THE Flanagan Collective and Belt Up Theatre director, writer, musician and performer Alexander Wright will do well to match his achievements of 2012 but he will give it a go – and will have a variety of opportunities to do so.

In October he began a year’s contract as associate artist at York Theatre Royal, continuing an association with the theatre that has incorporated shows with his two companies and his post as one of the assistant directors on the 2012 York Mystery Plays in the Museum Gardens.

“Yes. I had a lovely time last year,” he says. “We started the year on the road in Australia and lot’s happened since then and a lot’s moved on.

“It’s great that the success the Flanagan Collective has had with such shows as Beulah and the festivals we’ve done [the Edinburgh Fringe and the Little Festival of Everything at the Fauconberg Arms in his home village of Coxwold], which is testament to people wanting to get on with making things.

“There’s such a wealth of talent that, if you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile. So it’s been wonderful to do exciting work with people willing to put their creative imagination into things.

“Likewise, I feel very honoured to have worked on the York Mystery Plays and now to be given the associate artist’s post at the Theatre Royal.”

Alexander’s 2012 concluded with his adaptation of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol being performed by actor-musicians Ed Wren and John Holt Roberts as a dinner-theatre show in the Lamb And Lion Inn’s top parlour in High Petergate, York. A case of food for thought.

Come 2013, and Wright’s works Beulah and Some Small Love Story are to be taken on a national spring tour by Manchester producers HartshornHook Productions and The Flanagan Collective, playing studios in York, Leeds, Hull, Berkshire, Manchester and Edinburgh and the Coxwold pub before a run at the Arts Theatre in London’s West End.

The boutique musical Some Small Love Story is a delicate tale of passionate love and searing heartbreak, told by a cast of four with music by Gavin Whitworth; the William Blake-inspired Beulah is a folk musical about time, dreams, reality and the very fabric of our world whose story straddles this world and the next.

Alexander is busy writing his latest piece, Babylon, a post-apocalyptic dystopian folk tale.

“It’s a relatively big idea that takes a natural leap forward in style from Beulah, staged by lots of people in lots of ways as a big, romping folk gig with bands, dancing, singing and storytelling,” he says.

“It’s about a world we have broken, set some time in the future – a story of kings and queens and what we should remember to hold near and dear; the things which are truly important to us.”

Meanwhile, his duties at the Theatre Royal will benefit others. “My role is setting up new projects, creating things here that aren’t happening at the moment – which is a great opportunity for me,” says Alexander.