POLLING DAY

THE PRIZE
Photo by EP

STRANGE INTERLUDES

Glenda Jackson and EP in Strange Interlude

Thirty years ago today (5th May), Eugene O’Neill’s Strange Interlude closed on Broadway. The production had transferred from the Duke of York’s in London to the Nederlander Theatre on 41st Street (where Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf had its premiere in 1962, when the theatre was called the Billy Rose) with its principal cast intact: Glenda Jackson, myself, Brian Cox and James Hazeldene. Our ten weeks on Broadway were a happy experience and garnered for me Tony and Drama Desk Award nominations. With My Perfect Mind’s New York season on the near horizon, Kathleen and I are preparing a short film to mark the 30th anniversary of Strange Interlude on Broadway, which we will be posting soon.

O’Neill’s experimental and controversial nine-act play was first produced on Broadway by the Theatre Guild in 1928 and won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. It created such a stir that its famous soliloquy technique (characters speaking aloud their inner thoughts) featured as a running joke in the Marx Brothers’ film Animal Crackers in 1930.

A Hollywood adaptation of Strange Interlude was released by MGM in 1932, starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer. We reprised our production for television in 1988, which, apart from Glenda and me, had a different cast and a very different set from the clapboard and clouds of the stage version.

Strangely enough, with the Strange Interlude anniversary in my thoughts, the weekend before last at the National Theatre I ran into Brian Cox (our Dr Ned Darrell) and his son Alan who, as a youngster, made his West End debut in Strange Interlude, playing the boy unwittingly at the centre of so much subterfuge and angst in the drama. They gave me a lift home and we chatted over coffee in Regent’s Park Road where Alan snapped this picture of Charlie Marsden and Ned Darrell thirty years on.

EP and Brian Cox, April 2015
Photo by Alan Cox

Alan, himself a veteran of the Brits off Broadway festival, is currently appearing at the Arts Theatre in The Kingmaker, whilst Cox Snr is to appear with Bill Paterson in Waiting for Godot in the autumn as part of the 50th anniversary season of Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre. And exactly a month from today, I will be arriving in Manhattan in preparation for the first night of My Perfect Mind at 59E59.

THE IMMORTAL MEMORY

Ten thousand honors and blessings on the bard who has thus gilded the dull realities of life with innocent illusions; who has spread exquisite and unbought pleasures in my chequered path; and beguiled my spirit in many a lonely hour.

Washington Irving on Shakespeare 

A film in celebration of the Bard’s birthday, in remembrance of once rural West Hampstead, and in anticipation of My Perfect Mind’s New York season:

Photo by EP

Kilburn looking towards Hampstead.
Watercolour by George Adolphus Storey, 1858

There is a serene and settled majesty to woodland scenery that enters into the soul and delights and elevates it, and fills it with noble inclinations. Washington Irving

ABRAHAM LINCOLN

We do on stage things that are supposed to happen off. Which is a kind of integrity, if you look on every exit as being an entrance somewhere else.

The Player, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead 

A film to mark the 150^th anniversary of President Lincoln’s death, featuring a poem I wrote in my dressing room at the Kennedy Centre in Washington, D.C. during a performance of Hamlet in 1998.

ON AND OFF BROADWAY

Give my regards to old Broadway
And tell them I’ll be there ere long.

George M. Cohan

The second in a series of film blogs as My Perfect Mind prepares to head to New York in June.

Photo by EP

FAMILY TREES

We have nothing to fear and a great deal to learn from trees, that vigorous and pacific tribe which without stint produces strengthening essences for us, soothing balms, and in whose gracious company we spend so many cool, silent, and intimate hours. 

Marcel Proust 

A new film linking Richard III, the Moscow Art Theatre and My Perfect Mind and which takes us from the South Downs to the streets of Manhattan, with genealogical excursions along the way.

Eggshell Lear and Fool by EP

A Happy Easter to You All!

NEW YORK, NEW YORK

          We’ll have Manhattan,
          The Bronx and Staten
          Island too.

Rodgers and Hart

As My Perfect Mind prepares to head to New York for a short summer season at 59E59 Theaters, Told by an Idiot have commissioned me to do a regular blog about my memories of New York and in anticipation of returning. Here is the inaugural film blog: