“A young Australian moves to Prague to be with his girlfriend, and is soon harassed by an alcoholic grouch, a hypochondriac divorcee, and a delirious young woman. All three are dead, and the Australian is the man to help them find the light. If only he could understand a word of Czech.
Sinister, surreal and side-splitting… FALSE FRIENDS is a new comedy from the writer of last year’s DEJA VU.”
The cast of Deja Vu on the cover of The Prague Post Night and Day (Entertainment section).
Check out this sneak peak of Sweeney Todd, in the background you can see my scenic art! It took two weeks but I’m happy with the results, even though it was my first time as a scenic artist. I was accompanied by the very talented artist Michael Rowland who was the stage manager of Deja Vu (if you saw the play at the Prague Fringe Festival you would have seen him dressed in black moving the characters and props around on stage into some very interesting positions!)
Wanna see Sweeney Todd? You can find more details here: https://www.facebook.com/SweeneyToddPrague
Early this morning I was waiting for the tram near my home in Vinohrady, Prague when I saw a man pass me who looked just like Vaclav Havel. I felt I had to readjust my eyes, to make sure I was seeing things clearly. He was wearing a blue suit and carrying a suitcase in his right hand. But you see, it wasn’t just that he looked like Havel, but he had something about him – an air of intellect mixed with a beautiful childishness. As he walked, I noticed he had the same kind of bumbling gentleness about him too. A car jutted out of a driveway and Havel mosied around it offering no apologies and expecting none either. The tram arrived right at that moment and as I stepped onto it I then realised I would get the chance to take a proper look at the man again as the tram caught up with him and passed him. But instead, I turned my back and looked the other way. Who knows, maybe it really was Havel, having returned from a giant vortex in the fabric of time, from the same parallel dimension where Einstein and Da Vinci are still living and breathing. Maybe, or maybe not. At least in my imagination this will always be the case.
Featuring yours truly! Wish I had a pet pig!
Here is the recent promo film we shot for the play Déjà Vu which will be performed for four nights at the Prague Fringe Festival, Divadlo Kampa, in June 2012.
Here is the summary of the play:
“A young couple’s love is threatened by infidelity, a vague feeling they’ve seen it all before, and the mysterious appearance of more and more oranges. Why? It has something to do with Spain. But every time they try to expose the juicy truth, all is forgotten. Why? It has something to do with…
Charming, funny, surreal… DÉJÀ VU is a timeless comedy you’ll want to see over and over again.”
Déjà Vu is an upcoming play which will be performed for only four nights at the Prague Fringe Festival in June 2012. Here are the recent promo photos we took in Prague:
I take a lot of inspiration from Nick Cave. I have a lot of trouble with discipline for and I can therefore learn a lot from Cave’s work ethic. Cave treats writing as a 9 to 5 job, and this approach has made him incredibly successful. His idea is that ideas do not come out of nowhere, but from working hard at it. Nothing appears from thin air. Indeed, I agree that creativity does not come completely from nothing, but personally I like to think it’s a combination of inspiration and work. What I love about Cave is his humility. He works hard, and attributes his success to this. It is interesting that the word genius comes from the word genie, and also from jinn (the invisible ghost-like people of the Arabic world) who are credited for the seeming genius that some artists seem to pluck out of nowhere. In the romantic era especially, genius was something that helped to create humility. It was not necessarily the writer or artist themselves who were to be applauded for such brilliance, but they were the channels of something more divine. An artist can never be a genius – they have a genius.
Nick Cave’s genius is created from hard work. It is through this ethic that he channels his own creativity. And he therefore doesn’t sit around waiting for inspiration to come to him. He goes after it, which is to be admired. I’ve been watching a lot of interviews of Nick Cave on YouTube recently, and I found one in which he talks about life in Berlin, Paul McCartney writing his lyrics on toilet paper, and buying his first desk. He also talks about how he approaches music as a writer and not a musician, which is something that I find really interesting because I like to play guitar and to be honest I have never really thought of myself as a musician but always as a writer foremost. Cave gives me a lot of inspiration to keep writing music for the purpose of story telling. Cave is certainly a prolific artist, novels, poetry, music, films.
I haven’t blogged on this website for about a month, and the reason is that I’ve had blogger’s block, but also because I’ve been focusing on many things at the one time. I have just created the basis of a theatre company in Prague called “Wild Mint Productions”, and so I have been working very hard on this, as well as writing the script for the play “Deja Vu” which i have applied to perform in the Prague Fringe Festival 2012. Fingers crossed that the application is approved! 
So I have been working hard, and the blog has fallen a bit behind. Part of what I learn from Nick Cave is how to balance doing many things. Obviously Nick Cave is diversely talented, but he focuses on one thing at a time and that seems to be his secret. In the last month I believe I’m finally getting the hang of doing the same thing. If I put my energy into too many things all at once, it’s like juggling 7 balls and I end up dropping everything, but if I just juggle one thing at a time (well it’s not really juggling anymore) and I don’t drop it.
Here is the video:
