Authors Electric

The Empty Space is what Peter Brook called his terrific book on performance. It’s a space which only superficially resembles that occupied by the audience in the theatre and in their daily lives. In ‘real’ life, we live in a perpetual ‘Now’. In that ‘Now’, we construct a past from memories and a future on speculations, so they're both fictional rather than actual, built from the elements we prefer to select and stress.  But when writing for the stage, we’re not confined in that way. Simultaneity of past, present and even future can be achieved by such simple tricks as having two or more sets, dividing the stage area into locations that represent different time periods in which actors can ‘be’ the person they’re depicting at different times of their life or, indeed, the character may be represented by different actors so that the audience sees older and younger versions of him/her at the same time. And if we can simultaneously represent, for example, the barely comprehens...

The seductive lure of the theatre...it’s been calling to me ever since I can remember. I used to round up the local kids for ‘shows’ at the end of the cul-de-sac and spent hours threading raffia onto string to make grass skirts for hula-hula dancers, cutting up acres of crepe paper, writing scripts. I wanted to be an opera singer, never mind that I couldn’t produce a single squeak in my audition for the school choir. A ballet dancer, at 5’9”. An actor. I did join the local AmDram group and was offered an audition for the National Youth theatre on the strength of something (I’ve forgotten what) I played – but my ‘A’ levels were coming up and I took the straight and narrow way. I’m glad. I now know that I couldn’t have sustained the life of an actor; it’s simply too tough.           In more recent years, still under the old spell of glamour and greasepaint, I went for writing rather than performing. I submitted a script for Saturday Sit...