Every writer once in a while should stop wrestling with words and spend an hour watching Pangottic. I came to that conclusion after watching
Full Twist at The Brewery, Bristol's newest theatre venue, where two extraordinarily talented youngsters told a love story full of pathos and hilarity, crammed with insight as well as dazzling circus skills, breathtaking timing and irresistible audience rapport. Two love stories, in fact, as in a quirky subplot the cleaning staff find romance over rubber gloves. And the young lovers manage to juggle the hopes and insecurities of relationship along with the high-flying wine bottles, flowers, and ultimately babies. Without a single word. Show-don't-tell doesn't get any less, or more more-ish.
In all the shameful history slave ships, the story of Liverpool ship Zong must be most dreadful. Half their cargo of stolen lives was jettisoned for insurance. One survived, to carry the tale which became the stimulus and background story of
Crossings by Julie McNamara, who also takes one of the 4 roles. The anger is plangent, and this piece might have become a history lesson in other hands, but Julie's passion is more wide-reaching: the central story is of 15-year old Shelley, pregnant and on the run - a beautiful wild-child powerfully portrayed by Nadine Wild Palmer - but the theme is man's inhumanity to man, and more especially to woman. Julie's aim is to confront disablement in all its forms; the BSL interpreter is not sidelined but takes a central role and the piece was originally written for a blind actor. Ironically, and very sadly, she wasn't able to appear at the Tobacco Factory and it's to the credit of both the script and her replacement Naomi Cortes that the use of script-in-hand enhanced rather than detracting from this theme of challenging social attitudes and expectations.
Mustn't end the week without sending congratulations to Josh Tyas, one of the talented young writers on the Villiers Park writing group I co-tutored with Rosie Jackson last year, for winning the Farrago Fireworks Poetry Slam! Go forth and sparkle, Josh.
And finally: I haven't read Giles Brandreth's just-published diaries, enticingly titled
Something Sensational to read on the train, but reviews are discouraging. "He lacks the qualities looked for in a diarist" declared the Spectator: "he is minimally bitchy, shows a discretion that the reader applauds but does not rejoice in, and doesn't shag about." Blogger beware....
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Labels: Crossings, Pangottic
Don Paterson apologised throughout his reading at Toppings in Bath: he's dying with a cold, he'll be coughing a lot, his poems are all about death and divorce - is there nothing on television tonight? His new collection
Rain is certainly dark but not depressing; even the renku for
My Last 35 Deaths has moments of dry humour:
Here's your book back, world. Good story.
I underlined a few things. Sorry.A brilliant reading - and then questions, for which despite his cold, his cough, and his rainfilled silent skies, the poet finds fascinating answers. Self-consciousness, he says, is death to poetry: simple language enables the poem, but it will always be 'a bit twisted, naughty, beyond language.' Hence the joy of rhyme, which 'makes it weirder. Because English is a rhyme-poor language, so you have to forget what you wanted to say and that's a good thing.'
UP has been acclaimed the funniest Pixar film ever. There's more than a curmugeonly nod to
The Wizard of Oz in this fabulous fable of a septuagenarian dream-chaser flying off in a house weighed down with the pain of the past and equipped with a superflous random tracker cub, and finding in the end that home is where the heart is.. ahh.
And so Halloween arrives, filling the mild evening streets with its entourage of mummies, vampires, and ghouls. La Strada staff leapt zestfully into the spirit of the day - but would you buy a raspberry ripple from this man?
And anyone who heard my monologue for
Stage Write at the Merlin last month will realise how spooky it was for me to glimpse this hooded scream behind me on the hill...
Awen, I discovered this week, is a celtic word for poetic inspiration, and
The Garden of Awen opening night featured a fascinating array of awenydds. Bath's Chapel Arts Centre was atmospherically transformed by rural backdrops, flower poems, candles and laser lights as
Kevan Manwaring compered this 'showcase of Arcadian delights offering something different from the post-modern cul-de-sac.' Nikki Bennett launched her poetry collection
Love Shines Beyond Grief, joined by poets from Stroud, a vampiric story teller, and several excellent musicians including 'guitar-shaman'
James Hollingsworth. The theme tonight, in keeping with Samhein, was endings and new beginnings; the aim each month will be high quality diversity of spoken word and music. Great to see such an atmospheric venue join the local network of alternative entertainment.
Labels: Don Paterson, Garden of Awen, Halloween, UP
Autumn equinox. These are important days, astrologically, my friend Helen, who is a hearth-witch, told me when we met for our writing date: Halloween is the Celtic New Year: Samhein, Feast of the Dead, the time when Cailleach the Crone rules the earth. A full moon, too - owl moon, also called Hunter's moon or blood moon. Helen and I drank Emerald Sun tea and wrote from random fridge-magnate words and this is what happened for me:
Full moon, owl moon, Samhein moon:
Three reasons to celebrate the crone within –
No, to release the crone, to let her get on with her own
celebrations. What will she do?
She will dance, for sure. Will she dance wildly,
like the Bacchae? Will she drink deep, and laugh
too loud? Probably. Will she breathe deep and cry
for long gone loves, sigh silently those names
she once called out aloud? Why not.
This is her time of power and devastation.
Her wail is a wind to lift desert sand,
she shuffles ghosts like languid cards,
switches off the stars on a whim. She strides
regretless through forests of flux and lust,
paddles muddy water, finds surreal symmetry.
And is it easy? Yes, for a crone.
Look and learn, falterer, look and learn.No-one knew what to expect from
Poetry and Folk Retro Night at the Garden Cafe, but this random mix of guitarists and wordsmiths turned out to be a cracking evening.
My Irish/Californian friend Mo Robinson is over visiting our shared family, and as he set me up with a few gigs in San Francisco while I was staying with him in April, I thought it would be fun if the Poetry Cafe reciprocated with a 'happening'.
Mo gave us 3 spots, mingling his own powerful narrative ballads with political satire from
Tom Russell, and 15 open-mic performers ensured a stonking eclectic medley of music and words. Several contributors seized the retro theme:
Roger Wiltshire's witty rant inspired responses from both Lucy and Neil Howlett. Andy (
Leonardo's Bicycle) Morten dropped by; Dianne Penny performed a moving personal tribute to Sharon Olds, and it was great to see how well the high-energy of music mixed with reflective poetry. Definitely a formula to repeat.
Labels: Frome Poetry Cafe, Samhein
Does Metaphor Make You Better? was the somewhat ponderous tag that peeled away to reveal an inspirational talk by Victoria Field and Rose Flint at Frome Library this week.
Writing therapy, unlike art therapy, has no long-standing psychoanalytic pedigree, but research increasingly shows the healing power of creative writing for both acute and chronic disease and depression.
"I don’t work with the reasons" Rose says, "we’re not defined by our illnesses, our wellness is our best reality. I work from the place of wellness.” Victoria talked of our shared instinct to self-medicate through poems: "We're not concerned with literary merit but the sheer pleasure of putting words together." As well as being foremost practitioners in this work, Rose and Victoria are both amazing poets and the event ended with readings from their own 'therapeutic' poems, some dark but all glowing with compassion for the human experience.
My musical taste has ever been what can most charitably labelled 'eclectic' (Deep Purple to Dirty Vegas via Tom Waits & Arctic Monkeys) but I found a whole new genre to enjoy after a splendidly theatrical session at a Cotswold's jazz pub with Nick Gill's
Oxford Classic Jazz Band swinging through songs of the last century.
Big sound for a quartet (percussion sax and tuba as well as piano & vocals) and amazing range of mood: glitz and glamour, urban blues, and sweet melodic moments on that stardusted lazy river of the days gone by... Fabulous.
I'll end a random week with fireworks over Frome again, this time inspired by a request to the
One Show from Mandie Stone. The answer was Yes. "If it's good enough for Jenson Button, it's good enough for us, end of story." pronounced Christine Bleakley from the show's helicopter cockpit. Cue Pee Wee Ellis leading the parade through town - cue youth band, operatic society, firefighters and twirling majorettes - cue town cryer, and the ancient town of Frome is officially twinned with BBC One Show. And thanks Mandie, for including as one of your 20 reasons for the twinning ceremony:
The polished One Show performance is up on a pedestal; Frome’s own poet Crysse Morrison performed poetry on the plinth at Trafalgar Square. Mandie sponsored my outfit from her shop
Love Arts, an Aladdin's cave of retro delights, so it was great to see her in the studio giggling and threatening to wet herself as the story unfurled.
Labels: BBC One Show, Love Arts, Nick Gill, Rose Flint, Victoria Field
And after the flamboyant & entertaining metatheatricalism of
6 Characters, another play challenging audience expectations: Tim Crouch's
Author at the Royal Court. Only four characters here, though, unless you count the audience: we all became, reluctantly or not, participants in this tale of a tale recounted from among our midst. "Society is defined by its edges, not its centre" says Tim, playing a playwright called Tim Crouch who has written and produced a play that required the cast to research gross and brutal acts. The two 'cast' members confirm this, and their testimony shows the damaging consequences. For the author, degradation was even more extreme; in his impassive, endearing, voice Tim graphically describes participating in shocking obscenity. The actors were chillingly good, and the questions at the heart of the piece are powerful. But I wouldn't sit through it again.
Back home, the autumnal mood is celebratory: Apple Day ends with fireworks for Jenson Button's Formula1 win in Brazil. And four Frome writers collect certificates and prizes from the Mere Literary Festival Poetry Competition - local section, true, but over 120 entries nonetheless. Indranee took first, I was third, and Janet and Phyllis scooped merit awards.
Louis de Bernieres was senior judge.
And finally...
Enraptured as I am with lovely Johnny Lee Miller, Emma's sprightly Knightley in the BBC serialisation, I didn't realise he was Trainspotting's heroic Sick Boy... Go, girl...
mega mega lust for life rules.
Labels: Author, Emma, Mere Festival, Six Characters in search of an author
Paradise by local writer Nell Leyshon developed from her work with
Vita Nova: a Bournemouth-based theatre group of recovering addicts. The Salt factory (tagline "stark visual landscapes and restless text") production features charismatic Lee Hart and Celia Meiras as ex-junkies falling backwards through their story to refind their love. Jay Kerry's lighting is stunning and the minimalist set, Nell says, was designed around the dimensions of the tour van.
Lots of personal stories at the Merlin too, in a full-house foyer performance of STAGE WRITE last night.
This was the culmination of the
7 Ages of Shoes creative workshops aimed primarily to encourage those who've never written monologues for performance before, and was hailed a fantastic success.
Accolades buzzed round the bar like bees round buddleia, and verbal bouquets were still ringing around the group this morning. Many congratulations and thanks to everyone who stepped out of their comfort zone to share such a wide range of wonderful stories: our writers Anna Britten, Alison Clink, Jo Day, Rosemary Dun, Rosie Finnegan, Jeremy Gibson, Gordon Graft, Peter Macfadyen, Angela Moss, Magnus Nelson, Howard Vause; thanks to our actors Jo Hole and Annabelle Macfadyen, and to Howard for the visuals.
The project - my co-organiser Niamh and I are both determined - will continue...
And One-and-Other has finally ended, with the descent on Wednesday of the final human artefact, leaving the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square empty again.
But was it art? Anthony Gormley reckons so: "It's asking how art can be experienced.. if there isn't a bit of contention it isn't worth doing." It was fun, anyway, as I reminisced on a radio look-back at the one hundred days of plinthing. Had
my experience led to anything? the interviewer wanted to know. Hard to quantify how standing 28 feet above London for an hour shapes a life - but one direct outcome is another outing for The Frock when I'm the curtain-raiser act for Innua Ellams when he brings his award-winning poetry play
The 14th Tale to the Merlin next month...
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Labels: 14th Tale, Paradise, STAGE WRITE
This is the only image
I could find on the Bristol Old Vic website for the utterly amazing new touring production of
Six Characters in Search of an Author, sort-of by Pirandello, and maybe it's fitting that it's nothing to do with any of the onstage stories dovetailing thematically and interweaving emotionally: it's a section of audience looking variably enraptured and bemused.
So here's a picture of Luigi Pirandello, who didn't write this version, and the principal actor, who is better known as Wycliffe on the telly, all of which confusion seems totally appropriate for a performance that challenges both authorship & ownership, and our notions of entertainment & integrity. "The medium is the message", Marshall McLuhan pronounced back in 1964, long before intrusive docu-dramas were shaping lives and sensibilities; nowadays we're so used to the debates, both ethical and aesthetic, that this provocative interpretation of
Six Characters by Headlong is simply electrifying. Is this the story of a film producer dedicated to finding the 'truth' beyond the tear-jerk euthanasia story of the death of a boy, or is it the less noble, more torrid, story of six non-existing characters who claim " we are more than real, we are immutable." Both stories climax with the death of a boy, but the abuses and tragedy of the drama involve beautiful and extraordinary theatrical qualities, creating another strand of paradox in this densely layered and marvellous production. It's still touring, reaching Cardiff in November - go if you can.
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Labels: Bristol Old Vic, Headlong, Six Characters in search of an author
Home again, to find Frome in turmoil. The annual carnival, ever a reliable source of Disgusted letters in the local paper whether rage is directed at majorette voyeurism or mega-abuse of finite energy by illuminated floats, has excelled itself this year: "Baghdad Beauties" comprised a bevy of blokes in burkhahs with barmy slogans like 'does my bomb look big in this?' Protests were profuse, police have visited the entry organiser, and Frome is now on amber alert as a terrorist target. You go away for two weeks...
And now I'm back, it's been a week of meetings and talks. Local author Jane Elmor was talking to the writers' circle at the library about the importance of the writing habit, Bristol Old Vic's dynamic new Literary Associate Sharon Clark was talking to Southwest Scriptwriters about the importance of the collaborative process; there's been meetings about
STAGE WRITE at the Merlin next week and a
Home in Frome meeting at Annabelle's. All very useful and productive, especially the ones with cake.
On Wednesday evening the Shakespeare Schools Festival came to the Merlin, with four local schools each presenting a compressed version of one of the bard's plays. Adjudicator Alex Webb rightly praised everyone concerned in the productions.
Maybe because I'm a sucker for costume, even pink glitter pompoms, my favourite was Selwood Middle School's
Dream: it was the closest to classic structure, yet these young actors managed to make an unfamiliar 400-year-old language intelligible, showing characterisation as well as plot, and to integrate contemporary energy too. The conflict between modernity & traditionalism seemed more difficult for the older students, but it was certainly enterprising to cast Macbeth's three 'secret, black, and midnight hags' as a posse apparently on a St Trinian's form outing.
Back on the subject of racial stereotypes,
My Life With The Dogs at the Tobacco Factory featured a selection of Russian ruffians: corrupt cops, child molesters, everyone chronically drunk on vodka. But the story of street urchin Ivan Mishukov was stylish and very funny - and apparently true, though
NIE's interpretation was more pantomime than poignancy - and you'd have to be very po-faced not to enjoy the antics and music.
Figures reveal (who compiles these figures, I wonder, and why?) that Dan Brown is the most frequently donated author to Oxfam shops. Titter ye not; think how many books were initially sold to achieve this statistic. Though if you do want a titter, try this
site of Brownisms, which are kind-of Colmanballs without the rude bits: lines like "The kaleidoscope of power had been shaken, and Aringarosa was still reeling from the blow."
And finally: A children's picture book about two gay penguins and an orphan chick,
And Tango Makes Three, has been banned in the USA. Over this side of the pond, the Conservatives are planning to repeal the Human Rights Act and give 'normal' people the right to know if their neighbours are 'criminals'... and police investigation of carnival silliness begins to seem a bit less funny.
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Labels: Frome Carnival, Shakespeare Schools Festival, Tobacco Factory
Week 2 on Skyros, writers writing everywhere... on the terrace, in cafes, on the beach... delightful group, wonderful words.
Big shift in energy from an influx of two dozen lively new participants and another course led by lovely
life coach Suzy Greaves.
Balmy days & a fabulous final night cabaret ended the Skyros season for 2009 on a high.
And if you're ever stuck in Athens for five hours waiting for a flight you might like to know the Sofitel offers champagne buffet and spa treatments... coming home was never so good.
Labels: Skyros holistic holidays
Skyros equinox.
Cast off old ties that bound me
I will live anew.
Last week's 'Writers' Lab' group produced fantastic prose and poetry, covering the full range from moving to hilarious, culminating in a fabulous evening of personal readings on their penultimate night. (Thanks, Beth, for the haiku.) And thank you all for the immense pleasure of watching nine fascinatingly diverse personalities, all strongly individual, combine with mutual respect and good humour.
My Skyros session is right at the end of the season this year, and I've found some things unfamiliar though some things unchanged:
Juicy Bar still plays seventies songs while we spread ourselves in the afternoon sun and Aegean waves gasp their huge yoga-breaths along a beach of soft sand the colour of thick honey. Bougainvillea and jasmine still garnish whitewashed alleyways, feral cats still pause to pose. Old ladies in black, apparently all cloned from the same ubiquitous postcards, still greet us with
Yasous as we clamber the cobbled paths that cats-cradle the huge rock of Skyros.
And it's still summer here, though the locals predict winds of change. Watching the sun rise beyond Brooke Square and set below Atsitsa bay, it's still easy to feel that perhaps
this is all you know, and all you need to know...
Labels: Skyros holistic holidays
I'd have gone to more Poetry Can Festival events - I intended to, as line-ups looked great - but stuff kept getting in the way: theatre shows,
Play-Me-I'm-Yours pianos in random places, or simply sunshine on the docks... here on Arnolfini corner, the usual backdrop of colourful graffiti, boats, tourists & locals, below me the big, soft, chrome-coloured, sundribbled spread of Bristol's river with its flotsam of swans & debris and a stream of silver sunstars strobing the water like firework fallout. Drums from the Organic Food Fest on the far side, chora playing behind me. Seagulls circling.
But I made it to
Muscle at Bristol Old Vic on Saturday.
Pornography last week may not have been very pornographic, but
Muscle was certainly muscular – or at least, testosteronic. The setting is a gym where three men strain their physiques and their psyches in a bizarre emotional triangle: Terry loves Dan, who Steve hates because he’s shagging the woman Steve loves, but who does Dan love? The three men arrive as stereotypes and strip gradually in a strangely touching clumsy dance of mingled bravado and vulnerability. There’s no dramatic resolution, only a slow-burning, sometimes shocking, journey of self-exposure and self-realisation. Best bits were the fantasy monologues direct to audience; weak link was the miming of gym equipment, but that small distraction aside Sion Pritchard, Paul Mundell and Stewart Wright were impressive in their roles. Written by Tom Wainwright, this production emerged from the BOV/ Theatre West initiative to support new writing.
Personal passions in public places. That's the idea behind
Speeches, a project devised by
Lone Twin who "create community-based performances for specific sites and locations."
So of course I wanted to see what they were up to in Bath's Kennington Meadows - and if we can do it in Frome. The answers, in order, are: Enabling local people to soapbox their enthusiasms & expertise, and, Yes. Only I think in Frome we'd be more quirky, less formulaic.
Emily and I went along on Sunday and agreed foodie Cally was our fave. We ended our day out at the Odeon with phishfood icecream and
500 Days of Summer. “Boy meets Girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't.” Genre parodies, giggles & sniffles, what's not to enjoy...
And now I'm doing what I'm sure isn't blogger etiquette - adding to a posting because I realise there's a couple more things I should've mentioned before bragging about swanning off to Greece.
Collider at the Ustinov for one – part of their support programme for local writers – a rehearsed reading of a play still in development. Collider, in particle physics, refers to “two beams of particles accelerated and directed against each other, so that they collide while flying in opposite directions.” With the same force, perhaps, as a fervent evangelical pastor confronting an equally passionate atheist intent on refuting Creation? Shaun McCarthy’s new play isn’t afraid to push contrastive paradigms to almost parodic extremes: the pastor is a secret jew and his wife an ex-burlesque dancer, and one of the scientists is a vaudeville artist manqué (‘the unbelievable in search of the unimaginable’ he says, of both pursuits). The play does need more fine tuning, particularly around the character of the project leader, but complex issues of physics and ethics are entertainingly packaged to create a show that’s not just about conflict but is also often funny, sexy, and surprising.
And huge appreciation to
Brian Madigan who brought his 'raw acoustic songs, passion, wit, wisdom' to Frome Poetry Cafe and to the poets too. We were in unwitting competition with the Catherine Hill Bikers Wobble, and if small is beautiful, we were exquisite...
I'm off to Skyros island, twinned with Paradise, on Friday, so here's wishing you all a splendid equinox & misty mellow autumnal fruitfulness.
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Labels: 500 Days of Summer, Bristol Old Vic, Collider, Frome Poetry Cafe, Lone Twin, Muscle, Play Me I'm Yours, Skyros holistic holidays
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"If I'd read the write-up I don't think I'd have come," said the lady in powder blue & pearls in the queue for the loo after the matinee performance of
Pornography at the Theatre Royal, "-it was all over the place. Was he a bomber?"
He was indeed, and the pornography lurks in the 2005 attack on London rather than in the snapshot glimpses of people whose lives this touched. Writer Simon Stephens says that in the end the play is not about terrorism but about human beings, and can be performed in any order. There's a haunting quality of compassion in the portrayal of each of the 8 characters: the difference between these ordinarily transgressional lives and the vengeful terrorist is only a matter of degree.
I loved it for the actors' spare & elegant interpretation and for the writing, which had that moving, tough, blend of colloquial and lyrical achieved in the best of Jack Allsopp's lyrics (listen to
Blood on the new album
All Night Cinema to see what I mean: an urban opera in two verses). Billy Seymour and Sheila Reid stood out in an outstanding cast; Sean Holmes directed.
Frome's Merlin Theatre hosted the
Made in Somerset conference of theatre practitioners, organised jointly by Theatrework, Salisbury Arts Centre, and Take Art. Delegates get a mini-programme to wear like the Glastonbury gig-guide, except with cow pictures instead of psychedelia, and lots of tastes from the extensive tapas of local-based work in progress and tour-ready shows.
An inspirational, informative, and exhausting 3 days of showcases, talks, and discussions interrupted with breaks for excellent food & intensive conversations on the sunny lawns beside the Ecos amphitheatre, entertained by Frome Street Bandits.
It felt an amazing privilege to spend a day watching such a wide range of dance, drama, and community theatre - that's not an icecream van by the way, it's
Fuse's I Scream van - and great that young people from the college came along to participate.
Several positive outcomes from the symposium too: Emma Stenning, new executive director, affirmed Bristol Old Vic commitment to support artists across the southwest, not just within the city. And Rob Jones, Policy & Development Manager for Arts and Creative Industries, refuted the tag of artistic backwater: "Somerset is one of the most culturally diverse places I've ever seen." Good news, then... especially for those of us who didn't know that post existed.
I'll leave you with a miscellany of recent news items you may have missed, piquantly peppered with my own personal prejudice perspective.
•
Outrage over the raffle prize of a lamb from a school farm, in joint form, from the mother whose daughter sobs nightly because ‘an animal she bonded with is going to be slaughtered.’ Well call me Cruella de Ville, but surely the school’s intention was not to find her a fluffy sibling substitute but to show her where food comes from and introduce her to the realities of traditional rural life? Still, one more vegetarian is no bad thing…
• Shadow Cabinet Minister Alan Duncan has been
sacked for saying he feels like he’s been ‘on rations’ since the new rules on expenses. Am I the only one who feels this is a little unfair? He was merely whingeing - I want the bastards stopped from ripping us off, I don’t particularly want them to like it.
•
‘Lunacy’ says art critic Brian Sewell of Bristol Council's decision to let citizens vote before scrubbing out graffiti, after over 300,000 voted with their feet for Banky’s exhibition. “It will result in a proliferation of random decoration” he predicts. Imagine it- an enjoyably decorated environment, a sense of personal choice for the hoi polloi... dangerous stuff. “A world gone crazy.”
•
Tough words too from Joanna Lumley, who says aging actors should accept media preference for young faces. “I think we’ve got to be a bit sensible’ says Joanna, a bit sensibly. “None of these things going to change, so get over it.” Journalists leapt to compare her comments to the complaints of ageism by Anne Robinson, who has just unveiled a new face of which journalist Liz Hunt said “I’m all for growing old disgracefully, but you should be able to move your face enough to laugh about it.” Tee hee. I’m with lovely Rose Flint, who has decided the time has come to forget about her inner child and nourish the inner chrone.
Labels: Made in Somerset, Pornography
frogs jumping like ping! springs...
springs ping! like jumping frogs...
Palindromic poems in dangling mobiles, poems on posters, on screens, on boards, on badges, on jigsaws.... the Arnolfini top gallery has been transformed into a word playground by the
Why we Love Poetry exhibition, an all-age interactive experience open until 13th September.
I first met Liz Brownlea, one of the team who created this amazing poem creche, some years ago so it was good to catch up, and to indulge in some lachrymose musing on the magnetic board:
love empty as snow after winter rain.
Arnolfini is hosting a range of other events for the
Bristol Poetry Festival including readings and slams. I've been a fan of Byron Vincent since we shared a stage in Poole for a Bla-di-Bla poetry performance, so I went along to
Brimstone: five poets billed as 'funny, astute... vivid and youthful ... shiny and exciting.' But there's something enervating about the studio theatre as a venue for poetry, and while it's good to hear new work, I missed the anarchic energy I was expecting - though Anna Freeman's spot was excellent.
My antidote to non-arrival of Indian summer: Indian blossom steam room at Longleat's AQVA SANA, during a long & luxurious 'pamper day' which has no literary connection except that I went with Alison Clink and we did talk a bit about writing... when not blissed out on heated seats breathing sensuous steam...
Another antidote is revisiting wonderful summer writing experiences like
Finca el Cerrillo- there's a feast of words & pictures here on the Writing Magazine website -
and receiving by email the "recipes for Cortijo Romero" written by participants on a hot starry night in Andalucia. Lovely to read these little sparks from an unforgettably special week - and the note from one contributor: "amazing how these recipes seem to able to capture the whole mood, and essence, of the place in such a way that I'm finding I can tap back into it whenever I read them!" Now, these voices
are what I call shiny and exciting.
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Labels: bristol poetry festival, cortijo romero, Finca el Cerrillo, Writing Magazine
San Franciscan poet Sharon Olds has brought out a new collection, her ninth, entitled
One Secret Thing, from which she read to a packed congregation in the Church of St Michael in Bath last Friday. She is renowned for refusing an invitation to dine at the White House because of her fury at American warmongering, and for writing about her bum as 'cellulite fruit and nuts... exhausted, tragic.' Her passion to chronicle the ordinary sensual stuff of life and to oppose national conflict are both abiding themes in her poetry. "I don't know why children aren't as good a subject as war" she says, commenting on content-based rejections from literary magazines. "There is a real need for poems," she says simply. "We, the citizens of the earth, need to write poems."
The Poetry Society thinks that too, and to celebrate its one hundredth birthday there's been a series of events around the country, including a
Cascade of Words and Music at Prior Park on Sunday.
Warmly compered by organiser Nikki Bennett despite the chill, it was privilege to celebrate alongside wonderful voices like Rose Flint, David Johnson, Kevan Manwaring, and others - including my writer friend Hazel, back south for the weekend.
I'd like to end with a word for ITV's dramatisation of
Wuthering Heights... two words actually: rain, and death.
Neither of them my favourite things, though I'd watch Andrew Lincoln in any weather. Lots of flashing eyes and floating hair, galloping horses and ghostly intruders, though actual narrative is terse as text. Apparently writer Peter Bowker deleted characters and invented scenes for this psychotic love story but is there any other way to bring a novel to television?
Labels: Poetry Society, prior park, Sharon Olds
Sensational is the simplest way to describe my week at Cortijo Romero in Southern Spain leading the 'self expression through creative writing' group . A synaesthesia of senses, in fact: silken pool water, velvet hills, and rustling palms.
This area, in foothills of the Sierra Nevada, was tamed and irrigated by the Moors but given its tri-zonal climate by nature: flora is extraordinary and clear skies reveal breathtaking layers of stars. Our days quickly develop a delicious pattern: early morning yoga, then after a brief meeting the mornings are dedicated to word-work and word-play, with afternoons free to sunbathe around the pool. After supper, which like all meals is delicious & al fresco, there's optional activities like chanting, dancing, spanish song, or further immersion in conversation, or submersion in the pool...
Here's my 'recipe for Cortijo Romero':
Take white walls and terracotta tiles, and meld into habitation, flattening the roof so it forms a terrace under the stars. Decorate the traditional way with archways, courtyards, and a cat. Soak in sunshine for a long time while the pool is prepared. This must be surrounded by palm trees and blossom – hibiscus is ideal. Turn out under a firm blue sky onto a setting with views of mountains and acres of ancient tranquillity. Fill your finished cortijo with people who love it, with good food, with learning and laughter. Glaze with delight and sprinkle lightly with the scent of jasmine. Your guests will come back for another helping again and again.
Personal highlights, in a week that was up there with the eagles of the Sierra Nevada, were the strenuous clamber upriver to swim under the ice-melt waterfall, and the gentler cascade of wonderful words from my very wonderful group in the last-night cabaret.
So I wasn't looking forward to ten hours in Malaga on the final day, but actually it was brilliant - thanks, Louise, my intrepid and ever-delighted companion, for an unforgettable day of exploration and fiesta, finding ourselves suddenly in the heart of a very Spanish celebration. A great way to leave and take home the musical vibrance of Andalucia.
England was kind to my reluctant return, having the grace to offer sunshine today. I'm hoping it hangs around till next Sunday, for the 'Cascade of Words and Music' in Bath's Prior Park.
Labels: cortijo romero, prior park
Not so much a blog entry, more of a twitter really: arriving in Spain to discover Cortijo Romero has extensive gardens with a pool and palm trees, ripe grapes around the archways, an elegant & cool study where the writing group will meet, fabulous food and steady sunshine, but no internet connection. So there will now be a short intermission.
Labels: cortijo romero
Around 150 people, some resolutely picnicking beneath umbrellas, sat stoically for nearly three hours through monsoon conditions in Frome’s Ecos Amphitheatre to watch
Illyria recreate the heroic exploits of D’Artagnan and his
Three Musketeers, a folies-de-Bergerac frolic of intrigue, amour, frenetic swordplay and improbable moustaches. Six actors and a flurry of costume changes combined to create a plethora of friends, foes, landlords, servants, nuns and horses. Sex was skimpy and the plot too complex for most of the young in the audience but nobody seemed to mind as fun was fast, and furious fighting frequent: with swords, knives, saucepans, fists, pistols, poison, axes, and a chicken, imaginatively choreographed and involving everyone - wicked Lady de Winter (Annie Lees Jones) was deservedly cheered for her courageous cat-fight to the death. The four men all acquitted themselves superbly, with William Finkenrath particularly striking as Duke of Buckingham who must be secret twin to Blackadder's Lord Flashheart.
Two shows in swift succession in Bath, and both find me paddling against the current of decided opinion: at the Ustinov there's the world premiere of
Another Door Closed, a new play by Peter Gill. Applause was enthusiastic but it left me cold, literally, as air-conditioning was set on let-the-fuckers-freeze. Imagine an early draft of a Pinter play - before he decided that less is more effective to create the essence of relationships- cut into strips and restuck randomly, Dada-style, recited by two portly elderly ladies and that louche black-marketeer from Dad's Army.
I'll think up something else to say for publication, of course, but it won't be 'theatrical gem'.
Rik Mayall is unwell so press night for
Balmoral at Bath Theatre Royal was cancelled, though we're allowed to view and review at our own expense - a cunning but unsuccessful plan to deter local reports that the play is now an unsalvageable flop. I thought the performance lost nothing from stand-in Steve McNeil's underplaying of the potential mania of his role, but I'm probably alone in that view. Michael Frayn's fantasy is based on the appealing conceit that the 1917 revolution was not in Russia but in England, resulting in redeployment of Balmoral as a writers' retreat. Not just any old writers, but Godfrey Winn, Hugh Walpole, Warwick Deeping and Enid Blyton - who is an erotic poet until the farcical and whisky-fuelled events of the play inspire her to create the Secret Seven and become a children's author. Lots of opportunities, among the silliness and corpses in the cabin trunk, for droll comments on literature, class, and cultural stereotypes - though you'd have to be as old as the Secret Seven are now to recognise most of the references. Apart from the drunk belligerent Scot, of course. He's not going anywhere.
In the queue for the queue for Banksy on Sunday, buskers & an icecream van combined with brilliant sun and the cameraderie of the sidelined to create a carnival atmosphere. Cheers and party poppers as we secondary queuers reached the point of the hand-stamp which allowed us to join the legitimate queuers. We became entitled to privileges: the BANKSY versus BRISTOL MUSEUM flyer, giving precious little away about the location of tour highlights like the Easyjet version of the Flight to Egypt but providing a useful summary:
A unique collaboration between the city's foremost cultural institution and one of the region's most overrated artists. 
No lectures, no illegality, just delightful wordplay and wonderfully inventive images. Then back at the dockside for chilled wine, and at sunset watching scores of balloons float slowly across the city skyscape.
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Labels: Another Door Closed, Balmoral, Banksy, Illyria, Peter Hall
Unexpectedly at short notice, the chance of a weekend in Dublin, staying with my friend Jenny Sweeney, author of
Encounter Ireland. Jenny and I were college flatmates, so catching up is easy as falling off a bicycle. She takes me walking on the heathery hills of Howth, teaches me the knack of the Irish Times crossword; we search for cowries beside the taffeta sea of Dublin Bay, and for late orchids in the dunes of Dollymount, and the decades melt away.
And any visitor to the city has to see what's on at the Gate: “Everything gels perfectly” enthused the online write-up of the Noel Coward revival
Present Laughter, so I had hopes of entertainment with an edge, and was half lucky. This production was indulgent on the eye in terms of set and costume, but a little too easy on the intellect by underplaying the psychological connections between this extensive cast. The result was slick wit but no emotional credibility, erotic energy, or real humanity.
Stephen Brennan as Garry Essendine, the aging matinee idol, held the entire confection together compellingly, aided by Fiona Bell as his spiky secretary, and the laughter was indeed present. But the promised gel was missing in this series of tableau sequences, some of them voluptuous, some satiric, but never cohering enough for me to care by the end who went to bed with whom - or what happened to the hedonistic hero or anyone else in his ouroborotic coterie.
“All you ever do is pose in dressing-gowns,” Garry is challenged by Roland Maule (John Kavanagh, mangling the irony with buffoonery in this wasted role) “- you could be making people feel and think.” But why bother, when as the reviews all note: “The audience loved it!”
Stop Press News
Frome writer Rosie Finnegan has heard from Bristol-based
Writers' Block that her Sarah Siddons monologue has been accepted for production next Spring. Rosie says she was inspired by the '7 Ages of Shoes' monologue writing workshop and "You can quote me saying a big than you to you and Niamh!" which is jolly nice of her. She also says she's over the moon about it. So you should be, Rosie, it's a brilliant outcome for your first dramatic monologue.
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Labels: Present Laughter, Writers' Block
Words@ Frome Festival goes into recess for the rest of the summer once the bunting is down for another year. Mega congratulations to all involved in the hugely successful literary events - you can see the reviews, compiled by Wendy, on the
festival website. The debrief meeting is traditionally a bit of a knees-up too and this year Alison, who hosted, created a unique Plinth Cake: that's me on the top, complete with icing-sugar mic. Ahhh...
Somerset lacks focus in terms of cities, learning institutions, and cultural centres. Discuss.
The theatre practitioners' meeting at The Academy Theatre in Shepton Mallet did just that, with varied opinions as to whether decentralisation is a weakness or a strength. Either way
Take Art, who convened the meeting, is doing a grand job to thread our isolated pearls onto some sort of circlet of reciprocal awareness. Coffee, cakes, and networking opportunities supplemented the discussion, concluding with a flurry of post-it notes & hopes for continued contact.
Writer/performer Rob Benson brought
Borderline, billed as 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the ecstasy generation', to Bristol, giving Alma Tavern audiences a chance to see why this one-man show collected rave reviews at the Edinburgh festival.
His character is a Stone Roses fan who pops pills like Pringles ("once you start, you can't stop") until he lands in Mental Health Ward 206, off his head now on medicinal instead of recreational stuff. It's not just drugs to blame, he says. He's borderline schizophrenic, borderline victim, borderline recovered. Maybe his life will always ricochet in and out of paranoia, even though he longs for the normality of 'Ikea and Dixons' - and love.
Black comedy, physicality, raw emotionalism, and Streets-style poetry, all disturbingly enhanced by the extreme lighting design of director Jennifer Lunn, took this piece beyond era case-study to essential integrity. Next stop New York, but Rob will be back in the spring with a new play developed for the Ustinov's 'Script Factory'.
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Labels: Borderline, Frome Festival, Take Art, the Fourth Plinth
Back on planet normal, and the final event for the Words@ Frome Festival team: prize-giving night for Writers in Residence, at the Garden Cafe. "An amazing achievement", judge Lindsay Clark says of these stories scribbled in cafes and shops and bravely read aloud by their writers for his verdict: Gordon Graft and Tim O'Connor commended for two highly entertaining stories, and Tracy Wall taking top prize for her millinery- inspired poem.
Lindsay is 'not one of nature's judges' he says, but he's unfailingly eloquent on the subject of writing. Among his salient gems: "A good sentence is a breath taking shape, so it can’t carry too much in the way of excess baggage." "Qualifiers are not intensifiers, they weaken. Find the verb that dramatises."
What is the collective name for drama enthusiasts & practitioners? An OST-group would be Tuesday's answer. Open Space Technology, if you're not familiar with the concept (I wasn't), was devised in the 1980s which accounts for the slightly last-century jargon of ("We did vision that work but it's hard to progress in this funding landscape though we're making bridges") and Theatre Bristol's
To You To Me session attracted over 100 writers, performers, directors, and fans to Bristol Old Vic to contemplate the creative future.
OST has few rules and they all have a cosily indulgent flavour - the 'Law of Mobility' encourages participants to buzz off when bored - which was further enhanced by bowls of cherries and maltesers, and a scrummy greek supper after the debates were all done. A relaxed non-cliquey atmosphere is a great way to network, and Niamh and came back enthused, informed, and entertained, and very pleased to have found this bridge into the
Theatre Bristol landscape.
Miracle Theatre is touring their adaptation of
Tartuffe, Molière's once-scandalous parody of the hypocrisy of the Church and gullibility of the bourgeoisie, in an open-air season. They arrived in Frome on Thursday and were instantly diverted by torrential showers to the Merlin stage. Bill Scott’s version of the text plumps for one-liner wit rather than scrupulous translation or conventional rhyming couplet, and the overall effect of marionette-show–cum–farce is clearly designed for the picnic season theatre-goer, but it’s a wonderful high-energy romp nonetheless, with Ben Dyson as villain-hero Tartuffe effortlessly stealing every scene. For this preposterous drollery Molière was apparently dubbed 'a demon dressed in flesh' but it's still the most performed play in the French language, and has that strange vicar-in-the-wardrobe kind of innocence of a bygone era.
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Labels: Frome Festival, miracle theatre company, Theatre Bristol
24 hours on and I'm still high as Nelson's hat after my plinthathon in Trafalgar Square yesterday. I asked for messages and poem requests and they came by email, text, and facebook, from across the world. Great fun theming the hoard but even though I timed my 'script' l still didn't get through it all before they came to take me away...
Huge thanks to the 31 contributors whose words I used, hopefully not too gabbled or garbled, and apologies to the 5 who got squeezed out... you were there in spirit, prittsticked into my lagoon blue book.
Watching
my hour on the webcam I squirmed at the fluffed words and faffy bits, but I think it shows I'm happy to be there... and there's pix on the
plinth watch (page 2) that are close-up and hi-res enough to challenge my poetic claim to relish my wrinkles as tidemarks of mortality...
Best bits for me:
Smatterings of applause that showed I wasn't entirely inaudible, despite fire-engines, praying Christians, cheering open-top busses and general Londonny hubbub. Ecstatic reception of the gay wedding bus! Seeing my friends at the foot of the plinth. And, overwhelmingly, the extraordinariness of being there, high above the crowds and the fountains, allowed - no, REQUIRED - to blow my own trumpet to the world.
Labels: the Fourth Plinth
I first saw West Side Story in the original London production with George Chakiris in 1958 - I'd like to say I was wheeled in as a prem. baby but you wouldn't believe me - which is perhaps why it's always been my favourite musical. The community college production at Frome's Merlin Theatre was a wonderful way to revisit and rediscover the energy and passion as well as the songs of this classic Romeo & Juliet re-enaction.
Claudia Pepler-Berry's production rightly, and creatively, emphasises the youthfulness of these protagonists – the first rumble is like a playground scrap, and
When you’re a Jet not so much macho aggression as a chant for a tribe of Lost Boys: “Without a gang you’re an orphan" says Riff, their charismatic leader.
The two key ensemble pieces were simply brilliant, the girls bringing the feisty exuberance of a hen-night romp to
I like to be in America, and an inventive wittiness as well as high energy in the boys’ show-piece
Officer Krupke.
And then there's the young lovers, whose duets created such a sense of quintessential romance I could hear sobs all around me: Ben Macfadyen as Tony looking like a young James Dean and singing with charm and confidence. Kara Horler as Anita was outstanding too, and I loved the cameo role of Howard Vause the cowardly lion, now in glasses & tanktop working as a youth club leader in downtown Manhattan.
(Thanks Mike for the images)
And here's that
ONE AND OTHER link for Saturday 4-5, to see whether I need my brolly and bin-bags for my Trafalgar Square plinthathon: all about words, mine and maybe yours...
Labels: Merlin Theatre, West Side Story
The view from my room in
Finca el Cerrillo says it all really: luxurient gardens, blue pool, olives and vines on the ochre hills, and the mountain tops of the Sierra Almijara beyond.
That's my room, beyond the white jasmine (believe me I'm not gloating, just... smiling.)
My writing group is small but perfectly formed; we have all morning together in the cool studio as a 'master-class', then meet again before supper for what's become known as the 'aperitif session'.
Although this course has a fiction focus, the gorgeous gardens, rural architecture, and distant mountains all inspire lyricism, and our evening readbacks are filled with poetry as well as stories, so thanks Elaine, Collette, & Helen for a wonderful week of word-exploration.
In the afternoons... well, there's the pool to laze beside & within, there's cushions beneath the big carob tree.... and there's the meals for which this place is famed, along with the wonderfully relaxed hospitality of our hosts Sue and Gordon Kind.
And now I'm leaving all this & heading back to the Real World, where it's not 32 degrees every blue-skied, blue-pooled day, - and where there's a plinth in Trafalgar Square I'll be standing on next Saturday, and where like Christopher Robin and his bear, the
web-link is forever playing.
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Labels: Finca el Cerrillo, the Fourth Plinth
And as the heatwave continues, Winchester Writers Conference events are hotting up too. Here's my delightful and very talented group, taking a break from a long and intense day with a focus on dialogue in fiction - thanks guys for wonderfully entertaining readings and fascinating discussions. Lovely too to stay overnight with
conference inspiration-cum-fairy-godmother, the gracious and generous Barbara Large, who coordinates delegates' every need, even including lifts to the station and gypsy creams at tea-break.
Plinth update: a photo-call for the frock. Closest we can find to a plinth is this stone by the Merlin Theatre. (Thanks Somerset Standard for the pic.) I'm hoping to take to Trafalgar Square, as well as my stuff, a fistful of words from others - not just poems but quotes, quips, messages, greetings... anything. So I'm sending out a call - any fave limericks, haiku, maxims... anyone's birthday coming up around 18th July? Here's your chance to hear your words on Sky.... actually it's all too scary to contemplate, so I'm going to forget about it for a week...
...because I'm heading off to Spain tonight, to run a workshop in the foothills of the Sierra Almijara in Andalucia, a place I've never been before which is all the more exciting. So there won't be any Frome Festival bulletins from me this year: for those, click
here.
And have a great time.
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Labels: the Fourth Plinth, winchester writers conference
“Could we get any more British?” asks Duke Theseus, emerging as the umbrellas go up in Ashton Court Manor Gardens just before the start of
A Midsummer Night's Dream on Sunday.
Open-air theatre is not like theatre and I don’t just mean the drizzle; it brings out the territorial imperative in the cultural classes as they impose their own auditoriums on the lawn rather like Libyan forces invading Chad. Nearly all the grass was covered with predatory blankets laid out by a stentorian-voiced man urging his party to “maintain the line”. Children trail soft toys, parents eat paella from plastic plates, pies from wrappers, salads from Tuppaware, crisps, cakes, scotch eggs… waiting for curtain up is one long munch-fest. Corks pop, babies cry, mobile link-ups are arranged: “you’ll see us at the front, it’s not Glastonbury!”
Shakespeare's Globe on Tour has responded to the challenge by doing the whole play as a flapper-era end-of-pier show, with something for all the family: teddy-bears & percussion for the kiddies, Puck dressed as a pole-dancer for the Dads, and for us girls there was Chris McGill as Lysander/Quince/Moth, somehow managing to be equally irresistible whether a bold lover, rude mechanic, or gigolo elf.
The 8 actors in Raz Shaw's production play every part, morphing deftly from aristocrats to clowns to fairies, so there’s plenty of opportunity for inventive displays of versatility though less for costume change: adding aprons worked well for status downsizing but tailcoats and cigarette-holders for Peaseblossom’s posse didn’t do it for me. The production worked best when it stuck to the stage, creating a magic box that had everyone, even passersby peering over the railings, wide-eyed; the de-rigueur racing around the grass seemed like a slightly desperate, and unnecessary, crowd-pleasing tactic.
It’s a long play, made all the longer by William Mannering’s extemporising Bottom - I can see why the bard fell out with Will Kempe who first took the role – but at the end, despite the weather, numb bums, and no interval refreshments, the enthusiastic applause was rightly raucous. The
Tour continues till 31st August: Fiona Moorhead's photo courtesy of the Globe.
Plinth preparations continue: declaiming practice on Cley Hill, and lovely Mandie Stone from
Love Arts is kitting me out in retro prom frock with custom-made headdress (purple red & green) for my hour at Trafalgar Square on July 18th. I'm almost starting to look forward to it...
Labels: A Midsummer Night's Dream, Love Arts, the Fourth Plinth
Two nights after
Moonshadow, I'm back in Bristol at the Tobacco factory for another play on social repression based on a true life incident, showing that just because you're not sectioned doesn't mean you're not trapped.
In 1928 Ruth Snyder was executed in New York for the murder of her wealthy husband. Journalist Sophie Treadwell followed the trial & wrote a play based on the case.
Machinal was on stage within a year and still has impact today as a feminist statement. Helen, intelligently interpreted by Polly Barsby as naïve and mentally frail, is caught relentlessly in a loveless machine, unable to relate to her mother, husband, or even daughter. Her emotional dysfunction is triggered by - and powerfully expresses - the materialistic society and social expectations that combine to entrap her. Mechanist patterns are vividly created in both soundtrack and visuals, with a series of memorably brilliant Hopper-inspired tableaux at the speakeasy bar where Helen meets Dirk and her first taste of freedom. Director Sue Wilson wanted to show the skills of the graduating students from Old Vic Theatre School- 'not just actors but designers too ' and this provocative play showcased an impressively talented ensemble. I can't find any images from the show so here's a Hopper which evokes something of the sense of loneliness & oppression created by the set, lighting, and tonal range - oppressive monochrome, with seductive slashes of scarlet and elusive glimpses of purple night air. Credit to all the cast too, especially Piers Wehner as Helen's lover and John McGrellis as her victim husband.
Plinth update: by post, a large, card-reinforced, envelope containing an A5 booklet with 24 pages of information for us plinthers including a map of Trafalgar Square and helpful tips like "Before you leave home do take a look out of the window or consult the weather forecast. This is Britain after all!" and "London is well connected to the rest of the UK - you can get there by plane, train, bus or car." There's a whole section on how to avoid sinking into debt over travel costs too: "Hold a car boot sale - you'll be amazed what people will buy!... do odd jobs in return for small sums. You could wash cars, walk dogs, baby-sit, mow lawns, or deliver leaflets... or bake some cakes, and ask for donations when it's time for tea-break!"
So, be thrifty, dress warm, and bring an umbrella if it looks like rain. Who ever said Arts Funding pays people to sit around devising patronising twaddle?
Labels: Machinal, the Fourth Plinth
Despite the delights of Frome, I do sometimes find myself yearning for the busy, fizzy, Bristol buzz. Totterdown was busy, fizzy, & frankly sozzledy, on Sunday with a mini-festival at the Shakespeare, where I was one of the performing poets. The Plastic Rocket also featured popular Bristolian Rosemary Dunn, who often makes passes at men who wears glasses...
Ten years ago the big topic of the summer was how to get down to Cornwall for August 11th. Rumours were rife: roads would be jammed, trains crammed… my solution was to cycle from Frome with my son Sam as companion, tent-bearer, and map-reader. I watched the milky silence of that strange defining moment of solar eclipse from a games field temporarily converted into a campsite by its enterprising fooball club.
A decade on, Steve Hennessy’s play
Moonshadow is being revived at The White Bear in Kennington, and is still – disturbingly – relevant in its potent critique of psychiatric practices.
John wants to see the eclipse and feel the touch of the moon’s shadow but in the Catch-22 craziness of his sectioned existence, the more he wants to go, the more he’s seen as proving he can’t be allowed. Dr Brown diagnoses paranoid psychotic delusions and refuses leave, so the only way John will see the eclipse is by astral projection.
A minimalist set enhanced the impact of celestial lighting effects as John sails over Taunton, defying his dead, but still monstrous, stepfather to swallow the sun. “If you’re ever going to come out into the light you need to go into the darkness.”
As with most of Steve Hennessy’s plays, the central theme is that psychiatry dehumanises, and creates a system in which the only differences between carers and cared-for are the labels and the salaries. Four lonely people wrestle with the pain of living and the damage of their pasts, but only John has the astral motorbike. He may be prone and drooling, but when the ECT has worn off, he’ll be riding high…
Brilliant performances by Michael Dylan and Annabel Bates as the endearing patients and Oliver Hume and Beverley Longhurst as their equally ‘sexually disinhibited’ but better paid (and without files & labels) authority figures. Insightful direction by Chris Loveless brings out the bleak realism as well as highlighting moments of wry humour in this powerful play.
Theme for this solstice week was sunshine, and about time too. While up in London I took the opportunity to check out the Fourth Plinth, since I'll be up there next month. My co-plinthers in the other corners are King George IV, a Major, and a General... there's the Admiral too, but he's about a mile high. Here's my plinth, under the scaffolding, and here's me wondering what to do if I don't get a portable PA. Hurrah for Patrick Dunn and Nick Waterhouse, who stepped in to supply the goods!
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Labels: Moonshadow, the Fourth Plinth, The Plastic Rocket
"There's something about theatre in a confined space that's quite special" Niamh says "- anyone jaundiced with lavish traditional productions should try this - five quid for a seat on the sofa and great entertainment." We were at the double bill of one-act plays UPSTAIRS at the LANSDOWN, a tiny pub theatre in Clifton, more like voyeurs than audience. Both pieces were energetically acted and directed by students from the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School - yuppy humour in
About a girl who... by Stephen Vagg and anarchic hilarity in
1% Inspiration.
Written and directed by Lars Harald Gathe, this is a brilliant & absurd 'deconstruction and reinvention' of Ibsen's
Ghosts, the famously "dirty deed done in public" that shocked the 19th century theatre-going world. Especial praise to Jack Holden as Osvald and Nick Blakeley as assistant Harry, chronically confused, who had hoped "this was going to be something real." But Al the manic Director is changing the concept. A talking badger, a buffet, a song and dance routine with no actors – they’re out to lunch, literally until it chokes them. Al sees his role, apart from sitting on the red sofa staring at the wall, as a calming influence: he counters Mrs Alving's script complaints ( "When you look at life, everything is a bad translation") and consoles baffled Harry: “My grandmother told me this on her deathbed: It’s all useless. It’s all a waste of time.” Not this though- a thoroughly enjoyable night of new writing and emerging talent.
Eclecticism means never having to say you're copying... Last year Alison and I went down to Brighton to check out their (hugely funded) Small Wonder lit-fest event and came back fired with enthusiasm to recreate the event, better, unfunded, ourselves. Hence was born Frome FLASH FICTION Friday, story-telling crossed with slam, agreed by all who crowded into the Merlin foyer last night as fabulous fun. The lucky-dip format kept tension high but no-one overran their allotted 4 minutes so we had time for everyone who wanted to read.
Our judges – publisher Barry Cunningham, novelist Debby Holt, and lyricist Brian Madigan – had the tough task of on-the-spot marking so many excellent pieces to a nail-biting finale with two writers recalled to the mic: Jeremy Gibson and Gordon Graft, both best-known for their poetry. A swift secret ballot resulted in FFFF logo teeshirts for both and the £40 prize to Jeremy for his wicked black comedy
Happy Endings.
Congratulations to all 21 writers brave enough to stand up and be voted, and to create such a fantastic evening of entertainment.
Labels: Flash Fiction, Upstairs at the Lansdown
!!!!NEWS FLASH!!!A couple of months back I posted a pic of me messing about in Stourhead posing as a statue in one of the follies. Kevin's comment - seconded by haiku poet Alan Summers - suggested I apply the Anthony Gormley
One&Other project in London, so I did. One hour on top of a column in Trafalgar Square, doing anything you like. Some of me pomes, I offered brashly. And oops, I got a place. So that's
me on a plinth along with the admirals & pigeons on July 18th, 4-5pm, strutting my irreverent stuff.
Anthony Gormley created the Angel of the North, and now his vision is to reclaim Trafalgar Square from the old order and make a living sculpture of “people expressing our hopes and fears, for what is possible.”
Boris Johnson is somehow involved and there’ll be a 24 hour streaming website, Sky TV, and 2400 of us during the 100 days of the project, but “it really doesn’t matter in the end who gets up there, it’s more this process of asking ourselves, what do we care about? how would we express that? What would we do, if we had this hour in the most public place in the whole of the land? to make a project that is a portrait of the UK now?”
Well I know for a fact there'll be bagpipe-players & balloon-twisters, and I'll probably do my lipstick one...
O brave new world, that has such people in't!..
Labels: OneAndOther
As the bunting comes out for another Frome Festival, I sometimes wonder if I edge into sycophantic hyperbole when enthusing about my adopted home-town, with its 2 theatres, independent cinema, bookshop, music store, radio station, acoustic nights, band nights, and café & party culture – a place so small you could hoover the entire town centre from one powerpoint given a reasonable length extension flex, yet there’s more creative clubs, circles, & happenings here than flying eggs at a BNP protest rally. And then I read
The Furball, and I know I’m not exaggerating. In what other free town mag can you find, as well as local listings, music & arts reviews, parkour promotion and poetry, a reasoned argument against school prayers: “You wouldn’t want teachers telling your children Thor exists..." Artsy, energetic, and a little bit anarchic: like the editors say,
It’s a Frome thing. 
Not that I'm averse the charms of bourgeois Bath & bustling Bristol too. On Thursday, when the sun realised abruptly that it should be flattering the mountain-tops with sovereign eye, kissing with golden face the meadows green and gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy since it's damn-near midsummer, I spent a lovely day in Bath, having lunch and talking poetry with
Esme Ellis amid her garden lupins, then meeting
Diana Cambridge for a delicious sunset session at the Spa discussing her new project: a Travel Writing Taster week in Crete.
Over in Bristol, Writers' Room Coordinator Sharon Clark is busy making the Old Vic the hub of southwest theatreland with an awesome programme of projects including on Friday a scratch night for performers.
10x3, introduced bouncily by Howard Coggins as 'a bold new experiment, a cauldron, a smorgasbord...' Sharon's concept is that 3 minutes is long enough to create a character, and actors can use this as a chance to take a risk.
Niamh and I went with our own drama project in mind so what interested me most was the self-written pieces: David Bailey's menacing
Security Man, poems by Gillie Harris and Shagufta K Iqbal. Possibly the actors would have liked more specific audience feedback, but the general response was positive: these disparate pieces combined successfully and "The Old Vic is now a place to try things out."
Back in Bath again on Saturday, for Acumen in the Georgian elegance of the Bath Poetry Cafe's new home in Queen Square, with editor Patricia Oxley talking about how she whittles down the 5000 poems submitted each month to the 50 published, and poet William Oxley reading some of his work. In his pre-poetic life, William confides, he was an accountant, which is why he likes the line "no accounting for Paradise."
There are other readers too, among them Frome poet Rose Flint, and the shortlisted entrants from the Acumen Poetry Competition. I entered this, and was extremely chuffed to be among the 7 shortlisted poets & thus find myself reading at short notice my poem
Charity Shop Shuffle, so here I am looking chuffed with Rose. Winner was sonneteer Judith Young, with Yu Yan Chen runner-up.
We all met up again for brunch organised by Poetry Cafe choreographer Sue Boyle on Sunday, lingering in her sunny garden and then strolling nearby Alexandra Park to watch the city sunning itself under a Simpsons sky.
Labels: Acumen, Bath Poetry Cafe, Bristol Old Vic, Frome Festival
"I don't think the writers work as hard as they used to, because the writing isn't as good" John Cleese reportedly told an interviewer recently. He was talking about television, not the state of stage in the southwest.
It's not often a play makes you laugh till your ribs ache then cry till your face hurts so that after the final curtain you stumble out silenced, feeling like you've been through an emotional tumble-dryer. 'You' of course means me, and the play is
Ray Collins Dies on Stage at the Alma Tavern. Written by Mark Breckon and featuring the stunning talents of Oliver Millingham, Kirsty Cox, and Neil Jennings, directed with devastating insight and astounding pace by Chris Loveless - superlatives are essential to convey how moving and extraordinary this piece of theatre is. Picture a writer who's painfully and chronically allergic to every scrap of the fabric of his own life - the clothes he wears, room he lives in, computer he tries to work on. On the literal brink of suicide he's saved by love but dies anyway, killed not by despair but by clumsy experimentation from the medical profession... doesn't sound like a laugh a minute, does it? Believe me, it was. Mark knows the scenario well, he lived it - and unlike Ray Collins survived it. His account of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity and its treatment is hilarious and tragic and very, very, moving. Huge credit to Stepping Out Theatre Company for bringing this brave & brilliant play to Bristol: you can read audience responses
here, and go if you can, it's on till 13th June.
At the Ustinov in Bath, there's
The Adventures of Wound Man & Shirley - 'the best show I've seen, it's awesome' one barman is telling the other as I arrive.
Like Ray Collins, Shirley Gadanken is a social misfit on a macabre journey of pain and loneliness. And what do you need most, when you're a nerdy boy with knobbly knees, a sick brother, and a hopeless crush on a cross-country runner?
Why, a superhero of course, to make you his sidekick. Enter, clanking, Wound Man, looking "like Bill Murray crossed with a swiss army knife... weapons sticking out like cocktail sticks through cheese&pineapple at a party", whose special power is to calm those in extreme grief and pain by simply looking like they feel. Wound Man shows Shirley how to touch those he loves and can't because they're either dying (his brother) or despise him as a bender (his beloved). Lyrical and tender, gently humorous rather than hilarious, Chris Goode's highly original rites-of-passage story is performed by the writer as an intimate third person monologue, and deserves the barman's accolade.
John Cleese says the people who run TV these days are fearful of new, imaginative, ideas. John, you should get out more.
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Labels: Ray Collins Dies on Stage, The Adventures of Wound Man and Shirley
This week we're talking shoes... their stories, the characters they create and convey. It's the first "7 AGES OF SHOES" drama workshop, held at the Merlin foyer. Writer-friend Niamh Ferguson has teamed up with me for this project, conceived while watching the
Show of Strength 5-minute pieces in shops in Bedminster earlier this year & thinking: we could do stuff like that in Frome. The shoes stimulus was Niamh's idea, and proved a wonderful starting point for great writing. Several of these pieces were polished up with help from the Writers' Circle at Rosie's on Wednesday so we're on the way to an evening of monologues.. a season of short plays... .
We're expecting a full house for the Flash Fiction event Alison and I are running on June 19th - another stolen idea, freely adapted from Brighton's
Small Wonder contest. We've got some excellent judges: publisher
Barry Cunningham - he first picked Harry Potter from the slush pile - with effervescent novelist
Debby Holt and
Brian Madigan, lyric-writer extraordinaire. Fun and frolics for all, and forty quid for the winner - come along. There's a teeshirt with our logo on too, how Fromeishly cool is that.
Labels: Flash Fiction
May is the month for confetti whites – hawthorn blossom, horse-chestnut candles, wild garlic, and cow-parsley, my favourite, drenching the river banks and fluttering along the lanes like a ragged peasant army returning glorious. This seems a specially good year for these wonderful wayside umbellifers everywhere.
I’ve been travelling up north staying with friends: Hazel my bard-buddy now living near Worcester (which counts as north to a Watford-orientated south-Londoner like me) then way up into the wilds of the M6 – to Ribchester, a tiny Lancashire village on the banks of the Ribble, which traces its provenance back to Roman days and celebrates its farming status with two pubs called after bulls.
I’ve come to visit Anya, who I first met in Tobago over a decade ago; we now have one of those friendships that picks up effortlessly with each connection. With her new partner John we explored the noble history of Hutton-in-the-Forest, the industrial history of Salts Mill, and the natural history of High Head Sculpture Valley, where the cow parsley was as impressive as the art trail.
Writer and social psychologist
Stephen Whitehead is staying too, and we spent Bank Holiday Monday walking the fabulous unpeopled landscape around Anya’s home on the hottest day of the year so far.
Stephen’s specialism is gender and unusually for an academic his published work includes popular & accessible books like
The Many Faces of Men – featured on Richard & Judy among other media worldwide – as well as course readings on feminist post-structuralist theory.
And after a stop-off with my brother on the borders of Derbyshire, I'm back home in Frome, where the lilac really is in bloom, and the white roses out too, and there's a literary look at nature next week at the library. Organised by John Payne for the
Lost World series of events,
Nature Friend or Foe on June 5th is based on John's upcoming book
The West Country: a cultural history. I'm specially pleased I get to quote bits of Kubla Khan, written by Coleridge "in a sort of Reverie brought on by two grains of Opium taken to check a dysentery."
And finally... definitions for Tories: Louise Marnel, the Bromsgrove housewife who organised a petition against Julie Kirkbride for fiddling her parliamentary expenses, denies that the 4000 signatories she amassed mean she used "mob rule".
Quite right Louise. It's called - or was once - democracy.
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Labels: Lost World, Ribchester
Purchasing hairspray, choosing a belt,
waiting for cheese on toast to melt
and daytime TV doesn’t watch itself.
A poet’s work is never done. Luke Wright has a vocation: “It’s what I was born to do, say filthy things that rhyme”. With
Sex Butler, outrageously
Cool Mum, and the
Ballad of Fat Josh - he robbed pizza delivery boys and ate the evidence - you could nearly believe he means it. But Luke’s brilliant new show
A Poet's Work Is Never Done is a fast-moving journey from the bantery mockery of the show-title poem to powerful and dark scrutiny of modern life. “In a society where we do everything ironically, where does that leave meaning?” Luke’s theme, beneath the wicked wit & relentless rhyme, seems something like atonement. For cruelties of youth, insensitivities of adulthood, dread of spleen-filled old age … even the delirious stand-up that splices his poems is tinged with self-deprecating failure.
Most performance poetry has an edge of fury for social ills – callousness, classism, prejudice, stupidity. Luke is extraordinary in that his target is himself.
Luke’s Got A Joke is the most searing character assassination – even in a week of politicians’ expenses revelations – I’ve heard for a long while. He feels it’s the best thing he’s done.
“Here is wit, beauty and unashamed intelligence, in a show which should reap nothing but recommendations.” said
Edinburgh Festivals Magazine in a 5 star review. The audience at the Merlin last Friday agreed, and gave extra applause to Luke & charming support act Molly Naylor - who worried unnecessarily we might judge her for writing about boys - for their 6 hours on the M25 to bring the show to Frome.
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Labels: Luke Wright
It's official: May Madness at Frome Poetry Cafe was "the nipples" - and thankyou Alison for sharing this term of high approbation in a hilarious tale of teen times.
Dianne Penny and Jo Butts delighted the appreciative audience with musings on both May and madness as well as love and life generally, with sixteen other poets & writers contributing to the open mic. Impressively, several pieces had been written especially for this event. Many, like Bristol slammer David Johnson and local bard Phyllis Higgins, made us laugh; others were touching, intriguing, entertaining, lyrical... yeah, it was a great night. The nipples.
Jill (Happy as a Dead Cat) Miller and I went to the inaugural 'Writers' Lounge' at Bristol Old Vic on Thursday. Writers' Room Co-ordinator Sharon Clark had the great idea that as writers tend to feel isolated we should get together for "drinking, talking, and listening to music". Great fun, and good to meet up with writerly friends: screenwriter
David Lassman, Bath bard
Kevan Manwaring, and poet/novelist Rosemary Dun.
Poet James Nash has a new interactive site on Facebook, a kind of poetry party-bag, with songs, snippets and pictures - he's inviting Spring poems which he'll discuss onsite, and you can download his monthly podcast from here too. If you're not a Facebook fan, you can listen to it
here. I have a special interest in the May edition as I'm James's interviewee. We did it via Skype while I was in California, and just listening to it takes me back...
And finally... It's out! The
2009 Frome Festival brochure. Months of meetings interspersed with emails, enquiries, corrections, confusion, celebration, and the usual stuff involved in putting on 25 events in one week, ensuring there's something loosely under the banner of 'Literary' for every taste and age-group, including contests, talks, walks, agent-interviews, poetry performances, and workshops, with every genre covered from picturebook to screenwriting... you get the idea. So get the brochure, and start booking! You won't find Hat Box poets declaiming in the streets or internationally-acclaimed Arabic writers reading over supper in any other Lit. Fest. this year!
Labels: Bristol Old Vic, Frome Festival, Frome Poetry Cafe
"The first thing you must do as a writer is read" is Sarah Duncan's top tip at the inaugural meeting of
Writing Events Bath in New Oriel Hall in Larkhill last Sunday.
Organised by Alex Wilson and Jude Higgins, the event covered fiction both long and short, adult and children's, as well as drama, poetry, and self-publishing, in a fast-paced day with lots of breaks to mingle - and a really good lunch. What else could a writer want? Well, plenty of positive advice, answers to specific questions, and internet resource addresses. Happily all these were provided by the contributing practitioners: novelist
Sarah, YA author
Julia Green, poet
Carrie Etter, short story specialist Alison Clink, publisher
Miles Bailey - and (this blog is not noted for modesty) I did my best too.
"Poetry & a Pint" at the Wine Vaults takes me to Bath again on Monday. Robert Palmer is one of the featured poets, bringing his own quirky performance style to existential words both droll and sombre:
all his battling life he's wanted to trust someone - to give up - to believe...
Bristol's Mayfest has been bursting out all over, giving the new(ish)ly reopened Old Vic a great showcase for its makeover face of accessibility and vibrant modern writing, like
Kellerman, a touring production from
Imitating the Dog. All drama is a journey; this one is five journeys in different time spheres, two of them in a mental institution. It boasts - appropriate use of verb here - "a magnificent two-storey set which incorporates a revolving stage, flying harnesses, moving masks and stunning back and front projections". It was all, as claimed, extraordinary and exciting, but what I enjoyed most was the dark conundrum-laden script.
'Where does it all go, everything that’s ever happened to us?’
‘We’re left with what we remember.’But Harry remembers pasts he never inhabited, and people he never knew. "Perverse, erotic, poetic and grotesque,
Kellerman is a meditation on desire, loss and the structures that bind us to the lives we believe to be real."
Finally - a couple of plugs: May madness at the Poetry Cafe TONIGHT - the posters have become collector's items, thankyou Suzy! - and Luke Wright is at the Merlin on Friday with his new show
A POET'S WORK IS NEVER DONE... rarely begun, in my case. "Gifted social observer and wordsmith" Luke is sandwiching Frome into his national tour betwixt York and Maidenhead, which gives some idea of the truth of the title. If you missed Luke's on C4's "Seven Ages of Love", here's a bite of the real thing.
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Labels: Bristol Old Vic, Frome Poetry Cafe, Luke Wright, Mayfest, Poetry and a Pint, Writing Events Bath
Invasion of the blog-snatchers...
Writer John Baker's new book
Winged with Death is about time and tango and revolution, and is currently enjoying an ingenious extended launch, cyberspace-hopping through blogsites worldwide and collecting appreciative
reviews along the way. Today is my turn to welcome this novel and its enterprising author.
The first thing that impressed me is the fluency of the writer’s voice. The story is narrated by Frederick Boyle, aka Ramon Bolio, who establishes a dual time-zone from the outset. As an older man now living in England, he looks back to the journey of the boy he once was, jumping ship in Uruguay and finding a new name and a new life. His mentor Julio is introduced in a striking pen portrait as
a man of aphorisms, sometimes making sense but more often devoid of context. ‘Middle-class is the definition of criminality’ he would tell me, or ‘I don’t use drugs, my dreams are frightening enough.’ And then we’re back in now, and a new character sidles into the room and onto the page:
an interruption that upsets the flow… It’s this intriguing combination of adventure story and real-time immediacy that for me makes this novel so compelling, with its suggestion of continuing dualism as shadows from the past emerge and reconnect.
I asked John about this notion of threads linking the past to the present, and the unpredictable pattern of the dance; these themes, he feels, emerged as he wrote rather than being catalysts. “In the beginning there was the dream of Montevideo, an obsession with time and the wish to utilize dance as a metaphor. I don't believe I had more than that. The novel was the product of my immersing myself in these three and experimenting with the various ways they might combine.”
John Baker has published 8 novels already but this is the first time he’s gone galactic, as it were, with promotion. Feedback, he says, has been mostly positive, but “the tour has been hard work in a way I never quite imagined - touring, even
virtual touring means actually engaging in a way that my day-to-day working life as a writer shields me from. So there is a sense in which I'm 'whacked' as though I've been on a real road for the past few weeks. On the other hand it has, of course, been exhilarating to feel that kind of support that only can come from people who are engaged in the same struggle as oneself, either as writers or as readers.”
John picked his hosts from the
links of literary blogs on his own blog. “Some of them run popular sites with relatively large followings, others are little more than personal blogs. I wanted the book to find itself in as many various environments as possible. This seems to me to be the destiny of a book.”
You can read the first chapter
here. Tell John what you think, and let me know what you think of this creative new notion of host- blogging.
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Labels: John Baker, virtual tour, Winged with Death
Lord Hamlet is mad.
But what does that mean?The provocative production at Frome’s Merlin theatre tonight explored this question like peeling skins from a schizoid onion. The players become characters, characters players, with even the observing audience implicated in the eyes of the paranoid prince. Directed with exuberant bravado by Ben Macfadyen, this innovative production enhances menace through masks, hi-impact physicality, dance, and even disturbing humour- as when Hamlet turns ventriloquist with the limp body of Polonius. In a script that impressively holds the emotional story while playing hideandseek with the best-known speeches, the famous soliloquy is saved for the finale.
Is he even mad at all? Or are all these occurrences merely figments of his imagination? Who is in control? ask the programme notes, which explain the brief was to produce 'an anagram of Hamlet'.
At the helm is an A-level examination piece for the seven young people who took part; the examiner was seated among the awestruck audience crowded onstage around the action and the prince’s line ‘Madam, how like you this play?’ was addressed with ingenuous charm towards her. I hope the lady's marking did not protest too much.
Labels: Hamlet
So I arrive home to a blossomy English Mayday and the excellent
news that Carol Ann Duffy is our new Poet Laureate. She says she doesn't want the pay but will take the butt of sack upfront, please. That's 600 bottles, should be a good celebration party up there in 'leafy Manchester suburb of West Didsbury' where, surprisingly, this Scots working class poet now lives.
A month's worth of post takes a while to dispose of, mostly in the recycling bin, but it's nice to hear my first novel
Frozen Summer is being reprinted again in the Netherlands. Googling the Dutch edition, I found this intriguing plot summary:
Forgotten Summer of Crys Morrison
A fall Kirsty is 10 years from her memory lost.
Although it does its best to its past back to get
Kirsty feels in her heart still twenty student she once was.
If the first is lost gradually reminders are rising to the surface,
Kirsty is also very relieved. But the image that looms up
as more loose puzzle pieces fall into place,
does it realize that amnesia may be preferable to the truth...
The new comedy drama
Boy Meets Girl - which coincidentally is also based on trauma-created character confusion - was reviewed enthusiastically by Times online. "...really good. ITV1 has, almost unprecedentedly, given a total newcomer — the writer David Allison — three hour-long episodes." In fact the writer David Allison had a 10-year scriptwriting apprenticeship, according to his interview with
Screenwriting Goldmine. This site is a great resource for any writer interested in the meeja, by the way, as you can sign up for a free newsletter which is genuinely useful and topical. Asked how he sold this rather cheesey concept, David is frank: Knowing people - like Head of Productions - helps. "I was going to have lunch with him and I was panicking, and I saw a friend who'd seen this awful film about a man trapped inside a woman's body and it was really naff. I thought, is there a gender story here that's not a cliché? And I pitched up. If Id been just someone off the street I don't think he'd have listened, but I knew him."
(Martin Freeman plays Danny/Veronica, which helps too.) The bit that's 'not a cliché' is the notion that personality, not gender, is what shapes people. "If you try and sit down and write about things that matter to you, like the class divide, its really dull and boring. You need a vehicle, and then it takes off, so if there's something that you're interested in, go for it. You should never pitch what you think people want - it never works because you're not as passionate about those things."
And finally: the Writer's Blog, initially seen as the shell-suit of the publishing fashion world, has apparently found its Pride. The May issue of
Writing Magazine features blogging as one of five key trends for success - a chance to interact in a more private-conversational way as well as a tool for self-promotion. I use mine as a kind of exercise in right-brain/left-brain dovetailing - what songwriter Bob Peterson calls negotiating between the engineer and the muse. Recently I've veered to the musey, so I'm balancing out with a few more oily rags this week.
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Labels: Boy meets Girl, Carol Ann Duffy
And so it's farewell Half Moon Bay. I've had my last long walks beside the windswept sands & roaring rolling waves, with carpets of bright iceplant and cedars silhouetted against that impossible cobalt sky, my final rock scramble with only pelicans and egrets sharing Moss Beach with me. No more visits to the exciting city-ness of San Francisco and Santa Cruz.
No more maple porridge & Peruvian coffee then back to my laptop for my morning stint of writing, with the chickens peering in through my window. California I'm missing you already. Thanks Mo, Anja, Kaitlyn, Erin, for taking me into your home, and thanks to everyone who made this trip such a privilege and a pleasure.
So, on a scale of 1 to 10, how much did I enjoy my month in California?
I'd give it a straight 12.
After dreamy days of mostly meandering and writing, the end of my stay suddenly starts to bustle with spoken word.
Bazaar Cafe on the north side of San Francisco has an Open Mic Night and Mo and I were lucky to both get spots and an appreciative audience. Then I have Skype interview with the very lovely
James Nash for podcast out next Friday, then a spot at Cafe Lucca and then on Sunday an interview for KZSC Santa Cruz radio with Kevin Spitzer on his early morning
Conciliation Sunday programme. The trip to Santa Cruz, with its sealions, superb surfing beach and buzzy Boardwalk, turns out to be the icing on the sumptuous cake of my California trip - especially the ride up the coast on the back of Kevin's big deep-throaty black BMW.
As well as being a radio presenter with an easy laid-back charm, Kevin is a poet and philosophical entrepreneur, using his experience of native American culture within the bigger picture of his experience of world travels and life generally to create a theory of 'Transformative Re-frames'.
We finish our conversations over breakfast at Aldos down by Santa Cruz harbour, and then take Kevin's dog Wing for a walk down to the lighthouse, watching pelicans preening and cormorants diving in the bay.
Labels: Cafe Lucca, California, Half Moon Bay, KZSC, Santa Cruz
Bulletin 4 from Half Moon Bay...
We've had a couple of mornings of sea fog. It's like a pot of paint-water has been spilled across the vivid coastline colours, thick white tendrils unfurling dramatically into the cornflower blue sky. Undeterred surfers loom faintly like a ghost army of silkies. Now we're back to the familiar cloudlessness, with temperatures in the high 30s. Sitting with a café freddo in a Mezzaluna afternoon under this improbably blue sky, I'm thinking about making a poem about El Granada in April & start to make a list:
Long surfing waves surging endlessly for miles,
Wind sweeping peachy sands impeccably smooth,
Ice plants, creamy & plum pink, smothering the dunes,
Cedars twisting into sculptures, eucalyptus rustling.
Sandpipers paddling, cormorants grooming,
Garboesque seals lounging on outcrop rocks,
Crabs scuttling, lizards... being small and lizardy.
Ginger barking me into playing ball on the lawn,
Kaitlyn puzzling over the objective correlative,
Sowing onions with Anja, Mo's songs, Mahi-mahi taco at the Flying Fish Grill...
The poetry is the list,
The being here is bliss.
California seems very far away from home (5253 miles, to a crow with stamina) but Dee Allen's poem - see link in last post - is grimly close to the G20 violence. Time difference means I'm just about to set off on another sunny walk while it's midnight in the UK and I have Rob da Bank on as I finish my laptop work stint for the day. He plays a
Dop track I can't find on Youtube but it's this Bukowski poem:
The Genius of the Crowd.
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Labels: California, Half Moon Bay
To encourage my aim of walking every coastal path in striking distance, Mo took me to his building project above the cliffs at Moss Beach and loosed me there like a homing pigeon, except without wings and -more significantly- a sense of direction. He pointed me south and said 'Remember the tide's coming in' and I set off, scuttling like a Purple Shore-crab across the boulders along the rim of the ocean.
I know the type of crab because my route took me through the Fitzgerald Marine Reserve,
'one of the most diverse regions in California' according to the pictureboard. Volcanic action has shaped the rocks into huge hoops which are a haven for all kinds of wild life: while I was focusing on some comatose seals about thirty pelicans came flapping slowly past.
"Seals don't hate us, honey, they just want to be left alone" a woman was consoling her child.
Keeping the Pacific on my right and the skyline hills on my left for about 3 hours brings me back to the harbour where I can watch the windsurfers riding the long waves with a gigantic fig icecream. Me, not the surfers. They need their hands free.
The Haight is the hippy area of San Francisco, a bit like Glastonbury but harder-edgy and with more sunshine. Mo and I had a mooch around the coffee bars and a browse in Amoeba music shop and then headed for Diamond Dave's open mic night.
Diamond Dave boasts the longest running poetry cafe in San Francisco. "On that street some call Haight and some call Love, I turned 30 in that golden summer of '67" he tells us, and introduces us to the eclectic audience: "We have a representative of the British and Irish working class, coming together to prove that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, isn't that beautiful?" Guest of the night was a self-styled beat in Ugg boots nostalgic for the murk of his drug days, but better stuff came from the floor readers, a few similarly self-indulgent but some sharp and topical.
Highlight was Dee Allen whose poem
Face Down moved the agenda from rainbow-tinted nostalgia to powerful political protest at the recent killing of Oscar Grant by two Bay Area Rapid Transit police officers.
And I'm now again lost for words. Here's a few more images:
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, San Francisco
Vegetable connoisseurs may be fascinated to know this region boasts the title 'artichoke capital of the world'. Duartes restaurant, at nearby Pescadero, has made a sturdy reputation by supplying an enterprising range of artichoke-based dishes to hungry or curious visitors.
I was both, as we'd been walking the cliffs to watch basking seals and soaring cormorants, and the artichoke ratatouille was delicious. Deep twilight as we drove home, a rim of mystical pink separating silvering sea from darkening sky.
After ten days' nomadic exploration, I've become a connoisseur of cafe coffee. Discounting Starbucks, obviously, I've sampled Peet's (the gold standard, according to "zealous customers known as Peetniks"), Sam's (plentiful & free with breakfast), Raman's, New Leaf, and I can tell you with confidence that Mezzaluna down by the harbour wins by a Half Moon Mile. For one thing, it's served in a real cup, and actually served too, so you don't feel like a mere middleman on the disposable beaker's journey to the bin. And they make the best Americano in the Bay. I reported my findings to Mo and he said "Well they would, they're Italian."
Other discoveries:
- Blackbirds here sport scarlet epaulettes.
- PAM means jack of clubs. 'Tis in the Scrabble dictionary, so 'tmust be so.
- Huge full moon, Rain Moon, blazing like a magic lantern above the chicken shack outside my window.
Two open-mic events - my favourite was Cameron's English Pub - and a visit to the theatre.
The Coastal Repertory Theatre is a pleasant purpose-built venue - it’s where I saw Godot last year (in fact Mo was recognised and hailed for his ‘phenominal’ Pozzo) - with a very long stage. For their production of Sam Shepard’s
True West the director’s decision to use the length worked against the sense of intrusion and family claustrophobia in this story of a screenwriter challenged by the arrival of his drifter brother.
This play has been hailed as a masterpiece, simultaneously "clear, funny, naturalistic, opaque, terrifying, surrealistic", as a metaphor for "the two sides of the American present: one sophisticated, cultured, ambitious, and successful; the other alienated and outcast, raw, wild, violent... each is the double of the other, emphasizing that despite the American belief in starting anew, the past is never over but continues to intrude into the present." (Or as the review in the local paper put it: "Bottom line: As tough as things are, we can still laugh. And, after all, there’s always someone worse off.")
It's a strong theme, however you interpret it, and whether or not it's significant that the dramatist's intelligent screenplay is trounced by the more commercial pitch of his degenerate sibling, but for me the real drama is in the interaction of the brothers and the play didn’t need appearances from either the producer or the mother. Sam Shepard himself says it's not intended as "symbolic or metaphorical or any of that stuff. I just wanted to give a taste of what it feels like to be two-sided. It's a real thing, double nature. I think we're split in a much more devastating way than psychology can ever reveal."
Still on the subject of theatre: "I want to be genuinely shocked. I want plays that shine a light into the darkest recesses of the human soul, that lead the audience on a journey that leaves us breathless and invigorated even if we've been terrified and deeply shaken by what we've seen. And while I'm not asking our current playwrights to be as great as Shakespeare or Euripides, I am asking them to remember that those are the heroes of the tradition in which they work."
Louise Kennedy reviews for Boston, but I found her rant at the current state of theatre in
THE WEEK over my breakfast coffee, picked out as a
Best Column. Playwrights, she says, shouldn't attempt to compete with the 'heightened version of reality' of films and television. "In moving away from the essence of drama - that is, the subtle and expert use of language and carefully developed action to illuminate human life - toward thrill-seeking and adrenaline jolts, playwrights give up their own most precious gifts.
And the audience? Jaded by the unnatural shocks of electronic entertainment, we remain unmoved by its awkward imitators, and hungry for the real, visceral, cathartic thrills that true theater can provide."
On Saturday I varied my coastal path route by walking along the beach, which for most of its two-and-a-half miles was disconcertingly deserted for a holiday weekend apart from clusters of birds, possibly having a Hitchcock conference. I started thinking about all the warning signs: HAZARDOUS WAVE CONDITIONS EXIST EVEN ON CALM DAYS - WAVES CAN SWEEP PEOPLE INTO THE OCEAN before eventually reaching civilisation in the form of windsurfers, a scramble-up-able cliff, and a cafe.
And now it's Easter Sunday, the chocolate bunnies are risen, and I am unbelievably nearly halfway through my stay in paradise... must find a wicked apple before I go.
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Sam Shepard, True West
April in California... I loved it here in Autumn so I'm back for a month to write and to walk. The writing's up to me; for walk routes, my friend & host Mo has drawn me a sketch map of El Granada and its environs. We're about 400 yards from the Pacific here, with a coastal path all around Half Moon Bay. The snag is Highway 1, which also hugs the coastline, lies between me and the sea.
Mo's map shows two options: I can take the back roads to the harbour, where traffic lights allow the (nippy) pedestrian a chance to dash across the 6 lanes of ceaseless traffic, or I can creep through the (nearly dry) drain under the road at El Granada.
And then I have the freedom to walk for miles with barely a sound but birdsong and the rolling breakers. And the wind - this wind would skin a goat, Mo warned me before I came, but the sun is strong and the sky so immensely high, so densely blue. I see only a few other people on these paths, but they greet me like they've been recruited by some Californian 'Let's make visitors feel cherished!' campaign, offering smiles, handshakes, even names.
After a week of retreatful days & early nights I went along with Mo to a music evening - a gentle event but pleasant. I can't play guitar or sing so I offered a couple of me pomes.
Labels: California
An idyllic weekend staying with college-days friends, chewing the fat and the Mothers Day chox and doing a lot of walking. We went to Grantchester, famously the haunt of Rupert Brooke, where the orchard is now a hugely popular cafe so there is indeed honey still for tea. You can also pick up a free booklets about the 'Grantchester Group' which apparently comprised Forster, Russell, Keynes, Virginia Woolf and Wittgenstein as well as the soldier poet. Alongside photos & poems there are intriguing quotes, like Keynes on camping
: don't make one nearly so ill as one would suppose, Woolf on Forster:
I always feel him shrinking sensitively from me, and Russell on Wittgenstein:
he would never have noticed such small matters as bursting shells when he was thinking about logic. There's a little museum too, with pictures of Brooke's grave and statue on Skyros which made me nostalgic for the those Greek skies. Here's the
yet unacademic stream, along the river walk to Cambridge.
"We don't care if it's by a man or a woman or a dog, all we care about is the story" is what women's magazine editors say, according to Alison Clink's encouraging talk at the
Bath Writers Workshop where she and I were both guests on Wednesday. We were warmly welcomed by hosts Kevan Manwaring and David Lassman, and found the writers of Bath a friendly and participative audience. No canine members, I'm glad to say.
A retrospective footnote this week: positive feedback on
Chimes of Freedom in the local paper (read the review
here soon) and from our illustrious lead reader, who enjoyed the ‘radical’ edge in Frome - and thanks, Sharon, for the positive vibe on your
blog!
It's appropriate maybe I discover 70s cult classic
Harold and Maude this week. Elderly Maude has a sound philosophy of life - "Everyone has a right to make an arse out of themselves" - and a catchy theme song
if you want to sing out, sing out and when young Harold gives her 'the nicest gift anyone has given me in a long time' she throws it into the San Francisco Bay saying blithely "That way, I'll always know where it is."
Which brings me nicely to my own departure, in 2 days time, for a month in California. Not that I plan to sling anything in the bay - in fact I'm not really sure what I plan to do. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Labels: Bath Writers Workshop, Grantchester
A varied week.
On Wednesday Caleb & I recreated our collaborative sonnet
Je M'aime at the film studio for the Frome Festival Cabaret, once Howard has edited in the cello sequence and added his own animational flair.
(Loo, lippy, and narcissistic poses are integral to the poem; paper bag was Caleb's idea.)
And on Thursday a complete contrast in mood:
Because the poet is the only person
who never forgets
the meaning of freedom(Yandamiro Restano, from a Cuban prison, 1993)
Chimes of Freedom at the Merlin, based on readings from persecuted writers around the world, in support of
Pen.
Ten local writers and artists reading poems, letters, and speeches from Euripedes to Pinter, all passionately insisting on the right to free speech.
Booker judge Victoria Glendinning, who is among her other literary roles the vice-president of English Pen, introduced the evening and read a moving anti-war speech from dissident Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. Stories of imprisonment, torture, exile -
Come and see the blood in the streets, Pablo Neruda challenged the world after the murder of Lorca. Powerful stuff and inevitably dark - but with a dazzling lift after the break from musical performances by six of the Amnesty Youth Group, as stunningly talented as they were self-assured.
And finally: Andrew Motion
speaks out at the end of his 10-year tenure as Poet Laureate to berate journalists who 'turn poetry into a kind of Aunt Sally by making it look ridiculous and out of touch'. Poetry is, he says, 'a fundamental requirement of the human spirit, as natural and necessary as breathing.'
Words worth writing, and perhaps even worth waiting ten years for.
And who's next for the poison chalice? Wendy Cope says the post is ridiculous and should be axed, but Roger McGough demurs: "It's a rather nice tradition to have, and anything that gets poetry mentioned is fine by me - it can put a lot of pressure on a poet, but if you can't handle it, don't take it on." So, Luke Wright, Poet Laureate... Why not?
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Labels: Chimes of Freedom, je m'aime, PEN
There’s an out-of-season indolence along the sea front at Shanklin, souvenir shops still shut, entry to the lovely Chine area locked and the cliff-top lift closed till official holiday time begins. None of this detracts from the Isle of Wight's timewarp charm, which starts with the London tube-train waiting at the ferry point to transport the visitor on a rattling journey of nostalgia.
As Yannis our host at The Grange says: 'Here you are a time-traveller. You walk down the street and you walk into the 1950s.'
My last
Find Your Voice weekend here was a year ago - the 2008
Grangewriters had their reunion while I was back on the island - and though the group was great the weather was not. This time both were fab. Best bits: golden gorse and daffodils, red squirrels playing tag in the pines, spring notes of birdsong, and above all supportive friendly company and wonderful writing, brave, quirky, inventive & funny. For a sample - and a lush seascape image - see
Jay's blog where the 'recipe for Shanklin' says it all.
Regular readers - don't laugh, there are some - of this blog may recall my comments on the revival of William Saroyan's play
The Time of Your Life last December. I talked about an 'unsatisfying ending' but I wasn't nearly so disparaging as one reviewer of the original London production, 63 years ago this month. "The high spot of the evening was the incursion of an anonymous drunk. For this no marks can be allowed to the author" his summary concluded, adding dryly: "Certainly a play to be seen; one could hardly read it."
It's a voice I remember well. Regular readers of this blog will have to delve the archives a bit to realise why this review struck such a chord with me, as it was back in August last year I wrote "My father was a drama critic and he had a typewriter that must have been twinned with a lemon grater..." Yes, my regular and irregular friends, the H.G.M. at the end of this and several other pieces in
Theatre World magazine in March 1946 was himself. My father, younger than I ever knew him but clearly no less acidic.
I owe this emotional reunion to the lost world of my London childhood to a pile of just-post-war issues of this once-premier theatrical magazine, dug out of my dramaturgic friend's attic. "I thought you might like to see these" he said, and indeed I did.
Theatre World was heavy on black-and-white photos featuring kohl eyepencil and intense expression, and featured photo-stories of the major productions rather as
The Sun uses graphic illustrations on their problem page.
HG continued to review in his own distinctive, often lugubrious, style until the late 70s, and was particularly proud of his appraisal of
The Mousetrap: "I give it a week." His review of the 1946 Stratford-upon-Avon Festival concludes: "There were many children in the audience and from them the loudest applause followed the murder of Macduff's son and his mother's screams as she is strangled. Such are these times."
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Labels: The Grange, Theatre World
Black comedy hour again...
Blavatsky's Tower (at the Alma Tavern Theatre till March 21st) shows Sartre got it wrong: Hell is not other people, Hell is an agoraphobic family incarcerated in the top flat of a tower block with a crazy father who is the architect of this cultural monument to dysfunctionality. Gaudi built his cathedral high so the angels could reach it easily but angels aren't so easily lured here. Even the doctor who staggers up fifteen flights with an armchair can't save a trio who have normalised incest and incineration of their father's corpse in the roof garden. "We used his copy of Paradise Lost to start the blaze." And the comedy comes in... where exactly? Oddly enough, quite a lot, in Moira Buffini's script and in the actors' interpretations of this Chekhovian family dynamic, where the 'crushed' world below the high-rise is their own unattainable Moscow. Oliver Millingham as the patricidal son is especially moving.
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Labels: Alma Tavern
Mardi Gras night at Frome Poetry Cafe: a dash of razz-ma-tazz, a score of performers, and a Garden Cafe-ful of enthusiastic audience. The theme of celebration enjoyed wide interpretations, from Stephen Ledbury's ode to Shepton Mallet carnival to John Payne's charming Quantocks bestiary, from Bev's Salvadorian story to Lucy Howlett's fish-eye view of fairground life.
James Stokoe brought us Euridice and Rose Flint evoked Venus: "If love isn't around a Mardi Gras, I don't know where she'll be." A fantastic range of delightful reads and performances.
Actor Cameron Stewart found his grandfather a hard act to follow, so instead he's chosen to take that act around the country as a one-man show called
'My Grandfather's Great War'. The grandfather is Captain Alexander Stewart who fought in the three major assaults of the first world war with extraordinary heroism and survived to tell the tale in a handwritten diary forming the basis for this performance, which reached the Ustinov in Bath last week. The diaries have much of the grim humour of
Blackadder Goes Forth, including their own genuine General Melchett who agrees one particular mission is deathly lunacy but adds that it's the Brigadier's order, so "do your best, eh?". An amazing record of a man of exemplary moral qualities, but for me the most powerfully affecting words were the grandson's own as he ends his proud and passionate tribute: "I'm confused. All war is abomination. What the devil did you think you were doing, running around in the mud slaughtering each other?"
Change of pace again on Saturday, with the launch of the
Concertina Books weekend event at Widcombe Studios in Bath. Ruralist writer Peter Please is making a stand against the mass production of books, creating instead something 'quirky and individual' which combines old and new technologies. He has the support of John Moat, co-founder of the Arvon foundation, and several luminously talented writers and artists who contributed words and images to the project. There were readings too, some gentle, some charismatic; the whole evening a reminder that prim Bath can do bohemian, delightfully, too.
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Labels: Concertina Books, Mardi Gras, My Grandfather's Great War
I'm disconcerted to find myself in agreement with Salman Rushdie on the Slumdog subject - although he is considerably more irascible about this 'banal fluff.. slum tourism', commenting in the Guardian: 'To watch your home town's story being told in this comically absurd, tawdry fashion is, finally, to grow annoyed.'
Back in Bristol, Polly Teale from
Shared Experience, was at Bristol Old Vic to reveal 'how to weave a more physical approach into the building of character' to sixteen keen would-be playwrights. Hurtling around with chairs and intensive text analysis combined to confirm: objectives and obstacles are the essence of drama. "A good scene can be quite spare, a lot of it will come from the playing of it."
Bath Literature Festival boasts 'debate discovery passion and inspiration' and like all good festivals there's far too much to do. I went to hear Debby Holt, Sarah Duncan, and Robyn Sisman discuss the place - & status - of romance, an entertaining debate which proved a point made by Robyn: the novels may be light but that doesn't mean they're easy to write, despite the literary prejudice against romantic comedy. As Sarah said: women's issues are no less valuable than man-genres like Goth the Impaler. But can the complexities of a relationship be conveyed in a novel designed to entertain? asks chair Caroline Kington. Debby says an emphatic 'Yes - you can make a point more effectively in a funny way." I agree, and I wish I could remember who said
Humour tells the truth, but faster. 
Writer and publisher Diana Cambridge has a neat take on relationships too: they're our way of warding off death, she suggests, by making life dangerous and dynamic. We met for long nibbly lunch at Cafe Rouge, and later I was back in the Guildhall ready to be dazzled by the heavyweight talents of literary award-winners Helen Dunmore, Jane Gardam, and Rose Tremain. The brochure blurb predicted converse on
writing about love and yearning, youth and old age, loneliness, sex and exile. Irresistible. In the event they discussed form, research, and something defined, somewhat pompously, as 'the writerly frame of mind'. Perhaps it's a problem of format. Mathematically, a trio of writers talking should be three times as interesting a solo subject in the chair, but actually this triple division of topic feels superficial even in a heavy-going event like this. Paradoxically the chick-lit authors in the morning event achieved interactive discussion more successfully to create a sense of reciprocal interest. Or maybe it was the chandeliers in the great hall upstaging all below.
And finally... a word & image miscellany from here, there, and beyond:
"It's fun and it's difficult but that's the combination that, sometimes, gets you through" - Larry from U2 on making music. True of writing & life too.
"It's the best rush I've ever had and I'm utterly, hopelessly, addicted to it" - T.C.Boyle on writing. He's allegedly done 'vandalism, alcohol, drugs, maniacal driving, and the writings of Kerouac' so he should know.
LET DE MAN SPEAK, LET DE MAN BE HERD - Islamic hiphop site.
(Heartfelt echo is from a shopfront in Frome.)
"Can written language ever capture and recreate spoken language, or is it a place where the book is a lesser place than the tongue and the ear?"
Ian McMillan's piece in
The Reader is about writing in dialect, but i think it's a good question for every writer.
'In all Fairhurst's work there is a powerful human presence through actions, intervention, emotion and humour.'
Arnolfini guide to the Angus Fairhurst exhibition, on till the end of the month.
One of the first things you learn as a writer is that you write what you can, not what you want. - Gabriel Garcia Marquez, quoted by Debby.
Crysse finds her niche in the temple of Diana at Stourhead.
Labels: Bath Literary Festival, Shared Experience
Emerging blinking into the sunlight from the nightlights of Bristol's theatreland, I find Bedminster shops are full of.... theatre.
Trading Local is a Show of Strength initiative, using 19 shops to stage 5-minute monologues based on their own location and trade - each one repeated 3 times, so by scampering up & down North Street an ardent audient could catch them all. I didn't manage that, but the ones I saw were great: among them
Bernard the table lamenting his lot at the antique shop (Oliver Millingham gave great voice to Matthew Oven's tale from beneath candlewick drapings)
Tracy Wall's recreation of the
Poet Butcher, a real-life character who sold doggerel along with faggots in the 19th Century, and Caleb Parkin's
Units of Memory at Compuwave which took a poignant look at "life broken down into its componant parts." And I loved the reluctant tattoee musing on her graphic options, noting the sign on the door:
"No Children, No Drunks - I should think that just about rules out anyone who wants to come in." Satiric comedy may seem easy; evoking warmth rather than a patronised stereotype isn't, but writer Joe Hobbs & performer Kim Hick succeeded.
And as
Slumdog Millionnaire scoops the ultimate award on Oscar night, my question is this: how can brutality & sentimentalism emerge as 'the feel-good movie of the decade'? Fabulous soundtrack I agree, with brilliant camera work, and great montage ending, but the storyline was thin as the characterisation and the fairytale is embedded in realism as bloody as the rags on the eyesockets of the blinded beggar boy.
It's complex, I know. I wouldn't begrudge director Danny Boyle his Tigger-bouncing moment of glory or Simon Beaufoy his credit for the screenplay, but you have to search to find the name of the original writer: Vikas Swarup. And over in India there are riots over the 'humiliating' term in the title.
But is it the
dog or the
slum that's the problem? A perspective from an Indian journalist in
NYTimes insists that
Its depiction as a slum does little justice to the reality of Dharavi... (which is) safer than most American cities. The crowd is efficiently absorbed by the thousands of tiny streets branching off bustling commercial arteries. Also, you won’t be chased by beggars or see hopeless people loitering — Dharavi is probably the most active and lively part of an incredibly industrious city. People have learned to respond in creative ways to the indifference of the state — including having set up a highly functional recycling industry that serves the whole city. Promoting prejudice, creating misinformation - even
fear of reigniting the violence against Muslims of 1992 so graphically depicted in the film.... so although the title itself is merely a slur from the bad-cop who turned good-cop, objections are not as simple as one online comment seems to think: "Tough Shit. They don’t have any money to see it anyway."
Censorship is also the theme of
Chimes of Freedom, a Spoken Word event at the Merlin on March 19th featuring poems and prose by writers across the world who lacked - and lack - the luxury we see as our right: 'Freedom of Speech.' It's on behalf of
PEN, and former president Victoria Glendinning is joining the lineup of local writers who'll be reading. If you're in the area, come along.
Labels: PEN, Show of Strength, Slum Dog, Trading Local
A five-star revue from Venue for
On the Edge: "What characterises all four plays is efficient writing, crisp direction, and therapeutic humour... Remedy for winter blues available now at the Alma Tavern." And the audience feedback is great too. (It's all on the
Stepping Out website, click on the left-hand boxes.) Makes me come over all Kate Winslet. Other purr-making comments from Bristol
online listings ".. each story involving wonderfully unique storylines, all delivered with unwavering energy, this is an intriguing and satisfying way to contemplate serious issues, provoking laughter throughout a week of almost nightly sell-out performances."
And a huge thanks to my friends - more than 30 of you - who swelled the audience, and the even-more who sent good wishes when there were no tickets left.
Moving south, and back in time...
Road Hill House was the scene of the most sensational murder case of the 19th Century, and arguably responsible for the development of crime fiction as the genre we know today, with a wily sleuth uncovering secrets & lies from tiny clues and psychological tells. The building was renamed Langham House, and local spelling has changed to Rode, but it's the village I used as setting for my first novel
Frozen Summer, so I found Kate Summerscale's account of
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher particularly fascinating. "The dizzying expansion of the press in the1850s prompted worries that readers might be corrupted by the sex and violence in newspaper articles" she explains: "The new journalists shared much with the detectives; they were seen alternately as crusaders for the truth and sleazy voyeurs.” Freud recognised that therapy was psychic detection: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent he chatters with his fingertips; betrayal oozes out of him at every pore.”
Still a few months before the 2009 Frome Festival brochure is out, but 2008's Short Story winners and details of this year's competition are now on the
Festival website. Watch, as they say, this space.
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Labels: On the Edge
Bristol Evening Post has done us proud with their
Crackerjack review of
On The Edge. "...barrowloads of deft writing, some absolutely lovely comic acting and a hit of thought-provoking conundrums. Chock-full of bright ideas, a tight group of actors and a slick series of sets manage to punch far above their weight... The voracious appetite among Bristolians for good new playwrights continues to be well fed."
My favourite bit is being nominated for a medal for describing baklava as “a hamster drowned in honey”. Thanks, Sophie Lomax - and your notion of a 15-minute play as "theatrical espresso" deserves a mention in despatches too.
Reading Matters on BBC4 set out to prove that words can literally electrify us, and reading about an act creates the same brain response as doing it. Science writer Rita Carter led us through this mental maze in a blue pashmino and Tory hairdo looking like she was off for a bridge night rather than an MEG scan. Our brain, she explains, was never designed for reading or writing. It remoulds itself, like a lego truck remade into a tractor, combining the oral linguistic function with the ability to distinguish between prey & predator in order to create a new ability: distinguishing between symbols & interpreting them as language. Hence empathy. It was all very convincing. Use it or lose it, said Rita, because your brain is still on the move.
And speaking of empathy, I've been meaning to say something about
Being Human (TV, BBC3) because it has more interesting stories about half-lives than smiting, rending, and shooting them to bits. Humanity, not demonising, is what the world needs now... and it's better scripted and funnier than Demons too. I'm getting very fond of the characters: Annie the ghost with self-esteem issues, George the rueful werewolf and gorgeous Mitchell the vegetarian vampire. ( Mitchell's
prequel is a neat story in its own right.)
Annie's a spectre after my own heart: last week, determining to find out why she's remained trapped in a shared house in Bristol since her demise, she announced "I don't know how, but I'm pretty sure it will involve some highlighter pens and a large pad of paper." George's new thing is dating: "We need some ground rules about guests," he tells Mitchell: "- like, don't kill them."
And there's lots of love and sex and death too, what else do you need for a Sunday night sit-com?
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Labels: Being Human, On the Edge, Reading Matters
The snow brought Frome not so much to a standstill as a slide. The main road was briefly closed, with cars abandoned at odd angles or, more ominously, slipping backwards down the hill with horn on full alert. Police advice not to travel seemed a good call, so reluctantly I missed the final rehearsals of the
On the Edge plays - but the thaw came just in time for Sunday night's
Love Cafe in Bath.
Enterprising organisers Sue Boyle and Caleb Parkin had created a scripted evening which survived the weather warnings with compliant readers standing in for absentee poets. "I think we've got the aggressive butterfly" said Sue, doing the roll call, "do we have the melancholy waitress?" We did, and all the humour and pathos you'd expect from the night's theme.
'Je m'aime' was an email sonnet collaboration between Caleb and me, performed by Arabella Butler and Paul Hurley with Caleb on cello - all I contributed on the night was some Jane Birkinesque passionate gasping. Great fun - check it out on Youtube
here.
Still on things lyrical, the next
Frome Poetry Cafe is on March 4th, with a theme of celebration. Just because it's been a long winter.
From stage to page: Diana Athill’s memoir
Somewhere Towards The End, recipient of the Costa award for biography. The Daily Mail published an
extract focusing on her sex life, apparently with much the same view as Samuel Johnson had of women expressing opinions: "like a dog's walking on his hind legs: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all."
“The woman who worked her way through the Kama Sutra in her sixties – and at 91 refuses to worry about death - reveals how to grow old disgracefully” marvelled the Mail header, adding as further headline tasters
The delights of late-flowering lust and
Wear what you damn well like. 
The DM has never been bothered by tedious constraints like consistency and was soon back on ageist form with an acid comment on 75-year old Joan Collins posing in
Hello: "Hardly conventional for a pensioner."
Guardian columnist Michele Hanson responded tersely: "And what is a
conventional pensioner meant to wear? Maroon, or navy, or beige... tracksuit bottoms with elasticated waists, a sure sign that your sex life is no more.. but then none of that matters, when one is a "pensioner". As Michele's rant points out, a pensioner can be anyone from around 60 to over 100. "That's people with up to 40 years between them, all lumped together... No one would expect a five-year-old and a 45-year-old to wear the same frock."
All true. But I wish I was enjoying the old lady's memoir more. It seems sad that a woman who was once a courageously unconventional thinker now muses on misapplied lipstick and Max Factor facecream. It's unpretentious and honest, and the affectionate side of her bohemianism is a delight, but was it really the most interesting memoir the Costa board received? Or is this an example of what Marlene Dietrich called the Deathbed award: doled out indulgently and with a fine sprinkling of cynicism.
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Diana Athill
The annual Salon for affiliated artists of the Merlin theatre coincided with the heaviest snow seen in the southwest for 18 years, a fact of special significance as our venue was the Bath Arms, a charmingly eccentric hostelry on the Longleat estate... delightful for rambling in the forest but disconcerting when the track to the main road glazed into a skating rink.
We talked, among other associated artistic things, of the influence of social networking filters on modes of learning. By coincidence or zeitgeist, I'd been listening last week to Rupert Sheldrake on the radio propounding something similar with reference to the whole of nature. Not that crystals or creatures have social networking sites, but that they evolve, as we do, through collective memory. 'The laws of nature didn't spring into being fully formed at the moment of the Big Bang, like a kind of cosmic Napoleonic code,' he says: 'Through morphic resonance, the patterns of activity in self-organizing systems are influenced by similar patterns in the past, giving each species a collective memory.' So they're not actually laws, just habits. Sheldrake's classic
A New Science of life was tagged by one reviewer "the best candidate for burning there has been for many years" when first published, which brings me neatly on to censorship and Jaqueline Wilson.
Yes, amazingly, the Children's Laureate and Queen-Mum of young fiction faced removal from the shelves of Asda until her publishers agreed to change the word 'twat' to 'twit' in her new book
My Sister Jodie. Over 150,000 copies were already sold, apparently, before 3 complaints came to light. Who are these prits, winkers, and siddoes, one wonders.
Back
On the Edge, rehearsals are increasingly fascinating. On Wednesday we were in the tiny Upstairs Theatre at the Lansdown, snow whirling outside, and I quizzed Ollie about how to become a character - or in his case two characters in the same scene, which needs different-coloured highlighters for a start. He learns his lines as a monologue because, he says sensibly, he wouldn't know what other people are going to say. His process is to decide what the character wants, what's stopping him, and what would happen if he can't get it. When he's got these intentions, he works line by line to decide emotional action. Thrilling to watch the drama emerging from its script chrysalis -
Venue magazine has previewed our production and tagged it as their Choice in the listing, but there's more snow forecast for the first night...
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Labels: Jaqueline Wilson, Merlin Theatre, Oliver Millingham, Rupert Sheldrake, Upstairs at the Lansdown
Chris Loveless, founder/director of
Fallen Angel Theatre Company, says black comedy is his favourite kind of drama. Which is great, because he's directing my play
Thursday Coma and I've so enjoyed watching him and the actors work on "making the invisible visible" - including the humour lurking, I hope, in the darkness.
"What's the intention in that line?" he asks, as we sit round the table deconstructing my script over tea and Oliver Millingham's chocolate brownies, until I'm really not sure any more and my words start to look like soldier ants.
Challenging, and immensely exciting.
Oh What A Performance! was the typically quirky title Dave Angus chose for his monthly poetry event in St James Vaults in Bath. Dave, who so sadly died last month, was a droll performer as well as - in his own words - a militant atheist, so it was appropriate that the poetic community celebrated him with song, sonnet, and story in a memorial OWAP night last Friday. Organised by Richard Selby and attended by about a hundred people, the atmosphere was more upbeat than mournful, with many like Bard of Bath Master Duncan paying tribute to Dave's encouragement. Mary Palmer summed up: "Dave was really good at wrapping up a serious message in a lot of humour." Personally, I'll always remember him explaining the psychedelic connection between
The Owl and the Pussycat and
Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds at last year's Frome festival. Sailing, flying... all our stories are journeys.
Humour is truth, and as Peter Ustinov said, "Comedy is simply a funny way of being serious."
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Labels: Alma Tavern Theatre, Chris Loveless, Dave Angus, Thursday Coma
Cotswolds Conference Centre almost seems too comfortable for a Creative Writing course: warm rooms, free newspapers and constant coffee - don't real writers need an icy garret? or at least a draft and no choice of puddings. Apparently not; despite the indulgent surroundings of Farncombe Estate, my weekend group was brilliant, gelling easily and producing an inspiring range of styles and stories.
I drove home on a high, at least until the road disappeared in a sleet-storm that drowned out the radio and obliterated the landscape. It was as if all the local rivers, partially frozen, had reared up like pythons before shaking themselves back down to earth.
Poor naked wretches that bide the pelting of this pitiless storm, How shall your houseless heads and raggedness, defend you? a mentalist monarch with realm-rage might well have wondered.
Rehearsals for my plays in the
On the Edge programme at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin this week and director Pameli Benham invited me to come along for the thrill & privilege of witnessing my words brought alive by professionals.
The actors, Meg Whelan and Kirsty Cox, are both fabulous, morphing into their roles before my eyes and turning Pameli's diningroom into a Greek island terrace even with no sunshine spot or potted geraniums. My response to this empathetic interpretation was an intense desire to rewrite the entire play - or rather, to edit ruthlessly. I started extracting lines like they were prickly pear splinters. Exposition -
Out! Repetition -
Out! Gratuitous - obvious - cliché -
out, out, out !!! Best fun I've had with my boots on all winter.
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Labels: Alma Tavern Theatre, Farncombe Estate
Idiot Colony, at the Ustinov last week, was devised by
Redcape Theatre from the shockingly true stories of women institutionalised during the 1940s for having children by American GIs. The 1913 Mental Deficiency Act was in operation till the 1950s had a 'moral deficiency' clause and could be activated without a psychiatrist - it only needed the prejudice and hostility of two GPs and a relative. The three women performers evoked their characters stories succinctly and the 'business' was impressive but what touched me most was the words. Clever and self-confident performances but less stage skill and more speech would have made it even more emotionally memorable.
Nikki Bennett's party at the Bath Royal Sci & Lit Institute sounded a little bit daunting, with twenty-five performers lined up. It was actually a delightful evening, smoothly run with a generous bar and fabulous buffet and everyone keeping to their prescribed 3 minutes. A really lovely night.
And on this
inauguration day when America was told "the world has changed and we must change with it", if you've ever wondered who writes Obama's speeches, the name (according to the Independent) is Jon Favreau and he's 27. Obama disgorges his thoughts and Favreau crafts them into prose, and the pair then work in tandem. With disgorged thoughts like "Our patchwork heritage is a strength and not a weakness" and "We have chosen hope over fear", I guess the the soundbites write themselves.
And finally... Bath Poetry Cafe is putting on a Love Fest for February, with feisty Caleb Parkin and foxy Sue Boyle in charge. If you say it's a love poem, then it IS a love poem, says Sue, and wants "as many cafe poets and audience as possible to get a chance to read" in this UNUSUALLY CONVIVIAL, ENGAGING AND ORIGINAL EVENT. Tickets, from bathpoetrycafe@googlemail.com, are going fast.
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Nikki Bennett at the BRSLI, Redcape Theatre
"As you get older you realise that everyone is odd, in different ways" says Debby Holt at the lively launch of her new book
Love Affairs for Grownups. This is a story about two odd people who - like the rest of us, according to the author - do not get wiser as they get older. "They're constantly stymied by things that happened in the past which they don't talk about." Debby ended with a short reading, just enough to show the novel is funny and fascinating, and invited questions. "Do you think your heroines are getting tougher?" asked one gentleman. "They're drinking less" Debby agreed.
The January meeting of Words@ Frome Festival always has a sense of vague urgency. The festival - voted by
Time Out the best in the UK last year - isn't till July but brochure copy has to be ready next month... New events, regular favourites, and the return of the popular 'Authors and Publishers' day at the library.
Recording Miss Daisy:
Quantock Close, our team effort local radio soap, is progressing and Mike is working on other writerly programmes. Here's me reading my adaptation of Daisy Ashford's classic
The Young Visiters as a 5-part 'Book at Bedtime'. All recordings should start with salmon and wine, in my opinion.
And only a week now before rehearsals for my plays at the Alma Tavern Theatre begin, only three-and-a-bit weeks before the opening night!
Bookings 0117 9467899 or online
here.
Silly story of the week: American author JF Lewis is in trouble with his local church because his humorous debut novel
Staked features a vampire. If it had featured a tortured man with blood dripping from his head and side as he died in agony, maybe that would have been ok.
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Labels: Debby Holt, Frome FM, On the Edge
Exciting news: my plays, showing at the
Alma Tavern Theatre next month, have been cast: Oliver Millingham, whose work I've seen at the Tobacco Factory, Jo Lancastle, and Meg Whelan. It all seems so much closer now.
They're part of the 'Writing in the Margins' programme of short plays: my two are
Thursday Coma (when it's your mother's funeral and your estranged brother is arriving so you can't see your therapist, a quick coma seems a good solution) and
Your Time Starts Now (co-listening? just like conversation, isn't it? what could be simpler...)
Richard (Clockers) Price says every character you create is yourself: "How do I create a young black urban drug dealer? He’s me. Everybody’s the author, it’s all fiction." That was on
Front Row this week. Anne Enright said something similar in
The Guardian: "Writing fiction is a habit of flipping the world or tilting it... the way children make things up all the time. We are just picking up a fish finger and flying it across the dinner table: "Vrrrrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrr vrrrrrrrrrroooooooom".
And on the subject of flying fish fingers, I'm loving
Demons, a brilliant new vampire series with a wicked script. Gene Hunt turns Ghostbuster to aid novice warrior Luke in battling unbeings and entities. "We don’t care to name them" he growls in a softly unidentifiable transatlantic accent, " We just smite 'em."
Luke is shocked at the interruption to his revision and unfamiliar with the opposition.
"Is that an entity?"
"No Luke, that is a rat."
They meet Gareth from the Office wearing a beak, and set about smiting him. "Very well smit, if I may say so" concedes the unbeing before combusting. Absolutely excellent.
Still on a vampiric theme,
Van Helsing, a few years old now but shown this week on ITV2, is overlong but highly entertaining. Anna Valerious, aka Kate Beckingsale in a costume blending grechen with catwoman, must kill Dracula to save her family from purgatory and Transylvanians from being swooped on by a plague of winged vampires. Igor and Frankenstein are involved too, and Van Helsing has a sidekick friar called Carl, like the Lone Ranger and Tonto. There’s an awful lot of whooshing about and things flung dizzily around before exploding but the best scenes are frankly spoofy: the undead giving a whole new meaning to hissy fits, and Carl like Bond’s Q showing Van Helsing his state-of-the-art equipment (a cross bow).
David Wenham as the friar had most of the offbeat lines: "Why does it smell like wet dog in here?" he mused after a particularly gruesome werewolf battle. As Richard Price says, “If you put the way people really talk on the page, it would be interminable... you take all that stuff and compress it into a shapeliness, and it’s fake but it does have the appearance of, wow, this is how people really speak."
Frome library writers' group met this week for an excellent workshop led by Val Fellows on the timely topic of New Beginnings, reminding us that every next moment fits that category. New beginnings means starting from now. It doesn’t have to be box-fresh, this start. It only has to be illuminated by mindfulness of mortality, knowing that in this moment we are alive.
Footling footnote of the week: According to stats, the average Briton spends two-and-a-quarter hours every day feeling anxious. I wish I knew how they cope with the other 21 and three quarters. I grade my anxieties from 1 to 12, which happens also to be the scale used by Philip Glenister's smiting character for the nastiness of entities and unbeings.
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Labels: demons, On the Edge, Val Helsing
It’s the first day of January and my FB friends....
- Are eating chocolate cake
In a house full of dogs and hangovers
Wishing everyone glucklich dingdong
- Are wearing a woolly hat tis cold today
Reading Plato in bed
Saying happy new year, ya mofos!
- Are baking bread
Having watched a massive firework display
Wishing everyone a brilliant sparkly starry creative and loving new year
- Are yoga-ing by the red sea
Saying thanks for a fun night
And hoping all your dreams come true
- Are wondering why it doesn’t snow in Hong Kong
Yelling Happy New Year from Glastonbury Tor
And wishing everyone all we wish ourselves
(adding confusingly
May you all break eggs with sticks.)
So we made it to the end of the year. And now, slipping between melting ice-caps and teetering past abandoned outlets of retail giants, another precious little New Year tiptoes in. Time for a detox, a reprogramme at the gym, and a new To-Do writing list... my focus is on scripts, with Frome writers' soap Quantock Court scheduled to go out on local radio soon, and my 2 short plays on in Bristol next month.
And if you ever doubted the power of drama to change the world, muse on this titbit from the Blackadder documentary: more than half the regimental goats in the British army are now called Baldrick.
Twilight is a teen flick so obviously I went to see it for research purposes only, not for the charismatic allure of Robert Pattinson as a vegetarian vampire with super-hero skills and a passion for running up the tall pines of misty Washington forests with his girlfriend clinging on like a besotted backpack. Bella is the ultimate bored teen, so being sucked into a state of immortal sleeplessness is an irresistible lure, though that could be because the vampire gang are kindof the in-crowd at school, and Edward is especially good at biology although his mood swings kindof give her whiplash.
The blending of filmic conventions is actually quite well done, or maybe I have an adolescent longing for supernatural schizophrenia too. Edward initially attempts to explain his sudden superhuman strength as “an adrenalin rush – you can Google it.” Instead she googles vampires, and he comes clean.
“I’m the world’s most dangerous predator. Everything about me invites you in. And I’m designed to kill.”
“I trust you.”
“Don’t.”
But this is a love story, so of course she can... though not the other vampires, who turn a stormy baseball game into a showdown from
The Warriors and then there's a car chase and a massive fight in a hall of mirrors... I hope I'm not spoiling the story for you. Go see it, there's too much rushing through misty forests and very little sex but an unexpectedly good end.
And after the best seasonal celebrations I've enjoyed for years, the news that Harold Pinter died on Christmas day. "The most original, stylish and enigmatic writer in the post-war revival of British theatre" mourns The Telegraph. "The most influential, provocative and poetic dramatist of his generation" says The Guardian.
The Dumb Waiter , which I first saw in a student production in Northern Ireland, was my rite of passage into the power of contemporary drama. I admired his uncompromising opposition, undeterred by critical disdain, to the Iraq war - I had the chance to read his poem
Where was the dead body found? at a PEN event organised by Victoria Glendinning last year, and was dead proud when Antonia Fraser told me Harold would have liked it and she would tell him about it.
Adrian Mitchell, too, chose the deep mid-winter to depart - as I discovered from Facebook status tributes.
Only love can unlock locked-up love he wrote, unfashionably, when the trend to demonise inept parenting was just beginning in the 80s. I so agree.
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Labels: Adrian Mitchell, Harold Pinter, Twilight
The Finborough Theatre has a reputation for staging great drama so I made the trip to Earls Court this week to see a revival of William Saroyan's Politzer-winning play
The Time of Your Life. Somewhere between Altman's
Short Cuts and an early episode of
Cheers, it's billed as a comedy but the shadow of Second World War looms across Nick's downtown San Francisco joint where drunks, gamblers, whores, delusionists all wander in to show us their hopes and their loneliness. Twenty-seven of them, on a stage that spills across the auditorium so audience and actors share tables and pretzels. Nick runs his bar like a sleazy soup-kitchen, benign to all except the Vice Squad snoop: "How do you know the difference between a lady and a street walker? You're out to change the world from something bad to something worse."
With an ensemble piece like this, a fine cast is more important than a single star (though intriguingingly the wannabe entertainer who can't dance was played in 1939 by Gene Kelly) and
Icarus Theatre had that. For me the only unsatisfying aspect was the ending, a flurried death off-stage, leaving it unclear whether or not there would be repercussions for this "profusion of wistful dreamers, lonely hearts, and beer-hall-philosophers".
But a dramatic ending is hard to write, as I'm finding. It's got to come from the characters, and they can be perversely secretive. I nicked this Harold Pinter quote from John Baker's blog. "I don't know what kind of characters my plays will have until they indicate to me what they are. Once I've got the clues I follow them. That's my job, really, to follow the clues."
And now it's nearly the longest night so in the words of poet Inua Ellams, I wish you all a Happy....
Solstice - Samhain - Yule - Saturnalia - Winterval - Hogmanay - St. Nicholas - Kwanzaa- Bodhi - Yalda - Hanukkah - Christmas.
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Labels: Finborough Theatre
In Frome, ChristmasTreegate is hotting up. Letters in the local paper are fulminating about our traffic-distraction-free replacement as a "monstrous illuminated rotary washing line". "It looks like a broken umbrella," said one lady, who had brought visitors to view - "how embarrassing".
"A bit sparse but very nice" another correspondent called Carol comments, more kindly.
Excitement at Emily's writers' circle too, as Debby Holt's new novel
Love Affairs for Grownups is poised for launch next month. Debbie's previous novel in Italian translation was hailed as
Strepitoso!.
The Merlin theatre pantomime has been a sell-out again this year.
The Wizard of Oz is probably their most polished so far, with strong central performances from Dorothy and her wandering companions, though predictably Kylie the dog stole every scene she was in.
Star of the show for me though was Howard Vause, the most unforestwise lion ever, nearly as vain as Red Dwarf's cat and much more cuddly.
(Thanks, Mike, for the picture)
Another theatre show, a long way from the Land of Oz,
Carthage Must be Destroyed, at the
Ustinov in Bath: a brilliant play provocatively well performed.
"It's not a play about Iraq" says writer Alan Wilkins, "It's about the Third Punic War. But then... all wars are different - all wars are the same." It's about the culpability of passivity and the absurdity of violence, and the damage of love too. From the spa waters of Rome to the fires of Carthage, the first casualty of warmongering is integrity.
Performances till 20th December - go see if you can.
And finally....Angus Deaton who hosted the British Comedy Awards earlier this week is usually one of my TV heroes - most of whom can be prefixed by the word 'disgraced'. He introduced the Writers Guild Award with the comment that he was 'delighted at the number of good writers coming forward, which is hardly any at all.'
Gavin & Stacey won Best TV Comedy, so James Cordon may find that funny even if the rest of us don't.
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Labels: Alan Wilkins, Carthage must be Destroyed, Merlin Theatre
A new month and a new moon - the Moon of the Long Night. My adoptive home of Frome traditionally greets the solstice season with street festivities and a mass countdown to the ceremonial illumination-switching-on moment. The Extravaganza, as this was magnificently titled, centred around the big tree beside the market cross, with shops staying open late and plying mincepies mulled wine and chocolates as well as their trades.
We had carols, bellringers, bands... ah, the good times rolled. Last year, presumably responding to a directive from Brussells, the tree was surrounded by an iron fence Michael Eavis might envied, and local youths naturally rallied to the challenge. So this year there is no tree in the market place. Instead we had a Sunday market in the Cheese & Grain and sporadic santa-related activity in the precinct with sound effects from a radio van and a merry-go-round. Not quite what
Strictly judge Len would call a smorgsbord of gorgeousness, but with quaint charm, especially the Christmas fairies dispensing snow from Siberia.
"Christmas decorations are a kind of defiance" Rose Flint suggested in her poetry workshop at the library, "Awareness of the night sky is deep in the human psyche. We're bringing the stars inside, and helping the light to return." We wrote about snow, and glitter, and stars, shaping constellations like gods. Winter glitz for wintry glums.
The Poetry Cafe was crowded for "Difficult Journeys" and we had to clear the window sills when we ran out of room for chairs. The theme's tenuous connection with
The Wizard of Oz, the pantomime at the Merlin, was largely ignored by guest poets Rose Flint and Malinda Kennedy and 19 open-mic contributors who opted for more personal interpretations.
It always inspires a sense of privilege when writers share intimate feelings, and there were some glittering gems.
Dianne Penny's beautifully-performed poem was a favourite for me:
I never knew I had the right to speak... listen, listen, listen... Paula as theatre director picked out many for special praise and donated prizes, with Linda Perry and
Rosie Jackson agreed as worthy winners of the theatre tickets.
In horse talk, I have not been On Form this month. Consequently most of my time has been spent in comfort pursuits involving mooching about, close friends & family, and online scrabble, so there's not much in the literary line to report.
However, I made it to the Mission Theatre in Bath twice: once to see Tennessee Williams'
Orpheus Descending. It's set in the playwright's usual world of small-town America: full of repressed passion needing only the trigger of a wild outsider to set the place alight, with an ending as horrifying as any Greek tragedy. In the hot dry dust of unspoken grievance and unspeakable grief, wanderer Val celebrates lyricism and hope for "
a future called perhaps, which is the only possible thing to call the future. And the only important thing is not to allow that to scare you. "
It's a re-working of a much earlier, failed, play called
Battle of Angels which Williams never abandoned. He said "You will find the trail of my sleeve-worn heart in this completed play... it's about the acceptance of prescribed answers that are not answers at all"
That notion of freedom from 'prescribed answers' is most lyrically expressed in Val's fantasy of tiny birds with transparent wings, eluding predator. "
They live their whole life on the wing, and they sleep on the wing, they just spread their wings and go to sleep and never light on this earth but one time when they die! " A powerful image to anyone, perhaps especially to writers.
Russell Brand ended his documentary on Jack Kerouac with this thought: "
The main thing I got from this journey is that if you aren't governed by fear then you can live truthfully and you can find a kind of beauty. But if you're inhibited and fearful, you will live a prescriptive existance. Once you get beyond the hedonistic first impulse of that philosophy, you find that you need to focus on something wider, more permanent and beautiful and valuable. That's what I've learnt." Could be Tennessee Williams' Val talking. Except he'd probably have strummed it.
Then on Sunday the Bath Poetry Cafe had a Rialto night, celebrating local connections with this prestigious literary magazine. Editor Michael Mackmin talked about what he seeks from submissions - a self-seal envelope is paramount, apparently. Readings from poets who had avoided this and other fatal errors followed: I especially enjoyed Sue Boyle, Emily Wills, and of course Rose Flint, who writes so sensuously and with such tragedic yearning:
And what I hope for every winter is to find a way through
to the other side where the jubilant light begins again
in a hesitation of birdsong.Footnote this week: my online
interview with writer Judy Darley .
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Labels: Bath Poetry Cafe, Tennessee Williams
Shakespeare's
Twelfth Night set in a 1960s Soho nightclub sounds a jaunty idea and I had high hopes of this production by Frome Drama Club, usually never less than competent. Sadly, purple tie-dye does not a Viola make, and the bullying aspect of this drama became, rather than Sopranos-style tension, an epidemic of pinching, punching, happy-slapping that even included Orsino flooring Olivia so violently her subsequent request that he call her 'sister' must have sounded alarm calls in Social Services. Even good acting - Malvolio as a lanky Gollum, the pragmatic fool Feste - couldn't create characters to satisfactorily survive this directorial savagery.
I didn't know what to expect from Dracula staged as a musical at the White Bear theatre in Kennington by Loveless brothers writer/director Chris and composer Alex... a comedy, maybe? (
Wiv a littul bit of blood, a littul bit of blood, you can let temptation drip right in...) Not so. It was stunning. From the wilds of Transylvania to prim Victorian London, the drama was darkly bloodstained and biting. Piano and cello enhanced a mesmeric mood, with every element for a gothic fantasy glowing through: madness, lust, the fear that immortality is worse than death itself and that love can seem the deepest abyss of all. Songlines simmered:
Love is a knife that carves your life. Faithful to Bram Stoker, the production still managed to find twists in the story, and played grim torchlight on undercurrents of brutality posing as medicine and morality.
There's an amazing scene as the men, outraged by the transformation of their women into vampiric seducers, form an armed posse and thunder through the forest, the vampire as their quarry, like any group of self-righteous fanatics witch-hunting the outsider who threatens their supremacy. Brilliant. I'd go to see anything by
Fallen Angel Theatre Company now.
Pix by Michael Brydon, more about the production
hereI'm writing a play at the moment - I don't usually admit to writing anything until it's finished & safely published, so acknowledging this is a strange part of the process - and therefore collecting comments on drama from every source I come across, as well as my dramaturgy (wonderful word, too) mentor, playwright Steve Hennessy. Like this from Tony (Mark of Cain) Marchant in an RT interview: "I don't think there should be any taboos. The object of drama is to illuminate and to explore - it's a writer's job to make people think harder." Finding this week's BIG ISSUE is a playwrighting special, I turned the pages avidly with highlighter poised. Here's a collection of write-bites from the mag:
"What makes good drama? Pushing the creative boundaries" - this is agent Mel Kenyon- "the stage should be about metaphor rather than literal recreation." Zia Trench of Zeitgeist Theatre Company believes: "If theatre wants to grow more of an audience, it's got to rethink just about everything", and there's frustration about the moribund state of theatre among most interviewees. "Shakespeare is all well and good but we get 2000 scripts a year from unknown writers" says theatre director Lisa Goldman, lamenting that there is no funding to produce them.
Patron Joachim Fleury doesn't want theatre "a formaldehyde form of art - museum pieces resuscitated ad infinitum." James Phillips urges other directors like himself to relish the risk offered by new writing: "I mean we know Twelfth Night works, don't we?" (see above, James...)
An overall theme emerges: face the fear and do it anyway. "The most important virtue for a writer is determination" concludes the editorial.
True for any writing, any media - and especially with difficult stuff. I was talking this week with Malinda Kennedy, therapist and poet, whose experience has convinced her that long-term anxiety = suffering that's not been expressed creatively. But, she cautions, personal outpourings are not art. “Most people feel so good about the outpourings they think it’s a novel - it’s a poem - it’s a play! Is it heck. Now starts the crafting.”
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Labels: Dracula, Twelfth Night
Ninety years ago to the month, Siegfried Sassoon wrote
Memorial Tablet, a poem as full of anger about class divisions as about war itself. His grave, in the sombre yew-shadowed churchyard of Mells near where I live, is often honoured with red poppies, and always on Remembrance Sunday.
Merlin Theatre foyer turned tardis on Monday night, as an auditoriumful of audience crammed through to see the magnificent Eddie Izzard in a one-night-only try-out of stuff for his new London show.
It's a sell-out there too - here tickets were going on eBay for £160, and I'm sure the buyers were delighted - my eyes were sore next day from weeping with laughter. Eddie's new stuff circles "like a cow with a gun" from Obama through the fallacies of world history through Wikipedia, Galileo, Genesis, stromatolites, stone-age scrabble, squirrels, Spartans, creationism, arriving back at Obama and the possibility of hope for the future. "Terrorism exists where there is no hope" he says simply, at the end of two hours of surreal humour, unflinching satire and brilliant mime. I wish we could elect our own God, my vote would go to Eddie Izzard - even though he doesn't believe we have or need one. "I believe in humans" he says, "Good and evil are in your tummy. That's our fight, how to live our lives."
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Labels: Eddie Izzard, Remembrance Day
Hot on the heels of November 5th - and how celebratory those fireworks felt this year - came the verbal sparklers of Madabout Words night. Over 60 people came along to hear thirteen local writer/performers in a cabaret of poetry, prose, drama, and lyrics.
I'd love to give a full and impartial review but as I organised it I can't so I'll just say to fiction writers Debby Holt, Magnus Nelson, Rosie Jackson & Niamh Ferguson; to poets David Sollors, Gordon Graft, Rose Flint, & Caleb Parkin; to dramatists Alison Clink and Rosie Finnegan, and to musicians Howard Vause & PJ Leonard:
Darlings you were wonderful and I mean that most sincerely. And many thanks to all who supported us.
As one performer said, for us it's an opportunity to play to a perfectly listening audience, and "it is something that actually seems to matter to people - very lovely - this sort of thing is important isn't it?"
I certainly believe so.
Same yet different, another evening of spoken word at the launch of a new book from Peter Please:
CLATTINGER An Alphabet of Signs from Nature, a quirky look at a Wiltshire
wildflower meadow and site of special scientific interest. The Georgian premises of the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Society contrast and blend graciously with imagery of snakeshead fritillaries and damselflies. Unusually for an author launch, this gentle and charming event was designed as a team effort, with musical accompaniments and contributions from several other writers including a striking poem from cover artist Sean Borodale. Clattinger is an unusual book too, a hi-tech production finished by hand; Peter Please sewed them all himself, pinching the spines in the traditional manner of 19th Century craftsmen. "We are the farmers' markets in a supermarket world," I like to tell writer friends; Peter Please wants to be slow-simmered broth in a fast food planet. You can find out more
here.
Footnote to last week's epic event in America:
Jeremy Paxman to Dizzee Rascal "Mr Rascal, could you see this happening in Britain?" "If you believe you can achieve, innit?" "Do you believe in political parties in Britain?" "Yeah, they exist." Perfect.
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Labels: Clattinger, Madabout Words
Searching
Halloween for smatterings of significance beyond pumpkinheads and Dracula for this once hallowed evening, I found that in some cultures the entire month of November is a Festival of the Dead. Something to look forward to.
Emily and I celebrated this tricky night by treating ourselves to Comedy Scratch Night at the Arc in Trowbridge. A fun evening, though with a curiously non-contemporary ambience. 'Rather a lot of genitalia' one audience member commented, which was true, yet Master Bates apologised for both his swear words and no-one mentioned Voluptuagate.
You've probably already over-familiar with what the Head of the BBC calls "the tumultuous events of the past weeks" and the tabloids term "sickening obscenities that made the whole nation shudder", (the infamous phone call to Andrew Sachs has been viewed over a million times on
Youtube) so the only thing that can make it better is... another cheap jibe.
"This sort of obscenity against a member of the Satanic Sluts cannot be countenanced." thunders
News of the News,
"Suspension is hardly sufficient. The British sense of justice and fair play will not be satisfied until they are castrated by a baying crowd, pursued through the street on horseback with dogs, hanged by the neck outside White City until dead and their foul corpses left there to fester for at least a month. We pay our licence fees!"
What a good thing we in the literary world aren't tainted by such salacious voyeurism, I thought smugly, going into WH Smiths where exciting promotions encourage everyone to turn off the telly and read a good book. Promotions like TRAGIC LIFE STORIES - BUY 1 GET 1 HALF PRICE...
Quantum of Solace.... well I won't go on about the dizzy-making yumminess of Daniel Craig but I will just mention that Ben Elton's first novel Stark had a similar storyline (villain poses as environmentalist) though without the breathtaking car-chases, land-sea-&-air shoot-outs, the inferno and the Tosca opera. Other than that, pretty close.
I'm posting this as the world is poised to know whether Obama managed that final lap to the White House, so in electioneering mode I commend this more local
party political broadcast from 'shouty scot' & poetic genius Elvis Mcgonagall.
And finally... how about writing a novel this November?
NaNoWriMo will help you. Lots of tips and pep talks, and an international scoreboard for ongoing word-counts. England is at currently number 18, with the Germans already spreading their writing towels across the keyboard at number 1. So if you want to change that, pick up your pens! (Not now, at the end of the blog when lines are open....)
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Labels: Daniel Craig, Elvis McGonagall, Halloween, Jonathan Ross, NaNoWriMo, Russell Brand
"A marvel" is how
crackerjack's reviewer describes
Cave by Steve Hennessy, one of Theatre West's new season of 'Writing in the Margins'. The isolate cave is a setting and a metaphor too, representing the dark and difficult place where Greek dramatist Euripides - and by inference all passionate artists - must go to find their creativity. And it can be a place of refuge, which is why runnaway slave Helen is here, heavily pregnant, feral and defiant. Their strange shared sanctuary is invaded by Theodoros: young, citified, glamourous and shallow, he embodies everything the playwright loves and loathes. Will Euripides choose his muse or his career? neither of them are glittering any more. There is a third way, one which is reckless and loving and wholly credible. A play which resonates long after the cave is empty. See it if you can - it's on until 8th November at the
Alma Tavern Theatre.
Labels: The Cave
Foxton is a great name isn't it? Sounds like a place in a Rupert Bear annual, with plucky young animals called Algy having lots of adventures in rhyming verse. In fact it's near Cambridge, and the location of
Villiers Park education centre, where last week my writer friend
Rosie Jackson and I led a creative writing course for twentytwo 'gifted and talented' 17-year-olds from across the British Isles.
An amazing week, and I felt overawed by their energy and charm, a bit like watching seals at play off the Californian coast but with the addition of dazzling writing.
The gee&tees gave us comedy, political satire, and personal emotions, all explored with individual style and lucent integrity. They'd clearly never grasped the concept of Kevin-the-teenager - nasty, brutish, and short of vocabulary; they were delightful company too.
Friday's "presentations" were one highlight of the week, and another was a performance and talk by
Luke Wright, whose own blend of talent and candour the group found inspiring.
We had a theatre trip too: Alan Bennett's 'Talking Heads' at Mumford Theatre. I'm not a huge fan of Bennett's whimsical assaults on social Aunt Sallys, and the two monologues memorised by Moonstruck Theatre Company seemed to me dated in their snobby lampooning of low-brow culture. The students were polite and some were appreciative, but I felt more moved by their own work.
Throw in mountain bikes, music, footie, and a Murder Mystery night, no wonder course evaluations were so upbeat. Virtual group hug, anyone?
American update: I see from G2 that the phenomena of Tina Fey upstaging Sarah Palin has now registered this side of the pond. While giggling over the goofy spoofs, you may be interested to note Tina doesn't stray far from the original - in fact sometimes, as in this multiviewed CNN
clip, not at all...
And also from that slightly scary big place over there, news of a teacher suspended without pay for allowing her students to read
The Freedom Writers Diary. This motivational collection of true stories by young people is a best-selling book and now also a movie. It contains swearing, apparently. Did I say 'slightly' scary?
I don't know what the Indiana censors would make of Ricky Gervais on Jonathan Ross (my Razorlight-alert gave me the
link - they're at the end) – but he made some good points about comedy writing. He doesn't do gags, he says; just characters. "If it’s just constantly one-liners, the audience is looking at their watches after 20 minutes. There has to be some character." He underlines the point with a hysterically funny story about his mother’s funeral. No, really, it was. And it gave a glimpse of a loving family, and the way outsiders simply can’t touch their grief.
Finally: What were you doing at 22.04 yesterday? Four minutes past ten at night is apparently the time we are all most creative, according to a new survey. (What time of day do they dream up these research projects, I wonder.) Sebastian Faulks spoke up for writers: "I was thinking what I think at 10.04 most nights: whether to open another bottle of wine."
Which reminds me of something I haven't done since I came back from America...
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Labels: American elections, Villiers Park
Bill Bryson writes in
I'm a Stranger Here Myself of "those sumptuous days when autumn is full of muskiness and tangy, crisp, perfection with vivid blue sky..."
That's how it is here. Guitarist Bill Peterson summed it all up at Mo and Anja's party: "That view out front, sun shining, good food, nice company, great music playing - it doesn't get any better than this." I'd walked that afternoon along the coastal path, entranced by the views of shore and sea and wild birds, and spent the evening listening to 9 talented musicians' varied styles - most of the songs original.
(Especially popular was Mo's tribute to George Bush:
Daddy What's A Brain?)
Once again beside the rocks of Pescadero on my penultimate day: seals basking, spray crashing beyond the deep purple of the near-shore lagoons. It's a transitory landscape, as the coastline of California is crumbling: about a foot a year on average, apparently. We reflect on this sombre statistic for a while and then go to
Duartes Tavern for artichoke soup and sourdough.
And now I'm packing for my journey back to the UK, to dull grey days and the tension of trying to get hold of a car in time for next week's course in Cambridge... I'll have to stop giggling over Bill Bryson's account of the safety demonstrations on transatlantic flights and prepare myself to watch closely while the value of the whistle to attract attention is explained by United Airlines stewards self-taped into yellow lifejackets. Hoping, of course, that this is a hypothesis I won't have to test.
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Labels: California
Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever experienced was summer in San Francisco. Fooled by blue sky and palm trees when we drove in, I failed to realise this city has its own micro-climate direct from the Arctic Circle. The first thing I had to buy was another sweater and hot coffee. Thus fortified, we rode the platform on the cable car down to Fisherman's Wharf where the waterfront is full of buskers and the water is full of seals.
Back in time for another open-mic spot, at Cafe Lucca. The last three nights I've been regaling the locals with me pomes. There was open-mic at Camerons English Pub, which has a red phone box & a London bus outside it, but otherwise is big & bombastic American-style so my set had a certain novelty cachet, especially as all the other performers were musicians. Most of them turned up at Cafe Lucca the next night, and Saturday was even better, the whole cafe filled with appreciative audience for both Mo's singing and my extended poetry session. So thanks to all you generous Californians for coming along to hear a writer from England, and for being so exceedingly nice about what you heard.
There's a significant ripple of interest in the election along the California coast, with a healthy rash of Obama car stickers and street merchandise, and a spoof
debate doing the rounds. But the big news over here currently is Halloween. They take macabre seriously here. We went shopping for costumes at a hangar-sized building dedicated to vampires, ghouls, and other life-sized grotesques. Those evil-faced pumpkins are just a start, you can buy anything revolting from a bloodshot eye that walks to a torso that crawls, any costume from the tooth fairy to a plateful of poo, a vampire outfit for your dog or for $300 a family of gothic zombies.
Am I going to pass scornful comment on this national obsession? Of course not, I wouldn't be so rude. I'll simply say what San Mateo Coffee Company says to promote its Pumpkin Spiced Latte: " We hold this to be self-evident."
Labels: California, poetry performance
Morro Bay is more a nature reserve than a seaside resort, although ironically local promotion seems almost abashed there’s so little dollar-demanding distraction on offer. Only the seals at play, pelicans teasing the fishermen, sea-otters picnicking on clams in the blue water bay, and mighty Morro rock changing colour from early light to sunset.
Our stop-over base is close by the jetty, opposite the long sandspit which has been reclaimed as a sanctuary for estuary wild life, so we spend hours simply being there, watching, but the serious grape-growing area of California is close by so we take a drive to look at some wineries too.
Being here is like living in a road movie: the nonchalant acceptance of vastness, the affability of strangers, monster trucks and Harleys - and in towns pedestrians have right of way over traffic, how civilised. But they can’t make good Americano here– why is that? Coffee bars everywhere and it’s either too sweet, too weak, or filter.
What else have I learned… That the 250 mile coastal drive from Half Moon Bay to Morro rock is one of the wonders of the world, especially playing seventies folk –rock all the way.
Back to Half Moon Bay in time to walk the eucalyptus forest, admire the pumpkin harvest, and do a poetry set at Cafe Classique's performance night. As Basil Fawlty said, I think I got away with it...
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Morro Bay, poetry performance
So here I am in California, after 10 hours and 4 movies, none with a shot as good as the icecaps of Greenland. Mo collects me from San Francisco airport and we take the coast road past long pale sands where surfing waves are dramatically eroding the cliffs away, down to Half Moon Bay.
Mo and Anja live here in a blueygrey painted timber house, the Pacific on one side and hills & creeks on the other, canyons in the distance and hummingbirds in the back garden. In short, Wow...
Within an hour of arriving we’re all in Café Gibraltar where I’m mesmerised by the way the waiter chants the specials with particular attention to dressings. I pick the tomato salad with pumpernickel, Peruvian pine nuts and open-sesame seeds, drizzled with light squalls. (I may have misrecalled some of those ingredients, but the waiter applauded my choice & didn’t call the whole thing off even though I pronounced tomato the UK way.) Ah, and there was Californian wine too, I seem to recall...
Next day is mostly orientation & walking by the rocks of Pescadero, with an evening performance of
Waiting For Godot at the theatre in Half Moon Bay.
Mo plays Pozzo. “One day we were born, one day we shall die, the same day, the same second, is that not enough for you?” It’s an amazing play for many reasons, one of them being that every part seems to have the best lines. The director has decided that this timeless allegory of alienation exactly defines the plight of New Orleans after hurricane Katrina, and his set reflects this. It’s interesting, and of course all interpretations have validity, but for me there’s extraordinary power in Beckett’s evocation of the road to anywhere, and that existentialist question
what are we waiting for? is compromised rather than enhanced by a realistic answer: for rescue from specific urban tragedy. That aside, a great production, with some powerful performances, notably Estragon and Pozzo.
A quieter day seemed called for after the cast party: more coastal walking along the bluffs and a little downtown mooching -oo-er that’s me on the poster in the bookshop! I'm hoping my airbag burns will be less livid by the time I perform. We're off to Morro Bay for a couple of days first...
Labels: California, Half Moon Bay, Waiting for Godot
"The reasons we write fiction are both simple and complex. Simple in that we are story-telling creatures who must shape our experience and share it with others; complex in that we are all individuals with different motives and desires." Derek Johns is an agent and a novelist too, so he straddles both camps in his article 'Why Write Novels?' in the current issue of the Society of Authors' Journal.
Possibly from beneath the brim of that first hat, he concludes: "The European novel was a function of 19th-century middle-class leisure time, just as chamber music was a function of chambers. Will it be superseded? We will always tell ourselves stories, but will those stories necessarily take the form of novels? And is the novel necessarily the highest, most evolved form of story-telling, as we have tended to think?"
Answers on a blog, email, poetry podium, or postcard, please.
Writers-on-radio corner: If you thought Alan Partridge far-fetched, spare four minutes to squirm at
this interview with writer Hardeep Singh Kohli recently on local radio. Unbelievable but genuine.
"A misty Autumn day, smelling of empty benches... what will become of those memories of water and swans?" This was Saturday's Finale of 'Palace Intrusions' at Wells, as Artmusic threaded and wove together sunset and singing, candles and cellos - and awesome parkour free-running. A very different musical interlude from Acoustic Plus in Frome on Friday, featuring the 'Mendip Rock' of
Cary Grace who's also my multi-talented web-designer.
Monday was a dramatic night: "A Number" at Salisbury Playhouse only lasted an hour but crammed in everything anyone who’s ever been a parent, or a child, might have wondered or worried about. What is the value of a person, when we’ve got 30% the same genes as a lettuce… and does it even matter? Not being unique is hardly a death-penalty offence, is it? Carol Churchill’s play is rightly highly acclaimed, though the staccato faux-naturalistic interrupty dialogue is occasionally jarring, but the acting (Pip Donaghy & Fergus O'Donnell ) was stunning and the overall impact both moving and shocking.
And another dramatic impact that night was suffered by my car, deemed by the guy from the Crash Repair Centre about the worst damaged he's seen. Thank Daewoo for airbags - you only need them once but when you do, you do.
And now I'm off to Half Moon Bay in California to meet up with old friends in a new place - and to bring some southwest-UK stylee performance poetry to deepwest-USA. I'm billed to do a set in Caffe Lucca, Montara, which gets great reviews on
Yelp. "Espresso pulled to perfection and foam that is wickedly thick and fluffy" says Jonathan C, giving 5 stars: "The patio overlooks the Pacific, but has a window to keep the chill of the coastal breeze at bay and minimizes the noise pollution on Cabrillo Highway."
Fellow reviewer Elizabeth H - is that really her on the surfboard? xtreme! - says it's her new favourite place. Mine too and I haven't even been there yet... Can't wait.
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Labels: California, Hardeep Singh Kohli
"Civilisation as we know it is well and truly past its sell-by date, and this is where this book comes in" says Bath writer Esme Ellis at the launch her novel 'This Strange and Precious Thing'. It's love, of course, and more - an exploration, among other things, of the possibility that fantasy is only another name for potential.
Small Wonder (Sept 18th-21st) is billed as one of the UK's most successful independent literary festivals. It certainly must be one of the smallest, being entirely contained in a barn just off the A27 a few miles from Lewes. Alison and I drove down to investigate, arriving at sunset on Friday to be met with cathedral quietness and exceedingly good soup.
The barn belongs to Charleston, where the Bloomsbury set allegedly met, so although the house and garden weren't open we could imagine Virginia and Leonard musing beside the cows, and EM Forster picking his way through the byre in his carpet slippers.
Our inquisitiveness was specifically focused on the Short Story Slam, to see if the idea might be worth nicking for Frome festival next year and luckily for our 8-hour round trip, it is. We'll adapt it, of course. We won't open the event with a narrative poem about the Mau Mau Uprising - always tricky to lift the mood to high joviality after graphic details of bloody atrocities.
We won't have the scores writ large on screen, so that the least successful slam readers have to sit staring at their low ranking along with the entire audience like some dreadful dream of schooldays trauma. We won't - oh, we've got lots of ideas, you'll have to wait and see. But thanks & respect to the writers and readers who created a highly entertaining evening, even though I couldn't honestly tick the "totally agree" box on the evaluation form for "Small Wonder is designed with young people in mind."
Our evening ended on a more lively note in Hanover, where Alison's friend Jonathan hosted us & introduced us to his bit of Brighton with "aspirations to bohemianism". Now if he'd given us an evaluation form, we could have ticked Accessible, Stimulating, Exhilarating, and Fun....
And finally...
I'd never seen that "classic romantic drama” Brief Encounter so as it was on this Sunday afternoon I thought I Ought To. David Lean's iconic movie is more interesting as a study of a culture thankfully gone forever, where 'heppily merried' meant being hysterically emotionally repressed but with an invisible cook to make dinner. Romance I saw not: the love-struck couple sniggered and bitched like Karen and Jack from gay sitcom Will & Grace until guilt intervened to ruin their heppiness. Made in 1945 but clearly set pre-war (Noel Coward's script was written a decade earlier), there's appeal in the bravado of the voiceover technique, trusting us with the ending right from the start, but narrative viewpoint is sacrificed for an unnecessary scene in Stephen's flat. Brief? that was 86 minutes of rare British sunshine lost forever. But nothing lasts long, neither heppiness nor despair. And aren't we due an Indian summer?
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Labels: Brief Encounter, Small Wonder, This Rare and Precious Thing
Every writer once in a while should stop wrestling with words and spend an hour watching Pangottic. I came to that conclusion after watching Full Twist at The Brewery, Bristol's newest theatre venue, where two extraordinarily talented youngsters told a love story full of pathos and hilarity, crammed with insight as well as dazzling circus skills, breathtaking timing and irresistible audience rapport. Two love stories, in fact, as in a quirky subplot the cleaning staff find romance over rubber gloves. And the young lovers manage to juggle the hopes and insecurities of relationship along with the high-flying wine bottles, flowers, and ultimately babies. Without a single word. Show-don't-tell doesn't get any less, or more more-ish. 
In all the shameful history slave ships, the story of Liverpool ship Zong must be most dreadful. Half their cargo of stolen lives was jettisoned for insurance. One survived, to carry the tale which became the stimulus and background story of Crossings by Julie McNamara, who also takes one of the 4 roles. The anger is plangent, and this piece might have become a history lesson in other hands, but Julie's passion is more wide-reaching: the central story is of 15-year old Shelley, pregnant and on the run - a beautiful wild-child powerfully portrayed by Nadine Wild Palmer - but the theme is man's inhumanity to man, and more especially to woman. Julie's aim is to confront disablement in all its forms; the BSL interpreter is not sidelined but takes a central role and the piece was originally written for a blind actor. Ironically, and very sadly, she wasn't able to appear at the Tobacco Factory and it's to the credit of both the script and her replacement Naomi Cortes that the use of script-in-hand enhanced rather than detracting from this theme of challenging social attitudes and expectations. 
Mustn't end the week without sending congratulations to Josh Tyas, one of the talented young writers on the Villiers Park writing group I co-tutored with Rosie Jackson last year, for winning the Farrago Fireworks Poetry Slam! Go forth and sparkle, Josh. 
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