Writer (sometime Professor of Theatre, King's College London & UC Berkeley). Arguments mine, no 'views' to speak of, from Essex after all.
Joined December 2012
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5 Jun 2025
Packing my Library. In a reversal of my favourite essay by Walter Benjamin images from the Performance Foundation Archive before it moves: “a relationship to objects not emphasising their functional, utilitarian value but studied and loved as the scene, the stage of their fate”.
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Jun 12
In midst of Hockney tributes had deep desire to escape to a far less loveable artist but an exquisite painter, whose work inhabits a zone of performance between Renaissance bravura, Arcadian landscapes and 1970s clothing catalogues that I remember well: John Currin @SadieColesHQ.
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Jun 5
Rapt, respectful, resonant audience for Stockhausen’s once ‘scandalous’ Stimmung from 1968 @wigmore_hall celebrating their 125th anniversary in the best possible taste. I’d always known the Grateful Dead loved it and I could hear why tonight, as ‘London Voices’ gave it their all.
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Jun 4
The Prehistoric (an 1880s invention to account for the unwritten) that has threaded through Rachel Kushner’s ‘Creation Lake’ and Jack Nicholls’ ‘Shitheads’ returns in Oliver Beer’s resonance paintings tonight ‘The Sky in the Cave’ at Thaddaeus Ropak. Rufus Wainwright on vocals.
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Jun 3
When I see roles advertised as ‘Permanent’ I wonder who they think they are kidding given the precarity of human institutions. But Stonehenge took 1500 yrs to build, and looks pretty solid after 5000, so the ‘Head’ English Heritage are seeking had better be well-nigh immortal.
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May 29
The play that went wrong is a neat conceit & franchise but owes a long debt to an inescapabale paradox: humans unlike other perfect animals are attractive performers because the virtuosity they seek is beyond them, they can & do have capacity to disappoint instagram.com/reel/DY641uehO…
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May 28
The 5th of my West End reels has to be ‘Les Miserables’ a profit behemoth carried on the shoulders of Cosette, Victor Hugo’s ‘poor little brush girl’. I love the finale too, but ‘if you hear the people sing’ spare a thought for the rough sleepers outside: instagram.com/reel/DYonJj8oF…
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May 28
My wander through the West End took me to the world’s first ‘safety theatre’ built in the 1880s to mitigate the fires that routinely ravaged London’s terraced venues. My Q: Overnight the theatre like hotels became a safe place to sleep, but what of risk? instagram.com/reel/DYW1uNlhe…
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May 28
There is a peculiar ‘hi & lo’ split between ‘durational work’ in performance and the ‘long runs’ of theatre. If your measure is to ‘keep on keeping on’ then you’d better not forget an ensemble that nightly for 74yrs & counting has maintained their secret: instagram.com/reel/DYE0FSMBh…
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May 28
I’ve been out & about on ‘hi & lo’ exploring @kingsartshums back-yard wondering how ‘Theatreland’ came about & how far N, S, E & West the ‘West End’ goes. Quite far it seems. Here my favourite, the Lyceum where in 1972 the Grateful Dead woke me up to life: instagram.com/reel/DXwNvQYB3…
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May 28
This innocent reel has been picked up and circulated by fake-news farmers in Moscow cut & pasting my voice in a demented anti-European rant that picks a fight with my “former colleague” Emmanuel Macron. Don’t worry, as they say in panto: “It’s behind me”. instagram.com/reel/DSSgiwugZ…
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May 26
Peter arrived @UofEDrama just before our first Single Hons group with his wise, beautiful Brecht book in hand & the gimlet, questioning, curious eye of what I took to be Professorial rigour. But we all found so much more in his critical care & good counsel: a true theatre soul.
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May 11
My neighbour Wayne only missed one day’s work in the 1960s when he worked for Apple at 3 Savile Row, and it happened to be Jan 30th 1969 when ‘something happened on the roof’. He’s told me the story a few times without a hint of remorse. Site-specific is an overused term, but mmm
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May 8
Since childhood I’ve had what a doctor present at my talk at Magdalen College last night called ‘my’ “familial tremor”. After a bracing swim in Hampstead Ponds this morning, with seriously cold hands, I thought I’d test it out shooting an incoming freight train: seems to be cured
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May 8
‘London Falling’ is rightly getting plaudits for its panorama of the city from Docklands opportunism through oligarchary to the awful demise of its title. It’s a 40yr itinerary I also explored in ‘The Dark Theatre’ covering adjacent ground via the spectacle of ‘Cultural Cruelty’.
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May 7
Just emerged from giving a talk ‘Assisted Life & the Apparatus of the Image’ at Magdalen College for graduate medical students at the end of their first year @UniofOxford. I wasn’t remotely surprised how open, witty, rigorous and gracious they were, which augers well for us all.
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May 2
We visited the new TRAMPS in St Denis a couple of weeks ago, and today the nice new space in King’s Cross opposite McGlynn’s while it gets its makeover. Both areas have maintained their shabby halo that serves the work well. Here the lustrous, floating figures of Marcus Leotaud.
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May 1
In 1972 on one of my first ‘solo’ trips to London from the Essex Estuary, I saw the Grateful Dead at the derelict Lyceum Theatre. It was pre-Lion King days on Aldwych and ‘Theatreland’ existed in all but name. To return there @kingsartshums has been a joy: instagram.com/reel/DXwNvQYB3…
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Apr 30
Every coastal community under threat deserves an auteur with the cinematic genius of Mark Jenkin. I didn’t think ‘BAIT’ & ‘Enys Men’ could be bettered, but ‘Rose of Nevada’ combines exquisite framing, hypnotic colour, proper horror, for those in peril on the sea. The Newlyn Bard.
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Apr 30
The long awaited translated publication of Pierre Guyotat’s ‘Idiocy’ (2018) is his ‘coming of age’ novel. Of all the volumes signed for Flo @ICALondon through the 1990’s it is Pierre’s ‘Eden Eden Eden’ that we cherish. A brutally honest writer with such warmth, generosity & wit.
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Apr 29
Yes, obvs Roth, Lerner and Castillo share a narrative interest in the ‘dying animal’ that is the male, philosophically disposed Professor, but as one (deluded that is), it’s only @bartlebytaco in the columbined barely paragraphed prose of ‘Fresh, Green Life’ that touches a nerve.
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