Shakespeare's Macbeth is a ritualised drama that summons demonic forces in the hero and the world the play creates. What happens when a production refuses to close the ritual when the play ends? A few years ago I wrote an essay on Macbeth and Karma, calling the play a...
I sat down on Christmas Eve to watch ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ – it’s been a while – expecting a comforting serving of Christmas sentimentality with extra cheese. What I saw was a polemic about banking and a parable about karma and interconnectedness. You may be...
Visionary theatre director Peter Brook created Holy Theatre in an 'Empty Space', echoing the Buddhist teaching of Emptiness and Tibetan Buddhist meditation Thought for the Day, BBC Radio 4, 06 July 2022 When I was a theatre student in the 1980s Peter Book, who died...
As Dylan turns 80, his an icon of honesty in a world hungry for success rather than truth resonates with the Buddha's rejection of worldly values Prompted by his eightieth birthday, which fell on Monday, I’ve been listening to Bob Dylan and pondering what keeps...
Lincoln in the Bardo, winner of the 2017 Mann Booker Prize, has been widely praised as a remarkable vision of human life and its possibilities that is formally daring but also moving and accessible. It is all those things, but it is also the first truly great western...