It’s like you’re sifting through the culture, sifting through stuff that went before and you’re trying to find something that might still speak, that might be relevant – trying to find forms that you can do something with and create work through them. You’re quoting, you’re breaking up things from the past and trying to do something with them. There’s no authentic voice, there’s no original masterwork arising out of anybody’s soul, it’s all echoes and fragments and mutations of things that went before, and that somehow you inherited.

That's me talking to Peter Billingham in an interview for his new book At the Sharp End, published by Methuen this week and described in the blurbs as 'a critical examination of the work of five leading dramatists who have made an indelible mark on today's theatre'. Alongside the interview with yours truly you can find Peter in conversation with David Edgar, Mark Ravenhill, David Greig and Tanika Gupta. Check Hugo's picture of Cathy Naden in Forced Entertainment's Bloody Mess on the front also.

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Theron Schmidt reviews my Sketch video show 100 People and 3 People at A-N portal here. 

My friend J. wrote after seeing my performance by children project with Victoria, That Night Follows Day in Paris last week:

"At the applause my neighbour, a young woman in her mid-twenties, pointing out one kid to her friend:  "I want the same as this one".
In the metro going back home (22h30) 2kids in front of me 8 and 12 maybe, couldn't stop staring at them, trying to see into their brain, they were so quiet and I was imagining storm inside."

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W. wrote:

"I am sitting in hotel at one of those internet things where you put money in. was looking at your blog and time was running out. had to put money in as i was interested in the writer with three line stories thing. started to feel like one of those fair ground things where you put money in to see more - or maybe a peep show - and now trying to write to you with one minute one second left.

Something about time and money featuring in a place where it doesn't normally occur.

There is a church nearby where tourists can pay a euro to ring the bells- and every half an hour three blind mice play badly across the town."
 

Herzog's insistence that there is no meaningful difference between his features and his documentaries - 'In both cases, I am a storyteller,' he likes to say - offends advocates of cinema verite.. [whilst he], of course, relishes tweaking the traditionalists. 'There is just a very shallow truth in facts,' he told me. 'Otherwise, the phone directory would be the Book of Books.'

A long more-or-less business-as-usual Werner Herzog article (i.e. a portrait of the artist as crazed/inspired lunatic auteur, blundering around with stolen cameras in a travel-brochure of extreme landscapes, making films beset by bad-luck, injuries, illness, gun-threats, acts-of-god and fuelled by tempestuous relations with colleagues, all the while speaking some pretty eccentric English etc etc) in the Observer here. The quote above jumped out though, as did a brief note about Herzog's habit of surreptitiously feeding poetic lines to documentary-subjects during interviews.

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Kate Valk, the Wooster Group performer, interviewed a while back by Bomb magazine here, with pictures by Paula Court I haven't seen before.

The Richard Burton film—Burton playing Hamlet—is the backdrop of our version. The Burton film is played onstage and is an integral part of our performance, which plays off of it...  we aren’t really acting, we are channeling. There are things I bring to it just because of how I am and who I am, but my task as a performer is to stay open and fluid to channeling what’s on the screens.

Also at Bomb an impressive archive of other articles and interviews. Plus a slightly circular review of the WG's Hamlet in the New York Times here. Hoping I can get to see the piece in NY. Sold out, but fingers crossed.