"brilliant acting and brilliant writing"
"thoroughly enjoyable"
"clever to embrace a serious theme with humour - really worked"
"enjoyed the dialogue and its poetic quality"
"LOADS of food for thought - need to see it again"
"fabulous: funny, thoughtful,sad, encouraging and above all, entertaining"
"wonderful! So much in it!!"
"so enjoyed - would love to see the script so I can absorb it more deeply"
"innovative.. atmospheric...biting, courageous and hopeful"
"really original idea well written and acted"
Yes, it's the end of the week-long run of Vampire Nights at the Alma Tavern, where Love Bites shared a double bill with Conor McPherson's monologue St Nicholas. I'm immensely appreciative of everyone who gave me such supportive feedback on my play - those are all from personal emails to me, there's more audience feedback on the whole event at Stepping Out Theatre Company website - wonderful comments like "Wow, what a performance! One of the very best shows I have seen at the Tavern" and much well-deserved praise for Matt's unforgettable and mesmeric monologue performance. So mega-thanks to cast and crew and everyone who came.

We were Number 3 on Venue's 'Recommended' list this week, but I didn't expect a virtually full house on the hottest evening of the year at the Alma Tavern for the opening of Vampire Nights, nor a tribe of (twelve) real vampires in the audience - real enough, anyway, to cause an exotic and glamorous stir.

I was going to wait till I had the official pix of Love Bites and ...whisper it... a review, but in response to enquiries here's an interim posting from the first night - with huge appreciation to vampiric victim Kirsty Cox, her multi-tasking angel & demon lover Matt Ward, Anne Stiddard for a fantastic car-crash setting, Paul Lewis for atmospheric lighting, Chris Loveless for inventive direction, and of course the ever-supportive Stepping Out producer Steve Hennessy. It's an amazing privilege to be the curtain raiser in this double-bill. Matt, when he finished playing seven parts in my play, stepped straight back on stage with a monologue performance nearly four times as long and a lot darker too - St Nicholas by Conor McPherson.... I'm in awe.

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SHINE is the title of Frome children's author Kate Maryon's first book, and the theme of her launch at La Strada on Saturday. The event was crammed with the shiny faces and glittered cheeks of Kate's young fans, and several of her grownup admirers too. (Here's Suzy Mizrahi with Rachel Ward, whose own YA book Numbers is multi-shortlisted for awards, holding their copies.)
Kate started to 'write, write, write' as an escape tunnel from her home life, scribbling from the age of four, "writing down all my scared feelings I didn't know how to spell", until eventually her frozen feelings melted and she fulfilled her granny's prediction: 'One day that girl will shine.'
Kate unfolded her heartwarming story with the aid of a cast of nine picked from her enthusiastic audience, including a scary father who threw things and a fainting granny who was too beautiful for this world. A brave and unusual book launch that showed this author can certainly convey real-life experience authentically and in an entertaining way that engages attention unforgettably. So let's raise a glass to Kate's perceptive granny, even if she did pass out from time to time.

"War is a drug"... I'd read about The Hurt Locker before I went to see it, so I knew how disturbed I'd be by the authenticity of relentless violence and ruination of that invaded land. What was more insidious was the sense of enduring minute-by-minute with no-one to turn to or to trust. The enemy is everywhere: hidden behind windows and walls, in the marketplace, in your own unit, in your own head... deeply disturbing, way beyond matters of morality, because the question posed is not Will Our Brave Boys come home alive? nor even, In what disturbed state will they live the rest of their lives? It's if this destructive rage is so deep in the human psyche, how could we live without wars?

Eddie Izzard, as a performer and as a person, was on my A-list of demigods even before he ran 1105.62 miles in 51 days. I've now dragged my old running shoes out of comatose retirement and signed up for a Sport Relief run myself. Who knows, I might celebrate septagenarian status with another marathon...
And what has this to do with writing? Everything. If you want to run, don't obsess over the success of professional athletes - watch Eddie Izzard confound every probability and defy every piece of expert advice to do it his way. That's got to be an inspiration for anyone with a desire to achieve against the odds, writers and joggers alike.

Big excitement for me this week is seeing the flyer for Vampire Nights at the Alma Tavern in May - my short play alongside one by Conor McPherson, acclaimed writer of National productions The Weir and The Seafarer.
"As True Blood and Being Human demonstrate", says the bit on the back of the flyer that’s too small to see in a blog-pic, "our fascination with the vampire myth is as strong as ever. This darkly comic double bill features two plays with strange and disturbing new takes on the undead theme... Love Bites is by local novelist Crysse Morrison whose short plays Thursday Coma and Your Time Starts Now were a hit with critics and a sellout success at the Alma last year. Not for the squeamish!"
Actually mine is fine for the squeamish, me being quite squeamish myself, but Conor M - combining old-fashioned yarn-spinning skills with a canny grasp of the flawed contemporary psyche, as the New York Times puts it - definitely needs PG rating.
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Reds and golds slowly ebbing from my dreams, becoming familiar again with this heavy half-light we call day, so different from the white-hot light and black-hot dark of Thailand. Walking around here feels a bit like wading through grey soup, cold soup at that, but reconnecting with family & friends effectively reminds me how rich my life is here...

As well as wonderful real people this week brings immersion in fictional ones, with a double dose of theatre:

"After 3 hours of Shakespeare, we'll need a drink" the punter in front of me was saying as we jostled into the Tobacco Factory for A Midsummer Night's Dream. Three hours does sound a hefty slab of culture but the time melted like an entertaining dream - several of them, in fact, as overlapping casting highlighted the multiplicity of dreamers in the forest. The play's trefoil interweaving of nobles, fairies and tradesmen seems often to have one weaker thread, and in this production it was the fairies: Duke Theseus and his bride brought the same unethereal weight to their roles as Oberon and Titania, the tradesmen/attendants were awkwardly unfunny, and Puck exuded the harsh bravado of an ex-dealer turned drug advisor. But the lovers were wonderful, the girls especially vibrant and feisty: Rebecca Pownall's Helena was mesmeric - gorgeous and very funny. Top comedy marks though must go to the rude mechanicals in their set-piece performance of Pyramus and Thisbe, with an Oscar for Felix Hayes as Snout the tinker who underestimates his wall-bearing stamina. By the time the lords and ladies were dancing their finale - with a few lucky front-seated audience - we were all almost too weak with laughter to applaud. Almost, but not quite.


Exeter is a long way to go for a night out, but Theatre Alibi's Ministry of Fear made even the Ilminster bypass on a Friday night worthwhile. Based on the book by Graham Greene, this edgy espionage story was visually and aurally superb and brilliantly interpreted. The set, a surreal evocation of London in the blitz, lighting, and costumes all combined to create a surreal and compelling environment for the story - as did the haunting live music, a sax & double-bass combo. There's a dark and stormy storyline too: Arthur Rowe, going about his business with nothing on his mind apart from the fact he's a murderer, is mistaken for a secret agent after incorrectly guessing the weight of the cake at a village fete. That's the straightforward bit. He becomes increasingly embroiled with various nefarious, and often hilarious, spies and counterspies; loses his memory after an explosion; falls in love with a enemy agent... oh, you get the idea. It's touring till the end of May and should collect rave reviews wherever it goes. If I had to be picky, I'd say the femme needed to be a little more fatale; eroticism would have brought a touch of missing glamour. But a great show, and a wonderful party atmosphere despite the abrupt recent announcement that Northcott Theatre has gone into administration. A timely reminder we should all support our local regional theatres - if the Northcott folds, when it puts on shows like this, who's really safe?


Looking back: out of the grey, a meeting with a co-participant on my first Skyros course sends me scurrying to the 1993 holiday album... and there we are, and here am I, smiling in Greek sunlight from what feels like another lifetime.

Looking ahead: Vampire Nights at the Alma Tavern, May 24th-29th. My play Love Bites is featured alongside a monologue by Conor McPherson - an epic privilege, and one I never dreamed of while watching his play The Seafarer at the Theatre Royal Bath exactly 3 years ago.