If you write a play full of smoking and drinking

you can sit backstage before the show and watch stage management roll cigarettes to fill a battered 1930s cigarette packet, and mix water with burnt sugar solution and pour it through a funnel into a scuzzed-up 1930s cognac bottle. Then if everything is as it should be (and it is) you can watch the show, disbelief suspended, and well up when the actor playing Joseph Roth says (quoting the real Roth) staring into his glass of cognac, that if you drink enough, the line between what's miraculous and what's possible just blurs. Then afterwards maybe you wonder whether you came to theatre because although you'd more or less given up on God, you still wanted miracles, you still want to believe.

Red velvet curtains

So we opened my play The Thousand and Second Night on Tuesday, and there are seven performances to go. It's an epic...twenty-three actors playing sixty-something roles over thirty-eight scenes. One actor plays a Persian Musician, a Put Upon Husband at a ball in imperial Vienna, a Nazi Stormtrooper, a Corrupt Judge and a Parisian Priest. Backstage is a whirl of costume changes and sprinting between dressing rooms. And at two-and-a-half-hours it's the longest play I've ever written. There's a luxury to having all that space to tell a story. And working with such a huge cast, developing the play with them and a wonderful director, Hannah Eidinow, felt like having a magic toybox after writing plays for smaller casts. If I felt like writing a wonderworking Rabbi from Galicia, I threw one in. Best of all, we could have crowd scenes. I've always wanted to write crowd scenes. Like many of my fellow Miniaturists playwrights, I'm a monsterist at heart.

Now, though, I am doodling around with a two-hander for a bare stage with no props and actors in their own clothes. Just as a change. A new challenge. In between this epic and the next, of which more soon.

The best thing about The Thousand and Second Night is that it ends with a sweep of red velvet.

This picture's by Nikolai Kornum

What would Joseph Roth do?

My play, The Thousand and Second Night, opens in just over a week. I wrote it for twenty-three actors-in-training and it's an epic about Joseph Roth, and once of the best things about writing it was that I got to spend time in his company.

He didn't have a writing routine either; he lived a rackety life, mostly out of suitcases, writing at fever pitch, always short of money, torn up with guilt about his wife's schizophrenia, having a succession of intense affairs and drinking hard. In his last years, in the 1930s, in exile, he mainly wrote drunk in the Café Tournon in Paris. He lived in the hotel upstairs in a tiny room with just a bed in it. He'd come down of a morning and start drinking, and writing, and holding court as his fellow emigrés drifted in and out.

I wrote my play to try to work out why, at this moment of utter despair, with Europe dying, he wrote a novel that started out fantastical, frivolous, a fairytale. At first I thought it was escapism. But the more I worried at it, the more it seemed that having flirted with giving up fiction to be an activist, and having considered ending it all, he had eventually come round to a belief that art can save us. He called his novel The Tale of the Thousand and Second Night; like Scheherezade, he was writing for his life. And, really, why else would you write?