Shutterings and Mutterings

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Words going wild...

It is the beginning of May 2020, the UK lockdown against the Coronavirus is entering its sixth week and there is time to allow strange ideas to take shape and form themselves into curious creations. They are laid out like small ebooks but I prefer to consider them zines created as one-offs...

Cover of Antonin & his Double ebook

Antonin & his Double: A strange theatre sketch very loosely based on French theatre theorist Antonin Artaud with passing references to a one of his major essays: The Theatre of Cruelty which later appeared in a collection of essays called The Theatre And Its Double. I cannot claim to understand Artaud's theories, this sketch simply plays with some loose ideas put together for the hell of it. I just hope the spirit of Artaud has a sense of humour. Judge for yourself... Download PDF.

Cover of Cut Up Times ebook

Cut Up Times: A handful of cut-up poems extracted from news websites, a great late 19th century novel, a great Jacobean play and a landmark scientific theory of the mid 19th century. Some of them might make some sense, some probably make no sense at all. Take a look and see for yourself... Download PDF.

Who knows what kind of craziness the lockdown madness is going to turn out next?

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You don't write plays - what brought this theatre sketch on? I havn't thought about writing anything for theatre for many years but way back in my late teens and early twenties I was very interested in theatre and play writing. The old influences were probably stirred up when I looked at some Shakespeare and Ben Jonson scenes for cut up poetry sources.

And what exactly is cut-up poetry about? This is a creative technique that's been around for many years, the Dada poets certainly did it and people have probably been doing cut-ups of some kind before that. The idea is to take an existing piece of text - a poem, a newspaper article, anything - and extract odd words and phrases to piece together something new. Some may not consider it a very original way of working but it's an interesting challenge to find a new set of words among a bigger one.

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