The Rabble Across The River
For a playwright, the opportunity to write a Community Play may arise only once in a career. Mine came in 1995, when I was hired to write the play which...
Finding the Woman In ‘The Kiss’
In 2018 I was commissioned by the Belvedere Museum in Vienna to write a one-woman show for the bilingual – and very tall – actress Maxi Blaha about Emile Flöge,...
The Bestseller Detector
Publishers like to pretend that they can sniff out potential winners, but major bestsellers come out of the blue. This is because bestsellers exist in a chaotic environment. Not because...
Research and writing – which comes first?
“I think another crucial thing for students, if they are working in a new area, is not being too afraid to go and ask people, “What are the most important...
Being a writer
Meet the new you Being a new student can often seem like finding yourself in one of those science fiction films where the heroine wakes up one morning and finds...
Harnessing The Dream
I wrote songs before I wrote plays. Endless teenage evenings were spent bent crooked over a guitar, eyes shut, feeling the direction of the words, sensing the shift of the...
Delight In The Dullest Of Places
If you could re-live your fifth birthday, what would be top of your present list? I may be wrong, but it probably wouldn’t be a book about democracy. This is...
A Forest Called Homeland
Many paths led to this forest clearing, and none of them were driveable. Still, people had driven through cliff gorges, along the dug-out drove roads from Ottoman days that derange...
The Story Of Ourselves
Perhaps some time recently, before lockdown, you dropped into a high-street coffee chain and noticed, while sipping your latte, that the story of the farmer who produced your coffee beans...
Sentences
Compare the examples below Unclear example: Actually, storage is a real pain in small rooms. Every year students have exams and when they are over they have a problem knowing...