Talk:Shaun Lawton

The Shaun Lawton autobiography
Shaun Lawton (born Sydney Shaun Lawton; 1941) is an English playwright, poet, actor and singer/songwriter.

Early days
Shaun Lawton was born in the former iron-ore mining village of New Marske, North Yorkshire. In 1944, his mother took him and his sick baby sister down to friends in Brighton. On their way through London they were caught in V1 and V2 raids, and had to take shelter. After the war was over they returned home to the north. 1950 the family moved down to Marske-by-the-sea where in winter he and his father would gather seacoal from the beach - a coarse black coal-grit left behind by the ebb tide. His poem The Seacoaler, after the Old English poem The Seafarer, celebrates this peculiar North East ritual.

Despite becoming an early reader in a Brighton kindergarten his education regressed at Marske, failing the first part of the 11+ exam, A year at the newly opened Saltburn Secondary Modern School under the inspiration and guidance of teachers (Ray) Charlton and Saunby showed a marked improvement in his education and self-confidence getting him through the 13+ and to a place at Eston Technical School where he shone. At 16, he got a place at the newly opened Cleveland Technical College at Redcar, where he founded the college Astronomical Society. The college football team was briefly coached by Brian Clough and he was impressive enough to be recommended for a tryout for Middlesbrough Juniors as goalkeeper. His interests however lay in science but three failed attempts at O-Level English cost him a place at University. With two younger sisters the constraints of limited family finances meant he had to take up the offer of a job, shiftwork, in the petrochemical industry at Wilton ICI where he remained, married with a family for the next eleven years.

During the long night shifts he began to write poetry and short stories. He also made several attempts at running the notorious Lyke Wake Walk - 41 miles across the hostile terrain of the North York Moors, finally getting his time down to an acceptable 8 1/2 hours. The long miles running across treeless moor and its sometimes hallucinatory effect helped stimulate his fantasy.

New beginnings
In 1970, after a failed marriage, he moved, on impulse, to London and took a job as a laboratory technician at the Polytechnic of Central London setting himself a maximum of three years to get his life moving in new directions. In between single-handedly constructing a two meter high model of one-and-a-half turns of the DNA helix out of pieces of plastic for an Open-Day exhibition and installing a liquid-nitrogen-cooled Nuclear Magnetic Resonator he continued writing poetry and lyrics. During the first year he had scoured the music business until at Schroeder Music, publishers of Jimi Hendrix, he met folk-singer and songwriter Phil Chilton. Chilton put his music and voice to Lawton's lyrics and recorded them at Pathway Studios, taking Lawton along to his folk "gigs" and motivating him to read his poetry and lyrics to his audiences. Lawton's latent talent for comedy was quick to spot a demand for Northern humour, of which he took advantage by performing a mix of lyrics, humorous poetry and self-penned Yorkshire stories at "floor-spots" in folk clubs, bars and colleges, warming up audiences for star performers such as Noel Murphy of the Dubliners and Tony Capstick, with guidelines on the Art of drinking Old Peculiar and other such rustica. He soon was able to command the occasional fee as support for fellow poets Pete Brown (Cream and Jack Bruce lyric writer) and Liverpool Poet Brian Patton, while according to Pete Brown's drummer, Tony Fernandez, in 1974, Brown dubbed Lawton the mad yorkshire poet,  Lawton, having been denied theatre in his early life, was, at 30, inventing his own. He hosted an Alexis Korner concert at the University of London, which got him enrolled as a life member of the student's union bar.

In 1973 he was asked to come up with an English lyric for a French Chansôn. A month later the (French version) won the Eurovision Song Contest, giving Lawton the chance to drop out completely and become part of the underground music scene with his growing image as a rock-poet, well inside the 3-year time limit he'd set for himself. Identity changes – the vogue at the time - followed with Abbey Swine & Pig Rock (1973) and anti-glitter star Arfur Sparkle the Rock 'n' Roll Shepherd (1974). In 1973, together with jazz-rock guitarist Steve Waller (Dr. John), Dave Clague (Bonzo Dog), Tom Compton (Johnny Winter), Matt Irvin (Paul Young) and Mick Hawksworth (Andromeda) they turned a desolate pub, The Two Brewers at Clapham North, into one of the hottest rock pubs south of the river. It was a star attraction for band members coming off tours or from West-End Shows, to drop by for a "blow". It was a hang-out for locals such as Rory Gallagher and Kevin Coyne and an opportunity for Lawton to air all his new-found talents and create new ones - comedy, poetry and over-the-top rock 'n' roll. Jamming with Rory's boys along with Fred the Potman bowing the saw while Lawton's pre-punk-drunk mutilated Elvis' "Are You Lonesome Tonight" (1974) was a popular show-stopper. Blues/Rock singer and poet Kevin Coyne, having by then taken on the role of Mentor & Inspirator, introduced Lawton to Simon Draper at Virgin who gave him a songwriting contract.

Breaking Ground
By early 1974 Lawton was already moving on with an 11-minute performance poem backed with various pieces of rock and classical music, chosen with the help of his East Dulwich flatmate - band and session bass, Mick Hawksworth. It had a number of tryouts before taking on the title Desperado Corner for the Oval House Theatre, Kennigton Oval, South London, May 5, 1975, again set up for him by his friend Kevin Coyne. More sketches and improvisations were added with minimal costume changes and props such as a flick-knife, jelly babies and an original Rocky Horror Theatre Show plastic mask. Lawton had underestimated his popularity at the Two Brewers and the Oval House Theatre was better attended than anticipated. A theatre director from the Royal Court, present at the show, suggested a career in acting which eventually led Lawton to enroll at the East 15 Acting School - the next turning point in Lawton's undirected career. Aided by an ear for dialogue and abetted by (what he discovered to be) the accessible works of Arthur Miller, Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Toller, Georg Büchner and Franz Kafka, he turned his poem into a full length street drama for the stage, completing the first draft by 1976 and giving the whole the title: Desperado Corner. Former E15 director, Robert Walker of the Half Moon Theatre in London's East End was immediately interested in two school scenes in the first draft where the kids were so far beyond control the teachers refused to teach them. Walker was keen to stage the scenes on their own and even had a workshop with actors lined up. But Lawton, more concerned with getting the main part of the play finished, took the school scenes out in order to work on them later. But by then it was too late - the scenes had found another author - someone known to the Royal Court Theatre.

In 1977 Lawton was invited to join Peter Gill's "all star cast" of "The Cherry Orchard" at London's Riverside Studios. The significance being that Checkhov at the Riverside chanced to play a pivotal role in Lawton's challenge to upturn British theatre by linking him to play-reader Paul Kember who enthused about Desperado Corner from the start. It was Kember, with the help of Di Trevis, who would get it to Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre in 1980. In that same year Kember won the Evening Standard's New Playwright Award for his own play Not Quite Jerusalem – but Blake's Jerusalem was already witnessing the arrival of Thatcher & the Skins causing Lawton and his new family, in 1978, to seek refuge behind the Berlin Wall, on stage at Peter Stein's Schaubühne Theater acting in American avant-garde director Robert Wilson's Death, Destruction & Detroit, already his next unforeseen career about-turn and almost a Georg Heym vision. In his first Prussian winter Lawton made a Heym pilgrimage to Wannsee - "to test the ice!"

Relocation
Between 1974 and 1975 Lawton odd-jobbed as a security man at the Fender Soundhouse in Tottenham Court Road while driving delivery truck for an engineering workshop in Barnes. 1975 he married his Muse, Dutch-English artist, costume and set designer, Mary Theobald. In 1978 she was recipient of the student part of a "Shakespeare Prize" from Germany which offered six months theatre studies in West Germany. West Berlin was the choice. Summer 1978 they got to know German actor Otto Sander and his partner Monika in London with West Berlin's Schaubühne Theater. They offered their help should the Lawtons arrive in West Berlin. October 1978 Lawton was on stage at the Schaubühne in Robert Wilson's classic Death, Destruction & Detroit, Mary helping out backstage with costumes and set - three days after arrival - all with Sander's help - another unexpected turn in fortunes. Six months later they decided to stay. On the theatre's Open Day Lawton and a young guitarist from the cast performed a couple of Dylan numbers and folk songs. This led to a larger event at the popular Café Einstein. Lawton had brought his "New Wave Poetry" to German audiences. In 1979 he was hired by American independent film maker and Cultural Exchange Artist, Jon Jost, to make a film in a series called Projection 80 for the Free Berlin Broadcasting Station SFB. An experimental film based on the development of speech and performance called Stagefright. He was soon picking up more film roles in West Berlin, including the, now cult horror film, Possession (81) with Isabelle Adjani and Sam Neill as well as working with other visiting exchange artists from Europe and America.

Meanwhile, in London and Glasgow ground was being broken. Following the 1981 exceptional success of Desperado Corner at Glasgow, Mark Rylance, in an inspirational move, took the play back to his former school, RADA, who then sought Lawton's permission for their 1981 Final Year Student's to stage it. The students, as with the Glasgow Citizens' casts, finally had the material they needed to show what they could do with what they had already learned and they did it to phenomenal success: with Lawton's "New Wave Play" as their vehicle the students won the praise of the press as the "New Wave Actors emerging from RADA". The phones at Lawton's London literary agent, Tessa Sayle's, and Glasgow's Citizens' Theatre were ringing off the hook for several days. The theatres that applauded this unconventional piece of theatre written by an author who had no theatre convention except that of his own device, were the same theatres that over the five years previously had continuously and emphatically rejected it.

Back in Berlin after the success of Desperado Corner, Lawton made a video recording of the original 1974 Desperado Corner poem - adding his "acted" version of Coyne's House Upon the Hill and other pieces. He screened the video at the Berlinale Film Festival the following year, it was praised by Derek Malcolm of the Guardian who introduced Lawton to Mike Leigh who was showing his film Meantime with Gary Oldman's skinhead scene and its little "smoking" joke, impro'd from Desperado Corner.

The Last Wall
In 1983 after successfully playing the husband in a comic two-hander at America House his, newly founded, theatre group was offered the GRIPS (youth) Theater's rehearsal stage for further performances. Lawton became a member of the Charlottenburg Culture Society whose rooms (Bei Maria, in Kantstrasse 125) once served as a secret Synagogue for east European workers. In the 1980s its shell-pitted walls were a meeting place for East German (GDR) writers. The Grips are famous for their play Linie Eins (Line 1 - underground train) which has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Arabic.

At Maria's Lawton became acquainted with photo-realist painter Oskar Huth, known for his wartime forging of passports for Jews wanting to flee to Lisbon. He was a man who's every sentence was poetry. On the wall was his painting of Berlin's Wannsee train station – the main station from where Jews were transported by the masses from Berlin to Auschwitz. The painting depicted a completely deserted "Transport" station, at night in 1936 – during the Berlin Olympics.

Lawton would occasionally be hired by West Berlin's Television Training Centre to help coach invited professional media personnel from developing countries, in various studio techniques. During the 1980s he continued to get gigs with his own musicians or guesting with others: hosting a Jesse Ballard Christmas Party in the Quartiér Latin, supporting Kevin Coyne and Band in the filmed Last Wall Concert at the Tempodrom (Big Top), and an open-air concert in front of Hamburg's City Hall while Nina Simone played on a floating stage on the Inner Alster, part of a funded tour of Hamburgs cultural districts.

December 83 he brought his London-based musician friends over. Starting at the Logo Hamburg, Shaun Lawton & the Flying Pigs, with: Steve Waller, Guitar (Earthband) Micky Jones, Guitar (MAN) Mick Hawskworth, Bass (Cliff Bennett, Alvin Lee) and Rick Dyett on Drums. No rehearsals, just the sound check. Classical to Modern Rock + Desperado Poetry. As the applause died away someone jumped on stage, it was Redcar-born drummer Pete York (living in Hamburg) full of praise. They drove the East German Transit road to West Berlin, picking up Danny Deutschmark, Keys (Johnny & the Drivers) and hit the Quasimodo Jazz Keller. In a December sandwiched between Kevin Coyne and Herman Brood the Pigs were declared "Band of the Year" by the Jazz Keller's Manager Giorgio Carotti. November, six years on, the Pigs with Lawton minus Waller, minus Dyett plus Derek Ballard, Drums (Joy Rider) plus Rockabilly Keith Nelson, Banjo (Joel, Bowie, the Everlys, Starr, Newton-John....) were back at the Quasimodo with the Berlin Wall falling and a riot of TV-cameras - the drummer's mother in London had seen the band live from Berlin. The night after the wall opened (the previous week) Lawton gigged with his German friends and blind guitarist Daniel Ganz (son of the same name actor).

At the beginning of 89, Reiner Schweinfurt, theatre editor on the Zitty magazine, disappointed at Berlin's off-theater scene had checked out the London equivalent. On his return he told one of his reporters, Lutz Gumbel: "go and see what Shaun Lawton is doing." Shaun Lawton, on his own initiative, was "doing" Brian in Peter Nichols' A Day in the Death of Joe Egg. It got a rave review. But with the fall of the wall times had changed on a large scale. Foreign theatre struggled over the ensuing few years of reunification and rebuilding - Germany was obsessed with its new-found self, Berlin facing its new East/West challenges.

After The Wall
Berlin was broke. Foreign labourers, including Irish and Geordies were not getting paid, they broke into shops, stole baseball bats and went after their money. Architects were getting shot in their homes. At least one bank had its windows shot up from the pillion of a passing motorbike. Cheap contracts, cheap materials, cost-cutting in dangerous places - frost in the concrete.

Lawton took on translation work – a long slow struggle but it ensured that he also got the associated voice work, a lot of which was industrial for which, fortunately, he had the industrial experience. Two months after the wall fell he was called to help a BBC TV Business team visiting factories and small businesses in East Germany near Leipzig, interviewing Stalinist factory managers and New East-Wave Entrepreneurs. (One quick-off-the-mark East German Oligark was already boasting he owned almost the whole of East Germany.) On the way the BBC team drove past a run-down, broken-down Russian troop manoeuvre – soldiers drinking beers in the back of trucks, tanks having to be cranked off, a state of affairs that Western surveillance appears to have overlooked.

Four years later tanks and troops were gone altogether and, job-wise, things were picking up. The European Film Academy (EFA) in Berlin hired Lawton to join a group of actors on a Master School for young film directors. The course, entitled 6 Actors in Search of a Director, took place at the Amsterdam Summer University in the Keizersgracht, led by acclaimed Polish director, Krzysztof Kieslowski: Working with the Actor. For Lawton it was inspirational and a privilege. Four years previously, while reading through Desperado Corner with Di Trevis at Riverside Studios in Hammersmith, he had been asked by the San Quentin Drama Workshop, ex cons he knew from Berlin, to keep an eye on Sam Beckett during rehearsals for their up-coming European Tour. A letter threatening to kill Sam had arrived at Riverside that morning. Nothing happened but watching Beckett direct in London from a few feet away and later "feeling" Kieslowski direct, from a few feet away, in Amsterdam, Lawton was struck by the intense, coherent, energy that came from both. The almost intimate triangle between himself, his acting partner and Kieslowski showing the student how to work with the actors, was charged. Lawton did a couple of scenes with New Zealand actress Dulcie Smart both of which were influenced by this intensity. A year later when Kieslowski was giving a reading at the Polish Institute in Berlin he told Dulcie Smart that he was writing a screenplay for them. But he died the year after and the screenplay found its way into the hands of another director and was, unfortunately, lost to the two. Before the end of Kieslowski's Master Class Lawton had to leave for Thailand in response to an urgent request from former EFA Master Class Director Henning Carlsen that one of his main actors, Harvey Keitel, had to pull out. On his leaving Kieslowski embraced Lawton and thanked him for his contribution.

Lawton had worked with Danish director and former Golden Palme Winner Carlsen the previous year in Berlin. This time he was filming the novel Pan (film title: Two Green Feathers) written by Norwegian Nobel Prizewinner Knut Hamsun, with Lasse Kolsrud and Sofie Gråbol playing the leads. The main part of the story takes place on the Norwegian arctic circle but Lawton's role as Hunting Companion to the lead role would be shot in the jungle in the north of Thailand, two hours drive from Chiangmai, close to the Burmese border set in 1854. Extras and musicians were taken from local tribesmen. There was a Wat nearby where a well-known Monk had recently died. In the patch of jungle that had been cleared for the funeral guest's car park, the film crew built Hamsun's village. They built it so well that even before shooting began a Disney team, looking for a location for a new Dumbo film, bought the set, lock, stock and barrel.

Three weeks with mild monsoons and a docile zoo tiger called Cat - who was afraid of the jungle and pined for her cage. The Thai scenes were shot in English and Lawton got to dub his own voice into German. Then back in Berlin Lawton was acting for the Television Training Centre with former Dr. Who and East-Enders director Barry Letts, teaching a class of course participants how to shoot film for TV. No sooner had that come to an end when Lawton was called up to take over the role of Steve Sankey, leading milkman and lover to the leading lady in the Elmar Rice/Kurt Weill opera Street Scene with the Huston Opera Company at Berlin's Theater des Westens. After the Broadway premiere in 1947 Weill got the first Tony Award for Best Original Score for his work. In 1995 Lawton got written praise from the Opera's director Francesca Zambello for his "excellent performance". Zambello by then was in London directing a Covent Garden opera. In 1996 as voice work was picking up he joined the English speaker team of Deutsche Welle World TV – which was in unabashed competition with BBC World and CNN/ He was in the newsroom, reporting 9/11 as it happened. The involvement with DW lasted for 11 years – it turned out to be a double-edged security, distracting from creativity. Being shift-work, however, it was possible to trade shifts with colleagues and continue other theatre, film and TV activities at the same time, including: Giles Havergals' (Glasgow Citizens' director) stage adaptation of Graham Greenes' Travels with my Aunt - for four actors, two of which took the lion's share of the roles, each grey-suited as a retired Banker, without costume change, regardless of gender and with minimal props, set, and gestures. The German national weekly Die Welt wrote: "Shaun Lawton in his female roles was particularly seductive." Lawton verified the statement a year later with a convincing performance as a blind composer in Laurence Tooley's Clairvoyant. Director and Producer Bob Rafelson (Easy Rider, 5 Easy Pieces) during a visit to Berlin's dffb film school and on seeing Lawton's Showreel said to him, "You should be working all the time!" - but he didn't say at what! Computer games, online games, cartoon series, documentaries and museum guides ... followed continuously, including dubbing a number of series of the voice of the Zen Master in MTV's Fist of Zen. When Deutsche Welle World-TV manipulated him into retirement in 2006 (due to age) Lawton's career, unmanipulated, escalated even further.

Retirement
In 2007 Lawton had to host three broadcasts of GOAL due to the regular presenter suddenly taking ill. GOAL is the German Football Association's international satellite TV broadcast. Between 2007 and 2009 he toured as the magician Merlin in the Purcell and Dryden semi-opera, King Arthur, with the Berlin-based baroque orchestra the Lautten Compagney. The tour took in Switzerland, Poland, Austria and historical baroque theatres in Germany, including the Markgräflischen Opera House in Bayreuth, Potsdam's Sans Souci, Hannover Herrenhausen as well as the renovated Theatre Royal in Bury St. Edmunds – with an opening speech by Sir Jeremy Isaacs. After Bury St. Edmunds Lawton flew to Shanghai to join the film team filming the 1937 John Rabe story over a three-month period along with actors Steve Buscemi and Daniel Brühl – with flights home in between to keep up the voice work, and for Christmas. In January it snowed for the first time in 20 years in Shanghai causing chaos and the cancellation of all local and regional flights just as Chinese New Year was approaching – end of January Shanghai airport was like a refugee camp.

January 2010 he flew to Sri Lanka for three weeks to work on a 1914 German war-time story The Men of the Emden – as Governor of the Cocos Islands. A change of location at the end of January to the Tunisian desert was cancelled due to the Arab Spring breaking out.

He has sung at awards ceremonies for Berlin's Woman of the Year on World Women's Day. His partner, Sibylle Rothkegel, a specialist Psychotherapist for traumatised victims of war and torture was Berlin's Woman of the Year 2009 for her work with traumatised women and children. Fluent in Arabic, she works regularly in such places as the West Bank and Gaza as well as evaluating refugee camps in Beirut and DR Congo. In the late 1990s she covered all the Balkans and Sierra Leone. Lawton himself has supported her by singing on her behalf in government ministries, on retirement occasions, birthday partys for friends, friends of friends, judges and senators, as well as family such as Sibylle's half-Arab son Amir, architect and top goal-scorer for Berlin's Israeli football team the Maccabees, and also singing with Aida at Sibylle's daughter's home in Berlin's Dahlem Dorf - Aida who sang her soul out at the Arab Spring in Tahir Square in 2010 and later.

More recently he sang at a Heinrich Böll Stiftung Fund-raising event for a Tunisian fisherman who had rescued refugees from the sea near Lampedusa only to be arrested by the Italian police, thrown into prison and his fishing boat holed and sunk. Lawton sang a song he'd written in the early 1970s about Redcar fishermen losing their lives in rough seas and which he had performed on the BBC World Service's Sarah Ward Show. The text of the song was simultaneously translated to the Tunisian fisherman by a Palestinian guest. On another occasion he was asked to sing at the 60th birthday party of a former Secretary of State who was on his way to become a Judge at the ICC in The Hague. He followed this by singing the Mingulay Boat Song (unaccompanied) in Berlin's Church of the Holy Cross on the occasion of the retirement of Berlins Representative for Immigrants. He continues to write poetry, including the 60-page multi-style poem The Oracle and the Curse, The Seacoaler, A Toccata of Statisticles and songs such as "The Square of the Moon" ("Dance of the Martyrs") and many others.

And even in retirement he can, through a warm distinctive voice, maintain a full calendar of studio work, as well as occasionally helping film school students with their projects. He is currently writing his own biography, time permitting.

Broken Ground
The original 1974 Desperado Corner poem is on video, showing how it started out – a pre-punk performance poem that had not appeared on the printed page until it had to be written down for theatre. Lawton has performed the poem many times at various Rock-Gigs in Germany over the years to rapturous applause.

It seems the RSC, the Royal Court and the Bush Theatre, including most of the reviewers at Glasgow, were caught napping by something so unconventional they didn't have a sub-category for it. They couldn't have known that the author's career, from chemical worker to performing poet within a year, who with no original idea of theatre invented his own, was unconventional. Yet it was as accessible as Büchner, Miller,Kafka and Hamsun - accessible to the working classes. At 35 with a working-class background, undeveloped talents and having failed English Language three times, Lawton was the predestined author for a play like Desperado Corner.

At the Glasgow Citizens', as at RADA, the play brought the actors to life as the actors brought the play to life - which was always Lawton's way with his performance poetry, as can be seen in the video - and it garners applause. If West Side Story, says Lawton, "was the poetry of the street built on classical literary support with modern music or vice versa - Desperado Corner has no such vice versa and had no such literary base, (except for nods towards William Blake) it ″was″ the spoken poetry of the street – with a juke-box on stage playing Little Richard's Tutti Frutti, Elvis' Blue Suede Shoes and Chuck Berry's Roll Over Beethoven." One critic, while praising the actors performances described the play as a plot-less extravaganza, yet, at the last rehearsal before the Opening, the actors led by Andy Wilde as Big Larry, told Lawton that they wanted to thank him for giving them something they could finally get their teeth into. With RADA as with the Citizens' production, the actors impressively wrung every last drop out of the play. They were the artists who put the voices and actions back onto the text, adding their own shades of colour and light, placing centre-stage the author's question: "does every artwork need a plot; does one day in the lives of a cross-section of young people on the street need a plot; is it necessary to take lives when their lives have already been taken? - there is no poetry in bullets and knives as potent as that of Desperado Corner's poetry of the street." As Lawton himself wrote in an early theatre programme guide:- "The play is, in itself, the plot that seeks to trash the two-dimensionality of leftist ideology's working-class icons." In Glasgow Desperado Corner got the audiences it was written for.

It appears it did its job long after, apparently without the author's knowledge. Lawton left it with its discoverer, Paul Kember, and went on to live in another country. Now his beast can lie down in its own legends and myths.

In the words of Danish Film Director Henning Carlson (one) "pays the penalty for causing a stir relatively early in one's career." It transpires that Desperado Corner, and its author, paid that penalty with the imitators being allowed to collect the Laurels.

What the Birds on the Wire said
Kevin Coyne (1976), "If you write like that you can expect to have problems."

Robert Walker (Director, Half Moon Theatre, Stratford East, 1976) "I think the the play as a whole needs reworking but we'd love to do the school scenes and we have the actors from our workshop ready to do it."

Malcolm McKay (Playwright and Director 1977) "It feels like it still needs some organising, but if you get it right you will be breaking new ground."

Sharon Lipinski (1994) (Actress, after seeing Jim Cartwright's play Road at the Royal Court 1986 together with Gary Oldman): "Gary said Jim took everything from Shaun and Shaun is the better writer."

Terrence Malick (Oscar winning film-maker) 1999: "You stood the theatre world on its head," presumably culled from his partner in production, Gary Oldman.

Cierán Hinds' London agent, 2009: "The stories of Desperado Corner at the Glasgow Citizens are legion in the world of British theatre."

Graham Cowley, General Manager at the Royal Court Theatre from 1987 to 1995, said, after reading Desperado Corner in 2016 "The power of the play is undeniable. The raw, boiling anger is fearsome and also, frankly, a bit intimidating...snarly and violent... it's not often you come across something as full-blooded as your play."

Robert David MacDonald (Resident director at the Citizens and former student of Erwin Piscator at West Berlin's Freie Volksbühne) said, 1981: "Desperado Corner is possibly one of the five or six most important plays written in the last forty years."

Musical achievements

 * 1972 Signed to Hazy Music. Several ballads recorded at the newly opened Pathway Studios, sung by Phil Chilton.
 * 1973 Wonderful Dream (Lawton/Morgan) (Tu Te Reconnaitras) Eurovision Song Contest
 * 1973 Wonderful Dream on first K-Tel Album
 * 1973 Wonderful Dream reaches 13 in UK Top 20.
 * 1973 Anne-Marie David's album Wonderful Dream was released.
 * 1973 Abbey Swine & Los Domestos - (Pig Rock, Swine Fever, The Legend of Abbey Swine) together with Pete Barraclough, Mike King and Leon Anderson - later a drummer with The Cure.
 * 1974 and another personality change, this time to anti-glitter star Arfur Sparkle - The Rock & Roll Shepherd. The Arfur Sparkle Story (ASS) recorded at Scorpio Studios b/w Watch The Old Man Trying To Get Around (Pete Smith). Bud Handlesman of Punch drew a comic strip of Arfur Sparkle.
 * 1974 More songs recorded with Steve Waller who went on to tour as lead guitarist with Manfred Mann's Earthband.
 * 1974 Released from Hazy Music. Album and tour offers from Simon Draper at Virgin - Steve turns down due to other commitments. Song catalogue signed to Virgin.
 * 1975 One-Man Show Blue Suede Poetry at the Oval House Theatre, Kennington. Mercury Theatre, Notting Hill. Pete Kerr and Mike Finesilver of Pathway Studios offered to record the show.
 * 1975 - 1979 Acting break.
 * 1979 - 1992 Many gigs with The Flying Pigs: Berlin, Hamburg and wine festivals on the Mosel.
 * 1989 Sweet 16 is Rocking Still for the film Es War Einmal.
 * 1989 Berlin, November, Shaun Lawton & the Flying Pigs Rocking the Berlin Wall at the Quasimodo Jazz Keller

Voice

 * 2000 English voice on E Nomine's Lord's Prayer - (techno/Bible) with the choir of the Deutsche Opera. Also released on the album "Das Testament" as bonus track in English
 * Annually: Announcer for UNICEF's Cinema for Peace Gala at Berlin's Konzerthaus during the Berlinale Film Festival.
 * Lettre Ulysses Award: reads excerpts from the finalists.
 * Museum Audio Guides.

Filmography

 * 2009 John Rabe
 * 2007 I'd Like to Die a Thousand Times
 * 2006 Auf ewig und einen Tag
 * 2006 Elementary Particles
 * 2006 Final Contract: Death on Delivery
 * 2005 Æon Flux
 * 2004 Beyond the Sea
 * 2002 Clairvoyant
 * 2001 Der Tunnel
 * 1999 Doppeltes Spiel mit Anne
 * 1999 Mordkommission "Kalte Liebe"
 * 1995 Pan aka "Two Green Feathers"
 * 1994 Im Namen des Gesetzes "Verrate 7und verkauft"
 * 1990 Dr. M
 * 1987 Helsinki Napoli All Night Long
 * 1985 Wild Geese II
 * 1983 White Star
 * 1982 Blood Link
 * 1981 Nach Mitternacht
 * 1981 Possession
 * 1981 Charlotte
 * 1979 The Great Riviera Bank Robbery