Acting

Perhaps inevitably, we entered a period you might call the battle for recognition and rights. In all my time in theatre I've only ever been ratted on, or swindled, over rights to a text. Viable plays seem to provoke the…

There is an entry, in the category of counts – of whom there are many – in a schedule of the Hungarian aristocracy as follows: “Wenckheim: Article 73 of 1790/91. Austrian baron: 1776; Austrian count: 1802. The Wenckheims’ hereditary seat…

Nicholas Wenckheim was tall, slim handsomely lean-faced, beautifully dressed – probably in his fifties. He spoke remarkably good English and displayed the most exquisite manners. Even when – later – I detected anger, even fury, he controlled it in a…

So we wrote to Nicholas Wenckheim as follows: Would he go with this approach? The answer seemed to be ‘yes’. Other jurisdictions do bad things, too, he seems to concede. Also, some astonishing figures came out of this correspondence. Not…

My main concern, vis-à-vis the Wrangel play, was its historical accuracy. If I were to push it at Dan and Joan Crawford at the King’s Head for production it had to be believable. On the same theme, this is the…

We were at the height of the Cold War when Wenckheim was writing, so global fear of the possibility of a nuclear exchange, and the resulting effects of radiation on the surviving population, were at their most alarming. Nevertheless, what…