Artair believes that this play will be his masterwork, combining the appeal of a great – and to some extent – forgotten Irish novelist with the nostalgic appeal to the Gaelic/Celtic past. He can see it attracting interest (and grants) in Galway and Dumfries, in North Wales and down here in Cornwall – Kernow in the old tongue – and even in Brittany where they are keen to keep alive the Brezhoneg language. His readings have always gone down well there.

As he is carefully blotting Brinsley’s last sentence – This is all my bum – he suddenly sees Daniel Day-Lewis as Flann O’Brien. Not only would Daniel Day-Lewis make a wonderful, tortured, poetic and glamorous Flann O’Brien, he would also lift the whole enterprise out of the mire of dutiful regional theatre into a cosmos of serious, deeply committed acting. It could easily lead to a movie, in fact it would certainly lead to a movie if Daniel agreed to do it. Daniel is English, but he lives in Ireland and feels a deep kinship – Artair is sure – with the Irish prehistory that Flann O’Brien both loved and parodied. He wonders where Daniel stands on Celtic myth. He seems to be a very serious sort of feller.

Out of the broad but salt-stained windows, through which the lifeboat men used to keep watch, he sees the mud emerging as the tide recedes. Out to one side is the open sea, and Smugglers’ Doom, a sandbar that only shows at very low tide. Directly across the estuary is the wreck of a small fishing boat, scuppered, the locals say, and now he sees the wheelhouse appearing, draped in seaweed bunting.

Like all creative people, he feels refreshed and vigorous after his thunderclap of an idea. The ideas are all out there, he knows, and we – he extends his largesse to all genuinely creative people – are the lightning rods. We bring the ideas down to earth. Now the remains of the winch on the fishing boat that pulled in the nets appear. The winch is mottled and rusted. He never tires of the action of the tides. Long-legged birds with probing beaks – he’s not good on the names of birds, but he believes they are either sandpipers or curlews – are already arriving to prospect in the mud. Oddly enough, they keep their underbellies snowy white, even though they spend so much of their lives in this mud: nature – an infinite resource for the fertile mind.

Dear Daniel Day-Lewis

I know this comes rather out of the blue, but I want to tell you that I have laboured in the theatrical vineyard for some years.

(Does this sound a little stilted? Yes it does.)

Dear Daniel Day-Lewis