Our friend and client Tom Burke excelled last year as the lead in the West End adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s “Rosmersholm” . As a RADA student like Tom, some er, short time apart, there was a time I saw pretty much everything on at the theatre and that production was a highlight of my theatre going life.
Also last year, but in the cinema, he took the male lead role in “The Souvenir”, a harrowing piece of autobiography from director Joanna Hogg. It won the Grand Jury Prize and the Sundance Film Festival and was nominated for a host of other awards.
We were privileged to make the suit that “Anthony” wears for much of the film and were thrilled that critic Guy Lodge name checked it in his review for Variety Magazine. Here he is (below) across the table from Julie (Honor Swinton-Byrne, daughter of Tilda) as the besuited civil servant (not his infamous naked colleague), described by Lodge thus: a “pinstripe-clad Foreign Office dogsbody with a passion for art history, he exudes a precociously worldly, sophisticated air that turns out largely to be stale cigarette smoke and mirrors… Burke is entirely extraordinary as an internally collapsing man trying to hold everything together with expensively tailored privilege.”
There aren’t many people to whom Brian pays obeisance in this fashion, but he cast himself at Tom’s feet when he came for a fitting at the studio:
This weekend Mr B (Burke, not Brian) returns to the small screen as the endearing shuffling gum shoe private detective Cormoran Strike, adapted from the novels by J.K. Rowling.
Do please consider buying the t-shirt we created with Tom to benefit one of his preferred charities “Operation Smile” that performs surgery to correct cleft lips and palates. It shows Tom’s fine drawing of Charlie Chaplin’s boots. Chaplin as you may know had a miserably poor boyhood in Kennington before going on to become the most feted actor-director in the world. He also wrote the bitter sweet song, “Smile (Tho’ Your Heart is Breaking”. It is available of our e-shop on this website. £10 from every sale goes to Operation Smile.
Get yours here: https://earlofbedlam.bigcartel.com/product/charlie-chaplin-boots-to-make-you-smile-tee
Here is Tom studiously sketching in our studio:
