‘Tick. Tick. Tick. Boom.’

Life has, in recent months, tightened the leather straps of the old strait-jacket and plunged me head-first into Houdini’s own water-tank, well aware I would work out for myself that the jacket was an replication of a classic Armani number in infinite butterflies and the tank a spotlight filled with the shimmer of glitter. I gave up my air supply, I sent away The Devil I thought gave me so many of my powers, and I made it.

‘Bepo’ was a magnificent thing, a midnight circus of straight-men, chaos-bringers and joy-mongers. I remember Thursday’s quiet questioning “…is this right? Am I doing this right?” You did it perfectly. I remember Mr.Shifty’s love of his monologue, expressed with the quiet professional quality of simply perfecting it. I remember Bepo asking me to put him in character and knowing simply that by placing my hands on his arms and staring into his eyes it would happen. I remember Harry telling me that, “I’m trying this new thing called acting.” I remember Comedy and Tragedy’s irrepressible genuine smiles. I remember the rise of the music, the last spotlight, the battered band of rag-tag troubadours, the explosion of confetti, of glitter, of joy. It’s the first thing I’ve written where I really found my voice. I always wondered if you’d know when you did, and you know what? You do. And it feels like wearing a suit of wings.

More of it can be seen here on the website of the newly founded Unwish Theatre, the reviews here and here, and if I possibly can you’ll have another chance to see a performance of a closer-to-perfection script. Bepo & Co. are here to stay. As a result of it numerous new and intricate ideas are constructing themselves all over my mind. An adaption of ‘The Devils’ by Dostoyevsky set among a revolutionary cell of the Spanish civil war whose members are an ex-brass band with increasingly self-aware characters. A play of parallel stories – one the love between the soprano playing the title-role in a performance of ‘L’incoronazione di Poppea’ and her counter-part castrato playing Nero when she discovers ‘he’ is a woman in disguise, the other that of a gay Toreador fighting the two twin impulses of his life. Ever more ideas – the suit of wings is powered by the internal shockwave of a never ceasing atom bomb. In a week I go to the Edinburgh Fringe with Unwish’s first real debut: ‘Carnivàle‘ – an intimate candle-lit dinner-party where the darkness is palpably closing in, or so we hope. ‘The rail sounds like a round of applause.’ Onwards.

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