Well, the last four months have been absolutely nuts. I've kept you updated here with two projects over four fringes, and whilst I wasn't taking anything to the Edinburgh Fringe, I was kept busy reviewing that on my other web page. For some reason, Edinburgh Fringe provided me with a week of free accommodation, so I owed it to them to make an effort with I think a total of 38 reviews. If you to see more about how busy I was there, you can read the blow-by-blow account here.

I'm expecting next summer to be as crazy as this one, and though I have deep reserves of energy, it is still finite. So I'm now winding my activities down to something sane to get ready for next year. But I'm not coming to a complete stop, and I still have a few activities for you.

So the biggest project I'm involved in comes this month. Once more, I'm doing sound design for an Elysium Theatre play, this time it's Othello, Shakespeare's classic morality play about why it's better to discuss issues with your partner than let suspicions fester, definitely don't resort to strangling anybody, and especially don't when the guy encouraging you to do it is after your job. This has been transplanted to the War on Terror era, which I get to dig up all of my war sounds again. This, I believe, will be the longest Elysium run yet, at five weeks. As always, I would love to be on the tour for five week, but I have a day job. You'll find me at Queen's Hall to get this started up, and I'll probably pop along to the Assembly Rooms that the end of the run, if you want to say hi. For full details of the tour, go the the Elysium Page for Othello. If you want to see how rehearsals are getting on, their Instagram Feed is good.

Then I've got my first proper performance of Doctor Coppelius coming up in November. My three WIP-level performances went well, but now that's I've got a better idea about how to ramp up the emotions, I think the last third needs a rewrite. A festival programme page has just appeared, but it's currently behind a password screen (and, no, it's not, "Password1", "letmein" or "12345"), which I guess means tickets are going on sale imminently.

No plans for It's Not Cluedo in the remainder of this year, but me expectation is that it will be returning next year. I've barely started making plans on how this is going to work, but I'm determined to include Buxton this time, seeing as this was part of the original plan. Watch this space.

To address the elephant in the room, I think everyone agrees that Durham Fringe was a rough week. I'm sorry they got caught up in something that was at least 80% the fault of people within Durham Dramatic Society. What I think is important is that we work together on what we agree on, not fight over what we don't. Anyway, the good news from this is that I think we have a route to a compromise. There's A LOT of things to arrange behind the scenes before I'm ready to announce anything in public, but if this comes off, it could be quite exciting.

As for the other other elephant in the room, there is an outside chance of rebuilding some sort of working relationship with the leadership of Durham Dramatic Society - but the ball is in their court. As it stands, I'm not committing to anything of any importance to me if DDS has any involvement; I absolutely will not risk another project being derailed by another stunts being pulled behind my back. But the door is always open if you want to reach out to me, and the same deal applies: I am more interested in finding a way forward with what we can agree on than settling scores over what we don't. Other than that, your call.

This news feed will probably be quiet until things get moving again, but in the meantime, I'll be working on updating the rest of the site. I've got quite a long list of pages to update or create.

Laters.