The life-cycle of the moth...

It's a strange moment, the moment of creating characters who up to that moment have had no existence.

Not my words but Harold Pinter's, from his Nobel lecture Art, Truth and Politics which is a tremendous exploration of what it is to write a play as well as a condemnation of the 'tapestry of lies' which sustains our politicians' power. It has a fantastic account of how the openings of Old Times and The Homecoming emerged, so fits with today's title, the opening line of our play. It emerged from a very different place - I'm conscious that the profoundly good things which we've heard yesterday and today in the first two readthroughs come from Eva Ibbotson's book. Not just some of the best lines and situations but the passion and the humour too. Although the surface of the script has moved further and further from the book, I hope the core of both remains the same. I'd be interested to hear (so do post comments or entries) on how people who know both the book and play feel about all that.

We hit one of the areas of departure today when Sam rightly pointed out that The Mayfair Academy for Young Ladies, the Edwardian girls' school where both book and play begin, is in the novel rather a good place to be. In contrast, I've picked up on the comment that 'even the best teachers have trouble trying to make the Rivers of Southern England seem unusual and exciting'. It feels to me a better way to contrast the ideas of education in the story if Maia begins in a Gradgrindian environment of facts and rote learning. But I also realise that from the very first line I'm therefore shaving away complexities which exist in the novel. We've lost the marvellous sisters Miss Banks and Miss Emily for example, but in getting down to a manageable number of roles to be divided between eight actors, some characters (lots!) were always going to disappear.

The challenge is for the texture of the production - physical, vocal, visual, musical - to create its own depths. Like the lovely relationship which emerged this afternoon between Anna (Sam) and Dora (John) - Anna eager to enjoy conjuring the horrors of the Amazon for Maia and exasperated by Dora's softness. Who knows if that moment will find a place in the production - or how may people will consciously notice it if it does? But like a beautifully crafted sentence - and Eva Ibbotson has many of those - it adds depth and layers which an audience can absorb, as readers do good writing.

This was going to be a brief entry. I'm hugely behind with everything else I should be doing, in part because of a coffee spillage all over the keyboard as I was typing up the rehearsal draft last week. But then maybe I should have got it done before Christmas like I planned. I wonder how Harold Pinter is with deadlines?