Byron Vincent had missed two nights' sleep when he took the mic at the Bath Hip Yak Shack but it suited him: his headline spot was the supernova in a starry night of terrific guest performers, and an excellent Slam rightfully won (in my view, but then I was one of the judges) by Robbie Vane.

Frome's performance writing team Stagewrite took over Merlin theatre stage tonight with monologues inspired by A Postcard from... Fourteen local writers took us around the world, from past to future: funny or sad, memory or fantasy, every story had authenticity and charm. Huge congratulations to Alan Overton, Linda Perry, Beverly Jones, Rosie Jackson, Frances Liardet, Des Harris, Niamh Ferguson and her reader Maddy Herbert, Howard Vause, Karl Bevis, Alison Clink, Brenda Bannister, Rosie Finngen, and Jill Miller - and extra thanks to Howard for fabulous visuals.

Another exciting event coming soon: Frome Poetry cafe is On the road again... on Wednesday April 11th - metaphorically speaking of course, we'll be at the Garden Cafe as usual - with Mo Robinson sharing his edgy lyrical ballads inspired by real life stories spanning Ireland in the Troubles to contemporary California. Plenty of poetry too, with Paul Tobin and the usual popular open mic session.
Still on things poetic, I've just heard that my poem Previously Loved was Commended in the Lumen/Camden poetry competition run by Ward Wood for the London Homeless Shelters project. The contest was judged by Carol Ann Duffy & raised over £2000 which is great for the homeless and gratifying for me as it means selection from more than 800 entries. The winner was Bob Cooper, who's a proper published poet and can even write a neat sonnet to wheelie bins - respect!

And finally: Alma Tavern spring programme now ready to publish, and how chuffed am I to see my play Mascara in the brochure... Rehearsals starting early May, can't wait.

"Never try not to be nervous" says Niamh, at our 'Stage Write' group session with a focus on performing. Niamh's tips were aimed towards our Merlin Dressing Up Box monologues event, but were agreed by participants to be extremely useful for work and life too, in any situation where confidence ebbs and we find ourselves needing to 'do it the way you would do it if you could do it...'

Still at the Merlin, enterprising new director Claudia Berry is launching a New Writing Competition for one-act plays, with winners to be produced as a rehearsed script-in-hand performance on stage next March. It's free to enter, and there's special encouragement to younger writers with an under 25 category. Deadline is end January, and I'm looking forward to seeing some of the scripts as I'll be co-judging along with Mark McGann. First Nevertheless Productions launch Somerset's only Pub Theatre, now this - Frome Ferment is definitely fizzing.

1967 has a special place in my nostalgia files. It's the year I left university and got married in the same week, went off travelling and discovered the allure of Greek islands. It was the summer of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts' Club Band, the one they called the Summer of Love. Skirts were high and so were we - not so much on drugs (most of us couldn't afford to get any closer than song lyrics and Timothy O'Leary paperbacks) but on hope. Music and fashion were no longer dictatated by the providers but led by us from the street: we believed times really were a'changing, that year just before the providers labelled the bandwagon Flower Power and jumped on it. So when I read that Mike Bartlett's new play Love Love Love tracks a couple who met in '67 for forty years to see what kind of sexegenarians they became, and that the production had rave reviews in the posh papers, and was coming to Bath's Ustinov Theatre, I was agog.
Better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
Love Love Love (retitled by a local reviewer Long Long Long) runs for 3 hours with 2 intervals and I escaped after the laboriously 'establishing' opening act. Except in right-wing ranting tabloids we never met anyone like those ghastly students but we'd have considered them not idealistic free-spirits but arrogant pain-in-the-arses, if we had. Did anyone outside a Norman Tebbit dinner party anecdote actually complain about being sacked for smoking pot instead of serving customers? And what was with the mad-aunt costume, all lime green with pearls and platform sandals, for Sandra? If Mr Bartlett wants to raid precious times for drama again, here's what we looked like. The picture's faded but the dress was purple with tiny buttons. And the shoes - it's a shame you can't see them - were gorgeous.

..

A dramatic week, stylistically speaking, opening with a 10-minute play writing workshop organised by Writing Events Bath and led by charismatic young Australian Alex Broun. Alex is a prolific playwright himself and the inspiration behind Short-and-Sweet, the biggest 10-minute play festival in the world. "The greatest thrill for a playwright is to see your work performed" Alex began: true but tricky since his festival is in Sydney, though these festivals are apparently spreading across the world like creeping jenny: “My aim is to inspire you to write a play. Next step is to write a good play. You have to get on the bike and start peddling.” In three hours he had deconstructed and demystified the playwriting process with vigour and copious handout notes and we all came home hugely enthused and slightly exhausted.

Frome's own modest version of short-and-sweet drama events, Stage Write, started a new series of monologue workshops this week too. With 'dressing up' as our theme, the first session produced some fantastic writing which will find fruition in February at the Merlin.

Bristol Old Vic is currently staging Tim Crouch's play The Author which I saw a year ago at the Royal Court and wrote in my blog "The actors were chillingly good, and the questions at the heart of the piece are powerful. But I wouldn't sit through it again." Yet that's what I did, perhaps from curiosity to see why I'd felt so resistant to the 'disturbing' nature of the material' as the programme warns, adding in defence that "Tim Crouch's new play is about the harm carried out in the name of art." I'm reminded of Alex Broun's sound advice: "Never let your message or theme dominate the play – that’s didactic”. It's also deeply unpleasant, and at surface level as non-subversive as those car stickers that chide Baby On Board! as though without external control we'd all wantonly crash into (or abuse) every child in sight. It's scrupulously acted by the four performers, who are embedded among the audience in a show that's either stageless or all stage, according to how you look at it. Every now and then they ask with solicitous concern 'are you alright?'- 'is this alright?' as though allowing us to choose how much graphic description of violence and abuse we will accept in the name of boundary-breaking theatre. We stay, of course, because it's meticulously written and it's Tim Crouch, which is his point really: we consent, and come back for more, because we feel safe, but does that collusive voyeurism make the world a less safe place for everyone? Discuss, with reference to Greek and Shakespearean tragedies: did they encourage, or merely reflect and mourn, man's inhumanity to man?

Imagine a surreal game in which Jacques Tati meets Amélie in a Highland bothy. He says to her "Je vais avec mon lapin blanc", she says to him "Och the noo, me too" (actually there's only a smattering of speech throughout but that's the gist) and the consequence is they take a steam train to 1950s Edinburgh, beautifully animated in minute detail and pastel tones, and meander around having gentle adventures until like Wendy at the end of Peter Pan the girl becomes a grown-up... That's as close as I can get to describing The Illusionist, screenplay by Tati himself and now adapted and directed by Sylvain Chomet, poignantly evoking the final days of Music Hall as rock stars and television begin to take over the entertainment world. My writer friend Esme Ellis alerted me to this delightful evocation of an innocent era that's light years away from Tim Crouch's theatrical world. Or perhaps I mean dark years.

Big news for Frome Writers' Circle this month is that Rosie Finnegan's satirical comedy Back to Back, which was a Port Eliot competition winner earlier this year, has been selected by Salisbury company Bootleg for their autumn short play tour Snapshots and will also be performed Upstairs at the Lamb on November 10th & 11th as our next Nevertheless pub theatre production. Brilliant stuff Rosie.
And next week will see Poetry Platter at the Merlin: a totally new concept for performance poetry, as the stage will be transformed into an intimate restaurant so the audience can enjoy tapas while being entertained by six top-class local poets. A dramatic week indeed...

And finally: David Cameron's favourite poem is Dulce et decorum est (pro patria mori), he told an RT interviewer. "I still remember the first time I read Owen's poems and the incredible power and anger... I still find them moving when I read them again today" he quavered - I didn't hear him myself but I picture a quaver. A pity his knowledge of Latin doesn't match his enthusiasm for literature, or he might have recognised 'the old lie' when voting on the war in Iraq.
..

'Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory' is following the Dream with The Tempest, where a very different magician controls events far darker. Prospero, brooding endlessly on vengeance, has no faerie queen to tiff with and only two sprites for company: ethereal Ariel and brutish Caliban.
So why, you might wonder, does Ariel play Caliban - or rather, the same actor play both? I wondered too, until the final scene when Prospero turns to his crouched monster-slave and frees him with the speech to Ariel, and every bipolar anomaly in this harsh story fused suddenly in a profound sense of emotional resolution. Well it did for me. A fine production in the old-school tradition: impressive visually, and with a strong team of excellent actors. Miranda and Ferdinand (Ffion Jolly and Benjamin Askew) brought riveting conviction to their unlikely romance, the villains were vicious and the buffoons entertaining - especially Felix Hayes, an unforgettable Wall in the previous production, as the jester Trinculo.
(Thanks Graham Burke for the pic of Christopher Staines as Ariel. And Caliban. And, with big vanilla-blancmange breasts, as a table-top raver in the Masque sequence too.)

Lucky Dip was the theme for the second STAGE WRITE evening of readings at the Merlin foyer and to the delight of Niamh and I as co-hosts, the event surpassed even the success of 7 Ages of Shoes last year. The foyer was totally crowded and response was enthusiastic, and the readers were all just brilliant. "Enjoy an evening of varied styles: funny, poignant, often surprising, always authentic" we put on the flyer, and the stories were, and the audience did. Mega-thanks to Deborah, Jill, Alison, Linda, Annette, Audrey, Magnus, Rosie, Kevin, Laura, and of course Niamh - and to all our appreciative listeners who turned out on a sleety night to support spoken word and creativity in Frome. We couldn't have done it without you.

Standing room only at this month's Garden of Awen for a lively gallimaufry of spoken word. Dave Lassman led off with a champagne launch for his book on the Art of Self Publicity (check Wikipedia to see how good he is at this) followed by performances on the night's theme of fools and tricks. As guest poet I really appreciated the supportive energy of the audience, and there were some great contributions from the floor - songs by Ali George, and an amazing impro of random thoughts about Bath co-ordinated by Ben for his project on collecting the vibes of a town through unpremeditated lyricism... looking forward to that on Youtube. Which reminds me the animated version of my poem Onomatopoeia has 4925 hits currently - I'm hoping it'll reach five thousand before the end of the month (hint hint)
..

Paradise by local writer Nell Leyshon developed from her work with Vita Nova: a Bournemouth-based theatre group of recovering addicts. The Salt factory (tagline "stark visual landscapes and restless text") production features charismatic Lee Hart and Celia Meiras as ex-junkies falling backwards through their story to refind their love. Jay Kerry's lighting is stunning and the minimalist set, Nell says, was designed around the dimensions of the tour van.

Lots of personal stories at the Merlin too, in a full-house foyer performance of STAGE WRITE last night.
This was the culmination of the 7 Ages of Shoes creative workshops aimed primarily to encourage those who've never written monologues for performance before, and was hailed a fantastic success.
Accolades buzzed round the bar like bees round buddleia, and verbal bouquets were still ringing around the group this morning. Many congratulations and thanks to everyone who stepped out of their comfort zone to share such a wide range of wonderful stories: our writers Anna Britten, Alison Clink, Jo Day, Rosemary Dun, Rosie Finnegan, Jeremy Gibson, Gordon Graft, Peter Macfadyen, Angela Moss, Magnus Nelson, Howard Vause; thanks to our actors Jo Hole and Annabelle Macfadyen, and to Howard for the visuals. The project - my co-organiser Niamh and I are both determined - will continue...


And One-and-Other has finally ended, with the descent on Wednesday of the final human artefact, leaving the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square empty again.
But was it art? Anthony Gormley reckons so: "It's asking how art can be experienced.. if there isn't a bit of contention it isn't worth doing." It was fun, anyway, as I reminisced on a radio look-back at the one hundred days of plinthing. Had my experience led to anything? the interviewer wanted to know. Hard to quantify how standing 28 feet above London for an hour shapes a life - but one direct outcome is another outing for The Frock when I'm the curtain-raiser act for Innua Ellams when he brings his award-winning poetry play The 14th Tale to the Merlin next month...
..