I've been worried about Jonah the elder for some months now. He has never been what you might call "stable", but there was a sort of logic to his behaviour when he spent all that time in the Granary Theatre, telling everybody what to do; I could keep an eye on him there, without leaving my nest in the ivy under the theatre's eaves. If I was away hunting, Penny (my wife and mother) would watch him until my return with live comestibles for her to enjoy at a gulp - I love watching the lashing tails disappear.
But he changed after that spell in Malcaster General Hospital, and now he hardly every leaves their nest, not even to go to that house called Jolly Boatman where all the men quackers cackle and empty runny stuff down their beaks. You may recall that we owls communicate telepathically in English; well, I've noticed that the more time he spends in the Jolly Boatman the more jumbled his thoughts become. Also, when he walks back to their nest, he wanders a lot and trips over what they call the kerbstone.

These days, he sits in front of their talking picture-box, swearing at Helen Young (whom I quite like because she has an owlish quality) and all the lady sports commentators. When he's not there, he's in his study, where Cara (his wife and nurse) is not allowed to puff her fags and he will not sip his coffee. They both have to go to the picture-box to do that, and he burns his pipe. I check on them when I'm on my way to the canal tunnel where the flying mice live. The flying mice are what the quackers call "a protected species". Not from me, they're not, but their wings are a bit chewy.

Anyway, I knew something was wrong when I saw him sitting in his study, frowning at his computer and chewing the stem of his pipe. I flew down to the window-still and tapped on the glass with my beak. He lumbered over and let me in.

"What's the problem?" I asked, when we were settled

"It's my pal Bruce," he said. "He's decided he wants to put on a production of my play 'A Taste of Freedom', the one about the Peasants' Revolt."

I swivelled my head to glance along the row of manuscripts on his shelf.

"All of my plays are like my children, but of all of them, I think this one is the most precious. Instinctively, I know he'll treat it kindly, but it's full of pitfalls; I want to help him, but I don't want to interfere,"

"Tell me about it," I said, knowing that I couldn't stop him telling me about it.

"It's an incident in English history that has always fascinated me," he rumbled, filling his pipe and tamping down the tobacco, "ever since I learned about it at school. It happened when the vast labouring mass of the populace was kept in its place by a relatively small aristocracy and administration, by use of religion. Understand?"

"Well, I know what religion is," I said, "but I don't understand it, or why it is."

"Neither do I," he acquiesced. "Even though I go along with some of its tenets. The thing is that the events of 1381 meant more to me in later years, when I got trapped in the military for a while. There I was, with dozens of other lads, being forced willy-nilly to do the bidding of a few toffee-nosed woodentops."

I decided against requesting any explanation of the terminology.

"Then I discovered," he continued, the smoke beginning to wreath around his hairy face, "that some of the key events took place in my own home town. And when I got back there after the army, I noticed that civilians were becoming enslaved by convention, so I began my research into the town records and found accounts of exciting events and reports of interesting people. Eventually - after about three years of research and development - I arrived at the first draft of 'Freedom'. I think it ran for about six hours, so I honed and whittled through eight more drafts... it was important that I had it ready for its premiere performance on the 600th anniversary in June, 1981."

"Did you make it?" I asked.

"The play did," he murmured, "but I didn't."

I looked at him as quizzically as only an owl can.

"Circumstances had demanded that we moved over to the continent, where I'd been running my own experimental group for some time and all the members were keen to give 'Freedom' its first performance. Unfortunately, I'd financed one too many productions and my bank manager called me in to answer a few awkward questions. This coincided with my employers demanding that I went off to Saudi Arabia for a spell, for which they would pay me more than enough to settle my overdraft; see?"

I didn't 'see', but said nothing. Back at the newly refurbished nest, Penny would be getting impatient. She was settling down in preparation for the new brood.
"I tried to explain the situation to that pair of bankers in terms of artistic fulfilment and creative challenge, but they had no means of understanding. I tried humour, but, for their staid and pragmatic breed, jokes are no laughing matter.

"There was no way of avoiding a six-month stint in Saudi Arabia with one short break in the middle, so I considered alternatives. It was important that we hit that date on the eve of Corpus Christi, exactly 600 years after the event; I would not be there to direct the play, so I had to find another director. There was only one person in the area whom I thought I might be able to trust to work with my actors to the high standard that 'Freedom' demanded. He and I had enjoyed a state of intense rivalry ever since he made the mistake of casting me in a comedic lead, but we had a grudging respect for each other's talents, so I approached him with a proposition. He accepted. He would base his early interpretational work on one of the two copies that I possessed of the ninth draft, while I took the other one off to the desert to carefully construct the final version. We would discuss progress by mail (telephone in emergencies) and I would come back with the means of making all the copies he needed to go into rehearsal."
Jonah the elder paused to draw breath and to relight his pipe, so I slipped out through the open window to proceed on my bat-hunt. When I flitted past a little later, my beak full of dewinged pipistrelle, he was scowling at his screen and thumping the keys. I wondered whether Bruce would appreciate how much the author suffered.

Next week: "THE PLAY TAKES SHAPE"

Jonah was a very experience director, teacher and writer who sadly passed away in February 2006. He was also the author of the highly successful "Playmaker - The Craft of Directing Plays (The Way I Seen It)".