Pictures at an Exhibition

Tayo Aluko is a playwright, a stage and TV actor, and a singer born in Nigeria, and living in Liverpool. His one-man play about Paul Robeson, titled CALL MR ROBESON, has taken him as far afield as the North West Territories of Canada and Australia and New Zealand, and to New York’s Carnegie Hall. A second play, JUST AN ORDINARY LAWYER, deals with Black liberation struggles worldwide, and has also been performed on three continents. He has initiated an international project titled MAPPING “GREATNESS,” in which people of the Global Majority worldwide film themselves performing his poem GREATNESS IN A TIME OF COVID in many languages, as a response to Imperialism and the global pandemic. His audio play PAUL ROBESON’S LOVE SONG is available online. He continues to write drama which demonstrates how Black History is everybody’s history, every day of every year, and is a history of resistance, resilience and triumph.

Mark Bunyan was an out gay cabaret performer to start with, then wrote a youth musical JUST GOOD FRIENDS which played to packed houses and was named Best Musical of 1982 by City Limits magazine. This led to various other musicals with various degrees of success. (The most recent, BEING COLONEL BARKER (www.beingcolonelbarker.com) and DEFINING DR MINOR (www.definingdrminor.com) were workshopped at the Royal Academy of Music and have their own websites. Websites will be soon available for www.emyntrudeandesmeralda.com, www.unburiedtreasures.com and www.trueromances.com.

His stage play, DINNER, won the international playwriting competition —and had a successful run—at the Warehouse Theatre, Croydon. In 1995, he was canonised by the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, as St Mark of the Musical Tendency, for his contribution to gay liberation which included, in 1983, co-founding, with the late Brian Kennedy, the Pink Singers, now the oldest LGBT+ Choir in Europe.

A short documentary about him, MARK BUNYAN, VERY NEARLY ALMOST FAMOUS, was a selection at the San Francisco International Gay Film Festival in 2013 and is available to watch online for 99p (get some friends round and charge them 20p each) at https://vimeo.com/ondemand/mark.

Mark served as a local magistrate from 1995 to 2019, won two national gold medals for trampolining in the over-60s category for the British Gymnastics association and has recently started flying trapeze.

He lives with Andrew, his partner of 47 years and counting. As you can tell he’s probably a terrible b… Read More

Flloyd Kennedy (aka Fairy Bessie), Australian-born actress, performance poet, singer-songwriter, director and voice/speech/accent coach, took part in the British folk revival in the late 60s, performed street theatre, cabaret and fringe theatre in Scotland throughout the 1980s and 90s, returned to Australia where she undertook research into the performing voice (specifically Shakespeare) for her doctorate. She has performed, directed, and taught voice and acting skills at colleges and universities in the UK, US and Australia. Now resident in Liverpool, UK, Flloyd tours her one-person versa plays with music around the world, performs her songs and poems at open mics in and around Liverpool. She also coaches student and professional actors, private individuals and community and corporate groups through her private studio Being in Voice. She is artistic director of Thunder’s Mouth Theatre (theatre of poetry, passion and philosophy), a Certified Teacher of Knight-Thompson Speechwork and is an Associate Artist with ISAAC (International School for Acting And Clown), She has now published two collections of poetry, songs and essays, Sunsets & Kites and Home is Where I Hang My Hat. Her songs are available on Bandcamp, as well as all major online streaming services.