Alexander Fiske-Harrison

Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Occupation(s)	writer, playwright, actor

Alexander Rupert Fiske-Harrison (born 22 July 1976) is an English writer, playwright and actor. He is best known for writing and starring in The Pendulum in London's West End. and his writing on bullfighting. He is the son of Clive Fiske Harrison.

Education

Fiske-Harrison was educated at Eton College, then St Peter's College, Oxford. He did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics. He trained in acting at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York.

Writing

Fiske-Harrison won the Oxford University Dramatic Society New Writing Prize in 1998 with his play The Death of an Atheist.

His play The Pendulum - A Tragedy of 1900 Vienna, was staged at the Jermyn Street Theatre, a West End theatre in London. See below for more details. He has written for The Times, Prospect, Financial Times, and The Times Literary Supplement.

He has signed a deal with the UK publishers Profile Books to turn his blog The Last Arena - In Search Of The Spanish Bullfight, which covers his time in Spain examining the bullfight (including training as a bullfighter himself), into a book entitled Into The Arena - The World of the Spanish Bullfight.

Acting

Fiske-Harrison’s acting debut was as Govianus in The Second Maiden's Tragedy at the Hackney Empire theatre in London. He has also acted on the German stage and in independent films.

The Pendulum

The Pendulum
Alexander Fiske-Harrison & Gareth Kennerley
Written by	Alexander Fiske-Harrison
Date premiered	3 June 2008
Place premiered	Jermyn Street Theatre, West End, London

The Pendulum (2008) is a play set in 1900 Vienna, in which a young Cavalry officer (Lieut. Friedrich von Leiben) falls in love with a beautiful artist (Elena Suttner) with such passion that he begins to destroy himself and those around him, despite the attempts of his best friend (Dr. Artur Neurath) and an ageing family servant (Otto Melk).

The play was originally staged by Mephisto Productions at the Jermyn Street Theatre, a West End theatre in London in June 2008.

Michael Billington in The Guardian gave it three stars and said, "Fiske-Harrison has clearly done his homework: he understands, for instance, the tensions between Franz Joseph’s imperial benevolence and the antisemitism of Vienna’s populist mayor, Karl Lueger. The author himself plays the disintegrating hero with the right poker-backed irascibility... while it is refreshing to find a new play that gets away from bedsit angst, one wonders why Fiske-Harrison has tackled this subject now. If there are contemporary parallels, they are not obvious, and one comes away with the sensation of having seen an accomplished, but oddly impersonal, historical play." Other press was equally mixed: The Stage described it as "a new and touching four-hander... Fiske-Harrison himself plays the officer with something of the style of a handsome British film idol of the fifties, more concerned with burnishing his career than spending time with his wife. " The Sunday Times described it as "something earnest, nicely acted - if a little contained - but as far from the wildness of Schnitzler or the darkness of Schiele as you can possibly imagine". Time Out said "The play feels like an eviscerated version of a much longer script." and commented: "While the play signally fails to work, and is profoundly reactionary in style, it is reasonably acute on matters of jealousy and grand passions."

External links

• IMDb page
• BBC Film - Network web site
• London Theatre Database page
• Alexander Fiske-Harrison's weblog: The Last Arena - The World of the Spanish Bullfight
• The Pendulum Official Website

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