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Big Weekend - Barnes Children's Book Festival and 'Lord God'

Isn't it typical? You wait eighteen months for the return of book festivals and the premiere of exciting new musical comedies what you half wrote, and then they both come along at once!

On Saturday, Sarah McIntyre and I were invited to the Barnes Children's Book Festival, in south-west London. It's always a lovely event, and it was great to see it up and running again - the audience masked, and none of the usual marquees on Barnes Green, but otherwise feeling pretty much like normal. Sarah and I were both feeling a bit out of practise, but it all came back to us and, with some help from the audience, we told the story of Kevin and the Biscuit Bandit, and then helped criminal mastermind guinea pigs Neville and Beyoncé steal Michael Morpurgo's golden crown (he never attends a book festival without it). 

We also each did a solo session: Sarah's Grumpycorn picture book event turned into a dinosaur event, and I talked about Mortal Engines, Railhead, and Utterly Dark. The festival helpers were all great and made us feel very well looked-after, and I was particularly pleased to meet Judith Dixon, who wrote her dissertation on the Railhead trilogy for her MA in Children's Literature at Roehampton University. I scribbled a Hive Monk on the cover for her...

It would have been nice to linger longer in Barnes, but I had to dash, because I knew that, back in Devon, the Foundry Group were preparing for the premiere performance of Lord God, the musical I wrote with Brian Mitchell last summer. (Well, we wrote the script last summer - he's been slaving away on the music ever since.) Luckily all the trains ran on time, and I arrived in Ashburton Arts Centre about a third of the way through the first act, in time to see Emma Wingrove as Minty sing a touching ballad about the uncomfortableness of Lloyd Loom chairs. ("You'll never be caught napping in a Lloyd Loom chair/The chance of relaxation simply isn't there/One must sit healthfully upright, with keen mind and open eyes/And a sort of herringbone motif embossed upon one's thighs...') 

Rehearsing and staging a musical in the midst of a pandemic has proved challenging, to say the least, but the show is already in good shape, and quite possibly the most English thing ever. Murray Simon makes a wonderful Bertie Wooster-ish God (we were hoping he'd play the part when we wrote it), Emma is the most adorable atheist professor you could hope to see, Brian Mitchell does sterling work as the Archangel Gabriel and pompous theatre critic Rex Addison, and Joanna Neary is simply magnificent as a variety of angels, waitresses, registrars, newspaper sub-editors etc. The show, as God Himself would say, is 'really jolly good', and I hope you get a chance to see it. If you live in or near Brighton, your chance will come on 16th and 17th July when it's being staged in St Ann's Well Gardens: tickets here.

'Here up in Heaven everything is shiny and new...'

God (Murray Simon) tries to convince Minty Tweddle (Emma Wingrove) of His existence.

Jo Neary portraying the existential bewilderment of a Devon seaside hotel waitress discovering that one of her guests (Brian Mitchell) is a vegetarian...

Jo recommends the Full English Breakfast...

'Here down in Devon everything is tickety-boo...'




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