Jonathan Cripps

I was mute until the age of around two, I am told. I would make the odd noise, but certainly nothing in any discernible language. I also stubbornly refused to both smile and grow any hair. These combined factors made me appear something of an odd baby, as I'd stare down any young woman who'd coo and speak gibberish to me as if they ought to be sectioned. This, quite naturally, worried my parents, who thought that perhaps I wasn't all right upstairs.

Then, one day, I started talking. Not a first word, but a first sentence. I think it was "Shall we have a cup of tea and read Gardener's World?" - this being the sentence I'd heard most frequently from my grandad Jim, with whom I spent most of my time.

Obviously I'd been saving it up. 

This set something of a pattern for the rest of my life, and I recently decided that it would be a good idea to have my work all available in one place. So I built this website.

ABOUT ME

After deciding to speak, I went to Park Hill Junior School and Whitgift School, both of which are in the majestic cultural font of Croydon. At eighteen, I stubbornly refused to do something that might help me in the future and instead was accepted to the Drama Centre London.

From thence, I worked sporadically as an actor on stage and soon founded a theatre company, the Aporia Theatre. After a while, the move to directing became a full-time endeavour, and then a part-time endeavour, and eventually a no-time endeavour. 

I began learning the piano at the age of five, drums at the age of ten and have been playing and making music since. I was fortunate to be taught jazz basics from the great Anthony Strong in the UK and Joe Etzine in the USA, and have enjoyed a long-term collaboration with genius fiddler Freddie Smith. 

Throughout my life, music has been a reliable and patient background player who has, more consistently than anything else, put food on my table.

But my very first love was story-telling, and this I was doing from the day I learned to talk. When I was three, my grandmother would evince me to tell her a story while she patiently transcribed it and then read it back to me. I was obsessed by poetry when I was at junior school and wrote prolifically. Imagination and knowledge seemed then, and seem today, inexhaustible vistas of creative possibility. It's no wonder that people are told to find their 'inner child'; it's his visage I see the more I re-recognise myself.

My oldest friend (and collaborator) Alex and I, at the age of five or six, decided to compile an encyclopaedia. We've never finished this project, but at least we were ambitious. A few years ago, as I was going through childhood stuff to throw out at my parents' home in Croydon, I discovered poetry, prose and script in chronological order from the age of eleven throughout my teens until a year or so into my time at drama school.

I learned here something that ought to have been blindingly obvious: I'm a writer. Rarely do I choose to write anything, but will suddenly come-to in front my laptop having got to an impasse in a story. Indeed, I feel the way about writing that I was meant to feel about acting: that I can't really do anything else - at least, not authentically.

And so, in the sharing spirit, here's a taste of my work. None of it is chronological or organised in any particular way; it's more to give an impression or overview of what I do.

I hope that you enjoy it!