FOLLOWING its successful premiere at the Write On Festival last July, Anthony Jenkins' play Land of Mines can be seen again at The Courtyard on January 31.

Anthony, who with Pete Bird, also runs Exit Fool Productions (Angel and Of Mice and Men), started writing about five years ago as he left drama school.

"The first thing I ever wrote was called Butchers' Yard, which I started in 2008 but didn't finish until the following year - I made the mistake of writing, directing and acting in it," he reports. "I'll never do that again.

Land of Mines is based on a story Anthony was told by Filip Kremus about being out shopping with his mother in Bosnia when a bombardment began, forcing them to take cover and they found themselves sheltering for 12 hours in what proved to be a microcosm of the war itself as Serbians and Croatians found themselves in uncomfortably close proximity staring at each other only to disappear when the shelling ended.

Anthony took this story as his starting point and wrote Land of Mines, set in Sarajevo in 1992. Four characters are trapped inside a derelict house awaiting rescue from NATO. The UN soldier is trying to uphold the peace agreement while Serbian and Croatian refugees bicker and taunt each other as the shells constantly fall around them. Among the refugees is a severely wounded Muslim boy whose secrets affect everyone around him.

"It was a very strong subject, but I didn't think anything of it until I wanted an idea to submit to Write On and it came flooding back. It was perfect, and had a small cast."

Since its first outing, Land of Mines has been re-cast and now features Dave Thomas who, on first seeing it, asked Antony: 'Can I be in it if you do it again?", Katie Dalton, Ian Smith as the UN officer, Will Moore, a veteran of The Courtyard's Youth Theatre, and HMTC's John Stacey.

Following the advice of one of his tutors, Che Walker, who told him "If you want to get somewhere, create your own work," Antony has also been busy writing another play for this year's Write On Festival, The Rossville Barricade, about Bloody SUnday, and will return to The courtyard in April with Exit Fools' production of the acclaimed Bent, and again in the autumn with The Long, The Short and the Tall, to commemorate the anniversary of the D-Day Landings.

"It's my ambition to make the next year a really big year for Exit Fool," says Antony. "We want to develop a name for ourselves."