David Eldridge on Under the Blue Sky, revived for the West End (original) (raw)

Until recently, the only time I have ever registered with the tabloid press was when an Arsenal footballer mentioned that he adored my adaptation of Festen, in 2004. I can't even remember who it was now. Then, this year, a play I wrote in 1999, Under the Blue Sky, was revived for the West End, starring Francesca Annis and Catherine Tate - and all that changed.

First, Charlotte Church read out the dialogue from Tate's "sex scene" on her TV chat show, and the Sun ran a story that Catherine was going to get her "Tates out". (She plays a promiscuous maths teacher whose revenge shag goes comically wrong.) I was mortified by the crudeness of it, but the attention only intensified after Tate fell and hurt her ankle during the dress rehearsal. Before the first preview performance, her ankle became so swollen she couldn't walk. Our first public performance was cancelled, and that night the company got legless in the pub instead - apart from the very sensible Francesca Annis, who gracefully glided off in the direction of the nearest cinema.

Despite some frenzied speculation about the fate of the show, Tate did the first five previews with the aid of a crutch - an interesting twist on the blackly comic sexual fantasy scene I'd envisaged. Paparazzi swarmed outside the theatre; one unsavoury character pumped departing audience members for comments, and the News of the World got a picture inside the auditorium of Tate on the bed with the crutch: classy. The following week, when a woman had a fit in the royal circle and had to be carried out, the London Evening Standard joined in, asking: "Could the West End production of Under the Blue Sky be jinxed?"

Now the play is open, and the reviews are out. People always ask me if I'm bothered by reviews. Of course I hope they are good, but the truth is they never make much difference to me. Nothing a review has said has ever changed what I write - and nor should it for any serious artist. This summer's production of Under the Blue Sky has drawn a wide range of responses, from a wildly ecstatic "smashing" in the Telegraph, to a sneer from the Independent. I wish I could say that theatre people have a sophisticated response to negative press, but - even if it doesn't change the way I write - we don't. My mobile and email has hummed with indignation on my behalf; the language has been colourful, and the cusses hurled in the direction of detractors low. Sensibly, my wife now refuses to read any reviews. She thinks theatre people are stupid: "You cheer when they're good, and you say it's all bollocks when they're not."

What has been fascinating about the whole process, though, is experiencing a nine-year-old play being done again, and this time in a big theatre. (The first time round it was staged at the 70-seat Royal Court Theatre Upstairs.) As one critic has noted, a revival is "something that normally only happens to the dead". Theatre in this country is currently preoccupied with a cult of virginity, with new plays premiered and discarded in rapid succession; far more than it is in nurturing a contemporary repertoire that will sustain modern playwriting long-term. This is a shame: our theatre is the envy of the world, and has a back catalogue of contemporary plays more valued overseas than they are here. There is something wrong when some of the best new British plays become no more than boutique studio events, only available to early bookers and insiders. I worked out that, by the fifth preview of the revival of Under the Blue Sky, more people had seen my play than in the entire original run.

It has also been amazing to watch actors reinterpret characters I wrote all those years ago. In 2000, Justin Salinger's Nick was a "new man" whose emotional articulacy got him into more and more trouble. In 2008, Chris O'Dowd's Nick is an unthinking bloke who, in trying to be straight, ends up being unspeakably cruel. And where Sheila Hancock's Anne seemed movingly lacking in self-confidence, Francesca Annis's take on the same character wrings extraordinary pathos out of long-repressed feelings of sexual desire. In an early rehearsal, Catherine Tate joked that you wouldn't get a Welsh actor to play her part: in her mind, her maths teacher was indisputably southern. I didn't dare tell her that the actor who played the character first was from Cardiff.

Then there's the difference a large audience makes to the play itself, as well as the passage of time. What in a studio theatre, or in a rehearsal room, had been a painful titter becomes a huge wave of laughter in a West End theatre. The war imagery studding the play's battles of the sexes had a retrospective millennial feel in 2000, but, post 9/11, has a more disturbing resonance.

What's it like to be revived while you're still alive? Standing outside the theatre last week, despite the stomach-clenching observation that Tom Stoppard and Russell T Davies were on their way into the auditorium, I couldn't help feeling immodestly proud. But the play is on until the end of September. Still time to join the dead, I suppose.

· Under the Blue Sky is at the Duke of York's Theatre, London WC2, until September 20. Box office: 0870 060 6623.