Review: Clyde’s
Clyde’s follows Sweat, also seen at the Donmar in 2018, which won Lynn Nottage her second Pulitzer Prize. A play of redemption, indeed love. Outstanding.
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: Ikaria
Ikaria’s an essential play and marks Philippa Lawford – already at 25 with her own theatre company of six years and as director – a voice unafraid to use - and kern - direct experience; and create riveting theatre.
Review: Odyssey: A Heroic Pantomime
This compact one hour 45 show must run again. The most inventive, best-written and possibly best-sung panto in Town.
