LATEST NEWS
"Stronger than Superman". A Bengali translation of the play was successfully produced in Calcutta under the title "Amio Superman" in Spring 2014. Preparations are being made for a production in New York in Fall 2017. The play is also scheduled to have its Greek premiere in Athens in 2018.

The Czech-language premiere of "Camp Comedy" opened successfully on 4. February 2017 in the town of Jihlava, where Gustav Mahler once lived.

"The Cabaret of Death", (directed by Andrzej Celinski), a full-length Polish documentary film on cabaret in the holocaust, in which I feature, was awarded the Gold Medal as the best documentary film at the 2015 New York Film Festival. It has just triumphed at the 67th Prix Italia as the best Music and Arts Documentary. Look out for it. It's quite outstanding.

WELCOME!
This website will introduce you to some of the activities I am involved in as a writer and translator. I have been working in theatre since 1968 when I left Drama Centre London, where I trained as an actor. Before that I read French and Italian at the University of Wales, during which time I spent a year as a teacher in St.Etienne in the Massif Central, where I wrote a BA thesis on "Jacques Copeau, Jean Daste et La Comedie de St.Etienne". I moved to Berlin from London in 1981 after my play Stronger than Superman had opened at the GRIPS theatre.
I now live in the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, on which I have written three travel guides, "The Wupper Valley", "Dusseldorf, Aachen and the Lower Rhine" and Tour the Ruhr. My other activities include a one-man cabaret show in German on the area, talks, lectures, theatre criticism and workshops, and in 2010 I curated an exhibition of major living European poets for the RUHR.2010 cultural capital of Europe celebrations, entitled "Europe...a poem". A German/English book was published by Klartext Verlag to accompany the exhibition which was revived in Castrop-Rauxel in 2014 as part of the town's anniversary celebrations. The book gives facsimiles of the original handwritten poems, German and English translations of all the poems, along with essays, photos and biographical details.
And to finish where I began - the theatre.
I have just completed a new large-scale play on the failure of the Allies to honour their treaty obligations to protect Poland during the Second World War. "Eden's Garden" begins in 1939 and follows the parallel stories of the Polish underground worker Jan Karski, and the British Foreign Secretary (and later Prime Minister) Anthony Eden. The play culminates in their meeting in London in 1943 when Karski gave Eden an eyewitness report on Hitler's systematic murder of the Jews and pleaded with him for the Allies to take specific action to prevent any further extermination. Eden refused to commit himself and in his subsequent report to Winston Churchill he deliberately omitted any reference to the plight of the Jews. Between the meeting in 1943 and the end of the war, a further one and a quarter million Jews were murdered in the concentration camps. Anyone wishing to read the play, which has a large cast, should send me an email.