HOT OFF THE PRESS

At teatime last Thursday I received the first copies of my book, Slim Chances.

Front cover

This morning I go to the National Theatre, the Cottesloe, to see the set of a new play called The Holy Rosenbergs, which will be in situ on the stage when I do my book-launch Platform on the 23rd. Apparently the set, surrounded on four sides by the audience, is a of a middle-class kitchen in North London, the very setting in which I wrote a lot of the book: I thought of making a naturalistic entrance with a bag of shopping from Waitrose.

A sneak preview inside

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The people of Japan are in all our thoughts at this incomprehensibly catastrophic time for their country.

Myself as Feste and Emily as Viola.
Photo by Chris Arthur

By way of a small tribute to Japan’s rich cultural fusion of ancient and modern, and in remembrance of happier times in its history, I offer this short photographic retrospective. I took these photographs in 1982 when Emily and I were on a British Council tour of the Far East, performing in the London Shakespeare Group’s production of Twelfth Night. Emily played Viola and I Feste.

The video ends with a sound recording I made of a young Japanese student who recited for us Puck’s epilogue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.