Pictures from Trees for Life and Inverness

Should be here

Checkout my review of Blackout on The Skinny Website!

Blackout by Antony Sammeroff

Blackout was prouduced by Thickskin.

A Music Poem

So much of our breath is wasting, squandered are our words,
We've so much, the more to give them, the less seems quite absurd...
And yet we, in all good conscience, spend each waking day,
Speaking as though spoken-word, spoke all we had to say...

Why ever talk when you can sing?
Are words your only music?
Your music is your everything!
You little bird, you've taken wing!
Now put your heart into it,
And let your voice give your life meaning...

Time is not our only measure, of the here and now,
Your time can make all time a treasure, there's little doubt, here's how,
Just give your all, and everything, to everything you do,
You have got so much to bring, there's so much more to you...

Why ever talk when you can sing?
Are words your only music?
Your music is your everything!
You little bird, you've taken wing!
Now put your heart into it,
And let your voice give your life meaning...

Fish and Moose

" Fish and Moose is  a witty comedy following the tale of three close friends and Doug as they face their respective daily trials of work (and the avoiding of it), sexism, finding an occupied bed for the night (and leaving it without attracting attention to oneself).

Ray and Jules set about the task of trying to force their friend James to get over a break up as the sitcom gives a naturalist take on familiar situations. The cast is a highly believable bag of characters who share witty repartee, teaching you why be “moose” when you can be “fish” ! "



This is a most-loved project I'm working on with my friend Finn Townsley who stage managed my play Lock and the Emerald Eyes (my second play) and co-wrote+co-directed Patriot (the third.)

For me the interesing thing about this piece of writing is it started out life as an extensive list of jokes that we had coined over the course of several nights out. Us having a few different strands to our senses of humour, characters began emerging through the jokes as you could think "well that line could be said by the same person that said that line" ...and then storyline started to weave itself around the development characters. It has shown out to be a really cool, interesting and original way of writing, consistently funny, with some very unexpected results regarding the depths of some of the characters. Lots of happy coinicdences and subtext that was coined without preconception and becaue most of the jokes are things that were actually said the dialogue is very natural and believeable. I am very much looking forwards to seeing how this goes!

Orlando - Handel'd with Care

Scottish Opera perform a modernisation of Handel’s Orlando at the Theatre Royal, Glasgow

            Putting on one of Handel’s Operas will always create controversy between those impresarios pledging unfaltering fidelity to the original text and those staring in the face of a patronage acclimatised to the Italian Romantic repertoire which is the mainstay of the contemporary opera house. Rossini, Verdi, Puccini. They need little modernisation as they deliver in and of themselves exactly what an audience expects from the Opera. How though, can an early 18^th century work written for an audience that was expected to pay only cosmetic attention to the stage capture the attention of today? Needless to say some work has to be done whether one stays true to the original reading of the text or otherwise.

           Having attended a private seminar given by director, Harry Fehr, on his vision for the piece, it was with great expectation that I attended Scottish Opera’s contemporisation of Orlando. The “swords-and-sorcery” tale of a great soldier in Charlemagne's army driven mad by unrequited love only to be restored to sanity by a wizard’s spell has been reimagined in a World War II setting. Orlando is now a RAF hero, and the sorcerer is a talented psychologist who cures him with shock treatment - controversial! Unfortunately the adaptation, while often compelling, sometimes challenges the audience to credibly reintegrate libretto with setting, for example when Orlando pledges to slay dragons, monsters and madmen to prove his love to Angelica. The naturalistic themes synonymous with Handel’s Operas also find poor substitution in the clinical hospital. Dorinda sings: “How delightful it is in these woods! To watch the harmless play of goats and deer…” but the woods are a small garden with potted plants, and there are no playful goats or deer to be seen.

            While the acting is good on all counts (particularly Sally Silver’s heartfelt and emotionally torn performance of Dorinda) and there are some truly memorable aria moments, particularly in the third act, these merits are counterbalanced by some serious directorial blunders in the execution of the piece. The most unforgivable of these is at the very climax of the piece when Orlando is finally cured of his madness and declares himself a new man. Handel’s music suddenly rings out in all the colours of a glorious celebration, but far from finding our hero lauded and applauded at centre stage, where he belongs, he starts singing his Aria on his knees somewhere over to the left, and continues to distract us from his lovely voice by getting dressed throughout it. Patrons and critics will debate the relative merits and demerits of any modern rendering of an opera, but botching the climatic scene is unambiguously Fehr’s failing.

Still, Scottish Opera’s new setting holds novelty enough to make it worth seeing, each making their own value judgement as to the success of the new setting. Handel’s beautiful, plush, score provides much to thrill the ear, although some may feel that the two countertenor voices of the principle males joining the two soprano female leads perhaps creates too little variation in the vocal range.  Thankfully towards the end “Dr.” Zoroastro’s lower voice plays a more prominent role and is a welcome change of character.

West Side Story in the South Side

Glasgow Music Theatre perform West Side Story in Eastwood Park Theatre, Giffnock. 

            There's little doubt that West Side Story, Leonard Bernstein’s streetwise reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is one of the best loved musicals ever written. The 2009 Broadway Revival lasted out nearly 750 performances into January of this year. Nothing about the show is forgiving to amateur performers. They are expected to sing, dance and act with competence while at the same time maintaining the teenage zest of the characters they play rather over the maturity of their craft. The score, replete with ever-memorable showstoppers such as the America, Tonight and Maria, has been described, at best, as “rangy” to sing, and it requires a large ensemble (with many players doubling on more than one instrument) to properly realise its cocktail of jazz on the rocks served with cool ballads and a not-light sprinkling of off-beat dissonance carried fourth from Bernstein’s experience conducting the symphonies of Gustav Mahler. It is therefore with some degree of ambition that Glasgow Music Theatre, a new group formed in 2009, take on this as their third show.

The challenge is set. Expectations are high.  No one would care to see their favourite scenes and numbers floundered by poor execution. And no one will leave disappointed. Marion Baird’s choreography merges seamlessly into Amy Glover’s direction with intricate professionalism, and who can tell where ones work ends and the other’s begins? There are some wonderful dancers and actors in this group.

The principal cast, for the main part, give extremely nuanced performances: we see Bernardo, leader of the Shark gang (played by John McGlone) hold up his head and broaden his chest with Hispanic pride. His “Jet” counterpart, Riff (played by Stewart Archibald), deftly delivers his lines with attitude and impeccable timing. Kirsty Leith, who plays Maria (the Juliet of West Side Story) has a pure, clear voice truly to die for that fills the theatre and will ultimately bring a tear to the unsuspecting eye. Unfortunately, at times she is let down by the physical rigidity of her Romeo, played by Colin Richardson, who gives a good-natured performance that suffers from a lack of openness in his body language. This was particularly painful during his solo, Maria, in which the audience expects to see him stretch his arms out in a whirlwind of passion, but finds them magnetically drawn into his chest instead. David McCurrach gives a stand-out performance as Lt. Schrank, catching us off-guard as he switches with expert calculation between the attitudes of Good Cop and Bad Cop.

A particular success of the performance was a pervading feeling that these really were youngsters who believed their lives as hoodlums transformed them into adults. This is something that is often lost in renderings of West Side Story by more mature casts, notably the movie version. Such youthful spirit comes to crescendo in the playful satirical number Gee, Officer Kruptke, which is always a highlight of the show, but a more skilfully choreographed and amusingly performed rendition is beyond my imagination.

Look out for Glasgow Music Theatre, they’ll soon attain a worthy reputation as the most professional of amateur theatre company in Glasgow.

No Clear Deterrent - An Austere Case For Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament

Written for Nuclear Free Scotland the publication of the CND

The British public greet the new year with a VAT tax increase, along with the phase-in of the coalition-government’s savage cuts to public services which even The Telegraph reported will hit the poorest households (with incomes of under £10,000pa) 15 times harder than the richest. [1] Meanwhile the British National Debt approaches nine hundred and ninety seven billion[2] (£997,000,000,000) and each household will have to pay around £1,880 just to cover the interest on this massive figure, almost unfathomable to those of us who still believe that the purpose of paying tax in a liberal democracy is to fund public services rather than to pay off the rich corporate banking oligarchs. In a time where the most vulnerable members of society are being asked to bear the brunt of what are euphemistically termed ‘austerity measures,’ we see the true measure of parliamentarian hypocrisy in light of the majority support, both in the Conservative coalition and the Labour opposition, for continuing to upkeep Britain's independent nuclear deterrent, at the cost of £2 billion a year.

I add my own emphasis to the turn of phrase because “Nuclear Deterrent” in itself is a misnomer.  It is difficult to see the practical return we have rendered from the exorbitant amount of money successive governments have spent on nuclear weapons systems in the past, as they won us none of our wars, and deterred none of our enemies. Argentina was not deterred from seizing the Falklands even though we had the bomb and they didn’t.

Set to the backdrop of a volatile geopolitical landscape in modern times, we are entreated to believe that states such as Iran and North Korea may soon pose an imminent nuclear threat (as we were with Libya in the past) in order to justify a renewal of our nuclear arsenal in the not-too-distant future at a further cost of £76bn. Yet when our leaders make the argument from deterrence, they concomitantly empower other nations that may have nuclear aspirations to do the same. The sense of this is clear. Having initiated two legally (not to mention morally) questionable wars in the last decade, enemies of our state, and indeed those our state consider enemies, now more than ever have a compelling argument to present for their own place on the nuclear world stage.

Politicians allege that Iran develops its (perhaps ill-advised) civilian nuclear energy program only to front a desire to obtain nuclear weaponry, conveniently neglecting to mention that in order to produce weapons-grade material from uranium enrichment reactors, Iran would require thousands of centrifuges which they do not have, not to mention a nuclear warhead and delivery system. Iran’s nuclear energy initiative is also protected by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) who monitor for the diversion of fissionable materials to military programs.[3] The mainstream media plays its role in supporting this agenda by blurring the lines between the Shia Muslim nation of Iran and the Sunni Muslim extremist group we know as Al Qaida, despite the fact that in their own words, Al Qaida are “sworn to kill Jews, Christians and Shias.” What is more the US accepted Iran’s help in Afghanistan against the Taliban as they were a mutual enemy.

As for North Korea, the television coverage has been extremely selective, such as recently when they reported that North Korea was threatening to launch military strikes against the South, while failing to give equal notion to the fact that South Korea and the US were joining in running provocative military drills in which shells were fired close to the North Korean border. South Korea fired thousands of shells into waters within the standard 12-nautical-mile-limit of what North Korea may claim as it’s own waters. Such provocations could easily be stopped by simply instituting a no-fire zone running from the Yellow Sea to the Sea of Japan between the 37^th and 39^th parallel,[4] but where is the profit in peace?  

Warfare, coupled with a culture of fear, is the health of the state, allowing the justification of costly corporatist military programs such as nuclear weapons which play into the hands and pockets of the military industrial complex, the biggest industry in the world, trading at $500bn yearly. Our nation sells weapons to other countries to win influence and to reduce the unit cost of producing our own, claiming to stand up for human rights while at the same time supplying arms to dictators and despots. A great deal, perhaps over 50%, of publically funded research goes into arms development, yet it is a myth that arms spending is an effective way to create jobs. as the technology becomes more sophisticated and mechanised, it becomes less labour intensive. A Lucas aerospace worker said: “the taxpayer buys Harrier jump Jets and kidney machines. Lucas say it’s not profitable to buy kidney machines. We collected pennies on street corners to buy a machine for a little boy who was dying because the NHS couldn’t provide one. I wonder if it became unprofitable to produce aircraft , how many people would give pennies when the government wanted a new Harrier.” We could say the same of nuclear weapons, if ministers want them so badly, let them raise the money by donation, not at the cost of our vital public services. In the meantime, weapons are more profitable because government often guarantee manufacturers costs as well as an agreed profit, which is hardly to incentivise cost-efficiency.

It's time to start shaking hands instead of fists. At this point, the best thing the west could do in the interests of peace is open up communications and trade with countries like Iran and North Korea in good faith. As soon as there is a commercial stake in maintaining peace between nations the risk of conflict diminishes as neither nation stands to gain from losing any mutual benefit. Nato, which has been a block to disarmament since its inception, could be replaced with a much more loose alliance of non-nuclear European countries, each of whom would have their own independent arrangements but would agree to come to the aid of anyone who was attacked, because you don't need parity in weapons to fend off an aggressor, all you need is to create a situation where initiating aggression would come at great cost with no eventual gain to be had from success. Just look at the hiding our troops continue to receive from resistance fighters after over 9 years in Afghanistan, a poverty stricken nation!

There may be an argument for maintaining military strength in order to prevent terrorism, but far from serving as a deterrent to terrorists, nuclear weapons have no anti-terrorist application. On the other hand, they would provide fertile ground for any terrorist organisation who may become resourceful enough to buy, beg, borrow or steal one. This horrific scenario belies the tragic irony of the case that states that the more weapons you have the more safe you are, it seems our security is inversely proportionate to the size of our nuclear arsenal.

The biggest nuclear threat is not from any enemies, real or perceived, but by accident or mistake. Lets not forget the horrors caused by the Chernobyl incident, and that was only a tenth of a kiloton of fallout, one nuclear missile can involve 6,000 kilotons! No one in their right mind would use such a weapon because while the target gets the blast, the aggressor gets the fall out, and the whole planet gets a nuclear winter.  The idea that maintaining nuclear weapons makes the world safer is to assume that although there are tens of thousands of these weapons, none can ever be released by mistake, in response to a false alarm or worse still fall into the hands of terrorists who would love to get their hands on one. The only safe nuke is a dismantled nuke.

In 1980 the decision to replace our Polaris-Chevaline nuclear weapons system with Trident was made by Maggie Thatcher without any parliamentary discussion at all, let there not be a repeat! We want nuclear disarmament at home to stimulate multilateral agreements. Brazil and Argentina mutually agreed to end their rival nuclear programmes, South Africa abandoned their nuclear programme post-apartheid, and when the Soviet Union was no more, Ukraine and the former soviet states renounced their inherited nuclear capacity and offered America a pact to permanently eliminate all atomic weapons, but no response was fourth-coming. If Britain gave up on the idea of renewing Trident, dismantled our weapons, and began a phased withdrawal from Nato, it would undermine the justification for nuclear weapons abroad and put us in a position to make a strong case for a nuclear convention, banning the weapons world-wide.

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[1] Myra Butterworth 22/10/10 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/personalfinance/8080294/Poorest-households-hit-15-times-harder-by-Government-cuts.html

[2] http://www.debtbombshell.com/

[3] Debunking Iran Nuclear Propaganda: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2h2duVmkVI

[4] No Korean War: http://TinyURL.com/NoKoreanWar