Artistic director Adam Nichols, who heads up St Albans theatre company OVO, is returning to the stage after a six year break from treading the boards.

He last played Bottom in 2006 for the company’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and has been lured back by one of two Harold Pinter plays being directed at The Maltings Arts Theatre by Janet Podd, one of OVO’s associate directors.

Adam says: “It’s been a busy few years for OVO, with a significant expansion in our work and the decision to run our own theatre and take over the running of The Maltings last year. I’ve been busy on the management side of things, as well as directing five productions and starting a family. There just hasn’t been time to act before now.“

In Landscape, Adam plays one half of a couple at cross purposes delivering monologues at each other rather than being able to interact. The play creates a beautiful and graphic portrait of physical nearness and emotional separation.

A Kind of Alaska was inspired by Oliver Sacks’ Awakenings and charts the experience of a woman waking up after thirty years in a coma.

Placing a microscope on how we communicate in relationships, Harold Pinter’s language – spare, unadorned, bound like music by pause and silence – draws us,with remarkable intensity, into the lives of the characters he presents.

OVO’s Landscape and A Kind of Alaska will be performed at The Maltings Arts Theatre from May 17-19 at 8pm. Details: 07807 521436, www.ticketsource.co.uk/ovo