I remember carriage interiors very like this, with the leather strap to adjust the window to keep out smoke. I travelled widely as a touring actor before the infamous Dr Beeching axed hundreds of miles of branch lines in the early 1960s. I advise slow trains on branch lines, half-empty trains that go through meadows …
Violent brushwork and strident colour are the manifestation of a desperate intensity of vision, are an act of surrender to the terrible vitality of things. David Sylvester, Encounter, December 1954 In March 1981, Emily and I were busy. We spent eleven days in a television studio, filming Trevor Nunn’s RSC stage production of Chekhov’s Three …
The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been given back to me today by this friend of mine who taught me dancing. Hermann Hesse A short Halloween reflection in limerick form:
And calm within the bosom of the down, As though no Time could waste, no Fortune fret Her ancient peace, I see my own fair Town, Girdled with golden sunbeams, changeless yet. William John Courthope, ‘The Country Town: A Reverie’ A little film featuring the ancient church of St Peter, Hamsey and the Saxon king Athelstan …
A largess universal, like the sun, His liberal eye doth give to every one, Thawing cold fear, that mean and gentle all Behold, as may unworthiness define, A little touch of Harry in the night. Henry V, Prologue to Act IV Today, the Feast of Saints Crispin and Crispinian, marks the 600th anniversary of the …
And thanks for the light. Dr Rank’s last line in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House Yesterday was National Poetry Day in the UK and the theme was Light. At our new home in Sussex, our south-facing garden lies under an amazing expanse of sky and we are treated to glorious sunrises and sunsets as well as …
We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else. ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD We have been crowded out of our house by the boxes and our last week or so as residents of London …
To remember happiness which cannot be restored, is pain, but of a softened kind … and memory, however sad, is the best and purest link between this world and a better. But come! I’ll tell you a story of another kind. NICHOLAS NICKLEBY One of the recent rediscoveries in the mammoth ongoing task of sorting and packing …
Summer night: ruined mountains, rivers cry out with one voice. Flaming trees dance up into the angry autumn sky. Timiki Hara, Haiku 20, 6-7 August …
My friends, my dear friends! Can I be silent, in leaving this house for evermore? Can I restrain myself, in saying farewell, from expressing those feelings which now fill my whole being … ? Gaev in Act IV of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard I arrived back from New York last month not with a clutch …