Redder Than Roses at the Buxton Festival

Tickets now on sale for my new play Redder Than Roses - A Glimpse Of Mary Queen Of Scots at this year's Buxton Festival, world premiere - July 13th 2pm! Here's the link:

http://www.buxtonfestival.co.uk/other-events/redder-roses/

And here's links for two other plays I've done with the wonderful Wireless Theatre Company - available for FREE download is my surreal tragi-comedy MEDUSA ON THE BEACH, in which the head of the titular Gorgon from Greek mythology is found in a polythene bag on the beach of a modern British seaside town:

http://www.wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk/index.php/component/jotloader?Itemid=15&cid=2&id=91

And for a nominal fee, there's BLOOD AND STONE, my scary variation on the true-life story of Hungarian bloody Countess Elizabeth Bathory - nominated for a Rondo Award (the horror world's Oscars) last year:

http://www.wirelesstheatrecompany.co.uk/index.php/paid-downloads-radio-theatre/view_document/8-blood-and-stone--3d-thriller

Usher notes continued

Reflections of neon lights spangling Madeline's pale, almost white, hair.

As we crossed the river, our shared past came rolling back upon me.

Back at art school, the Ushers already stars of the scene, myself just an also-ran, but I made up the numbers at the parties they used to hold at the house of their widower father, a suburban vicar. Bluebeard's Castle & The Velvet Underground cranked up to full blast.

Loved Madeline, but never dared... not only because she was so intimidatingly, sublimely beautiful, but because there were rumours even then about the intensity of the relationship between brother and sister. Certainly neither one of them ever found a partner that anyone else ever knew about.

That one night... party at someone else's tenement flat - bed in the kitchen recess. Madeline crawling into bed in black bra and panties. Do you want to climb in? Ed (in Spiderman Y fronts!) sliding in beside her. 'Nothing' happened, barely touching, her soft pulse, dreams deep as the Clyde, the Atlantic even - that moment fresh in his head as he sat in divorce court ten years later. Most beautiful moment of his unbeautiful life.

Far end of old docks - warehouse on edge of quay, like granite bee hive. Inside, skeletons, Victorian clothes on rusty hangers like dusty angels, ragged maquettes. She pops pills, goes to bed. Ed alongside her.

Rod appears, furious. Your little bloodbath stole the show, all anyone's talking about.

Glasgow, Like A Stranger

Ted Gillman is coming home... to the murders that were never solved, the victim who didn't die, the lover who never forgot, the brother who disappeared but won't go away... and the city where every dark back street leads to the grave.

Now available from Amazon....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Glasgow-Like-A-Stranger-ebook/dp/B004ZH3EGQ/ref=la_B004H9DTMQ_1_7?ie=UTF8&qid=1366543338&sr=1-7

Doctor Who; The Lurkers At Sunlight's Edge

My Doctor Who audio drama still available from Big Finish, featuring Sylvester McCoy as the Doctor and essentially confronting the Doctor with a thinly disguised version of H.P Lovecraft and his nightmarish cosmos/mythos. Hear Ace embrace C.P Doveday as he shifts and slides in and out of monstrous extraterrestrial form: a spiky, slimy business. One day as a kid, living in the Glasgow suburb of Newton Mearns, I discovered the Lovecraft universe in one of the old US Skywald horror magazines and convinced all my little playmates that the entrance to the underground realm of the Shoggoths lay in a great broken end of water pipe feeding into the local burn: I stuck my arm in there, then screamed and pulled the arm out, a great bite mark conspicuous on the flesh (of course I'd already discreetly bit my own hand while my friends weren't looking). My own dramatic, if indirect, contribution to the Cthulu mythos was inevitable from that day on. Here's the Big Finish link:

http://www.bigfinish.com/releases/v/lurkers-at-sunlight-s-edge-307

Also available via Amazon. Here's their Marty Ross page:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Marty-Ross/e/B004H9DTMQ/ref=ntt_athr_dp_pel_1

Falling For The Ushers Sunday Morning Notes

Outside taxi... Glasgow sliding by in shades of burning leather and blackest oil.

The River Clyde... mightier than the Amazon, thicker than molasses, choked full of rusting ghosts.

Skeleton of a blue whale curled at one end of studio.

Bouncer's face like square sausage sweating in a frying pan.

Madeline: in that gallery full of spurious gestures, a single image with the

awesome, unnerving force belonging solely to the greatest works of art, the most unearthly gestures of nature - the image of Madeline Usher herself.

Heart Shaped Hole notes

One of my not-quite-schoolfriends once hacked another human being to pieces. Back in my PE class, we seemed to spend a lot of time sitting around the changing room and not doing PE (strikes?). There were two tough guys in the class - guy called Haughey was one. I actually liked him - his very Glasgow patter was genuinely funny and I'd sit quietly over the other side of the room noting his verbal panache with a writer's attention. But next to him there'd be Young-y, Gordon Young, a little imp of a guy who hardly spoke, who stared at existence with a kind of psychopathic malice that wouldn't even allow him to exchange a word with the world around him. Years later, I heard that he and a bunch of other guys had chased a promising student up a back alley in Busby and hacked him into pieces (with a machete?): it was a big case in the Scottish papers at the time. (What happened to him?) Heart-Shaped Hole 'hero' must be a sort of combination of Haughey and Young-y - the patter of one, the sheer hateful focus of the other.

Workbook Usher cont'd

1st sight of Madeline, hiding in corner by fire extinguisher.

Canapes less tasty after Rod slags Eddy off.

Chandelier has dead goldfish instead of crystal pendants.

Blogger: It's so exquisite, it's like looking death in the face, like watching Doctor Dolittle in a slaughterhouse.

She hardly seemed to have changed at all. My dream. My Madeline.

Bloody hand: Won't you kiss it better, just for old time's sake? It was a dare. Madeline had set me so many dares in the past. I'd never said no to any of them. Blood sweeter in my mouth than the canapes.

Their art: cheap jokes instead of howls of pain.

They're going to murder us. Tomorrow morning in the papers - they're going to murder us. Maybe it's about time. Like the man said: "we belong dead".

You belong with me. You always did. Although doubtless you forgot.

No, Eddy. I never forgot.

You've bled all over the fucking gallery. Well, at least there's some kind of statement of life and truth and pain - in among all the neon and bollocks.

You're still claiming ownership of Madeline's feminine side?

What kind of show is this where the only show of truth and passion is taking place in the ladies toilet?

Shut up and behave and get out there and SELL THE SHOW!

I can't sell myself any further down the river, Rod. It's getting terribly deep. And awfully cold.

My fingers are getting excessively acquainted with the back of your throat, sister dear.

Get out - get a taxi - and use the fucking back door!

I can't go back on my own....