I promise you , I thought it was my job to conscientiously try to find a new way of writing each time I wrote a play. Critics and audiences think otherwise. No sooner have they forgiven you for the last play you wrote and got used to it somehow, than you come along again with something different and even worse - Wow they hate that. To hear them, you'd think they actually liked what you did last time.

So, not content with having achieved sudden and early success with Ambulance, I stupidly left it all behind with the surreal and unwieldy Downfall, knowingly titled. Then, when the dust, if we can call what hit the fan, dust, had barely settled, I took a complete about-turn into a kind of simple off-beat lyricism with Looking At You(revivied) Again, and got royally slated for it, though the play was instantly transfered to London from Leicester, and was soon a huge hit in Paris. Before the British critics or audiences had time to catch up, I duly and conscientiously, took another turn, a departure into yet more unfamiliar territory. I started writing A Message for the Broken Hearted in 1991, a week after finishing Looking At You (revived) Again, in 1991, the two plays were worlds apart, you could hardly guess they were by the same writer. It was the deliberate oppostie of my fluent and poetic style. My new technique, for this play, was to reject every line that came into my head and write another one. It took ages, it was the hardest thing I had written. It wasn't performed until 1993, after being rejected by my then friend Lindsay Posner at the Royal Court despite being a commission. He didn't like the personal turn my writing had taken. He had once been a champion of my work at the Royal Court, but never was again. This was indeed a new departure, couldn't be more different from the wild, circus atmopshpere of the kalaidescopic Downfall, that Posner had last directed. Lindsay confessed himself embarrassed by the nakedness of the emotional squalor of the play. I think he didn't like the idea of one man between two women, he was afraid it might be an outburst of vanity on my part. Nothing could have been further from the truth, as the play itself shows. The man was certainly not a hero, he was a failure. It's painful to watch. Certainly the difficult and disjointed and hard-to-deliver dialogue showed that I had made it difficult for myself. This was no easy ride. It was about as far as you could get from the platitudes of TV dialogue that was around then dominating the stage. This wasn't stage language, it was language as it was spoken, by remarkable and unremarkable people, not middle-class people, intelligent while being crude and neurotic at the same time. This was real life thrown onto the stage in a way it was not fashionable to do, despite all the claims to the contrary. I was, in this play as ever, a complete outsider, it was still as if it written by someone with no familiarity with the rules and practices of stagecraft. You must know that around this time they were actually teaching these rules, using a blackboard. This isnt a metafor, it's real. I walked through a room and saw them doing it. This play, whatever it's faults, and it had many, was completely original. It horrified critics and managements alike. It was taken up by the Liverpool Playhouse, by Ramin Gray who was directing a season of "new writing" there. After two plays at the Royal Court, one at the Riverside and one at the Leicester and the Bush, within the space of 3 years, I hardly counted as 'new writing' , but since it was now 2 years since I'd had a play on, maybe I could count as rediscovered writing, or perhaps new again writing, or even born again writing. The basic set up of A Message For the Broken Hearted was certainly a long way from Ambulance, since for the first time, my play had characters who lived in a house, with even a garden. Within a couple of years a Swedish production had inexplicably taken these characters and put them back into the laundrette where they thought they belonged. Indeed Ramin Gray when he first read the play, had thought in the light of my track record that the play must be about a slum. In reality it was only a slum of the mind. The critical response was as usual one of mystified outrage; when it was brought down to Battersea Arts Centre, this modest little production was hailed by many who saw it as something unique. It was the first of a few very successful and happy collaborations in directing between Ramin Gray and myself. The unusualness of the dialogue made it expedient for me to take an active part in the directing, the first and third weeks of the 4 week process being largely me directing. It was to Ramins great credit that he allowed this- his ego didn't get in the way, and we worked seamlessly together, I felt as if I completely relied on him, and he to some degree relied on me. We had a lot of fun.
The original cast was:
Kevin McMonagle, Rose Keegan, Samantha
Holland, Morris Perry.
Set design by a daring and amused Nigel Prabhavalkar, music by
Lawrence Muspratt, (the sound designer who brilliantly extemporised an off-key piece, on a piano during a tea-brake,  I overheard it and roped it into the show, of which it became an integral part)

The play certainly hit some sort of target, we all felt, as did many others, that it  was truely un-like anything else, even if it was very odd. I didn't realise just how odd, whereas Ramin did.

The critics hated it of course and toook offence and felt obliged to be horrible back and to try to end my career, as if I had one. I think they felt genuinely hurt or annoyed by it. British reviewers do tend to take things personally , as an affront, they put their personal dignity between themselves and the play. French critics aren't so hysterical, and are capable of at least trying to be objective.

Audience reception was strangely enough, the most positive it had been to date, since there was a large number of people who claimed it was the best thing they had seen- which it can't have been, but they were at least sufficiently struck by it to think so.

After one night, a woman who, it turned out, was a pshychotherapist, remarked, cryptically, to one of the company about the author "it's lucky he likes women."