First Person
Bill Knight
This exhibition includes one of my images, so I hesitated when I was asked to write about it – but I only hesitated for a moment. I have learned that if you are reluctant to promote your own work other people are even more inclined in that direction, so you should seize any chance you get.My entry (main picture) shows the actor Vanessa Babiyre and her eldest sister Vivian (nearest the camera). The shot was taken at the Royal Court, where Vanessa has recently appeared, and is part of my forthcoming exhibition Where I Come From, about BAME graduates and their families. I have been a fan of Read more ...
John Martin
The raising of a temporary structure theatre in the middle of the “Jungle” refugee camp in Calais (pictured below) has brought the issue of arts in situations of crisis into sharp focus. This big brave act by two young Brits, opening a creative space to some of the most miserable and traumatised people in Europe, in some of the most squalid conditions and in sight of the English coast, has hit a nerve which we cannot ignore.People sat up, journalists sat up, activists sat up and realised that this is embarrassingly close to home but that, where governments, international bodies and Read more ...
Guy Johnston
In June 2014, I was invited to the late Sir John Tavener’s Memorial Service in Westminster Abbey. It was a poignant occasion, marked by a number of special tributes and performances. My childhood idol Steven Isserlis performed Threnos during the service and as I made my way up to thank him for his moving performance, I was aware he was clutching a big blue score, and talking with Meurig Bowen, the Artistic Director of the Cheltenham Festival.Just as I approached them, I heard Meurig ask Steven whom he would recommend to perform the premiere of the recently completed Read more ...
Melissa Bubnic
In the opening scene of Boys Will Be Boys, the lead character, Astrid, talks about how there’s a boys’ world and a girls’ world. Boys’ world is where you want to be. That’s where power is, that’s where fun is. Boys get to be boys and that means holding all the cards, and doing whatever the fuck you want. How do women get into boys’ world when they’ve got a vagina?This play is about how women navigate life in a man’s world. The play is set in the macho world of fictional trading and broking firm, the very respectable Peterson Jones & Walker. Our characters embrace the work-hard-play-hard Read more ...
Simon Bent
It’s a little over two years since I was approached to adapt The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson for Manchester Royal Exchange. I was living in Liverpool at the time and had recently seen That Day We Sang by Victoria Wood at the Exchange. It was terrific, wonderfully directed by Sarah Frankcom. I had never seen a musical in the round before, it was so dynamic. There’s nowhere to hide in the round, you can’t get away with anything, you’re totally exposed, and I remember thinking how great it would be to write for such a space.I read Walzer in one sitting and couldn’t put it down. It’s a Read more ...
Mark Hayhurst
Nothing quite prepares you for your first sight of Thiepval, the Memorial to the Missing of the Somme. I had read about the events it commemorated and, before that, been told about them as a young boy. I’d studied the war poets at school and as a teenager had been introduced to Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That and Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. I knew about the vast numbers of war dead, of how they exceeded the populations of famous cities. But once there, in Picardy, gazing for the first time on Sir Edwin Lutyens’s gigantic monument, it was impossible not to gasp Read more ...
Matthew Wright
Life and art have generally had a troubled relationship. In the case of former hobo and punk-blues singer Seasick Steve, however, it all seemed so simple. When he sang "Dog House Boogie" on his extraordinary Hootenanny debut nearly a decade ago, it was his grit and authenticity, even more than his musical skills – though the two go hand-in-hand – that the audience fell in love with. Read any fan forum and it’s clear that Steve is loved because most audiences believe he’s experienced exactly what he sings.The official biography, documented repeatedly in the hundreds of press interviews Steve Read more ...
Simon Evans
Doctor Peter Raby (Emeritus Fellow at Cambridge University) was quick to pull me up on my first stab at A Midsummer Night's Dream – an indulgence-of-a-production played out in a university park to the sound of cucumber flirting with Pimm's. His grounds were that I had failed to acknowledge the mortal danger facing those errant elopers, Hermia and Lysander. He had, he said, expected better of me.Revisiting the play a decade on (I take criticism slowly) I see his point: in turning their backs on the ancient law of Athens and fleeing seven leagues, the pair openly defy the patriarchy of the Read more ...
Professor Gareth Williams
Culture, said Aneurin Bevan, comes off the end of a pick. A hundred years ago there was no shortage of picks when a quarter of a million coalminers were employed in south Wales. By now the mines have gone but many of the choirs they created are still here, for the male voice choir is one of the distinctive emblems of Welsh identity.The south Wales coalfield is the longest continuous coalfield in Britain and its choral tradition is just as unbroken. It began when the first tramload of the best steam coal in the world trundled out of the Bute Colliery in Treherbert at the top of the Rhondda Read more ...
Alistair Beaton
It’s either serious or it’s funny. That’s a view I quite often encountered when working in Germany. A theatre professional there once advised me to remove all references to writing television comedy from my biography in the theatre programme.“Why?” I asked.“People will think you’re not a serious playwright.”“A serious playwright can’t write comedy?”“It’s a bit worse than that.”“How, exactly?”“Well, it’s not just that you’re writing comedy, it’s that you’re writing comedy for television.”“Is that bad?”“It’s not good.”“In what way is it not good?”“Television is Unterhaltung.”And there we had it Read more ...
Charlene James
I knew that if I was going to write a play about female genital mutilation, I would have to try and understand why any mother or grandmother would make their child undergo such a brutal procedure. In my research, I read many articles and accounts of young women who were living with the emotional and physical consequences of FGM. I’d watched disturbing and devastating footage of young girls being cut, so it was difficult to comprehend how anyone could allow this act to happen, let alone celebrate it.But what I learned was that many of these mothers weren’t the villains I wrongly cast them as. Read more ...
Matthew Romain
A few days after two Taliban rockets had quivered in the Afghan skies above us, I found myself looking up at an altogether different set of heavens in the Sistine Chapel. Moments of reflection on this tour were, out of necessity, brief; our schedule, out of necessity, hectic. Contrasts were commonplace. Vatican City was our 191st country, and our two-year tour to play Hamlet to every nation in the world was rolling rapidly to its conclusion.A friendly priest who'd enjoyed our performance the night before had been showing us round, jumping queues and hopping barriers and peeking into closed- Read more ...