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It came out of a lifelong passion for Poe's work and for the man himself. I'd come across two or three pages describing this obscure incident, in the last few months of his life, when Poe was arrested for being drunk and disorderly and shoved for one night into Philadelphia's Moyamensing Prison to 'dry out'. Upon his release, he gave an acquaintance, John Sartain, a detailed account of the hallucinations and nightmares he'd suffered that night 鈥� and these were extraordinary, as bizarre and terrible and weirdly beautiful as anything in his stories, and it struck me that here was a metaphor for his whole life, that the best way to do justice to that life would be by creating a kind of dream-play around these hallucinations, as opposed to a more straightforward cradle-to-grave 'biopic' treatment: Poe's intense life was the inner life of his dreams and obsessions and memories, and these didn't have the rationalist, linear structure or naturalistic straightforwardness that biopic structure imposes.

First of all, it's an attempt to evoke what it was really like to be inside the head of Edgar Allan Poe: it tries to evoke all the different aspects of his imagination, so there's the obviously macabre stuff, but there's also a more lyrical sense of Poe reaching for visions of beauty, and feminine beauty specifically, that can never be grasped, or grasped for long without their being snatched away. And there's also a wild, grotesque comedy, which was also a crucial part of what he was about. His humorous stories, like 'Never Bet The Devil Your Head' and 'The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether' are less well known than the horror stories, and frankly they aren't nearly as good, but they're a significant part of his work 鈥� and filled with an extreme, almost surrealist slapstick comedy, particularly involving images of physical mutilation and incarceration, and there's certainly a strong aspect of that kind of black, absurdist humour in the play 鈥� I was particularly interested in that aspect of Poe which anticipates the likes of Kafka, Ionesco and Bunuel, the surrealists and expressionists and Artaud's Theatre Of Cruelty.

But Moyamensing is also about how utterly at odds Poe was with his own society. The story America likes to tell about itself is a story with a big fat happy ending: the place where anyone's dream can come true, the country that's the crowning point of freedom and democracy, etc. And Poe is completely at odds with that: his work is radically pessimistic, it prefers strange dream-like landscapes to the American social scene, its language is hieratic and 'difficult', yet it equally disdains 'Yankee' notions of 'good taste' and 'serious culture' imported from English high society. It's also devoid of the puritan moralism that a contemporary like Hawthorne brought to Gothic themes 鈥� one critic said that Poe wrote as if Christianity had never been invented, which is quite something in America, then or now! And so I was interested in the theme of a writer completely, irreconcilably at odds with every assumption of his culture, high and low: starting the play on an election night helped to emphasise this.

Oh yes. He'd been one of my first literary loves and any writer who's done a lot of work, as I have, in the fields of the Gothic and the fantastical, the surrealist end of psychological drama etc. has to acknowledge him as one of the masters, maybe the master, the man who poured more raw, intense feeling into the Gothic forms than any other writer before or since. Also, for a writer like myself, who frankly had a longer than average struggle to get his voice heard in the first place, he was always a kind of patron saint, a holy martyr, by way of the struggle he'd had. The connection was more intensely personal than simple literary admiration.

The biggest challenge was getting the thing produced at all! The actual writing flowed very easily, I recall: my lifelong interest in Poe and my own feelings, at least at the time, of being a literary 'outsider' meant this story was bottled up in me for a long time before I got to pour it free. But the first time we pitched it, we couldn't find a 'slot' it would be at home in: it's such a weird and wayward play. But I never lost faith in it: Moyamensing was the script that got me through the door at 大象传媒 Scotland and laid the ground for my professional career, and even after having a lot of other things produced, I always wanted to go back to it. Then, miraculously, David Ian Neville and Radio Scotland rescued it from limbo, with at last the slot it deserved, as a Halloween broadcast: I suppose Poe's work is proof that the dead always come back when you love them hard enough! I approached it with some trepidation, thinking I might have to do a lot of rewriting, but I found it stood up very well. The rewriting I did was basically polishing: a brisker exposition, a clarification of some details and symbols. But it's still, fundamentally, the script I wrote in the first place. In the meantime, I'd developed the story as a one man show in my parallel career as a live theatrical storyteller, performing it at this year's Edinburgh Fringe - and I was able to incorporate into the final draft of the radio play things which had worked well in the live show, even though that, like all my storytelling shows, was itself unscripted, essentially developed as a series of memorized improvisations.

A relief! The Edinburgh Fringe version I'd performed had been an intense, demanding show: I'd finished every night drenched head to foot with sweat and feeling half-mad myself, so when at the final rehearsal I heard David, directing, say to John Kielty, who was playing Poe, that he would and should be exhausted by the end of it, I thought to myself 鈥淕ee, great, tonight it's someone else who'll go through all that, while I get a comfy seat!鈥� And then to just sit back and have the story told to me, and for it to come across so strongly as a piece of storytelling, was enormously satisfying.

Pleasantly, yes. There's a couple of places near the end which, in the one man show, I'd played in a very manic, extreme, expressionistic, almost Theatre Of Cruelty sort of way, which seemed the right way to go at the time. But David got John Kielty, as Poe, to play these moments in a much quieter, gentler way and the result, far from dissipating tension, was electrifying: Poe's plight came across far more powerfully precisely because of that gentleness 鈥� I felt Poe's tragedy more fully than ever before, and I'm the guy who wrote the damn play. I think John's version of Poe is a far more likeable, vulnerable character than my own portrayal 鈥� it's moments like that which remind us playwrights why we need actors. And that's the greatest pleasure in playwriting 鈥� those moments when a talented actor and director give your words, without changing a comma, a depth and resonance beyond what you saw there: it's like a parent seeing its own kid walking without needing to be held up.

Oh yes. As I write, I'm just waiting to hear the final cut, but certainly the live performance, seeing such a confident and proficient cast have fun with a play which, for all its horror, is supposed to be a lot of fun, was enormously heartening. And to see the story come across so clearly was important: precisely because the play aims to create the effect of a kind of surrealist stream-of consciousness, it's all the more important that it has to actually have a narrative structure of almost Hitchcockian tautness and precision, a very precise beginning and middle and end and 'through-line' between them all.

Back to my live storytelling 鈥� and more Poe. On Halloween, at Lee Rosy's in Nottingham, I'm performing one of my 21st Century Poe stories, in which I update Poe's stories to contemporary Glasgow. I'm doing Falling For The Ushers, in which Roderick and Madeline Usher are no longer stuck in some gloomy mansion in the middle of nowhere, but are superstars of the conceptual art scene (think Damien Hirst meets the Chapman Bros!). I'm doing that same show on Nov. 8th at Belper in Derbyshire and then I have a scarifyingly short amount of time to prepare my Christmas show, The Strange Tale Of The Glasgow Golem, in which a 16th. Century Jewish folk tale is reinvented in seventies Glasgow: we premiere on December 6th. It's a fairy tale more than horror: I need a break from horror! And then it's back to trying to get new work commissioned for the radio: once again, like Poe, I'm trudging the figurative sidewalks, trying to get my voice heard....