Harold Pinter’s plays have always scared me to death. Where do you begin? Where do you end? Is there an end? Is there a beginning?

What is it about the American family that playwrights continue to find so irresistible? Maybe it’s the fact that the characters are often unique, compelling, and clearly unhinged, or that the storylines are bizarre and impossible to predict, or that running through it all are epic emotions that have little to nothing to do with reason.

human

adjective

1 they're only human: mortal, flesh and blood; fallible, weak, frail, imperfect, vulnerable, susceptible, erring, error-prone; physical, bodily, fleshly.

It’s hard to be a human being and even harder to be a good one.

“The Last days of Judas Iscariot” was a play I had been desperately trying to avoid for at least five years. Each time I read a page of the script I would immediately slam it shut in absolute horror.

I’ve always been fascinated by ghosts. Not the ones in a white sheet that go bump in the night, but the ones that follow us around step by step, breath by breath, so silently you rarely sense they’re there. But they are there. Always. Inevitably. Tugging at the present with the ferocity of a rabid dog.

With the world finally beginning to show its age I can think of no better time to be an artist. Common wisdom would have us believe that when times are tough the arts are the first thing to be taken out back and shot behind the wood shed, with theatre first in line.

Who hasn’t brooded over the past? In Craig Wright’s luminous play Pavilion, the past is full of memories that can never be truly saved, but can certainly be savored if looked at from the correct angle.

One of the most beautiful, yet sometimes heartbreaking ironies of life is the fact that the young have no idea that they’re young.

The beauty of directing is at once the beauty of theatre itself. Where else can you move people around to a story that only you can see and then hide behind the words of a playwright?