[for your enjoyment, please play The Platters “I’m Sorry…” as an audio accompaniment to this blog entry.]

Birthday delight for me yesterday as the Bristol Uni P2 team pulled out top drawer performances for our two presentations of The Little Sister. Slick, sassy and stacked with humour, I felt totally at ease as the show rattled through it’s 60-minute journey toward the final revelation that it was, infact, the little sister wot dunnit. In a spurious film studio screen-test four Marlowe-wannabes get whittled down to one as the others succumb to being recast as fall guys; picked off, one by one. The surviving ‘dick’, Marlowe, is left decidedly uneasy as he delivers his coda, flanked by a posse of gun toting femme fatales.

It’s been a stressful and exhausting couple of weeks; long hours spent crafting the material into shape. At times I felt a finished show might actually be beyond us. Now, of course, in the afterglow, I wish the rewards could be extended with further performances, but term-time is now over and all have scattered to their Christmas hideaways for deserved breaks. I arrived back in Birmingham at midnight, celebrating the tail-end of my birthday on a bouncy castle at the Stan’s Cafe Christmas Party. A perfectly mad end to an excellent day.