Day 60. With the make belief and miracles that only come alive in Candleland. (1/3/19)

(Soundtrack: Candleland by Ian McCulloch, the title track of his first post Bunnymen solo album. There are two versions: the album version and 'Candleland: The Second Coming', the single version, billed as 'feat. Elizabeth Fraser', the beautiful voice of The Cocteau Twins. The single version is a touch faster, a bit more upbeat, starts with strings. The mix may be glossier. Both versions are impossibly perfect. It's as great a song as The Killing Moon. I believed that on the day it was first issued. I still believe it, thirty years later. And some will already know exactly why this is the soundtrack to today. For those that don't, I'll be explaining very shortly.)

Candleland was always going to be used at the end of Those Two Weeks. From the moment the script was completed, there was only one song that I wanted to encapsulate everything we'd just seen.

For those who haven't seen it, those who may yet see it, those who may never see it, Those Two Weeks isn't a play about Hillsborough. It's a play about the two weeks before Hillsborough. It starts on the 1st of April 1989 and ends before midnight on the 14th. It's a play about before. It's a play about the last time life was normal.

It's a year this week since we performed it for the first time: a four night run at Unity Theatre in Liverpool. Five performances. Three of those sold out. On the Saturday we were turning people away. Which you both want and don't want at the same time. You want the audience, you want the theatre full, you also want to expand the theatre to fit everybody in. You obviously can't. Two more later in the year at The Gladstone Theatre in Port Sunlight.

The play came from a conversation that J and I had one Christmas Eve morning in Costa coffee on Aintree retail park. Christmas Eve 2014. The first Christmas Eve in my life that I hadn't worked. Also the first Christmas Eve since we had lost my dad, less than two months previously. His loss undoubtedly informs parts of the play, sits in some of the themes of the passage of time that I wanted to put into the script.

Not that any of that was in the conversation that J and I were having that day.

We were talking about the 'what's next'. Venus Rising had played in September. I'm glad of that, it meant that my dad saw one of my plays on stage, knew that I was doing something I wanted to do. Half The Sky was in the writing process. Six monologues for actresses to deliver, three of them that had either happened to me or came from my thoughts and beliefs on life and destiny. Again, I know that my reaction to losing my dad is in one of those monologues. It lays deep in there and people may not notice but I know it's there and that's often enough.

J was talking about a film that she'd seen; 'Remember Me' starring Robert Pattinson. In this the ex-Twilight star plays a young man who falls in love, has family issues, has moments of falling apart but pulls himself together and reconciles with everybody that he needs to reconcile. And, at the end, as he stands in his father's office, waiting to speak to his father, he looks out of the window. And sees the first plane flying toward him. 'Remember Me' was a 9/11 film without being a 9/11 film.

Which reminded me of Paul Auster's Brooklyn Follies. A widower in his seventies buys a brownstone in Brooklyn. He rents the basement flat to a single mother in her twenties. They share a relationship that is platonic but filled with love. He meets a woman, she meets a man.  The widower is diagnosed with cancer and is treated. On the last page, as he leaves his oncologist in Brooklyn he looks across the river and sees the first plane head toward the towers. Auster, a New York novelist, had just written his 9/11 book and not allowed you to know the fact until the very last line.

And J said 'why don't you do something like that?' Something where the point of the story doesn't become apparent until the very end.

My reply was that there was one overriding moment that influenced the lives of our generation but that I didn't know if I had the right to write about it.

I wasn't there. I didn't experience what those who were there on the day went through. I couldn't tell the stories of those who were lost; it wasn't mine to tell, it was their families', and it had been told brilliantly by Jimmy McGovern.

I couldn't tell the story of my brothers and what they went through on the day. That was theirs and I could never know fully what they experienced. There have been conversations over the years but those conversations will never have fully illustrated Keith and Kevin's experience or reaction. So much of the last thirty years has been internal for so many.

There was something I could write about though: I could write about what it was like at home. This still seemed the wrong thing to focus a story on. It still felt intrusive.

The correct thing to talk about presented itself quite quickly: I could talk about what it was like before.

I still wasn't entirely comfortable with the idea of writing the play but I had an idea: a family, a family very like ours in terms of their background - North Liverpool, working class, working class with aspirations that their children would achieve more than their parents because every working class family I have ever known is exactly the same in this way. You want your children to take the next step. I didn't go to University, I wanted to make sure my children had that chance, if they wanted it.

I wanted a family with ambition. A family of individual characters with their own needs, wants, passions, desires, happiness and troubles.

I wanted a family that could seem to be comfortable and happy, and genuinely love each other, but a family where one misplaced sentence could pull them apart. I wanted to be able to tell a story of normal life but show how fragile just normal life could be.

And there was one massive proviso. I know that the story had to end on the Friday night as talking about the day would not be right. But I couldn't just have the family leave the home and finish there.

I had to let you know they came back.

The Millers are a fictional family. I had to make sure an audience left knowing that we hadn't told the tale of anybody who didn't return. I had to make sure that there would be no thought that they represented anybody specific.

I wanted them to represent everybody that I knew in the city. I wanted them to be all of us.

I worked out the ideas for a while. I knew who the characters were, knew what their issues were, where they were going, what they thought of each other. But I still hadn't convinced myself that I had the courage to do this.

There was a trip to Wembley for a League Cup final with out Kev and our mate Mike. 19th April 2015. And I told them about my plans for this. If there had been negativity or objection, I'd have stopped there and then. There wasn't, so I went to the script.

I have one rule in all I write. Nothing that wouldn't be said in conversation can go in. We don't tell each other things we already know about each other when we talk. Nothing of that could appear. There was an early note, from an early reader, suggesting that there should be more foreshadowing of what was to come. I understand that but I wouldn't do it. These characters could only talk about what they knew. They couldn't imagine an absolutely unimaginable future.

The other side of the dialogue approach is that anything that IS said in conversation COULD go in. All the sidebars, the wandering round, the hesitations and the stumbles? They're all allowed. The idea that people don't go to the theatre to hear characters talk like people in real life? I'm not having that. I want real life on stage and I want people who don't think that they 'go to the theatre' sitting in the audience.

The play was finished and submitted to a couple of theatres and a couple of production companies. There were favourable comments but nothing that could move it forward immediately, which is what I wanted.

So I decided that this would be another project to carry out under my own steam. But that I would carry this out on a bigger scale.

There was a director I'd met. Went to see two of his plays in Manchester one night with a mutual friend. Met him afterwards. Filed him under 'yeah, could definitely work with him, he's sound'.

And a while later we had one of those Facebook conversations. He was working on a play with some football content (the exceptionally wonderful Bob The Russian) and he wanted to pick my brains on the footy side. Sounded a great idea, as I thought I might have something we could work on.

So we had lunch. In Leaf on Bold Street where most of Liverpool's artistic decisions are made. The place is full of plotting. And we talked it through.

Mike was a little reticent. Wasn't sure that he could take on a play that covered such a sensitive subject. And he generally didn't do 'realistic' stuff. He was darker, or bigger, bolder, funnier.

But he said he'd read the script. And see what he thought.

He thought yes.

Plays take time. And a huge amount of work. And a massive amount of buy-in and trust from the people you work with. You ask a lot from cast and crew. There are levels of theatre, possibly the vast majority of theatre, in the same way as the vast majority of music and any other artistic endeavour, where the time put in by everybody will never come close to being recompensed in a monetary manner.

But that's not the point. The point is to make something you believe in. The people we worked with believed in this.

The first two months of 2018 saw intense rehearsal. Rehearsal in rooms over pubs. Cold rooms over pubs. With sticky floors and a smell of grease. Long evenings, long afternoons. Most of which I didn't attend. Nobody wants writers in the room.

There was an evening rehearsal. Mike asked me to come in, see what he'd done with a scene. The scene was an argument. It may well have been one of the scenes that had led to one of the theatres regarding the play as serious. I knew there were laughs in the play; it was about a Liverpool family, humour is unavoidable, we wind each other up, we take the mickey. This scene though? This was heavy, this was intense.

The version I saw though? The way the actors were portraying it? Still intense but diffused with laughs. Not a word changed. For a second I was worried that the play might be seen as comedic, light. And then I realise what it actually was: better.

This is the joy of theatre in one example. It's the collaboration. It's everybody bringing their worldview, their experience, their emotion and bringing it to bear on the script. Mike had brought a lightness of touch to something that could have been just an argument. And it was human because of that. Because there are always moments of light that poke through. Moments when we appreciate how ridiculous we are.

We knew what we had and we knew we were happy with it. But you never know how an audience will react.

We did something on the first day of the play that I had always said we would do. We had a final dress rehearsal first thing in the morning and then performed for the first time in the early afternoon in a private matinee for an invited audience.

A friend of mine had kindly put me in touch with the right channels to pass an open invitation on to any members of the families of those lost and any survivor group members who wished to attend.

My intention had always been to ensure that those most closely affected by the day had the chance to see the story we had chosen to tell before anybody else. The idea that anybody would hear about it after the event without the chance to have full knowledge first would have been unacceptable.

We are all eternally humbled by those who gave their time to see this.

We played the afternoon to a hushed, intent, emotionally charged room. The sight of this audience applauding the cast, and the cast applauding back, is one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen. And the comments made to us afterwards by people who have seen more than we have and fought more than we have, for so very long, were humbling and inspirational.

I have described it since, and will continue to describe it, as the most intensely profound and profoundly intense experience of my life.

The evening was massive. A sold out room with laughs at every moment of humour, tears where tears were appropriate and the message that had always been intended, that everybody of my generation knows how easily any of our lives could have changed forever on that day, seeming to come across.

The response has been unbelievable. The audience feedback on social media was incredible, the support for the show amazing, the reviews excellent.

And this all happened a year ago this week. It seems like five minutes, it seems like decades.

We're doing it again. People have asked us if we would do it again and we've always wanted to, intended to. We're currently in the 'specifics' stage, tying down details, as soon as we can tell you the where and when, we'll tell you.

You will see it again. We can't not do it again. No matter what else I do, this will always be the work I'm proudest of.

And the song?

Music is important in the show. It sets up scenes, it tells you things about the characters, their tastes, their states of mind. And every song within the show is specific to the time. It's the music we were listening to in 1989. A lot of it is in the top 40 for the week ending 1st of April. There are songs we'd have liked to use but they weren't from the right time. There was a book I wanted Joseph to be reading at the beginning, a book that carried some themes that I wanted in the play within its pages - themes about growing up and the way you change, the way you think as you grow older. But the book wasn't out in England at the time we were talking about. The references had to be real. The songs had to be true.

But Candleland is different. Candleland comes from after. The album is released in September 1989, the single in 1990. And we use the song as the lights go out on the stage and close out the story. We use it as the signal that we've left the long ago and have moved forward. Because we know that was a right not afforded to all.

And we use Candleland for this reason: I saw Ian McCulloch play the song live at the cathedral a few years ago, string section in place, and he announced it something like this:

"People used to ask me where Candleland was and I always thought it was heaven. But it's not, is it? It's Liverpool. Which is the same place really."

It's a misquote but it's a misquote that will stay with me for life.

The first week of March 2018. The Unity Theatre. That's going to stay with me for life.

Mike Dickinson
Jackie Jones
Mike San
James Ledsham
Katie King
Daniel Cassidy
Sam Walton
Lisa Mc Mahon
Cath Ainsworth

Thank you all forever x

And thanks, always, to J. Because, without her, there is none of this xx