Dr Sophie Fordham

View of the stage at last night’s Fontaines gig at Finsbury Park with ‘Free Palestine’ illuminated in green

🤟❤️🇵🇸🇮🇪

Bedford’s new landmark mini golf features a hole devoted to John Bunyan. Of course.

Sheffield students! I am once again recruiting actors (and a fight director) for my practice-as-research workshops! please email lucy.clarke@sheffield.ac.uk if interested! @sheffieldcems.bsky.social @sheffielduni.bsky.social #skystorians #practiceasresearch #actorswanted

Probably shouldn’t give a review only 5 pages in, but I just started Orlando Reade’s ‘What in Me Is Dark’ and it’s already up there as the one of the most accessible books on Milton I’ve read. Books about difficult (formidable?) texts should all have this kind of humour, ease, insight. Easier said…

I fully expected to go into #ACompleteUnknown and not be able to hear beyond Willy Wonka doing an impersonation of Bob Dylan, but my my young Timmy smashed it out the park.

Let Me Love You Blossoms · Gary's Covers · Song · 2024

delighted, astonished, grateful to blossoms for covering middle school me’s fave song open.spotify.com/track/4n8SSz...

so deserving 👊

Ceiling chandelier

The stage of Oliver!

This is now a theatre account.

I thought I would hate the headphones, but they provided this odd juxtaposition of distance and intimacy which worked SO WELL for this play, where - heartbreakingly (in an almost mechanical way) - they inadvertently give one another up for a crown they think will be the making of them. Also: kilts.

Macbeth programme featuring Lady Macbeth (Cush Jumbo) crowning Macbeth (David Tennant).

A silver bowl filled with water sits on top of a white plinth on stage at the 2024 production of Macbeth at the Harold Pinter theatre.

Attempting to fill my algorithm with things I like: namely, incredible interpretations of Macbeth like this. Once I saw the bowl, I was sold.

I leant upon a coppice gate When Frost was spectre-grey, And Winter's dregs made desolate The weakening eye of day. The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres, And all mankind that haunted nigh Had sought their household fires. The land's sharp features seemed to be The Century's corpse outleant, His crypt the cloudy canopy, The wind his death-lament. The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, And every spirit upon earth Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among The bleak twigs overhead In a full-hearted evensong Of joy illimited; An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, In blast-beruffled plume, Had chosen thus to fling his soul Upon the growing gloom. So little cause for carolings Of such ecstatic sound Was written on terrestrial things Afar or nigh around, That I could think there trembled through His happy good-night air Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew And I was unaware.

I first read Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush at school, but I didn’t fully realise what a brilliant and moving poem it is until I returned to it later on. Could it be my favourite poem of all time?