PERSONAL


This is more a sort of ever-changing blog, where I shall be communicating a few of my current concerns, interests and enthusiasms, including a poem I particularly like at the moment. You can find this below under SOUL FOOD

EUROPE...A POEM
My poetry project for the European Capital of Culture RUHR2010 is now online at www.gedichte2010.de. It consists of two interlinked exhibitions, one of which "Castrop Rauxel... ein Gedicht" exhibits 2010 poems all over the town until the middle of August 2010. People from all over the world were invited to suggest German and English language poems for the exhibition. The second exhibiton entitled "Europe... a poem" presents 27 hand-written, signed poems by one leading poet from every EU country, along with English and German translations, biographical details, photos, sound recordings etc. The exhibition runs until Augst 14 2010.
For more see: www.gedichte2010.de.


Biography

ROY KIFT

ROY KIFT, born 30.01.1943 in Bideford, England; 1961-65 University of Wales, French and Romance Studies; 1965-68 acting course at the Drama Centre, London. 1968-71 Actor in Newcastle, Sheffield, London and Holland, during which time he started writing. Since 1972 he has been a full-time playwright (over twenty plays for stage, radio and television, and an opera libretto) with occasional excursions into directing (stage, radio and tv) and teaching in both England and Germany. He was resident writer for the Freehold Company (dir: Nancy Meckler) for whom he wrote ‘Mary Mary’ and ‘Genesis’, both of which were shown in London at the Royal Court Theatre. Other plays have been presented at the Warehouse Theatre (Studio of the Royal Shakespeare Theatre), Almost Free Theatre, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Tricycle Theatre, Hampstead Theatre and National Theatre. TV plays for Granada TV, Thames TV and BBC; radio plays for the BBC, and – in Germany – Radio Bremen and RIAS-Berlin. He moved to West Berlin in 1981 where he lived until 1987: he is currently living and working in Castrop-Rauxel.

His best known play is `Stronger than Superman' (German: ‘Stärker als Superman’) which was premiered in Berlin at the GRIPS Theater on March 7th 1981 and ran there for three seasons. Subsequently it has been produced in over 20 German theatres, as well as being televised in Germany, Austria, Israel, Pakistan and Belgium. It has been translated and performed on stage in over twenty countries from Iceland to New Zealand. His other plays include ‘Dreams of Beating Time” on classical musicians in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, `Camp Comedy' which deals with the fate of the Jewish German actor and director, Kurt Gerron and the cabaret performers in Theresienstadt (published in “The Theatre of the Holocaust. Vol. 2”; University of Wisconsin Press USA), a critical play on the current state of the Roman Catholic church ‘Cathedral of Heresies’ (available in English ms. or in German from S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt/Main: ‘Kathedrale des Irrglaubens’), and ‘Kissing in the Hall of Mirrors – or Love Letters with Shakespeare’, a triangular love story, completed in 2006.

Amongst the literary awards which he has won are the University of Wales Eisteddfodd Prize for Playwriting (1964), the Thames Television Stage Dramatists Award (1974), 1st prize in the New Plays Competition organised by the German Bundesarbeitsgemeinschaft `Hilfe für Behinderte' for `Stronger than Superman'. 1984 the `Förderpreis' of the Würtemmbergischen Staatstheaters, Stuttgart for the chamber opera ’Joy' (Music:. Susanne Erding, Libretto:Roy Kift. Jury members included Henze and Kagel), and a Berlin Writer's Stipendium in 1987.

Kift is also a translator of stage plays. Amongst the authors he has translated for the English theatre and the BBC are Molière, Goldoni, Gozzi,(‘King Stag’ at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter) Patrick Süskind (‘The Double Bass’ at the Royal National Theatre and Edinburgh Festival) and Heinar Kipphardt (‘Brother Eichmann’ at the Library Theatre, Manchester) and the plays of the Berlin GRIPS Theater.

He was an honorary adviser on the Drama Panel to the Arts Council of Great Britain from 1969 to 76. In 1983 he was a member of the British delegation of the ITI at the international conference in East Berlin. He has contributed to several theatre magazines,
including DRAMA, Plays and Players, Theatre Quarterly, New Theatre Quarterly, Theatre International, Theatre Research International and Gambit, and currently writes reviews on theatre in the Ruhrgebiet – in particular the Ruhrtriennale and the Recklinghausen Festspiele – for the theatre magazine, ‘Western European Stages’ in New York. In addition he has given guest lectures on the theatre at the Universities of Berlin, Bremen, Wales, Glasgow and Tel Aviv, at the Institut Francais in London and the British Council, Berlin.

Kift also appears as the narrator in the documentary film on Kurt Gerron for German television and ARTE entitled ‘Kurt Gerrons Karussell’ which also features Ben Becker, Ute Lempe and Kurt Raab. The film was selected for the Berlin Film Festival 1999. In the Ruhrgebiet Kift is perhaps best known for his "Tour the Ruhr" guide, published in 1999 which is available in English and Dutch. It was published in a third updated Euro edition in April 2003. Since its publication Kift has given guest lectures on the Ruhrgebiet in Rotterdam, Trieste and at the University of Central Lancashire in Great Britain In 2004, after a series of lectures on the Ruhrgebiet in Volkshochschulen, Kift turned his talks into a one-man cabaret entitled “Roy KiFft im Pott – ein Engländer stolpert durchs Ruhrgebiet”. After an initial showing in Castrop-Rauxel, he was invited to present the show at Stratmanns Theater in Essen. He has also performed one-man shows/readings on “New York” and “Shakespeare in Love”. In June 1997 he published his first (children’s) book in German ‘Franz, Anna und die Zechengeister’, an adventure story set in a deserted coal mine in Dortmund. (Klartext Verlag Essen).

As a translator in other fields he has worked for Ruhrgebiet Tourismus GmbH, RVR, Projekt Ruhr, the RUHRtriennale, Zeche Zollverein in Essen, Stiftungindustriekultur in Dortmund, the Villa Hügel, Festspielhaus Recklinghausen, the Westfälisches Industriemuseum (in Dortmund, Bochum, Hattingen and Henrichenburg), the Rheinisches Industriemuseum in Oberhausen, the Stiftung Industriedenkmalpflege und Geschichtskultur in Dortmund, the Ludwig Galerie in Oberhausen, Museum Schloss Moyland (Joseph Beuys museum) in Bedburg-Hau, the Fritz Bauer Institut Frankfurt/Main, the BBC, and Cambridge University Press. He translated the German texts for the FIFA official history “One Hundred Years of Football” (written by French, German and English academics) published in 2004. He is responsible for all the English texts on the information boards along the ‘Route der Industriekultur’ in the Ruhrgebiet, and is currently providing English texts for the RUHR2010 European Capital of Culture.

Roy Kift’s latest works are the first guide book in English to the Bergisch Land, entitled “The Wupper Valley - Wuppertal, Remscheid, Solingen and the Bergisch Land, published by Klartext Verlag in Essen. (June 2006): and a guide to "Düsseldorf, Aachen and the Lower Rhine" (Klartext Verlag. September 2008). He also contributed to the volume “Bericht aus der Zukunft des Ruhrgebiets. Das Jahr 2031” published by Peter Pomp Verlag and the Verein pro Ruhrgebiet (November 2006).

Roy Kift
Office: Schanzenstrasse 74,
40549 Düsseldorf
Tel.: 0211/56386938
www.roy-kift.de
roy.kift@t-online.de


THE ART OF SURVIVAL

Germans take art much more seriously than the English, and we are continually being told it is as important for our survival as food and drink. After many years living here, and then visiting other countries, I am beginning to agree with them.
That said, if we don’t start taking immediate action to stop C02 emissions which are not only playing havoc with the climate but destroying the planet, we are not going to be here much longer. By comparison all other political issues like world poverty, hunger, and terrorism are trivial. I therefore urge you to see Al Gore’s film ”An Inconvenient Truth” and get everyone you know to do so too.
Better still get yourself a low emission hybrid car (next on my shopping list) and change your electricity supplier from a conventional atomic power/fossil fuel supplier to one supplying power from renewable sources. Where I live, most people get their electricity supply from RWE, which is the largest CO2 polluter (127 million tons per year!) in Europe. I have now switched to Lichtblick in Hamburg, 89% of whose electricity comes from renewable sources. What's more, it's not costing me a cent more, and Lichtblick channels back part of my monthly payments into protecting the rain forests.
For more: www.lichtblick.de

BOOK TIPS

Time to give you another few tips of books I really value

1. A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. If you think Bryson is just a very funny travel writer, take a look at this. It should be compulsory reading for everybody in and out of school. I learnt more about natural science and the universe in two weeks from reading this book than in the whole of the rest of my life.
2. Nausea by Jean-Paul Sartre. A must, if you want to get the true feel of existentialism.
3. Unless of course you prefer The Outsider by his great rival Albert Camus. A man commits a seemingly senseless murder...in a seemingly indifferent universe.
4. 1599 by James Shapiro. Might this be the best biography of William Shakespeare? It brings the man and his age stunningly back to life.
5. Mao - the Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. This one really puts the man in a new perspective. If it's only half true (and I'm sure it's more than that) it's a chilling narrative of the horrors of absolute power.
6. Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes. He may have savagely exploited the sensitivities of his wife Sylvia Plath, but this biographical collection of poems dealing with his marriage is extraordinary in its quality.
7. Arthur and George by Julian Barnes. I'd read a lot about Barnes, but only got round to sampling his talents very recently. This is a hugely well-written novel about Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and an unknown citizen accused of a strange murder in the Midlands. If you don't know Barnes' work, you could do worse than start here.
8. Drop City by T.C. Boyle. A hilarious recount of a hippie commune in the 60s in the USA, and the selfishness behind much of the "love and peace" generation. But it's something more than satirical memorising as it all ends in a tragically horrifying manner.
9. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. This was the novel which taught me what prose writing was all about. Some of the sentences are so masterly, they should be chiselled in rock.
10. Shakespeare (of course, but only in the original). Every time I return to him I realise what linguistic and intellectual genius is about. Not to speak of stagecraft.

Current reading

I've just finished John Irving's impresive epic "Last Night in Twisted River". a fabulous story that also told me a lot about the art of writing a novel. But this is not simply a book for writers. It's more about lumberjacking and restaurants. Read it and enjoy a great writer at the top of his form. (Then try his masterpiece "A Prayer of Owen Meany".

GET INSPIRED

My life would have all much poorer, were it not for my encounters with – spontaneously – the following artists: Pablo Picasso, Miles Davis, Giacometti, Rudolf Nureyev, the Beatles, Bach, the Who, Glenn Gould, Horowitz, Flaubert, Rabelais, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Ted Hughes, Ian McEwan, Laurence Olivier, Paola Dionisotti, Juliet Stevenson, Leonardo da Vinci, Jacques Brel, Monet, Beethoven, Mozart, Bob Dylan, Dylan Thomas, Molière, Flaubert, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Malle, Francois Truffaut, Jean Dasté, Jacques Copeau, Ingmar Bergmann, Jack Nicolson, Marlon Brando, James Dean, Clint Eastwood, Diane Keaton, Buster Keaton, George Best, Stanley Mathews, Jack Kelsey, Pelé, Denis Compton, Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Rod Laver, Martina Navratilova, Yat Malmgren, Peter Brook, Peter Stein, George Tabori, Peter Zadek, Gustav Mahler, Felix Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, Frankie Howerd, Tony Hancock, Warren Mitchell, Cecilia Bartoli, Joan Armatrading, Diana Krall, Charles Aznavour, Thelonius Monk, Dave Brubeck, John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, Philip Roth, John Irving, Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Saul Bellow and Shakespeare, Shakespeare and yet again Shakespeare…

DON'T SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER
When I was a village kid in Alderminster near Stratford-upon-Avon, my parents, made me learn how to play the piano, and although I detested the daily practice I am now very grateful I was forced to persist, no matter how clumsily I still perform. Everyone has to learn how to play an instrument to really appreciate the work involved in even the most apparently simple pieces. I use my work breaks to keep in trim..Bach Two Part Inventions, and Thelonius Monk.

THE TOWER OF BABEL
The fact that I fell in love with the French language for no apparent reason – none of my family had ever been abroad – at the age of 11, has given me an undying curiosity to learn more languages. Latin at Bournemouth school: thank God for ”Ego” Knight, my A level tutor. ”Quadrupedante pedum, sonitu quatit ungula campum”; say it quickly and you can feel the horses galloping over the plain). Italian (at University), a smattering of Hungarian (thanks Agnès), pretty fluent German (although I still can’t write the stuff, all those ”der”s ”die”s and ”dass”es in all the wrong places, not to speak of the impossible cases) and last not least, my stubborn efforts to teach myself Chinese and thereby slow down my dying brain cells. It’s actually much easier than German providing you’re not afraid to sing like an opera diva.

FOOD AND DRINK
The Germans would call this "leibliche Wohl" which roughly means "fleshly wellness".

My year as a more than hopeless assistant teacher in the Lycée Claude Fauriel in St. Etienne, (Loire) was an eye-opener (more accurately a mouth-opener) in the delights of wine and good cooking. In my younger days I earned something of a reputation for my Indian curries, not to speak of my Boeuf Bourguignon. Now I’m into Thai cooking with a vengeance. There are few pleasures in the world to match a really good red wine. What a pity the French have become so unreliable. Now I prefer to get my "fleshly wellness" from a bottle from Australia, Spain, Italy or Chile.

SOUL FOOD
Life ain't all about fleshly wellness. The soul needs feeding too, even if we're not quite sure where it is. The following poem was suggested by Juliet Stevenson for the exhibition "Castrop-Rauxel...ein Gedicht". I love it too, especially because the last line reminds me of good old Malcolm Muggeridge, an acidic broadcaster and columnist in the 1980s and 90s who wrote an autobiography using it as a title.

Had I the Heaven's Embroidered Cloths...

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light;
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

—W. B. Yeats (* 1865, † 1939)

I shall be updating this section regularly, so come by for a new piece of soul food if you're feeling in need of a little nourishment. For the German equivalent of soul food, see "Other Activities"


FRIENDS
Apart from my family, the most valuable aspect of my life are my friends scattered all over the world. You know who you are, and if you don’t, I do. So I’m not going to embarrass you by listing more names than the one or two hidden somewhere above...

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