Stag comes to the ultimate Stag night city this May – it’s on 17 to 19 May at Theatre de Cameleon…

http://www.orangeteatheatre.com/

I have a few readings of recent playwriting coming up:

Change, a 10-minute political comedy about two investment bankers and a beggar, will feature at the next Artists Anonymous Page to Stage at the Battersea Art Centre on Friday 24 February.

Scene 2 of Mondeo Man – about the downfall of an over-reaching sex addict MP – will be read at February’s MSFT Sunday Surgery at The Others, Stoke Newington on Sunday 26 February.

My full length play The Inheritance is featuring at Transmission Workshop.

The play explores the antagonism, rage and finally love between Jeremy, a faded Nineties pop musician and his father Frank, a jack-the-lad Peckham tailor now laid low with Parkinson’s Disease and suspected dementia.

More details soon…

This October sees the premiere of Stag, my play about a stag night in eastern Europe that goes disastrously wrong.

Two friends, John and Davvo, are reunited in the same dilapidated ex-Soviet city where they worked together as teachers a decade before.

While John teeters on the brink of comfortable marriage, best man Davvo has chosen a life of free-wheeling debauchery.

But they find the city where their friendship blossomed has been transformed from romantic decay to soulless conformity. And it’s not just the city that’s changed in the intervening years.

Over the course of an evening, they probe each others’ insecurities, finally agreeing to spend a lost weekend together, during which their friendship is tested to crisis point.

Stag runs from 11 to 16 October 2011 at the Courtyard Theatre, 40 Pitfield Street, London N1 6EU; www.thecourtyard.org.uk

More details will be available soon.

Searching for a two bedroom flat to buy last year, I was struck by the omnipresence of three items in almost every property we viewed:

1. An apple mac
2. A picture of the current owner as a child (more about this elsewhere)
3. A copy of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.

Strange that this fat volume should have become indispensible to the English property-owning classes.

To the breakfast club, then, for a steak burrito.

Ensconsed within the cubicle, I find they are playing “How Do You Mend A Broken Heart” by Al Green.

Did Al Green think when he recorded the song, all those years ago on a hot night in Memphis, “One day, people will be micturating to my music”?

Potemkin’s theatre’s first event too place on 13 February: a rehearsed reading of The Inheritance – a work-in-progress play set in a South London old people’s home.

Rob, Jeremy and Ruth perform

Father and son duo Rob and Jeremy Allen played the warring father and son characters of the drama, with Ruth Chatto as Gloria. Aimee Lawrence gave great support with cooking and theatre design.

Among the audience were journalist Ben Moore-Bridger, writer Roger Stephens and Golden Delilah’s Anniwaa Buachie.

Thanks again to Rob, Jeremy, Ruth and Aimee for making it such a successful evening.