This week, Lee Mattinson's play Donna Disco returns to Newcastle's Live Theatre, where it began five years ago, prior to a national tour.
The play was first staged as a rehearsed reading as part of the Live Lab programme in 2010 as half of a double-bill presented under the umbrella of Girls on the Verge. The show went on to enjoy a successful run at the Edinburgh Fringe and New Wimbledon Theatre in 2011 as well as a sell out run at Live in 2012.
"Donna Disco was the first play I ever wrote," said Mattinson. "It was scribbled in between split shifts at the then Café Live into an exercise book in pink felt tip. It swiftly disappeared into the trademark ‘bottom draw’ of unproduced work where it sat until a pact was struck up with Paula Penman to attempt to make something together. I remembered Donna, whipped her out and so our adventure began."
A one-woman show performed by Penman and directed by Laura Lindow, it's the story of Donna who is fourteen, clumsy and fat—and bullied. She’s bland, bespectacled and, if she’d ever heard of The Beautiful South, she’d adore them.
She also has a new school project, to source a stranger’s story and present her findings at the annual Christmas Pageant. And so she takes it upon herself to befriend the colourful cross-dressing butcher from downstairs.
But then things go wrong...
"It seems fitting," Mattinson added, "that we bring Donna back to her spiritual and theatrical home to kick of her first National Tour, which will run until the end of March."
The play runs at Live from Thursday to Saturday and then moves on to The Place Theatre, Bedford (4 March), Theatre Severn, Shrewsbury (5 March), stage@leeds, Leeds (10 March), Assembly Rooms, Tamworth (13 March), New Diorama Theatre, London (15 March), Capstone Theatre, Liverpool (17 March), Cast, Doncaster (19 March), Hull Truck Theatre, Hull (20 March), Queen’s Hall Arts Centre, Hexham (24 and 25 March) and Upstairs at the Western, Leicester (28 March).