I once appeared on stage with Sir Ian McKellen. It was not one of my greater moments in the spotlight. It came about late in 1994 (I forget the exact date), when I was in the middle of programming a long season of Shakespeare-related films at the National Film Theatre. One of them was aRead More
The first X-rated film I saw was The Long Good Friday. It was 1981, I was nineteen, and a little apprehensive about the promised violence that only someone of the age I had now attained was permitted to see. The opening scenes of the film were confusing. Money was being changed hands, clearly illicitly. TheRead More
Among the saddest sights in half-empty London are its theatres. Walk along Shaftesbury Avenue and adjoining streets, and there is theatre after theatre advertising empty shows. The Victorian and Edwardian grand buildings, with their stony solidity, graced with sculptural curlicues and busts of Shakespeare, proudly bearing the names of theatrical greats, squeezed tightly into theRead More
I’ve been in Athens for a few days, on holiday, not having visited city or indeed the country before now. One curious event I wasn’t expecting was finding out that the National Theatre of Greece was putting on William Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Timon in Athens? I could not say no. Timon of Athens isRead More
Was this face the face That every day under his household roof Did keep ten thousand men? Was this the face That like the sun did make beholders wink? … A brittle glory shineth in this face. As brittle as the glory is the face. To the cinema, and the next day to the theatre,Read More
Skimming through Twitter early on a Saturday morning I caught sight of a message from the Before Shakespeare project. It invited its followers to come to an event that afternoon to celebrate and explore the history of The Curtain, one of the first London 16th-century theatres, whose archaeological site was only recently discovered. So offRead More
I’ve been producing a series of posts on my personal cultural highlights from 2017. They have covered things online, music, books and artworks. Last in the series is a list of highlights. These are some of the one-off events or publications that particularly stood out for me in 2017, and against which 2018 will haveRead More
The Bridge. It’s a good name for a theatre. It makes you think of those plain, bold, striking names given to London’s theatres in Shakespeare’s time: The Globe, The Rose, The Swan, The Theatre. They were located (most of them) on the southern bank of the Thames, and likewise The Bridge, which sits on theRead More
It was with a degree of apprehension that I went to see Conor McPherson’s new play, Girl from the North Country, at the Old Vic. Sprinkling your theatre production with Bob Dylan songs seems to be quite the thing to do just now, what with the Andrew Scott Hamlet recently playing in the West EndRead More
Ink is a new play running at the Almeida Theatre in London, written by James Graham, author of the very successful drama about 1970s politics, This House. Its subject is the relaunch of The Sun newspaper under owner Rupert Murdoch (played by Bertie Carvel) and editor Larry Lamb (Richard Coyle). It’s a clever and entertainingRead More