Current Arts Stuff

Last edited on Friday 27th June 2025 - terms and conditions apply....!
"Imagination is the source of every human achievement"
(Ken Robinson)

Currently reading: Geraldine McCaughrean's Tamburlaine's Elephants

Non-fiction/Seasonal Reading:  Edited by Adam Newell The Art of Classic Sci-Fi Movies
Current Bedside Poetry: Ben and David Crystal's Everyday Shakespeare: Lines for Life
Last read: Justin Cronin's The Passage
Most recent re-reading: Josh Silver's HappyHead

Looking forward to reading: Justin Cronin’s The Twelve
 

Recent memorable reading: Sebastian Barry’s Days Without EndJohn Boyne’s The Heart's Invisible Furies, Patrick Gale’s A Place Called Winter, George Gissing's The Odd Women, Maggie O Farrell's Hamnet, Mary Lawson's Crow Lake, Kerry Madden's Werewolf Hamlet, Elizabeth Strout’s The Burgess Boys, Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time, Tara Westover's Educated

Authors whose work I love reading (and re-reading): Margaret Atwood, Jane Austen, Anne Brontë, Emily Brontë, Charlotte Brontë, Angela Carter, John Christopher, Charles Dickens, Dave Duncan, EM Forster, Alan Garner, William Golding, Sally Green, Thomas Hardy, Alice Hoffmann, Kazuo Ishiguro, DH Lawrence, Kerry Madden, Somerset Maugham, Anne McCaffrey, Toni Morrison, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, RL Stevenson, Meera Syal, Colm Tóibín, Anne Tyler, Evelyn Waugh, HG Wells, TH White

Most recent cinema: Macbeth (from Donmar, streaming), Conclave, Six (theatre show, streaming), The Brontes by Anita Rani: Sisters of Disruption (cinema screening as part of Bradford City of Culture), The Ballad of Wallis Island, Pip and Posy: Sandpit Friends

Top Ten Films (currently): All About My Mother, The Big Chill, Cabaret, The Deer Hunter, The Godfather I&II, God’s Own Country, Hannah and her Sisters, Promising Young Woman, The Remains of the Day, Singin' in the Rain

Most recent TV: Andor, The Bear, Couples Therapy, Lessons in Chemistry, Shrinking, Slow Horses, Squid Game, Stranger Things, Succession, Umbrella Academy 

Looking forward to watching at theatre: @ The RSC: The Constant Wife, 4:48 Psychosis, The Forsyte Saga, Measure for Measure, Macbeth @ Bradford City of Culture Events: The Railway Children (partly on a train!)

Some (not so) recent memorable theatre:
  • Ballet Rambert’s Ghost Dances (at Bradford Alhambra)
  • Bolton Octagon’s Tenant of Wildfell Hall
  • Bradford Alhambra tour of RSC’s Matilda
  • Bristol Old Vic/Sally Cookson’s Jane Eyre
  • Glenda Jackson in Deborah Warner’s King Lear
  • Globe Theatre’s Edward II, Richard II
  • Leeds Playhouse’s Piaf 
  • Manchester Royal Exchange's Gypsy
  • Opera North’s Gianni Schicchi, Magic Flute, Rite of Spring (latter with Phoenix Dance Company)
  • RSC’s Comedy of Errors (in the outdoor Garden Theatre)
Ten theatre productions that stirred my soul: Adrian Noble’s As You Like It with Juliet Stephenson, Melly Still’s National Theatre Coram Boy, Adrian Noble’s Doctor Faustus with Ben Kingsley at the Royal Exchange in Manchester, Matthew Warchus’s West Yorkshire Playhouse Fiddler on the Roof, Michael Bogdanov’s ESC Shakespeare’s History Cycle, Michael Boyd’s Shakespeare’s History Cycle, Laurie Sansom’s/Rona Munro's The James Plays, RSC’s Nicholas Nickleby, Matthew Warchus’s West Yorkshire Playhouse The Plough and the Stars, Nicholas Hytner’s RSC The Tempest 

Dramatists I am always keen to book theatre tickets for: Caryl Churchill, Helen Edmondson, John Fletcher, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Jonson, Christopher Marlowe, Arthur Miller, Eugene O’Neill, Joe Orton, Harold Pinter, Peter Shaffer, William Shakespeare, Timberlake Wertenbaker, Oscar Wilde, Tennessee Williams

Poets I re-read (aloud if in a “safe space”): Maya Angelou, Simon Armitage, WH Auden, William Blake, Emily Brontë, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Geoffrey Chaucer, John Clare, Gillian Clarke, ST Coleridge, Emily Dickinson, John Donne, Carol Ann Duffy, TS Eliot, Seamus Heaney, George Herbert, Ted Hughes, Gerard Manley Hopkins, John Keats, Philip Larkin, Louis Macneice, John Milton, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Alexander Pope, Peter Porter, Isaac Rosenberg, Christina Rossetti, Percy Shelley, Alfred Tennyson, William Wordsworth, WB Yeats

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