George Nabney Bell – 26/4/52 – 20/11/22 Rest, rest now, sweet coz. I shall not look upon your lovely like again. My poem ‘Bird Brains’ has just been published in a beautiful collection of poetry entitled ‘Voices for the Silent’ in aid of the League Against Cruel Sports and edited by Ronnie Goodyer at Indigo […]
George Nabney Bell – 26/4/52 – 20/11/22
22/11/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Silver Gulls …’
07/11/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Silver Gulls …’ by Ms Paige Turner In 1977 (gosh!) I directed Chekhov’s ‘Three Sisters’ with a bunch of warm and widely cosmopolitan Canadian students at the Dome Theatre in Montreal. It’s my favourite of Chekhov’s seven full-length plays. As a director’s gift the cast gave me a silver seagull locket which I have always […]
‘Boiling Points’ …
31/10/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Boiling Points’ by Ms Paige Turner Mister Justin Case and I recently went to see the National Theatre’s production of Arthur Miller’s ‘The Crucible’. I have played the part of Mary Warren (the Proctors’ hapless maidservant) at the Ashcroft Theatre, Croydon, wrote on the play as my teaching diploma thesis at the Royal Central School […]
‘All these Memoirs …’
07/10/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘All these Memoirs …’ by Ms Paige Turner. We are rained down with memoirs. Plentiful, pouring forth and post-pandemic. I’ve worked it out. March 2020. Lockdown. Celebrities can’t perform. Write. For 9 months to a year. March 21. Send to publishers. Who WFH. Autumn 22 – Memoir launch/TV appearances/ In time for Christmas. I am […]
‘Dialogue with the Queen …’
24/09/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Dialogue with the Queen …’ by Ms Paige Turner Dialogue with the Queen Last night I dreamt the Queen said to me, “Oh Janet, weren’t you in the crowd at Jubilee in … nineteen seventy seven? Wasn’t it that little town in Devon?” “Falmouth,” I replied. “Ah yes, and in nineteen eighty two at Regent’s […]
Blog 300 …
03/09/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Blog 300 …’ by Ms Paige Turner I had my brows dyed this afternoon. The lovely beauty therapist said that when she was training she was told that one isn’t a Mistress of Brows until one has completed 150 treatments. Malcolm Gladwell who is very hot on numbers says one cannot be a master of […]
‘Flying Nannies …’
26/08/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Flying Nannies …’ by Ms Paige Turner Of late, I have focused on ‘Theatre’. It’s because we were Thespian-starved during the pandemic and we are now seeing as much theatre as we can afford. This trip was primarily to give our five-year-old granddaughter a break from summer club. She has two working parents and is […]
‘Knocking on Doors …’
16/08/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Knocking on Doors …’ by Ms Paige Turner In response to my last bi-month’s blog ‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries …’ focusing on Tennessee Williams’s ‘The Glass Menagerie’, my former Creative Writing student Steve Givens from St Louis, Missouri, USA emailed me his story. Steve was visiting Florida as a 19-year-old English student and made a […]
‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries …
06/08/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Memory, Misappropriation and Menageries … ‘by Ms Paige Turner. ‘The Glass Menagerie’ by Tennessee Williams – a play told in flashback by a narrator who is one of the characters. A play about fragility and seeing the past through a triangular prism: the dysfunction of a family unit of three: mother, brother, sister – all […]
‘Seeing Behind the Lines …’
22/07/2022 // by Jan Moran Neil
‘Seeing Behind the Lines …’ by Ms Paige Turner Mister Double Cream from Uxbridge – one of my three blog readers – aka playwright Phillip Sheahan – has asked me to write this in less than 500 words. Here goes on the hottest UK day on record. Three years ago I volunteered to organise a […]