Ben Pester

speaker

327 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 4 Jul

Ben Pester’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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London Review Bookshop Podcast · Claire-Louise Bennett & Ben Pester: Magic & Mechanics · 4 Jul 2026 podcast

The core things that I learned, like as a student or whatever, that have always been important to me, that always fall back on, are all to do with theatre studies.

Like Antonin Artaud was like the main one that we studied at A-level.

And I kind of, that way of thinking, the kind of, and then everything in the kind of, around the early modernism and then the Dadaists and the Surrealists,

all of that.

And then when I got to university, we were studying Mayhold.

I had to study Mayhold for a whole year, like absolutely incredible kind of the concept of biomechanics, which is different from Mayhold than it is.

We mean biomechanics, something else, but he was talking about turning, turning the body into a kind of flexible, uh,

sort of machine that could do things, that could convey emotion of a language that did not need to be vocalized, didn't need to be spoken, there didn't need to be dialogue, and there didn't actually need necessarily to be what we would think of as structure, like a three-act structure or a kind of a payoff, like it didn't always have to be a joke.

And then I got into

You know, the Commedia dell'arte, I was really interested in that at university.

And all of that kind of coming back to some of the things from Arto, like the kind of thinking about status.

Like Arto, one of Arto's only stage plays was called There Is No More Firmament.

That's about the end of, it's about the end of the world, basically.

But it works through everything by category of status.

And that is the same as the masks in...

Comedia dell'arte, every single piece of comedy, every single piece of drama there works based on status.

Yeah, exactly, social status.

But also that can be translated in multiple ways as well.

And how social status is represented is different based on the different masks, the different players.

And so obviously I don't write about any of this, but that sort of is what's going on while I'm working.

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