Strength Weekly

Further to the material on the releasing of liquids in the previous post I am appending here a short technical monograph.
Blood in the performing arts is always the wrong colour. It’s never dark enough. The benchmark for film blood used to be a concoction known as Kensington Gore. (This is a pun: Kensington [...]

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There is, of course, nothing funnier than a man covered in shit. It’s hilarious. What’s even more hilarious is when the man is first not covered in shit (because nobody wants to be covered in shit) then, because of a failure, he is suddenly covered in it. If he were to walk in covered in [...]

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The eight month Dash Dash Dash project is largely over. I say ‘largely’ in order to acknowledge the distressing impact of a theft which led to the abrupt cancellation of our final show. On the night of Saturday 15th May, one hour before we were to open the third night of The Omnibus (six short [...]

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A speech from ‘Sleet’, the fifth Dash Dash Dash show (March 2010)
To get where I am today, Gretchen and Bobbin and Timmy, I turned right at the road and over the hedge and into the field and under the bridge and along the track and down to the dark stream and up to the copse [...]

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This is the final post in a series that begins below with ‘Stage & Screen 1′

In ‘The Truman Show’ (1998) Truman Burbank is the unwitting star of a hugely successful documentary TV show based on his life. The show runs continuously, following Truman from the moment of his birth into adulthood. Truman is completely unaware [...]

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quotes in this post are taken from company websites

Feels like ages since I last dissed Shakespeare. As ardent readers of this journal may have noticed, I have no time for the fellow and consider him directly responsible for the complacently novelistic condition of much British mainstream theatre. (Yes, I know it doesn’t follow but [...]

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This post is in a series: please start at Episode 1

Let my imagination go. Uhuh. Roger was very likeable and I was flattered by his view that the eccentric work of Lumiere & Son - or something like it - would be viable in the centricity of BBCTV. I would pull out all the stops [...]

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I’m in the front room of Hilary’s old house, which she is probably going to sell. All around the walls, on shelves, in boxes, cabinets and crates she has stashed a great archive of the papers of Lumiere & Son, the theatre company we ran together from 1972 to 1992 when the still Thatcherised Arts [...]

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I shall carry the images to my grave. In one of the two shows I’ve written and directed for presentation at Wimbledon College of Art this week (previewed here), the designers proposed a set, described in the playlet text here, the walls of which were built to be leaped through. Large, thin, rectangular sheets of [...]

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