Edinburgh beckons – scarcely, two weeks away.

We have an IKEA bed set up in The Leathermarket rehearsal space; industrial-style practical lamps fixed to the metal-framed headboard. Plastic chairs laid out to remind us of the intense intimacy of the Pleasance ‘Beside’ space that will be home for the duration of the Fringe Festival – a venue more disposed to stand-up than our essentially horizontal meditations.

Despite two days’ highly productive R&D work earlier in the month I started the day uncertain, nervous.

Red Shift’s The Fall of Man weaves passages of Milton’s Paradise Lost (the Temptation, the Fall) into the anatomy of an illicit affair gone wrong. It’s ruthlessly exposing. No therapy here for Lost Love, Guilt, Jealousy or Shame. Just wounds prodded and poked, opened up for scrutiny.

There’s a rich, raw seam of material lurking not far beneath the surface and I’m hacking at it, for better or worse, in the hope that something honest and real comes through. But it’s been emotionally exhausting. I feel bruised…in the way I remember feeling bruised after  long night-time arguments with lover, long ago.

The actor-me considers the fact that I’m not mediating sufficiently (the benefit of characterising ‘outside of oneself’), but I’m sure that once we’ve nailed the parameters of the content and once I’ve unraveled my innards on the rehearsal room floor, a Peter will emerge, reconstructed, out of the wreckage.