Thirty-five.

First, some housekeeping chatter, then something more personal I’ve been circling around for some time.

I’ve been determined that I would stick to this whole Substack thing for at least a year. It’s been really rather lovely to do something that is very much about me showing up and delivering each week but that feels like it’s for me. I haven’t paid too much attention to how many people are reading it, or how much chatter or attention it is or is not getting, and honestly I’ve been pleasantly surprised by my own discipline. Resisting the ‘stats’ page has been important because frankly most people who start a Substack don’t see growth for a long while (if at all, most people give up before it happens). This was never really about generating a following, though, so much as it was about working through my own thoughts about what I’m doing, being more purposeful in managing my work, and engaging with the part of my brain that wants change in our industry but didn’t previously get room to breathe.

I passionately believe that the main reason artists, journalists and audiences distrust producers is they don’t see enough of us being open and honest about what’s going on. So in my own small way, this experiment has been a way to right that wrong, even if I have always had low expectations about how many people might read it.

When I do encounter people ‘in the wild’ who actually read my waffle and they tell me they enjoy it, it never fails to come as a surprise to me. I was more than a little overwhelmed just a couple weeks ago when someone much more senior in the industry and who I’ve looked up to for a long time told me he reads it and enjoys it. I just don’t naturally believe that anyone is paying that much attention, so it’s a very welcome, and unexpected, compliment when they do. Well, when you do. That probably says more about how I view myself than I’d ordinarily be willing to admit.

Past attempts at having a side-thing have failed from a lack of consistency on my part (sitting on my hard drive are at least three novels, two plays and various other attempts at blogging or somesuch that never got past the first burst of attention). So this week is about very much me turning up and delivering something, even if it’s not quite what I had in mind.

Producing could drive a person crazy, but if anything, doing this has helped me stay sane. I’m certain that there’s no point doing this if I start doing it on autopilot, which has been the case in the last few weeks when I’ve hit Wednesday afternoon and realised I still have to write the next day’s stack (it is currently 11.30pm on Wednesday…). Whether that means I change up the rhythm now I’ve outlasted all previous attempts, or I start to adjust what output on here looks like remains to be seen. I think it’s probably both - I think maybe the pressure of delivering weekly isn’t always helpful, but sometimes it stops the whole endeavour languishing and falling apart out of inaction. Whatever the case, I haven’t really had room to think about it lately, and very much would like to take the time to do that.

Anyway, all of this is to say I am taking next week off work to try and reset a bit, so expect to hear from me again the week after - unless inspiration strikes!

And now, part two.

If I seem in a reflective mood, it’s no coincidence. I will turn 35 on Monday, which for my entire adult life has been creeping towards me as a huge, admittedly arbitrary, milestone.

If you’ve been here from the start, you may recall that my first full-length post featured a series of references to Company, Stephen Sondheim and George Furth’s 1970 musical. In the show, Robert (Bobby) is (not-so-)surprised when his friends - all married or engaged - throw him a secret birthday party. When Bobby fails to blow out any candles on his birthday cake, his friends pat him on the back and tell him his wishes can still come true.

What follows is a series of vignettes - perhaps imagined, perhaps remembered. While each of his close friends is approaching middle age with successful careers, children or spouses, Bobby is single, cynical about love, and in so many ways lost. From the outside he seems happy, successful and ready to settle down, and his friends variously envy his freedom or try to set him up with someone. Bobby is detached from all of it at the start, overwhelmed by everyone’s nagging, wishing for nothing in particular. He’s seeking love because he knows he should, but not really trying very hard. Each vignette slowly chips away at the front he’s built.

Despite all the faults and foibles he can point to in everyone else’s relationships, he slowly finds himself admitting that he wants a turn too. When his friend Amy, herself overwhelmed by it all, almost doesn’t turn up to her own wedding, he suggests they get married so “everyone leaves us alone”. In private he insists he’s ready, if only it would just happen, trying to imagine a marriage where he doesn’t have to compromise on anything. Finally at the show’s climax, his closest friend Joanne - an older woman on her third marriage, herself clearly not okay - challenges him directly, then propositions him in an incisive calling-out of all the lies he’s told himself. When she tells him she’ll care for him, he responds “who will I care for?” and in that moment the whole artifice he’s built falters - causing him to spiral - as he finally admits he wants more. We return to the birthday party, as everyone is leaving.

The final addition to the musical, which took Sondheim a while to ‘find’, is “Being Alive”, which replaced the frankly much more bleak “Happily Ever After”, which takes a jolly, whimsical-sounding accompaniment and layers on top of it a total rejection of love and marriage. You can hear echoes of Sunday in the Park with George and Into the Woods in the cut song, which eventually found a home in the revue Marry Me a Little (the title song of which was itself also cut from and restored to Company… keeping up?). Hal Prince always insisted it wasn’t the right song, and he was right. In the end, Bobby’s eleven-o-clock number would become the musical’s most famous tune, in which Bobby initially rubbishes the idea of being tied down in marriage, before eventually pleading for someone to “crowd [him] with love”. Being Alive is the opposite of Happily Ever After - ballad-like, slowed down, but with optimism instead of pessimism. Entire books could be written about the deceitful simplicity of it (and I’m sure many a dissertation has been), which like many other Sondheim finales, layers together everything from the previous few hours in the most complex way over the most straightforward of structures. I still find new things in it 15 years after first hearing it.

Of course Company isn’t really just about marriage. Critics have speculated over the years that Bobby, like Sondheim, might be gay (something he’s even accused of by three of his affairs in the song this blog it takes its name from). Others have written about how Bobby’s relationship with Joanne - spiky, troublesome Joanne - might be an Oedipal allegory for Sondheim’s own life. As for marriage, Sondheim himself resisted it for a long time, only settling down in his final years.

Whatever the case, I’ve always been drawn to Bobby. To me, the musical is really about hopes unrequited, about still feeling lost when everyone around you seems secure, about the identities we outwardly display for others and the ones we try and find for ourselves in secret, about hitting 35 and still not having answers. It’s about who you choose to be, as much as who you are underneath it all. It’s about what you wish for, or whether you wish for anything at all, and whether life is worth living with nothing to look forward to. Every so often I find myself returning to it.

I don’t really have a favourite musical, but for one reason or another, Company has always been the one I reach for when I’m pressed to name one. Most Sondheim aficionados would, I think, point to Sunday in the Park with George for all its musical complexity as Sondheim’s best character study; others love Into the Woods for its subversion, Sweeney Todd for its operatic heights and entertainment value, maybe Pacific Overtures or Passion if they’re trying to be clever. For me it’s always Company. It’s always where I end up. It’s an early Sondheim, comparatively, before the great heights of those other musicals, and it paints in broader strokes than some of the others, which is perhaps why it was easy for me to get my teeth into when I first encountered it at uni. In any case, it’s stuck with me.

When I decided to pursue theatre as a career, 35 was the target I set myself. If I haven’t made it work by 35, then I’ll move on, before it’s too late.

Like Bobby, I find myself turning 35, staring down the barrel of the rest of my life, wondering whether I’ve made the right decisions, wondering whether it’s too late to fix my mistakes. Those of us who choose to work in theatre but not attached to a bigger, wealthier organisation have to sacrifice so much to make it work - I spent my 20s scraping together pennies for Tube fares and never going on holiday. I’ve spent the first half of my 30s still living at home, gradually earning more money, but still lacking security or even my own space. I don’t particularly regret any of that, aside from one sliding doors moment about a decade ago, but in any case I most certainly have not ‘made it’, let alone made it work. Rather like Bobby, the older I get, the more my cynicism about my life comes to the fore. Those of us working in theatre often define ourselves by it because it’s so all-encompassing - when someone asks me how I am, I respond with how work is going. When someone asks me what I’m up to, I describe the projects I’m working on. 15 years in, I’m starting to wonder if I’m defining myself by failures and near-misses rather than my successes. I certainly thought I’d be further along than I am by now.

Like Bobby, I’m single. Like Bobby, the idea of marriage - or god forbid, children - absolutely repels me. Like Bobby, I often push back when people get too close. Like Bobby, I’ve resisted moves and things that would be good for me as part of a defensive crouch, out of an abundance of self-preservation. Like Bobby, I’m very comfortable in the company of someone like Joanne, drinking more than she should and reserving her barbs for everyone else and not for me. Like Bobby, I take great pleasure in helping people find their next, right step, and cheering them on along the way. Like Bobby, I have a large circle of friends, each of varying depths, and often each kept just outside of the innermost circle for no explainable reason.

Like Bobby, I appear to be admitting much more about myself than I intended to when I started this.

Like Bobby, I don’t know what comes next, and I don’t know what my next move should be. Like Bobby, it doesn’t quite ever seem to happen. Like Bobby, I don’t know if what I’ve been doing is what I should continue doing. Like Bobby, I can’t always tell where I’ve taken the wrong turns. Like Bobby, I’m not sure if the thing I think I want really is what’s meant for me.

I’d be lying if I said I haven’t wavered the closer 35 has got. I have taken many turns, right ones and wrong ones, over my years doing this job. I have had plenty of successes and plenty of failures. I still feel like I’m barely beginning my journey, and yet I also feel more detached and indifferent to it than I ever have, because to be a producer is often to be drained of every scrap of energy and every penny you have saved in order to serve whatever project it is you’re working on.

After 15 years, I have no pennies saved, and I have little energy left to summon and use to drive it all forward.

The truth has always been that relaunching my company last year, starting this Substack, refreshing the branding, writing the roadmap - it’s all an attempt to give it one last shot. To see through what I started when I had that sliding doors moment, which I’ve shied away from for a long time. I am lucky to be surrounded by many very wonderful people and to have built some very lovely relationships in and out of this industry. Yet right now, as I sit waiting to blow out my candles, like Bobby, I don’t quite know what I’m wishing for.

Producing theatre could drive a person crazy. In fact, it has driven a lot of people crazy over the years.

As well as my 35^th birthday, Monday is also the 14^th anniversary of my first ever main house press night, in the truly wonderful York Theatre Royal.

That’s also the only press night I’ve ever had in a theatre that big. And that rather feels like failure, even when I know objectively that it’s so very much more complicated than that.

In “Side by Side by Side”, one of Bobby’s friends remarks that “we get older every year, yet [Bobby] stays the same.” It’s meant as a compliment, but I’ve always heard it as a reprimand - everyone else moves forward, Bobby continues to tread water.

That song turns into “What Would We Do Without You?”, a vaudevillian celebration of all the ways Bobby - as the unattached, single friend - supports everyone around him’s success, and how much they value him. In the middle of it all is Bobby, a puppeteer, a valuable beloved friend, but not enjoying any of the fruits of his labour that all his friends get to enjoy. As another friend remarks in “Side by Side by Side”, Bobby “doesn’t have the good things and he doesn’t have the bad things. But he doesn’t have the good things either.”

I feel as if I have trod water for a long time now.

I promised myself that I’d give this Substack thing a year, and that means I’m also giving all the things I kickstarted last November a year too. I shall see, when the end of 2026 rolls around, what it is that comes next for me - in theatre and outside of it. I shall see whether the decade-long roadmap makes it past its inaugural year.

I promise you that despite the rather dour tone of all this, there is a lot in the pipeline that’s really rather exciting. I have plenty on the cards I’m excited to try to do, inside theatre and outside of it. At this moment of reflection, I’m considering which parts to hold on to.

Whatever the case, thanks for sticking around. Thanks for reading. And, forgive the self-indulgence, happy almost-birthday to me.