Is there anyone rich out there who wants to give us a rehearsal space?

I was rehearsing with Michael yesterday in what is quite possibly the smallest room in the world. We had to tuck our elbows in.

The stage we are going to perform on is cavernous and enormous. It's like an aircraft carrier. It's like a set from that Howard Hughes movie.

I am quite an imaginative person, but I'm not that good.

In other news, Standing There Productions: snubbed again at the Oscars this year. What a disgrace. Shame on the Academy. I'm sending the showbag back in the mail.

Guess what...?

I finished the script!

I am so happy I could celebrate by going to Rita's birthday party and seeing her before she later cuts her foot open and spends the morning getting three stitches and attempting to rehydrate.

Yes, really.

Poor Rits. She came to the cast read-through tonight and she managed to remain vertical throughout most of it.

As they say, tomorrow is another day. Another set of deadlines, another packet of painkillers. We'll get there. If we'd both stop breaking ourselves.

(By the way, I also saw Under Milk Wood in the city on Friday night. It is such a beautifully written piece of theatre. I heart Dylan Thomas. Go and see it if you can - special mention to Mr Pugh.)

Spent the entire day in the State Library.

Have now become the particular type of obsessive who does things like this:

- Refuses to break except for lunch including having phone turned off, rather than on silent

- Does not go to the bathroom unless completely necessary, on account of not wanting to lose a desk to some infuriating student/genealogist/crazy man with shopping bags, who clearly does not deserve the desk because he/she has not earned the desk by becoming known by all library staff and making friends with the regulars (of whom there are about half a dozen - we roll our eyes at each other during the busy times).

- Considers the use of one's fountain pen instead of one's computer screen a "treat".

- Enjoys the company of security guards. Polite, quiet, desperate for whispered niceties but expecting nothing more, these are princes among men.

I wonder what parties are like these days.

Dear people in the library who talk on mobile phones while other people are trying to write scripts,

Who do you think you're fooling when you rush from your desk and speak in a low murmur for as long as your heart desires in the book stacks?

The books stacks are not your refuge! The book stacks are privately furious. The book stacks are giving you stink eye , you low-murmuring, long-talking selfish bastards.

I am very good friends with the book stacks, and I respect them as independent persons within their own rights. I can tell from the way the book stacks are shaking with a hitherto unexpressed fury that the book stacks may at any moment dislodge themselves from their foundations and conspire one day to crush your very important phone conversation beneath their lofty, learned, perfectly quiet shelves.

Be very careful. The books and I do not like you very much at all.

PS there is a foyer and there is a bathroom and there is an entire world outside and also there is a button called OFF.

Yes, I am getting older. Shut up.

So we finally finished our auditions last night. How is it that there are so many good performers in Australia and hardly any of them are on TV?

Auditions are so hard. So many people, so many different combinations, far too many frustrating circular discussions that go for hours longer than they should. My head, even more than usual, is totally ready to explode.

Which it will have to do in the State Library.

See you guys later.

I've been sent an email this week by several people about a playwright competition. I get emails like it all through the year, because I sign up to lists and because people are nice and think it would be good if I entered. I don't think I'd win, even I could enter. But I can't enter.

Competitions mean something in the theatre world. If you win a competition, sometimes it's the only exposure you get. That, and reviews. But a surefire way of getting reviews is by winning a playwright award for "excellence in Australian writing" or for "innovation in theatre" for addressing "issues of concern to Australia" etc. It's all a bit nauseating, but that's how it works.

The prizes are apparently offered to playwrights out of an interest in promoting excellence in Australian writing and revealing interesting things about our national psyche.

Let me be the first to say: what a load of crap.

In order to enter a script in a competition, you have to have done the following with it:

nothing

So, if you have produced the play yourself (because you don't like the idea of your script sitting around in a bottom drawer until someone else discovers it), you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have allowed somebody else to produce the script, whether for stage or radio or in fact reproducing it in any way, you're not allowed to enter a script competition.

If you have agreed to one day in the future possibly allow someone else to produce the play, you're not allowed to enter a competition.

If you have entered the play in another competition, you're not allowed to enter.

So basically, you have to write your play for the competition. You have to submit it months in advance and you have to wait. You aren't allowed to enter it in anything else and you aren't allowed to put it on at the local scout hall.

This is because playwright competitions and funding bodies want to fund interesting and clever Australian pieces that hold a mirror up to society.

Or not.

Maybe it's because they want exclusive rights to put the play on first. I dunno. Just a wild guess.

I've been talking to some writer friends of mine. People who actually do write things that "hold up a mirror to Australia's psyche" and I think they should be able to enter competitions. Under the current rules, Shakespeare would be barred. Yes, I did just compare my friends and myself to Shakespeare. It's one in the morning on a Saturday and I'm getting worked up. I apologise. It won't happen again.

So I've been working seven days a week lately and I've been thinking it ain't so bad.
Quite a good way to spend your time, actually, because you get to see people in your scheduled "breaks" between writing/organising/meeting Rita and drawing up plans for auditions.

Then, this arvo, like a truck, it hit me. I collapsed into a dream-addled sleep on my bed in the middle of the day. My phone rang, the washing machine whirred, the ABC radio news shouted at me from the stereo. I floated semi conscious above all of it. I'm exhausted. You see, I had been taking it a bit easy, because of auditions tonight, but it's that fact that I'm taking things easy that my body has seized upon and now I am yawning and staring into the middle distance and losing focus and falling into five minute non-power-naps without even noticing.

I did not schedule this in. Somebody get me a coffee. Or twelve.

When I used to perform, I absolutely hated auditions unless I completely nailed them. There was no middle ground.

And when I didn't get a part, do you know who I hated? Do you know who I lost respect for? One of two people. Either the director (I can't believe she didn't cast me when clearly I was the most brilliant person in the audition) or the writer (it's not my fault the script was crap. What did they want me to do, work miracles?).

Obviously now my perspective on this has changed. Considerably.

Because now, as director, there is too much choice. Not too little choice. When we cast our last play, we actually had to draw maps. Days worth of maps. Does this "Samsonfish" go with that "Briony"? Could we imagine this "TJ" shouting at this "Oliver"? If we don't cast this brilliant performer in any of these roles here, then she can't be in the play at all! That's terrible! What do we do? Do we write another role, really quickly, and squeeze it into an already bursting script? Do we call her up and ask her to understudy? Do we tell her she was ace? Do we tell her anything? Would she mind if we took her home and brought her out for funny accents at parties?

Casting is hard from the director's perspective, because sometimes it doesn't matter how good someone is, they just aren't appropriate. Imagine if Geoffrey Rush was auditioning for Liar Liar, starring Jim Carey or Garden State starring Zac Braff. Our boy Geoffrey is a good actor, but he's really not great for the part.

All of which brings me to the other thing that actors don't notice in auditions: the writer is auditioning the script and the director is auditioning the version of the play that might be produced. There's so much stuff going on, it's a wonder the entire process doesn't grind to a complete halt before it even starts.

After the auditions for People Watching, I noticed a few bits that really didn't work. The actors stumbled over them or ad-libbed their own corrections without noticing. It was an excellent way to edit.

So now I think of auditions as a kind of workshop between everyone in the room. We're all trying stuff out. Sometimes it's going to work, sometimes it's going to fail. Nothing truly appalling will ever happen. At best it will be exciting, at worst it will be humbling. That's a pretty good sliding scale.

Anyway chumps, see you at the auditions. I'll be the one with the script and the big red pen.