After twelve months of back-to-back work (seven productions, 87 actors, 32 weeks in rehearsal) I am at home again. It’s amazing what domestic chaos that level of work can create. I’ve spent the last week or two throwing out all sorts of rubbish and trying to make the place habitable again. Not resting: nesting.

The triple bill of new plays in the Cottesloe finished its very short but extremely lively run last Thursday. Directing three one-hour plays with a cross-cast company of twenty actors was very hard work. The plays were written as stand-alone pieces for the Connections programme. The three writers couldn’t be more different in outlook and sensibility and the plays reflected that. What made it a rich evening (when you saw all three together) made it equally rather taxing to rehearse. In a six week rehearsal period (the norm at the Cottesloe) that means the equivalent of two weeks per piece. What I discovered is that it’s certainly nothing like rehearsing a three-hour play in the same time. Each play is an imaginative world unto itself – in many ways the actual playing time is relatively immaterial since the really tough bit is cracking into the vocabulary and grammar of each one.

Somewhat predictably a few of the reviewers took the opportunity to say that they weren’t up to the standard of Burn / Citizenship / Chatroom and hilariously all decided to make definitive pronouncements about which of the three was “obviously” the best (naturally it varied from reviewer to reviewer). But on the whole they went very well with the press. Increasingly I get less concerned about whether they are good and more purely relieved if they decide not to give something a kicking.

Mark Shenton has written about a particularly ‘lively’ night when he went to see them. It’s true that when the audience was dominated by school parties it made for a fairly wild event sometimes. I remember the experience of those trips: so much of it is the hysteria about the trip itself (the travelling, the being out of uniform, the eating arrangements) that the opportunities for overt or furtive anarchy seem limitless. So a mere play often doesn’t stand a chance in this whirlpool of adolescence. They were often high on a lot of stuff too: Haribo, Red Bull, Pringles. They were sometimes dangling over the courtyard-style architecture of the Cottesloe, making for a rather too alarmingly Elizabethan experience. But the plays worked on them. The reactions were unlike anything you normally get. The realisation that you could go the theatre and see stuff that actually reflected your own life as its lived now with a bite and linguistic fizz wholly lacking on TV was so potent it eclipsed even the thrills of the school trip.

But it’s true what I said to Mark, that the best evenings were when the audience was about equally spread between school groups, the regular NT audience (aka ‘The Mailing List’, whoever they are – I’m not so sure that it’s the fixed entity it once was) and the new audience of interested young people who now find stuff on for them (it started with His Dark Materials) which there wasn’t before.

All three plays featured some or all of the cast in school uniform. As does The History Boys, of course, meaning that out of the 87 actors I’ve directed in the last year, something like 28 have been in blazers, most of these in the last six months. I don’t think I want this to become some sort of trademark image…

The London production of The History Boys closes this week too. It feels epochal: the play has had a more or less continuous life for four years. Seeing it last week it still seems astonishingly fresh, a tribute to this terrific cast. By Saturday they will have played 226 performances by my reckoning (having started rehearsals on August 6th last year and first performing it at Plymouth on Sept 6th). I said that some performances of the Triple Bill felt Elizabethan: the performance at the delightful Wyndham’s Theatre (built 1899) last Tuesday was positively Edwardian. The Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, was there, laughing (as they say) uproariously; an Asquith minister at a Shaw play.

Now what do I do? Get started on the big backlog of sitting down I guess.