Nick Hennegan's Bohemian Britain
Lifestyle tales from the city
I’m excited to announce this brilliant comedy drama Two, by Jim Cartwright @theatreattabard Chiswick, London in April… and as a friend of Maverick there’s 10% off all seats booked before the end of Feb using the booking code. MAVERICK.
It’s our 30th anniversary year! Phew! And if you’d like us to bring this to your venue – pub, club or theatre – all you need is a room and £100 and we’re there! Email pubs@mavericktheatre.co.uk.
Tickets for London – https://tabard.org.uk/whats-on/two/
Just a normal Monday #writing night in the Cross Keys #Pub in Hammersmith – with a cat, a pigeon and a pirate.
Another quiet night at The Raven in Hammersmith with a bad script, cold beer and warm fire!
Two ladies who can’t decide if they are British or American! Best of luck in Dublin! Remember, Guinness is back of the throat- not tip of the tongue. #LondonLiteraryPubCrawl
Nick Hennegan talks to Irish Poet Cahal Dallat on Literary London on Resonance 104.4fm and BohemianBritain.com about a new, interactive trail following the life and works of London Irish Poet WB Yeats around his boyhood home in Bedford Park, Chiswick, London. They also chat about inspiration and other famous Irish and London artists.
For details of the project, see www.wbyeatsbedfordpark.com — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bohemianbritain/message
Watch the live video below.
I’ve been double-booked for #press nights tonight. So I shunned the Red Lion #islington in favour of the @riversidestudioslondon who were first with an invitation. Not sure I made the right decision though, looking at this critic!
A gentle look back of some of the Bohemian highlights of 2022 with Nick Hennegan on Resonance 104.4fm’s ‘Literary London’ It includes an interview with Andy Slaughter, M.P. for Hammersmith in London, on the occasion of a new artwork celebrating WB Yeats; music from the Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Prejudice And Pride and Winston and David…. news of Jim Cartwright’s TWO, and how you can put it on at your local bar, pub or community centre... and will Nick return to acting for the first time in 30 years?
www.BohemianBritain.com — Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bohemianbritain/message
The Dirty Duck is a great pub in Stratford-upon-Avon in Warks. It’s also a pub with TWO names. It used to be run by the formidable Pam… but for the last 20-odd years, Sam has been in charge. When my play, Henry V – Lion of England was in Stratford in the late 1990’s we had our launch party here and the RSC still use the place regularly today. To find our more see this little video I made a while ago…
Well… this is nice…
THEATRE REVIEW: A CHRISTMAS CAROL – WATERSIDE ARTS, SALE
December 2, 2022 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Mesmerising in his delivery, Guy Masterson’s A CHRISTMAS CAROL is one of the best theatre adaptations to grace the stage.
In 1843 there was a novella published. That novella was A CHRISTMAS CAROL by Charles Dickens and would go on to be one of the most consistently read works on the planet. It has never been out of print, it has been translated into every language and countless film and theatre productions have portrayed the tale of Scrooge, his fear, his hope and his redemption with varying success.
The performance starts with the audience being taken back in time by a brief but very effective audio montage; we are no longer in 2022, we are in London on a cold and bleak Christmas Eve. It is cold, it is foggy, Scrooge is a miser resenting more than one coal on a fire for his clerk, Bob Cracchit and with his own ideas on how to “decrease the surplus population” of waifs and strays. The scene is set for us to fly with Scrooge on his journey, a tale we all know but with this telling as fresh as the day it was published.
Our sole guide is Guy Masterson who is mesmerising in his delivery, there is not one utterance that goes unheard, not one action that is missed where the audience are not enthralled under a spell of pure joy. Captivated by a story heard so many times a pin dropping would have been loud enough to have been the clanking of the chains surrounding Marley. A solo performance is hard, it is hard on the actor to hit the right note with the audience, to build the suspense and to convey the atmosphere and nuances of each character but in this performance that is exactly what happens; it is simply a tour de force of storytelling. Characters are conveyed with not only voice changes but also in mannerisms, descriptions are lucious and vivid and the attention to the text is detailed.
Writer and director Nick Hennegan has worked from an early script by Dickens himself for his reading tours for this live performance and it shows. More than anything it feels not like an adaptation, not a glossy rewrite but unmistakably Dickensian, the words are not merely written and spoken, they are painted on a page and recounted with passion.
This performance has been met with critical acclaim and rightly so. It is simply the best theatre adaptation I have witnessed; whether that is because of the sheer power of the delivery by Guy Masterson, the “stripped back” nature of the staging or merely the fact that a work first given to the work nearly 200 years ago is as relevant today as ever I don’t know. What I do know is that it is not so much a performance as an experience. In the theatre you could feel the audience living every word and perhaps that is the measure of the work and the performance that touches all. After watching this powerful adaptation you may just, in the words of Scrooge himself, “honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year”.
