Milton's Tweets.

For over 400 years the Gresham Lectures have been part of the cultural life of the city of London, paid for by an endowment set up in 1597 by Sir Thomas Gresham. Every year over a 100 fascinating free talks on every subject imaginable are delivered by an impressive range of academics. It's a very civilised institution.

Tonight at the Museum of London Alice Beer gave a fascinating insight into the dissidence of two titans of the seventeenth century: Walter Raleigh and John Milton, attended by a cheerful and motley crew of Londoners, mostly on their way home from work.

Beer suggested that whilst Raleigh used his incarceration in the tower (he was there for most of the last fifteen years of his life) to carefully put together his history of the world, subtly using ancient stories from Babylon and Mesopotamia to draw critical parallels with the Jacobean regime; Milton found that the rapidly developing print culture of the mid seventeenth century provided him with the wonderful opportunity to fire off pamphlets with all the regularity of the tweet. A passionate advocate for the Commonwealth. Beer, a round head herself, compared Milton's role, after the overthrow of the monarchy, to that of the social net workers who helped galvanise the clean up operation after this summer's riots.

By the end of his life Milton was a somewhat discredited figure - although pardoned for his earlier tracts he was never reconciled to the restored Stuart family. He died blind, but still writing, dreaming and shaping of a new kind of religious toleration that would sow the seeds for both the glorious revolution of 1688 and in the longer term set in principal some of the philosophical tenants adopted by the nascent Whig party. A fore run of our own form of liberalism.

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Dennis Kelly & Saved.

A very full day. Dennis Kelly came in this afternoon to talk to the Level 1 students about his work. It was a brilliant session full of wisdom, insight and candour. Over the last decade Dennis has, perhaps more than any other writer, been on the money. Osama the Hero - a play in which a vigilante group take revenge on a young man they believe has terrorist sympathies was produced at Hampstead just weeks before the 7/7 bombings in London and more recent work such as Love and Money and Orphans seemed to anticipate our loss of trust both in institutions and accepted moral authority. In many ways Dennis, although he'd probably strenuously deny it, is one of the writers fulfilling theatre's ancient and role: warning of things to come.

We ran class like a platform session at the National. I asked a couple of general things and then turned to the students who brilliantly and hungrily filled the next hour and a half with thoughtful and fascinating questions.

Dennis in turn responded with patience and great humour teasing out each comment and thinking fresh about each point raised.

He suggested that one of the reasons his plays worked was because he was an average guy, who thought average thoughts. He figures if something interests or concerns him, then it's likely to concern a fair few others.

'I'm not a moral person,' he said 'I don't really think I can teach anybody anything. I write good people, who I understand and then I put them into terrible situations and see how they react. I think the definition of a good writer is one who can write characters into impossible situations and then write them out the other side.'

After the lecture I hurried over to the Lyric, Hammersmith to see Sean Holmes' production of Edward Bond's groundbreaking sixties classic Saved. It's the first London revival of the play for 25 years. Drama St Mary's old girl Monsay plays the part of Liz, a small role, with one decent scene, but, having had some time of to have a baby, it's great to see her back on stage. The gal done good.

Steph O'D was also around and it was wonderful to catch up. She's stayed on at the theatre after assisting on Blasted last year and is currently in rehearsals with Filter for the production of A Midsummer Night's Dream which comes in in February.

Saved itself is a cracking play and the revival in post-riot London is a timely reminder of the social problems that creating a deficit culture provokes. There have been huge material gains for all of us since the 1960s, but the intellectual emptiness and moral vacuum at the heart of the story rings as true now as it did then. Consumerism has not enriched us and the outcome of allowing a culturally impoverished underclass to evolve, as both Bond and Kelly are quick to remind us, is invariably violent.
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A Dish of Tea with Doctor Johnson.

Out of Joint brought their successful show A Dish of Tea with Dr Johnson to Drama St Mary's tonight. The first play in our Autumn season with our old friend Ian Redford playing the title role.

The show itself is a fairly straight forward adaptation. Johnson is brought to full life through both his own writings and the observations made by his trusted younger companion James Boswell, played by Luke Griffin. Occasionally scenes are punctuated by Johnson's own dictionary definition of ideas and things, but in the main this is a biographical homage to one of the most bullish minds of the 1700s.

As well as playing Boswell Griffin trundles through a host of other supporting roles each one throwing into relief a different shade of Johnson's own personality. Flora MacDonald delights him, George III makes him servile, Goldsmith and Garrick bore him, Joshua Reynolds draws his scorn and Hester Thrale breaks his heart. Whilst these quick shifts do little to allow us to see the inner workings of these eighteenth century celebrities the device does make for good storytelling. I sensed again some of the students could have done with a guidebook to help them understand the historical importance of each of Johnson's encounters.

Ian himself was fairly magnificent finding real moments of charm and vulnerability to punctuate the bluster. I found myself becoming increasingly aware of Johnson's brilliant childishness and petulant refusal to deviate from his own carefully crafted view of the world. Each syllable of his argument drenched in the Lichfield burr, adding a tonal sense of melancholy to a man at the peak of his intellectual power but unsure of his value to posterity. It was a truly touching performance.
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Robot Minds.

The second in the series of lectures organised by the Philosophy department this evening this time turning attention on ethical issues surrounding the creation of artificial intelligence. It was given by Murray Shanahan who is a Professor for Cognitive Robotics at Imperial College.

Murray's contention is that within the next few decades the technology will have advanced enough for us to accurately create a computer programme that can accurately reproduce the 4 million or so neurons that go up to make a mouse's brain. In effect, we could one by one replace those neurons in the brain with artificial electrical charges, the culminative effect of which would be to create a new brain. If we were to do this would the mouse still be a 'real' mouse?

At what point, as we develop these 'new' brains do we say it's immoral to 'test' or 'destroy' them. If we're capable of introducing the concept, or more realistically the sensation, of suffering or pain into an artificial intelligence then will we still have the right to control or dismantle it?

It seemed appropriate to having this Frankenstein-esque debate in the Waldegrave Drawing room, with Walpole's house, a major aesthetic influence for the early Gothic writers, visible through the window. Darkness fell as we began to contemplate a world where scientists had computer designed an intelligence with enough plasticity in it to be able to grow and learn beyond our control. The romantic imaginations of the eighteenth century are beginning to find a tangible shape.

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Indian Summer.

The last few days in South West London have been glorious. I always think St Mary's is at its best this time of year with the pale Autumn light, lengthening shadows and dry crisp piles of leaves building up in the piazza. Walpole's house, now fully restored to its bright white colouring, absorbs the pink sunsets beautifully. Cycling up to the campus - all feels well in the world. This is a marvellous place to study.

Beyond our little paradise Richmond and Kingston were both full to the brim this weekend with Londoners out on a final summer jaunt before the colder winds of Winter sweep in. The towpath was crowded with children, dogs and couples hand in hand, the parks covered in picnickers.

Late on Sunday, with all the work for the week ahead planned, Eleanor and I went on a long bike ride around Bushey Park, which lies just south of Teddington, about a mile from campus. We took a circular route coming in at the north entrance and heading down Christopher Wren's grand Chestnut Avenue before turning eastwards on the more rural Cobbler's Walk toward Hampton Wick Gate.

Cobbler's Walk is named after a local shoemaker Timothy Bennet, who in the mid 1700s managed, through the courts, to establish a public right of way through the Royal Park, much to the consternation of the local ranger Lord Halifax. When asked why he'd gone to the trouble and risk Bennet replied that he was 'unwilling to leave the world worse than he found it.' A memorial dedicated to him and all those who follow his creed lies by the gate.

We swept south past the Diana fountain and back up through the woodland gardens to our starting place. It's rutting season in the park and the stags, like prehistoric monsters, could be heard calling, braying and roaring from every corner of the park.

There have been stories of a particularly aggressive sixteen pronged 'beast' this year whose been terrorising the many photographers who come to take photographs - although the truth is probably that with the hot weather more people than usual have come to watch the rituals and a few have got too close. Keeping our distance, fully aware how much, to a shortsighted stag, a pair of handlebars might look like the antlers of a rival, we carefully made our way out of the park and headed for home.

The Dystopia of Richard III

An evening screening of Richard Eyre's film version of Richard III as part of the Early Modern Drama module. It's brilliant proving, if proof be needed, that Shakespeare's understanding of the human condition transcends time and space and helps us unveil the universal truths that allow us to unite under the broad term of humanity.

The War of the Roses were only three generations away from Shakespeare. Only eighty years separate the real king's death from Shakespeare's own birth. If not a living memory then there would certainly have been stories, songs and myths from the wreckage of that time in the same way that our generation still have a cultural sense of the trenches, the Somme and Passchendaele.

Eyre sets his production in the interwar years and imagines what would have happened in that long weekend had Britain itself been conned into National Socialism. Ian MacKellan superbly judges Richard as a charming Mosesly-esque figure, eyes on the main chance, driven by a desire for adulation and power. Jim Carter plays Prime Minister Hastings as a bluff squire in the Stanley Baldwin mould. Maggie Smith plays Richard's mother, the Duchess of York as Mary of Teck and Annette Benning's American Queen on the make, Elizabeth offers all too clear parallels to Mrs Simpson. The growing importance of the RAF is also given credence through Edward Hardwicke's Stanley, who heads up this service and effectively brings Richard's reign to an end by switching sides before the Battle of Bosworth and bombing the King's camp into the ground. It's a counter factual history that makes complete sense.

The film enjoys a certain amount of witty and dystopic cinematic references beginning with a cruelly shattered homage to The Dambusters. The Lady Anne scene is straight out of Brief Encounter and Dominic West's wholesome Richmond gives a great audition to be the first James Bond.

It's a masterclass in concept direction. The idea that old stories can be used to help us understand new truths. Linking the past with our modern sense of ourselves.

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The Museum of London.

A day at the Museum of London looking in particular at some of the restoration artifacts. It's a brilliant museum and a fantastic resource. I just wish it were larger.

I'm beginning to turn my mind to writing something on the reformation of a theatrical scene in London and the friendly, for the most part, rivalry between Tom Killigrew and William Devenant, who were awarded the two exclusive royal patents to build new playhouses and start up companies. Charles II's own love of theatre not only endorsed the new age, but made it absolutely essential that anybody who is anybody be seen there. It's a classic tortoise and hare story. Killigrew, who'd loyally spent the 1650s in exile with the King set to work at once with a prolific output of work, hiring all of the best known actors from the days before the commonwealth and resurrecting the rhetorical style of the Jacobean and first Caroline period.

Devenant took his time, explored and pioneered European staging effects and recognised the importance of the scenic to the bright new age of show and light. When his Opera opened a year behind Killigrew it caused a sensation with the King himself switching patronage.

All of this of course is beautifully and gossipy recorded in Samuel Pepys diaries and after I'd finished at the museum I took the short walk east to Seething Lane where he lived for the large part of his adult life, and the parish church of St Olave, where he worshipped and prayed forgiveness for his many indiscretions. High above the alter stands a bust of his wife Elizabeth, mouth slightly open, eyes unblinking. She died young and Pepys distraught commissioned the sculpture to look down on him once a week, keeping him in check, reminding him of duty. It didn't work very well. I suspect Samuel enjoyed feeling guilty a little too much.

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