I've been pretty shattered today, as yesterday was a 17-hour fest of teaching and theatre-going. Lear was pretty good, thanks for asking, even though it was in Newcastle rather than Leeds, as I mistakenly led you to believe. The kids were fine, though Danny Moore's experimention with slo-mo crisp eating annoyed the middle-class toss-arses in the row in front of us.

I should explain my class terminology here. Though it pains me to admit it, I am now middle class. But the above mentioned toss-arses were the sort of people I mean when the part of me that is still working class uses "middle class" as an insult. There were three of them: mum, dad and teenage daughter. Mum clearly wasn't getting any off the speccy goon she'd married (probably because she was, as poet Rob Bellerby pointed out, "a bit of a munter, sir"). She certainly perked up every time Edmund came on stage. The daughter - let's call her Jemma, or Emily - was bored off her tits, and seemed to want nothing more than to go home and get back to her Physics homework and mock Oxbridge entrace exams.

Anyway, you and I know that eating a packet of crisps slowly in a theatre actually makes more noise than troughing them back at normal speed. But acquiring that knowledge is a painful rite of passage, and Danny was going through it last night. The toss-arses didn't turn round and politely ask us to ask him to stop. They just made comments to each other about it being "iwwitating". Eventually Telf got a bit iwwitated himself, told Danny to be quiet and firmly asked the speccy one if he would accept our apologies. Only he did it in that special Telf voice that suggests that if the apologies aren't accepted the apologisee will be subjected to the variant of the Vulcan Death Grip that gets taught on Bristol University English courses.

The show was a mixed bag. Corin Redgrave's Lear was good, though for my money he kind of fluffed the final sequence. Edgar wasn't really up to the job, but Edmund was superb. Lear's a bit like Paradise Lost: the bad guy is by far the most likeable character. I find Edmund's Darth Vader-like repentance once he knows he's dying a bit wet, though. I'd be much happier if the play ended with Lear, Cordelia, Albany, Kent, Gloucester and Edgar dead, and Edmund standing centre-stage with Goneril and Regan on either arm. As the lights went down his final line would be, "now it's mine! all mine! ha ha ha ha ha!". Much more satisfactory.

I haven't seen a lot of Shakespeare in the three years since I took to being a playwright myself. I look at him with different eyes now. As I've said before, I've started to notice that his story structures are a bit shit to say the least. Audiences don't notice because his characters and language are so fucking fantastic that they carry us along, past all the weird contrivances of letters thrown through windows and women pretending to be statues of their dead selves and mistimings and misunderstandings. These days, lacking the power of Shakespeare's talent and influenced by film, we're obsessed by precise structures. Well, at least I am. I suppose in that regard I'm more of a screenwriter that writes for the stage than a proper playwright.

The other thing that struck me is that if he were around today he'd be absolutely minted. The bloke died getting on for half a millennium ago, and his stuff is still playing to packed houses. And not just school parties and toss-arses out for self-improvement, either. There were people there, it seemed to me, just for the fun of it.