Peter Kenny
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Home is where the hurt is
For someone who hates flying as much as I do, I seem to travel a lot. Countries as far apart as Mexico, Chad, and Japan have seen me emerge from the plane blinking in gratitude to the sky gods for my safe arrival, and ready to explore. But when I return to Guernsey I feel I am coming home. I…
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Definitely cup half-full
Watching actors rehearsing your script is like being at a birth. Messy, noisy but rewarding too. Over the last few weeks in all kinds of venues (a big shout out to Brighton’s The Duke of Wellington where we have been using an upstairs room for the last few rehearsals and lapped up a few drinks too). Beth,…
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Zooming in on drought
I should mention here that some of the work I was doing in Chad has now started to go live. The audience for this particular execution (below) is those watching faith channels on TV, particularly Evangelical Christians. After much discussion with the 11 London team with Tearfund I came up with the positioning Give Like Jesus, and evolved the questioning format…
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A writer’s progress, in 3 machines
1: the mould green typewriter. At first it was all pencil, fountain pen, biro and felt tip, until a mould green typewriter changed my life. It had belonged to my Canadian great-aunt and somehow found itself at our house in London. Plonking, one finger at time, I transferred my secretly pencilled hoard of teenage poems into typescript. Their newfound…
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Bard at work
Been hard at work this week on my poem for the mysterious sounding Project 154. It involves writing a response to Willie the Shake’s sonnet 19, perhaps not one of his best but nevertheless magnificent about time and love. Directly responding to other poet’s work is not something I’ve done much (other than renga experiments with friends long ago) so good…
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A Glass of Nothing: rehearsals start
Rehearsals for ‘A Glass of Nothing’, my dark comedy, fittingly began in a dark and blurry basement. Left to right below are a blurry Kitty Underhill and a blurry Beth Symons, while Dylan Corbett-Bader stands absorbing the script before he swaggers on. Tickets are now available directly from Other Place Brighton.
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Tickets on sale for A Glass of Nothing
So I finally finished writing my play ‘A Glass of Nothing’. Quite handy really, as the first actor’s read through was on Saturday afternoon. Unlike Douglas Adams, I hate the whooshing sound deadlines make as they go by. In fact even thinking about missing a deadline makes my toes curl in horror so I was mightily relieved to…
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Getting in ‘Under the Radar’
I’m not fantastic at the humblebrag tightrope. I either come across as bragging or too self-deferential. But damning the torpedoes… I have a poem in the latest Under the Radar magazine. It has an inviting and mysterious design for the cover and a library book label inside, stamped ‘withdrawn’. I guess like everyone I look for names of people…
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Gut decisions
Beth and I have our cast! The audition process was fairly smooth. Slightly tangentially I found myself interested by where the auditions were held. The Brighton ones were done in the basement of a restaurant bar Neighbourhood on St James Street. The metal bull’s head on the wall felt, for me, like some kind of a good omen as we sat underneath it. The…
Peter Kenny: a writer's notebook 