What: Kabaret at Karamel
Where: Wood Green, London
When: 2nd March 2018
Who: Society of Imaginary Friends, Darren Hirst – Monologues & Soliloquies, Outre Dan Steele, Stepan Honc + others.
Well, for some reason, wise or foolish, the good people at the Karamel Klub invited me back for a second visit to perform another branch of my occasional show: Darren Hirst – Monologue and Soliloquies.
In the second half of March, our theatre “Ravenscourt Arts” will host “The Shakespearience Too”.
This is the latest venture for our own production company “The Shakespearience” which Darren Hirst founded in 2009 to present an introduction to Shakespeare for young people of pre-GCSE school age.
When the Shakespearience first began to work together, it was actors, a tour bus and props but since our own theatre opened, life has been much easier.
What: The Shakespearience Too
Who: The Shakespearience Production Company
Where: Ravenscourt Arts, Hammersmith, London
When: March 2015
In 2009, I had a dream. I mean literally. I had a dream. I woke up in my hotel in Stratford-Upon-Avon with a notion that I should start a theatre company that would present Shakespeare for schoolchildren in a way that would be informative, entertaining and educational. I was in town to review a play by the Bard but I have to say that I can’t even remember which one. But I do remember what happened next.
What: Cordner and Rudolph supported by Perkelt
Where: Ravenscourt Arts, Hammersmith, London
When: June 11, 2014
This show promised to be an unusual and cosmopolitan evening of folk music and it didn’t disappoint. The main act came from Northern Ireland and France, the support from the Czech Republic and in the show there was something for everyone.
When: March 16th 2014
Where: The Suffolk Punch, Fulham Palace Road, London
The last time I caught up with Perkelt, they were a six-piece band, all from the Czech Republic and dressed in Mediaeval outfits. Now they are a three-piece and their appearance is Gothic but more in the Camden town sense than in any attempted historical reproduction.
Thank you to everyone who visits and supports this site. We now get more visitors per day than ever before. We get twice as many visitors per day just reading old stuff as we used to get on the old site on a day when a new article went up.
So a couple of weeks into the New Year, what seems to be likely to appear here in 2014 and what else will I be involved in?
Sometimes you just hear something that is so unusual and innovative that you just know that there must be an audience out there for it…….
Something like that happened to me the first time that I heard Perkelt. I was wandering around Stratford-Upon-Avon trying to visualise in my head the structure of a Shakespearean production that I was eager to develop ……. when I heard some folk music.
We packed up our tour bus and we toured the local schools. Having stolen the name “The Shakespearience” from a long-forgotten tourist project in Stratford-Upon-Avon, I produced a two-hour presentation of the highlights of “Romeo and Juliet”, “Merchant of Venice” and “Macbeth”, complete with narration to explain the full story. Largely directed by Richard Evans but with input from the whole acting company, we produced a truly collaborative venture which we performed to audiences aged from 9-15. Our largest round of applause (and standing ovation) came from a crowd of 220 fifteen year olds so we must have done something right.
It seems like only the other day that I was talking about the variety of roles that life throws up for me and here comes another unusual experience.
