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
It makes me so happy. To be at the beginning again, knowing almost nothing … A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It’s the best possible time of being alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia A
My life has often been marked, and enriched, by the most remarkable coincidences; and sometimes the coincidences come not single spies, but in battalions (or at any rate in small clusters). This Christmas Eve I thought I’d share with you a very recent brush with serendipity. In addition, I specially want to thank all of
Two Christmas poems, the first a sonnet to camera in tribute to my mother: And: A Night Before Christmas (17 December 2017) Waking in the small hours No hope of heavenly hosts amongst the empty galaxies But on this spec – this spinning ball – our world – My iPhone, balanced on the bedside table, Brings tidings
Recently I took part in an exploration of theatrical lighting conducted by Fiona Shaw for Radio 3. Fiona and I appeared together in The Rivals at the National Theatre in 1983 – it was her first juvenile role at the NT and my last. The programme airs on Christmas Day at 6.45pm and is called Illuminating
A trailer for my play Pillar Talk which I first performed at the Edinburgh Fringe in 2005 and which is now available for the first time on CD. For information on how to purchase, please visit BRAINFOOD AUDIOBOOKS UK.
One should be a painter. As a writer, I feel the beauty, which is almost entirely colour, very subtle, very changeable, running over my pen, as if you poured a large jug of champagne over a hairpin. Virginia Woolf As the grey and chill of winter set in, a short sequence of poems inspired by
Time is a game played beautifully by children. Heraclitus Two short poems about the mysterious passage and stillness of time: Another blog to follow very soon …
At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2005, Edward performed his one-man play Pillar Talk about the fifth-century Syrian saint Simeon Stylites, the remains of whose pillar he had visited that year. He subsequently recorded a radio version of the play which will shortly be available for the first time on CD through Brainfood Audiobooks UK. In anticipation of
You don’t make a photograph just with a camera. You bring to the act of photography all the pictures you have seen, the books you have read, the music you have heard, the people you have loved. Ansel Adams, photographer and environmentalist Lately I have been trawling through my ‘library’ of pictures, magically and mysteriously