We had a great time at the Edinburgh Fringe this August. It's the biggest open arts festival in the world! Writer of our London Literary Pub Crawl, Nick Hennegan, wrote one for Edinburgh. And we had a blast. And like our regular weekly London Pub Crawl he met some great new people! 

Most of the Posts are now?yola-link-is-coming=true on www.BohemianBritain.com. Go have a look!


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As most of our posts are now on BohemainBritain.com, I'd ask you to have a look there. But it's nice to pop on to this site occasionally. We're doing an ambitious but logical production! Yep... Nick's extending the Literary Pub Crawl to the world's biggest open arts festival! Come and see us if you're in Edinburgh this August. 



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Our writer, Nick Hennegan had the pleasure of meeting the Pogues frontman, Shane MacGowan - punk, traditionalist and perceived hell-raiser - who has passed away. They met in Soho, London. This is Nick's personal tribute on Bohemian Britain. Join us every Saturday on the Literary Pub Crawl at 5pm for a 'Rainy Night In Soho' and a 'Fairytale of New York... sorry... Soho!'

www.BohemianBritain.com

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Writer Nick Hennegan is at the Edinburgh Fringe this year, just for a week - a different experience after the last few, full-on years. Follow him on our new website -  Bohemian Britain




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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 ...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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The roots of the Literary Pub Crawl lie in the Fitzroy Tavern. I was doing my Masters at the University of London and looking for a cheap pint.  My mate from Birmingham, filmmaker Andy Bloom, suggested I could get a cheaper pint at the Fitzroy, as the pub was run by the Sam Smiths Brewery and they were considerably cheaper than other pubs in the area.  He also told me about the Writers and Artists Bar at the pub, which certainly appealed.

So I was nursing my cheap pint downstairs and couldn't ...
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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 ...

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Or at least the final blog of this particular production. What can I say! We’ve just finished and I’ve just got back from the last night.  And the consumption of a few drinks with the cast makes this not the best time to write this, perhaps! But it became a big deal for me. As you may have gathered from the previous blogs, I had a number of concerns with this production. Although small in scale it was large in ambition and my first toe in the West End water.  I only actually got to watch ...
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I love the image above we are using for Under Milk Wood.  It has a wistful quality to it and that is how I feel about some of our writers - especially Dylan Thomas, who was taken from us so tragically early. I also love Wales, and this image kind of sums up my schoolboy holidays in out-of-season seaside towns. This bench has seen a lot, you can just tell.  And it quietly waits for the next joyful - or maybe melancholy - experience. 

But enough wooden bench and more Milk Wood.  He was a smart c...
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Under Milk Wood, by Dylan Thomas

£ 15 Friday 8th November 2013 at 7.30pm Saturday 9th November, 2013 at 2.30pm The Wheatsheaf Pub, Rathbone Street, London, W1T 1JB   A rare, fund-raising performance of the "play for voices' given on the very day Dylan died sixty years ago. The Maverick Theatre Company and the Literary Pub Crawl Company present this stunning vocal masterpiece in the same pub where Dylan Thomas drank and met his wife, Caitlan.   A unique, not-to-be-missed event celebrating the genius o...

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If you're coming to see us over the summer, the chances are you might meet one of this talented bunch of actors. If you've already been on the London Literary Pub Crawl, you may recognise the alleyway next to the Newman's Arms, George Orwell's local.
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One of the pubs we visit on the tour is The Newman Arms. It's a great pub and unusual in that it's one of very few pubs in the area still owned outright by a family, rather than a brewery. I'll go into more detail about the pub in a later post, but I love the place. And it's appeared in some famous films. But perhaps most famously it's where George Orwell used to drink and is widely believed to be the template for the Proles pub in his novel 1984. You can hear some of his description of the p...
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 Quaintish seafront shops. Closed, of course. But it was Sunday.

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The first of our Christmas tours took place on Saturday 15th, and a great time we had too. This was the scene at the end of the tour in our last pub in Soho. The songs were imminently singable and we're gong to make it a regular Saturday evening thing going forward.

 Happy Christmas and we hope to see you in the New Year. Here's to 2013!



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