My short Play The Gasman Cometh will be performed at the Cotswold Playhouse on 11th October at 14:00.

It’s a dark comedy set in a Crematorium – Andrew and Frida have both come to bury their late spouses… only to recognise each other from a previous traumatic event. Can they keep their secret from their in-laws? Can they use the meeting to begin coming to terms with their loss?

The play was originally performed as part of the Salisbury Fringe back in 2016, but I’ve always liked it, and it will be great to see it performed again. Tickets available here.

My stage play Paper Human will be given an online table read by R Creatives in September, with a possibility of an actual (scratch) performance later in the year. After Bristol Old Vic were so interested in it last Autumn, but ultimately didn’t select it, it’s great to get another chance, especially given how long it’s been in the writing. If you’re interested in listening in, you can get a (free!) ticket here, all welcome!

We live in an age of Algorithms. Paper Human tells the story of the very first one, the wartime use of IBM technology to identify – on racial grounds – the Jews of Holland and France.

Another short piece published, this time as part of National Flash Flood day. Trollbooth is a very dark piece, but mercifully short!

I’ve recently gone back to working on some short stories, with some success.

Nosferatu, originally developed as one of a series of monologues – each one involving a narrator standing by a gravestone – was published by DoubleSpeak and can be found here.

My Radio Play Square With The House is being broadcast on Adam Crowther’s BBC Upload show this week!

The broadcast will be at the following times:
Thursday, 21st August on BBC Radio Gloucestershire & BBC Radio Wiltshire from 6pm and from 7pm on BBC Radio Bristol & BBC Radio Somerset.
Saturday, 23rd August on BBC Radio Gloucestershire, BBC Radio Wiltshire, BBC Radio Bristol and BBC Radio Somerset between 6-8pm. You can listen on your radio or via the free BBC Sounds app.

Not only can you hear the play again, but I will also be interviewed by Adam.

In Square With The House brother and sister Jack & Ali arrive at the lake to scatter the ashes of their late father. Having forgotten to ask permission, they must dodge the park staff, confront a crisis in their relationship as well as dealing with their feelings towards their late, estranged father. The play was written/recorded as part of my Virtual Residency at Lake 32 in the Cotswold Water Park, arranged by Dialect, the Stroud-based development network offering learning and publication opportunities to writers in rural and edgeland places. It was wonderful program to get involved with and a lot of fun making it work.

Thanks to Katy Sorensen and Adrian McPherson (of Cirencester Theatre Company) for doing such a good job.

Another radio play The Destiny of Shoes gets another lease of life when it’s broadcast this Saturday evening on BBC Radio Gloucestershire, BBC Radio Wiltshire, BBC Radio Bristol and BBC Radio Somerset between 6-8pm. You can listen on your radio or via the free BBC Sounds app.

Grame Bruce Fletcher plays both of a pair of shoes undergoing an existential crisis!

So, it’s all over. Read throughs, rehearsals, rewrites, planning… and finally the performance. Was it the gleaming theatrical perfection I had imagined beforehand? No, but my director and cast (all volunteers) put it over well and with genuine passion. Was I afterwards bombarded by offers from theatre directors and agents? No. I specifically emailed Wireless Theatre Company (to whom I pitched the idea back in January) but none of the strangers appeared to be them. But lots of people turned up and they all seemed to enjoy it and – just as importantly – to get what it was supposed to be about. I sensed much surprise at what the play was about, at how I had chosen to put it over.

Now that all the stress and anxiety of the process is over and done with, I can put the script aside for a while before I decide what to do with it next. Some genuinely interesting and useful things came out of the read-throughs and rehearsals, not all of which could be actioned in time for the performance. A number of moments in the script basically just didn’t work, and these had to be changed so that the whole narrative make sense. Lines I added for the minor characters began throwing up ideas about Fathers and Sons and I would like to develop these further.

One moment that sticks out during the final rehearsal was the sudden sense of being totally redundant, that the whole thing was now out of my hands, that I was no longer needed in order for the production to go ahead: I had served my purpose.

My short monologue PATER EST TESTUDO will be performed by Scratch Theatre at the Greenbank Pub, Easton, Bristol on Tuesday, 10th June. It’s one of a series, each featuring a character interacting with a gravestone. Previous monologues have been performed at the Bolton, Octagon and the Cockpit, London. The title translates as Father is a tortoise, a reference to my legendary Latin teacher Mrs Galloway who once tried to make us sing Christmas carols… in Latin.

I have always loved writing monologues, inspired by Alan Bennett’s Talking Heads. I love the way the characters put themselves across, the stories emerging organically along the way.

For five years Gillian has secretly visited cemeteries, in search of graves with her missing daughter’s birthday in the forlorn hope of maintaining some kind of connection…