Selling myself like soap powder

My days are currently spent trying to think up ways to tell people about Lady in Bed that will ensure that bottoms actually make contact with seats. A problem with performing a play every now and again in different venues is that my poor beleaguered email list is regularly propositioned, and must be sick to the back teeth of hearing about the ruddy show. But that’s not the attitude is it?…All I’m doing is telling people about a show which I am proud of, and which, chances are, they’d enjoy if they saw. My immediate challenges are dates at the See You Next Tuesday Festival and Oxford Fringe. The former I am doing because I wanted to play the lovely New Players (I’m addicted to old music-hall style theatres) and because various people I know in London haven’t seen the show yet. I also wanted to be associated with a festival with a rude title. Oxfringe (you see what they did there?) I am doing because I fancy spending 4 days in Oxford. You may be getting the impression I am not performing this play for the most noble of intentions. But then, the greatest of all playwrights (Shakey, Chekhov, that lot) probably didn’t think ‘I must market my play so that people will come and see it and be irrevocably changed for the better in a way that will also make the world a nicer place’. No, I expect they wanted to earn a few notes and see some folk in the bar afterwards and be patted on the back a lot. So, onwards and upwards with pestering people. (I’ll be doing it all again later in the year for Edinburgh, you Scottish friends and theatre-tourists – you cannot hide)