WONDER OF OUR STAGE

Hear the voice of the Bard!
Who Present, Past, & Future sees ...

William Blake, Songs of Experience

Last week was the first annual, national Shakespeare Week. In celebration, I offer two new sonnets, written as a tribute from an actor to the one whom Ben Jonson called ‘the wonder of our stage’:

In progress
A new self-portrait, my second in oils, smaller and rather different in style from the one featured in our last film, Reflections.

News

My Perfect Mind returns to the Young Vic for a limited season 1st September. Booking is now open on the theatre’s website.

LENTEN REFLECTION

This, as a coherent whole, only casually observed;
never as yet tried in suffering or succeeding,
held together for an enduring fulfillment,
yet so as if for times to come, out of these scattered things,
something serious and lasting were being planned.

Rilke, ‘Self-Portrait’ (1906)

A new film and a new sonnet:

Here is neither a self-portrait nor a domestic interior but an urban landscape, the latest version of my painting of Mill Lane previewed in our Sensing Spaces film. 

I was walking down Mill Lane yesterday and on the pavement outside our local florist was greeted by these charming flowers which some children had painted in colour chalk. 

Photo by EP

The flowers reminded me that Mill Lane, a name redolent of the old rural hamlet of West End, still has vestiges and echoes of its meadowed past amidst its terraces, shops and modest high-rises – as celebrated in this little film.