Thoughts on Theatre

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I started out trying to become a novelist.

I think this was partly because my love of theatre had got tangled up in my fear of being transgendered.

So my theatricality at first expressed itself in a passionate academic interest in the works of the 17th century Spanish dramatist Calderón.

When I began research for my PhD, I spent a couple of years in a tiny basement room in St. Andrews utterly immersed in Calderón's plays, and those of his contemporaried Tirso e Molina and Lope de Vega.

Theatre in 1600's Madrid was far more real to me then than contemporary British theatre.

And in a strange way, it still is.

Those were the writers that formed me and that I still admire above any others.