Decorative image of piles of scripts

Links

People I work with:

Durham Dramatic Society: 71-seat theatre in Fowler's Yard. Place where I'm currently doing my one-acts, readings and directing of other plays.

Brighton Fringe: England's biggest open arts festival, and second biggest in the UK after Edinburgh. And I'm finally taking part in it. Gulp.

Buxton Fringe: Small open arts festival still. Taken part in this three times now. Much cheaper than either Brighton or Edinburgh, so you needn't sell your granny to medical experiments.

Sweet Venues: Manages various venues, but the important one to me is the Waterfront Hotel, Brighton, where I'll make my inaugural Brighton Fringe appearance.

Underground Venues: Manages two of the venues at the Buxton Fringe. This is where I've always ended up performing. Ongoing in-joke that their season will be the last one before the building is redeveloped - we're still waiting for this to actually happen.

Tess Hagger's web page: I collaborate with Tess Hagger on several projects, and she usually ends up as assistanct director for the plays I direct. When she's not doing stuff at Durham Dramatic Society, she runs a business teaching drama and other vocal skills.

Alan Godfrey's Twitter page: Alan and I frequently collaborate on plays. We both had out plays performed at DDS's 2011 New Writing festival, and I was producer for his play at Buxton Fringe 2015.

Empty Shop: Arts venue in Durham that made its name by making use of disused retail spaces in the city. I occasionally use this as a performance venue for previews.

People I've previously worked with:

Live Theatre: New writing theatre in Newcastle where I had Celebrity Ghost Patrol Live developed as part of their writers' group.

Moon in the Sky Theatre: Group run by Tom Casling, mostly performs his work, but where I had some some of my earlier work performed.

The Empty Space: Provide advice to all sorts of small arts orgnaisations in the north-east. They offer at least one hour's advice to anyone who asks - I highly recommend taking up this offer.

My other sites:

My blog on theatre: Set up after several requests from people who say I should review plays. For some reason, this seems to get taken quite seriously. I'm not sure why, because I usually end up biting the hand that feeds me.

Durham Dramatic Society's play archive: Page I run which has an archive of DDS's past productions. This site might have a bigger scope in the future, but at the moment it's mostly a photo gallery.

My Twitter feed: My extremely begruding concession to social media. Basically a feed for updates to this site and my theatre blog (above) and not much more. Don't use Twitter to contact me, I won't necessarily monitor the feed. Use the Contact Me page on this site instead.

My page on doollee.com: Apparently, the fact that I took a play to Buxton Fringe qualifies me on the definitive database of modern English-speaking playwright. I share the site with great writers such as Ayckbourn, Godber and Pinter. There again, I am also sharing the site with writers of some god-awful Fringe Theatre pieces, so think carefully.

Things I like:

Stephen Joseph Theatre: A theatre in the round in Scarborough, best known for a very famous former artistic director. Well worth the trek from Durham.

Orange Tree Theatre: Another theatre in the round in Richmond, London. I draw the line at journeying to London in order to see a play, but I aim to tie in a visit to them whenever I happen to be in London.

Northern Stage: Newcastle's other producing theatre. Not so much new work, but do contemporary plays to an excellent standard.

Gala Theatre: Durham's own professional theatre. Sadly not used for actual theatre as much as it use to be, but you still get the odd touring productions worth seeing.

Edinburgh Fringe: The big one. A long way to go before I'll consider doing this festival. But it's a very important part of the arts world, because anyone can take part and it's the audiences, not selections panels, who have the power to pick the winners.

Bite Size: Brighton-based company that puts on ten-minute plays. Tours to Edinburgh Fringe every year to thoroughly deserved praise.

Three's Company: London-based company that makes frequent appearances at Buxton and Edinburgh Fringes. Usually surrealistic comedies with compulsory audience participation. And no, you don't get off the hook by sitting at the back.

Sparkle and Dark: Wonderful theatre/puppetry company, at first doing family shows, now a lot darker. Been following their work since 2010, and they're just got better and better.