Happy birthday to The 39 Steps… and me!

The success of Art — which turned into a West End, touring and international industry for a while - enabled David Pugh to slow down for a bit, but like all good producers, he ultimately wanted to make art, not just endless re-runs of Art; and got another success to follow Art into Wyndham’s with The Play What I Wrote. But no producer can always recreate his own winning formula, and he floundered with his next collaboration with The Right Size when he produced Ducktastic! at the Albery in 2005. Just as success hasn’t stopped him, neither has failure, and this year he was back in the producing fray with another Yasmina Reza play, God of Carnage (which he cleverly closed after it recouped its initial investment, instead of re-casting and threatening those gains) and Brief Encounter, which he has supported into a run though I doubt it has made him much, if any, money. Sometimes doing good work is enough cause for celebration.

And that’s what I need to try to celebrate for myself. Arts journalism isn’t the best paid business in the world - but then, as I always remind myself when I feel like complaining, no one forces me to do it. I do it for the joy, pleasure and love of what I write about. And it does pay my bills, just about. Besides, what else could I do? Or more importantly, want to do? It’s a privileged life and I remind myself of it constantly.

And if I’m in a reflective mood today, that’s also because I am celebrating an anniversary of my own: a birthday. I have been trying to ignore this one, but maybe I should just embrace it. And this is my own way of doing so publicly!

This blog has frequently been a forum in which I’ve inevitably blurred the boundaries between my private and public lives; and those divisions happen also to be one of the subjects of Christopher Shinn’s Now or Later that premiered at the Royal Court last night. Set on an American presidential election night, the play might appear to be topical; but the real-life story of this political battle is already proving to be stranger - and infinitely more scary - than anything Shinn has dreamt up. And so is the possible outcome.

He optimistically imagines a victory for the Democratic candidate; but even a playwright as evidently tuned into his own country’s political landscape as Shinn surely wouldn’t have dared to create a character as frightening as Republican running mate Sarah Palin - or with a personal family story like hers, that has already been turned from scandal into a rallying cry for her version of family values. In a short interview in last Sunday’s Observer, Shinn was asked if he was ever worried about reality upstaging the drama he was creating, and he replied, “When I started writing it about a year and a half ago, it was already becoming clear what the issues of the election would be. But I felt that the issues raised in the play would be relevant no matter what happened. If you make a decision that you can’t write about anything current, then you are really limiting yourself. “

And where Palin’s life and family story have now become public property, so the President elect is here immediately propelled into a scandal precipitated by the revelation that his 20-year-old gay son has attended a college party dressed as Mohammed. Opening the play on the 7th anniversary of 9/11 underlines the dangers that it also deals with of fomenting anti-Muslim sentiments, however unwittingly.