While I've got my health and fitness, I'm available... except for panto, of course. Too bloody much like hard work.

I do enjoy doing pantomime at Christmas. If I didn't do it, I'd feel as though I was missing something.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.

Relate comic things in pompous fashion. Irregularity, in other words the unexpected, the surprising, the astonishing, are essential to and characteristic of beauty. Two fundamental literary qualities: supernaturalism and irony. The blend of the grotesque and the tragic are attractive to the mind, as is discord to blas? ears. Imagine a canvas for a lyrical, magical farce, for a pantomime, and translate it into a serious novel. Drown the whole thing in an abnormal, dreamy atmosphere, in the atmosphere of great days ? the region of pure poetry.

Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity, the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man's own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of what we are, this "nausea," as a writer of today calls it, is also the absurd.

I like actors that are good with pantomime and that can transmit a lot by their presence and attitude more than through their dialogue.