www.BohemianBritain.com

The French House Pub famously only serves half-pints. Apart from on Pint Night! When, for charity and for one day only, they serve pints like other pubs.

Traditionally, there’s a lot of things happen on pints day at The French. And usually the musician Suggs, from the band Madness, pours the 1st pint in the morning. (His Mom used to be a regular)

As you may gather from watching this little video, I started uploading live to Facebook etc but now just do them here. And the video was filmed towa...

I thought I'd share this from November 2009 when British and Allied troops were in Afghanistan. Dad lived another 7 years after this. But it remains the only time he ever visited London. And one of very few times he talked about his war-time experience.

It's been an unusually domestic week for me. And with remembrance day, British troops in Afghanistan and the Sun newspaper giving Gordon Brown a bad time over...

A Bohemian lifestyle guide from BohemainBritain.com..!

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

Failing early in our careers can make us question whether we are on the right path. We may look at people who have succeeded from the outset and wonder why it doesn’t come so easily to us. Classical violinist Nigel Kennedy, actor Natalie Portman and painter Pablo Picasso are examples of young geniuses who were successful early on.

But for some of us, failure at the beginning of our careers is important to ...

Lyric Hammersmith, London, W6.

🍷🍷🍷🍷  (4 glasses out of 5, PLUS a shot !)

It’s always a novelty going to see a play with a name you find hard to pronounce! But having done a bit of research (you’re welcome!) it turns out the story is based, as so many brilliant stories are, on an Ancient Greek myth. And Splott is in Wales.

So good, so classical. But there is a burning contemporary edge to this story. Set in Wales, the modern name for our heroine is Effie… a Slapp...

🍷🍷🍷🍷 - 4 out of 5 (non alcoholic) glasses.

Gabriel Byrne is an international superstar but was born to a poor working-class family just outside Dublin. Watching him perform in a comfortable, up-market West End Theatre in London, I was hugely relieved he was there.  As a working-class artist myself, it’s very important that these stories are told, particularly when the arts, and theatre, in particular, seem to be heading back to levels of privilege not seen since the John Gielgud ...

From www.BohemianBritain.com 

It’s a big, bombastic, futuristic and vibrant Messina is this latest ‘Much Ad...

Love of the common people. Some of the team behind the Fitzrovia Arts Festival.

Full disclosure. I’m from Birmingham. And I love Britain’s Second City. But I’ve been flirting with London for nearly 40 years and I’ve been here full-time for over 15 years. When I first came to live in London – south of the river – I travelled with a baseball bat for security. Now this might sound extreme, but remember, no one from my family had ever been further from Brum than Wales for summer holida...

Another interesting piece from The Conversation, by Jess Cotton, Lecturer at the School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University.

Illness, unlike war, as English academic and writer Elizabeth Outka brilliantly demonstrates in her book Viral Modernism(2019), is a story that easily slips out of cultural and historical memory.

In illness, the modernist writer Virginia Woolf observed, “We cease to be soldiers in the army of the upright; we become deserters.” Woolf, writing i...

As you know, we're writers and artists ourselves and crazy about our little bit of England and its literature. We've a books list on this website, but we really loved this blog in The Conversation by Heather Green, a PhD Candidate, Literary Heritage at Nottingham Trent University, who works for Wirksworth Heritage Centre.

Some books can really bring to life the place in which they’re set. Their words knit together in such a way that whole landscapes or entire floorplans of buildings you’ve...

The evolution of the novel and short story in the 19th century brought us one of the greatest human sources of comfort, besides food and a nice hot bath. When someone tells me they are planning to “curl up with a good book”, I am filled with a sense of peace on thei...

It’s been an incredible 2019 in all sorts of ways.  The worlds of politics on both sides of the pond have seen incredible events.  I’m sure George Orwell is smiling, wherever he is. Or maybe grimacing!  On a more domestic note, we sold out in the summer and I was at the Edinburgh festival fringe again with not one, but TWO new plays.  Well, one new adaptation - a footballing version of Romeo and Juliet with a feisty Juliet - and a comedy (some would say tragi-comedy) I wrote a few years a...

"WE DRIFT OFF INTO THE SOHO EVENING, COMFORTED THAT A VIVID APPROACH TO THE LIFE'S WORK OF SOME OF THE WORLD’S MOST FAMOUS AUTHORS SHOWS THAT THERE IS AS MUCH TO BE LEARNT IN THEIR PUBS AS THEIR PAGES."  SUNDAY TELEGRAPH.

For a writer, I've not been writing on here very much!  Mainly due to the creative madness that is the Edinburgh Festival Fringe.  I actually had THREE productions I’d written and directed at the festival this year - A Christmas Carol, Henry V - Lion of England and Hamlet - Horatio’s Tale.  Yes, it was a hectic, but a glorious and intense experience.  Adapting Shakespeare’s Hamlet almost sent me as mad as the gloomy Dane himself. (Or was he mad? Or gloomy?  Or just pretending.  How mad ...

Crowning a new King and Prince.

It’s been a strange old few weeks. With our Shakespeare’s Tavern Tour around the south bank in London celebrating the birth of the bard, to final actors auditions for our new Edinburgh Fringe show, to gatecrashing the end of the London marathon - it’s been a time of high emotion. 

It was Shakespeare that started my writing and theatre journey in 1992 and all these years later I’m still creating new works based on his genius.

Auditions for actors are always...

It’s been a busy few weeks in London Literary Pub Crawl land. We’ve had three parties this week, including our first ‘Coffee Shop’ Tour - the non-alcoholic version of the Literary Pub Crawl - for 35 young students from South Africa. If you’ve been to see us you’ll know there are a few ‘adult’ stories. We took those out of course and the whole group were fantastic and really seemed to get what we were offering. 

Later we hosted a private tour with two Americans. Rusty was the Fa...

It’s been a couple of months since I last posted here.  But I’m trying to sort a script and music for our national tour of A Christmas Carol later in the year.  I finally managed to get a group of international journalists together to come on the London Literary Pub Crawl, so we’re having our official opening 5 years after we started!  I’m working on a TV script; I’m trying to negotiate with a National Trust garden to present a WW1 play in November and so spending time on this blog ...

Dylan Day - a celebration of the work of Welsh poet Dylan Thomas - is a great idea for a number of reasons.  Firstly it's always a good idea to celebrate art and literature.  In a world full of Trump, May, Brexit, Syria and conflict, it's a very good idea to remind ourselves of the real reason we are all really here.  For the sweet, satisfied moments of family, friendship, kindness, vision and imagination.  I can’t remember who said a civilised society is only measured by the success of it...

It’s been great being involved with the new International Dylan Day. 14 May each year has been designated Dylan Day to mark the first time his play for voices ‘Under Milk Wood’ was performed in public in the USA. It’s a direct lift from Blooms Day, an annual event inspired by one of the lead characters in Ulysses, by James Joyce. We're going to celebrate it this year with an extra tour and extra Dylan content.  Book now for 13th May - the Saturday before the day.  We also have some id...

We're used to writers, artists and stars in London.  In the last few months, we've literally bumped into a Doctor Who, a Beatle, a Downton Abbey Lady and the most famous female author in the world!  We've also been asked not once, but twice, to provide a 'secret' performance tour for A-list Hollywood actors and their teams!
But Nick, our writer, remembers early days of Bowie in South London and we thought this might be of interest.  

It's by Andrew Frayn, a Lecturer in Twentieth Century Literat...

So the clocks have gone back in the UK, marking the end of British Summer Time. It used to depress me a bit - the long dark nights and lack of sunshine. But actually, London takes on a different quality in the winter. But it is still quality! It's a good time for walks around some of our fantastic parks and heaths and pub wise there's a few little gems to check out.

Favourites have got to include The Dove on the riverside in Hammersmith in West London. You will have seen this pub if you've eve...

We were all a bit surprised when Bob Dylan was awarded his Nobel prize for literature.  Our Charles Dickens Christmas Crawl stops at the very pub where Bob Dylan gave his first ever public performance outside the USA!  This is what Richard Brown, Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds thought about it.

To the surprise of many, Bob Dylan has become the first singer-songwriter to win the Nobel prize in literature.

As the news broke, I was in the middle of teaching James Joyce to s...

Our writer Nick Hennegan has taken numerous productions to Edinburgh and on our Podcast Page you can hear reports from 2015.  As the fringe opened this week, we thought you might find this of interest.

The Edinburgh Festival is upon us again, a three-week spectacular that turns the Scottish capital into the biggest arts destination on the planet. It is in fact a number of different festivals, with ...

As you may know, our promenade performance tour is seeped in the lives of some of the most famous writers in the world.  So this article, by Gregory Currie, the Professor and Head of Department of Philosophy at the University of York is interesting.  It was first published in The Conversation.

If you are committed to the pleasures of reading you may be pleased to discover that there is evidence to suggest that reading fiction is good for you. In a paper published in Trends in Cognitive Science...

1.  Brexit is a word that has become used as a shorthand way of saying the UK leaving the EU - merging the words Britain and exit to get Brexit, in a same way as a Greek exit from the EU was dubbed Grexit in the past.  A referendum took place in the UK on Thursday 23rd June, 2016.  Everyone in the UK (almost) was eligible to vote, just like in a general election. But on the ballot paper were just two questions.  Should the UK leave the EU or remain in the EU.

2. The E.U. - short for the Euro...

Having just celebrated the second Dylan Thomas day, we came across this on Facebook.  Written by Josh Brown, it's self-explanatory.  Nick Hennegan, our writer, really liked it and Josh gave us permission to repost it, so here it is.  Thanks Josh!

 
Brown's Hotel, Laugharne, Wales.

I have meant to post about my visit to Laugharne in the 70's since joining the [Dylan Thomas Facebook] group. Here it is........

I was born in a snowstorm in 1947, 6 years before Dylan died. My mo...

It was on this day in 1950 that the Welsh poet Dylan Thomasembarked on his first reading tour of the United States. He had always wanted to travel to America because he’d grown up in Wales watching American cowboy movies and American car...

It's exciting being back in Birmingham at the Old Joint Stock Pub and Theatre. And last years London sellout version of my A Christmas Carol has done just that again - this time in Birmingham. Here's what I wrote for the theatre programme. 

We all know Charles Dickens' remarkable Christmas story. He wrote it in 1843, just as his fame and success as a writer was fading. The novella has not been out of print since! I first came across the book as a boy. I borrowed a children's version of the sto...

With our writer, Nick Hennegan, taking 2 weeks in Wales to write, we thought this article from The Conversation by Andrew Tate, Reader in English at Lancaster University, might be appropriate.

Hell is not, as Sartre suggested, other people – it’s a holiday without books. Holidays, with their promise of carefree pleasure seeking, might seem like the most materialistic of activities. Yet the name has sacred roots: the holy day suggests a time set apart from the ordinary flow of life.

I can to...

The piece has been partly rewritten, edited and chopped up to a short and snap...

An Evening at The Wheatsheaf Pub, Rathbone Place, London, W1. 8pm

This just in....

• The Young Vic’s A View From The Bridge takes home Best Revival, Best Actor for Mark Strong and Best Director for Ivo Van Hove.
• Hampstead Theatre’s West End transfer of Sunny Afternoon wins the most awards for any single production and is crowned MasterCard Best New Musical 
• Dame Angela Lansbury receives her first Olivier for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Blithe Spirit and Penelope Wilton is named Best Actress for Taken At Midnight 
• Mike Bartlett takes home two prizes ...

We started 2014 in the shadow of the previous year.

My experiment with theatre in a pub, as opposed to Pub Theatre as it's understood in London, had proved very successful in 2013.  I managed to get the rights to produce Under Milk Wood on the 60th anniversary of Dylan Thomas' death.  It proved a success in a number of ways, but mainly though conversations with the excellent veteran theatre director John Adams.  John was not available to direct, but he recommended a former student of his who ...

Thursday, 2 October 2014

Over the years, London has been the home of many famous writers. Whilst not all of London’s writers were born in the city, many considered it to be the place where they belonged. Here we will talk through some of the famous writers that resided in London and their well-known works of literature