Lights on the stair

And another quick blip that reflects a day largely spent boosting the NaNoWriMo word count. Up to 10000 now - still a little behind schedule but with any luck a good day tomorrow will get me back on track. The story is still going its own way, without any clear plan. I suspect, if I manage to keep going to the end of the month, that I'll have a rather rambling 50000 words that probably would struggle to be called a novel. but at least I will have written 50000 words!
Went to a read through at the Grads tonight - yet another night back at Buccleuch Place. The play we were reading was Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem and the leading/only candidate for the group's spring play next year. An exploration of Englishness, with some fairly obvious, some might say cliched, elements - let's set it on St George's Day, start it with a character singing England's unofficial national anthem, Jerusalem and quote from it frequently throughout. Then make the 'eccentric' anti-hero at the heart of it a benign drug dealer, peddling to the local kids and tempting them away from the semi-legal drug of alcohol that is available down the pub. It's all okay though, as most of the kids move on, once they've been through the teenage drinking/druggy/promiscuous phase. Overall it seems a classic case of making people think they are thinking - something that always plays well in the theatre. If you actually make people think you are generally less well-received.
Perhaps it's just me. Generally the reading seemed to go down well although someone else thought it smacked of bourgeois 'class tourism'. To me it seemed most relevant performed in England - would a similar modern examination of 'Scottishness' not be more relevant for a group based in Edinburgh?
It does seem to depend very much on the actor playing Johnny, the afore-mentioned 'good' drug-dealer. A couple of other decent male roles as well but, and given the balance of the good actors in the group perhaps a problem, the female roles are weak and pretty stereotypical. Thinking about it, the women seem passive, even the woman who acts as the instrument of the local council, or Johnny's former partner and mother of his child. I know this play was praised to the heavens in London's West End and on Broadway, but it seems casually misogynist in its portrayal of women without any real agency in the world.
Interestingly, when the group has done Shakespeare in recent years it has changed the gender of several characters - such as a female Polonius, Rozencrantz and Guildenstern as two of Hamlet's ex-girlfriends - to create more roles for women in plays that were mostly written with male characters. When they do a modern play there are presumably restrictions in the rights to prevent such changes, and so a male-heavy modern play remains a male-heavy play.