"Get your character up a tree...

...throw stones at him, get him down". I think I first heard this way of structuring a three-act play from Stephen Jeffreys. I wondered if anyone would call me on the fact that the heroine of Cling To Me Like Ivy spends Act Two up a tree; it took another playwright, lovely Marissa Skudlarek, to notice. I never meant to take the structure advice quite so literally; it just happened. But it's still the best way I know of working out a journey for a play.

How to fly a magic carpet #2

(Don't try this at home). So, apparently, the seeds of this plant, Syrian Rue, also known as peganum harmala, were traditionally ground up to make the dye for Persian carpets (they make that gorgeous hot red colour). They're also entheogenic, so they can induce psychedelic trances. 

So, possibly, the carpet makers were high on dye, and as they were making the carpets they were  literally tripping.

So that's how you fly a magic carpet.

How to fly a magic carpet

I had been working on other projects, but my magic carpet play keeps wanting to get written—I was stomping down the Edgware Road the other day when I came across this magic carpet shop

and this supermarket...

and then I remembered this wooden box my mother brought from Baghdad (my family couldn't bring much when they left Iraq, but they did bring this box—and two rolling pins). Scheherezade looks rather louche here, telling stories to the king—and she's sitting on her very own magic carpet.

I was often disappointed, as a child, when carpets that looked like they ought to be magic utterly failed to take off, no matter how much wishing I did. But the good thing about being a playwright is that you can make things happen. And the magic carpet in my play is definitely taking off.