I remember pacing around my council flat in north London, knowing I hadn't yet found my voice. What I had written was all very well, it had a certain ability and was certainly distinctive, but it didn't automatically allow me to say what I wanted- in fact it led me astray, up a few dead ends. I didn't mind that, but I also needed a way to get directly from my brain to the page that didn't involve being virtually unconscious while writing.

I knew discovery of it was about finding a tone, and I set about finding one. The playwright's method, if he is any good, is to internalise what he intends to write; if he wants to write what a pigeon-fancier says he has to find the pigeon-fancier inside himself and speak from that. He mustn't describe from outside. The same goes for actors. This is one reason why so much of theatre is so weak, because writers often aren't broadminded enough to find much inside themselves, they generally come from a bigoted little cadre of self-riteous folk who think that the doctrines found in the Guardian newspaper are the correct ones, and they write from that, with different levels of emphasis.
The whole theatre world encourages this bigotry, bristles with it. It's moribund, it's finished, it's not worth wasting your time with.

But there I was, wasting my time with it.

My technique with Cat and Mouse was to present to the audience their own ideas until it hurt. Sometimes I would juxtapose them with other alien ideas, quite similar but alien to them nevertheless. I would start a sentence from one standpoint and end it on another, the audience would start with one response but find it was being shaken off by the rest of the sentence, and they were in danger of getting caught with the wrong opinion. So it goes when you don't think for yourself. Sometimes I would simply say things I wasn't allowed to say, parading my disobedience, like any comedian does- if he still dares. These days even comedians are in danger, but in those days it was specifically the theatre that was miles behind almost every other form, with its bigotry and stiff-minded adherence to doctrine. It was a celebration of smugness.
That smugness has now turned into something even worse, it has turned into a form of authoritarianism. The left is now more or less fascist.

So , I had my play- three characters essentially, Gengis Khan an Indian shopkeeper in North London, his aunt, a middle class English woman with a penchant for the latest left wing ideas, and his uncle, an Irish immigrant with an authoritarian streak, but a flair for adopting convenient ideas. Oh yes, there was the poet laureate, Dickwitts. But what theatre in Britain would put on such a play, one that was not only very dense and demanding and stylistically utterly alien and unfathomable to the theatre managements, but a play that also seemed to be attacking or ridiculing everything they believed in? The answer was, none of them were willing to produce such a play.

Good fortune struck. Such was my status in France at that time, that the huge Odeon Theatre which called itself, and in effect was,  the National Theatre of Europe, was arranging to do a presentation called "Around Gregory Motton," which was to be directed by Claude Regy, the celebrated director and 'discoverer' of Peter Hanke, Harold Pinter, Edward Bond, and myself, for the French. He heard about my latest play, and in a stroke of genius decided to give a huge slice of the budget for the project, directly to me, so that I could premiere my new play in Paris.

Because we decided to do it in English we were given the petit salle to do it in, but this suited our purposes. This was not a play to do in the 800 seater to a foreign audience unused to satire unless it was Moliere. In London we built a giant puppet theatre to put ourselves in, and after rehearsals shipped it over to Paris where we erected it, much to the amusement and bewilderment of our hosts.

We had Kevin McMonagle, who had so far been in two of my plays, Ambulance and Message for the Broken Hearted, Tony Rohr who had been in Looking at you (revived) Again, and Penny Dimond. Penny was an old friend from the Rain days, and had been in three more of my early plays in tiny theatres. This was the first time I have been able to pay her for working with me. She was a genius of comedy acting, and had a most effective way of registering moral outrage on her face. She is the embodiment of Aunty, and it is possible I wrote with her in mind before we started, because I had worked with her so much before. Kevin had to get every single word of every single line exactly right or the sense would be lost- and he drove the pace, and was effectively the band-leader. He has a brain that can store 40 notes on a scene and deliver each and every one of them. He combines all that technical mastery with a seemingly out of control manner and wild unpredictablity that made each moment potentially startling to an audience (and to me ). Kevin often refers to his roles , including in Ambulance, as my alter -ego, and our friendship lives in this bizarre context. He is the godfather to two of my children, and like me is a catholic.

Tony Rohr- I suppose I did write the part of Uncle, but it seems to me as if Tony wrote it. I certainly cannot imagine anyone else playing it, and now when I write his lines, in subsequent Gengis plays, it is Tony's voice I hear, and I write them for him.

He can portray that out-of-fashion aspect of the Irishness I know, that so perfectly fits these plays. He is one of the great Irish actors, a natural for Beckett. One of my great resentments of being stopped from having a career is that I wasn't able to do several other of my plays with Tony. I am always jealous when I see he is doing other things. I think one reason he finds my lines so easily is that much of what I write comes from the Irish part of my brain, his voice finds my rhythm.

They adapted to the very strict way of working where there was nil interpretation, it's like learning a score. But that score by the end of it was one they had written, and it was all interpretation, it is a strange paradox. The truth is a strange mystery of mutual reliance based on discipline - of writing, directing and acting. Nothing was left to chance, and that way we allowed chaos onto the stage.
The three of them were absolutely wild, they gave the impression of having just turned up at the theatre by accident and having landed on the stage by chance, the whole thing was haphazard and uncontrolled- and yet wasn't. They knew the level of precision needed, and policed themselves rigourously and took no liberties.  Rehearsal was pure enjoyment for me, they engaged completely with what I was trying to do, and they knew it was difficult and went at it with vigour, no matter what we asked them to do they did it. With actors of that calibre there is no nonsense about their creativity or any of that sort of talk. They know and I know where the creativity lies- for all of us, it is in serving the central idea of the play. Like slaves, all of us. As a director I am a slave to the play. They know that doing exactly what the play wants them to do, is what is required and that by doing that,  by going through that most narrow of eyes of the needle, real expression and artistic creativity is achieved. The result is, the paradox that it is something that I could not have written, or even imagined, because by following the demands of the play rigourously they make it more than I wrote not Less.

It is a truth that I encountered the opposite of in Europe and that opposite view is something you hear from lesser actors. Some people believe that the play is a starting point for everyone else's  'creativity'    - that is puerile nonsense and broadly accepted. I got nearly lynched in a theatre in Newcastle for saying it to an auditorium full of "professionals". I suppose it's a misunderstanding about at what point the actor's humanity comes into the mixture; through the prism of the play, and after it has been through it, or in a broad and scattered way instead of the play.  Many actors are now taught the latter, just as Roland Barthes liberated the reader from the tyranny of the text of a book, actors, and even more so directors, have been liberated from the tyranny of the play. This used to be the case primarily in Europe, now it applies here too, as the excessive power of directors within theatre takes its effect.  With actors of Penny, Kevin and Tony's an Patrick's calibre, you might be struggling to explain something and they will say to me- just say it the way you'd like me to say it- I say it,  and off they go. There's no preciousness, they know what they are doing, and they know what the play is for.

When we got to France the technical precision of our actors astonished them, they couldn't believe that we achieved what we did in three weeks, it takes them three months.

The show went very well. The french loved us and although I was known there, I was known only through productions by French directors, whose heaviness verged on the lugubrious. This high comedy came as a bit of a shock. There was one further problem- they didn't really understand what was being said, and French politics didn't correspond exactly to British politics- or at least they hadn't realised how much it did yet. The more we saw it, and the more the French laughed, the more we felt needed to show the play in England, where more pain and gain might be felt. Gengis returns to England