There are, I suppose, a couple of choices:

• I could explain everything that’s actually happened over the last 12 months in great detail.  That’d be quite dull.
  
• I could fake it, and turn the last year into 10,000 words of confessional melodrama, complete with passion, pain, joy, dramatic volte-faces and satisfying character arcs.  First of all, though, none of it would be true.  And second, this isn’t a confessional blog (unless you count “I saw a peacock in the park and went to New Zealand” as confessional); I’m not out to write Bridget Jones’s Diary.
  
• I could pretend that I’d actually been blogging all this time and that my efforts were lost to the vagaries of the internet, in much the same way that hamsters used to be fond of maths homework. That would not only be a lie, but would also suggest that I attach such importance to vomiting my thoughts onto the internet that I tweet my breakfast.  I don’t.

So I settled on this: sorry for the gap, I allowed my attention to wander to other things, I’m back now, and if you’re reading this, then I thank you very much.

One of the things to which my attention wandered was, of course, taking pictures.  And over the next few posts that’s probably all I’ll be writing about.  So steel yourselves: first up are a few highlights from the wonderful, colourful, creative world of London theatre.

 

Starting with DoubleFalsehood, the play that was controversially admitted to the accepted canon of Shakespeare works in 2010 and carries just a hint of darkness. 

Falsehood’s (excellent) first professional production in over 200 years presented a bit of a challenge for the publicity photos.  We needed to get across the idea of a rape without (a) showing too much, (b) producing something too literal and just plain unattractive and (c) making it look too campy. 

Other images we shot that never made it to press (revealed here in a shock world exclusive) included a suicide attempt and more than a little blood on the dance floor.

A highly successful and entertaining run at the Union Theatre and the New Players Theatre followed, from which some production photos below.

Director Andrew Keates’ Conjugal Rites, at the Courtyard Theatre in Hoxton, starring Alexandra Boyd and Gary Heron, was a very different kind of play: a very funny battle of the sexes set in a couple’s bedroom, I had the privilege of taking the production photos.

And finally, at a top secret gothic location bursting with all things valuable far from central London (ooooh…!), amid health and safety requirements and disclaimers aplenty, I spent a highly entertaining evening shooting for Courtesans, soprano Lizzie Byrne’s three-man extravaganza with actor Paul Hegarty and pianist Stefano Curina that explores the lives of three historical ladies of ill-repute.  We left behind not a scratch and the venue’s owners – I can only assume – breathed a sigh of relief as the security gates dropped down behind us.