Blog

Eileen Agar Review

Angel of Anarchy: it’s all in the title.  Walking away from the Whitechapel Gallery’s mesmerising Eileen Agar exhibition, I felt inflated with air, time and space, my imagination infused with a myriad, happenstance possibilities. For hers was an imagination soaring high: confident, unfettered, feminist in spirit and wayward in intention.  In a flurry of tranquil […]

Read more...

ERIC SANDERS AT 100: trailer (2020)

My interview with Viennese Jewish emigre Eric Sanders: composer, pianist, teacher, soldier, crime novelist and antifascist, filmed by Roger Schindler, will play the Rio Cinema, Dalston; JW3 in NW3; and an event for the Association of Jewish Refugees in December/January, all with live Q&A celebrating a remarkably prolific centenarian.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m2-4oAJmio&feature=youtu.be

Read more...

Voices in the Dark

JUST THE TICKET: VOICES IN THE DARK I’d been clearing out my attic, trying to decide how to dispose of five years’ worth of old receipts. Make a bonfire, cautioned a friend. You don’t want anyone jumping onto your credit card details.  So last Sunday, just before the rain hit, we emptied the contents of […]

Read more...

From Music To Morse – Eric Sanders at 100

Listen to the inspiring story of the centenarian Eric Sanders, who was interviewed by actor Norma Cohen about his years before the Second World War in Vienna, his flight to the UK and his life after the war. Listen here :https://www.acflondon.org/events/music-morse-eric-sanders-100/

Read more...

PRIVATE PASSIONS

My two favourite radio programmes: Desert Island Discs & Private Passions. Two days ago, I stood entranced in front of the radio listening to Marlon James’ rolling, ironic, bass voice reflecting on his journey towards emancipation and liberation on the personal and writing fronts. Essential listening for anyone struggling with the pressure of rejection, especially […]

Read more...

first person testimony

This week, two programmes had a powerful impact on me. On Wednesday, BBC Radio Wales’ Eye on Wales put out a searing half-hour documentary on two of the last remaining Jewish women refugees in Wales, now aged 85 and 90, whose lives were saved when their parents put them on trains and into the care […]

Read more...

The Rasputin Show

On Monday, December 10th, I’m performing in THE RASPUTIN SHOW: an inter-generational cast including veterans of the alternative theatre movement and young performers, playing (at least) a cabaret performer, a posh woman and a government minister. Unfinished Histories present The Rasputin Show  by Michael Almaz: history as farce, fast-moving and topical. A staged reading of […]

Read more...

False Memory Syndrome

Wishful thinking to remember that Tino Orsini played my Italian husband in Genova 1960, set in the shadow of Mussolini’s rantings. In fact, Tino reminds me that he played a hitman in a completely different film: Mercy, where I was not Italian, nor making pasta, not looking ever more demented but merely a determinedly sober-faced […]

Read more...

The Tino Orsini Show

A few years ago, I played Amalia, a careworn Italian housewife manically stirring a pasta sauce whilst her husband stripped down to vest and braces to step into a tin bath of hot water after a hard day at the factory. In the background, as the pasta sauce started flying and the husband began peddling […]

Read more...

Attics yield strange fruit

  Scrabbling through a crate of photos in my attic, I come across an old theatre programme from the sixties. Plump angels fly across a faded pink cover proclaiming a double bill of melodrama and musical hall: Unity Theatre, radical open university for working class writers and actors presenting its uncontentious Christmas show, circa 1962. […]

Read more...