I’m presenting an installtion of poems and a bit of prose called BEING SLAGGY at Camden People’s Theatre SPRINT Festival. It’s a development of the work I wrote about in this post. You can book tickets HERE (please do! And bring your friends). I’ll be drinking in the bar…join me Here’s a poem: Hot (adjective) : If…

The notes below accompany my performance exhibit, ‘Being Slaggy’, currently showing at Camden People’s Theatre.* The notes in the exhibit are handwritten, they comment on the works of poetry, prose and the drawings and objects that are displayed alongside them. I wrote them quickly as a way to share my in-the-moment thinking about the works…

Hello. Happy New Year. I mentioned online, and on my Reasons to be Single blog, way back in late summer, that I had this idea for a sixteen-part weekly mail-out. In fact, the idea was to publish the book that I started back in 2014, a spin off of my Reasons to be Single Blog,…

  I invite proposals for a special issue of Studies in Theatre and Performance exploring the relationship between performance, activism and housing in conditions of crisis. Please do pass this CfP on to anyone you feel might be interested in contributing. * This Housing, Activism and Performance special issue will investigate how and under what…

I have been working with some fantastic colleagues from Queen Mary, Birkbeck and Royal Holloway to organise an interdisciplinary symposium on home in the housing crisis. Although there is a lot of academic research into the nature of the housing crisis, and its impact on lives across the globe, these debates remain separate from considerations of…

Over the past couple of years I have attempted to develop my approach to performance research by thinking about the ways in which my personal experiences feed into my reading of plays, and my writing about them. For me this is a political act. Far too much performance scholarship still fails to explicitly acknowledge the…

On Saturday, Dr Anthony Seldon, Master of the elite UK independent school Wellington College and newly appointed Vice Chancellor of Britain’s first independent university, the University of Buckingham, accused British Universities of laziness. ‘An ocean of complacency exists in the sector,’ he wrote in an article for The Times, complaining that the UK Higher Education…

Over the weekend, protesters across London who had defaced a war memorial were widely (and predictably) condemned as moronic and evil by social media users and the newspaper press. They had written ‘Fuck Tory scum’, in a furious crimson scrawl, across The Monument to the Women of World War II, on Whitehall in London. Never…

In these times of uncertainty, as rising rents and soaring house prices mean even Britain’s professional classes struggle to afford shelter, the phrase ‘council estate’ has become demonised. Estates are characterised by the right-wing press as hot beds of crime, poverty and immorality; as depressing ghettos where miserable people in tracksuits scam the benefits system…