Diary of a Somebody

Product Information

He has written short stories for BBC Radio 4 and his radio plays include A Portrait of Richard Hillary, Madonna's Plumber, [6] and A Nightingale Sang in Fernhurst Road. Matthew has two sons and a step-daughter and lives in London and Suffolk with his wife. [ citation needed] Bibliography [ edit ] Imagine a mash-up of John Cooper Clarke, Ed Reardon’s Week and James Joyce, and you’re about halfway there. Feel free to answer as many of the questions as you want. Post your replies below, discuss with us on social media using @BookSocialUK, or pose some questions of your own. If you enjoyed the questions, have a go at last month’s Get Involved: Spring. We want our comments to be a lively and valuable part of our community - a place where readers can debate and engage with the most important local issues. The ability to comment on our stories is a privilege, not a right, however, and that privilege may be withdrawn if it is abused or misused.

Diary of a Somebody at The Seven Dials Playhouse – Review Diary of a Somebody at The Seven Dials Playhouse – Review

I have long envied artists who draw and sketch each day; who are able to transform ordinary visual experience into art – I imagine it to be a joy. As a journalist, he has been a travel writer for The Sunday Times, a restaurant critic for Vogue, a property correspondent for Punch, and a television and book reviewer for the Daily Mail. Taken verbatim from Joe Orton's private and often explicit diaries, this raucous and poignant new production is directed by Nico Rao Pimparé ( The Start of Nothing, 2020; Rainer, Arcola Theatre; Candy, King’s Head Theatre). The cast is completed by Jemma Churchill ( Doctor Who, BBC; Birthdays Past, Birthdays Present, NewVic Theatre; NATIVITY! The Musical, UK tour), Jamie Zubairi ( Cucumber, Why The Lion Danced, Yellow Earth; The Letter; Wyndham'sTheatre), Sorcha Kennedy ( Rainer; Arcola Theatre, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Comedy of Errors; Petersfield Festival, Sam Wanamaker Festival; Shakespeare's Globe) and Ryan Rajan Mal, making his stage debut.Our eponymous hero, Brian Bilston, starts the year with the intention of writing a poem a day. Whilst that goes by the wayside some days, we are still treated to many poems of the very clever and mostly rhyming variety that I love. The poems form the first part of the entries in Brian's diary over the course of a year of numerous ups and downs for him. There are the events of 1966, detailed in Joe Orton's diaries on which the play based, Lahr catching Orton's delight in transgression and his longtime boyfriend, Kenneth Halliwell's, plunge into depression. There's the 1989 original production of the play, when many of Orton's transgressions had been legalised, but prevailing attitudes were probably best summed up by Tom Robinson's line in 'Glad To Be Gay' - "The buggers are legal now, what more are they after?" And then 2022, when the moral panics that the letters LGBT excite in the media have tilted firmly to the T. with LGB largely met with a shrug of the shoulders if they warrant any reaction at all.

Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston | The National Review: Diary of a Somebody by Brian Bilston | The National

I am a big fan of Brian Bilston and really enjoyed his poetry collection You Took the Last Bus Home (2017). Not halfway through the book and I just can't take anymore of this male Bridget Jones who reliably screws everything up and is deeply, inconsistently stupid (doesn´t know who Gaudi is!!??) just to sound funny. No. I simply cannot laugh at a pathetic nincompoop who deserves every bad thing that happens to him, maybe even more. Nor can I sympathize with him but with his poor wife (or ex-wife, don't know yet). Glorious. I will be astonished if I read a more original, more inventive or funnier novel this year.The other four members of the cast play a cavalcade of figures, famous and unknown, who breezed through Orton's life at the height of his short-lived fame. Jamie Zubairi delivers a deliciously camp Kenneth Williams, instantly recognised by many in the house a third of a century after his death. Jemma Churchill is terribly good reading the letters Joe wrote to the BBC to complain about... Orton of course! Sorcha Kennedy gives us a neighbour wholly unconcerned about Joe and Ken's lifestyle and fame - just preoccupied with the usual working class Londoner's worries. Ryan Rajah Mal nails the closeted, but also doomed. Brian Epstein, the Beatles' manager. He's a bit of a likeable fool. I particularly loved how Brian would enter a bookshop for one particular book and just had to buy a few more to keep it company. I'm sure that resonates with every book lover. It's all well-trodden ground these days, but it still hurts knowing what fate awaits Joe, so full of life, and Ken, so trapped in his own neurosis, unable to arrest its descent into psychosis. But, as alluded to above, it's not all quite the same as it was. Data provided courtesy of the Edinburgh Festivals Listings API, Brighton Fringe, Encore, Eventotron, OutSavvy and user submissions. We accept no liability for errors or omissions.