Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation

Recommending: Growing your own vegetables

Philip Ridley & Cecil Collins

More from my Soho theatre workshop last week. This is to stimulate some seeds of thought. More to come…

“You create in order to understand, not the other way around”

Cecil Collins to a young Philip Ridley studying at art school, having been inspired to find Cecil after seeing this painting (I think) in the Tate.
Cecil Collins
Philip had to “borrow” a UB40 and pretend to be much older in order to gain entry to Cecil Collins’ class at St. Martins…

This week only

Shameless plug.

For this week only you can cacth my radio play, Patent Breaking Life Saving, for BBC World Service on internet playback on this link:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/programmes/world_drama.shtml

or directly on this link.

The website blurb is:

Patent Breaking, Life Saving
By Ben Yeoh

This week’s BBC World Drama takes a wry look at world health, in the comedy Patent Breaking Life Saving.

Ernest is the lazy President of a small African state, from a long family line of lazy Presidents. He likes the uniform, and the fireworks displays. The widespread sickness in his country is distasteful but hardly his problem. And then one day, he is hit on the head during a game of crazy golf, and starts to care. His first act, as visionary leader, is to break all the international patent agreements, for the sake of his people’s health.

From fat cats to fat rats, international treaties to crazy golf, Patent Breaking, Life Saving stars Danny Sapani as Ernest and Tanya Moodie as Grace.

Directed by Jessica Dromgoole

Soho Theatre Workshop

Had a good “workshop” at the Soho Theatre yesterday. Often (perhaps like seeing plays) they are mediocre but this one opened some little doors of ideas in my head mainly by introducing a hip hop dance troupe, a puppet maker and designer, Philip Ridley (very inspiring) and a performance artist (for want of a better term).

New Artistic Director, Lisa Goldman also suggested three aspects to Soho Theatre, which perhaps are different than before (in my intrepretation):

A sense of London identity. Work London – as an international and multicultural place and community would be interested in.

New work where new writing may collaborate with other art forms. Not to the exclusion of the “straight play” but to the inclusion of performance art, dance, puppets, site specific, physical….

Work which reflects the (turbulent) changes in the world.

More on the workshop particularly the great Philip Ridley when I have time to digest the day.

  • About me

    I'm a playwright and investment analyst. I have a broad range of interests: food, gardening, innovation & intellectual property, sustainability, architecture & design, writing and the arts. I sit on the board of Talawa Theatre Company and advise a CIS investment trust on socially responsible investments.

  • Recent Work

    Recent plays include, for theatre: Nakamitsu, Yellow Gentlemen, Lost in Peru, Lemon Love. For radio: Places in Between (R4), Patent Breaking Life Saving (WS).

  • Nakamitsu

  • Yellow Gentlemen