What I'm Up To

It has been ages since I updated my blog. Mainly due to me being stupidly busy, which is always a good thing. Since my last blog I have made a whole host of shows, including 'Flora's Fairy Challenge' at the Citizens which received fantastic five ***** reviews in the Herald and The Stage! I was also extremely privileged to have won a New Playwrights Award from Playwrights Studio Scotland, this will give me a fantastic opportunity to really spread my creative wings and give me to the time and space to write something, hopefully, very good indeed!

I am now working on a number of exciting projects and am currently writing this blog from my new workshop space/office thingy, which will hopefully give me the time and space to get all the work done!

Projects I'm working on:

I am delighted to be writing a new musical called 'Vinyl Idol' with Debbie Hannan for Play, Pie and a Pint at Oran Mor. We worked on this a few years ago as a wee side project but it has developed it's own arms and legs and we are really excited about being part of the Oran Mor's first Mini Musicals series. The story follows a girl who fantasies about the idols of her record collection coming to life and taking her on dates. But it never ends well...

Cliff will be making an appearance in 'Vinyl Idol'

I am also delighted to be taking my play with songs 'The Rise and Inevitable Fall of Lucas Petite' out on tour with my company Sleeping Warrior in conjunction with the Macrobert theatre in Stirling. We secured Creative Scotland to allow us to tour this show around the country. We hope to repeat the success of 'Love 2.0' - it will hit the road around September time.

Here's a silly wee video I made for when we worked on a version of the show a few years ago:



Before that I will also be writing and directing 'Naughty Cat and the Cheesy Moon' at the Edinburgh Fringe with masters students from the musical theatre department at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. This is really exciting, and slightly bizarre. It's a play I wrote for Staging Stories (mentioned below) and it's based on a story written by a class of 5 year olds from Port Glasgow! I am really excited to be presenting it at the fringe, it is ridiculous, hilarious and totally bonkers. Just what I like!

As always, I enjoy working with professional actors but also love making theatre with young people, I have 3 projects that I'm currently working towards.

Staging Stories with Beacon Youth Theatre is a large-scale show featuring close to 100 young people. We asked various school in the Inverclyde area to write us stories and, after much deliberation, we have turned some of these stories into plays for BYT members to perform. It's been a huge undertaking but we are really looking forward to showing off what we've done so far. We shared a little of our work at the Youth Arts Scotland training weekend a few weeks ago and it all went down very well.

Beacon Youth Theatre perform 'Staging Stories'

I am also working with BYT to create a new piece for their young company to take to the National Theatre of Scotland's Exchange festival in Stirling. The play is called 'Hector Moray' and it follows the adventures of a more than ordinary Scottish teenager as he becomes embroiled in an underground movement for Scottish independence.

The Beacon Young Company rehearse 'Hector Moray'

And to round up my work with young people I am currently directing the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland's Junior Conservatoire third years in a devised play called '20 Days'. It's an exciting project that will end up with a performance in the Circle Studio at the Citizens theatre. It's a dark play that looks at memory (in a similar way to the film 'Memento'). It's an ambitious script where everything remains unclear until the final few minutes, so we are really focusing on the clarity of story telling and it has been fun to have good long rehearsal times to really focus on the acting and getting real detail into the performances.

Phew! So that's why I haven't been updating this blog. Lots happening. Now, back to work.

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