There's something disarmingly easy about directing a thing you've written yourself.

Much conversation when rehearsing a thing crafted by someone else - a stranger - is spent on trying to figure out what this or that character means when they say this or that thing. You look at the other things the character has said, you look at what the other characters have said about that character, you look at the overall story and try to figure out, in the context of all of that, what the original intention might have been.

But when it's a laboriously alliterative thing from your very own pen, of course you know. I know. And if They disagree, well, there's a clear winner in every argument.

Unfortunately for the cast, what this seems to translate into as far as Mme Directeur is concerned, is a pouncing on every potentially ambivalently delivered line along with a barked "do you know what you're saying there?" for heaven forfend that the poor actors don't see the 64th nuance in this or that weary old cliche.

Pity the actors.

I feel they've started to tense and inwardly perhaps roll an eye at the dreaded words. A similar visceral reaction to the "before we begin, we're going to do some exercises" line.

When we are done, if nothing else, they must all be given a prize for patience.