As it's now a year since their last post, I guess we should formally say goodbye to Encore Theatre Magazine. I'll leave the link up here just because the site still contains some wonderfully readable stuff, however out of date now. It was a marvellous experiment - witty, intelligent, thoughtful, pungent. There were plenty of things to disagree with. But it looks as if the effort to maintain an anonymous collective aesthetic statement was too great. If any of the writers would like to 'come out' it would be great to hear the story.

This is of course a thinly disguised attempt to draw attention away from the fact that I haven't posted for over a week. A temporary fog of chaos has descended over me thanks to two playreadings last week and my departure for Tokyo next week.

For the record, the readings went well and served their purpose, I think. The actors were Helen McCrory, Damian Lewis, David Westhead, Sean Chapman, Claudie Blakely and Eugene O'Hare in Orson's Shadow by Austin Pendleton - the first five of them playing, respectively, Vivien Leigh, Ken Tynan, Orson Welles, Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright. In Trance by Shoji Kokami at the Bush were Andrew French, Raquel Cassidy and the peerless Nicolas Tennant. Nick played a man who thinks he's the Emperor of Japan. Priceless.

I've been annoyingly ill on-and-off over the past week or so with a virus I can't seem to properly shake. So I've been at home preparing for the two readings which I'm involved with this week. The first is Orson's Shadow, an American play featuring Orson Welles, which takes place tomorrow in the Old Vic's rehearsal room; the next is on Friday at The Bush and it's called Trance by a Japanese playwright I know from Tokyo called Shoji Kokami.

There are dozens, perhaps more, playreadings happening across London in any given week now. They're never quite as straight-forward to get together as you might assume. I sometimes think the anxiety of casting them means that you might as well be doing a proper production of the play. And if you really want to show the play off well you have to be clever with the casting, too.

The number of these readings has grown exponentially since I started out. I've heard it darkly muttered that they are just the managements' way of evading their responsibility to a play. But at their best they can show a play in a new light. I can think of several plays from when I was at the NT which were springboarded forward into production on the basis of a sparkling reading. But they are outnumbered, inevitably, by the ones where the water closed over the piece's head shortly after. I guess they've taken over from the Royal Court's 'productions without decor' on a Sunday night. I once did a rehearsed reading of a new play which went so well in front of a gathering of all the artistic directors of the London new play theatres (we were lucky - you rarely get them all) that it never saw the light of day again - they all thought they'd seen it done, so what was the point of putting it on merely for the public? I've also been at readings which have propelled the play forward into production only for all concerned later to look back ruefully at the gloss of the reading and ask 'what went wrong?'. Some plays are just better as readings. On the whole, I tend to prefer the 'working readings' where there are only a handful of people and the author stands a chance of learning something about their play, rather than it feeling like the worst kind of first night.

So while emailing and occasionally phoning this stuff in from home, I've been watching the re-runs of ER that are dotted throughout the day. It's very confusing. On Channel 4 in the mornings is what seems to be around series 8 or so, in the afternoon on More 4 there's series 4 (I think). In the evenings scattered through the week is the present series 12. So you can see Romano both after and then before his arm got chopped off by a helicopter blade (choppered off?); Greene is still alive in the afternoons and there are even glimpses of Dr Ross; in the evenings there's what seems like a whole new staff, with Carter having left the ER for Africa. Actually the montage effect all this creates is not unmoving and lends perspective: people who are mere children in the afternoons are running the place in the evening.

The whole so-called 'freedom of expression' controversy is something that I don't really want to wade into. I'm referring of course to the famous Danish cartoons. It seems to me that relatively minute numbers of people have had reason to use this as a further opportunity to stir up notions of a 'clash of civilisations'. Some leaders of Muslim-majority countries need it for nationalistic reasons; fundamentalist mischief-makers (of whom it seems to me there are a very limited number, including the newly gaoled Abu Hamza and the marvellously unreasonable Anjem Choudary on Newsnight last night); and naturally the meeja, fanning the flames of a fire that they hope to warm their hands at in due course.

But I have my instincts (if you remember the Bezhti incident). I am a very old fashioned liberal in this respect, believing in the free trade in opinion. In this regard I am delighted to find a trenchant piece by Christopher Hitchens, a brilliant writer whom I had almost given up on, expressing some of my gut feeling, even if he, too, tends towards the last-struggle-for-the-soul-of-mankind end of things.

My own modest thought in all this, though, is that there is something interesting about the fact that it's images we're talking about, not words. In the Christian-dominated world we had our crisis about image and representation around 500 years ago with the Reformation. In some ways the period since has been the inevitable unravelling of taboos. (The recent fuss about Jerry Springer - the Opera and the censorship of Will and Grace is the last hurrah for the rearguard, not the opening of a new front, as some seem to wish - they being, oddly or not, roughly the same mix of nationalistic leaders, fundamentalist mischief-makers and the media as before). Is there an image now that could bring us out into the streets? Threatening death? I can't think of one. But that wasn't always the case. This is not to be smug about Christianity versus Islam, just to say that there seem to be common patterns which monotheistic religions must go through over time. And when I say 'us' I speak of course as an atheist in the most secular country in the world (after Russia and South Korea). Thank God.

I've been wiped out with some sort of virus over the last few days - hence the no posting. I still feel acutely groggy, but can still pass fingers across a keyboard. Just.

On the theatre front, this has been posted on the whatsonstage.com discussion board by a Monsterist. It picks up on the Guardian piece by David Farr on writers and directors which I commented on at the end of last year. Sticking with the religious theme, there's a distinct danger of this all descending into counting angels on the heads of pins. But the Monsters have successfully kicked up the dirt with their campaign and have been boldly asserting the rights and, in fairness, the responsibilities of playwrights. So I think they deserve all the attention they're getting.

Personally I think that a tightening of their manifesto might suit them and by giving the project a tad more definition help give it an even bigger profile. As I understand it the Dogme film-makers didn't permanently renounce sin and go to live in the Dogme monastery. They issued their strict doctrines (not unlike, incidentally, Luther's theses nailed to the door of the church in Wittenburg) and then declared whether the next project they were working on was a Dogme film or not. Couldn't it perhaps be the same for the Monsterists? Start a reformation...

I am safely home again and have slept for hours and hours.

I wasn't going to post any pictures of my cast but since this has appeared on another website after the press conference, I think I can. (Incidentally, if you click on that link to the Japan Theatre Guide, the caption under the picture of me literally translates as "Pole Mirror of production".)

On the left is Tatsuya Fujiwara and in the middle is Masachika Ichimura; next to me is Miyoko Ito, interpreting.