Review: Eugenia and Quentin Russell Recital St Nicholas Church, Brighton
Niche but nicely judged and worth 53 minutes of a lunchtime away from the burly world
Simon Jenner
Simon Jenner was born in Cuckfield in 1959. Failing everything except art, he learnt to fly instead: discovering poetry forestalled a career in airframes. Belatedly educated at Leeds, then Cambridge, his PhD was paradoxically in ’Oxford Poetry of the 1940s’. Simon’s been Director of Survivors' Poetry since 2003, and from 2008-10, also Royal Literary Fund Fellow, at UEL and Chichester. Simon’s poetry collections are About Bloody Time (2006), Wrong Evenings (2011), Two for Joy (2013) all from Waterloo. Perdika/Poet in the City brought out Pessoa (2009) and commissioned close translations of Propertius Elegies Book I. Agenda Edition’s Airs to Another Planet on music poems is forthcoming. In 2016 his poem ‘Peter Philips’ Part Book Talks to Breugel’ was a prize-winner in the National Poetry Competition. One of six Poet in the City Residencies, Hackney, which launched in 2014 also maked a turning point. It’s where the kernel of Simon’s first play has developed, now being developed by a Guildford company. One adptation of a novel based on First World War flying, and two other plays, one based on a friend’s sectioning, are in development. Simon also writes music criticism.
Recent reviews:
Review: Murder on the Orient Express
Even if you don’t like Christie it’s worth seeing not just for an exceptional – and exceptionally-acted – production, but for moral questions that now, as in 1934, need answers in the face of dictators.
Review: Heisenberg
If flawed it’s a fascinating, intimate piece given new life and with luck a new performing tradition. The most compelling two-hander now playing.
Review: The Inseparables
A transfixingly beautiful production, with often superb acting, especially from Lara Manela
Review: Tending
Essential theatre, essential witness and mandatory for anyone who wants to know how human we have to be, from beginning to end.
