This was supposed to be one of the thing I wrote in December, but due to the combination of my day job temporarily going nuts, and me fighting off a monster stomach bug at the same time. Anyone waiting for me to wrap up everything on the theatre blog, apologies. Will make a proper attempt to catch up this weekend.

Anyway, here we go:

The good ...

Fewer items to list compared to last year, but one of them really is a big deal.

• We launched Durham Free Fringe. Probably the most audacious thing I've ever done in theatre. And the most stress-inducing as well. Honestly, I'd spent pretty much every day from November 2024 to July 2025 stressing over how this would turn out. Would we get enough acts? Would we get an audience? Would things hold together with our venues? And so many other things. But, madlads that we are, we pulled it off. Enough to put a programme together, and whilst the audience varied from event to event, I'd say our bigger events had some really respectable audiences. I won't tell a lie, not everything worked as well as we hoped it would, we had some precarious moments, and we learned a lot of lessons. But that was our first attempt, and we've got a better plan in place for Durham Free Fringe 2026. Hope to open programming in the next week or so.
• It's not Cluedo had its second year, continuing my partnership with the Rotunda at Brighton Fringe, reprising at Scarborough, finally coming to Buxton and Durham, both of which I'd wanted to do for ages. The show's evolved into something a lot more versatile than last year, able to scale up from informal games with a handful of audience to all-star line ups at Brighton Fringe - but I have to say, my favourite show this year was a Brighton Fringe one. No disrespect to the rest of my guests, all of whom were great, but the show that featured Do The Thing, Glenda and Rita, Aaron Weight and Bad Clowns was INCREDIBLE. Lots of people funnier than me taking the show to levels I could never have done on my own.
• I performed Doctor Coppelius. A much lower-key project, partly because the Buxton Fringe venue where I'd intended to do this, the Green Man Gallery, sadly closed for 2025. But I really did love performing in Scrivener's bookshops so I stuck with a set of intimate performances there. Got some really good feedback from that. I'm not quite done with this, because the new Rotunda Pip space was just too tempting for an encore, so if you'd like to see me do something serious for a change at Brighton Fringe, you can see me there.
• I've been getting busy with lighting. Just a side-project compared to everything else, but I finally managed to get my mits on some lighting rigs of the big theatres. I learned loads from And There Were None at the People's Theatre, although I left the big decisions to the director there as he knows his way round the 100+ lights better than me. Then it was an encore for Durham University Ballet Company where I had two hours to knock together a lighting plot from zero. Oh, and I found out at the last moment I was operating the sound too. But miraculously it worked and I was amazed by how this turned out.
• I ditched Theatre Twitter: Not the grandest milestone of the year, but really wanted to do this ever since the AI revenge porn guy bought the site. Quite apart from the moral arguments - of which I have many - it's just become totally unusable, from stupid promotion of Musk-approved conspiracy theories to just being overrun by bugs. Until last year, however, I was stuck with the hellsite for the lack of a viable alternative. But finally, enough people moved to Bluesky for me to set up a new home there, thanks to the election of an orange maniac. I'd have preferred it if aforementioned orange maniac wasn't elected, but a social media channel that actually works is a silver lining.

I've got photos from various projects to add to the site which I hope to finally get round to. But honestly, I've got some good ones.

The bad ...

Partly because I'm aware that the temptation is for artists to paint a artificially good picture of success, but mostly so I can do a play on words of that Clint Eastwood film, here's the things that didn't work so well.

• I got the walk of shame. It finally happened. Every fringe performer dreads getting no-one to a performance, and I've had a few near misses, but it finally happened for one of my Doctor Coppelius performances at Buxton. In my defence, this happened during a monster heatwave and it clobbered ticket sales for pretty much everybody in the first week. Second week was better, but always frustrating to not get the word-of-mouth publicity you need at the start of the run. MI actually had sold tickets for that performance, but they didn't turn up. My request: please don't do that. If you buy tickets to a small show where every bum on seat counts, it really demoralises performers to simply not come along when you were expected. You've got the rest of the evening to chill out in the sun.
• I've hit the limit for what I can do: I've been aware for a few years that I cannot do one billion squillion zillion things at the same time, and I've been careful over what I commit to in the summer. Even so, five fringes in four months (two shows, one venue to run and lots of reviewing) is a lot of work and a lot of stress, and - I won't tell a lie - I was approaching breaking point by the end of it. As a result, I'm going to be more careful about overstretching myself in 2026. For anyone who thinks they're not doing enough and looking enviously at people who do everything and wondering how we manage to do it all - take it from me, we're looking enviously at you not having all these high-stress high-stakes projects. Do copy what I'm doing unless you're mad.
• I ditched Theatre Twitter. Whilst I'm glad to be rid of the cursed birdapp hellsite, Bluesky has only been a partial substitute. Progress on a theatre Bluesky community is slow, and I suspect it will never fully rebuild what was once Theatre Twitter. And that's not good for me, because that was one of my best publicity channels. Theatre blog hasn't been too bad, because Google has mostly filled the gap left my Twitter, but my theatre projects have taken a bigger hit with publicity. Instagram seems to have taken over as the main social media publicity channel now, but I've found images too much of a faff. No intention of going back, though - even if I wanted to, Theatre Twitter's pretty much decimated now. So it's still worth it.

... and the ugly:

It wasn't my play to make The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly an annual theme. I thought the shenanigans with Durham Dramatic Society was the last ugly bit of business I had to deal with. Sadly, there's more.

• A venue I used to perform at turned racist on us. I've said my piece elsewhere as to why I believe Whistlebinkies' and Banshee Labyrinth's exclusion of a Jewish performers from their Edinburgh Fringe programmes is both illegal and racist, and I won't repeat that here. But there's nothing more gutting than one of the venues doing this being a place I performed at and liked. The easy thing to do would be to do what most fringe performers do, and keep my head down - but after all the time I spent banging on about standing up to wrongdoing wherever you see it, it would have hypocritical of me. Ah well, looks like I won't be going back to Edinburgh Horror Festival in a hurry. I can at least take a small comfort that I tricked Banshee Labyrinth into hosting a play they'd never have permitted if they knew what it was really saying. And, satisfyingly, Banshee Labyrinth can never admit they'd have had a problem with that.
• Durham Dramatic Society doesn't seem to be getting much better. Much as I resent how I was treated, part of me wondered if the root problem was me. Was the society was getting on better without me? The answer, it turns out, is no. There's been a pretty ugly incident which, for once, I had nothing to do with. I'm not going to say what allegedly happened, because I've heard contradictory accounts, I've drawn a blank over who (if anyone) is in the wrong, and this would be damaging the people should the allegations be wrong and/or a misunderstanding. What I will say - and I'm saying this because I still care about the future of DDS - is that they really do need a proper complaints procedure. This is nowhere near as bad as Banshee Labyrinth (who richly deserve to be sued to high heaven), but incidents like this could still put them on the wrong side of the law. I have no reason to believe I will be listened to, but I'm happy to explain how you're pushing your luck with the Equality Act and what you ought to do about it.

Okay, this summary looks more downbeat than it really is. But, honestly, the launch of Durham Free Fringe was by far my biggest event of 2025, and everything else was just footnotes. Hopefully in 2026 I'll have a lot more good things to tell you about Durham Free Fringe. Please don't give me any bad or ugly things to write about.