Following the success of our located production of The Persians, within the landscape of an MOD range in the Brecon Beacons, for the 2010 inaugural session of National Theatre Wales; Mike Pearson and I have been asked to develop a new large scale theatre event based on Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, in collaboration with National Theatre Wales and the Royal Shakespeare Company, to be performed within the World Shakespeare Festival as part of the Cultural Olympiad 2012.

In its origins, this new work, which we are calling Coriolan/us, draws on Shakespeare’s original text, Brecht’s unfinished adaptation Coriolan, and The Plebeians Rehearse the Uprising by Günter Grass.

I am opening this exploratory blog project as an ongoing attempt to see what might build here in parallel to my other processes – and initially to see what might collect here, over the period of this coming year, as we develop Coriolan/us.

As much as possible, I intend to limit myself to simple descriptions, recordings and drawings – as traces and fragments of the things that I remember or do. And to post these fragments as I consider them – their chronology reflecting a progression across the work, rather than its history, or daily life.

There will be many things that I choose to keep to myself – most things probably. I have never been very interested in process for its own sake. Not even when the process is mine.

My hope is simply that, as time and the work progress, my periodic posts here might accumulate – and that their accumulation might reveal something useful. They may, of course, remain merely a pile of fragments. In which case, I will be able to throw them away.