2011, let's get cracking

I'm not sure at what point saying "Happy New year" becomes a redundant phrase, merely serving to irritate everyone who ground wearily back to work on about the 3rd January, reminding them of glorious holidays in which one is actively encouraged to lounge about eating and drinking and demanding to be entertained like Louis 16th crossed with a slug, but anyway, Happy New Year, cheer up.

My new year is starting with a whiteboard of writing deadlines (some of which I have done in RED pen) but in blythe delusional January tradition, I am regarding them not with fear but as a little armada of exciting projects bobbing about on the horizon. And I should know something about defeating armadas, I am from Plymouth after all.

So for starters, I am most pleased to be kicking off 2011 with the second year of my residency at the lovely Canal Cafe Theatre in London with a spring monologue project, details to follow.

And after much staring at things and oceans of tea, I now have a working title for my latest full length piece, And Then Come The Nightjars. With the subline 'Nobody likes a tourist', the play will be a satire about what happens to one family coming to the countryside in pursuit of the good life set against a time of crisis based on the devastating Foot and Mouth epidemic of 2001.  

I read recently that the theme of a play should be invisible from the outside but running through the core like the words written in a stick of rock and just before Christmas I was lucky enough to catch a play which exemplified this, the fantastic Bea at the Soho Theatre.

No I didn't go because it was called 'Bea', I went because I had free tickets but what an astounding piece; funny, poignant, dark, honest, gripping with an extremely strong and committed cast. Company On Theatre produce work devised from a theme, in this case 'empathy' and I'm not sure I've ever seen a theme so cannily and intricately woven into every aspect of each scene, had my brain chewing on that one for weeks later, what more can you ask for?

And coming up I am all anticipation and that for John Donnelly's The Knowledge at the Bush, Bristol Old Vic's Ferment and the Bristol Storytelling festival, my mate Anna in Half a Sixpence. Oh and Frankenstein at the National, if I can ever get a bloody ticket.

Right well back to the whiteboard armada, for England and for the Queen! Or stirring words to that effect.