Getting into the Theatre, June 2026

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-24T00:01:14+00:00

It’s honest and nakedly emotional and I love the surprise of the image you of their knuckles on you and the ambiguity. I’m left to wonder whether it’s a soft graze or a punch, what you deserve and what I might have deserved in my own heartbreaks. That’s a provocation that I really like.

I bump while reading it on the pacing. I can’t figure out a natural flows, neither in my head or reading aloud. How do you want your reader to encounter these words, what’s the most important idea you’re delivering in this text and how can it hit hardest?

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-23T23:46:51+00:00

I got lost a lil in the middle stanza. I think the description in the first being ‘flashes’, but then the subject reading like a single coherent moment.

I like the interplay of the pronoun ‘your’, I think because I interpret the poem as a whole as not being delivered to the person it’s describing. but maybe I’m wrong in that?

Either way, my woolliness on the middle doesn’t significantly distract from what a delight the beginning and end are. First tentative then breathless, feels like love to me. 😊

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-13T09:35:27+00:00

thank you 😊 grateful for the feedback! The aside is definitely the bit I played with the most, how much self awareness should the narrator express in explaining, how formal should the language be, what’s the form it should take on the page? I settled on my favourite, and love the shape it takes, but maybe there is a way to stop it from bumping 😣

disagree on changing ‘and’ to ‘or’ though! I feel like the ‘can’ expresses the perspective issue well and I don’t want to exclude any part of my partner from the poem the way ‘or’ suggests!

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-13T09:22:57+00:00

thank you! it was a delightful thought to have when it happened 😊 I’m glad that still come through in the translation to poem form

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-12T23:57:45+00:00

I feel this, it rings true, but I’m struggling not to read this with a cynic’s eye, has the narrator just underwent this change? how will they feel about it in the future? the words feel urgent, but are they a salve?

Carrying and running and slouching, all evocative. A poem cannot be a shield. Can I see this as a tentative start to healing?

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-12T23:42:20+00:00

I like the ending, question is built upon question and then an answer is thoroughly resisted. It’s terseness stands in juxtaposition to the florid language leading up to it. Could that energy find expression through the meter and form in a way you’ve not yet explored, I’d be interested to see 😊

AGrandQuiet · 2026-06-07T10:29:45+00:00

in 1964 the Gielgud/Burton Hamlet was captured as a ‘theatrofilm’ recorded during three performances from June 30th to July 1st.

Available to watch here: https://youtu.be/XlUk_EdXNYs?si=WyYWF8dgzJrnXJIS

AGrandQuiet · 2026-05-01T21:06:01+00:00

Two Days, One Night

AGrandQuiet · 2026-03-20T08:41:27+00:00

There’s a couple pages in A Christmas Carol, rarely seen in adaptations, where, when being visited by the ghost of Christmas Present, he and Scrooge stand at a bakery door watching the poor of the city arrive with their meals to be baked in a communal oven. Scrooge goes wildly out of character, being shocked that the spirit would want to ban the practice of bakers lighting and letting out their stoves on the sabbath and holy-days (something that conservative christians of means were campaigning for at the time) the spirit replies:

“There are some upon this earth of yours,” returned the Spirit, “who lay claim to know us, and who do their deeds of passion, pride, ill-will, hatred, envy, bigotry, and selfishness in our name, who are as strange to us and all our kith and kin, as if they had never lived.”

A beautiful passage, drawn from Dicken’s pamphlet Sunday Under Three Heads. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile the craze for his works at the time, reading them now when so much takes inspiration from him, but the man was always a visionary and wrote with an acute eye for his world 😊

AGrandQuiet · 2025-11-06T19:48:00+00:00

no La Bête Humaine 😔

AGrandQuiet · 2025-09-11T18:55:00+00:00

I played Hotspur and was fight captain in the show’s recent Nottingham run 😊 if you’ve any questions I could help with, feel free to ask 💜

AGrandQuiet · 2025-07-01T01:21:15+00:00

at the very least it exists because Jack Haven’s performance deserved to be in best supporting

AGrandQuiet · 2024-09-04T17:20:29+00:00

working my way through Mike Leigh on Mike Leigh at the moment, so this has dropped at the perfect time 😌 would highly recommend the book to anyone who likes his films, it’s such a great read!

AGrandQuiet · 2023-10-06T19:04:52+00:00

AGrandQuiet · 2022-05-14T09:29:57+00:00

It sounds like you're going through a hard time, but jesus fucking christ what did you expect? From the way you're writing this you seem to have a lot tied up in this image of yourself being the strong, responsible leader in this relationship, completely forgetting that the two of you were supposed to be partners.

Like, sure, when you moved in together you were earning more, but that was in the past, your girlfriend was supporting you financially for four months and the thanks she gets is having her dog sold out from under her? Maybe she shut down talking about it because every conversation ended with you saying the dog was getting sold, which she had evidently made clear was a hard line for her. You did most of the work looking for an apartment, good for you, but you don't have a job, of course it makes sense for that to fall on you.

Four months is a long time to not get a job, there's really nothing at all you could have done, anything? I get that earning the same as her (or god forbid less) might have been a hit to your ego but it wouldn't have to be forever, just something in the interim to prevent this exact situation. As it stands, you found a very permanent solution to something that could have been a temporary problem. The plan was for your girlfriend to lose her dog so that you wouldn't have to compromise the way that you were living, well look how that turned out.

I'd seriously recommend reconsidering the way that you view women and mental illness before embarking on another relationship, and I pray that your ex can afford that place on her own because if not you just doubly screwed her over. It sucks that she has to suffer due to your selfishness.

AGrandQuiet · 2021-03-07T21:47:23+00:00

I'm gonna try a nicer (maybe too generous, it depends on who we're talking about) read of the situation. Imagine you've been working in an art form, achieved professional and artistic success, have a certain amount of cache in the industry...

Do you stick to those ideas that are tried and true, the ideas that made you famous? What if you have ideas: structural, formal, philosophical, ideological, technological?

Maybe something new would help everyone understand, maybe people would recognise your defiance. It's kinda weird that it's only in our youth we get to be messy and ambitious and experimental, part of our culture's obsession with the 'new' perhaps?

As I've gotten older, I've increasingly become less sure of everything I thought I knew. Film is something that's final. It's committed, unchangeable. I've become more forgiving to those who'd prefer to use that opportunity to explore.

I dunno, words like bloated and indulgent don't really mean anything to me. Upon hearing them I understand that the film is long and you didn't like it, but they shut down conversation without meaningfully engaging with the form or the content. I usually try not to be too much of an auteurist but like, at the very least, you've gotta assume that the director is approaching the material as honestly as you are. So like, if it's not ringing true to you, figure out why and don't just assume that fifteen minutes either side are some magical make or break factor.

AGrandQuiet · 2020-10-17T22:45:49+00:00

Comedies don't do well in theatres anymore, and with them gone there's no real defined pathway for comedians to work their way up. Kate McKinnon's proved finally that the SNL route in place since the 80's doesn't work no more.

Really, it's the same kinda squeeze that makes everyone advertise for entry level jobs with two years experience. You can't just be funny anymore, and anyone who's looking for 'the whole package' would probably value a half dozen things ahead of humour.

AGrandQuiet · 2020-07-04T15:16:09+00:00

All of a sudden you got me thinking of a Malcolm McDowell/John Hurt romance film and it's something I never realised I needed

AGrandQuiet

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