'Facebook' Frome is actually nothing to do with IT: ceramic artist Hans Borgonjon has cast local faces for display throughout Frome festival in the beautiful space of Silk Mill gallery. Hans has created both convex and concave versions of each face, and paradoxically its the latter which have most animation, their blind gaze seeming by some quirk of shadowing to follow us around while the 3-D ones are more like death masks. I found my mask eventually: it's the wincing one, although in fact I enjoyed the meditative experience of the casting.

The Parlour, Marian Bruce's art space in Paul Street, is showing works by Alastair Crawford on the theme of Conflict. 'Killing without the possibility of being killed is nothing new' says Alastair, writing of drones: 'Nothing changes except the uniform.'Personal experiences from Africa predominate in this visceral and passionate imagery ranging from 3D heads and figures to bold charcoals inspired by photojournalism as well as by monochrome artists like Goya and Picasso.

There's open-air art in festival week too, and desultry rain added a lonely lustre to the sculpture gardens on Friday. Natural imagery seems the primary influence in some lovely pieces at both the Blue House and Bastion Garden.

And as Frome Festival opened officially on Friday night with a plethora of creativity ~ Equus at the Merlin, fabulous (free) live music at The Griffin and The Olive Tree, and Festival Club at the Granary ~ only a total recluse or a Fromie with flaky diary skills would be anywhere else. I fell in the latter category, having arranged to perform in Bath at the Curfew Inn Story Friday event organised by Clare Reddaway who runs A Word In Your Ear. Immensely high standard and slick organisation made this a thoroughly enjoyable event well worth a visit and, writers note! submission is open for future themes.

Alison & I spent Saturday in Bristol with the Complete Reworks of Shakespeare day at Colston Hall, where our installation PlayText, the Living Bard was projected on screens in the foyer and box office areas. Very gratifying to watch people stopping to look and staying to laugh as they read our scripts of text messages between characters showing core action of the play in comic dialogue. What might Bottom say to Titania if he had a Blackberry? Imagine the Macbeths texting away between murders. Lol.

Unusual takes on Shakespeare's themes and characters abounded throughout the day: I particularly enjoyed the Taoist philosopher's take on Richard II's downfall, and contemporary cameos around classic moments like Kate's wedding to Petruchio, Juliet's teenage balcony-euphoria ("I think that's a Maria Carey lyric") and Ophelia's madness. There was small robotic cat reciting random bardic phrases, too, and pictures of the man from Stratford to decorate. An ambitious project, so congratulations to artistic director Emma Henry & her team and thanks to Eva Martino.

The famous Festival Food Feast was underway by the time we got back to Frome, the marketplace looking like a more colourful version of Renoir's Les Parapluies as families queued at stalls serving up dishes from round the world while the fabulous Frome Street Bandits showed everyone how to cheerfully disdain the rain. Inside the Cheese & Grain steamed and bopped to sets from fantastic musicians like Isis and brilliant Phil King as once again Frome shows the world how to party... great night - and more to come!

We all realise the earth roll’d round in its diurnal course with rocks and stones and trees, as Wordsworth pantheisticly put it, for a very long time before Homo Sapiens came along to blow up the rocks and cut down the trees, but Did You Know that if you decided to walk the history of this planet at a rate of 2 steps = one million years, you’d have to walk all day, and only after lunch would man’s ancestors emerge, jellyfishlike, and only in the last 2 centimetres would agriculture register anywhere in the world, followed within millimetres by war, industry, and religion? Nor me. Greg Morter has worked out a scale timeline from the Big Bang till now, and his Cosmic Walk is mind-blowing. You take hydrogen gas and you leave it alone and it turns into rose-bushes, giraffes, and humans, is how cosmologist Brian Swimme sums up the inconceivable surprisingness of our history - and it gets weirder than that.

The full journey takes two days, as the longest part of the story is lifeless chaos until on the morning of the second day, a mere 5 billion years ago, our mother-star Tiamat goes supernova and from the blazing dust of that catastrophe our solar system begins to form. We are indeed stardust, as Joni Mitchell sang, and as Greg beautifully puts it: we are a stardust cloud that has become conscious of itself and its own history – dust talking to itself, about itself.

Greg’s talks are full of fascinating facts and thought-provoking soundbites, though I admit round about Matter is not matter in the opening presentation I did start feeling like Dougal in Father Ted when Ted explains perspective by use of a small plastic cow. “This one close, that one far away. Now do you get it, Dougal?” “No, Ted.” But slowly, walking our time-line in kilometres which each represent a billion years – 13.7 of them – we all begin to grasp the full extraordinariness, if not the meaning, of life. It’s surprisingly late in the story before death enters ~ along with sex. As bacteria, we had no life cycle and basked in sunshine without predators or prey: only when plants evolved with chloroplast, enabling them to make their own food, did rudimentary animal life start to develop mouths in order to eat each other. So you could say that because 2 billion years ago we lacked one tiny element in our cell structure, we grew into a species programmed to attack and destroy…

Greg says no such thing, of course. He reminds us that “We are the species that reflects back to the universe its own majesty.” And it’s not all about the science: there are celebratory rituals and reflections, cosmic role-play (pictured is Annabelle as the earth being bombarded by comets) and lots of superb food on offer at the camp site. The weather was 90% excellent, so we could laze on our breaks in million-year old sunshine (a million years and 8 minutes, actually – rays take 8 minutes to travel to earth) and appreciate a celebratory rainbow at the end of the day,
At the end of the weekend as we ponder on this astonishing world which has somehow survived blazing infernos and ice ages and at least five extinctions, the two themes which emerge most powerfully are creativity and continuity. The world we recognise now won't survive, clearly, but something will happen and on past history "it will probably be beyond our wildest dreams.” So it’s up to us, really. But we all know that anyway.
I’ll end this posting as we ended the evening around the camp fire, with the Galaxy Song.

Final meeting of Frome Scriptwriters before our festival debut event Flaming Voices, last readthrough of some cracking pieces. Bristol's Stepping Out Theatre Company stepped in to supply professional actors & direction for this rehearsed read-through ~ a fantastic & exciting support for our fledgling group. As Rosie says,"New writing is always exciting because you just don't know what gems are hidden there." All that glitters will be revealed 8pm Friday 13 July at the Cornerhouse, and it's FREE so come early for a seat!

Still on the subject of new writing: Short Shrifts is the collective title of twelve short plays by Peter Oswald ~ we're talking really short here, 90 minutes for the full dozen with an interval thrown in ~ which are bizarre and often beautiful. The writing is superb, both real and surreal: clever, lyrical, and often savagely funny. Meet the couple who discover when meeting on holiday they share the same town.. street... house... name.. ("small world!") and the husband who reads out crazy newspaper items that reflect his own broken relationship, the wife who taunts her husband with his inability to do anything ("you can forget about death Donald you're not up to it, death is a leap in the dark and you've never been able to leap.")...a ventriloquist, a trumpet player, cannibals, and Medusa. And more. Despite the disparity, these pieces hold together through an enchanting discordancy: however absurd or baffling the situation there's always a thread of uneasy but palpable connection with human feelings of frustration and longing, hope and disappointment. I absolutely loved the cadence of language and the theatricality of form in this boundary-pushing writing, and the actors ~ Josephine Larsen, musician Nemo Jones and the writer himself ~ are stunningly good. It's on till July 7th at the Brewery in Bristol, go!

Scoring poetry is arbitrary bullshit, says Jack Dean in his introduction to the National Slam Final at the Bierkeller on Thursday: the poetry is the thing. And, with teams from Bristol, Bath, Birmingham, Cardiff and London, the thing was mostly brilliant. There were a few new-wave formulaic recitations with fluttering hands and heart-stopping pauses, a couple of William Burroughs-stylee rants, but most were funny, funky, and original. Bath's poets, including and especially Robbie Vane and Liv Tork, did themselves proud but despite the judges' sometimes baffling corroboration of Jack Dean's thesis, no-one could deny team London deserved their first place. Fantastic stuff Keith Jarrett and the rest of the trio!
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The last weekend of June is Winchester Writers’ Conference, a bitter-sweet event since although there’s the usual camaraderie, fascinating talks and enjoyable meetings & reunions, this is the last year that much-loved founder & organiser Barbara Large will be at the helm. And I use ‘much-loved’ factually: I’ve never heard anyone mention her name without affection & admiration bordering on awe. For 32 years Barbara has been inspirational to her every-extending ‘family of writers’, not just a pioneer in egalitarian provision of routes to success, but also a warm & nurturing presence – tales are legion of her personal involvement in solving delegates’ difficulties way beyond the scope of a director. I’ve been recipient of her kindness too, so I hope this doesn’t sound like an elegy for a this lively lady when I say for me this is the end of an era…
So… back to the highlights: Friday night I joined John Jenkins, Adrienne Dines, Veronica Heley and John Gilbey on the the Writers’ Panel in the Vault, where audience-inspired topics ranged from issues of integrity & the place of reportage in fiction to appropriate use of research: “Don’t do too much,” advised Veronica, “the story is king.” Saturday morning’s plenary session featured Alan Titchmarsh with an excellent talk on How to Grow a Writer – entertaining anecdote and genuine advice in pithy soundbites, like “There’s no one way to write – there’s only your way.” And on the writer’s journey: “You go in all bells & whistles & flourishes, you spend the rest of your life making less and less of it.” He recalled telling Alan Bennett how his characters were deciding what should happen next, and receiving the sage reply: “The mind is a bigger bucket than we know, there’s stuff at the bottom you’d never dream of.”
Sunshine flitted around the proceedings and delegates flitted around the construction works - an intrusive presence here for the last 3 years – as the day continued. I always appreciate opportunities to go into other speakers’ sessions, and enjoyed both Patrick Sandford’s drama workshop & a fascinating talk from Debby Holt on finding inspiration. Debby’s list of ten sources was an inspiration in itself, including such diverse stimuli as following current events ~ we read, she suggests, to make sense of the world, so if as writers we cut ourselves off we’re not doing our job properly ~ and trust of the unconscious, as recommended by Martin Amis.
And when evening falls and the talks are over, and bottles of wine replace the thermoses on the welcome table, there’s the Awards Ceremony, a key aspect for many of the delegates since 18 writing prizes are up for grabs. This inevitably over-runs even the hour-and-a half allotted, so since unlike most of the rest of the audience I wasn't biting my nails with hope & apprehension frantically mingled, I indulged in the alternative self-entertainment of a gender watch. From which I can tell you that prizewinners consisted of 40 women and 9 men (one was the same man 3 times), with 65 women and 21 men making up the list of Commended and Highly Commended. To complete statistics corner, the adjudicating board comprised of 10 men and 4 women...
But Winchester weekend is more than the talks, workshops & speeches: it’s about exciting random interactions over depleted thermoses and those peculiar pastry-obsessed meals, too ~ sometimes useful leads like enterprising Cat Randle's BigUp Words project, or just pleasant chat like John Gilbey explaining Singularity, parallel processing, and neural networks over Sunday breakfast, and Craig Batty ~ my main mate & ally when I was external examiner for Southampton but now living in Melbourne, who silenced the lunch table by remarking “There’s loads of funding for the Arts there!” And many other speakers and delegates, and the delightfully appreciative group who came to my talk... thanks all of you. And thank you again & again to Barbara.

Hay-on-Wye I used to think was a pop-up town made of books specially for the famous festival, but actually it appears to be made of books all the time. Also not a town but a kingdom, with bookseller Richard Booth the crowned head, and laws like Ban the Kindle! which is perhaps understandable in a place where every building from cafe to garden shed hosts its own bookshop. I specially liked the Crime & Mystery specialist shop, with corpse outlined on the pavement outside and Arthur Conan Doyle characters musing on the stairs. And when you're booked out, there's lovely Wye Valley river trails to follow as summer solstice teases us with occasional sightings of blue among the fifty shades of grey.

On the subject of that elusive golden orb, Andy Burns and his team from the Herschel Museum of Astronomy were out & about in Bath Abbey precinct inviting passers-by to enjoy a bit of solstice sun-gazing. Did you know the sun has an eleven year cycle of building up magnesium activity which is then released as a vast plasmic sun-spot? Nor me. Sadly, and unsurprisingly really, this is the quietest the sun has been for about 130 years so no sunspots today.

Shakespearean activity, however, has been building up visibly as we near July's pledge of "a national celebration of Shakespeare to coincide with the London Olympics." Bristol Shakespeare Festival was launched last night with balloons speeches and sonnets, appropriately in The Shakespeare Tavern beside the docks. "This year it's about pushing the festival further and bringing the plays to life in different ways" said artistic director Emma Henry. I'm very proud that PlayText, the Living Bard, a text-speak version of two well-known dramas by me and Alison Clink, is one of those different ways, sited in one of the further pushes: viz, Colston Hall on July 7th. Lots of other great reworkings there too - dance, photographs, and a randomly-reciting robotic cat... and it's all free!

Tautly titled Can't Wait for the Festival? POETRY ON THE FRINGE Frome Poetry Cafe on Monday was generally acclaimed a brilliant night, thanks to three great guests: Carrie Etter, Alasdair Paterson and Frome's own dazzling Robbie Vane - and also to our open mic-ers, including a small explosion of performance from Liv Torc and Jesse Perrett, limbering up for the National Slam Final in Bristol next month. And Carrie held the crowded room spellbound with a profoundly moving reading of some of the superb poems in her pamphlet The Son (Oystercatcher Press). Unforgettable.

So now it's time to look beyond the fringe as Frome Festival begins in three weeks! Come Rhyme With Me is my main poetry event, but I'll be an avid audience member at Hip Yak Poetry Shack featuring Tim Clare... then there's Pub Theatre, nightly music, writerly talks, and delights for every taste... if you haven't picked up a brochure, check out the events here and book your tickets!

Fortuitous sunshine in the midst of this car-wash summer (thanks Audrey for the apt phrase) as Stourhead becomes a concert hall for local community choirs, so no better way to spend Saturday than picnicking by the lake listening to massed voices singing Dance me to the end of love...

That evening was the last night of my play Mascara at the Alma Tavern Theatre, with the best performance of the run. This has been the most intense experience of my writing life ~ not even publication of my first novel came near the excitement of being included in a close team all much more experienced than me in this chaotic, emotional, seductive world of theatre... Now the get-out's over, set dismantled, the imaginary world we visited nightly for two weeks gone forever, and it feels a bit weird. All that's remains is those audience messages after each show. So here, as a way of pinching myself to prove it's all true, is another selection ~ a bit long, but indulge me, there are lots more too!
"Powerful, real, intense, upsetting, brilliantly acted, relevant. I couldn’t fault it."... Fantastic. Actress stunning and sexy. Thanks for a good night!... Wow!...WOW!!...clubbing scene was hilarious and the end really packed a punch... Clever shifts in tempo to keep the pace going, clever mirroring of relationships ..."A very impressive performance all round: a well crafted and thought-provoking script, a superbly directed mise-en-scène and wonderful acting – Olivia particularly subtle and one to watch. " ...Brilliant explosive and chilling ending. Great performances... The author did a wonderful job on threading opposing views.. I loved this... I was riveted throughout... "We regularly go to the theatre all over, including London and this performance was equal to any." ...gripping, thought-provoking play, excellently acted, directed, set... The most insightful and powerful studio production I've ever seen....deserves to be seen elsewhere. Highly engrossing. Beautifully subtle and sensitive writing – intriguing and challenging subject matter, adapted and implemented with intelligence and skill... original and fascinating... welcome moments of humour. Strong performances and perceptive, well-judged direction with a visually arresting set. ...highly emotive and beautifully performed. I would definitely recommend it to others. I was captivated and completely engaged from start to finish. "The actors gripped me from the moment they came on stage. They were able to switch between characters so effectively – they really took the audience with them through the whole journey... Thank you all for such a fantastic evening!" ...Fantastic, incredibly intense and the tension built to a great climax...definitely a hit. Terrific. Absolutely brilliant. Clever and complex. Totally engaging all the way through – varied pace and clever dialogue, sensitively written and consistently intriguing. An amazing evening. Deeply moving and thought-provoking. Brilliantly written and staged. God! Riveting performances of an amazing, deeply disturbing play.. "I kept thinking these were the actual people not actors!!! Even though I cried I thought the acting was superb and the writing of the script very clever and the twist brilliant... The best play I have seen."...Very well staged and acted, with an original and exciting script. Dynamic performances and directing– hugely enjoyable evening! Well done all round! Very emotional. Loved the club scene! Well done Stepping Out!...Powerful, educational, amazing drama, loved the disco scene. Acting fantastic. Moving....Fantastic performance. Well-written play, well directed... should be should be shown again, perhaps even afar. Congratulations, a fab show. ...Riveting – superbly acted overall, fantastic theatre....What good theatre is all about. Very sensitively done, fine writing, well directed. A thought-provoking exploration of the subject. Congratulations.... the nightclub scene was genius...Best play I've seen in a long time. ...All that one would hope from a play... "Huge congratulations on Mascara. The writing was incredibly condensed and raised so many unnerving questions about the family and social norms – I could watch it several times over and still get something new from it. I love the way it never tells the audience what to think – you have to think for yourself! It is an excellent piece of writing and certainly deserves many further outings. I do hope it can be brought to London at some point as I am sure it would be perfect for a fringe audience down here."

Back in the real world... there's Winchester to prepare for, and Frome Festival is less than a month away... And if you're in Bristol on July 7th, there's The Complete Reworks of Shakespeare at Colston Hall including PlayText the Living Bard which since you ask is café wall projection of 2 popular plays rewritten by me & Alison as mobile texting scripts... Lord what fools these mortals be. Lol :-)

"Amazon will tell you it's incredibly easy to publish on Kindle, you just press click, but that's actually not quite true" warned marketing expert Jenni O'Connor in her Sunday workshop at New Oriel Hall for Writers Events Bath. Her power-point presentation rapid-fired through the complexities of e-book publishing in exhausting detail but Alison and I were both inspired, so blog musings may well take a kindling turn before the end of the year...


And no need to wait for July to hear sensational performances as Frome Poetry Cafe next Wednesday has a sizzling line-up of new guests. Real world looking quite bright, all in all!

First week's run of my play Mascara at the Alma Tavern Theatre has left me still reeling at the enthusiasm of audience feedback. Gripping, mesmerising, fascinating, totally absorbing, were frequently used words, along with believable, convincing, and - of course - brilliantly acted. "Worth seeing more than once" was also good to see, and appreciations of my intentions in choosing a real-life kidnap story: Excellent play, well researched and an interesting angle, cleverly brought humour into a dark subject... the way the play managed to mix humour and intensity wonderful, it raised a lot of profound questions in a very interesting way.
And I specially like this facebook review from Dave Clark:
"This is a very well acted and written two hander exploring the Natascha Kampusch story, with wider references to the nature of abuse within relationships, the meaning of love, and the role of 'victims' within society. We were gripped from start to finish - the climax has a visceral intensity which works brilliantly in this intimate space. Bloody Marvellous!"
Thanks to everyone ~ and to Jose Navarro for these evocative stills.

Back in Frome, Sunday is our annual Fun Day and streets are full of stalls selling pottery & beads, candles & retro clothes, vegan cakes & ewes cheese. There's a cup-and-saucer roundabout outside the petshop and a champagne bar by St Aldhelm's well where the excellent Pigeons are playing. My highlight is street theatre from SATCO with their mountaineering ascent of Cheap Street, gloriously achieving the summit at La Strada despite avalanches as onlookers smile and murmur "Only in Frome!" while they sip their lattes. Not true, of course, but perhaps only in Frome would the team be led by the town mayor who also smashed the mayoral chain competing in the CobbleWobble cycle race last year...
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And finally... culmination of all those weeks of planning. Mascara has opened at Alma Tavern Theatre. Ann Stiddard's set looked brilliant under Luke Murray's lighting design, the audience laughed at the meant-to-be funny bits and applauded wildly at the end, and Olivia Dennis & Oliver Millingham were simply fabulous.
I'm so proud of the whole team, including of course my intuitive and inventive director Steve Hennessy, who's also artistic director of Stepping Out Theatre Company. Phew... can't wait to see if feedback is as good as it was for the Frome preview - it should be!

If you'd been too busy for telly for two weeks and suddenly got a free day, what would you first watch On Demand? For me it's two comedies, both previously unknown and now, in their second series, suddenly recognised as writing genius. Episodes and Grandma's House are both superbly acted, full of wry social observation on the painful absurdity of relationships, and both about creative struggles ~ specifically with dramatic scripts. The Episodes couple (played by wonderful Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig) are finding Hollywood about as dreamy as a bull-invaded china-shop; Simon Amstell's hell-is-other-people experience comes from his family, who would be truly monstrous if they weren't so appallingly funny. Even Grandma can't bear to watch and goes off to count her shoes when Simon's hopes of production are crushed by the train-crash of his relations in the final episode of series 2. Will there be another? Personally I hope they quit while they're ahead - both of them - rather than go the way of some of my other favourites like Being Human, subverting initial energy into clone characters and convoluted plot twists. I'd rather mourn them as classics.


May is simmering to an end, June is poised to burst out all over, must be time to promote the next Frome Poetry Cafe. We have three terrific guests: Carrie Etter and Alasdair Paterson are joined by newcomer Robbie Vane ~ should be an amazing night at Frome's Garden Cafe on June 13th!

Two weeks of intense rehearsals, two frantic days of final arrangements, and we're open for business. Friday and Saturday were the Mascara previews at The Cornerhouse in Frome, both blisteringly hot evenings on which full-house audiences deserved applause themselves for remaining raptly attentive. I'm going to let a medley of comments from our feedback forms tell the good news.

I was totally riveted throughout from the opening line to the ending. Wonderful. Kept me totally enthralled throughout. Thankyou for bringing this to Frome. An immensely subtle and powerful play, passionately performed, about a very complex subject. Much food for thought. Will keep me reflecting, and talking, for a long time. Excellent play – moving, clever and poignant, extremely well acted and very disturbing. What a performance - absolutely superb, we were totally absorbed... Tremendous – varied, thought-provoking, amusing and shocking.... very convincing and mature acting... brilliant... powerful, funny , very thought-provoking. Wow! Extremely powerful play! ... talented writer... acted with sensitivity and power... both actors v. good, especially Leonie... particularly liked the music + set... props/sound/lighting effects meant the quality of acting/writing really showed through... the end was dramatic and shocking, the club scene was great too... Well crafted play that raised thought-provoking issues. I particularly liked the way the story of the kidnapped girl was woken into the couples’ relationship... Engaging, challenging, thought-provoking – great night out... very well portrayed and sympathetically explored... believable and real and it made me ‘feel’... beyond amazing... awesome... emotionally hard-hitting... Wow !!
A stunning play which carried incredible intensity in every moment. We are privileged here in Frome. Brilliant acting by both performers. Pub Theatre at its very best.

After "thought-provoking", the most repeated words were "congratulations" and "thanks". So my congratulations and thanks too, to the whole team, and to Rosie for holding my nervous hand ~ almost literally ~ at these opening nights. Opening in Bristol at the Alma Tavern Theatre on Tuesday.
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This week started with a blistering row - between my characters, that is - and discussions on music & costume... then the first part of the set arrives... full setup in hectic get-in at The Cornerhouse and looks amazing. I'm loving being involved with all this but no spoilers before our opening TONIGHT!

Between rehearsals for MASCARA and promoting the show I haven't managed to do much else this week but happily I did get to Toppings in Bath for the launch of Liz Brownlee's amazing book Animal Magic. This is the most extraordinary poetry book you'll ever read: Liz's meltingly beautiful words about some of the world's most fascinating creatures are interspersed with careful research telling simply the facts of their endangered lives. It's published by Iron Press, whose editor Peter Mortimer always gives so much support to aspiring writers ~ as I know from personal experience, as some years ago I sent him a story which he liked but declined to publish as he said it should have been a play. I rewrote it as a radio script, and it was subsequently broadcast. Peter had travelled all the way from North Shields to tell the crowded bookshop that 'of all the books I've published, this is the one of which I've been most proud.' A due accolade and a lovely event.

And my footnote for this posting has distinct, if tenuous, connection with this final image from MASCARA rehearsals: I've been reading an interview with actor Samuel West in which he says his favourite line of Shakespeare is the opening of Richard II's soliloquy in prison as he reflects on life and loss, his body constrained but his mind roaming, finding new identity as he tries to forgive the people who have wronged him. Parallels with my imprisoned character/s aside, this speech was the internal soundtrack to my teenage years. I read it, and the deposition scene that precedes it, so many times I knew them by heart. Even these days, get me started on 'Your cares set up do not pluck my cares down' and you may have a wait a while before I stop reciting. So Richard II is an intensely personal play to me, but as Samuel West points out it's modern too in its honesty about society nominating people to be 'kings' & telling them they're semi-divine, only to kill them.

The current season of plays at the Alma is Directors' Cuts, the annual showcase for BOV Theatre School graduates. The Yalta Game by Brian Friel, the choice of Timothy Howe, begins as an apparently frothy seaside romance as dandy flâneur Dimitry, whiling his days away in inventive gossip, nets another lonely young woman with his 'game' of people watching. “These categories – public, private - authentic, deceptive – are never as separate as we think” Dmitry tells the audience, and deceptive simplicity in the script plays with notions of self-perception, lies and longings. The clever set supports this sense of unreliable narration: it's a giant postcard, which unpacks into furnishings to create the reality Dimitry and his lover inhabit. But did this brief encounter really become the love of his life? Did they meet in Moscow, and dance, and kiss..? by the end we don't know if anything is real, even the dog... Witty direction and crisp acting brought out every nuance in a delightful production.

Baroque, beautifully staged and performed, with stunning music: all the hallmarks of Mark Bruce Company productions are intensely present in Made in Heaven which opened at The Tobacco Factory this week. There's more of sea than sky about this story ~ billowing satin waves where a mermaid loses her tail to a knife, a nun loses her head to a shark ~ but for Mark who wrote, choreographed and directed the show, the connections are symbolic. “A lot of things come from my subconscious," he says: "Characters come from Paradise, then you take them away.” It's a filmic world too, with references ranging from the crazed robot cop in Westworld to Judy Garland-esque prairie girls. Music is equally eclectic: Debussy and Chopin, Cohen and Leadbelly, White Stripes and Sonic Youth. It's violent and vengeful as well as sublimely beautiful, and dream-imagery like the angel baby, the butchered mer-tail, and severed head hacked by hockeysticks, is unforgettable.

Despite the fact my personal cosmos recently seems to have shrunk to Bristol and the road to Bristol from Frome, I haven't forgotten there's a wider world out there, with more than a few problems. Like every grecophile, I'm waiting and watching, with hope as well sadness and concern, for some resolution to the current crisis. Skyros holidays organiser Yannis Andricopoulos, who has written a trilogy of books on the significance of Greece and Greek culture, is following events in his blog, where he also pledges "We’ll not cancel Skyros holidays, whatever happens either in Greece or in the world! So book with confidence - you’ll have a great time, and give the Greeks the support they need in their most testing times since the war."

Local writer Niamh Ferguson, back from India to the delight of her Frome friends, is paying tribute to the power of the daily journal: her 'morning pages' morphed into emails that tell the story of her fascinating journey ~ to be published next month under the title Love From India. Watch this space for launch details!

Currently my days are largely obsessed with the progress of MASCARA: we now have a publicity shot, thanks to Hen & Chickens beer garden and a sunny day. I'm still overwhelmed by how much as a writer I can learn from these rehearsals as each scene is tried out in different ways ~ tenderness/anger, fun/thoughtfulness, momentum/stillness ~ to vary the light & shade and find the shape. "Don't give too much away too soon - surprise the audience sometimes," is one directorial guideline. Actors paraphrase their script to find the subtext, intentions are discussed and lines tweaked with scalpel efficiency. It's a fascinating insight into the process of bringing a play off the page into performance, exhausting as well as exhilarating.

And turning elsewhere: Tim Clare brought his touring show How to be a Leader to the monthly Word of Mouth event in BOV Basement. There as six rules, apparently, from the satirically plausible to the sublimely ridiculous, all wittily expounded by Tim with ruthless certainty and powerpoint presentation. I especially liked the Margaret Thatcher rap ("Iron lay-dee? ~ do your own fucking ironing...")
Over in Bath, it was interesting for Rosie & I to see Alliance at the Rondo, since this set of 6 short plays were all penned by the Bath scriptwriting group, curated by David Lassman and directed by Hannah Drake. The quandary set was "co-operation in the 21st Century - is it possible?" and writers' responses ranged from competition between job interviewees to survival instincts afloat after a shipwreck. Some fantastically strong acting ~ step forward Oliver Millingham ~ provided plenty of laughs in several of the pieces and I especially enjoyed the story of the unstable Occupy undercover agent.

Terrific hiphop dancing in the Egg foyer before the night's performance of DNA. Hull Truck has Arts funding and writer Dennis Kelly has won awards, so I’m confident they'll easily withstand carping so.... for me the first few words (“Dead! uttered repeatedly like the opening expletive of Four Weddings & a Funeral) were the highlight of the show. It's a tale of school bullying off even the Daily Mail scale, resulting in an apparent murder and a complex evasion, provided by a morose and munching mute with a mind worthy of Miss Marple, which leads to The Cops fingering an innocent fat postman. The plot fails the first credibility test (ie what happens when suspect produces alibi and gives a description of the missing boy's associates who foistered the fake evidence on him), but more importantly the characters are neither credible nor empathetic, and the torrential banality of the dialogue made the Revenger's Tragedy seem like a haiku. Quite well performed, though, and striking set.

Still in Bath, something really good to end with: Sarah Ruhl's play In The Next Room, the third in director Laurence Boswell's American season at the Ustinov, is inspired by early medical treatment for female hysteria.It's aptly subtitled The Vibrator Play and the equipment in question may look like a primitive dental drill but it's capable, sometimes with human intervention too, of delivering sexual ecstasy on the scale of Barbarella's pleasure machine. Everyone in the story is in some state of yearning and denial, and all in differently comical ways find relief with this scientific equipment, sometimes in hilarious tableaux of suppressed emotions. Engaging characters and great dialogue, as well as deeper emotional and social strands in the narrative, ensure this is so much more than a sexy farce, and the ending is bold, beautiful, and surprisingly touching. It's fabulously well acted, superbly dressed, and the splendid double-decker set is simply inspired. Two and a half hours of sheer enjoyment: five stars, at least.