Poet
Playwright
Podcaster
“Over the past fifty years, he has made significant contributions to contemporary theatre”
I have spent the last fifty years making theatre as a playwright and director. That also means fifty years of thinking about what theatre is and does and how. As a writer I have 39 plays registered on the Doollee Database of contemporary theatre. As a director I have developed a style and theory which I call The Burning Stage based on Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, Grotowski’s Poor Theatre and Peter Brook’s “Empty Space”. It has developed from my early extensive work in theatre-in-the-round and street theatre with luminaries such as Ken Campbell, Ben Bennison and Jonathan Kaye. Burning Theatre challenges the actor to enter a different relationship with the audience by a complete commitment to the limited space they are both inhabiting. In The Burning Stage The triangle of Writer, Actor and Audience each shares a third of the responsibility for every performance thus turning the play into a truly immersive social ritual. This has led me to experiment with unusual stage arrangements such as traverse or having the audience in the centre of the playing area. After six years as Artistic Director of Arts Council promoted Oxfordshire Theatre Company, I formed my own company Spyway Projects. Much of my work has been in small venues for community audiences and has included a celebrated theatre project for adults with learning disabilities throughout Dorset which was called Sparkle and which led to a follow up in France, Belgium and the Netherlands.
“Ah, the burning stage in theatre is where the magic happens, isn't it? It's that pivotal moment in a play or performance where emotions reach a peak and the narrative takes a crucial turn. This phase often involves intense drama, conflict, or revelation, and it's where both the characters and the audience are deeply engaged.”
I have worked extensively with Radio 3 musician Roddy Skeaping and his Collectif International des Improvisateurs and have contributed lyrics to works at The Barbican and Queen Elizabeth Hall as well as a commissioned oratorio “Our World of Shopping” for the Brighton International Festival. In 2002/3 we were commissioned to write Two Songs for Elizabeth in honour of Queen Elizabeth’s Golden Jubilee. Performed by James Bowman and the English Consort of Viols at the Banqueting Hall of Whitehall Palace.
Some of my most enjoyable musical moments have been working with Lucie Skeaping’s City Waites early music band.
As a performer I have appeared on stage and films and I am to be seen around Bournemouth and Dorset performing my poetry. (Poetry Platform Award 2024)
I am recently wrestling with extended prose writing from which will emerge two novels of bewilderment.
I also make videos and podcasts.
I am deeply committed to the idea of the arts as a fundamental human necessity in interpreting and expressing the world we live in and, while we all have to make a living, I find the idea of an Arts Industry which lives off the backs of the inspired and creative to be anathema.
“… programmed into my ear-drums like a comforting case of tinnitus.” C.W. Blackburn
“I didn’t understand a word of it.” Abby G. Poetree
Come with me on a journey
The journey, I suppose, of landscapes, of events, of people that I’ve seen and met during my life as a writer. I hope you’ll find all sorts of things that will amuse you, as they did me, with links to some of my poems and projects as well as my history and Publications. If you are a booker, there’s information under the heading Press in the About Me section that you can use directly for publicity. I’ll let you know about any Events that I’m taking part in with dates and so on.
I have two blogs here (TWO count them). An as-and-when journal about anything that takes my fancy under Latest and a daily journal of the people, weather and happening on Bournemouth’s West Cliff Green.
Something that I hope will make you think is the story of my journey as a storyteller. I try to work out what I’ve been up to all these years so I hope you will join me. Click on the “My Story Story” link here or above and start with the Praeludium.
I Make Stories
For fifty years I have written plays, poems, books and made videos and Podcasts. .
My whole life has been taken up with Story Telling. I tell funny stories, sad stories, serious stories, weird stories. I like funny and unusual words. Lots of words, cascades of words, torrents of words. I want to bring as much enjoyment to you, the reader, watcher, listener as I do when I am making them up.
I tell them in plays, poems and podcasts. I tell them in videos and live performances.
"I like the process of story telling. The intensity of Living Nature through myself--using the medium of words to define the poetry of living space; that is my aim, life and work."
I make Stories about Railways and Machines
The Runaway Train at the Oxford Playhouse (written with Jem Barnes)
Look out for my Railway Tales on You Tube
I love machines. Trains, planes, motorbikes, farm machinery. I get the same elemental pleasure from observing machines as I do from watching nature. I like to plunge in, fathoms deep, into the visceral heart of machinery. There is as much pleasure in the sound of a BSA Gold Star motorbike or the three cylinder bark of a Class A2 4-6-2 as there is in hearing the song of the wren hidden in a gorse bush nearby.
I make stories about significant men and women
Starting with “The Jolly Farmer” about radical politician William Cobbett with Jem Barnes in 1974 through to my trilogy about significant Women of Dorset in the 2000s
My play about the pioneer fossil hunter, Mary Anning, “The Mad Woman of Lyme” toured with AsOne Theatre Company during 2017 and again in 2021
http://www.as-onetheatre.co.uk/
I have been privileged to have been commissioned to write a trilogy of plays about three women who have contributed in their different ways to Dorset’s global significance but who’s lives have never been fully explored before. They were Thomas Hardy’s first wife Emma in “She Opened the Door”. The world famous paleantologist, Mary Anning in “Lost in Time”and the controversial birth- control campaigner Marie Stopes in “Escaping the Storm.
I make stories balanced on the Cliff Edge
I make stories about my wanderings
“Your words have been a great source of gentle, uplifting guidance for me.”
Linda Ni’Man
“Every story is a journey. Every journey is a story”
—My Story Story - Peter John Cooper
Useful Quotes
Work towards what you want. Research it. Listen to others. Make a basic plan and go for it. You’ll figure it out along the way
Keitei Ventures (You Tuber).