Odd that on my last ‘Bard Blog’ day – I usually start thinking about the blog on Friday – I should have met someone who remembered my Hamlet; a tall order because, although two productions of Hamlet featuring me as the Prince were planned, one at the Mermaid Theatre, the other by the British Council …
My blogs, including my first Bard Blog, have been variously criticized for not being blogs at all, far too long (never far too short), and even, for resembling every other blog. So I thought if I featured a short piece of footage of me speaking Shakespeare in my one-man show of 1999, at least it …
This week, the first of three ‘Bard Blogs’. And, after all last Sunday’s talk of England, my inaugural Shakespearean post takes its cue, literally, from a speech I made nearly two years ago on St George’s Day: Madam Mayor, my lords, ladies and gentlemen, such is the honour of being asked to speak at this …
This week I want to take you to a very precise and, at the moment, highly sought-after spot in London, surrounded by pink plasterwork inside a building that seems to be posing as a cake, iced ambitiously by a master confectioner with theatrical aspirations. I had managed to procure H20, the end seat on the …
‘They’ would rather I did not divulge any news of the part I have landed until the project has been officially launched. However, having, since the launch of my Weekly Post, promised a glimpse of my painting in progress, ‘Sophie and the Unicorn’, I thought it fitting this Sunday to compose two blogs, a double …
Donner’s Painting The wayward paint and wilful sable brush find me, unable, undeft, laborious, not the ideal painter of a fable – ‘A naked woman sitting about a garden with a unicorn eating the roses.’ Inching, dragging, dabbing, staring, caring and correcting, and revising these poses of derivative devising – how many yestermorns must there …
Last week I half promised a glimpse of Sophie and the unicorn, but I am not sure they are yet fit to be seen. Instead I offer two little items I think are worth looking at, for their curiosity value if nothing else, and perhaps for the verses I have just composed to go with …
I have been offered that job I was auditioning for, by the way. I am not being coy, but I can’t tell you what it is; my agent sweetly phoned me last thing on Friday, so that I’d know the news before the weekend, but the deal is not done yet. I had been recalled, …
The other day, on the way home from an audition in town, I went to the big Turner exhibition at Tate Britain. His canvases are hung with an impressive array of the Masters and contemporaries he emulated, rivalled and ‘sought to outdo’: Rembrandt, Claude Lorrain, Titian, Poussin and Canaletto to name but a few. An …
I recommend the following films from this extensive list: