Nick Awde - Plays and Fiction

Plays and Fiction

With Chris Bartlett he co-wrote the comedy drama Pete and Dud: Come Again, a hit at the Assembly Rooms at the Edinburgh Festival in August 2005 before transferring to London's West End at The Venue, in March 2006, then doing a 90-date tour of the UK the following year. The play examines the highly influential comic relationship that existed between comedians Peter Cook and Dudley Moore - along with Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller they kickstarted the satirical comedy movement in the United Kingdom in the early 1960s with Beyond the Fringe, before branching off on their own. Set in a chat show during the early eighties, the play tells their tale from the perspective of Dudley Moore, by then an international film star. In June 2006 Pete and Dud: Come Again transferred for a short run in Auckland, New Zealand, as part of the Bruce Mason Centre's first Best of British Festival. Classic rock group 10cc shared the bill.

In 2007 two other plays have followed, premiering at the Edinburgh Festival: Unnatural Acts at Assembly and Blood Confession at the Gilded Balloon. Written with Chris Bartlett, directed by David Giles and starring Jessica Martin and Jason Wood, Unnatural Acts is a comedy about two flatmates, a gay man and a straight woman, who try to have a baby together. Written by Awde and directed by Jon Bonfiglio, Blood Confession is a violent drama about an interrogation, about a child murder from 25 years ago, that goes horribly wrong.

In 1993, Awde wrote, composed and produced Andrew Lloyd Webber The Musical, described as "a bizarre mix of spoof and satire" by The Virgin Encyclopedia of Stage & Film Musicals. A pastiche of the life of top musical composer Lloyd Webber, in loving homage to Mel Brooks' The Producers, it ran in a variety of fringe venues across London with several casts. It is now available in book form. Awde's 1994 follow-up Margaret Thatcher: The Musical failed to find backing. The satirical musical followed the fortunes of the former prime minister as she dies and is forced to wait at the Pearly Gates as a desperate God and the equally desperate Devil devise a game show in which the loser has to take her for eternity, complicated by an audience vote at the finale. Andrew Lloyd Webber: The Musical has been regarded as the first serious show in the 'celebrity title' genre, pioneering the way for hits such as Jerry Springer: The Opera. Awde's other stage works are Eros and the Skull (Bloomsbury Theatre, London, 1988) - a multi-created one-man show about the French poet Baudelaire - and Semtex & Lipstick (King's Head Theatre, London, 1992) - a drama for actor and actress about love and political torture. He also co-designed costumes for historical drama Tewodros (Arts Theatre, 1987).

In 2003 he published his first novel, The Virgin Killers as part of The Public School Chronicles series. It is a complex thriller about murders of priests at a Catholic prep school in the wilds of Lancashire that lead to a trail of Jesuit and Freemason conspiracies deep within the British Establishment. Intended as a thinly disguised political comment on the state of the nation, the book, unusually for a thriller, also contains a historical appendix - a timeline linking events in British and Irish history to the constitutional oppression of Catholics, Jews and other Non-Conformists within the United Kingdom and Ireland right up to the present day.

He has been a theatre critic since the early 1990s, and has been writing for The Stage newspaper for most of that time. Together with fellow Stage contributor Gerald Berkowitz, in 1999 he set up theatreguidelondon.co.uk, the first UK-based theatre website to be run exclusively by professional critics. He has also worked as an editor, sub-editor and designer for a wide range of publications, and during the 90s worked on more than 50 start-ups at various stages in their development. While working on The Voice he was reputed to have written a front-page headline that caused a riot in Brixton the following day and attempted siege of the local police station.

As an illustrator and cartoonist, over the years his more high-profile work has included newspapers such as The Voice and The Weekly Journal - where he was the regular profile illustrator for several years - City Limits and The Guardian newspaper. His cartoons also illustrate comedian Llewella Gideon's The Little Big Woman Book. He has done illustration work for Spanish educational publishers and has run a wide range of cartoon strips in specialist publications such as Boogie (music press, Spain), London Student, Untitled, The Wharf and The Stage.