I have a bee in my bonnet recently about non-actors misquoting theatre situations (after a staggering misunderstanding of my own recollections). So of course I noticed Paul McKenna the hypnotist and behaviourist reporting a memory from Roger Moore, which seemed to make Sir Roger a work-seeking actor at the same…

I gather that the top titles that people falsely claim to have read are “War & Peace”, “Hamlet”, “Ulysses” and “Les Miserables”. Sometimes of course it’s hard to be sure! Many stories are so omni-present that we know them almost like a race memory. And “War & Peace” is a…

Our home filing system looks good, with smart filing cabinets and the drawers each marked. The drawback is the problem of finding things from it. No, I shouldn’t say Our, that’s cowardly and unfair of me — sorry, Maggie — because most of the Stuff is mine, everything from my…

Last month I noticed that I had been keeping this blog for a year (my thanks again to Mei who showed me how to start). That may have been one of the reasons I eventually took the time to read it through from the beginning. Was I coherent? Was I…

And here’s another story in the paper about twins! Last week’s feature about fifteen pairs starting primary school in Inverclyde had a picture of many of them — “not all” the caption informed us “are identical, making the task of telling them apart easier for their new teachers.” …

There are many times when the way ahead is clear. Those are often times when things around us are tangled, and we long for the clarity of the outcome. The outcome might be the present war ending, the present illness resolving, the pandemic retreating or the political crisis calming down…

There is a story — it has been around for hundreds of years — of an actor playing Shakespeare’s malevolent Richard III, with that long opening solo speech, who was barracked by the audience’s shouts of “You’re drunk!” He is supposed to have responded directly and just as bluntly “If…

The Wimbledon season takes me back to other summers, and especially to the men’s final in 1982 between Connors and McEnroe, which I watched at Denville Hall with my old friend the actor James Dale. …

Cartoonists have often depicted a performance in progress with a kind of repetiteur’s hood in the centre of the front of the stage (what used to be called ‘the floats’, from the days of footlights). The prompter is beneath the hood, apparently shouting a line at a forgetful cast. It…