Seven Dials Playhouse opened in February 2022 with Steve directed by Andrew Keates. It seeks to provide opportunities for people to collaborate on bold, creative and high quality work while providing journeys of enlightenment and entertainment for artists and audiences alike. Toby Osmond told QX, “This fantastic play, based on the diary of Joe Orton is as exciting as the stars it stars. Orton’s tragically short life was a roller coaster – a big part of which was Halliwell, who I have the privilege to play. I cannot wait to tread the boards again – my first time since Game of Thrones finished – and inhabit this doomed lover and killer.” The first is that my 148 diaries represent only about one eighth of the total number of volumes Laura wrote. It turns out that I don’t have a single complete year after 1962, and that almost all the 70s, the second half of both the 60s and 80s, and most of the 90s are missing. Estimating from the gaps in my collection, the correct total number of books is closer to 1,000, or 40m words. Laura was the most prolific diarist in known history.

If you like a) laughing or b) words which rhyme with each other, you will love Brian Bilston' - Richard Osman, author of The Thursday Murder Club One must live dangerously, take risks, or one otherwise is in an ordinary metier all along… I now see I can do it. IT MUST BE DONE!!” Book Genre: British Literature, Comedy, Contemporary, Diary, European Literature, Fiction, Humor, Modern, Novels, Poetry I”’s curse began when she was 14, took over her life when she was 20, at its worst ruined three weeks out of every four (one lost to fear, one to pain, one to exhaustion), caused her to lose around 36 litres of blood and membrane, and was not considered bad enough to need medical attention. Brian Bilston is a laureate for our fractured times, a wordsmith who cares deeply about the impact his language makes as it dances before our eyes -- Ian McMillanI missed my nameless pronoun. An abstract that had a few minutes before floated everywhere had been crushed into a particular. I liked this woman, whatever her name. I enjoyed her clumsiness and her obsessions and her occasional desires for an outburst of violence. I thought I recognised a lot of her qualities in myself. I wanted to understand her. Biographers often report that they enjoy a private relationship with their subject that is (even when this is impossible, because the subject is dead) shared on both sides. So what if Laura was called Laura? Laura was everywhere. I recall my father, a huge admirer of Kenneth Williams, reading and enjoying his diaries (not as explicit as Joe's of course) but remarking that the Tangier trips with Orton and Halliwell for "Beach, Boys and Bum" as Joe characteristically styles it, was "wrong". We've learned a lot more about 'White Privilege' in the 30 years since that conversation and I think I would agree with that conclusion more readily now. Laura and I are now friends. She has read the biography I have written of her life twice, and approved it all. I have long envied artists who draw and sketch each day; who are able to transform ordinary visual experience into art – I imagine it to be a joy. Part tender love story, part murder mystery, part coruscating description of a wasted life, and interspersed with some of the funniest poems about the mundane and the profound, Diary of a Somebody is a unique, original and hilarious novel.

A month later, I saw Laura Francis for the first time. She was standing in the doorway of her bungalow, clutching a ring-bound jotting pad in her right hand. “Are you Alex?” she said as I held out my hand to greet her. “I was just writing in my diary about you.”She writes long letters to “E”, and gets terse, pompous replies: “E said I am a weakling. E said there is no place for them in life, they ought to be hung up”; “E said she’s glad she’s not my parents.” Achingly funny. Without doubt it should win next year's Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse prize for the best comic novel, even if my own novel is in contention as well -- Jonathan Coe This fun, charming novel is a fine showcase for Bilston's irrepressible creativity . . . It's all done with wit, playfulness and a sense of amused wonder at the possibilities and idiosyncrasies of the English language, with the occasional groanworthy pun seeming like a price well worth paying. -- Alastair Mabbott * Herald * Only in poetry does he find refuge and relief, interlarding diary entries with his mischievous verses, some parodies of pop songs (REM, Bee Gees, Blur), some of actual poems, nearly all of them quotable. I especially like his haiku horoscopes: Brian Bilston has decided to write a poem every day for a year while he tries to repair his ever-desperate life. His ex-wife has taken up with a new man, a marketing guru and motivational speaker who seems to be disturbingly influencing his son, Dylan. Meanwhile Dylan’s football team keeps being beaten 0–11, as he stands disconsolately on the wing waiting vainly to receive the ball. At work Brian is drowning in a sea of spreadsheets and is becoming increasingly confused by the complexities of modern communication and management jargon. So poetry will be his salvation. But can Brian’s poetry save him from Toby Salt, his arch nemesis in the Poetry Group and potential rival suitor to Brian’s new poetic inspiration, Liz? Worst of all Toby has announced that boutique artisan publishing house Shooting from the Hip will be publishing his first collection, titled This Bridge No Hands Shall Cleft, in the autumn. And when he goes missing Brian is inevitably the number one suspect.