There had always been lilies there, self-sown from wind-dropped seed, floating red and white on the green plates of their leaves. Water, for hundreds of years, had silted down into the hollow, and lay there, four or five feet deep over a black cushion of mud. Under the thick plate of green water, glazed in …
I had occasion to be in Hove on the Spring Bank Holiday and while strolling along the prom I spotted, on the rich yellow façade of a Renaissance Revival-style mansion block, a pair of blue plaques. The names on the plaques, very familiar to me, were of two contrasting personalities of the Victorian and Edwardian stage. …
Google has today been celebrating the 117th birthday of Lotte Reiniger, pioneer of silhouette animation, with a rather wonderful animated ‘doodle’ by Olivia Huynh: For my Actors’ Company production of Jack and the Beanstalk (in a double bill with Euripides’ Bacchae), Lotte designed a marvellously effective shadow play for the Jack-Giant sequence; it was the …