Glenda Jackson and EP in Strange Interlude Thirty years ago today (5th May), Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude closed on Broadway. The production had transferred from the Duke of York’s in London to the Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street (where Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf had its premiere in 1962, when the theatre was called the …
Ten thousand honors and blessings on the bard who has thus gilded the dull realities of life with innocent illusions; who has spread exquisite and unbought pleasures in my chequered path; and beguiled my spirit in many a lonely hour. Washington Irving on Shakespeare A film in celebration of the Bard’s birthday, in remembrance of …
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. The Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead A film to mark the 150th anniversary of President Lincoln’s death, featuring a poem I wrote in my dressing …
Give my regards to old Broadway And tell them I’ll be there ere long. George M. Cohan The second in a series of film blogs as My Perfect Mind prepares to head to New York in June. Photo by EP
We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. Marcel Proust A new film linking Richard III, the Moscow Art Theatre and …
We’ll have Manhattan, The Bronx and Staten Island too. Rodgers and Hart As My Perfect Mind prepares to head to New York for a short summer season at 59E59 Theaters, Told by an Idiot have commissioned me to do a regular …
Later today the coffin of Richard III will reach Leicester Cathedral where it will lie in state before the king’s reinterment on Thursday. This morning I woke to Radio 4’s live broadcast of the Sunday service from Leicester Cathedral. A limerick to mark the occasion. The monarch old Richard the Third Of whom everybody has …
Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. Seamus Heaney, ‘Crediting Poetry’, Nobel Lecture, 1995 In celebration of St Patrick’s Day, a preview of …
Our grapevine on Friday the 13th.Photo by EP A reprise of an excerpt from a little diary I kept in the first weeks of Spring 2009, just as I was finishing work on the portrait of my brother Bill outside the Bradford Alhambra. It is only Tuesday, 17 March, but already the year, or at …
What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching murmur which would soon gather distinctness. George Eliot, Middlemarch Although she is not featured in the film, it is worth mentioning, by way of a postscript, the prominent socialist …