Toft and Howard

This morning I went to the Warehouse Theatre to see how I am getting on. The ‘I’ in question is the actor John Howard, who will be performing three monologues around the illness and death of my father for the English Comedy Club this Thursday, Friday and Saturday. This morning he went through the pieces with the director, Conrad Toft, and I was both fascinated and deeply moved: fascinated, to see somebody take ‘my’ material and render it into a thoroughly convincing creative act, and moved because, thanks to John’s acting skills, the basic themes – the euphemisms around mortality, the relationship between father and son – come across very powerfully. To sit in on the process as a privileged spectator was a thoroughly absorbing experience. As I wrote in a previous piece, John Howard is much better at being me than I am!