15 Thursday Jul 2021
Posted in Scribbling, Stories, Theatre
We all read The Three Musketeers as children, don’t we? And we play make-believe, and watch the movies (and the fact itself that they keep making more of them must mean something), and go on to read Twenty Years Later, and perhaps The Man in the Iron Mask – but this is already where “we” split into two camps, roughly speaking: those who leave behind Dumas as yet another childhood pleasure, and those who do not. Continue reading
01 Thursday Jul 2021
Posted in Theatre
Alice again tonight – on the very, very large outside stage, where we never did it before… Continue reading
24 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Theatre
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And tonight we debut Il Rumore delle Ali – that is, The Sound of Wings – my own Amelia Earhart play, the one I’m co-directing together with Nina…
As usual, I want to emigrate to St. Helena, and the natural condition of theatre, and all that – but, for once, not really. We had dress rehearsals last night – well, tech rehearsals and then dress, in quick succession – and it was all the tiniest tad Noisesoffish, in that I’d be hard put to say which was which – but in spite of that, it all went… dare I say it? No, I don’t, of course. One never does, for fear of jinxing things. Let us put it this way: when I say that I want to emigrate to St. Helena, I might be slightly overstating the case. Continue reading
17 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Theatre
Two days to Sognando Alice – that is, A Dream of Alice…
Rehearsals tonight, dress tomorrow – and Saturday we go onstage. We just got the hedges in the nick of time, and I’m not sure if and when the back platform will be mounted, and the overall pace and rhythm still aren’t quite what they ought to be, and the Duck’s mask has proved highly unpractical, and there’s that change they still botch every damn time, and last night sudden blanks appeared where there used to be none, and the magnets for the tea arrived in time but just don’t work, and how on earth do I keep the damn pudding steady, and there are moments when I want to hyperventilate, and can I have one more month? A week? Two days? Please…? Continue reading
03 Thursday Jun 2021
Posted in Poetry, Scribbling, Theatre
…And “June” hummed a bee
In a Bacchic glee
As he tumbled over and over
Drunk with the honey-dew.
And that was Clinton Scollard. That said… Continue reading
18 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Theatre
Yes, I’m a director now.
No longer an assistant, no – a full fledged director.
I won’t say it wasn’t in the air, because it was. Has been for some time perhaps. After the last summer season – which was a test I passed.
And now… Continue reading
11 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Books, Scribbling, Theatre
It’s a Dover Thrift paperback, thin, smallish, the pages rather yellowed at the edges, my initials embossed on the right hand corner of the frontispiece… and I can’t quite remember where I got it.
Published in 1997, the copyright note says – so it can’t have been in Cardiff, much less in Edinburgh. And it can’t have been London, because I know for certain that I already had the book by the summer of 1998 – and I wouldn’t move to London (however briefly) until a whole year later… No, my small collection of Crane stories must have come from Pavia, from one of several bookshops around the University that stocked books in the original language. Continue reading
04 Thursday Mar 2021
Posted in Theatre
Nellie Bly was a remarkable character. She was sixteen when she wrote her first article, passionately denying that marriage and motherhood were the only option for girls. The article impressed the editors at the Pittsburgh Dispatch, enough to earn her her fist job as a journalist. At 21 she spent six months in Mexico, writing correspondences, and getting in trouble with the regime of Porfirio Dìaz for championing press freedom. At 23 she spent ten days undercover in an asylum to expose the appalling conditions of the mentally ill. At 25 she journeyed around the world to beat Phileas Fogg’s 80 days record – and she did it! Continue reading
17 Thursday Dec 2020
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I was looking for my little stash of those tiny bulbs you have on old fashioned strings of Christmas lights, you know what I mean – and instead I found, of all things, the ticket of my first Don Carlo. Continue reading
03 Thursday Dec 2020
Posted in Scribbling, Theatre
December again…
Had things been different – had things been normal – I’d be going through the backstage routine for the umpteenth time with the newest recruit of the Quick Change Team (whoever she or he might be), getting ready for tonight’s dress rehearsals of a Christmas Carol, discussing our Scrooge’s foibles – and perhaps trying on my own costume for Ruth Grimshaw in the prologue… All the while, also getting ready for our new big play – my own Verne adaptation, to open on New Year’s Eve. Also, Gemma and the good old Squirrels would be doing my Christmas Triptych on the 17th – so, even without being directly and officially involved in the production, more preparations… Continue reading
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