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of fellow students who warmly befriended me, but the almost unlimited opportunities for acting and performance the college provided me with. Westfield in the early '80s was a hotbed of talent and creativity and I wasted little time in passionately engaging with it.
Within days I'd made a close friend of Andrew, a fellow French and Drama student from Darlington in the north east. Before long, we were both being directed by a dynamic and flamboyant guy called Lee in Brecht and Weill's's "The Threepenny Opera". I'd two small roles, the most interesting being that of a petty street thief Filch, who'd been played by the French writer and actor Antonin Artaud in "L' Opra de quat'sous", one of two versions of the play directed by G.W. Pabst. Fool that I was I was proud of this fact because Artaud, a tragic example of the avant garde persuasion taken to its logical conclusion was one of my favourite cursed poets. More or less by accident I recently heard a brief snatch of a recording he made a few months prior to his death aged on the internet; and it was one of the most distressing aural experiences I've ever had, so much so that it took days for me to return to normal. Through this production I went on to play jive-talking disc jockey Galactic Jack in the musical play "The Tooth of Crime" by Sam Shepard, who has allegedly named Artaud as an influence on his work through theatrical theories contained in his "Le Thtre et son Double". The director, Neil, had been impressed by myself and Andrew in "The Threepenny Opera" and so cast us as Jack and the lead, Hoss, respectively.

I'd say things started to go a little wrong for me once I left Westfield in the summer of '83 with a few months to spare before travelling to Paris to work as an English language assistant in a French secondary school, the Lycee Jean-Paul Timbaud. This spelled my exile from the old drama clique, and I'd not be joining them in their final year celebrations, and the knowledge of this must have affected me. I was after all severing myself from a vast network of gifted friends of whom I was deeply fond, and so losing an opportunity of growing as an artist in tandem with like-minded spirits. I could've opted for an alternative few weeks in France as Andrew did, but doing so would've deprived me of the chance of spending more than six months in Paris, a city I'd long worshipped as the only true home of an artist. So, in the autumn of that year, I took lodgings on the grounds of the Lycee JP Timbaud in

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