Jean Paul Dionysus’s acting career began in “The Theatre”. (An unusual place to begin, n’est pas?).He first acted in a production called ‘It is a pity she’s a whore’ by John Ford. Jean Paul played the part of a charlatan doctor and after a month of rehearsals, he was thrown in the deep end when the company went to the Edinburgh festival to perform. The play was a great success and was reviewed favourably in the local press. After the play he would play his music in the Festival club.  At the time he was in the process of making the transition from his stage name Jean Paul Dionysus to Dr Space Toad, although his parents had given him the name Paul, his mother had always said that when he had been born the Elves had changed the baby, so in reality he was and is a changeling.                                                          His next acting appearance was as the narrator in Brect’s ‘Threepenny opera’ in which he sang ‘Mac the knife’. This performance took place in the MaderMarket Theatre and was also a success. Later that year, in the same theatre, he played the part of the minstrel (a part which came very easily to him!!) in Ben Johnson’s ‘Bartholomew Fair’. In this play, he also played the Mandolin and composed the music.

The theatre took a back seat for the next few years, until he wrote his own first complete play, ‘The Thwarted Tangentialist From The End Of Time’. The Director of the Nightingale Theatre in Brighton, heard some of Space Toad’s play and asked him to stage it. In May 1996, as part of the Brighton Festival, it played for the first time ever at the Nightingale Theatre. The audience  included people such as Playwrite Brian Behan, (brother of Brendan Behan and Dominic Behan) who said “That was very silly”. The reaction of the others, was a strange mixture of laughter and bemusement although some expressed feelings of existential life changing profundity. It was described as iconoclastic, surrealistic and one person later said, that it had a cataclysmic effect on his life and changed it completely.

The play was in the genre of ‘The Theatre of The Absurd’. It was a two man play with a female narrator with slight overtones of Samuel Beckett.

This a photograph taken in rehearsal for ‘The Thwarted Tangentialist’.

Once again, Space Toad took a break from theatre until he was in the middle of his degree in music and related arts when he wrote his second play, “Le Marriage de Roi Bizarre”. He showed the finished play to the Head of Literature who thought it was great and said “Apolinaire would have bean jealous” and pointed out the strong connection with other writers of the theatre of the absurd. This was strange, as up to this point, Space Toad had only been familiar with the work of one of these writers, Samuel Beckett. He decided to study the theatre of the absurd for his dissertation and discovered he had a great affinity with writers such as Eugene Ianesco, Alfred Jarry and Fernando Arabel amongst others. He staged a shortened version of the play in the University and there was a fantastic audience reaction with people falling about laughing. Unfortunately the video of this play mysteriously ‘disappeared’.  He then moved to Paris under the name of Paul Francis “Le Troubadour” and proceeded  to translated his plays  into French.

Soon after he had finished his degree, Space Toad was asked to play the music for a Garcia Lorca play: ‘Blood Wedding’ in the Brighton Festival 2000. This was by the Prodigal Theatre Company and they called their version ‘Ballad of the Shadow’. This play was staged in the Brighton Buddist Centre and everbody congratulated him on the musical pieces he chose and wrote for the play. He was also asked by the Prodigal Theatre Company to play the role of King Claudius in a version of William Shakespear’s Hamlet “The play within the play”.It took place in the grounds of Lewis Castle and was very well recieved.                                                                                                                                                                 Lorsqu’il vivait à Paris, il jouait un rôle de figurant dans une Tele Cine production

Réçemment Paul Francis “le Troubadour” a lu un lecture de ça piece “Le Tangentialiste coincé” dans  Le Théâtre de La Huchette Paris.

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