Diplomatic Immunity....

Seaside Towns

Pretty obsessed by these at the moment for some reason.

BFI Future Shorts

My friend Jon Gordon won the BFI Best Documentary Category with his film 'Lasting Rights' in their 5th annual Future Film Festival. It is an beautifully shot film with the delicately handled topic of assisted suicide. Congrats! Check the trailer here...


http://vimeo.com/36593318


and his other incredible videos here...


http://vimeo.com/jonnygordon

Theatre Top 3 last year

That reminds me, I wanted to do a top three end-of-the-year-style countdown of the best things I saw in 2011, but here it is two months late.

3. One Man, Two Guvnors

I feel quite privileged to have seen this for £5 at the National as I walk past queues of people in sleeping bags outside it now every morning on my way to work. By far the most I have ever laughed in a theatre. The slapstick is brilliantly choreographed and the way the show interacts with the audience is very clever, meaning everyone who sees it really feels they have been a part of something special.

2. The Pitmen Painters

Another National production, based on the true story of a group of Northumberland miners who took art lessons in their spare time. The paintings they produced, and the questions about art the play raises, are both incredibly thought-provoking. It is powerfully acted, engages with class, politics and art, and the script is funny and touching, while being playful with juxtaposing the geordie dialect of the miners against the RP tutor. It is still on at the Duchess theatre, somehow without queues out the door.

1. Jerusalem

Quite simply the best play I have ever seen. Incredibly acted, at times hilarious (the Professor/Ginger), at others brutal. Mark Rylance was amazing, and the supporting cast not far behind. No wonder it was as successful as it was. I was front row, thanks to an amazing Christmas present from my girlfriend, and that was two months ago. I still feel like I'm in Rooster's Wood now.

Theatre for the upper-classes?

I went to see the Noel Coward play Hay Fever at the Noel Coward this week, and can't say I particularly enjoyed it. It got a couple of laughs out of me, and has a good comic scene at the end where the four guests to the family's home try to escape without being noticed a day before they are due to leave, but overall I felt it relied too much on the public's inkling to laugh at a hyperbolic shambolic upper-middle-class.

It kind of grated on me, and after Terence Rattigan's centenary productions across the West End last year, it got me thinking why it is these plays are seen as candidates for reproduction in the current social climate, which seems to me quite anti-upper-class. (Maybe I just speak to the right people.) Is it because successful playwrights of the first half of the 20th century tended to focus on these characters rather than those occupying different places in society? Write what you know after all. By all accounts, Coward had a modest upbringing, but from an outsider's perspective, and from watching plays like Hay Fever, it seems writing for the stage used to be a hobby of the privileged, or it was demanded by audiences that it appeared that way.

It still begs the question of why they are being revived and revisited in theatres across the country in 2012. Is theatre-going still an upper-class pursuit? I'd like to think not. Then again, I got a free ticket.

Bedford Square

Well it's been a while since I updated this, but am preempting a New Years resolution (because I don't like them) and starting writing on this more. I have a new job and, although it's not in writing, I'm starting to be able to fit that in around it. Started writing a play, submitting poetry to more magazines and blogging (now at least). I'm near certain that fame and critical acclaim are just around the corner. Maybe.

Anyway - I should point you in the direction of the Bedford Square 5 anthology that has been published by Ward Wood Publishing. It showcases the work of both poets and prose writers from the last 2 years of the Royal Holloway Creative Writing MA. There are 5 poems of my own in there which are all over-shadowed by some incredible work. Have a read!

Buy it here

"I can smell it coming like a hound", and clarify, "I can smell it just like a hound does"

I have been neglecting this recently, partly down to the constant routine of working on my dissertation and working in a theatre and partly down to finding it strange spending time writing things that not many people read and isn't particularly interesting, but I just realised I want to be a poet so should probably work through that apprehension.

It feels like a bit of a grinding schedule at the moment, but since the last time I wrote I've been snuck up on by some culture. So things I have seen are as follows:
I saw One Man, Two Guvnors and the National Theatre with James Corden, and though I don't like him that much as a comedian, it was one of the funniest things I've ever seen live. An amazing supporting cast and perfectly choreographed slapstick. Also saw Butley with Dominic West on my night off last week. Resisted the temptation to shout "FIVE - O" when he came on stage, and a great script about the unravelling day in the life of an English professor.
 
My friend and poet, Kayo Chingonyi, generously offered me a spare ticket to see a reading at London Literature Festival in the Southbank centre a couple of weeks ago. It was on the 5th floor (not the Library side) which has brilliant views of the Eye and Parliament, and with four poets reading their work on the theme of Place. It was interesting to hear Kate Clanchy taking and reading about an ambiguous relationship to Scotland, a place she grew up but feels rejected by in many respects. I don't personally feel like a poet rooted in place at all, which is often such a great theme, and it was refreshing to hear writing and opinion from that perspective as well as Toby Martinez De Las Rivas who writes expansively and eloquently on his relationship with the places that have shaped him. Nick Laird, one of my favourite poets, was top of the bill though and after some understandably powerful poems about growing up in Northern Ireland, he gave a taster of the new collection he is working on with a poem called 'Go Rangers', a phrase he hears a lot living in New York.
Read Kayo's blog of the event http://litandspoken.southbankcentre.co.uk/2011/07/07/poetry-and-place-weston-roof-pavillion-royal-festival-hall/

On New York, and I am onto the close analysis of James Schuyler's poems for my dissertation, which has come as a relief and motivation as I now remember (after all the theory) why I am exploring his writing. It's so grounded in things he can see and hear and somehow he makes every observation incredibly poignant and philosophical. I've been really looking at 'Empathy and New Year' today, which deals with the problems of naming and observation 'Not knowing / the name for something proves nothing'. He finishes it brilliantly, the snow he's been admiring having blown off the trees:

Night / and snow and the threads of life
for once seen as they are,
in ropes like roots.