The work that's most in progress is just about the most exciting thing I've done for ages. I've just been acting in a proper play at the Bristol Old Vic. Called A Busy Day, it was written in 1800 by Fanny Burney (the mother of English fiction, according to Virginia Woolf) but was never performed at the time. Kind of a Regency farce (imagine Are You Being Proud And Prejudiced?) with lots of mistaken identities, silly assumptions and ridiculous comeuppances.
I've just written a two-hander romantic comedy for me and a fabulous Irish actress called Janice Phayre. It's called Three Wishes and it's about a couple getting engaged. Then the Earth enters a mysterious cloud in space and everyone in the world gets three wishes. But when you know you'll get what you wish for, are you sure about what you really want? It also features an analysis of William Golding's Flies Of The Lord, his forgotten classic about a planeload of savage boys who crash on an English public school and swiftly resort to fagging and giving each other daft nicknames. Look out for a production in the autumn.
My most confusing project is still Elastic Planet - the sitcom David Lynch would have written for the cast of the Animaniacs. It involves a scientist building a supercollider for the family while his wife walks around the world on a tightrope; meanwhile his friend is receiving nuisance phone calls counting down from 12 - what happens when they reach zero? It's been rejected by virtually every TV commissioning editor for being too full of ideas, too different and, in one case, too like a film. I guess it needs to be less interesting, less original and more like everything else on TV to get made. As someone once said, originality is its own punishment.
I struggle on.
A Busy Day is at the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London (020-7494 5045) from June 19
