and even then, it can be something of a postcode lottery that determines the type of access they receive. The BBC shared an investigation on this back in 2023 - you can see it here.

I have a friend who likes to joke, “heterosexuals should not be trusted with conception”. Of course, she doesn’t mean it. And of course, for many heterosexual people the road to having children is extremely challenging, both physically and emotionally. I don’t denigrate that for one second. And yet, I find it striking, and painful, how unfair access to fertility treatment is for queer people.

For me, one important way to take action around this kind of inequality is to talk about it - here in this newsletter, with friends, in plays, with strangers. That’s what I want to do - start to open up the conversation, in the hopes that things will begin to change.

Now and then, people email me out of the blue to share their work. They don’t go through my agent, they often DM me on Instagram - and usually, nine times out of ten in fact, it turns out not to be a good fit. But sometimes, a cold approach really hits the spot - and that was the case with Happy Baby.

As a daily yoga practitioner, who uses yoga in my directing practice all the time, my first thought when I read the title was of the yoga pose. But Happy Baby is a play about an attempt to become a queer parent - and the cute imagery of the title belies the painful, knotty, wry and witty tone of the whole show.

Happy Baby is JJ Johnson’s first dramatic writing. I somewhat hesitate to call it a play, because it’s more unusual than that - it could be a play, it could be a film, it could be live art - and that’s why it feels so exciting to be involved at this early stage. JJ asked me to direct the first public reading of the work, as part of its launch into the world - initially, as a book.

It’s unusual in theatre for work to be published before it’s performed. But I think in this case, it’s a really important part of this story’s journey into the world.

Happy Baby follows Joe, a queer, non-binary person as they try to have a child. The show lives in a kind of heightened naturalism - it takes place in a queer London that is hilariously familiar to me. Think lidos and cycling and coffees and long delicious conversations with friends. But the piece also tracks the grim reality of the discrimination queer people face if they try to have children - especially if they have unconventional relationship structures, like Joe does.

Joe is in an open relationship with another AFAB person (in case you’re not familiar, this term means ‘assigned female at birth’). They want to work with a friend to donate sperm - and this friend is HIV positive. Joe is told that because the pair are not in a conventional heterosexual relationship, they aren’t able to work with sperm donated by someone with this HIV status - even though, if they were together, the clinic would ‘wash’ the sperm (even the terminology feels discriminatory). This was a story I’d never heard before, and it made me angry, and sad.

Prioritising hetero-patriarchal family systems - basically, two parents of different biological sexes and probably different genders, who are married - means we don’t get all kinds of alternative family systems that could be - and are - really powerful. A pair of friends co-parenting. A group of several couples who live next door to each other or share a home as well as childcare - these are set ups that are just as valid as something that looks more conventional within the patriarchy.

Happy Baby is art as activism in that it shines a light on the casual discriminations of today’s healthcare system, but balances this with warmth and truth and authenticity. You get a sense that everyone is doing the best they can with what they have. So while the story lives in tonal contrast with its punningly ironic title, it manages to remain both real and uplifting.

I think we need more stories about alternative family systems. About queer parenting - about sharing caregiving in different and new ways. If we don’t have conversations about this - and live performance helps start these conversations, as well as continue them with people who don’t know each other - then we stay, stuck.

That’s why I’m so glad to be a part of Happy Baby - that JJ thought of cold approaching me and trusted me with their work. The show has a cornucopia of characters - both queer and not so queer - and to bring it to life, we’re multi-rolling across just four performers: Daisy Bevan, Helen Pearson, EM Williams and Leo Wan. Part of the joy of JJ’s writing is how the stage directions engage in conversation with the reader - and we’ll include them in this first public sharing of the text.

If you’re free on 6th August, come along to the reading and hear for yourself. The reading and book launch is at 7.30pm at FormaHQ. More info, and tickets here.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant. I’ll see you next week.

J x

Dear friends,

If you read last week’s letter, you’ll have seen that I’m committing this summer to writing my Big Play - and in the process, trying to build a more compassionate writing practice for myself.

I thought about treating myself less like a punchbag, and more like the way I treat actors in rehearsal - with structure and clarity, but also compassion. On top of this, I want to treat myself like I treat my whippet, Pan - boundaries and firmness, but also loads of affection, understanding, the right amount of exercise at the right times and delicious food at mealtimes. (Though as an avowed vegetarian I would not want to eat what Pan eats, lol).

So - with all this in mind, here’s what my compassionate writing day looks like.

I’m also trying not to be too rigidly structured, so this is loose. Perhaps the most important part of it is not being ‘time optimistic’ with how much I can get done - allowing the writing to take longer or shorter without over-committing to other work, meetings or little tasks.

Morning - the writing starts before the writing starts

• Wake up without an alarm if I possibly can - a much gentler ease into the day. Now that I don’t drink alcohol I find waking up and going to sleep so much easier.

• Make a coffee and take it back to bed - already makes me feel like I’m on holiday.

• Invite Pan to come and snuggle in bed with me.

• Read something inspiring for 30-45 mins - right now I’m reading the brilliant new novel Ghost Eye by Amitav Ghosh.

• Move my body - mostly depending on where I am in my cycle - currently I’m really vibing with Zacharias’s power mandala yoga classes on Peloton. I know working out from home isn’t for everyone, but I love it - especially as I can’t afford a gym right now - and it means it always happens, and I feel better for it. Peloton is amazing value if you don’t have the bike - £12.99 a month for the best digital studio experience I’ve ever had! I’m not sponsored by them (lol) but if you’re curious here’s 60 days of the app for free. This is how I discovered it - someone referring on Substack - and I’m so glad I did.

• Walk with Pan - on the beach if I’m in Margate. Don’t take my phone. Look at the sea.

• Have a nourishing breakfast.

• In fact - the key to all this is my phone is not invited to the party until after I get back from walking Pan. Starting the first few hours of my day without my phone (I do Peloton on my laptop) makes so much difference to how I feel and how my energy begins the day.

The writing begins

• A good writing day starts with the morning routine unfolding in the way I like - but it can be quite flexible. If I wake up later, perhaps I’ll only do 10 mins of reading and a 5 min stretch. The more I get to know myself, the more I realise I’m much better - and my inner critic is much quieter - when I’m less rigid.

• Once I’m at my desk - which I like to be any time between 8am and 10am, depending on how the rest of the day is looking - I do 15 mins of morning pages by hand in my notebook. This is a version of the check in I do with actors in rehearsal. I ask myself where I’m at this morning personally and professionally - and then I do a little bit of CBT coaching at the end on anything that’s come up.

• This next shifts depending on where I am at in a writing process, but next I like to do some ‘noodling’ longhand in my notebook around whatever I’m working on. This usually looks like asking myself a question about the plot, or a character, and answering it. There’s something about the process of writing by hand that really unlocks things for me creatively. It slows my brain down while simultaneously not allowing my inner critic to take hold. Many of my best ideas come this way.

Taking a break

• I’m getting better at taking breaks - even when I’m on a roll! Finishing an idea then stopping in some flow isn’t the same as procrastination.

• After noodling - definitely a break for a coffee. I’m trying to encourage myself to stand up and walk around more as I think it really helps move the ideas. During the pandemic, I invested in a wooden contraption that elevates the laptop so your normal desk can become a standing desk. I’d all but forgotten about it - I bought it for digital facilitation - but I’ve re-introduced it and I’m LOVING it. I find I write best by hand sitting down but typing standing is so much more pleasant.

• Next, I like to do an iteration process moving from longhand to the laptop. This isn’t as simple as typing up my noodles - I’ll close the notebook and try to thrash out the same problem, but in a more structured way.

• Iteration is absolutely vital to my creative process. This is something I’m only just learning to apply to writing. When I’m directing, I iterate again and again. We create rough ‘drafts’ of scenes and then repeat them and repeat them in different ways, shaping and changing til we find the right thing. Because, historically, my inner critic has been so active when I write, I found myself shying away from iteration, just writing at top speed, as fast as I can, then kind of covering my eyes til it was done. Now, I still work fast, but I let things percolate and shift and change more. The pressure’s off. Not surprisingly, it makes for much better work - not to mention a more fun process.

On the subject of the inner critic

• A really powerful way I’ve found of working with my inner critic is - and bear with me - making sure they feel heard.

• It’s a bit like whack-a-mole - the more I tried to push my inner critic down, the more they would spring up and appear in an unexpected place.

• So, now, if they’re really going off on one, I set a timer for 15 mins and I say - OK, I know you’re doing your best here, and you want to keep me safe - I’m going to listen to all your ideas, all the things you have to say, and I’m going to write them down to deal with later.

• The inner critic feels heard - so they can relax. They get to be a passenger on the journey - but they don’t get to drive the bus.

• This method is astonishingly effective for me. The inner critic is just like all of us. If they feel heard, they are able to quieten down and relax.

The rest of the day

• A good writing day will be trying to put down a good three hours before lunch. Stopping for a proper break and having a nourishing meal is also key, for me. I might even run an errand or have another walk with Pan.

• Then, when I get back, I try and take the pressure off writing more. If I’m in the flow, then great - but if not, maybe I’ll watch something that is an inspiration for the project, read something, or cook a meal for later while turning over the idea in my mind.

• Some of my best ‘writing’ comes from this sideways time - and if I fill it with other meetings, reading for other projects, tasks, etc, I find myself robbed of this critical gestation time.

• Of course, sometimes other work creeps in - but I’m trying to be disciplined about that.

A thought on discipline

• I’m somewhat embarrassed to admit that the biggest obstacle for my writing right now is email. I am totally addicted to checking my emails. The moment I find myself butting up against a challenging problem or entering a bit of the project that’s difficult, I find myself switching into email.

• This is a disaster. Why? Because instead of sitting in the discomfort, staring out of the window for a moment, or even for 10 mins, and grappling with the problem, I’m breaking my concentration and my connection with the project - indeed, my connection with my own creative spark - and handing over my attention to email. Email! Boring, soulless admin, leeching my creativity away from me.

• Of course, this makes sense. My email is where opportunity lives - when an exciting new project comes through, that’s where it will land. It’s classic gambling addiction - when I push the button to refresh, will I have won the jackpot?

• But what really ends up happening is that my writing takes much, much longer - my concentration is shallower, it’s less satisfying, it’s less good and it’s far less fun.

• So, for this period, I’ve challenged myself with checking my email just once a day for 15 mins. Set a timer, no checking until the end of the day. And you know what? Already, my urges to check my email are down. My enjoyment of my writing has massively increased. And I feel sure the output is better.

• Breaking my email addiction will, I hope, be one of the best and longest lasting gifts I can give my writing practice. If you’re lucky enough to be able to have this relationship with email that you can control, I urge you to try it out. So worthwhile.

Ending the writing day

• So, right at the end, I’ll check my email for 15 mins and make sure nothing too urgent has come through.

• If I’ve finished something - especially a pitch, if it’s for TV - I’ll ping it over to my agents for their notes.

• I’ll figure out where I want my writing to start with the following day so I have a task to pick up with.

• Then, I’ll do a quick check out on paper - what went well, what didn’t go well, what would I do differently - before heading out for an evening walk with Pan.

While this is specific to writing, I’d love to hear if any of the tools and techniques resonate with other work - creative or non-creative - and if this is useful material. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.

J x

Dear friends,

I wanted to share a more vulnerable letter this week. Because sometimes we all feel soft, delicate, tender. And that is where I am at right now.

Regular readers of this letter will know that I combine my directing practice with writing. The truth is, it took me a long time to have the courage to write myself. For years, I hid myself in the safety of directing - there was something about it that was less vulnerable than sharing my actual true real thoughts through dialogue on the page.

Thanks to some amazing words of encouragement from a producer at the BBC, I felt I finally had the permission to write. And I loved it. Writing, especially when it’s alongside directing, feels to me like freedom. You have the great palace of your imagination. In the beginning phases, you’re not answerable to anyone but yourself. You can truly play.

And yet. Now, I’m facing a summer of working on a new play; a play I’ve been wrestling with for a while. It’s a Big Play. An ambitious play: spanning hundreds of years and more characters than I’ve ever held by myself before.

As I approach this writing sprint, I find myself shrinking away from it. There’s no other word for it: I am afraid. If I love this practice so much, if I’ve been craving the space to think and play and write by myself, after the intensity of the rehearsal room - why do I have this reaction?

Of course, I don’t have all the answers, but I’m fairly sure it comes down to this:

I feel almost ashamed to share this with you - especially since my directing practice is all about emotional safety, care and compassion - but here are some of the things I find myself telling myself when I’m writing:

• You’re going too slowly - this will never get done

• You might as well give up

• This idea is totally useless and pathetic

• This is never going to work

• How do you expect to get anything done if you’re thinking like this?

And more, much, much more which would be too boring to relay. Imagine if I spoke to actors in this way! There are totally directors who do - but I am not one of them. I know, from years of work, that this process just doesn’t work with actors - even if you might occasionally think it as a director. (Lol - just kidding! Especially if any actors I’ve ever worked with are reading this).

I’ve been turning this over in my mind and I think it’s for a few reasons - first, I’m newer to writing. I’ve had 15 years to hone my craft as a director - I’ve only been seriously writing for 5 years. It’s a big difference.

Second, when I’m writing I’m alone. I’ve changed my relationship with being alone, over many years, and now I love it - I used to find it very hard, even frightening - but now I recognise when I need it and create the time and space for it. It’s probably why - almost subconsciously - I’ve created the time and space for writing right after a big directing project - the energies feel complimentary. And yet - when I’m alone I find my inner critic has a much louder and more compelling voice. I wonder if this is true for everyone? Perhaps others find it harder in groups - but I find creating work in a small group where I am leading (lol, classic director) the most relaxed I feel anywhere.

Third, and I’ve touched on this already, I think writing just is more vulnerable. It’s putting yourself on the line in a very different way to directing. It’s a stake in the ground, a little piece of your soul: this is how I see the world, this is my inner truth, this is the most soft and vulnerable part of myself.

In this way, it’s rather like what we get actors to do - to put themselves on the line. This has got me thinking: if I would never speak to actors the way I speak to myself, if the process I’m going through is something akin to what I ask actors to do, why not treat myself as a writer more like how I take care of actors in the rehearsal room?

So, this is what I’m going to try over the next six weeks. Treating myself as a writer with the same care and compassion I do actors in the rehearsal room. And I hope (if this isn’t too grand a statement) that it will change my writing practice, forever. To become more sustainable, more playful, more fun and more productive.

Some of the traps I’m hoping to dismantle in the process:

• Overactive inner critic (see above)

• Procrastination - showing up every day for writing in good spirits

• Time optimism - beating myself up for not achieving what I set out to achieve, even if that is an impossible task

• Planning effectively - not getting stuck in over-planning, nor running blindly into a void

• Retaining a sense of play and fun so I don’t burn myself out - this is a speculative project, even though there are producers waiting on it, I’m investing my own time in it, it should be fun.

Come back next week, and I’ll share how I’m structuring my writing day through this lens. And I’d love to hear from you - have you struggled with this with solo creativity or work? Let me know in the comments.

If you liked what you read here, please do hit the little heart button - apparently, it helps people find my writing. Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.

J x

Dear friends,

As the run of my show, Are You Watching?, comes to a close at the Royal Court, I find myself reflecting on how important rituals are in theatre. Perhaps this isn’t surprising. Theatre (and theatre people) has a reputation for superstition. Some completely nonsensical, which I personally don’t subscribe to - like refusing to say use the word ‘Macbeth’ in a theatre because it’s considered bad luck, and instead calling it the Scottish play. (Brilliantly immortalised in this scene in Blackadder.) But some are much more sensible - for example, the tradition that it’s bad luck to whistle in a theatre is because the flymen - the people who’s role backstage was to operate the complicated system of ropes that fly pieces of set in and out of the high ceiling of the theatre - used to communicate using whistles. So, time was, whistling in a theatre unsuspectingly could land you with a piece of scenery flying out - or more dangerously, suddenly flying in.

But to me, superstition and ritual are very different things. Rituals helps us mark time. They help us acknowledge the hard work that has been put in, the journey we’ve been on, how far we’ve come. They can be very powerful - and can help us understand our growth.

Perhaps because of the superstition, and the adrenalised, high stakes, pretty public nature of what we do, rituals in theatre are quite important. Typically, there are a few that happen in almost every theatre I’ve worked in.

Meet and greet

This happens on the first day of rehearsals and involves every member of the team - not just the people who’ll be in rehearsal every day (actors, director, assistant director, stage managers), but all the heads of department (set and costume design, sound, lighting, production manager, etc) and many of the staff from the theatre.

When I am part of a meet and greet, even though it’s usually held and lead by a creative leader from the building, I make a request. I ask that we all do a check in together. This is quite a time investment - especially if you have 30 or 40 people across the visiting company and the building all standing in a big circle in the rehearsal room. But I’ve found it’s so worth it.

In my experience, shows tend to work best when a visiting company feels really part of the team - and when the building feels really invested in the show that’s taking place. As such, I consider us all to be one big company. Company is the name for all the people making a show - sometimes you’ll hear people refer to ‘a company of actors’, but it means everyone who is contributing to making the show happen. For me, that’s everyone from the box office assistant to the marketing officer to the head of finance. We’re all making the show together. And checking in together reflects this.

Also, when people participate in my check in, together we become more than just our names and roles. We become humans - with pets and loved ones and bicycles that we commute in on and recipes we like and anything else we may choose to share. The check in makes everyone human - and starting with a ritual of human connection transforms our collective connecting tissue to make the whole show. I start as a I mean to go on.

First preview

The first time you put a show in front of an audience is a really vulnerable moment. There’s no getting away from it. Even if you feel really well prepared, the script is in great shape, and there are no moments where you’re worried the wheels might fall off, it’s still nerve-wracking. What I say to my actors, as well as the wider company is: nerves are good, because they mean you care. Of course, you don’t want destructive anxiety, but the day I stop feeling the thrill of nerves before a first preview (or, indeed, the first day of rehearsals) will be a day I worry if this is still the right job for me.

I have a joke I make with the actors as we get closer to the first preview, that now we are “waiting for the last member of the company to arrive!” - which is, of course, the audience. It’s definitely silly, but I make this joke a lot because it has real value. The audience are a fundamental part of the piece of work - and during the preview period, they will tell us exactly what they think of it with their audible and visible reactions in the auditorium.

Often, after a first preview, a theatre will have drinks for the company as they come offstage - a beautiful recognition of the hard work that has got us all this far - and a celebration of that effort.

Press night

But the real celebration often comes on press night. Yes, it’s the night that the critics are permitted to see the show, usually at the end of the preview period, when the show is ‘locked’. During previews, the creative team and actors will typically still be making changes to a show: adjusting lighting, shifting sounds, perhaps even cutting whole scenes. The creative process is still very much unfolding. But by press night, all the changes have been made, like it or not, and we all agree the show is finished.

Press nights can be even more nerve-wracking than first preview. It’s scary, putting your work out there to be judged. I think critics play a very real and important role in helping audiences figure out what they want to see - and there are many critics I respect a great deal. But I am resolute in sharing with my company - especially my actors - that we do not make work for critics. And it’s part of my creative process to not read reviews until after the show is open. I’m going to be writing about this in more detail next week - once the show is over, and I’ve read the reviews!

As well as the critics coming in, press night is an equally important moment to celebrate with friends and family and acknowledge all the hard work that has gotten us this far. Cards are exchanged, and this is one of my favourite parts of the process: to privately commit in writing the things I appreciate and value in the person. It can be rather moving.

Closing night

Now, we’re approaching closing night at the Royal Court. For me, it’s just as important to mark and celebrate endings as it is beginnings. It’s something I’m less good at, as a naturally urgent person - and something I’m trying to get actively better at. There can be both grief and relief as a show closes. We’ve run Are You Watching? during a major heatwave and that has been hard for the actors. But coming together on the final night, sharing stories and reflections from the run, and appreciating one another one last time is an essential ritual for me, especially on this show which has been so important to me.

When you create a show with a company, it feels like you’re making a little family for a few months. A brilliant musical director I worked with years ago said that in our business, we’re creating and dissolving families all the time. It’s like little breakups, even tiny traumas when this work comes to an end. You make such close connections with people, often sharing deep intimacies, seeing them every day, before moving on to the next show. That’s why these rituals are so important: to acknowledge, to value, to appreciate, to connect.

I think we could do well to bring rituals elsewhere into our working lives. Do you have any rituals, way markers or celebrations you like to do? I’d love to hear. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant,

J x

Dear friends,

If you’re in the UK or Europe - especially London - I hope you’re staying cool in the heatwave. London isn’t really set up for this kind of heat and it can be brutal. I used to be really bad in high temperatures, but I’m better these days. What changed it, I am convinced, was doing my yoga teacher training back in 2017 in India. It was 35 degrees throughout, there was no AC, and we were doing 4-6 hours of yoga per day. Suffice to say, the beginning was very uncomfortable - but by the end, my body felt like it could take on temperature differently. So, while I’ve been HOT like everyone else this week - and somewhat grumpy that work commitments have meant I haven’t been able to escape to breezy, balmy Margate - I haven’t been excruciated like I would have pre-2017 in London heat like this.

I also think these days I’m (slightly) better at slowing down. And that’s the thing about the heat. It really encourages you to go slowly. It got me thinking about how important it is to live at different speeds - to not expect yourself to be going at full tilt every single day, every single season of the year.

I’ve just had a period of intense activity, of speed, in opening my show at the Royal Court. After press night, I took myself away for a weekend to stay with my friend Claudia who is renovating a farm that belonged to her grandparents. It’s about 45 minutes from London and the site is perfect: rolling fields, huge weeping willows, wild daisies scattering the sides of the tracks.

Claudia is a psychotherapist, a former yoga teacher, and a very wise person in the realms of the mind and the body, and how the two connect. Whenever we see each other, we have a great deal to talk about - she’s a fascinating and brilliant person. At the farm, she’s exploring re-wilding and permaculture, and how this engaged, long term experience with nature grounds and stills us therapeutically. When she invited me to the farm, I knew it would be exactly the right gear-shift once my show opened. I jumped at the chance.

Claudia has a way of curating space which is hugely intentional, and calming. Our taste runs quite different - I am a maximalist, a real lover of pattern and colour and vibrancy, where she favours more neutral tones and natural fabrics and textures: wood, stone, linen, rattan. I find her spaces deeply relaxing because they are so simple, clean, clear and decided. As soon as I stepped into the space, I felt my brain move to a slower gear.

I’ve written before here about how much my dog, Pan, allows me to move at a slower pace. And bringing her to the farm to hang out with Claudia’s dog Olive was a delight. It was also the first time Pan had ever encountered pigs! Claudia’s three pigs (pictured, above, almost posing like movie stars) are still quite little - just three months old - and meeting them was completely gorgeous. Vocal, bold and incredibly sweet, I was taken aback by how much they are like dogs. They literally run towards you, wagging their tails, and they love nothing more than having their bellies rubbed. One of them lay on her back, trotters in the air, accepting rubs on her belly from me for probably 20 minutes, emitting little oinks of pleasure. Both of us were in heaven.

Feeding the pigs, walking the dogs, watching the blue tits flitting in and out of the willow trees snatching the live meal worm Claudia had put out for them - all of this was a real speed antidote for the fast-pace, high stakes technical rehearsal and preview period I’d just been through. It was an essential grounding, coming down from the high pitch of work I’d been at - and honestly, I’d like to try and do something similar after every show I make.

Often, I create a seasonal goal for myself. And I think my summer goal, now that we’re past the solstice, might be to stop rushing. To take my time. Things like allowing double the amount of time I think to do a task, or to travel to a place - so I can take a surprising route, or walk most of the way. Stopping trying to fit three things into one evening (as I did last night). Building in decompression time either side of a task - especially if it’s writing, or creatively demanding. Making time to swim every day when I’m in Margate. Rolling around on the floor with Pan as often as I can. Things that can be savoured.

I feel really uncomfortable when I think about slowing down. I reckon it’s something to do with being a lifelong freelancer: being in charge of my own time means I need to push push push push. I have this buried core belief that if I slow down at all, I’ll somehow run out of ambition and end up sluggish, lazy, totally unproductive. As I’ve started to introduce some of these elements of slowing down, I’ve felt almost existentially challenged: if I go more slowly, will I even be me? As though, if I am less productive, I’ll have less worth, less moral value. Of course, I know this isn’t true. But these are old patterns, and they might take time to untangle.

What do you do slow down? I’d love to hear. Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant. I’ll see you next week.

J x

Dear friends,

Tomorrow, I’m heading to Northern School of Contemporary Dance to spend a day workshopping with their graduate students. These dancers are exploring directing as part of their training, and I can’t wait to share my manifesto with them for what it means to be a great director.

I love working with MA students. I think it’s one of the most exciting times to intervene in an artist’s career. A person who has already demonstrated commitment and depth - as well as having some life experience and wider understanding of the world to bring to their practice. You can, of course, do an MA at any age. I’ve worked with MA students between the ages of 22 and 67 - and had deeply fulfilling experiences with many of them. From time to time, I lecture on the MA in Creative Writing at Oxford University, as well as working with the MA musical theatre students at LAMDA to explore discomfort. Last year, I directed the MA musical theatre graduating show at Central School of Speech and Drama - and our production of Carrie was as brutal and dark and brilliant as anything I’ve directed lately.

In my experience, MA students have the magic trifecta: knowledge, enthusiasm and skill. They have enough knowledge to make great work but also to be so aware of what they still don’t know. They’re open and available to what you have to say - but they’re also bound to teach you loads as well. They have deep, profound enthusiasm for their craft - born of a real commitment to following it that comes with the significant investment (of time, of money, of hope) that comes with an MA. And they are honing their skills in such a way that they are bound to surprise you. They are still learning the rules, they are still assembling their toolkit - so, their contributions to a workshop or a rehearsal room are often unusual. I love working with them.

I hope this hasn’t happened to me, but as a director, I fear becoming stuck in my ways: so dedicated to my process, which I massively believe in, that I forget to stay open minded to the new. Directors are unique in theatre in that we don’t get to see inside other people’s rehearsal rooms - unlike any of our other creative colleagues, from stage management to designers to actors. When I was an assistant director - and I was hopeless, because I always wanted to be In Charge, that role drove me crazy - the one huge benefit was being allowed to see how other people’s processes worked, how they constructed a room and put a show together.

So, this is my manifesto for why everyone’s practice should contain some teaching. Even - or especially - if you’re at the top of your game. Artists who are entrenched in learning will startle you out of your well-worn ways, demand something different of you, make you see the work anew. And compel you into real discernment about your process, helping you be really intentional. With this in mind, here’s what my workshop with the MA students at Northern Contemporary School of Dance is likely to contain. And I say likely because - though I prep very thoroughly, I almost never plan to within an inch of my life. Because I like to be flexible to what shows up in the room.

Check in

This is a vital part of my rehearsal process, and I’ve written about it here before. But in case you missed it, here’s a recap.

Everyone in the room is invited to speak for as long (within reason) or as short as they like about where they’re at, personally and professionally. We go around the room ‘popcorn style’, which means anyone who is called to speak may speak - not round in a circle. When someone else is speaking, we don’t respond, we just listen with our full attention. If someone taps into a deep emotion, for example, if they cry, we don’t try to change that emotion, for example by comforting them, we just give them the gift of our full attention until they are ready to stop speaking. The check in space is opened and closed like a ritual: what happens in the check in, stays in the check in.

The magic of this process is that it allows everyone in the group to tell the others anything they might need to know - about health, mental or physical, or mood, or demeanour, without it needing to turn into a big conversation. It also has the benefit of creating what brilliant facilitation teacher Nancy Kline calls a ‘thinking environment’. She reasons, if everyone in a group gets the chance to speak before the group begins its work, the quality of thinking across the whole group will be higher.

The DNA Game

I won’t put you through the fresh hell of me giving a blow by blow description of a physical game BUT, in brief, this game is a super simple way of getting the whole group messing about, being silly, feeling OK to shout and move in front of each other, as well as understand the dynamics of a scene.

It involves speaking each other’s names (which I playfully call the ‘text’ of the scene); throwing tennis balls in a very specific order (the ‘intention’ of the scene, or its energy); and moving around the space (the ‘blocking’ or movement of the scene). It’s a simple way of literalising the metaphor of directing, and what’s happening in any one scene. I play with everyone from brand new actors to seasoned professionals with years under their belt, because it gets the brain working so effectively AND helps create a solid ensemble very swiftly.

Thinking like a director

Now we’ve moved our bodies, we can head to group discussion. I find everyone thinks so much better once they’ve moved, myself included. Why should we only warm up for physical work - a warm up for cerebral or intellectual work is just as crucial.

I’ll facilitate a discussion across the group: what are the skills and qualities a director needs? What are the responsibilities of a director in the rehearsal room? What challenges might we face as directors? What most excites us about directing?

Close textual analysis

This is where I’ll teach some skills. My directing toolkit, outside of using the nervous system, is largely based on actioning and uniting - an approach created by the brilliant Russian acting teacher Konstantin Stanislavski in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Initially, we’ll get on our feet again and play a simple game of word association - but with actions. Very simply, actions are transitive verbs - something you can do to someone. Acting is always more interesting, in my opinion, when it is active - when there is something you are trying to do to someone. It’s easy to test whether something is an action or not based on if it fits in the sentence “I want to… you”. So, flirt is not an action because you can’t say “I want to flirt you”, but charm is: “I want to charm you”. To get us thinking in terms of actions, we’ll chuck the ball around and say “I want to ____ you”, with each action growing out of the previous one.

A big reason I’m a director is that I love words. And actions, for me, represent the perfect shorthand communication between actor and director, making sure we are all making the same version of the scene, and by extension, the same show. Actors in my work will often tire of me saying, again and again, “what are you playing on this line?” as we zero in on exactly the right action for that moment in the piece.

So, we’ll explore actions and units on a specific scene and chat through how to use this tool in rehearsal.

Hopes & Fears

Finally, we’ll end the workshop with another game. I love this one and often play it one day 1 of rehearsals. It’s really simple: two chairs, everyone stands around them. One chair is for ‘hopes’, one chair is for ‘fears’. Anyone in the room can jump in, and declare their hopes or fears for a particular project. So, if it was the beginning of rehearsal, you might say ‘I hope that we make a great show’, or ‘I fear that no one will come to see it and I will fall over in the first preview’.

The sillier (to begin with), the better - and if anyone in the room shares the hope or fear, they can say after you ‘I hope that too’. It’s a really powerful way of getting all the hopes/fears out into the room, and you keep going until there is nothing left. This group are about to embark on a research project - a perfect time to get their hopes and fears out of the body and into the space.

Why I’ve structured it this way

I might finish the session with a short one or two word check out - before thanking everyone and appreciating everyone for being part of the session. Warm, genuine appreciation is so important to me as a working practice, and I’ll always take the time to do it in this way.

I’ve structured it like this so there is a subtle unfolding of speak - move - think in a repeating cycle throughout the session. I find this gets the best out of people and allows them to be in their bodies and their brains. And even if you don’t want to be a director, thinking like a director is valuable to anyone who wants to lead a creative room, in any environment.

Anything from here resonate? If so, I’d love to know. Let me know in the comments. And if you have teaching as part of your creative practice, I’d love to know how it influences you.

I’ll see you next week. Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant,

J x

Dear friends,

I’ve been a little quiet on here the last month because I’ve been deep in rehearsals for Are You Watching? at the Royal Court Theatre. Now, we’re open, and I’m welcoming a bit more spaciousness back into my life. I’d like to take the time to reflect on the process here, and share some of it with you.

The Royal Court has been a very important theatre to me, as I’ve grown into my taste, my style, the way I think as a director. From the powerful, incisive politics of Laura Wade’s Posh to the deeply moving loneliness of Alistair McDowell’s X, the Royal Court’s shows have helped to shape me - not just as an artist, but as a person.

I hope it’s not too grand to say that I think theatre at its best constitutes a process of psychological healing. There’s a reason why the ancient Greeks put a theatre and a hospital together at Epidaurus. When we go to the theatre and witness horrific things taking place, we rehearse what it might feel like to experience these things in real life. We practise the processing, so that we might better be prepared for what life throws at us. We perform this act of imaginative self-examination in order to be better at being human.

Are You Watching? is a remorseless, funny, acerbic play about sexual violence and the internet. I consider myself - Substack notwithstanding - to be a pretty chronically offline person. I am intensely boundaried with my phone - it’s not welcome in my bedroom or the rooms where I sleep when I’m away. I use Opal and Freedom and avoid looking at it late at night and in the morning. When I’m walking with Pan, as much as I can I leave it at home.

No matter how much we are personally offline, though, internet culture shapes our reality. Our politics, our relationship with gender, how we treat each other. Are You Watching? is, I hope, horrible and at times shocking. I think that’s the kind of art we need for these times. And I think audiences are ready to feel uncomfortable again. Because we’re all part of it.

A really key aspect of my process as a director is compassion and care. This began because I found myself making a lot of autofiction - I needed to create emotional safety in the room because the writer or artists were dealing with their own lived experience, sometimes their own trauma.

Are You Watching? is not a piece of autofiction, but it does involve major pieces of news. It calls into the room our public reality, as a collective (the news and our relationship with it); our private reality (the things which might have happened to us in our lives); and the bodies in the space (both actors and audience). This triangulation was something I was constantly thinking about in rehearsals - how to protect all three, so that we could take the greatest and boldest creative risk.

Levity, playfulness and fun are always a part of my rehearsal processes. Sometimes I think I don’t give notes, I tease people so that they can hear my point of view. (Teasing, but always with compassion, I hope). I find it almost impossible to work with people with whom I don’t share a sense of humour. I have to laugh in the making of the work. And with Are You Watching?, this was even more profoundly true. We were only able to take on the real, unavoidable darkness in the piece through laughter, compassion and connection.

The show is sold out. The Royal Court does a brilliant thing of holding back Monday night tickets at £15 each and releasing them at 9am every Monday - so if you do want to see the show, this is one way of doing it. There’s also a waiting list. In my opinion, it’s worth the wait.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant,

J x

For the first time here, sharing a recipe after popular demand for it from my birthday newsletter!

I love to cook. I am very much an amateur and I kind of like it that way. I cook the things I enjoy - I experiment with flavours and recipes and I make a lot of mistakes. I absolutely love hosting - and to me, gathering a group of friends around the table in my home and cooking for them is how I express love. I wish I could bake you these brownies and we could share them over coffee today (Sunday) but I’ll do the next best thing and share the recipe.

When I’m in rehearsal I find it even more imperative to have good, healthy, nourishing snacks to keep me going. As anyone who works in London knows, in this economy it’s so easy to waste your entire fee (or salary) on an uninspiring series of meals, coffees and snacks from Pret (etc) which can end up costing you £30 a day if you’re not careful. When I’m in rehearsal, I love to batch cook every Sunday and slowly make enough food to last the whole week - both lunches and dinners.

Right now, I’m making a show at the Royal Court and when I have Pan with me (my whippet), we end up being close to 12 hours out of the house every day. I love to take the opportunity to walk her somewhere new - this time, Green Park, which is a park I’d never really spent time in and have come to really enjoy over the last fortnight - extremely nice trees, a lovely zig-zaggy route you can take, nice lush grass. But it means there isn’t really time to cook properly if you’re out 8am-8pm. And, as the content of the show is pretty heavy, I’m doing all I can to make my life easy and nourishing and fun around that.

So! Here is the brownie recipe I swear by. I love it because it’s basically all nuts and seeds - there is a little bit of sugar, but nowhere near the cloying sweetness of a bought brownie - and it’s properly filling with all the nuts and seeds in there. Perfect with a cup of coffee. I’m sorry, vegans, it does have two eggs - but I think it could easily be adapted with more tahini and perhaps rice syrup or maple if you wanted to make it vegan. I like to be fairly free and easy with the nuts so you can use what you like or what you have in the cupboard. Sadly, no pic of the brownies because I am terrible at taking pictures of food, and didn’t want to put you off. Let’s get into it.

Ingredients

350g tub tahini
1 tablespoon peanut butter (miss this out if you don’t like it)
1 teaspoon of bicarbonate of soda
1 teaspoon of vanilla essence
4 tablespoons of cocoa powder
2 eggs
2 tablespoons milled flax and almond - or other milled nuts of your choosing!
1 large tablespoon barley malt extract - or large teaspoon of miso paste
5 tablespoons of coconut sugar - or soft brown sugar if you have it, or indeed rice or maple syrup (this is a flexible recipe what can I say)
1 handful walnuts or other nut or indeed mixed nuts of your choosing
1 handful seeds

Method

• Pre heat the oven to 180 degrees

• Mix all the ingredients together in a big bowl - if you’re using miso make sure it doesn’t all clump in one place as it is wont to do

• It will be quite thick and that’s OK

• Line a small-medium baking tray with baking parchment

• Press the thick mix into the baking tray and make sure it’s evenly spread

• Bake for 10 mins then check it

• It will be soft and gooey after 10 mins

• Bake for longer if you prefer a more firm texture

• But be warned - longer than 20 mins gets a bit dry

Then, I wait for them to cool before slicing them into small squares - this makes 20-25 squares - and then I put them in a Tupperware in the freezer. They freeze really well. Each morning, I put two squares in my little snack tin and have them with my morning coffee at 11.30am-ish, or whenever our tea break is in rehearsal. And honestly? Heaven.

Bonus points: I am evangelical about my snack tin. It is a lovely, metal and plastic sort of swizzle top with rounded edges. I’ll include a pic here. It’s old - the person who sold it to me said it is World War 2 military issue - who knows if this is true - but what I know to be true is that it brings me pleasure every single time I use it.

I think having ‘the perfect thing’, as regards everyday practical objects makes a real difference to my moment to moment sense of happiness. I searched long and hard for the aforementioned perfect snack tin, the perfect lunchbox, the perfect coffee flask, etc. I never know if this kind of thing is interesting to anyone other than myself but if you’re curious about my take on the perfect thing I’ll gladly write a whole newsletter about it (lol). Let me know in the comments.

On the subject of food - I love Lydia Pang’s dry, acerbic style on her Instagram so I pre-ordered her food book / memoir, Eat Bitter, a while ago. Drawing on her Hakka Chinese heritage, I thought the book looked funny and fascinating and I was not disappointed when it arrive on Wednesday. I’ve already devoured the first few chapters. Hard recommend.

The Hakka Chinese proverb ‘eat bitter’, meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness’, hugely chimes with me as it feels close to my own feelings on sitting with discomfort in order to grow. I can’t wait to read more - and I’m going to try some of the recipes!

Entering week 3 of rehearsals for Are You Watching? and I’ll give you a full update on rehearsals in next week’s letter. In the meantime - do let me know if you make the brownies, and if you have a twist on them of your own! I especially wonder if they might be delicious with dates or other dried fruit in. Might try that myself today.

Thank you so much for being here and reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant.
J x

Each year, I like to share the things that feel important, right at this moment. Some playful, some profound, all came to me this morning. Here we go…

1. Reading is always a good idea - especially in the morning.

2. In fact, starting the day with a coffee that you take back to bed with a good book will make every day feel like you’re on holiday.

3. Read widely, read voraciously: read what calls to you, not what people say you should read. Old and new, fiction and non, trashy and serious.

4. If you love a book, once you’ve finished reading it, immediately press it into a friend’s hands. It’s such an act of love.

5. Writing always helps to figure things out - writing by hand even better.

6. Put some writing near the beginning of each day.

7. When you feel unmoored, hanging out with a dog (especially Pan) always helps.

8. In fact, Pan is my greatest teacher: she’s interested in the things that matter and she constantly lives in the present.

9. If you feel grumpy, you almost certainly need something to eat. Especially if it’s between 6 and 8pm.

10. Put time and care into your space, whatever it looks like.

11. Arrange the books, curate the artwork - even if it is postcards in frames from Ikea (in fact, some of the best gallery walls are this).

12. Make your space somewhere that gives you inspiration and delight and you’ll feel these things more almost without even noticing it.

13. Search for wonder in the quotidian. The blossom on your ordinary walk to the tube, the overgrown grass in someone’s garden that whispers in the breeze, the woodpecker in the park making that amazing sound.

14. Ask as many open questions as you can.

15. Listen. Really listen. Don’t just want for your turn to speak.

16. Open yourself up to be surprised at any opportunity.

17. Find delight in what you’re wearing.

18. Give yourself space to practice desire: wanting, dreaming.

19. Cooking is always a good idea.

20. … And so is following recipes! It’s taken me a long time to realise this and now I love a recipe. It’s really broadened my repertoire.

21. Find a snack you really love and learn how to make it. For me, it’s these tahini brownies (happy to share the recipe - if you’re interested, drop me a comment). They are delicious and easy to make and actually super healthy because they are mainly seeds and nuts and I eat them every day.

22. Make the small items you use every day the most beautiful and satisfying versions of themselves - I have a little snack tine for aforementioned brownies which brings me pleasure every time I use it.

23. And similarly, give away or sell the things that don’t work for you. The itchy fabrics, the bottle with the unsettling texture, the shoes that are too small. Dispense with unnecessary discomfort.

24. When you have small pleasures - savour them. I feel this way about coffee every. Single. Day.

25. Examine your habits and ask yourself if you want to change them.

26. Be curious about why you do the things you do.

27. Try sobriety for 100 days and see what happens.

28. And, indeed - sobriety is a superpower. You have so much more time, you get so much more done, your emotions make so much more sense.

29. Move your body every day.

30. Don’t let your phone sleep in your room - or even come into your room, if you can. This has been the single most effective wellness intervention I have ever done, honestly.

31. When you go on dog walks, leave your phone if you possibly can - for me, this is quality time for me and Pan and the phone interrupts that.

32. Take time to gaze at your loved ones (and Pan) and take in every aspect of them.

33. Experiment with style, with clothes, with scent. See what it does to the way you hold yourself.

34. It’s not a holiday unless you’ve plunged yourself into cold water.

35. If it can’t be a yes, make it a quick no.

36. The greatest gift to those around you is balancing clarity and compassion. Don’t tell people what you think they want to hear - you can never really know.

37. Always let your curiosity get the better of you.

Thanks for being here, and supporting the J Mail. It’s become such a wonderful space for me to share and reflect. I appreciate every single one of you. You’re brilliant.

J x

Dear friends,

I write to you this week from my flat Margate. I haven’t had a chance to be here very much lately - I’ve been doing quite a lot of collaborative work which has meant being in London. I find the city extremely inspiring - and I love being there, but it’s been really wonderful to use this time in Margate as a chance to retreat.

I go into rehearsals at the Royal Court for my next play at the end of April, so before then I’m working on some notes for a writing project and doing my preparation for rehearsals. It got me thinking about how to curate this spacious time, and make sure it feels really powerful. So, I’ve decided to think of it a little more formally - a Retreat with a capital R rather than just some time out of the city.

I’ve always wanted to go on a proper retreat. I’ve done it only once - as part of my previous life during the pandemic working with a health and wellness tech startup - and we went to the most remarkable place - Cabilla in Cornwall, on the edge of Bodmin Moor. It was three days of mindfulness practices, co-led by the group, in some of the most breathtaking nature I’ve ever experienced. The ancient temperate rainforest which comprised a large part of the site had a profound impact on me - so much so that my next play is partly inspired by the experience I had in this extraordinary landscape.

But retreats are expensive. This one was a perk of the job I was doing - and I’ve not been able to justify the expense before or since. And yet, I think the concept of ‘retreating’ can be incorporated into your every day life, as a regular practice. Here’s how I’m conceiving of the ten days I have here in Margate:

Keep meetings to a minimum

Knowing I had some deep work to get done, I tried to group all my meetings into one afternoon. The rest of the time, I wanted to keep (relatively) sacred for dreaming and thinking and creating.

Don’t try to fit too much in

I have terrible trouble with time optimism - I always think I can get more done than is actually possible in the time I have. I ended up taking a whole project off the list for this week - effectively doubling the time I had for another. It was such a relief - an increase in the spaciousness.

Try working in a different rhythm

I’d set aside a whole day to get a piece of work done, and I experimented with working on it in the morning, before doing anything else, in bed. I know, I know, you’re not meant to work in bed - it’s terrible for your back, etc, etc, but sometimes I like to make like Marcel Proust for a few hours and write in bed. I noticed it helped me drop right into focus without the noise of the rest of the day getting in the way.

Take ideas for a walk

As a freelancer, I have a terrible tendency to regard any time spent not at my desk or in the rehearsal room as non-work time. And yet, I have so many of my best ideas when I’m moving my body, out walking or running with my whippet, Pan. So during this retreat, I’m consciously scheduling walking/thinking time as part of the creative process. Too often, I expect the process to happen super quickly, so taking ideas for a walk feels like an indulgence. I’m planning a long walk, all the way to Broadstairs, without my phone but with my notebook, just to think about the play and see what surprises me.

Give yourself the same gifts you give others

When I’m directing, I incorporate movement into every day. And to be honest, I’m pretty good at prioritising exercise in my everyday life because I find it makes me so much more level headed and better able to show up in every aspect of my life. But I definitely file exercise in the ‘play’ area of my life, not the ‘work’ area. But much as I fold it into rehearsal, I want exercise to feel like part of my retreat here in Margate. So rather than rushing it, squeezing it into half an hour, I’m going to let it be a longer, more luxuriant part of the day - an hour or 45 minutes.

Sauna

Everyone who knows me well knows how passionate I am about sauna. One of my proudest achievements was helping to build my own sauna on my roof terrace in Margate. When I’m here I use it a lot - but like exercise it isn’t part of the work day. This time, I’m going to try ‘taking ideas for a sauna’, much as I would for a walk. Maybe there’ll be inspiration there, who knows?

Cooking as meditation

I love to cook, and when I’m busy with work it’s a brilliant reset of my brain - especially if lots of chopping is involved. I think it’s something to do with the regular, repetitive movement. But often I squish it into a small window of time. On retreat, I’m going to make more spaciousness around cooking and eating - let it be part of the creative process too.

Sleep and rest

Perhaps the most important thing - giving myself a full night’s rest, maintaining boundaries with my phone (it’s not allowed in my bedroom) and starting the day gently with reading and coffee. This is definitely a ‘daily retreat practice’ for me, even when I’m crazy busy or in rehearsal. And since I stopped drinking, it’s been even more rewarding. It’s kind of unglamorous but sleep and no phone really does make all the difference.

A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting to my dear friend, psychotherapist Claudia Smith about a new offering she is putting together: a self-directed, solo retreat at a beautiful location near London. It made me think about these qualities of retreating, and when we can create them for ourselves.

In summary, here are my ingredients for the perfect solo retreat:

• Thinking time

• Moving your body - yoga, running, swimming in the sea

• Sauna

• Deep rest

• Time without a phone - as much as possible

• Long walks to explore an idea

• Nourishing food you prepare yourself, if that inspires you

• Reading inspiring material in hard copy

• Spaciousness: not too many meetings or plans

Have you ever found yourself retreating? What are the best ingredients for you? What might a tiny retreat look like in your everyday life? If any of this resonated, hit the little heart to ‘like’ or leave a comment.

Til next week - thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant,
J 💚

I’m so delighted to finally be able to share with you my next show. I’m directing Are You Watching? at the Royal Court Theatre, opening in May this year. The play is by the brilliant Georgie Dettmer, and I couldn’t be more excited to be working on it.

The play handles some really dark material. Essentially, it asks us to examine our cultural responses to events of horror. I’ll let you come and see the play to know more, but it is an unflinching and shocking piece of work - a mosaic play, presenting several different narrative strands and allowing the audience to make their own connections between them. The show asks us to reflect on our own relationship with witnessing, what it means to invest our attention in something, and how much a part of something we are, if we are watching.

It’s something of a dream come true for me, to work at the Royal Court. In this building, I’ve had some of my most formative artistic experiences. From the iconoclasm and shocking politics of Posh by Laura Wade, which I saw with my mum on my 21st birthday while I was a student at Oxford; to Polly Stenham’s No Quarter in the Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, where our play will be.

Are You Watching? feels like a very Royal Court play. When I first read it, it completely seemed in the great heritage of plays here in this building which refuse to shy away from the worst parts of human nature. Edward Bond’s Saved, back in 1965; Sarah Kane’s Blasted, in the very same auditorium where our show will be. These were plays I read as a young person which transformed my understanding of what theatre can do. That storytelling that involves the body is some of the most powerful, compelling and terrifying we can do. To be a link in the chain of these artists telling stories that are so confronting is an incredible feeling.

I’ll write more, here, about the process of making the show - and how to include care, compassion and emotional safety when working with such charged material. I won’t give spoilers so if you’re planning to see the show, these letters should only enhance your experience of it, rather than giving anything away. I feel so proud to be working with such an amazing team of actors - announced yesterday in the press - and my incredible creative team: Georgia Wilmot designing, Xana sound designing, Beth Gupwell lighting designing.

Thanks for reading - and hope to see you in the audience.

You’re brilliant.
J x

You find me in the midst of a number of projects, all at development stages. One which will definitely come out this year which I am not allowed to talk about publicly yet, but which I can’t wait to share with you soon. Announcement coming next week…

But in the meantime, I carved out a week to do a sprint on something I’ve been working on for ages.

And ages.

And ages.

It is a Big Play. I didn’t think I’d write another play so soon after my debut was on in December, but I found that the Big Play wouldn’t leave me alone. It’s an idea I’ve had a for a while which I tried as hard as I could to squish into a small play, but it wouldn’t go. It seems to demand to be the whole eight characters, two halves, 150+ year timescale. And taking on some ridiculously big personal and political stuff.

I did a lot of research for the Big Play over the last 18 months. I was lucky enough to get a Peggy Ramsay award to start it, and my beloved London Library turned out to be the perfect place to do the research. I’ve probably read 30+ books in service of the research for the Big Play. Science and nationhood and history and politics.

And after all this research, I hadn’t actually written a useable word. I’d written several versions of the first 30 pages, none of which I was happy with. I’d beaten out several versions in post-its on the wall, all of which made no sense to me when I came back to them.

So finally, I had no choice but to accept - I just had to f*cking write it.

I think it’s the least fashionable, and hardest to hear, advice for any creative person that at some point you just have to sit down and get it done. And most importantly:

Be prepared to accept it will probably be quite crap the first time around

And that is OK!

So, last week, I went every day to the London Library with the goal of just writing the thing in a week. And being OK with this first draft being a big mess, and full of contradictions, but hoping I would come out with at least some pages I didn’t hate, a better knowledge and understanding of the characters and a renewed enthusiasm to keep going with the project.

And you know what? It worked. I ended up with 80 pages and greater clarity and a feeling of having properly begun - more value in a week than I ever could have expected. Of course, the 18 months before and the research and thinking and noodling I had done all went into the mulch which helped to fertilise the idea, but at the end of the day that was nothing without just writing it.

Just writing it.

One of the things I tried out, which I haven’t tried before, is something I’d actually recommend. I wanted to share this very rudimentary process here in case it’s useful - as a way to trick your brain around something creative it’s procrastinating.

1. Write the pitch for the thing as if you’re telling a great piece of gossip to a good friend.

This is something I like to do with almost every project because it helps me feel like the thing is real. I then often share the thing with a few trusted people - even potential partners like producers and theatres. Some writers I’m sure would hate this. For me, it helps build the momentum of the thing in the real world, not just in my head, and allows me to include others on the creative process, which I love. I’m having a meeting with one of the people I shared the pitch with this week.

2. Write a list of the interesting things you’d like to see happen.

For me, this became a rudimentary scene list. I knew not all of them would make it into the play - though I originally called this a ‘set pieces’ list - it was in a completely random order and was just all the stuff I’d be curious about that I thought could happen in the story.

3. Each morning, show up at your desk.

Sorry but this is crucial. For me, there was building work going on in my London home so I had to get to the Library. For a week, it felt great.

4. Pick the scenes from the list that call to you, and Just Write Those.

This turned out to be a really useful process. I didn’t worry about chronology, or sense, or flow of scenes, or whether I conveyed information once or twice or not at all - I just wrote the scenes I fancied each morning. I thought this would leave me with the horrible hard ones at the end of the week, but in fact because I gained things like momentum and understanding and confidence through the week, I ended up writing some of my favourite material on the last day.

5. Print it out with a proper title page.

At last, I bunged the scenes in a simple order and printed the whole thing out. And god, it felt like A Play! I was so surprised by the value of doing this simple, practical step at the end of the week. It really felt like the work had created something. It will also make it easier to conceptualise / move around in this form, I think.

I confess, I had been planning to do another spurt of work on it this week and next, to get it into a really good state by 13th April - but I’m not going to manage this, and that’s OK. I had some other work commitments that couldn’t be avoided (and were great fun) developing two other projects, and then I was struck down with another bout of sinusitis. So, I’m going to keep going with it but at a slightly slower pace than I have been, taking my time with it and figuring out what’s there.

All in all, I honestly couldn’t recommend enough the mixture of discipline and chaos with which I’ve approached this project. Hopefully I’ll have more to share on it soon…

Thanks for reading, right to the end. You’re brilliant. I’ll see you next week,

J x

Sometimes, for me, doing little jobs and running errands is a form of procrastination. If I’m working from home, doing the laundry or tidying the living room or making sure my desk is clear - these small tasks can take me away from what really matters. It’s very easy to spend an entire day pottering - and realise you’ve got no room left for the big stuff.

But sometimes, a task that doesn’t require me to over-stretch my brain can be the perfect way to percolate on something creative. Let me give you an example.

Recently, I woke up from a dream about my grandad. He died almost a decade ago, and now and then when I dream about him it’s like we get to spend time together again. I usually wake up with a mixture of loss and connection - that bittersweet feeling that can feel terribly sad, even though the dream itself was not a sad one.

All my life, my grandad lived in North Yorkshire. He wasn’t originally a Yorkshireman, but he made this part of the country his home. He loved the North York Moors and spent many happy hours walking there when he was in good health. His ashes are scattered there, along with my grandma’s. There are beautiful curlews sometimes to be see in this beautiful and blasted landscape, and I have an amazing painting of a curlew done by my mum, who is an extraordinary artist. She gave it to me on my 30th birthday, and I like to think of it as a sort of portrait of my grandad, a curlew on the North York Moors among the purple heather.

When I was small, my grandad had a beloved sheepdog. Sophie. Now, when I walk with Pan, I think of them sometimes. I was too little really to understand the bond they had, but I hope I understand a little of it these days.

When he walked on the moors, my grandad would wear a very old, battered Barbour jacket and a flat cap - full Yorkshireman aesthetic, though he would never have called it that. On my 21st birthday, he bought me a Barbour of my own. This was a very special thing as they were - and are - expensive and beautifully made items of clothing.

I still have the Barbour. I’ve worn it a great deal. You’re supposed to re-wax them every season - though I’m not sure who has the time to do it with that level of frequency.

Re-waxing a Barbour is just the kind of thing I remember my grandad doing. The gentle warming of the wax, the working it into the jacket with a cloth. The long, slow, careful work of restoring something to its full glory - of paying attention to a prized and beloved item, restoring it, of caring diligently for your belongings. Of making something old into something new.

So, that morning, having had this dream about my grandad, I decided to spend some time with him in an activity we both love. Instead of catapulting myself directly into work, I took out the Barbour, warmed up the wax, and began to carefully work it into the cloth. The whole exercise took about an hour - and during the process it feels like something magic happened.

Paying careful attention to my things, especially things that are old or things I have had for a long time, makes me feel like I am caring for myself. Doing the slow, gradual labour of restoring something slows my mind down, and somehow helps me think more clearly. It almost feels like an action of making safe, if that makes sense.

I have a challenging tendency to urgency. I rush from thing to thing, especialyl when I’m in London, constantly performing origami in my schedule to fit in another meeting, another hour of writing, another appointment. I don’t mean to pathologise this tendency - in many ways, it’s served me very well as it allows me to get lots done. And I think it’s partly a symptom of enthusiasm - to see all the wonderful shows London has to offer, to engage with my creative work and the brilliant humans I’m working with.

But also, going quickly is hard on the nervous system. If you’re always running, perhaps you can tell yourself that it is safer to present a moving target, but you will always feel like you’re running away from something.

Spending time with my grandad, and the gentle but persistent grief I felt when I woke up from that dream of him, vivid and hale and so alive, was a choice not to run, but to remain. To sit in the feeling. To think about him and the things he taught me. And engaging in the act of restoring this beloved object in a way he would have valued made me slow down all the more.

How do you connect with yourself, your ancestors, your history? How do you slow things down? If any of this resonates, I’d love to hear in the comments.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.
J x

Lately, I’ve been immersing myself in the study of tarot. I’ve been interested for years - in fact, the deck I’m using is one that was given to me by a friend my mum’s when I was really little - maybe 7 or 8. I got into it then, but had a big break from the cards in my 20s. I’d now and then pull a card at New Year, or on a significant date, but I didn’t really have a practice of reading tarot.

In the summer, I was on a magical trip with a group of friends in the Tuscan countryside. One of my dearest friends had very generously taken us away to celebrate her marriage, a year before. As we settle into the villa, I and another of our number shared being stopped at security - for nothing more nefarious than the fact we had both brought our decks of Tarot! As it turns out, packs of card or paper flag something in the security scanners.

We got talking about the cards, and my friend - a much more adept expert than I - gave a few readings. He said he had taught himself as a teenager from a deck belonging to his Italian grandmother. He also said something that struck me as hugely insightful - that if he were ever to teach a group of people about storytelling, he would ask them all to learn tarot.

This, for me, was a brilliantly incisive summary of why I am attracted to tarot. Like many different esoteric teachings, it asks us to read into a subjective and elliptical image and draw our own conclusions. As I’ve gotten deeper into tarot, I don’t expect it to tell me my future, more for it to exist as a powerful lens through which to illuminate and examine human psychology.

So, I’ve been immersing myself in learning around tarot, and drawing one card each day as part of my morning journalling practice. Sometimes, I’ll ask a general question, something like:

What wisdom do you have for me today?

or I might ask something more specific, like:

What do you have to share about my current writing project?

or

What am I not seeing in this relationship?

Always, I find something interesting in the card I draw. Having now practiced this for some months, it astonishes me when cards come up again and again. Throughout December and January - in fact, to be honest, since I’ve been doing this - I find myself drawing a lot of swords.

Swords are the suit of intellect, of rationality, and they are associated with the element of Air. They have a bit of a reputation as being the most challenging suit of the four in the deck (the others being Cups, Wands and Pentacles). This card is a classic for me. Somehow, I seem to draw it often. It’s a brilliant reminder for my brain though - when I’m trapped in what I think to be a binary situation, telling myself the story that I can only choose either A or B. But if I just took that blindfold off, and looked over my shoulder, I’d see a whole lake of possibilities behind me.

It’s a great reminder that we always have more choices than we think. It’s funny, with this particular deck, I often joke that it is ‘reading me’ to borrow the parlance of drag queens the world over - like, teasing me or giving me very direct, ribbing advice to make me see things more clearly. It feels like a deck with a sense of humour. I know some of you will be rolling your eyes at this, but it definitely helps me to see myself with more lightness and playfulness, even to laugh at myself when I’m in a state of crisis.

Another card I draw relatively often is the High Priestess - so often, in fact, that I made myself a perfume and named it after this card. I’m struck by how similar this is to the Two of Swords in some ways - the duality of the light and dark pillars, the watery quality of the robes, the single figure in the centre of the card. But if the Two of Swords is blind and binary, the High Priestess is much more reflective. The bright pomegranates on the veil behind her bring a lushness to the card. The moon at her feet is magical. And behind the veil of pomegranates, just possible to glimpse, is a lake of water - perhaps the same lake of water we see unveiled in the Two of Swords.

What I love about learning Tarot more deeply is the range of symbolism there is to explore. A lot of Tarot scholars think the pool behind both these figures represents the unconscious - and what else is Tarot good for than for stirring these waters of the unconscious? I suppose that’s what I find so endlessly compelling about it. The opportunity to tell stories at the same time as turning my gaze inward and asking myself unexpected questions.

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I’m hoping to get good enough over the next year or so to start doing readings for friends. At the moment, I’m thinking this study will always be a hobby. I might write about it in here but I don’t want to monetise it. And that feels really good! There are few things in my life that don’t have some application to my work - and it feels really nourishing to be learning purely for the joy of it.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. If any of this resonated, please do drop me a comment. And if you liked what you read, please do hit the little heart button - it helps other people find my writing. See you next week. You’re brilliant.
J x

No letter last week because I was battling with the horrendous sinus infection that was going round. It knocked me out and meant cancelling everything that wasn’t completely essential - and even now, I write this letter to you from bed, an homage to Marcel Proust.

I’m terrible at being ill. It brings me out in a kind of existential dread. Probably related to my productivity addiction, I think it’s also a consequence of enthusiasm. I find it hard to stop working because I love my job; I feel a hedonic hunger for all the wonderful experiences London has to offer; my friends endlessly fascinate me so I want to see them - all of which is to say, in brief: being ill sucks.

The subject of this letter is discomfort. And I think, honestly, the idea has partly grown out of my grappling withe being unwell. Last night, I delivered the second in a series of workshop/lectures at LAMDA on the MA Musical Theatre. The actors on this programme, in my brief experience working with them, are brilliant: bright, incisive, mutually generous and with surprising and interesting collaborative ideas. I’ve loved working with them.

I was asked to come and speak to these actors about how to prepared themselves for an R&D or workshop scenario. I’m so pleased that LAMDA values this, as it’s a common experience for many actors throughout their careers, and can be a daunting experience if you’ve never done it before. Our first session revolved around uncertainty - a key tenet not only of any R&D process but also of any rehearsal process - perhaps, to take it even further, of any satisfying working environment.

The reason I think uncertainty makes things satisfying is because it’s boring to remain in the familiar for too long. Which leads me to the subject of this newsletter - something we explored together at LAMDA yesterday evening.

We are often trying as hard as we can to avoid discomfort. And that’s understandable. The brain is hard wired to conserve energy, and avoiding discomfort is one way of doing that. Of course, I would much rather have avoided the physical discomfort that comes with being unwell. And even though there was probably something to learn there, I would have preferred to avoid the mental discomfort (existential crisis) that comes, for me, with rest and recovery.

But too often, I think we confuse discomfort with being unsafe. Of course, there are situations in which we are unsafe - at work, in life. There are environments that are physically unsafe - in a theatre, this might be when a piece of set hasn’t been built properly, or a boss or colleague is actively abusive.

However, and especially as we all become more familiar with therapeutic language, it can become all too easy to confuse discomfort with feelings of unsafety. And if we do this, we deny ourselves an important area of growth.

Many psychologists and coaches have identified there are three ‘zones’ we can exist in - I’m going to take this specifically with the lens of creative work, in the rehearsal room, but I reckon you could apply it to any working situation.

• There’s the place that is familiar. Things you’ve done before, what you know you can do. This is the comfort zone.

• There’s the place that you’re trying something new. Where you’re pushing yourself to learn, challenge yourself, take risks. This is the stretch zone.

• There’s the place where you are actively unsafe. This is the danger zone.

I’ve drawn all three with basically equal weight in this diagram, but I think (hope) the reality might be something more like this:

The stretch zone is much bigger than we think. And if we confine ourselves to the comfort zone, we’re boxing ourselves into a space that is likely much too small for us: like a plant that needs repotting, or Marcel Proust in bed.

The task of the artist, or indeed anyone who is interested in personal growth, is to explore where the bounds of the stretch zone are for you - because they’ll be different for each of us.

For me, some of the signs that I’m in the stretch zone might be:

• Feeling inspired or delighted by the work I’m making

• Righteous tiredness at the end of the day, like I’ve really achieved something

• Ideas popping up even when I’ve stopped work - not ruminating, but ‘shower thoughts’ or ideas when I’m walking the dog

• Excitedly talking about the work to my loved ones

• Feeling ready to show up the next day

Signs that I might be more in the danger zone:

• Feelings of dread the night before that don’t go away once I start doing the work - this is a slippery one, as ‘dread’ can sometimes show up when we just feel discomfort, so it’s not necessarily a warning light on the dashboard, only if it becomes perpetual

• Feeling sluggish, or listless, or exhausted all the time

• Ruminating overnight about a part of the work or a relationship in the work

• Being unable to switch off

• Self-punishing or an extremely amplified inner critic

This last diagram isn’t perfect, but it struck me as a way to explore where you’re at in the different zones. In order to understand whether you’re entering the danger zone, you can ask yourself what your responsibilities are to the work and in the rehearsal room, or workplace.

I think it’s worth triangulating between your understanding of your own responsibilities in a room; where your resilience is at, which might be affected by a bunch of factors, including:

• Health

• Sleep

• Where you're at in your cycle, if you have one

• Accessibility for you in the space

• How resourced you are emotionally

• The intersectionality of the space

It’s important to be building your resilience from a spirit of self-compassion, as it helps you to be in the stretch zone when you want to be and therefore explore new things and (I think) ultimately have more fun. Knowing where your resilience is at and understanding your responsibilities lets you be more available, safely, to discomfort - and it shows you when and where it’s important to advocate for yourself.

When I raised this with my LAMDA actors last night they came up with some absolutely brilliant responses. It would be a much longer letter to distill everything we discussed, but here are some of their offers for our responsibilities showing up in a rehearsal room:

• Generosity

• Openness

• Attention

• Allowance - as in, letting things develop and see where they go

• Respect - for yourself and for others and for the work

• Reflection - thinking through the process at the end of the day

• Kindness

• Empathy for our different processes

We also explored when and how to advocate for yourself, and when clarity and neutrality can help you sit in discomfort to disagree - without taking you into the danger zone. Overall, I thought this could create an amazing playbook for any working environment.

What’s your relationship with discomfort? Does any of this resonate? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.
J x

Dear friends,

Right now, I’m casting for a new project. It’s something of a dream show - at a theatre I adore, and the writing is provocative and intense and vivid and frightening. I feel very lucky to be doing it. More on this soon - sad to say, I can’t share more details of what it is yet.

This week, we’ve been casting for the show. I thought it might be useful, or interesting, or perhaps both, to share some insights from how I cast. This is for actors and other theatre makers - but also for anyone who has the power to inflect an interview process of any kind.

Famously stressful, often nerve-racking, traditional images of casting can be cruel, brutal, cut-throat. I hope this is changing in the industry - but everyone has a story of an interview they felt they could have done better. I consider it to be my responsibility during a casting process to get the best out of the person in front of me - to help them feel relaxed, and happy, and themself. Maybe even to have fun.

If you’re interviewing or casting someone, here are my top tips for helping the person show up as their best:

Find some common ground

I spend generally the first 5 or even 10 minutes of an audition chatting. It might be innocuous - one lovely actor yesterday told me about his new puppy, Chip - or it might be about a show I’ve seen of theirs or a collaborator we have in common. It doesn’t really matter what it is - the point is to see something of the person and help them feel like we are equals meeting in a space. A producer I worked with recently who has become a dear friend once described me as ‘the opposite of a gatekeeper’ which to me was the highest compliment. In finding the common ground in the first few minutes of the meeting, you’re sharing the power equally between you.

Break down the divides

I never like to sit behind a desk - either during rehearsals, or during castings. This week, my brilliant casting director arranged our four chairs in a circle - me, her, the writer and the actor coming in. I loved this - it made everyone feel like they were part of the same conversation, and it felt like a good reflection of my rehearsal process. I hate what is known in the industry as ‘table work’ - sitting around a table for the first week - even first two weeks, the horror! - exclusively doing textual analysis. Don’t get me wrong, I do a lot of close focus and deconstruction of the text, but I like to illuminate it by putting it on its feet as soon as possible. A table is a barrier. It’s great to break it down.

Get curious

I’m currently training to be a listening volunteer with the amazing charity Switchboard (the LGBTQ+ listening service), and so I’m tuning my brain strongly into open questions. That’s the Who What Where When Why How of it all - questions that invite thinking, rather than a closed ‘yes’ or ‘no’ response. Once I’ve broken the ice a bit with the actor I’ll ask them a few questions so I can get to know them better. Usually this will be about the kind of work they’re attracted to and a favourite job of the last few years. This is so far from a trick question and helps me understand them better, which honestly makes the whole process more interesting.

Tune into chemistry

I honestly believe that if a casting director (or if you’re in another industry, a recruiter) has brought someone into the room, they’ll be able to do the job. Starting from this assumption let’s me see the person more clearly, and be rooting for their success. It also allows me to concentrate more on the chemistry between us, which is for me the key ingredient in seeing if we’ll work well together. Our brains don’t have to work the same - but is there some coherence there? Do we vibe? Will we have fun in a room together? If the answer to this is yes, we’re much more likely to make good work.

Share your process and ask questions first

I love working with actions in the rehearsal room - transitive verbs that help expose what the character wants. An easy way to check if something is an action or not is to see if it fits into the sentence: “I want to ___________ you”. So, if the opening line of the scene is “What are you up to?”, it will feel very different in energy if the action is “I want to welcome you” versus “I want to expose you”.

In an audition, I’ll ask the actor first what they think the action is, and then we’ll work together from there to dial up or down different energies. It’s a fabulous shorthand to communicating the nub of our mutual understanding of a scene.

If you don’t work in theatre, when interviewing someone, is there a way of quickly sharing your working style and both inhabiting it together? Solving a problem collaboratively is an amazing way of seeing if you vibe.

Have fun

It’s no secret that I often have my little whippet, Pan, in rehearsals with me - but this week was the first time I ever brought her along to a casting. She loves this particular theatre and is made to feel very welcome there. And you know what? The informality of her presence in the casting room really brought an atmosphere of playfulness and fun for the actors. I would 100% bring her again - she turned out to be a great casting assistant. It’s amazing what the presence of a little playful animal does to everyone’s nervous systems. Most of the time, it gets us all to relax.

I pride myself on the fact that actors often say they enjoy auditioning for me. Often, I’ll know if someone is right or not very early on in the meeting, perhaps even when they first walk into a room. This is just because of how I’ve created the character in my head already - perhaps it’s something to do with height or build, perhaps it’s something more ineffable. But I consider my job always to be to get the best out of someone, and if I do this right, so often they will teach me something I didn’t know about the text. It’s a pleasure to go through what can be a very tiring and intense process if you enter into it with this kind of openness.

I wonder if any of what I’ve shared here resonates? Especially if you’re not in theatre, I’d be so curious to know if this would change the way you approach an interview process. If you have reflections, I’d love to hear them in the comments - and if you liked this letter, please do hit the little heart button - it helps other people find my work. Thanks for reading, right to the end. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.
J x

Dear friends,

Regular readers of this newsletter will know how much I love to take on the ‘inner critic’. I’m sure you’ve experienced it: that voice in your head that shows up to tell you why you can’t do something. It helps me to remember that this voice is there to keep us safe. Often, the inner critic who lives in your head might be based on a parent, a teacher, or someone else you respected when you were small, who was watching out for danger. The trouble is that when the inner critic is driving the bus, at best we make very safe choices - and at worst, we wind up beating ourselves up or tying ourselves in knots.

There are all sorts of techniques for working with the inner critic, and I’ve ended up exploring lots of them in my work with actors. Performance requires such a profound level of present-ness - you can’t be battling your inner critic at the same time as giving your best performance, and if you are, you’re working twice as hard as you need to be. This week, I want to share with you just one technique I’ve found to be so helpful and powerful to make your way round the inner critic. I’ve used it in all sorts of creative processes with different collaborators: from actors and writers to designers when we’re exploring the visual concept for a show.

I call it the bad idea version.

It’s that simple.

When you care a lot about the work you’re making - whether it’s notionally creative or not, perhaps you put a lot of pressure on yourself to get it right first time. The bad idea version shakes things up a little, it releases the pressure. It allows you to make it messy, make it quick, make it embarrassing or cringe or boring.

And more often than not, the bad idea version releases something great. Because everyone in the space not only feels free, but feels safe to take risks.

I was reminded of how much I use this simple tool when working with a brilliant young actor this morning. I count myself lucky to work with the wonderful charity Open Door, who exist to support actors from lower socioeconomic backgrounds get into drama school. The charity fulfils a vital role in an industry which is becoming more and more inequitable, and their statistics speak for themselves. So many Open Door participants wind up not only getting into drama school, but also having stellar careers and helping create real change in the industry. I’m one of Open Door’s tutors, and I get so much out of working with the talented, conscientious and disciplined young people who are our participants.

This week, one of my actors shared what had made the most difference to him in our time working together. And he said it was the bad idea version. That it freed him up to start a speech wherever he was at, to put the words in the space and see what was there. Above all, to take ownership of the words. I could not have been more glad to hear this. When you’re working with verse, it’s all too easy for a young actor (or indeed, any actor!) to feel the weight of history bearing down upon them, to hear the ghosts of all the actors from the last 400 years right back to Shakespeare saying the words over their shoulder. It was brilliant to know that the notion of the bad idea version had released this actor from that weight. I felt so proud.

I’ll share some other examples of how I put the bad idea version into practice in my various creative processes:

• “It’s not this, but…” - as simple as making a metaphorical comparison might unlock something for you or your collaborators. But try not to go too far down this road or you might end up in this Mitchell and Webb sketch.

• “What if it was the most cartoon version?” This especially works with sets - what if it was all plush velvet, what if the whole space filled with blood, what if everyone was dressed identically? Usually the flavours are too strong but it brings something else to the fore.

• “What if they all just said exactly what they mean?” This is great with writing a scene. The result will be - and I cannot say this strongly enough - UnPerformable - but it will bring your subtext to the fore and make you think hard about what you actually want the point of the scene to be. I’ve never tried this but I imagine it would also work well with public speaking, isolating your points clearly.

I’d love to hear if you try out the bad idea version in your working processes, and if it might release something for your creative collaborators. As always, do give this a like if you enjoyed it - it really helps other people find my writing. And thank you, as ever, for being here. I’ll see you next week. You’re brilliant.

J x