Bauhaus Drama Launched!

I am delighted to announce that Bring Again The Now Of Then is now available for downloading and streaming. With approximately 30 revisions and 2 read-throughs, it has been the culmination of 5 years’ work. I am really happy with the outcome! Everybody involved has been thoroughly tremendous: Alex Bennett, Paul Gallagher, Jill Korn, Mark Coleman, Stuart Edgar, Andy Jones, Dani Heron, Lauren Downie, Iain McAleese, Julia Ndlovu, and Lorenzo Novani. It is slightly surreal to know the drama is complete. Now, I have to convince people to take a wee gamble and listen to the series. All episodes are available here:

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/bring-again-the-now-of-then-the-bauhaus-in-weimar/id1799557549

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Adding the world

This week I received the draft of the first two episodes of Bring Again The Now Of Then…and it sounds amazing! As the introductory music fades we hear the crackling of an open fire and bang…we’re in Gertrud Grunow’s study where she regales us with the story of the spiritual years of the Bauhaus as she goes about her paperwork.

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Review: Cracked Tiles

Some memories are so vivid, so powerful as to remain with us for all time. Occasionally, living on beyond our own existence. Those memories involving loss go deeper, scarring our conscience and creasing the moments of recall. We are all reluctant collectors of such moments. We seek no claim of them, yet deep down we know a life without loss is like a bag of chips without salt n vinegar. Just not worth the pickle.

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Recording Bring Again the Now of Then

For me it’s walking. It’s when all my best ideas come. Their genesis, their development, and their resolution. It literally never happens whilst I am sitting at the PC. Something about the subconscious, I suppose. One day after watching a documentary on BBC 4, celebrating the centenary of the Bauhaus opening in Weimar, I went for a walk. I think you know what happened next…

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Review: VL

Universal evocation. Nice idea if you can nail it. Setting a play in a school gets you 100% audience buy-in. Young or old, we have all been there and have our memories of it. For some it is perhaps the best days of their lives. For most, probably not. VL, written by Kieran Hurley and Gary McNair, is set in a secondary school and the ghost of that place clearly comes flooding back for a good deal of the audience.

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Review: My Son's A Queer (But What Can You Do?)

Theatre sets are fascinating. Sometimes you enter an auditorium and wonder at the world immediately before you as it induces uncertainty. Other times, an unexpected familiarity envelopes you in its warm cocoon. On this occasion, it’s the latter. The pre-millennial décor of a 1990s living room draws the focus: an extrapolation of the room which will readily feature in the home videos. The protagonist, Rob Madge, is the absolute epitome of that generation of kids who grew up in a family where the camcorder is an extension of the parental eye: the era of affordable video technology prior to mobile phones breaching their original USP to usurp the former. Subsequently, we see Rob at the age of 12 putting on a Disney show in their living room where he plays Mary Poppins, Mickey Mouse and a host of other characters. It doesn’t quite go to plan and their father - stage manager and Goofy - gets all the blame but their grandmother is having a ball in a ‘teacup’

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Review: Failure Project

As the saying goes: the road to success is littered with failures. But who amongst us, lying in a rain-filled pothole, has ever thought “Ah! My greatest success lies just around the corner!”? Failure is all-consuming and leaves no room for such thoughts…and that road is all the longer and in a greater state of disrepair if you happen to be black and female.

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Review: Galahad Takes a Bath

Time-shifting is a guaranteed way of manifesting avenues for drama and comedy. Dropping characters into time-zones clearly alien to them yet recognisable to the audience is, at least, amusing. However, it requires a clearly delineated development to control the dramatic irony. Allowing the audience to always be one-step ahead of the character risks a punctured performance.

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Early Years of the Bauhaus

It was a pleasure, last week, to mingle with an excellent cast for a reading of my new audio play Bring Again the Now of Then on the early years of the Bauhaus. The aim was to establish the correct mix of voices for the piece and, as ever, to ascertain whether another draft of the play is required. Happy to say only small edits are needed.

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Review: Maggie & Me

It is not easy for art, rooted within one medium, to transcend its source and achieve equal salience within an adjacent medium. The well-trod path from page to stage is littered with an unintended dialectic between literature and performance. Curatorial precision is required at all times. This is perhaps most true when considering the memoir: a medium which confers unto the reader the intimacy of personal insight.  

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Review: A Streetcar Named Desire

The cognitive dissonance between the person we perceive ourselves to be and the person others see is least for those who don’t give a shit. Blithely crashing through life, the Stanleys of this world lose not a wink of sleep on what others think of them. Whilst society can hardly be split into ‘Stanleys’ and ‘Blanches’, the latter group will move heaven and earth for others to see them in the right light, even if that means living in a perpetual twilight.

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Review: The Threepenny Opera

“Some are in the darkness…others in the light”

We see the moon and the moon sees us…and the shark with the teeth pearly white. One minute in and an orchestra introduces that most recognisable of songs: Kurt Weill’s Mack The Knife or Mackie Messer as it is known in its native source text; a piece on people and their amorality. A disembodied face shines as ‘The Moon Over Soho’ (Josefine Platt), suitably elevated betwixt glittering curtains. Those four world-weary yet entertaining minutes set the tone. Then suddenly, the societal structure of which the moon sings protrudes: inflexible, delineated, skeletal. A structure without sinew or tissue. A construction in progress. A machine for living…on-stage or off. Each person hierarchically valued as decreed by a strict system of rigour.

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Review: Loving The Enemy

What would you do if your native country ended up at war with your parents’ native country? Where might your loyalties lie? How much love have you for your parents? How much have they for theirs? Patriotism is a complex equation wherein variables change value with time. All very well fighting for culture and values, the question is: whose?

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Review: The Mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

Surviving an event where other people experience loss of life is likely to follow, if not define, you for the rest of your life. This was the lot of Yuri Yudin.

In January 1959, 10 experienced Soviet hikers set out on an expedition to the Ural Mountains. Part of this initiative was the attainment of the highest level of Soviet accreditation. An honour none of the party would attain. 9 hikers died on Kholat Syakhi and the sole survivor, Yuri Yudin, earlier succumbed to the recurrence of an ailment forcing him to abort his mission. Yudin became one of life’s guilty without guilt.

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Review: Being Sophie Scholl

The danger of presenting the body as complete in itself is that the society which gave that body its place in a code of social relations turns on it. Sophie Scholl and her friends spent a long time pondering how an individual must act under a dictatorship. And when that dictatorship finally arrived, they were confronted with Nazis.

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