About
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The Widow Stanton is a blog about shows, spectacle, circus, show business and the people involved. We’ll feature interviews with artists, as well as anything else that takes our fancy.
Liz Arratoon grew up watching light entertainment programmes on TV. Her love of the circus stems from a childhood outing to Bertram Mills Circus. She was the circus critic for The Stage newspaper in the UK from 1993-2014, championing the art form at a time when no other journalists were interested in it. She has ridden Messham’s Wall of Death, climbed to the high-wire platform at Blackpool Tower Circus and done hand-to-hand onstage at the Barbican in London.
She was the first journalist from a UK national newspaper to cover the Monte-Carlo International Circus Festival and did so for 18 years, also interviewing Princess Stephanie.
In 2005, she was the only circus critic on a circus industry panel organised by the Circus Arts Forum at the National Theatre in London.
In 2012, she was a judge at the first Edinburgh Circus Festival, and at the UK’s first circus competition for young artists, Circus Maximus, in London, a year later. In 2014, she was a jury member at the European Youth Circus Festival in Wiesbaden.
Liz has been a member of the marking panel for the degree students at the National Centre for Circus Arts (formerly the Circus Space) in the UK.
She contributed to a BBC4 TV documentary, When the Circus Comes to Town, to the Timeshift documentary By the Light of the Stars, about Circa director Yaron Lifschitz for ABC TV in Australia, and to Last Word on BBC Radio 4.
Liz has contributed articles to the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, Spectacle magazine in the US, and the Southbank Centre, London.
Adrian Arratoon has been a journalist for more than 20 years, writing about showbusiness and theatre for The Stage and working on titles too numerous to mention. In that time he’s interviewed film and TV stars, as well as jugglers, puppeteers, magicians, dancers and, recently, Mr Potato in the Peppa Pig theatre show. He’s just about old enough to have grown up in the heyday of light entertainment on TV, which prompted a lifelong love of showbusiness. Whenever Liz has been reviewing shows, he’s been there beside her – or, in certain cases, in the bar…
The Widow
According to an article in the International Herald Tribune, Mrs Louise T Stanton came from a prominent family in Jacksonville, Florida, and though disabled by childhood polio she held a special pilot’s licence. On 21 November, 1933, ten days after her husband was killed in car accident, she borrowed an aeroplane, put in four hours’ supply of fuel and, grief-stricken, flew east out over the Atlantic until it ran out. No trace of the wreckage was found.
That act, much like this site, was something done for love.
