The first stage of One H W’s is just a week away. All the writers are in place and tomorrow I go into Soho theatre to meet the National Youth Theatre members who will be our actors for the week. It’s quite a tough task to write a play in a day, but I’m expecting the actors to learn their lines and perform a script they will have only been given that lunchtime, maybe that’s an even tougher task, I guess I wont know the answer to that until next week.

One of the joys of working with the National Youth Theatre is that there are a lot of them. This enables the writers to write for a large cast,to be ambitious with the scale of their work and also to explore all sorts of possibilies such as having a chorus, or a less traditional format.

Over the past few weeks I’ve travelled to China, Estonia, Finland and Sweden, listening intently and always surprised by the way language doesn’t always sound the way you think it will.

Estonian sounded more how I imagined Finnish would sound, but the Finnish deliver their language in a kind of way that makes it seem as if they are pulling the words back in, rather than letting them out. Sweden being right next to Finland I thought might sound similar but no! being a tonal language it was much more like Mandarin Chinese! Or is that just because I’m frantically learning Mandarin as part of ‘One Hundred Words’? I can write almost 100 charactors. Not that I could compose anything sensible by putting them together, but individually they look great.

When we were in Beijing earlier this year I recorded a couple of small sessions on my mobile phone… see one here on YouTube and the second is here.