: About Me

James is a freelance who wears many hats - all taken off for the photograph! Writer, Actor, Tour Director, Events Organiser, Tennis Champion, English Butler, Office and Estate Manager, Pentathlete and Raconteur. One of the above is not true. Mixed heritage from an Irish mother and Scottish father makes him an opinionated, over-sensitive, under-achieving Libran with control issues and a excruciating sense of justice and fair play. Apart from that, he's a sane as you or I, can sing 'Danny Boy' or 'My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose' with the best of them and has the legs for a kilt.

Often to be found either in London or by the sea near Brighton (on the south coast of England), he greatly admires T S Eliot and Armistead Maupin, Shakespeare, Simon Gray and Sylvia Plath. If he had to do it all over again, he'd play Romeo rather than Hamlet, Scrooge rather than Fagin and Lady Bracknell rather than Charley's Aunt.

We don't suppose for a moment he said it, but Catullus is alleged to have suggested a motto for life James is happy to acquiesce to : Illegitimis nil carborundum.

Arts & Humanities > Theater & Drama Stage reviews: Lord of the Rings

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I have been waiting since about 1973 - when I first read both LOTR and The Hobbit - for someone t0 produce a live version of these magical, inspiring and moving tales. We could debate for ever - and no doubt will - what symbolism Tolkein had in mind (given that he wrote the bulk of the stories before, during and after the Second World War) but sufficient to say for now that we can take from them what inspires and moves us individually. Doubtless Jackson's films a few years back gave impetus to the final arrival of the stage version, but I had known of its journey for some time. It opened f...

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