Category Archive for: Uncategorized

Uncategorized March 14, 2010

PERFECT INFINITIVE

  There’s always a first time, and this is it: my very first webcam blog, featuring a brand new recording of my poem ‘Infinity, and So Forth’, filmed just a few feet away from the site of its composition, and a sneak preview of a new self-portrait. Here is the painting, which is approximately 10 …

Uncategorized March 7, 2010

MORE MATTER FOR A MARCH MORNING

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 …

Uncategorized February 28, 2010

AND ONE MAN IN HIS TIME

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 …

Uncategorized February 21, 2010

CRY ‘GOD FOR HARRY! ENGLAND AND SAINT GEORGE!’

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 …

Uncategorized February 14, 2010

ON ENGLAND’S PLEASANT PASTURES SEEN

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 …

Uncategorized February 7, 2010

RARE GLIMPSES, I

‘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 …

Uncategorized February 7, 2010

RARE GLIMPSES, II

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 …

Uncategorized January 31, 2010

SO SINGULAR IN EACH PARTICULAR

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 …

Uncategorized January 24, 2010

IN THE PRESENCE OF A MASTERPIECE

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, …

Uncategorized January 17, 2010

A TURNERESQUE TOUCH OF LIFE AND LIGHT

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 …