Local Playwright Simon Carter's Plays Phys Ed And Blink Come To Nottingham

Award-winning playwright and comedy sketch writer Simon Carter is about to have two of his plays performed in his hometown of Nottingham. Phys Ed, a critically-acclaimed one-man play is finishing its UK tour, including a highly successful stint at the Edinburgh fringe, with a one night performance in Calverton, whilst Blink is currently in rehearsal and will be performed by The People's Theatre Company at The Nottingham Arts Theatre in November.

"It was accident more than design getting back into playwriting. I'd worked as a comedy sketch writer and I was the creator of the Traces Of Nuts show, one of the most successful audio comedy podcasts in Britain. I'd written a couple of plays a while ago and I was invited to take part in the Nottingham One Act Play Festival 2010 and did really well with a show called Limbo, a one hour, one-man show. One thing led to another and The Nottingham Arts Theatre asked if I would be interested in writing a full-length piece for them so I started writing Blink and I also wrote Phys Ed which toured at the Edinburgh festival this year. So my first love was really playwriting and it's great to be getting back into it.


"Phys Ed is a comedy monologue, a one man show about a PE teacher in a public school and he's rugby obsessed but his identical twin brother is phenomenally more successsful than he is and is a rugby international so he lives in his brother's shadow. But he gets the opportunity to get some glory back for himself when he and his team of 12-year-old kids are in the final of a national rugby tournament. It's about sibling rivalry and people who carve out their own heroic path, it's a comedy drama, family-orientated, very light-hearted show. The play is performed by Nicholas Osmond, familiar to Radio 4 listeners as the voice of Leon in The Archers and to younger audiences from his appearances in BBC TV's The Sarah Jane Adventures.

Simon Carter and Nicholas Osmond

"Blink is a serious piece about a guy called Thomas who suffers from a condition called locked-in syndrome. Patients who suffer from this are fully aware and can hear but they've lost the part of the brain that enables them to move and communicate in a regular way and their movements are limited to basic things such as blinking and twitching fingers. They develop these very intricate systems of commmunication through a letters chart so they can blink out the letters of a word and form a sentence but a sentence may take two hours, it's very painstaking and very difficult. It's an interesting avenue for drama, it's fairly intense. Blink is currently in rehearsal and because it's a brand new play, recently written and never been seen before, I'm involved with the rehearsal period and I go in once or twice a week. I try and blend into the background and not say too much because I want the director and actors to develop the characters and don't want to interfere too much. I'm there more to advise and assist."

Phys Ed plays at St Wilfrid's C of E School Hall, Calverton, Nottingham NG14 6FG on Friday Oct 28 at 8pm. Tickets are £4/£3 concessions and can be reserved by calling 0115 965 2775

Blink is at Nottingham Arts Theatre Nov 15-19 full details of times and ticket prices are available at http://www.nottingham-theatre.co.uk/