CityLife

24:7 showcase: Vegetable

IMAGINE the nightmare scenario of waking up one morning to discover you are trapped inside your own body, unable to move or speak. That is what happened to Estelle, attacked in her home and left for dead two months earlier.

How can she communicate to her doctors and family that she is not a vegetable? Who attacked her? And why? That terrifying, moving premise is the basis for Diane Whitley's 24:7 hit Vegetable, picked as one of the three best of the festival awards.

In fact, Diane Whitley was so inspired by last year's event that she wrote Vegetable especially for it, having not penned anything for the theatre for the previous 16 years. "I'd been one of the co-founders of the Pan Theatre Company, working at Contact," recalls Diane, "and seeing some of those productions reawakened something in me, made me think I should push myself.

Concentrate

"I originally trained as an actor and when Dave (Simpson) and I started a family, the allure of a season in rep started to wane somewhat, so I decided to concentrate on my TV work round about the time my TV work started to dry up! "I therefore found myself `resting' much of the time and so decided to write a radio play. I

had expert tuition from Dave and although I didn't manage to sell that first play, I did sell my second and have gone on from there, writing and producing mostly children's TV."

Her successes have included Children's Ward and Big Meg, Little Meg. She also worked on Grange Hill and, with Dave, runs a writing school where tutors include Willy Russell, Paul Abbott, Kay Mellor, Stella Duffy and Jackie Kay.

The success of Vegetable (directed at the Octagon by Alan Rothwell), though, has made her think about doing more writing for the theatre again and perhaps expanding Vegetable.

"I think the discipline of writing to fit into a one-hour time slot is great and I'm also a great one for deadlines, so that way of working also made 24:7 very attractive.

"On the other hand, Vegetable feels very packed, in that you're trying to get a lot into that time-span, so I've got some ideas for quite a big rewrite."