Dammit. So it's still running too long. Full run last night and it sat, albeit with some dithering, at one hour and 48 minutes. I'm aiming for a nice neat 90 minutes. So the great debate is how much will they speed up when they're consistently concentrating. 

Ty /Gregor said last night, with great surprise, "it's actually really funny. I hadn't realised". In fact, I think his actual words were "it's a hilarious farce". Which I had to take issue with like a pedant as it's not farcical in the slightest really. But I hope that my dark mind has yielded something that's darkly funny. Certainly, we're all laughing away watching it in that slightly slavishly adoring way that comes from seeing it too many times and anticipating your favourite bits. But we are undoubtedly biased.

I continue amazed at how much I love rehearsals. I arrived 8 minutes late from a train back from London last night and by rights, should have had no appetite at all for such frivolity when I'd been up since 5:30am. 

But beyond furious irritation when the actors were mostly late and - I'm guessing - hadn't travelled from another country to the rehearsal rooms, they won my heart again. They're acting now, you see, as well as urgently trying to learn their lines (books down on Monday!). And everytime they do a few little lines particularly well or get just the right facial expression, I want to jump up and hug them. And the final scene. Boof. 

I wait with equal terror and anticipation to see whether people (an audience - for we must have one at some point I suppose. But oh the bad language. Thank goodness I didn't make young Brad say the worst of words. Think of the grandparents!) are appalled or thrilled. Or just ambivalent. What larks.

Rehearsals lope on. To my surprise, I'm dearly loving it. Now the terrible scrutiny of is the script good enough is over (more or less), I'm left with the comical delight of seeing people I don't know (and some I do!) wrestle with words from my head.

It turns out my head (my lack of background research) failed me when it came to the Scottish judicial system. Last night, the lawyer in the cast told me sheepishly that the scene I described when the photographer is taken in for questioning by the Police would never have happened.

We ran the show from start to end on Sunday and it was - at a kind estimate - twenty minutes too long. At a mean estimate, thirty minutes too long. I think over-running in the Fringe is the height of rudeness so am currently on an editing rampage. It will clearly speed up when they know their words and know where to stand. But it'll be nice to leave them pause for thought too.

So the implausible prison scene, despite containing a beloved (by me only) line about a man whose eyes were filled with blood (the ultimate horror surely in a play of aesthetic overload), is gone. And it turns out that 'most everyone had secretly thought it didn't work but no-one was vulgar enough to mention it.

I love that, three weeks in, they feel that they can speak their minds. This is a good sign, right?