Machines. We make them, we use them, we occasionally Rage Against them. They can help the sick and elderly  or drop a bomb in your chimney. All in all, they’re a mixed bunch.

My producer has told me to do a blog about the new show I’m making. Part of this process involves me coming up with an “elevator pitch”. This means the thing that you would say about your new project to some dreadfully important person who could change your career forever if you had them cornered in an elevator for thirty seconds. I’m guessing said important people take the stairs now. This is also thing I have to whip out when people ask me “what’s the show about?”.

I always struggle with these, because I tend to let a whole seraphic host of ideas bounce around in my head before throwing a trawler net over them and dragging them flapping and hosannah-ing into a few pages of writing. But here’s my shortlist.

1. It’s about a man struggling to be a good father to a bright but quarrelsome girl.

1. It’s about said girl struggling to understand a world of rules, restrictions and lost possibilities.

1. It’s an epic steampunk fairtytale for grownups that will totally rock your socks off until the auditorium is just one big sock receptacle and the theatre staff look at me like “really, Jack, THIS AGAIN?”.

1. It’s about machines. The little ones, like radios and bicycle wheels, the big ones, like battleships and factories, and the social and economic machine, the one we have created to bring us freedom and prosperity, but, like Frankenstein’s Monster, has turned on its makers to destroy their habitats and their happiness. I would call this machine Capitalism, as uncomfortable as that makes people at dinner parties who were just trying to ask what I’ve been up to.

1. It’s about me. Isn’t everything writers write? It’s about my struggle to grow up and fit in with contemporary British society, and my obsession with fantasising about different worlds, molded by a bombardment of video games and sci-fi movies in my youth and hardened in the fires of global change.

1. It’s Disney Pixar’s Up, but with robots and swearing.

1. It’s about England. A country that for many is a proxy for far-right views, for others a source of post-imperial guilt and shame. For me, it is a story that we tell ourselves, one with elements of no small subtlety and frail beauty buried within it, a story we can use, if we choose, to arm ourselves against oppression and division rather than to perpetuate it.

One of those? Maybe? Or a mix of some or all of them? Basically, you should go see it.  There. Marketing absolutely NAILED. I’m off to the pub.

Grandad And The Machine is in development over April and May, before launching at venues across the UK. You can see performance dates here.