Actor John Stride – Stoppard’s original Rosencrantz to my Guildesntern – passed away last Friday, 20th April, at the age of 81. ‘Derek Goldby’s production’, Peter Lewis announced, ‘comes out of the dark like a spotlit jewel, full of vibrations.’ ‘In their scenes together they behave as if they had been stuck beside one another throughout …
Well-apparel’d April on the heel Of limping Winter treads. Romeo and Juliet, Act I, sc.ii A slightly belated birthday tribute to the Bard.
Bad luck does not intervene By numbers and days, such as Friday, thirteen Nature overnight Bloomed this Blackthorn’s pure white Unperturbed in its blessed routine.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that. Martin Luther King Jr I took this photograph of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool while on tour in the late 90s with the RSC in Washington DC.
What is the meaning of life? That was all – a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years, the great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead, there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse In a …
A short film inspired by a recent day out among the Sussex Downs, and with an eye to revolutions both historical and close to home. Clapham House in Litlington, mentioned at the end of the film, was also home to Charles Joseph La Trobe (1801-1875), first Lieutenant-Governor of the then colony of Victoria. He was …
The snows are fled away, leaves on the shaws And grasses in the mead renew their birth, The river to the river-bed withdraws, And altered is the fashion of the earth. A. E. Housman,‘Diffugere Nives’ (Horace, Odes IV.vii) A poem to celebrate a golden harbinger of spring in Sussex:
Three years ago, Kathleen and I produced a short film to mark International Women’s Day and to celebrate the special contributions of West Hampstead’s former residents to the cause of women’s emancipation. We reprise the film here to acknowledge the centenary of the first legislative step towards women’s suffrage in Britain.
Google has today created a new ‘doodle’ to celebrate Virginia Woolf’s 136th birthday. And so, it seems timely to reprise our little film which features my sonnets about Virginia and her last home, Monk’s House, here in East Sussex. Towards the end of the film, you will have heard Emily reading, so beautifully, an excerpt …
Geraldine Stephenson, movement teacher and choreographer, died on Christmas Eve. Philip [Prowse, director of The Duchess of Malfi, NT 1985], I discovered, had instinctive choreographic flair. Even in the rehearsal room, with four or five actors standing about as courtiers in their street clothes, he would offhandedly gesture to suggest a shift of position and the …