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THIS JUST IN...

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Further to earlier intelligence (see below), Robert will not be appearing at either the Brighton or Edinburgh Fringes 2020, because a worldwide pandemic has caused both events to be abandoned, along with just about every other event in the world. It’s hoped that the Brighton Fringe may yet happen in the autumn; in the meantime, Robert has been busy at home, making a series of short vlogs as wardens’ warden Quint McBride. Keeping the Faith explores the great man’s feelings about being confined to home when, in his view, there’s an absolute pandemic of parking abuse going on out there. The first dispatch can be found here, with much more to follow.

​Robert Cohen will be appearing in the Brighton and Edinburgh Fringes in the Monica Bauer play
The Real Machiavelli.

​He’ll be playing the title character, alongside Heather Rose Andrews, Jenny Rowe and Andy Carne; direction will be by Sweet Venues’ JD Henshaw.
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This’ll be RC’s third time in a play with Jenny Rowe (to whom he’s wed), following mutual participation in productions of Twelfth Night and The Merry Wives of Windsow – but it’ll be the first time they’ve ever had any scenes onstage together.

A PAIR OF QUINTS!

Kevin “Quint” McBride, traffic warden anti-hero of the Cohenian monodrama High Vis, made his earliest appearances as part of the online comedy project Vlog Roll, and though he’s not been so much of an online presence in recent years, there’s now something of a Quint glut – at least on Youtube, where two interpretations of the great man are now vying for attention.

Shot three years back but only just making its presence known online, Autumn Patrol is a 5-minute short in which the role of Quint is taken up by Ross Gurney-Randall. The film finds Quint in thoughtful mode, reflecting ruefully, as he pounds his daily beat, on the death of summer and the inexorable advance of pay-by-phone parking. 
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Some may like to compare and contrast with Bohemian Travesty, a short piece of vloggery in which Quint, as played by his creator, holds forth on what he perceives to be the long-term damage wrought by Freddie Mercury’s finest moment... 

WORKS
IN PROGRESS

Blood is currently being sweated on two stage projects.
One is the musical Say What You See, an adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen tale The Emperor’s New Clothes. As well as writing book, music and lyrics for that, Robert is at third-draft stage with a play called Little Things That Keep Us Together.
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Deriving its title from a Scott Walker song, Little Things... takes its inspiration from authorial memories of an obnoxious art teacher encountered at prep school in the early ’70s; a defining recollection is of handing in a picture at the end of a lesson and having it torn in two before his eyes. A challenging medium, it may be argued, in which for the artist to work – but small potatoes, in fact, for one whose previous protagonists have included traffic wardens, murderous kings and McCarthyite supergrasses. 

Completion on Little Things That Keep Us Together is expected some time towards the early summer of the year AD 2020.
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Robert Cohen can be Twittered at both @cohenbobbycoco and @HighVisTheShow