my blog

2012-01-29T10:00:00.016Z

Haunting accordion and a nightclub setting hung with glamorous costumes greeted us at the Rondo Theatre as Rogue Theatre presented their current touring show The Dancer and the Devil but even as glittering hostess Laverna welcomed us - with chocolates - the black&white photographs scattered around the auditorium like lost memorabilia were already stirring unease... allure and menace are twin themes of the show. Songs, dances and stories all blend beauty and erotica with terror. The shadow of the holocaust is there from the start but this is not a linear drama, more a dream sequence in which dark psychological insights from fairy tales, Sondheim-style, mingle with historical and contemporary cultural displacements. Abandonment, addiction and abuse surge through the sensuous cabaret set-pieces, and macabre violence repeatedly intrudes in the midnight world of the Lounge Limbo.

This series of gems is very nearly a fantastic show, except for the misjudged inclusion of a lengthy audience-participation 'quiz show' which snapped the mesmeric tension and undermined the compelling theatricality. Omitting this, and the interval, would have ensured an extraordinary emotional journey for everyone in the audience, but a spell like that once broken is hard to cast again. Nevertheless this immensely talented team sent us out into the winter night illuminated by gorgeous visuals and haunting score. All seven performers were superb, but musicians Julian Gaskell & Lauren Vandike deserve special mention.
And how refreshing it is to have Rondo Theatre in Bath as a friendly and delightfully atmospheric alternative to the big theatre in the city centre - check out their season for more excellent touring shows.

2012-01-28T07:30:00.009Z

And as vivid images of Cambodia begin to fade in the where's-my-gloves-and-brolly?-ness of being back in England, with its very different rhythm of meetings and catch-ups, great to see Kate Edgley's sensitive and vividly evocative piece in The Guardian today. Kate, despite her proficiency already as an experienced travel writer, participated fully in the writing sessions and one of my top memories is the night in Siem Reap when three of us skipped supper to sit beside the pool as the sky darkened and strings of glittering lights turned the gardens into a night palace, writing and sharing.

2012-01-25T08:15:00.010Z

Bradford-on-Avon's poetry entrepreneur Dawn Gorman has found a new and more glamorous venue for Words & Ears, and The Swan Cellar Bar was crammed on Monday night. David C Johnson, self-styled 'half man, half pippin' led an evening of varied and enjoyable contributions with performances from his new book Fallen Apples, and I'm pleased to say the Frome posse all participated too - here's 'domestic goddess' Rosie sharing quirky thoughts on housework.

Bath's Mission Theatre celebrated the 7th birthday of resident group Next Stage Company with the opening night of Jerusalem - a startling coup since its multi-starred West End production closed only last week, with queues throughout the night for the final performances. Jez Butterworth's play is about society's relationship to outsiders, national psyche, authority, change, love, loss, and basically the meaning of life: his brilliant script was also showcase for Mark Rylance as Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, the swaggering reprobate whose life blood is the sap of essential energy destroyed as wild woodlands are eroded by new estates. Comparison is impossible yet inevitable, and this bold production scores surprisingly well, finding the humour & humanity, maintaining energy & suspense, and with a positive advantage in the genuine youthfulness of Rooster's under-age woodland 'rats' which creates the credibility - and underlines the vulnerability - of his kingdom. Set, sound, and lighting are excellent, with creditable performances by all the cast and Tim Evan charismatic in the central role. Huge credit to director Ann Garner for bringing an extraordinary and important play successfully to Bath. Highly recommended - it's on till Saturday.

- as a postscript to my comments above, Mission Theatre's snatching of the Rylance baton has been noted by the arts section in the i, with a big fat picture as well as quotes from the director. Nice one Next Stage!
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2012-01-23T00:00:00.019Z

Back home now from the Skyros-led Adventure in Cambodia... wow oh wow, where to start? I suppose with first impressions, and lasting memories too: paradoxes and contrasts. Splendor, squalor, and spirituality, all shaken chaotically together. Our ten day journey was a daily fascination of culture shocks. A million motor-scooters whirling like mosquitoes around Phnom Penh streets, long hours of bus travel past a timeless landscape of fields, stilt houses, and water buffalo, to arrive at a five-star hotel with a vast pool in gardens that nightly turned into a glittering fairyland - juxtapositions of ancient & modern, poverty & money, past & future, which are part of every culture, in Cambodia are vivid and violent. Reverence for traditions - buddhist, hindu, even ancient animism - jostles with insistence that this is a young country with a vibrant future. And it is young, still teenage: it was 1993 when monarchy was restored after the terrible years of Khmer Rouge and the war with Vietnam which left 3 million dead and touched every family in the land.
They don't pretend to forget. The message of the Genocide Museum, a stupifyingly sad collection of memorabilia housed in a school-turned-torture chamber, reads Keeping the memory of the atrocities alive.. plays a crucial role in preventing new Pol Pot from emerging in the lands of Angkor or anywhere on earth.
And with temples and paraphernalia of holiness everywhere, it's hard not to wonder how such cruelty could happen. Maybe humans aren't meant to stifle emotions behind that famous Angkor smile, maybe there's good reason the friezes show Ganesha, Remover of Obstacles, seated next to his 'beloved brother' Murugan, God of War. The more direct reason is of course more sinister: the national shift to communism that allowed Pol Pot's extremist policy of 'rupture' was caused by Nixon's covert, illegal, carpet bombing of Cambodia in 1973 - an outrage supported by Kissinger, whose reward of the Nobel Peace Prize inspired Tom Lehrer to pronounce political satire now obsolete. And the rest is ghastly history.
Recent past is close to the surface everywhere but our journey revealed many layers of history and it's impossible to fully summarise ten days of amazing experiences, a full notebook and 200 photographs, so here's a list of some of the many memorable aspects and precious moments:

~ the meditation led by Michael at Ta Prohm where spong trees swaddle the ruined temples, while monkeys hooted and cicadas shrilled as dusk deepened

~ the local children jostling around the charnel house in the Killing Caves, irrepressible symbol of hope for better future

~ the Circus School in Battambang - the dazzling skill & exuberance of these children from the streets

~ champa blossom fallen everywhere, called the yoni flower...

~ luxuries! khmer massage, hotel breakfasts of papaya and dragon-fruit, restaurant suppers of Fish Amok - a speciality of Cambodia, local fish in seasoned sauce of coconut milk and spices.

~ Apsara dancers, exquisitely performing traditional story-routines, in costumes based on the temple friezes of these heavenly half-goddesses

~ the floating village on Tonle Sap lake, where life goes on the same as the water level sinks and rises

~ Kulen National Park, the massive reclining buddah carved into ancient rock, the waterfall, and the sudden monsoon downpour

~ 360 steps to the five temples of Banan, with extensive views of beautiful forests with minefield warnings...

~ water lilies, puce and spiky, on long stiff stems

~ Water of Hope, bringing wells to the rural communities of this country, poorest in southeast asia, high infant mortality rate, and still bereft of supportive infrastructure we met Narong who runs this project here.

~ our writing night in the poolside bar

~ Banteay Srei, the beautiful 'Lady Temple' with its elaborate exotic, and some erotic, carvings smothering the red limestone walls

~ our wonderful guide Soriya who shared his sensitive feelings and sense of humour as well as his extensive historical & political knowledge

~ and my group of fellow travellers, expertly led by Michael Eales. Great to spend time with you all, here's hoping to meet up again with all my new friends.

Like a Kate Winslet speech, my list could go on and on... I'll end back at Phnom Penh airport, where I bought two last souvenirs: a pack of postcards showing smiling children among the fields and flowers of this beautiful country, seemingly living in rural innocence - and a local paper with front page story about a group of villagers shot by the private army of an encroaching Rubber Company when they tried to protect their cassava harvest. Rights workers condemned the violence, but the provincial governor made no comment. Which of these contrasting aspects is the real Cambodia? It's another paradox.

2012-01-08T11:01:00.134Z

Bristol-based theatre company Travelling Light has a big name for their devised productions, so I was keen to see their version of Cinderella despite the fact the promo image looked like a cover shot for a Pia Jewellery catalogue. Happily their Ella was more like a traveller from the woods of Jerusalem, sprinting to the ball with leaves in her old bowler hat and glitter on her Doc Martins, and the show was an absolute delight. Director Sally Cookson used the good-fairy birds and the toe-butchering eye-pecking savagery of the Grimm Brothers version, but wove in panto-style comedy too: the prince is an asthmatic bird-watcher with a striking resemblance to Austin Powers, and there's oodles of saucy cross-dressing. Music is a big part of the magic, Benji Bower and brother Will creating a vivid and exquisite soundscape to match every mood.
Unsurprisingly, this imaginative and cleverly-executed show is sold out till the end of the run but I managed to slip in at a schools performance and enjoyed the add-on pleasure of seeing the children's engrossed enchanted faces and hearing their frank reactions ("Yeah!" as streamers of blood flow from the wicked stepmother's gouged eyeballs, and "Yucch!" for the lovers' smoochy kiss.) Their responses on the blackboard in the foyer said it all: ‘amazing’, ‘brilliant’, ‘loveley but scary', 'I like the lights’ and ‘its great its only 5 people and the music is great’.

Another nearly-missed treat, this time in Bath: The Holburne Museum garden this winter has been filled with thousands of colour-changing fibre-optic lights, creating a Field of Light that comes to life as dusk deepens into night. The installation closes today but I heard about it just in time to experience this amazing artwork.

And there will now be a short intermission. I'm not taking my laptop to Cambodia, where I'll be offering guidance on finding way of processing through writing what looks like an amazing adventure holiday... full report to follow after 18th January, when I'm home again.
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2011-12-30T23:30:00.008Z

Bristol Old Vic main stage is still off-limits while refurbishment trundles on and, having seen some cracking productions in their tiny studio this season, I wanted to see their main event too – Coram Boy, staged in 2000-capacity Colston Hall. This is a revival of a show that began life at the National six years ago then crossed to Broadway where it was mauled by the critics. Muddled, preposterous and not much fun are some of the kinder epithets among reviews including more specific objections like "You could call it Dickensian if Dickens wrote in clichés and didn’t give a tuppence about characterisation” and, simpler if less literary, "It’s torture." Make your own mind up time, I thought, so I went along.
It's long - nearly three hours. During the interval the woman sitting next to me scoured her programme notes declaring 'we must have missed something, there's got to be a basic plot.' There was indeed a kind of central core within this vast flurry of duplicity, all double-cast to show the passage of years, which for me was defined in the words of Mrs Lynch, one of the minor villains: "All wealth is based on the suffering of others."
This is an era of opulance and degradation, the line between them thin as a hymen, or a noose. On the one side Thomas Coram, benefactor and child-saver: on the other wicked Otis who pretends to act for him but buries the babies and pockets the money. Even rescued children aren't safe really, as kind Mr Coram can't prevent them being kidnapped and shipped off to a Turkish harem. These are just some of the sub-plots - the basic plot, missus, is the double quest for a lost son, leading to a double reunion at the end. Hallelujah, Hallelujah, as Handel might say - and indeed did, appearing in a small cameo role to conduct the ending. All clear?
Coram Boy delivers a full orchestra, little choir boys, gorgeous Georgian costumes, high-energy action scenes, morally-aware social commentary, and birth-to-death dramatic scope: what’s not to enjoy? And I did enjoy, but on a very modest scale considering the vast casts and complexity of sets. It was partly the panto-style simplicity of the script, so every character stayed 2-dimensional, and partly an uncomfortable feeling that the real passion at the heart of this production was filling a large auditorium with paying punters. I couldn't imagine any one of these highly competent actors, directors, and technicians, actually aching to communicate this story to an audience, and to me that's what theatre should be. Personal and vulnerable beats slick and spectacular every time.

Within a couple of hours I was at the Watershed watching another intensely violent tale - Almodovar's monstrously beautiful The Skin I Live In , which to say anything about would be to spoil - except that this film showed the cruelty of obsession and the pain of loss in a way absolutely opposite to the play I'd just seen: frenzied and viscerally painful but deeply important to its creator.

So now would be a good time to do a review-of-the-year but I can't remember back that far so I'll just do a little list of things I've most enjoyed this Christmas:
~ the day itself, with my children and my children's children,

~ celebrations with friends - round solstice fire, at parties and in town,
~ prosecco with christmas stockings at Emily's,
~ crazy dressing-up day with Macfadyens,
~ how mild it's been!
~ unexpected discovery, on a Longleat walk, that the estate had been transformed into a winter wonderland with reindeer, and iceskating, and festive stalls and an amazing constantly-changing illuminated 'Singing Tree' sending the sound of carols through the woodlands.
~ Doctor Who Christmas Special!
~ fantastic live music at the Cornerhouse,
~ minced pies and mulled wine at the Garden Cafe...
~ Sherlock Holmes: a Game of Shadows - fabulous cinematography, great acting, clever script.
~ decorations in streets and homes, lighting up midwinter like it always has been ever since there's been people and long before electricity or gospels since our galaxy is only one of millions and billions.....

Oh, and turkey of the holiday season: BBC's much hyped Great Expectations - aptly named for its intriguing indigo-toned previews but turning out to be an uninteresting and self-conscious adaptation disturbingly miscast, Estella more like the elder Miss Bingley and Pip looking in every shot like he'd rather be auditioning for a retro boy band. Luckily HIGNFY and the Ab Fab girls were on the other channel!

Happy New Year!

2011-12-24T17:00:00.002Z

Among a plethora of pantomimes, The French Detective and the Blue Dog by Hattie Naylor is the delightfully-different seasonal production at The Egg in Bath, where the ovoid stage is transformed into a quaint street in pre-invasion Belgium. Enter the famous Parisian Inspector Charcuterie (brilliantly played with Jacques Cluseau hang-dog expression and ‘Allo ‘Allo accent by Chris Bianchi), off on holiday with his assistant mini-sleuth Minette, child genius and self-styled niece. The musical is full of jolly songs like "Let's solve the murder NOW!" but they don't get beyond the opening number before the first victim hits the stage, followed by most of the rest of this village where everyone is a secret circus performer. “There is no greater tragedy than not being able to do the thing you love, that’s why we’re all so hopeless at our jobs” says Fe-fe le Knife profoundly. Deeper than the clowning and comedy, the story touches movingly on human needs: Minette’s solo “I’ll be on my own again”, as her idiotic pseudo-uncle falls besottedly for Madame Spaniel and abandons his little charge, is real lump-in-the-throat time. 12-year old Flossie Ure, who took this key role on the performance I saw, was sensational in both her singing and her stage presence.
Billed as a family show for 6-and-upwards, younger children are unlikely to appreciate the Franglais Midsomer-Murders parodies but vibrant acting, superb script, and fabulous production values carry the show triumphantly through two hours with even the littlies (mostly) gripped. Rapid costume changes and clever props helped a marvellous trio (John Biddle, Paul Mundell, and Jessica Pidsley) create a medley of Belgian misfits and the nail-biting finale is sensational – it would be a spoiler to reveal how dazzling is the circus trick that ends the show.
The programme calls this a ‘world premiere’ which suggests it may travel – it certainly deserves to, but don’t chance it – go along to Bath before January 8th and be ready for much mirth and the odd sniffle.

So here we are, another Christmas. I hope you're having a good one as I write this, and have recycled all the bottles & gift wrappings and made-up all the rows by the time you read this. The year we called 2011 and messed up so thoroughly is nearly finished - time for a new one, box-fresh and shiny. Try and keep it clean this time...

2011-12-19T23:00:00.010Z

Until a few weeks ago, my mental image of 'the Canary Islands' was rowdy bars and rows of loungers on black sand. I'd never heard of La Gomera, reached by ferry from western side of Tenerife. So if your geography is as shaky as mine, you might like to know the total population of this 2-million-year dormant volcano is slightly less than that of Frome, and most of this tiny circular island is covered with one of the oldest natural forests of the world.
You can walk deep into the laurel 'cloud forest' with moss thick as hoarfrost on every branch, you can climb literally out of the clouds into brilliant blue sky again at the top of the rocks, and an hour's walk will take you through eco-systems varying from dense pine forest to near-barren rocks polka-dotted with cactus and aloe vera.
Every turn in the hairpin-roads brings vistas to make you gasp, from the hikers' paradise of Garajonay National Park right down to the palm fringed bays 1450 metres below.
And then you drive back along the narrow mountain road past rural settlements painted moorish colours of cinamon and gold, a route that becomes daily more familiar - there's the goats, there's the bar with the bougainvillea - there's our house, in the middle of Chejelipes, as Madness might sing.

And the apartment was utterly astounding. A picky person might take issue with the broken cooker and paucity of light bulbs, but there's a coffee-machine and a fridge, and what I'll always remember is the panoramic window giving amazing views right down the valley, high above the reservoir where hawks circle slowly in sheer blue sky in the morning and at night the moon rose slowly above craggy distant hills.

Which brings me back to lounging beside black sand, which after 2 or 3 - or even 5 - hours of strenuous walking seems a grand idea, when beer comes in frosted glasses and all you can think is: it's December, and it's 23 degrees!

So I've just spent a week of my life without wifi or internet access, and mostly without mobile signal. But I've seen dolphins and exotic plants and primeval forests and incredible rock formations in sunshine and mist, in places I could never have imagined and places I'll never forget...

Back in the real world, there was a festive feel in the air at Words&Ears Poetry night in Bradford-on-Avon on Monday, so thanks to Frome posse - Rose, Alison, and Rosie - for so brilliantly supporting my guest spot. For an angelic footnote: click here then Programmes and scroll down to Dec 18th Seeing Things - A Week of Angels for David Chandler's programme on FromeFM featuring some of the great poets of Frome.
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2011-12-07T23:00:00.004Z

So now it's December there's no holding back the encroaching of spangles and jingles and festive tingles. I joined the throng on Catherine Hill for Sunday's Artisan market, where Marian Bruce's studio was offering winter stabling for the SCRAPTORS horse while delicious fare and delectable fairings were selling like hot punch all along the cobbles.

On Monday night we went Into the Wardrobe for the final Frome Poetry Cafe of the year: our annual Merlin Christmas Show Special with theatre tickets for 'best' readings inspired by The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Making the selection was Mayor Nick White - appropriately an actor himself.
"Just fantastic - really brilliant" was his overall verdict on the fabulous range of performances, from sultry wintry magic from Rose Flint to festive sauciness with Muriel Lavender and Liv Torc, and some moving personal pieces as well as lashings of wicked wit around the theme. Nick's final pick went to Alison Clink's quirky musings on Narnia and Phyllis Higgins' cautionary tale of an impressionable child who would try it at home, although "I explained to her that household furniture/ Seldom conceals an other world aperture..."

And with two writing circles in one day, my writers' year ends in a plethora of chocolate, Prosecco, and fascinating readings and discussions. There'll be more celebrations of course, but I'll miss some of them as I'm away next week - but I'll be back for Words & Ears Poetry Cafe at Bradford on Avon. Be there, as they say, or be elsewhere...

2011-12-03T01:00:00.012Z

November 2011 was one of the warmest on record, according to BBC weather website, but for me it's always the month of what my friend Bob Paterson calls 'toxic nostalgia'. This year I followed Kenji Miyazawa's theory "we must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey": encouraged by a supportive writing circle I'm dipping, episodically, into the past, and with the help of a friend with a loft ladder I retrieved my boxes of attic-abilia for embrace and burning. And I've spent the last two days of the month in and around Newton Abbott, where my grandparents lived, revisiting the coast and moors that were such a big part of my childhood and adult life. Lovely dawns and dusks over the river Teign, watery sun and bleak wind for out-of-season Teignmouth, and howling King-Lear-mad-scene-meets-Ken-Russell's-Gothic storm on Haytor Down. I stood watching the rain blowing in jagged torrents, eating downpour with every gasp, with the past clinging to my skin closer than my saturated jeans, remembering the final words of AA Milne's last story about his son: So they went off together. But wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest a little boy and his bear will always be playing.

Back in the present tense, Keep Frome Local celebrated its first birthday at the Granary with brilliant live music from, among others, Indigo Children (with a fabulous cover of Ed Sheeran's You need me but I don't need you), Al O'Kane, and ever-excellent Leander Morales. With typical Frome eccentricity, organiser Tim O'Connor decided a bit of poetry would go down well mid-evening and, as Rosie Jackson, Rose Flint and I discovered, it actually did. Tim in his MC role was mindful of venue Health-and-Safety regulations, opening the event with the reminder "If you see a fire: huddle round it, it gets chilly in the evenings..."

The Surprise of Love, written by Marivaux in 1722 and currently playing at the Ustinov, is a deceptive piece: an apparent confection of gorgeous costumes and witty mockery of aristocratic emotional self-indulgence in the Olivia/Orsino tradition – you can almost hear Shakespearean fairies muttering ‘Lord what fools these mortals be’ just off the exquisitely painted set. But in this masterly new translation by Mike Alfreds, an entertaining Harlequinade of multiple courtships becomes a set of knots worthy of RD Laing as the characters tie themselves into psychological insecurities that classic philosopher Hortensius is powerless to unravel. The Marquise is a young widow in love with her own romantic grief, until her bereaved neighbour the Chevalier arrives full of the importance of his own despair. I believe I have an obligation to you, to compensate you for the loss of my husband's friendship, she promptly decides, with glazed eyes an inch from his face.

It’s significant, perhaps, that the nobles are named only by their status: their servants, smart Lisette and honest Lubin, are the ones with emotional insight, though only ‘audience privilege’ gives the full picture. And as we wait for all to end predictably, the ‘twist’ isn't that the inevitable coupling fails to occur, it’s that the path to this outcome becomes not a rose-strewn comedy but a painfully dark passage of jealousy and rage with others hurt on the way. Perhaps the surprise of love is that we are never ready for its pain.

Strong direction by Laurence Boswell and a splendid cast make this a great finale to the autumn season trilogy of European classics – and Ustinov studio theatre is the perfect venue, the stage confined enough for side walls to become boundaries and props to fretful petulance, and all seats close enough for us to be mesmerised every expression of emotion transparently played by a marvellous cast, especially luminous Laura Rees as the Marquise.

There's a weird footnote to the attic clearance mentioned above - in fact so weird I still don't know how to write about it. Briefly, we discovered another box, a previous resident - a coffin-sized box containing a white lace wedding dress which, as if its presence alone wasn't Miss-Haversham enough, was stained with something dark red, mysteriously sticky at the centre. I blogged earlier in November about the poetry workshop reminding me of writing for Marian Bruce's fallen angels, and here now in my house was graphic debris that could have belonged to the Angel Bride, whose artless love poems contrasted with her whispered dreams as she lies alone and desolate in the forest.
I re-read the words I'd imagined for her dreams: Last night I dreamed I went to the place where I had hidden my wings. I had packed them carefully but as I began to unwrap them I found the coverings had been bleeding. I unwound and unwound for a long time, and the wrappings became like sodden bandages.
"One of those life-changing moments when we encounter ourselves, and know that we've moved on" suggested Pippa Howell, reviewing this staged installation in 2003. Let's hope so.
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2011-11-26T21:00:00.010Z

"If you only see one West End play this year it's got to be Jerusalem"... so we did, convinced by scrolls of honours for Jez Butterworth's script and Mark Rylance in the lead role of Rooster, rogue-hero and Green Man, striving to create the Jerusalem of Blake's anthem among retreating rural woodlands of Wiltshire.

Rylance's Rooster is an extraordinary figure: drunken clown & local menace as well as storyteller with near-mystical powers and a body broken by Evel Knievel stunting but apparently indestructible, his insalubrious Occupy has become a magnet for the disaffected and a threat to the developers and civic authorities. The story is violent, painfully funny, and stonkingly well acted- not only magical Mark, who eats the audience from the palm of his hand, but a wonderful support team headed by out-of-office Mackenzie Crook. Challenging, baffling and entertaining in roughly equal proportions, that's brilliant writing.

I Malvolio the fourth of Tim Crouch's 'retellings' of famous Shakespeare plays in the perspective of a minor character, presents the dour steward of Twelfth Night incarcerated as insane after being tricked out of habitual restraint in a society he insists is more crazy than he is. And certainly Shakespeare's plot devices of boy/girl confusion and infatuations do seem, in his outraged summary, ripe for therapy. The ranting is comical and the outfit a joke demonstration of every emblem of derangement and rejection from soiling to KICK ME card on his back, but we're not allowed to forget the false 'love letter' that led Malvolio to this state, or the fury of his futile threat I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you. What pushed him into this abyss was the terrible thrill of believing he was loved. Which is why our laughter chills into silence as we watch Malvolio changing, slowly and deliberately, back into the corseted, starch-shirted, buttoned-up, dark-suited being he sees as worthy of respect.
Friday's late show at Bristol Old Vic was billed as adult content, so what did Tim change? Not much, apparently. He always strips to his leopard-print thong, but doesn’t usually talk so much about audience drinking. Or cardboard boxes and orgasm. The main difference was the amount of ad-libbing - so much he nearly falls out of character but, like a bungee jumper, always pulls back, and the laughter fades. This is a man stripped of everything he valued, left only with what he dreads: the vulnerability of being human. Perhaps Malvolio is right, and believing yourself beloved is madness.

Frome Christmas Extravaganza, fun even when thronging with umbrellas, was a vintage one this year - a mild clear night, and a return of the traditional 'real tree' to the market place. The town was seething with all the usual jollities, including craft fair at the Merlin, and a dance stage in the main street (only in Frome, surely, is the Christmas Light Switch-On prefaced by performances of The Sugar Plum Fairy and Whip My Hair...) Nick White in mayoral role (and male attire, which doesn't always happen, though he looks just as good in a suit as in tutu) with the help of the three little winners of the draw-a-Christmas-card contest (a crowd ahhhh moment) did the countdown (5... 4... 3... 2... 1...) and the Frome tradition of partial success was maintained to the satisfaction of all. 'Oh well, look behind you,' said Nick cheerfully, 'some of them have come on there.' And then we had fireworks. I genuinely love Frome civic celebrations, I feel a bit like Dr Johnson admiring dogs that walk on their hind legs: It is not done well, but you are surprised to find it done at all.
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2011-11-23T11:30:00.015Z

"Don't come expecting anything because it won't be the way you expected" is the message from Filter to audiences of their Lyric co-production Midsummer Night's Dream now touring. I went expecting rowdy anarchy, and was not disappointed.The Tobacco Factory auditorium, largely composed of college students, helpfully recreated Elizabethan mob racket from the start, heedless of Flute's plea from the stage "Stop talking! Do you not know I can actually see you, it’s not the telly." Flute was in prologue mode at the time, introducing their show to Bristol with the conceit that Bottom was to be played tonight by Martin Clunes whose nonarrival now meant cancellation... Cue the fabulous Fergus O'Donnell, aka a punter called Steve, to identify himself as keen (and insured through MU) and step into role, cleverly anticipating the Mechanical's similar dismay when Pyramus goes missing. And for me it's the way jokes & chaos were always somehow entwined with Shakespeare's storylines & themes that makes this production so much more than merely a romp with fairies & funny frocks. In fact costumes, like lighting, set, and props evoking Occupy rather than Athenian woodland, all encouraged suspension of disbelief rather than eye-feasting, with Bottom's transformation effected without any visual change. Sound was the magic, throughout, creating donkey hooves, moonlit magic, and turning Titania's flowery dell into a seething club scene. Lots of the hilarity as well as the musical vitality came from contemporary references: Oberon, a central character throughout, was a wonderful combo of over-excited child and annoying office boss as played by Jonathan Broadbent in a Batman suit telling everyone ‘I’m invisible!’

But even with cuts and changes, the themes of Shakespeare's story came through and his words remained the real success of the play. The pain of the young lovers' relationships, the brutality of rejection in a trusted bonding, the distress at abandonment - all these timeless elements were shown full-on and the gravity of that anguish wasn't compromised by the culminating violent food fight with flying flump across the stage and auditorium. Both ways. I think that was my favourite bit, along with Batman/Oberon and his Robin/Puck settling in camping chairs with Carlings to watch the humans fight... fight....

Summing up in 4 words: brilliant, inventive, anarchic, overlong. I don't know what it's like on other nights, but it seemed to me we'd had our best fun out of the 'metafiction' of Pyramus and Thisbe at the opening, and the production could have ended after the magic righting of the final wrong, giving Bottom the rueful last word ("Shame...") as he wakes from his Dream to find he's no longer hung like a donkey, and then returning him back to his seat in the audience. The cast seemed as exhausted as the audience, and the long death scene meant the production ended with wafts of confused pre-emptive applause.. not a good finale for a fabulous show. But 4 stars, definitely, so take a look at the Youtube or just book and go.

And here's a picture of Autumn at Stourhead, before this unexpectedly mellow autumn remembers it's nearly the end of November and disappears into wintry murk.

2011-11-22T00:28:00.009Z

Bristol is positively bristling with new theatrical initiatives: two new mini-venues (The Wardrobe and Little Black Box) and Lunchtime Theatre at The Brewery, launched this week with a short play by Tamsin Walker and yummy pizza from Mark's Bread next door. Digits, developed from Tobacco Factory’s Script Space new writing competition, was well acted with pacey direction and clever 2-D props, but the basic idea - unreliable narrator blames duped friend after failed scam - needed a less unwavering trajectory in the storyline to maintain curiosity, and the dim/devious Likely Lads duo came over as dole-queue cliches rather than credible characters.

Still in Bristol, the Old Vic hosted a new production from Sound&Fury who last year transformed the studio into a submarine for the unforgettable experience of Kursk, a play I reviewed as amazingly poignant and a brilliant a piece of theatre... unforgettable. So I had high expectations of Going Dark, and wasn't disappointed by the fabulous theatricality and sensitive solo performance by John Mackay as Max, the astrophysicist whose galactic knowledge and cosmic understanding can't help him when he begins to lose his sight. "We are all scattered stardust... we exist in our heads" Max tells us as the darkened auditorium becomes the planetarium where he lectures on the wonders of the universe below a vast night sky. Max's talks are fascinating and contrast touchingly with the dialogue with his unseen child, though the inherent poignancy does get a bit sentimentalised (the little boy is called Leo, to further point the pathos of Max losing both his sun and his son...) Some surprisingly clunky sections too – the “what’s that you say?” repeated-phone-conversation device, and unexplained references to hallucinations - apparently common during visual loss - dropped confusingly into the story. But despite any reservations about Hattie Naylor's script, being huddled the dark, knowing our galaxy is hurtling away from the light... that was goosebumps stuff. Great direction by Tom Espiner and Dan Jones.

Plutarch called painting 'silent poetry' and Leonardo said "Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen." Though presumably in Italian. That near-symbiotic relationship was wonderfully evident on Monday night when twenty poets joined guests Rose Flint and David Davies at one of the best nights we've ever seen at the Frome Poetry Cafe. "Inspired by Art" proved a rich theme, as the room filled with intensely perceived visual experiences and deeply felt emotions. Eight of the 'Angels in Art' workshop participants read great pieces from that experience, several people brought paintings to show, and poems ranged from intense observation of a single piece to reflections on art and artists in general. We heard anger as well as awe - and refreshing humour too from Alison, and Phyllis who confessed One dictum I use - not yours, mine/ if it looks like a photo, fine. More serious thoughts particularly appreciated came from regular contributors Rosie Jackson (Stanley Spencer) & Helen Moore (Duchamp's urinal), and first time visitor Stephen Boyce (Barbara Hepworth's Configuration). I could go on and on, it was just one of those great nights that Frome's Garden Cafe hosts so well. And there'll be another soon - the annual spangly Merlin Theatre tie-in, this time going Into The Wardrobe possibly with lions and witches and hopefully with a strong spell of irreligious fantasy. Nick White, Frome Mayor and famed local thespian, will be there to reward the most popular pieces with tickets for The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Magic....

2011-11-17T00:30:00.007Z

In the fabulously inventive and audaciously absurd world of Gonzo Moose, Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, the famous fairytale-collecting brothers featured in their touring production Grimm and Grimmer, are just like Jedward, except one looks like Tweedledum and the other looks like Robin Cook. It's tempting to say that, in their various fairytale guises, Seamus Allen and Mark Conway steal every scene with their witty physicality, but I'm aware too that the charm and theatrical presence of Lauren Silver, in the single role of their sister Lotte, is the glue that holds this hilarious chaos together. The plot is essentially pure fairytale: the hero(ine)'s journey, the helpers (an ear, some lascivious elves), the darkest hour (top tip: brute force beats magic) but with a large helping of Monty Python and Gonzo Moose black humour sprinkled in. And blood. "Let's never do that again" say the Grimm boys, back in Jedward unison mode, after the (not-gratuitous-at-all) blood-gushing heart-surgery scene at the end... I've missed a bit of the story, actually. The show came to Bath's tidy little Rondo Theatre for one night only - I think you should all go & see it in Oxford next month.

Angels... what are they like? I've known some strange ones. Marian Bruce's amazing life-size installations - arguing, whoring, desolate... The Recording Angel in my play Love Bites, whose smart-arse jocularity would make him voiceover candidate for any celestial Come Dine With Me. Historically of course angels are depicted with feathery, birdlike, wings: the Tom Lomax artifacts exhibited at Rook Lane Arts are more cerebral, calculated apparently according to rules of alchemy, but the tiny ones looked to me more like mangled fondant mice. Whatever one's expectations, Rose Flint's excellent poetry workshop at that exhibition space inspired wide-ranging thoughts and feelings: Linda Perry's magnificent piece accused her chosen angel of looking for bones to hang your bare existence on, and as Rose commented, all our angels were pretty broken. I look forward to next Monday, when I hope to remeet some of these psychotic, traumatised, mutilated, angels struggling towards the Poetry Cafe to be born again....

Still on a poetic theme, a quick plug for Words & Ears, Dawn Gorman's monthly gig in Bradford on Avon, where I'm flying the flag for the Provocative Elder movement next month - also small poetic role as sexegenarian separatist at the fundraiser party for Keep Frome Local on December 1st.

2011-11-13T11:00:00.449Z

Back in Frome, and everything that was simmering quietly when I left seems to be coming to a rapid boil. First event occurred before I'd worked through my pile of post: Hip Yak Poetry Shack, with actual yak, puppet-stylee, co-hosted by lovely Liv Torc and dashingly moustachioed Jonny Fluffypunk, premiered in Bath's Porter Cellar Bar and featured also Chris Redmond (who wowed Frome on Poetry Platter night with his reclamation of Slow) and surreal humorist Rachel Pantechnicon - all brilliant performers deservedly well received by the lively, largely student, audience. I especially liked Chris's ironic homage to Kenny G (I don't want acid jazz, I want flaccid jazz) and his delvings into dark places like a cold which made him sound like the love child of Darth Vadar and Deidre Barlow, and the only good poo poem ever written.

There were some women among the audience but as performers it was left to just Liv, sassy Bath poet Jo Butts and me to cut a swathe through the testosterone jungle.(Sorry Rachel but you know what I mean.) I'm amazed that with a line advocating no more appeasing and male ego-pleasing I got to bronze in the mini-slam - the winner cramming in more cocks, wanks, muffs and spunk than you'd find scrawled on the door of a primary school loo. I've nothing against any of these ingredients to a healthy & happy lifestyle but the term 'over-egged' came to mind, as did the image of Keats' Ruth amid the alien corn feeling a bit sick. And shouldn't students be off out Occupying somewhere? These elderly quibbles aside Hip Yak Poetry Shack was an excellent evening's entertainment, to be repeated in Frome on December 17th Upstairs at the Cornerhouse so I urge you all to go along & try it if you live nearby as I think you'll enjoy.

Poetry of a different style by the market cross in Frome for the 11.11 anti-war & Gaian evening vigil. Rain poured with anthropomorphic dramatic effect as Rose Flint read her magical Prayer for Peace and Helen Moore intoned her splendid Kali Exorcism.

Bristol Old Vic is still operating without a main theatre, but the 1927 production The Animals and Children Took To The Streets was ideally suited the studio: the show was brilliant but also hard to describe. Imagine Lemony Snicket rewrote the tale of the Pied Piper, and Tim Burton decided to make a film of it. This could be the cuttings. A cunningly animated backdrop created the infested putrid underbelly of the city, a place where the caretaker is regularly beaten up by Wayne the Racist and his eight kids, where gangs of violent children have to be sedated by Granny's zombifying gumdrops - which the neighbours agree is "a massive improvement". References to modern life - vile living conditions, an underclass society, urban riots, chemical overdosing of mental disorders, and probably a few others - crawl and scurry through the action like the vermin, but presentation is more Victorian end-of-pier: the three women who played all the (non-projected) roles wore pierrot style make-up, and silent-movie piano-playing accompanied the action. Outrageous imagination and subversive humour defiantly compensated for a slim and slightly repetitive story-line in this inverse-fairy-tale which put every theatrical element in the blender and pressed Pulse. The full-house audience all loved it, especially the children. Little dears.

2011-11-05T19:30:00.021Z

My last week here in the Bay has treated me to continuing Indian summer with day-glo blue skies and amazing sunsets so sudden it's like the moon, which has been floating high fragile as a snowflake for ages, has finally lost patience and yelled “you’re supposed to be on a break” across the celestial orbs.
For me this means more long walks, with birds and surfers to watch as well as the long rolling waves. I've been doing most of my writing on the hoof in a notebook, my laptop mainly used to scroll world news. “All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking” Nietzsche said. I don't know about great thoughts but the tranquility is marvellous.
Longest walk - five and a half hours - took me up to the Moss Beach Marine Reserve, over Pillar Point bluff, breeding ground for seals as well as unique preserve of molluscs and other sea life.
The only other life form I see on these perambulations is generally canine plus owner, and I'm going to share now, with fulsome apology to all the very lovely doggy people I know (Anja, Jacqui, Rose et al...) that after three weeks in California I’ve developed a fervent wish that dog-owning will some day become as unpopular as public smoking and for much the same reasons: environmentally polluting, intrustive and unhealthy for passive victims. Even in the sublime serenity of a beach at sunset you’re not safe from a woman brandishing a ball in one of those long plastic claws calling out reassuringly ‘He’s only being friendly!’ The tempting, but unuttered, response is ‘Madam, were your son as big as a pony with the exhuberance of a Drone bomber, would you be equally blasé to watch him paw my breast, headbutt my chin, and lick up my nose? I think not Madam, indeed I suspect you would have required sharp words with his teacher and grounded him for the rest of his puberty.’

Don’t get the impression I’m anthropophobic or averse to fraternising, far from it. Every stranger who's connected with me by word or gesture has been really friendly - and despite my joy in solitude I’ve had great social times too: with the Coastside Life Story Writers group who made me hugely welcome at their meeting and over lunch, at Dave Minton’s Spoken Word event, Mo’s amazing music night (six singer/guitarists & electric standing bass), and the Friday morning jamming sessions at Ramans - all highlights of my stay.

So too was our visit to the city, fortuitously on the only rainy day of my trip. Masters of Venice was the stunning and surprisingly sensuous exhibition we viewed at the de Younge Fine Art Gallery - here's Titian's Danaë and the shower of gold - followed by an afternoon in hippy Haight district, with amazing shops like Piedmont Boutique, and taking a detour past the Occupy camp to show solidarity on the way home.

So tomorrow I'll be flying out of San Francisco: no more walks along the bay where white waves crash endlessly and sunlight glitters liquid silver over amethyst ocean and the sky is so enormously blue all I can say to describe what I see, like Steve Jobs facing death, is Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.

2011-10-30T23:00:00.026Z

We've had no coastal fog here in Half Moon Bay this week, which means intense blue sky and dazzling sunshine all day. The beach is a scimitar of soft sand for five miles, or a bit more if you take the cliff-top nature trail. These routes intersect at various points between the town and the port (including at El Granada sea front where I join them via the well-used pedestrian access of the big drainpipe under the highway) and after daily investigation - lasting from 2-4 hours - of every permutation, I can now confidently report they are all mind-blowingly entrancing.
The path is popular with cyclists and dog-walkers, but the beach has long stretches generally completely deserted. Near the connection points where there are car parks they suddenly become alive with clusters of picnickers or broiling with surfers, but the seabirds don't mind and nor do I.

So we've really arrived on Planet Pumpkin now it's the eve of Halloween. Every housefront is decked with ghoulies and ghosties and things that go Boo! on the lawn. Pumpkins are so franticly ubiquitous that every emporium looks like Squash Central, including the canine beauty parlour (devilish dog costumes also available for hire.) Mo and I got busy with the carving knives but our Jack o'Lantern efforts were paltry compared to the winner of the 24th Annual Pumpkin Carving Contest at Farmer John's, for which we were both inexplicably invited to join the judging panel. San Francisco skyline, complete with witch, we unanimously voted first, though I also like OCCUPY THIS! and a teeny muffin-sized squash deemed in candle-lit lettering by its carver BIG. Partying in the maize under the glimmering new moon was fun too.

Finally, since this is - ostensibly - a writer's blog, let me recommend this TED talk sent me by Keith Hart. Fascinating. I've also been intrigued by Bill Bryson's At Home which ranges far from hearth & hall, illuminating all manner of social developments including the response of the 19th Century establishment to the Chartists' London rally: viz,sending in 170,000 special constables armed with swords and muskets. Plus ça change...
..

2011-10-25T14:00:00.021+01:00

One of the amazing things, to someone like me more familiar with the spaghetti-snarling roads of England, is the casual way that long road trips are undertaken in California. Our weekend jaunt took us eight hours up the Redwood Highway, through the famous 'Avenue of Giants' and literally through a tree, to Arcata where Anja's daughter Kaitlyn is studying at Humboldt State University - visually thrilling all the way.
Arcata is a delightfully boho little coastal town, full of gaily painted wooden buildings dating from the 1850s when it was first established. Dress code is hippy/sporty, as if the entire population listens to the Eagles on headphones while jogging. The entire population, actually, more than doubles during termtime: of the 17,000 inhabitants, nearly 8000 are students. On Saturdays there's a Farmers Market in the Plaza - a large grass square with a statue of William McKinley, a few palm trees, a blue-grass quartet called Striped Pig Stringband and the Occupy Arcata encampment, all surrounded by fruit, veg, flower, and cookie stalls.
There's a lively cafe culture in the admirably compact town centre, but Arcata's major attraction is the wonderful wild fowl sanctuary that's actually a water treatment plant, where you can see hundreds of sea and marsh birds. We saw pelicans, sandpipers, avocets, egrets and herons - including a black crowned night heron in a tree only feet away.

Good times, with lovely people, and some great meals too... here's Mo & me snapped by Anja choosing a starter of Rumi's Lovechild from the esoteric menu of culty self-styled 'cafe at the end of the universe' Three Foods, a misnumber if not a deliberate misnomer.

So now we're back in El Granada, an even longer drive partly because we took the even-more-fabulously-scenic coast road and also became caught in a truck-fire tailback coming out of San Francisco. Since I wasn't driving, I took the opportunity to finish reading Jonathan Franzen's Freedom which I'd recommend to anyone wanting insightful context to America politics and society, or just anyone who wants a really gripping read. As well as following stories of his annoying yet endearing characters, the novel offers shocking & sad truths about the depravity and inevitability of capitalism. The American experiment of self-government is statistically skewed from the outset, his narrator reflects, because it wasn’t the people with sociable genes who fled the crowded Old World for the new continent; it was the people who didn’t get along with others. Nevertheless it was good to see students in the posh Uni campus up the hill have united - in principle if not in location - with the transients & campaigners in the town centre in support of the Wall Street anti-capitalist protest and plea for peace.

2011-10-20T12:00:00.013+01:00

This seems a strange time to be in America, with news of protest occupations of Wall Street and San Francisco - & now the rest of the world - flooding facebook... a strange time to be anywhere, maybe.

I think a lot about these things, and the news from Libya, as I pace along the five mile stretch of Half Moon Bay.
It's a great place to walk and reflect: there's usually no-one else around, apart from a few surfers down by the harbour, and the odd dog-walker.
I've walked here every day since I arrived last Friday, watching the pelicans' dipping flight and the tiny sanderlings skittering along the rim of the waves and snatching at the dark shimmering sand for molluscs. There is huge solace in this timelessness, in becoming invisible on the long shoreline as swirling sea mists drift in.

So in lieu of weighty matters I've decided to focus on a few aspects of life here in, all beginning with P.
1 Pumpkins, obviously. Half Moon Bay is the pumpkin capital of the world - it's official & on all the banners. Thousands of cars crawled the final miles of Highway One to cram the town's Pumpkin Festival last weekend, where the streets were dense with stalls selling pumpkinabilia while bands played. Best act was Farmer Mike, carving Disney faces into giant squashes with remarkable skill. Pumkins grow easily in this climate - the fields are all scattered with orange - and a pumpkin for Halloween is an Article of Faith over here.

2 Pelicans - they seem so exotic and bizarre, like small lost pterodactyls looking for another era.
3 Plinko. My great friends & generous hosts, Mo & Anja, have acquired a cat and that's his name. Apparently it's from a 'pricing game' on American TV but Plinks is clearly oblivious to that, being into physical rather than fiscal play.

4 Pharmacists - well, the one in Half Moon Bay's CVS, anyway. I had a bit of an itch in my eye, so I approached the Consultant Pharmacist counter for advice. He decided it was probably an incipient stye. "Have you got anything...?" I asked. He scoffed - really, it's the only applicable verb.
"This is America! Of course we've got something. Look, here y'are - " (it was a small tube obligingly labled STYE) " - it's vaseline. Vaseline! D'you wanna pay 11 dollars for vaseline? Do you know what vaseline does to skin? It blocks the pores. This is America, this is American capitalism! Get a hot compress, that's all you need. I dunno what it's like where you come from but this is America and it's lousy."
Always good to consult a specialist, I thought as I thanked him and scuttled away. (Oh and my eye's better now, thanks. Hot compress seems to have done the trick...) I don't have a picture of the rogue retailer himself but here's the halloween figure greeting CVS shoppers, which probably didn't improve his patriotic fervour.

5 Prosecco in the garden at sunset... since then it's been log fires before supper, but Sunday was really lovely.

6&7 Peace and privilege of being here.

2011-10-13T09:00:00.013+01:00

Ustinov Studio, round the corner from Bath's more opulent and well-to-do Theatre Royal, has launched an ambitious autumn season under the guidance of new Artistic director Laurence Boswell. Promotion promises 'the most exciting period of its history... British premieres of brand new in-house productions by major European playwrights... in brand new translations commissioned by the Ustinov Studio.'
Three of these are in an extensive run till Christmas, and if the other two are as good as Iphigenia the hype is well justified. Meredith Oakes' excellent translation brings psychological sensitivity to the conventions of Goethe's Greek-influenced dramatic form, with long passages of narrative in the opening scenes, but it's well worth waiting for the slow-smouldering fuse to ignite emotional fireworks in the later scenes. Laura Rees sustained with simplicity the difficult central role of the priestess herself, requiring presentation of long speeches with minimal physicality. The four men had chunkier and more complex roles: Tom Mothersdale is outstanding as Orestes, crazed by guilt at having murdered their mother, as is Christopher Hunter's King Thoas, who cuts through this Gordian knot of blame and punishment with moving simplicity at the end. Sound design by Fergus O’Hare was eerie and exquisite. I can't wait to see this superb ensemble of actors in another production - there's The Phoenix of Madrid by Spanish writer Calderon and The Surprise of Love by Marivaux to choose from.

And now for something completely different: Midnight in Paris. I've previously only seen Owen Wilson on an aeroplane in the cumbersome one-star comedy You, Me and Dupree so was unprepared for the subtlety and charm of his performance as Gil, the wanner-be novelist transported from his problematic present-day reality into the glamour of the 1920s ex-pat literati in Paris nightly with Cinderella-like exactness as midnight strikes. Woody Allen's delightful fantasy is visually seductive and witty in both eras: it's fun celebrity-spotting in Gertrude Stein's salon and the bars where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald dance and Ernest Hemingway brags as Cole Porter plays piano. It's a homage to Paris and to nostalgia itself, a rite-of-passage story, and a perky social comedy with so much psychological layering I wanted to see it again as soon as it was over. You'll miss a treat if you don't see this movie, but at least watch this 40 second clip

And now I'm packing for California, where the forecast is 22 degrees and sunshine. I'm planning to write and walk, whatever the weather, but there'll be music and poetry there too.. and Scrabble is a certainty.

2011-10-09T17:00:00.027+01:00

October 8th. A hundred and twenty black balloons float in a grey London sky, one for every murderous month of the war in Afghanistan. Stop The War Coalition has organised an assembly of protest against the continuation of this war, and every other imperialist intervention. You might expect our 4-hour gathering to be sombre, but actually it was inspirational: powerful and passionate words from activists including actors, poets, musicians, students, soldiers and families of soldiers.
There were so many highlights, from the poignant 'reading of names' of 120 war victims and Mark Rylance's spine-tingling delivery of I am not yet born by Louis Macniece, to the lively crowd responses in LowKey's rap Long live Palestine and Sanasino al Yemen's poem My name is not Iraq.
It was moving to hear life-long campaigner Hetty Bower, aged 106, tell us “The wars have changed, the lies remain the same” and Joan Humphries whose grandson died in Helmand mourning the 60,000 Afghanis who've been killed too.
Some like Elvis McGonagall in his wonderful anthem Operation Undying Conflict focussed on the hideousness of war itself; others made angry comparisons between the cost of war and our 'austerity programme' - as John Hilary from War on Want put it: "We should invest that 12 million spent on war every day in hospitals, schools, and the welfare state that Cameron is ripping apart". Jeremy Corbyn was one of several who pointed out that as well as bringing poverty and drug-dealing instead of peace, peddling death and destruction has brought 'unbelievable millions' of profit to the arms companies while the weakest and poorest of our own country are asked to 'tighten our belts'.
Lies were another major theme - the pretension that these wars are about bringing democracy and stability to Afghanistan & Libya was repeatedly and powerfully exposed. Jemima Khan crisply listed the horrifying statistics about Afghanistan which combine to make it the worst place in the world to be a woman or a child now. John Pilger challenged the media take on the strikes on Libya that morning: "The media call this town a pro-Gaddafi stronghold... the people of Sirte are ‘unworthy’ victims – not worthy of thought or concern. It's like Pinter says: None of this happened. It didn’t happen even when it was happening. It didn’t matter. Total has negotiated 45% of oil trade in exchange for French involvement and this is what Cameron boasts is a ‘model’ for intervention! We are here today to represent sanity. It’s those who justify these wars who are the extremists."
And Julian Assange in a brilliant short speech insisted "Wars are the result of lies, so who are the war criminals? Not just the politicians, the journalists too. If wars can be started by lies, peace can be started by truth. That is the task for the media now. Go and get your truth."
Another popular rhetorical message was the one to Tony Blair from Andrew Murray “Enjoy your money. There’s not enough water in the river Jordon to wash the blood off your hands.”

George Galloway was on stridently theatrical form with a succinct reminiscence: When the soldiers went in ten years ago, Jack Straw said they’d be home by Christmas. I said, “Not ten Christmases hence!” He laughed. It’s in Hansard. He laughed and he invited his colleagues to laugh with him. Well they’re not laughing now. And the families of the hundreds who have died will never laugh again!

Tony Benn's message was simple: "This is not a protest, it is a demand. End the war in Afghanistan."
Which brought us back to the petition introduced at the start by Joe Glenton, the soldier jailed for 9 months for refusing to fight in Afghanistan, who recalled Seigfried Sassoon's words: “The war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it”. So hundreds more soldiers and thousands more civilians should not have to die in the next three years to save face for NATO, when 70% of the public, and all of the politicians if they're honest, know this war has been a failure and a ghastly mistake from the start.

So what did we achieve, apart from providing substantial overtime for the staggering number of police who greeted us at Downing Street? I'm not under any illusion that anyone in power will wring their hands and have a change of heart because of balloons in Trafalgar Square - they already know their policies are based on strategic control not humanitarian care. I just wanted to stand up and be counted with those who believe - in Jeremy Corbyn's words - War is wrong. All wars are bad wars. There's a tribal feeling of connection, despite all our diversities, and it's exhilarating to be among so many passionate people on a grey October day... and to find one of them is my brother!

2011-10-07T11:00:00.007+01:00

"Tea on the lawn. What could be more normal than that?"
Theatre West's autumn season of new writing inspired by locational photographs under the umbrella title Picture This has opened at Alma Tavern Theatre with The Darkroom by Steve Lambert. The play's title is both literally a place where secrets on film are revealed and metaphorically the murky recesses of human minds, individually and culturally. It's 1949 and all three characters hold sinister secrets from their wartime past which will blitz the fragile semblance of calm as one by one they are relentless detonated. In fact that's the main problem: the play effectively evokes the emotional austerity of post-war England, superficially subdued but seething with unresolved trauma, but a determination to include so many dark revelations ultimately overloaded the plot with twists at the expense of character empathy. Duncan Bonner as William brought stature and gravitas to the role of the double-agent who re-enters a troubled marital relationship to stir up the past; the production was directed with sensitivity by Pameli Benham.

Countryboy's Struggle at the Merlin, devised and performed by Maxwell Golden is the most exciting theatre I've seen for a long time. Maxwell opens the show as hi-energy MC Vibe-wire, setting the scene with clever free-styling (and a chance for local poets too - Muriel Lavender and I were both immensely thrilled to find ourselves adding verisimilitude to his open-mic sequence) before introducing us to hip-hop rapper 'Countryboy' Michael. Then the journey of his struggle begins - with a wonderfully lyrical poem from the womb - taking us confidently and with amazing emotional range through childhood, teens, family disputes, and adventures in London, right up to the club night we've all been sharing from the start.

It's an extraordinary tour de force, electrifying, and very varied, individual sequences which combine into the credible story of an immensely likeable young man. Maxwell's uses postures & gestures with skillful minimalism to create Michael's life through childhood, rites of adolescent passage, family conflict, and his naive first experiences of London. He's rarely alone - we meet his teenage mates in multiple roles playing Simpsons, and his rose-tinted arrival in London is vocalised & actualised through a landscape of Big Ben, pigeons, pushers, dossers & South Bank skaters until he meets his - slightly Spaced - flatmates. Simple set and clever lighting, using Michael's own vastly magnified shadow to show his relationship with his father, combine with brilliant sound track and Maxwell Golden's mesmeric and unforgettable performance to make this a must-see show. It's touring southwest now, moving up north later. Check out tour dates and hire a charabanc for your friends!

Footling footnote of the week: ever wondered which were the officially funniest gags at the Edinburgh fringe this year? Here it comes:
3: People say "I'm taking one day at a time." So is everybody. That's how time works. (Hannibal Buress)
2: Crime in multi-storey car parks - that is wrong on so many different levels. (Tim Vine)
1: I needed a password of 8 characters so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. (Nick Helm)

Nick says his Dad is chuffed about the Dave award - it was his joke.

2011-10-04T21:00:00.005+01:00

Clifton's charming little Redgrave Theatre has a new production of The Importance of Being Earnest with Floor to Ceiling, a new venture by two Bristol Old Vic Theatre School Graduates. It's hard to bring a new take to Oscar Wilde's well-known words - and who would want to, with such outrageous wit and social parody. Monty Till's production wisely didn't try, concentrating instead on nuances of physical exchange between the characters. There were some nice details but overall the pace didn't seem to flow as urbanely as it should, the clunky set & oddly accessorised costumes not helping, to say the least. Nevertheless an entertaining evening out, and an interesting extension from previous productions.

How social manners change... from ladies to ladettes in Life and Soul by Ian McGlynn at the Rondo, where Katie, Chloe and Amy get drunk a lot and have an increasingly crap time. Provocation is committed to 'tackling social issues with a razor-sharp sense of humour and a barely-controlled simmering rage at the state we're in today' and this one tackles binge-drinking. The two-minute mime at the start - applying make-up, drinking, puking - as Black Eyed Peas sing I got a feeling summed up this morality play about what happens if you don't get good A levels. Katy Rachel Moore was outstanding as Amy, bitchiest and also most poignant of the three.

Bristol Old Vic offered another of their excellent script-writing workshops this week, this time led by Sarah Dickenson. The focus was on style, what it is and how to achieve it, with Sarah leading discussions and exercises aimed at understanding how drama needs to "trust its own tempo, trust the audience, understand what directors and actors can do, knowing that theatre can do more than words do.”
We had to create our own Wikipedia entry too - here's mine:
Crysse led the movement that became known as ‘Provocative Elder’ and in keeping with her tag she defines her style in perversely different terms when interviewed. Her ‘transgressional’ themes and disturbingly visible subtexts have split opinions among the critics. See also meta-theatrical and neo-realism. This entry needs verification.
So what does Sarah look for in her role as Soho Theatre's senior reader? "Freshness in story telling. A play written about something. Work that has immediacy, that says something about the world we live in. Plays that make me laugh and cry and think. Just good plays, basically.”

And as this amazingly unexpected week of late summer ends, let's give thanks for glorious sunshine days of cycling and fabulous parties & meetings with family and friends...

2011-09-30T13:00:00.135+01:00

Sometimes a community event comes together exactly as you hoped, to create a special & extraordinary shared experience. That's what happened at the Merlin on Thursday night. Hyperbole? Maybe, but that sentiment was buzzing among the audience at our Poetry Platter special, where Elvis McGonagall entertained for over an hour on a stage atmospherically transformed into a bistro.

Elvis was on top form, ricocheting from political passion to outrageous comedy in a single stanza. Cameron, Clegg and Jeremy Clarkson were popular targets with the audience, but the bitingly funny, and biting, assaults are on policies as well as personalities - economic and social injustices, and international war. Operation Undying Conflict, very different in tone from the parodies that had us helpless with laughter, is packed with shocking fact and imagery right through to the angry end.
And now Elvis has left the building.... big thanks to all the marvellous Merlin people, and Nicki for the delicious suppers, and Noah for fantastic lighting effects; to Liv Torc and Chris Redmond for a superb support act, to the King himself of course and to YOU, if you came, for doubling our intended sell-out capacity and having a rip-roaring time.

Writers of Frome have been meeting on Wednesday mornings at Alison's house since the ending of the summer 'Bootcamp'at Frances' house. Now these sessions too are ending, with a closing party of cake and readings in the garden. Happily, plans are already afoot for solstice rendezvous.

So as the promised Indian summer arrives and the southwest sizzles in high-20s temperatures, what better place to be than at the seaside? Coasting at the Bristol Old Vic, set at the end of a pier somewhere in the 80s, is a new play by Natalie McGrath developed over the last two years with support from two producers and a dramaturg/director. It's a tense and turbulent piece set in a dark and sulphurous place more like Hades than Hove, with three damaged characters who dialogue together in a kind of dysfunctional Dada style, as though their thoughts have been chopped up and scattered on the beach before utterance. There's Ocean, who is vulnerable, brutal, and beautifully-played by Tom Wainwright; troubled gay policewoman Falcon, and Pearl who looks great for her hoodie-urchin role and speaks in curious sub-Shakespearean dialect, referring to herself in the third person like Lady Gaga. There was much to enjoy on press night - the foyer tattoo parlour, interval fish'n'chips, & stairway acapella performance of Perfect Day - and it's great to see experimental work being developed, but I found this piece overlong and inaccessible. Others were more appreciative, claiming recognition of both location and dialect (it's apparently a mix of 1950s gay slang, hip-hop & 80's pop): The Guardian' reviewer Lynn Gardner echoes some of my reservations but values the "distinctive timbre of McGrath's voice and a real ability to capture the dead-fly desolation and bruised end-of-season melancholy of a place where survival requires the growth of a disguising skin." It's on till October 15th.

I hadn't heard of Israeli singer Tally Koren until she decided to celebrate her album 72 Names with a competition for poems of 72 words and selected my submission for second prize and a mention in her Youtube - it's quite a long speech, she misquotes my name rather charmingly around 10 minutes in. If you want to read my 72 words, scroll to October's 'poem of the month' on the right hand side.

2011-09-26T00:30:00.017+01:00

Salisbury's Bootleg Theatre brought their current touring production 15 Minutes of Fame to Frome's Cornerhouse this week. Excellent performances from Stewart Taylor as a small-time pusher moonlighting as a therapist in the Glastonbury healing field, and from producer Colin Burdon as a self-deluded ex-footballer, but my personal highlight was Rosie Finnegan's authentic account of her meeting with Arthur Miller in The Last Night Party.

Britain's Tree Story is a beautifully produced compilation of pictures and tales from around the country by Julian Hight (aka Bugs from popular local band Bugs and the Collaborators) elegantly published by National Trust.
Julian was at Hunting Raven bookshop on Saturday morning signing copies for an avid queue of admiring buyers, and the book is already collecting 5-star reviews on amazon... well ok, one of them is mine but it is genuine and completely unsolicited.

Saturday was carnival night, always a spectacular display of community creativity, flamboyant costumes, time-trecking music tracks, and floats with historical tableaux like the little-known dinosaur spear-war era...
Inevitably there'll be protest letters in the local paper (wattage waste, child exploitation, ladies purporting to poo on loos) but you'd have to be a real curmudgeon not to enjoy this wonderful parade, the whole town celebrating with liquid light wands and wigglers and pints in hand as dusk darkens on a balmy night. Best entry for me this year: Big Heads, led in style by Frome Street Bandits.

Carnivals like this are exclusively a south-west phenomena, but the Cobble Wobble is specific to Frome: more than 200 cyclists of all ages & attire sprinting up a long hill of steep cobbles. On Sunday afternoon Catherine Hill was completely lined with cheering crowds as costumed characters competed with sound-barrier-breaking speed freaks who stormed the 164 metres from a standing start in little over 20 seconds.

Here's mayor Nick, whose chain of office was - like several bike chains - a casualty of the struggle,

one of the leader group and a duck

and some random entrants awaiting their turn.

2011-09-21T23:30:00.019+01:00

Frome TV is not just a top-class media outfit, they know how to throw a party too... Jade, Ed and the crew took over the Garden Cafe on a fortuitously mild Sunday night, and crammed it with people having a good time while entertaining us with projected programmes about other good times. Here's the scene at dusk, just before all the twinkly lights came on, and Nigel with Matt Graham, creator of Life on Mars and thus inspiration for that louche and loudmouthed pin-up Gene Hunt... sigh...
(best quote of the series:
Sam Tyler: You're an overweight, over-the-hill, nicotine-stained, borderline-alcoholic homophobe with a superiority complex and an unhealthy obsession with male bonding.
Gene: You make that sound like a bad thing.)

This week Bath, ever mindful of its Georgian heritage, has been wearing its pokes and bonnets (literally) with especial flamboyance: it's the annual Jane Austen Festival, with opportunities to dine and dance like a Regency belle, to Rummage through the Reticule, or even make your own (it's a small drawstring bag, in case you were wondering). Drawingroom Theatricals at the Mission Theatre featured the special Austen powers of of Pride and Prejudice, opening with Rosie Finnegan’s witty contemporary take on this famous tale with a thoroughly modern Lizzie at the ironing-board musing on her rocky road to romance. Arsey-Darcy, as she reminds herself she should no longer call him, made his first wooing overture by waylaying her tumbling tin of tomatoes outside Waitrose. Lizzie remained underwhelmed until her visit to Centreparcs with her aunt and uncle, where they coincide in the Subtropical Paradise. “Darcy and I went down the outdoor rapids a few times” she confides. Cleverly - even though social references are transposed to an era of predictive text - Lizzie’s personality, the sisterly relations and motherly vulgarity, all remain delightfully recognisable.

Aardvark Productions. followed with their own novel interpretation: two actors undertook to play all the key P&P characters aided only by gesture, expression, movement, and a slightly scary puppet. Oh, and the audience. We were required to play the weather (often exceptionally stormy), to flutter our programmes bashfully at the balls, and to urge Elizabeth into refusal or acceptance of her suitors. Naturally the opportunity to radically rewrite this seminal text inspired a certain amount of over-excitement, causing Lizzie to scold exasperatedly ‘Have you not read the book?’. The script was funny (Mr Darcy’s stilted proposal:”Thought I’d run it up the flagpole, see if anyone salutes”) and the adlibs funnier. Aardvark apparently specialise in children’s history shows, I wish we’d had that sort of teaching when I was at school.

Also in Bath this week: The Poetry Business celebrated its 25th anniversary upstairs at the BLSI with the Bath Poetry Cafe in an evening of readings from 15 local poets and two special guests: Poetry Business promoter Allison McVety and indefatigable event organiser & pamphlet competition winner Sue Boyle.
In a tightly organised first half we heard work of an impressively high standard, with Allison picking four 'winners', for their performance and poems: Rosie Jackson, Dawn Gorman, Rose Flint, and Jay Arr - all friends of mine so I'm especially delighted.
Sue read from her stunning new collection Wintering in Rome, a city she finds reminds her of mortality and the brevity of life. An inspirational evening.

Final footnote: Apologies are funny things. They can be a bit like trying to wipe up splashed ketchup, every attempt seems to spread the damage, and while it's easy to say sorry to someone who's stepped on your shoe it can be tricky when you have a real reason. Which is why I quite admire the personal apology from Johann Hari last week, to his bosses, his enemies, his friends, and a lot of total strangers. He's also returned his George Orwell Prize and signed up to learn how to be a proper responsible journalist who doesn't make up quotes and stories. No quips about facing a lonely future there, please. He gives some useful writing tips while tugging on his hair shirt too. It's not all forgive-and-forget yet, though, as you'll find if you google David Rose (his mendacious pen-name) - The Telegraph finds his dishonesty is 'magnificently strange' while their readers take the view he's 'a pompous, sanctimonious, self-serving, thieving, duplicitious, little prick', but 'all left wing people are stark staring mad. And most are crooks as well.' And so the debate rumbles on...

2011-09-17T11:54:00.008+01:00

Thirty years before One Day stormed the book world with its a missed-opportunities love story spanning fifty years, A R Gurney had done just that - poignancy, nostalgia, empathy and all, in a slimmer and more elegant package. Love Letters tells its tale through the correspondence of an American couple at college in 1937 who continue to chart their dreams and disappointments until the late 1980s. New Yorker Albert Ramsdell G was born in 1930 himself so ideally placed for the dry social observation which is the strength of this simple concept, ensuring characters engage and the ending is moving without being sentimental. Admirably uncluttered direction by Derek Fowlds and excellent performances – especially Alison Farina’s luminous Melissa - in a Butterfly Psyche production of great charm, sadly only on for two nights at the Rondo or I'd urge you all to go.
(Derek btw was one of the mainstays of Yes Minister in his role as private secretary Bernard and hosted the best New Year party I ever went to...)

Back in Frome, urging is appropriate: the new exhibition at Rook Lane Chapel Blue II has a fascinating collection of multi-media art until the end of the month. Coordinator Carolyn Griffiths was inspired by an 18th Century 'dye recipe' book from old Wallbridge Mill (also on display): 'it's the trade secrets of these craftsmen' she says, 'part of the cultural and creative heritage of Frome.'
My favourite pieces are the porcelain poetry books by Pauline Watson, some even with pages you can turn.

2011-09-13T23:00:00.003+01:00

Esme Ellis hosted the launch of her latest book Dreaming Worlds Awake at her Combe Down home on Sunday, providing warm hospitality as well as a fascinating insight into the creative journey of this reflection on synchronicity in our lives. For me it was also a chance to catch up with some Bath & Bristol writer friends & hear some great poetry - here's Skip reading a piece inspired by Brian Patten. A sculpture student in the crucible 1950s, Esme remembers furore over Epstein's 'obscene, brutish' works: Jacob, assaulted by an angel in this 1940 alabaster piece, is one of the voices in her book and Esme also includes a poem I wrote at the same time, without knowing about her reflections.
Jacob meets the angel
I didn’t know what to expect – well, would you?
An angel descending suddenly, heavily,
wings like tombstones, dishevelled hair, staring eyes.
A gargoyle on acid he looked, this heavenly apparition.
He swung like a wrecking ball towards me,
clung to me, clouting my thigh. I almost fell, and he held me,
his stony arms grasping, his huge legs buckled under me.
I should have felt pain, but I didn’t. I felt sustained.
It was what I had always wanted. Maimed, and claimed.

Poetry & a Pint at St James' Vault on Monday night found itself in scheduling conflict with the opening of Bristol Poetry Festival, but Stroud poet Adam Horovitz validated my channel choice with readings from his new book Turning. His poems are both tender and shrewd: they delicately normalise the raw painfulness of life and loss, Carol Ann Duffy, who puts things better than me, reviewed this collection as 'physical language of scrupulous integrity'.

Back in Frome, for crouching theatre, hidden talent... Nevertheless Productions pounces once again in November with a performance with the working title Agony Ecstasy and Gin Sling - ok that will change - which will introduce Lady Philadelphia de Courcey to an unsuspecting audience. Let's hope everyone's ready...

Finally: Art with attitude at the Silk Mill gallery: ecological attitudes and sexual politics tersely challenged in a surprisingly alluring exhibition, on till 25th September. Recommended.

2011-09-10T21:04:00.003+01:00

Last week was officially the end of military repatriations to ceremonial applause from thousands who have flocked to watch 167 bodies pass through the streets of Wootton Bassett since 2007. Bristol Old Vic's Young Company has collaborated with the National Theatre to examine the part this ceremony plays in our national psyche, as observed by the town's teenagers. Writer James Graham and director Anthony Banks talked to local pupils about how the situation impacted on a generation barely school age at the time of 9/11, which celebrates its tenth birthday on Sunday.

Creating a performance from this project has two main challenges: to create credible differentiation between thirteen Year-11(ish) pupils without 2-dimensionalising, and even more importantly, to distill discussion into essential theatricality. For me Bassett succeeded brilliantly. The young performers held the stage from the start, overcame some slightly Vicky-Pollardy lines to create a passionate scenario which smoldered to a shocking climax in its own (theatrical) way authentic.

Locked into detention by an exasperated supply teacher, the 'Citizen Skills' class is already registering on Lord-of-the-Flies scale when we meet them, with only autistic Spencer obeying her last command not to move. They're furious and indignant about missing "the Re-pat", especially since today's coffin belongs to ex-schoolmate Charlie, a hero in their eyes. Their debate about the role of their town as grief-centre of the war digs into a range of issues, with Leo - the most knowledgeable and also the most militant - increasingly frustrated by dissent from less dogmatic classmates. Tensions escalate relentlessly and when memories of the real Charlie intrude, this volatile situation explodes: the patriot cracks to release the terrorist within.

Last word goes to Spencer, who has been reading the teacher's notes on history: "If it wasn’t for us the world would be worse than it is. So I think we’ll be alright in the long run.” But Spencer is still obediently facing the other way: he didn't see what really happened at all.

Anyone agreeing with Cameron, Obama, and Leo that the Wootton Bassett ritual represents 'the best of British' will be glad to know the tradition continues seamlessly at Carterton, near Brize Norton: the first of the new arrivals, Royal Marine Sgt Barry Weston, was escorted through on the same day I watched this play.
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2011-09-07T16:00:00.004+01:00

I should have learnt by now. Every bland production I've seen at Bath Theatre Royal has been memorable only because enough money for a brace of bankers' bonuses has been thrown at it, and that was certainly the case with The Syndicate opening there last night. Wonderful set, atmospheric lighting, and immaculate costumes effectively evoked 1960s Naples despite the theatre's fussily refurbished surroundings, and the stella cast all shone - we even had Cherie Lunghi in a bit part (literally - she bares her chest after being savaged by a dog, so actually she has a tit-bit part, as my companion quipped). But none of this could disguise the weakness of Eduardo de Fillipo's play in both structure and dialogue - and I had issues with the concept too.
Ian McKellen is Don Antonio, a transparently-disguised mafia figure who self-glamourises himself as a Mister Naughty-But-Nice, overlording his squabbling community. In fact he revels in brutal domination, abuses friendship and relates more to his savage dogs than to his wife, yet his self-indulgent ramblings combined with a quasi-religious 'last supper' scene appear intended to encourage sentimental affection for the bullying old thug. Perhaps the Just-one-cornetto! accents affected by the cast were meant to enhance the charm of this synthetic story. Sean Mathias over-directed to distraction: characters striding around with props, moving chairs, shadow-boxing, polishing their shoes... ceaseless stage business which could not redeem a play that delivered a few sparse laughs but remains basically flawed. "Eduardo de Filippo was one of the great figures of European theatre. But this-" as The Guardian's Michael Billington tactfully puts it, "strikes me as one of his lesser pieces."

Bath is currently gearing up for the annual Jane Austen Festival featuring, among other Regency fancies, two short performance pieces written by my friend and Nevertheless Productions colleague Rosie Finnegan. This represents triple success for Rosie this month, as her monologue The Last Night Party is one of a quartet about to begin an autumn tour with Bootleg Theatre Company - maybe at a venue near you!

And still on things theatrical, I'm delighted to see our choice for Nevertheless Productions' in Frome Festival, Lullabies of Broadmoor, harvested a sheaf of 4-star reviews in Edinburgh before heading to London where Sam Marlow in The Times enthuses: "Steve Hennessy’s quartet of plays ooze violence (but) are thoughtful, compassionate and fascinating, too; superbly acted by a role-swapping, four-strong cast. Hennessy’s writing is playful and profound... four hours of drama that is disturbing, distressing, and richly absorbing."

Logophiles' corner: commentators are indignant about the new edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, bemoaning the loss of charabanc to make room for various johnny-come-lately terms. I don't think they need worry. Personally if I need to refer to such a vehicle I won't avoid that charming piece of franglais any more than I'll use the clumsy trendyism helicopter parenting to sneer at over-solicitous mums, and I guess most people will continue conversing to communicate rather than to be à la mode Oxford-stylee. But explosions of spleen against 'invasion of our language' are a frequent journalistic theme, interlopers generally being accused of transatlantic origin even when as Old English as gotten. Googling Americanisms raises a dust-storm of protest, petulance, carping and bickering. Zounds, I say. We can always use new words - and I'd like to propose one much needed, as an alternative to the hideous term fuck-buddy: a fwab - Friend With Added Benefits. All those in favour say aye or yeah according to preference.

2011-09-02T21:00:00.019+01:00

Farncombe Estate in Worcestershire covers about 300 acres with stunning views across the Cotswolds, but my previous writers' groups there have been in winter so I've never appreciated this splendid setting to the full. I hadn't seen the lovely silver birch glade in full leaf or followed the nature trail through woods and wild flower fields. August Bank Holiday revealed more of the glorious surroundings to Conference Centre, now a buzzing hive for curious and creative course-goers.
Actually we were unusually un-buzzy this time: our twelve writers were the only participants, giving a curiously Miss Marple-like atmosphere to the big dining hall, a sense of being almost outnumbered by the attentive staff... However, undistracted by murder mystery possibilities, my group energetically engaged with an intensive 3-day programme of writing styles and techniques to adapt to their own themes and projects, producing some wonderful ideas and impressive pieces of writing. Diversity and mutual support are the key strengths for this kind of workshop, and this group was great at providing both.

And now it's September, officially autumn: we can no longer grumble at the ochre tinge on trees and verges or be surprised each day by chilly air. Instead we can enjoy being more pleasantly surprised by occasional mellow days with evenings warm enough to sit in the garden till midges call dusk curfew, as on my visit to my friend Diana in Bath. Diana is a writer & editor, and manages to find journalistic opportunities even in these difficult times when, as she puts it, many of us are 'time-rich' when we'd rather be 'time-poor'. "I don't want to be comfortable," she says "- I want to be resourceful." I agree. The risky edge is the place for writers.

Back in the day, photography was a big part of my life, both images and journalism....everything passes and everything changes, but I still keep a digi-snapper alongside notebook & pen in my bag at all times, and love the new exhibition of prints by Ed Thomas from Frome.tv at Divas - impact narrative in every shot.

Footling footnote of the week: always on the lookout for snappy reviews, was tickled the Radio1 verdict on Madonna’s directorial take on the Wallis Simpson story in her movie W.E: “It’s nice to have a hobby but if you bake cakes and they turn out terrible you should just eat them yourself - don’t press them on unsuspecting strangers”

2011-08-26T00:00:00.033+01:00

Homecoming often means counting degrees of heat difference on fingers of both hands and toes of both feet and wanting to curl up under my autumnal duvet - but Liv Torc guesting at Words&Ears in Bradford-on-Avon looked like a don't-miss event, so Muriel Lavender and I went along to hear the Wondermentalist poet whose website mission statement pledges Liv Torc seeks the humanity and absurdity within the human condition and when she finds it, she strips it naked and kicks it...
The Asbo bard did not disappoint. Kissing, beards (nastiness thereof), the wet patch (its charm), love generally and Amy Winehouse in particular, Liv is empathetic and enchanting.
To be fair to the English weather, although it's rarely fair to me, we've had some lovely days since my return, one of which occurred for the Writing BootCamp picnic party. This has been the summer inspiration of Alison Clink and Frances Liardet, whose lovely house we've weekly invaded for intensive inspections of work-in-progress.
Around two dozen local writers (I told you Frome was prolific, didn't I?) arrive at these sessions to share current work, pitch projects, and generally expose our vulnerable authorial bellies for the compassion, and passion, of like-minded scribes. Groupings - there are obviously several, with such high numbers of participants - are by lot, but always seem to provide the right mix of diversity and empathy. So here we are, some of us at least, celebrating this amazingly egalitarian and supportive experience, a summer Boot Camp with flip-flop friendliness, marching us all on to further writerly achievements.

The Madness of George III, directed by Christopher Luscombe for the Peter Hall Company at Bath Theatre Royal, is not as much like the Nigel Hawthorne/Helen Mirron movie as you might expect. Alan Bennett's script is clever and dazzling, of course, with intriguing insights into 18th Century attitudes to politics, medicine, and manners, but the focus here is on spectacle. Characters place themselves like playing cards lined up for an elaborate game and there’s no pretence of natural interaction as they deliver their lines. Scenes are static, so static that the production seemed almost like an elaborately costumed play-reading – but hey, hey, as the Farmer King would say, what costumes! Gillray lived and breathed through the Prince Regent and his coterie.
In a big bland theatre with a vast stage to fill this was probably the best strategy, and evoked a sense of Shakespearean drama, from the broad comedy of the kings poo to the tragedy of his downfall into lunacy. George recalls Richard II in his collapse to the ground to tell sad stories of the death of kings, and the parallel is plangent in a late scene as he reads from King Lear.
George III is a fascinating character, sane or mad: grieving for the lost colonies of America in a John of Gaunt-like speech, childlike games of Mr and Mrs King with his unerotic but much-loved wife, and plaintive repetitions of “I am the King!” as sanity spirals out of his grasp and his people slip away from his control. A thought-provoking, splendidly visual, evening with a first class cast – especially the king himself, played due to illness by understudy Simon Markey who was promoted from footman for the occasion and received well-deserved cheers at the final curtain.

And to round off the week: The Merlin Young Company presented their production of Fame, unbelievably well choreographed and performed after an incredible two-week-only intensive workshop. A full auditorium laughed and wept and cheered the huge cast of energetic youngsters who sang and danced their way through this iconic 80s story making it fresh as tomorrow, the hiphop dancers adding especial vibrancy. Ensemble sets fantastic, and especially moving performances from young Dillon Berry, Matt Graham as the shy thespian, and Kara Horler as Carmen. Claudia Pepler, who directed the show, should be proud as well as delighted. (Thanks Mike for the pictures)
And on the way home we called in at The Cornerhouse, Frome's favourite live music pub, where the John Law Trio were making amazing jazz with luschious singer Emma Harris.
This is Frome on a Friday night - nothing bought in, all local produce.
Now I don't mean to be boring but honestly, where else in the world.....

2011-08-21T14:15:00.024+01:00

I began my second week in Cortijo Romero with a bang – on my head, caused by reckless lane-leaping and resulting in a trip to Motril hospital with Maggie for an x-ray. My Spanish doesn't extend beyond bright & benign holas and gracias, but I could tell from the sniggers that Maggie was repeating the tale of the fig-scrumping granny with gleeful relish.
Luckily no repercussions ensued, other than the obvious teasing, and I was back in time for supper with the new group.
There seems to be a special energy for writers at this venue, perhaps something to do with the calm of our moorish work room, the inspirational gardens, physical stimulation of yoga and pool-play, and the nourishment of knowing that amazing meals will frequently appear... Or maybe the people who are drawn to find their writing voices in this venue are simply exceptional people, open-minded and open-hearted. I'll remember this group for its wonderfully varied explorations of mood and style, and huge mutual support. Which is what makes it all happen, so mega-thanks Ray, Jacqui, Russ, Annette, Lucy, and Pauline - and everyone else too, for walks, talks, word-'tasting', and companionship.
I especially like the image (below) of popular facilitators Tristem and Yvonne enjoying the cabaret interpretation of their yoga sessions.. and I've loved the long walks into the foothills along the acequias - ancient moorish irrigation routes still used today.

And when not in the Alpujarras I’ve been in New York – in 1909 Manhattan, to be specific.
I don’t usually do book recommendations here as there are so many sites devoted to reading & reviews, but The Interpretation of Murder achieved the near-impossible, creating a world almost as vivid and irresistibly compelling as Cortijo Romero. Probably the best novel I’ve read this century, it's a murder mystery narrated from various viewpoints with cliff-hanging intensity, solved through a mix of psychological and Shakespearean analysis; real events and social history are entwined inextricably with dramatic – and melodramatic – inventiveness. You can get a taste of the style here - I was hooked from that opening paragraph. Author Jed Rubenfeld's exploration of the psyches of Freud, Jung and Hamlet shows inspiringly how personal specialism can enrich fiction.

Home now, scampering to catch up with all that's occurring in & around Frome - including next month's Poetry Platter at the Merlin, featuring Elvis Mcgonagall, World Slam winner, festival favourite, radical rhymester of Radio 4, and standup comedic genius, of whom it has been so rightly said: "If poetry is the new rock'n roll then Elvis is Elvis". I'm so excited I managed to twist his arm, bite his ankle, and generally pester him into agreement to be our guest, and look forward to a brilliant night. If you're anywhere near Frome on 29th September, Merlin stage is the place to be - seats severely limited so do book!

2011-08-13T11:30:00.031+01:00

Being Here in Andalusia – the apt and delightful name for last week's session in Cortijo Romero – was sheer bliss. Most of the group has gone now, no longer singing I believe I can fly while dancing in the pool but actually doing so, heading back to UK debris and political post-mortems, leaving only six of us to meet the oncoming group. Strange how much you can miss people after only a week, still glimpsing their smiles everywhere… the laughter of last night’s cabaret seems still plangent in the air. Hazel Carey, our amazing & incomparable group leader, left early in a taxi, her tap-dance razzle dazzle still glittering in the full moon sky.
And what, apart from dance, song, yoga, and creative play, does being here mean?
No riots, no rain, only the fireworks of fiesta
and a solidity of sunshine. We cut it in slabs,
munch it all day, garnished with mountain herbs.
We write wish-lists of beautiful aspirations,
wanting almost to hide in this light,
so luminous are we, basking, floating on water,
watching dark shadows and the rustling fronds of the palms.

2011-08-05T13:00:00.006+01:00

No dramas this week so here's a miscellany of random writerly snippets. As a starter: for collectors of curious words, I offer you the paraprosdokian, meaning a figure of speech which takes a surprising turn, like I want to die in my sleep like my grandfather, not screaming and yelling like his passengers, and The last thing I want to do is hurt you but it's still on the list, or I asked God for a bike, but God doesn't work that way so I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness. So now when you see those irritating office signs You don't have to be mad to work here - but it helps! you can say "Is that intended as a mission statement or merely a paraprosdokian?"

Moving swiftly on, I'm Abegail Morley's featured poet this month - a real privilege as Abi's book with Cinnamon Press How to Pour Madness into a Teacup was shortlisted for the Forward Prize Best First Collection.

And looking ahead: two brilliant autumn happenings: the very wonderful Elvis McGonagall is feature poet at Poetry Platter at the Merlin on Tuesday 29th September. Stand-up poet, revolutionary, rocker, and frequent contributor to BBC Radio 4’s “Saturday Live”, Elvis is a World Slam Champion and internationally popular performance poet - this is a fantastic opportunity to enjoy this “brilliant, political, and side-splittingly funny” poet sharing his lyrical and witty views on life in the intimate space of our very own onstage Poetry Café – with real supper!

And before the season of mists and mellow fruitfulness brings clouds that blooms uncomfortably close to the soft-dying day, I'll have another taste of sun on Kalymnos with a new holistic holiday centre, Greek Retreats, which looks just idyllic.

And now I'm off, going where the sun keeps shining and the weather suits my clothes. Dawn tomorrow will see me over Bristol, backing off of the Northeast wind, sailing on a summer breeze and skipping over the ocean like a stone, leaping from Keats to Midnight Cowboy in my excitement. Tomorrow night I'll be in beautiful Cortijo Romero in the Andalucian mountain region where signal is flaky at best so if everybody's talking at me I may not hear a word they're saying. I'll miss you all madly, but only for a couple of weeks - speak then.

2011-07-29T12:22:00.006+01:00

Summertime in England means touring outdoor theatre, traditionally camp as panto and inevitably vulnerable to the vagaries of, well, summertime in England. The last three open-air shows I saw were all victims of rain from heaven dropping upon the place beneath with no likeness whatsoever to mercy: Oddsocks struggled on with the Scottish play while Miracle's Sherlock Holmes and Illyria's Mr Fox both took shelter, losing along with the umbrellas and damp picnics some of the dynamic energy of these larger-than-stage productions.
Wonderful, then, that for the return of Illyria to Frome with Twelfth Night, the evening was warm and dry and the ECOS amphitheatre happily crammed with a family audience and a party atmosphere. Director Oliver Gray takes his responsibility to Shakespeare's text seriously, going back to the First Folio editions to seek out and expose innuendo wherever it may hide. He follows the Elizabethan tradition of using a multi-tasking team of five players, with a brilliant quintet: Alastair Chisholm, Martin Clark, Lawrence Kemp, Emmeline Prior and Miriam Jay Allwright doubled up in unlikely ways to create a score of characters, most of whom are unrequitedly in love. This is quick-change, quick-fire comedy, every line played for laughs and lots of witty adlibs, yet the poignancy is there too in moments of menace and magic, as if longing for love can bewitch the eyes as powerfully as Puck's fairy juice - this production is more than an al-fresco romp, it touches a real Shakespearean nerve of human frailty and how little we understand our own impulses or our universe.
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2011-07-25T16:00:00.006+01:00

You might think a double dose of murderous madness in Broadmoor would be enough for one month, but - like several others after Venus and The Demon Box played in Frome - I couldn't resist a trip to Bristol to see the final two Lullabies of Broadmoor in the Stepping Out Theatre quartet.

The Murder Club and Wilderness again feature John Coleman as Principal Attendant at the hospital, still fighting his own demons and trying to find a way to heal his tragic charges. Immensely powerful emotionally, both plays deal with childhood abuse and the effect of unacknowledged trauma: in Murder Club it's the murdered prostitute narrator (brilliantly played by Violet Ryder) who deserves our sympathy while her psychotic killer remorselessly manipulates all around him; in Wilderness it's the murderer himself, self-destructively penitent, who carries that terrible legacy through the American Civil War across the world until on a foggy night in London it catches up with him. Key roles in these dramas were strongly played by Chris Bianchi and Chris Courtney, while Chris Donnelly's Coleman holds every play together with warmth and sensitivity. Set, costumes, and lighting all work really well and direction by Chris Loveless is excellent, bringing out the gothic elements with menace but not melodrama. But undoubtedly the most memorable aspect of all four plays is the scripts, crafted with insight, anger, sadness, and compassion by Steve Hennessy. It's hard to explain how such dark material can be both funny and moving as well as shocking and disturbing - best you go see for yourself: the Lullabies quartet is heading for London's Finborough in September after a month at C Venue in Edinburgh, so lots chances before the end of September!
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2011-07-22T09:40:00.017+01:00

Monday at the Garden Cafe was the finale for festival Writers penning their pieces in Residence at shops & cafes, with organisers Gordon and Mike hosting and Tricia Wastvedt picking her favourites for prizes. A real treat to hear all these little gems, several of them evoking their venues, like Jenny Gilling's sweetshop reflection: Nostalgia comes in many forms - this time it's in a jar. Popular winners were (in photo-order) Caroline Smailes' lyrical beach reverie, Rosie Finnegan's sassy & brilliantly- read monologue, and Jenny Woodhouse's well-crafted coming-of-age story.

Now life is settling down after the festival flurry and I've had time to transcribe my jottings from this summer's events, here's a mezze of quotes I found inspiring, wise, or just head-noddingly true.
• Exercise is brilliant for creativity. - Debby Holt, novelist
• Humour is vital. It deflates tension, increases desperation, underlines deep sadness. When in deep trouble and sorrow, laughter is all you can do. - Barry Cunningham, publisher
• Lines should not explain the image. We think about sex while we wash up. Line and image should be at variance. - Patrick Sandford, theatre producer.
• The process of poetry is like sculpting an elephant, just chip away everything that isn’t an elephant. - Rosemary Dun, performance poet
• What you leave out is as important as what you put in. - Geoff Holt, writer
• Every sentence must be there for a reason. If it’s not, take it out. - Lorella Belli, agent
• Be fearless. You can terrify yourself with a plan, so just plough on and get to the end. - Matt Graham, screenwriter
• 'There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately nobody knows what they are.' - W.Somerset Maugham, quoted by Steve Voake, author

Laurence Parnell, luthier extraordinaire, gave a brilliant solo concert in the chapel of Wells Cathedral which demonstrated his craftsmanship as well as performance skill - his fretless classical is a thing of moorish beauty as well as sounding fabulous. One especially lovely melancholic melody, Dance, for those who'd rather not, I remember well from Liquid Jam days, when Laurie joined Hazel Stewart and I at poetry performances and we would end our set with a plus-words version, jointly composed. I wanted to embed the Dance tune here but don't know how - any ideas, please? - so will link instead to Laurie's interpretation of Writing with a Knife. Our trio disbanded naturally when Hazel left Frome some years ago, but I can't resist including an image from our promo in those fresh(er)-faced days. Ahh...

2011-07-18T12:00:00.029+01:00

Final festival bulletin from Frome, where our revels here are ended... there's been fantastic free music all week, from the Boot Hill All Stars at the food feast and the Critters at the Olive Tree to Emma Harris and fabulous friends at The Cornerhouse.
Nunney Rocks on Sunday duly rocked, especially the amazing voice of Simon Allen. Jill and I walked the three miles there and back, dodging showers, in time for the The Death of Sherlock Holmes scheduled for the Merlin amphitheatre.
Miracle Theatre is one of my favourite touring companies, but sadly the drizzle relocated their performance inside, never a good alternative in my view as without the delightful absurdity of creating an interior world in open space, expansive gestures and voices become charade-style exaggerations. Indoors, shrill is not funny, it's just... shrill. But there was much to enjoy as the cast of five - including brilliant Ben Dyson as Dr Watson - with a variety of props, wigs and jokes about spiritualism, created thirteen characters to evoke the 19th century world of the great detective. In their best moments they achieved this with glorious hilarity but these moments were mostly in the second half, which was faster, smarter, and more inventive. Conan Doyle famously later revoked the death of his hero, and this adaptation uses the clever conceit of introducing the author into the story, outwitted like Moriarty by the craftiness of his own creation. Al Munden's versatile set not only looked good but allowed for full costume changes and some of the best theatrical gags - like the moving train that foils Moriarty and a frenzied puppet fight. And now at least the mystery of why Sherlock Holmes was revived is satisfactorily solved.

So ends probably my best Frome Festival yet, mostly because I got to see so much more of it. I'll conclude with an image from the start of the week, that opening night when the market square was absolutely full of people celebrating summer sunshine and the creativity of our town.

2011-07-16T23:30:00.104+01:00

ABC Day brought eleven Authors of Books for Children for a series of events around the town, including a Library session of Teatime Treats: that popular ABC of activities, books, and cakes. Rachel Ward and Kate Maryon both have new novels out to complete their respective trilogies, and plans for more stories to keep their avid 9-13 year-old readers happy.

Edward Albee's one-act play The Zoo Story is the festival choice of Frome Drama Club, with performances in various venues including, appropriately for a story set on a bench in Central Park, Frome's Victoria Park. Written in the late fifties, this brilliant script, like the best of Raymond Carver's stories, both evokes its era and reaches beyond to existential humanity. Intriguingly, Albee later put a ban on all professional productions of this play and it's now available only to students and amateur companies. Actors Aynsley Minty and Dan Gaisford deserve full marks for engagingly illuminating the loneliness of the human heart.

Scene change to a rainy night in the garden auditorium of Blaise Castle: Oddsocks Productions version of Macbeth promises "something funny this way comes", grabbing gags and giggles from the audience at every available moment - a latecomer greeted by friends is cue for all five actors to dash over demanding a group hug; the obligatory unsilenced mobile and even the persistent downpour become opportunities to heckle the audience in scots accents. The actors dredge the bard's words for humour too, finding knockabout farce in the famous tragedy by fair means or foul. Devices like giving Duncan a lisp and Lady Macbeth arriving apparently via The Only Way Is Essex got the kids laughing but did little for the characters' emotional depth, leaving the show reliant on charisma and clowning through a long, wet, two hours. Luckily the players have plenty of both qualities: Oddsocks Macbeth - like their version of the witches' cauldron - is a trifle, but an honest trifle.

Back now to Frome Festival and the art trail - twentyone venues, more if you include the fringe, as Open Studios. All were differently fascinating, so I'll mention just three for their connection with words: Box Art by Robert Lee on the theme of Novel Images was intriguing - this one's called Tangos Telegrams and Tolstoy ,inspired by The Beauty of the Husband by Anne Carson. Then a wonderful collection of work in different media at Inside Out where our new local laureate David Davies has been writing alongside the artists ...we are getting smaller / somewhere drifting, somewhere / long, into ever-reaching forward. Beautiful.

Amazing work too at the studio of Ellen Tovey whose 'artist statement' concludes: Inspired by the innumerable elements of the self, my paintings become an exploration of and surrender to the unknown. What better summary of creativity, including writing, could there be?

2011-07-14T14:30:00.004+01:00

Festival Poetry Cafe was born on a balmy night in Frome with readings under the stars... and we've had to move indoors ever since, so it was delightful to be once again in the tranquil garden of Garden Cafe for the tenth anniversary of this special occasion: the only Poetry Cafe of the year here which uses words like 'judging' and 'winner'- but, since this is Frome, the 'slam' element is laidback and the atmosphere supportive. This year's laureate, voted from the audience, was David Davies who has been working alongside visual artists in the Open Studios festival trail. Elegantly hosted by this year's organiser, the luscious Muriel Lavender, with a superb guest spot from Gordon Graft whose personal, political, passionate poems go straight to parts others cannot reach.

The big event of the week for me was Lullabies of Broadmoor Upstairs at the Cornerhouse. There's been a huge buzz around these two Stepping Out Theatre productions which Rosie and I booked for a Nevertheless festival special - a pre-Edinburgh premiere Upstairs at the Cornerhouse. Venus at Broadmoor was sold out in advance, and so many of the audience returned for a double-dose of murderous madness that we were completely full for The Demon Box too, with huge applause on both nights for the immensely talented cast, impressive direction, and insightful and incisive scripts.
Both plays travel deep into psychosis, showing effects and suggesting causes, not flinching from the horror but with compassion as well as superb theatricality and surprising humour. Is there a cure for madness? There are no easy answers, either now or in 19th Century Broadmoor, but these stories make a powerful case, and subliminal plea, for love.
Fantastic, brilliant, and amazing were the most frequently used words on the feedback forms: also wonderfully moving and highly emotional... funny and erotic... poetic at times and at times very funny.. Superb script, acting and décor! ... Gloriously theatrical and inventive – lovely set & costumes and VERY well acted... Captivating from the outset, I can’t believe I just got to watch such quality drama for £5!... We will come back again. Frome Rocks!
Congratulations and appreciations to the splendid Chris quartet - Bianchi, Courtenay, Donnelly and director Loveless, to exquisitely ruthless Violet Ryder, to Ann Stiddard for working tardis-magic with the set, and to the imaginative skill of writer-producer Steve Hennessy.
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2011-07-10T21:20:00.025+01:00

Frome Festival 2011 was officially launched on Thursday night at Rook Lane Chapel, with a chance to enjoy Muriel Lavender performing with her usual panache, the evocative hippy vibe of Morales Watts, and much chatting about the week ahead. Here's Rosie, showing the posters for Lullabies of Broadmoor to theatre-pub landlord Martin Earley and Katy Duke before we set off on a late-night fly-posting expedition.

Saturday morning sees the double invasion from gnomes intent on fishing in Cheap Street's famous leat, and poets declaiming from a Witness Box to random passers-by, while shops and cafés are hosting Writers-in-residence competing to produce a story in a day. Afternoon events include garden tours, art trails, and the delightful Summer Fair in Victoria Park, all blending timewise into the World Food Feast in the market square.

Frome Street Bandits led us into a fabulous evening of free music, and Festival Creative Director Martin Dimery welcomed the Mayor, decked in formal chain, to address to the happy hords congregated in the late evening sunshine. Don't get the impression our lovely mayor always cavorts in public cross-dressed, by the way - his street theatre group SATCO were excessively bearded and in full climbing kit earlier in the day, struggling to ascend Catherine Hill despite avalanches.

Sunday is Writers' and Publishers' day, offering talks, workshops, and one-to-ones with an eye on commercial markets. It's also the day when the Frome Short Story Competition results are revealed, organised by Alison Clink and this year judged by Emma Darwin and Jonathon Lee.
Jonathan, whose book immediately scooped reviewers' accolades and award nominations, feels short stories get a hard time, disagreeing with JG Ballard who suggested they represent "the loose change in the treasury of fiction... an over-valued currency that often turns out to be counterfeit." Far from being easier than novels to write, a good short story needs greater skill in order to create a universe in miniature. The winning story, a Belfast teenager's experience of life in a riot-torn city, was movingly read by Gail Thornton-Mason.

Emma Darwin was back at the library in the afternoon, along with fellow novelist Debby Holt, script-writer Matt Graham, and performance poet Rosemary Dun for a writers' Q&A session impeccably hosted by children's author Steve Voake. Questions ranged through planning and editing, grabbing attention, maintaining it through that 'middle dip', and successful pitching, concluding appropriately with the Pros and Cons of being a writer: For Debby: You're never bored - but you're never off duty. Matt suggested 'I have a million stories in my head all the time' in both categories, Rosemary weighed the magic of creating against writer's bum, while Emma finds writing a godlike responsibility - "whether you believe in Him or not, God is a creator."
Fascinating insights, valid advice, and a thoroughly entertaining afternoon.

2011-07-03T21:00:00.025+01:00

Memo to self: if ever again going to the Winchester Writers' Conference, avoid staying in the halls of residence. How could I have forgetten the stained beige carpets, scratched tan veneer, mattress like knotted coat-hangers, tiny shared bathrooms with illustrated instructions on disposal of used condoms and sanitory towels blutacked to the door - and this year my basin is clogged with matted hair and what looks like cooked spaghetti, presumably predigested...
And yet, soothed by the benign presence of organiser Barbara Large and supported by her amazing energy, the conference always works a certain magic. Four hundred delegates manage to find their way to their personal choices among the 60 talks and 21 workshops on offer, to pitch their work to their targeted agents and editors, to swap website and facebook details, and to have a stonkingly good time. From directors like Patrick Sandford of Southampton's Nuffield Theatre to student entrepreneurs like Jeffrey Sallkild, everyone shares a passion for words. By Sunday noon there's a distinctly after-the-party atmosphere, empty glasses covering the promotions table and festive balloons faltering in doorways, and a benign feeling of let's-do-it-all-again-next-year prevailing. Among many stimulating and talented people I met I'm delighted to include agent Kate Nash, authors Sophie King and Jane Wenham-Jones - and my great workshop group who decisively confirmed that 'Small is Smart'.
Saturday's full-on day began with 'an electric mix': Geoff Holt whose hugely-praised book Walking on Water tells the story of his solo round-Britain voyage, and publisher Barry Cunningham who will forever, despite the success of Chicken House, be introduced as "the man who discovered JK Rowling." Both men spoke of the importance of valour, and humour, in writing as in life. Setbacks and rejections are 'part of the process'. Inspiring words, and a great insight from Barry on the special skill required in publisher's marketing departments: it's fear of the unknown.

Meanwhile Frome is limbering up for festival, and for the first time in eleven years I'm not on the organising team so I'm really looking forward to participating as a punter. There's a terrific programme of music as well as all the Words events - and Nevertheless Productions has teamed up with Bristol's Stepping Out Theatre to bring Lullabies of Broadmoor Upstairs at the Cornerhouse (or the Lamb to those who keep forgetting about the name-change) for a pre-Edinburgh premiere showing.
It's a revival of a double bill The Independent acclaimed as "powerfully performed... a piquant mix of witty Gothic ghoulishness and serious questioning.. absorbing and atmospheric... plays that remind you why intimate fringe venues can touch parts other theatres can’t. Steve Hennessy’s entertaining script revels in macabre surrealism tempered by shrewd psychology and historical research”
All this for just a fiver, starting at 8pm so plenty of time for a drink too. Booking is through the Cheese&Grain (01373 455420, cheeseandgraintickets@hotmail.com) and highly recommended - Rosie and I are delighted to see the first night's nearly sold out already!
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2011-06-30T17:30:00.003+01:00

A last look at the magic island, before a different genre of reality claims me and I have to move on from posting photos on facebook and revelling in comments like "OMG - I'm definitely booking now", "What is an Atsitsa and how do I sign up?" and "owwwwwwwwwwwwwweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee" So here we are, or were, when all you needed was love and a guitar at sunset...

Meg Whelan's new play Lost Luggage at the Alma puts the focus on holiday travel too, contrasting the journey of an intrepid Victorian with that of a contemporary hen-party-goer, as both women meet in a surreal and slightly Kafkaesque Lost Property Office. Gently entertaining social observations, with more than a few droll digs at changing values.
There's deeper digging in Bunny, as you'd expect from Skins writer Jack Thorne in a production by nabakov whose mission statement promises 'an antagonistic response to contemporary agendas'.
Rosie Wyatt takes the gruelling role of Katie, relating events of one late afternoon when a trivial street confrontation escalated mesmerically through ugly urban power-struggle to coming-of-age crisis. Katie's an average Luton girl with an older black boyfriend and identity issues: she plays clarinet in the school orchestra and wants a tattoo saying Will Lick For Money – in tiny writing – on her wrist. Her sexuality, and the fine line between thrill and contempt, is one of the values up for shock re-evaluation when she's involved in a car chase with a brutal agenda. "I don’t know how to bring up the whole racist thing – it’s a conundrum," Katie declares, but when you live on streets of smoldering conflict, difficult decisions are unavoidable. A gripping and unpredictable script made Katie compellingly likable despite her flaws as she struggles to articulate things she doesn't like thinking, summed up eventually "I’m not a bunny, I’m a scared little girl." Rosie Wyatt is brilliant in this one-hour emotionally-exhausting monologue against an effectively simplistic scribbled backdrop designed by Hannah Clark, pacily directed by Joe Murphy.

Meanwhile in Bristol, it's TO ME TO YOU time again: writers from across the southwest convened on a sultry evening in a vault-like chamber in the Arnolfini to discuss the question how can the region's network best serve its members in the next three years? Seth Honnor, ex-Theatre Bristol director, facilitated this session modelled on a three-hour coffee break, during which clusters of writers, actors, and producers discussed key questions of collaboration, working relationships, promotion, and... funding. Good to hear a range of views, great to meet the makers and shakers, and as ever, the (real) coffee-breaks were the most useful bits.

2011-06-22T18:45:00.020+01:00

It won't mean much if you've never been to Skyros but I was apprehensive when I first heard my writing course this year would run not in the little town I claim as my spiritual home but on the other side of the island, in Atsitsa Bay. Yeah I know, it's an idyllic communal paradise amid green pines and flame red geraniums, surrounded by blazing blues of sea and sky, but this is a place of rugged rocks, hut tribes, and magic circles... Atsitsa dances to its own drum beat, on Dead Goat beach at night and Bare-Ass beach by day, and even wifi is untamed. Here the first rule, obeyed on land and water, from dawn till high full moon, is: be playful.

As it turned out, this session – both sessions – rocked. It was, as Anna would say, amazing. My initial group swelled from three to five, then twelve, with each day providing stunning responses to every exercise: poignant, political, sensual, celebratory, funny and simply fabulous. We began nomadically, roaming between terraces, eventually settling at Mariana’s bar on promontory, with fresh orange juice and frappes – and ice-cream wine and cake, for writers rising too late for breakfast.

So what do we take, and leave, now that buses and ferries and planes have separated us from our magic-island home? For me:
• preconceptions exploded
• sun on sea, still mind-dazzling
• sense of privilege, and excitement, from every piece of writing shared – so much I’d love to have written myself…
• golden skin glow and a hundred mosquito bites,
• a small weaving, a slight cough (still), loads of laughter and new friends
• a handful of pebbles
For stones, like love, move silently across the world - in the words of Alyson Hallett - ... migrating past line, border, boundary, their movements a constellation of questions:
where is home, what is home, and who in their right mind can claim land as their own?

Back in Frome now, missing everyone and pining for sun, sea, and cicadas, but cheered to hear my submission to the 'Kenneth Branagh Award for New Drama Writing' reached the final shortlist, and my poem Aspiration will be published in the next issue of Mslexia.

2011-06-16T18:00:00.000+01:00

The best thing about the storm when we arrived in Atsitsa - apart from the thrill of being greeted by Poseidon's firework display and drum-roll band - was the amazing writing it stimulated for my writing group.

Delightfully diverse, they've been taking every straw I sling at them and weaving it promptly into gold. There's an immensely creative community here in this geranium village in the pine forest above the bay: visitors and work-scholars all joining in courses on guitar, photography and rainbow weaving, as well as windsurfing and sailing, bodywork, yoga and massage...

And if that sounds like a promo for Skyros holistic holidays, well what's not to promote? Beautiful island, lovely people, wonderful opportunities. With the storm over and hut-land simmering in sunshine again, and another session still to go, it's nothing but blue skies from now on...

2011-06-09T09:25:00.005+01:00

"I write things I think people can identify with" said Fleur Adock at the last ever Uni-verse event at the BRLSI in Bath:"It's not fashionable, but I want to be accessible - I hate the idea of people slaving away to analyse my words." Fleur's much-awarded collections span more than fifty years, from wartime infancy through peripatetic childhood she recalls as constantly in culture shock. Her poems are dry, often droll, almost like clippings from a life longing always to be more ordinary.

Fleur was joined by Alyson Hallett at this reading on the theme of "Geographical Intimacy - Relationships between poet and place." Alyson's poems are immensely visual and sensual experiences of the natural world, sometimes surreal but somehow always grounded. Her poem Origin exquisitely conveys that feeling of walking through woods until Unsure
if the thoughts in her head belong to her
or this mulch of earth, leaf and light.
She's influenced by dreams, she says, and is fascinated by the migration of stones. 'Our culture thinks of stones as fixed, but they're travellers.' Beautiful poems read with warmth and charm.

A random roundup of unconnected items before I leave for Greece:
~ According to Amazon, Kindle is their 'number one bestselling product', with Kindle books outselling hardback books by 2 to 1. I'm glad to hear it: I was never a fan of hardbacks, designed as permanent property rather than ready usage, and didn't launch my second novel until the paperback version came out.
~ Award-winning performance poet Inua Ellams, who brought The 14th Tale to the Merlin last year, writes that his new show is now cancelled due to withdrawal of funding. Is he fuming? No. "I’m from where no one funds art. At All. To have be supported thus far is more than I ever expected. One door closes, a window opens... " The grim fact is a lot of us will be looking through, or for, that window, so alongside the protests it's great to hear some positive affirmations.
~ And finally:here's two of the paired paintings from the Rook Lane exhibition of a remarkable project by artist Barry Cooper using music as stimulus and painting alongside Ray Toll after his stroke. These pictures were inspired by Tidelines, composed by Helen Ottaway for the silkie story Annabelle and I devised for First Cut Theatre Company and toured in the south west.

Right, packing for Skyros now, where in homage to Alyson I will 'move stones silently across the world'.

2011-06-05T19:30:00.007+01:00

Summer in the city.... while Bath Festival Fringe does unicycle juggling and clarinets, Bristol dockside does stag parties and thunking drum n' bass.

I'm back there for yet another session of short plays - well, why do just 39 in a week when with a little more effort I can manage 45? The six competition winners of Saturday Shorts 2 were produced at Bristol Folk House as script-in-hand readings, making a lively evening's entertainment. Impressive writing, and brilliant performances from ever-awesome actors like Annette Chown, Alan Coveney and Dan Winter.

Frome joined in the urban celebrations with a Fun Day in Cheap Street, local celebrities contributing to the frolics: that's our mayor looking fetching in turquoise, and the vision in pink below is popular performance poet Muriel Lavender, with children's author Kate Maryon being interviewed for fromeFM by artist David Chandler.

Sadly this was the only wet day of the week, but since the theme was a traditional 'Day at the Beach', rain naturally didn't dampen our spirits although it did soak the market stalls and make the snacks soggy and, even more tragically, compelled Illyria to transfer The Fantastic Mr Fox from the ECOS amphitheatre to inside the Merlin.

The show played to an enthusiastic full house, but to my mind the wonderfully vibrant energy of Illyria thrives best in outdoor theatre, and much as I enjoyed the animal antics and the beastliness of the farmers, I kept imagining how exuberant the production would have been in the open-air. That aside, this multi-talented six-strong team successfully shuffled twenty characters, often in swift succession, to create Roald Dahl's famous Mr Fox story in a way that enchanted the children and even floated a few environmental- and aggression-related thoughts for the adults to ponder. Best prop was the vast mechanical digger that looked a cross between a dinosaur and a kite, funniest moment the hen coop break-in, with every cast member abruptly sprouting chicken-arms and clucking.

And finally... Theatre West has concluded the initial stage of Picture This, with nine playwrights picked to continue the journey, leaving the abandoned thirty to congratulate with gritted teeth and commiserate with gnashed teeth. Disappointed? Well yes, I wouldn't have much commitment to the craft if I wasn't. But as I always remind others in similar situations: the work for a writer is finding a way to be heard - the writing is the just the enjoyable bit. I'm pleased to see some of my favourite entries were picked but not totally surprised several are absent: choices, as we all know, are inevitably and rightly subjective. The judging process could not have been fairer and the weekend of readings was briliantly organised, great fun - and good learning too. Now pass me my teeth, I have gritting and gnashing to do.
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2011-06-03T08:00:00.005+01:00

And I And Silence, a world premiere at Finborough Theatre, premier venue for provocative new writing, sounded worth a trip to London: with daisy-chains of stars from reviewers and deemed "unmissable" by Guardian drama queen Lyn Gardner. Theatre Guide London rates it “a play that wants to make you weep, and is quite likely to succeed, so touching is its story” and I'd go half-way with that, stopping at the second comma. It was eye-wateringly dreary. Maybe it's sacrilege to suggest that a play dealing with a subject like racial segregation still needs credible characters and dialogue which is more than abstract ranting, occasionally in rhyme. “Naomi Wallace's short, painful prison drama uses the backdrop of racially segregated '50s America to weave a tale of the hope that can blossom behind bars, and the despair that can destroy a life outside them.” said Time Out, tactfully focussing on the plot not the writing. Short? - even with four excellent women actors, that was a long 70 minutes. Among the critics' bewilderingly gushing tributes there's one incisive comment by Miriam Gillinson in Culture Wars: "plays commissioned for a set purpose (are) tough to stomach... this process often seems to suck the life and spontaneity right out of the writing." And as this honest and unsychophantic review says, And I And Silence is a formulaic play that teaches no-one anything about prison life or its effects.

No need to trek up to London for entertainment anyway, when Bath on a sunny day brims with street theatre and live music. My friend Diana Cambridge lives in delightfully bohemian style in a house with views across the city, and lunch in her garden is always a treat. Her next book Writing for Magazines: The Essential Guide is out in October.

And once again belatedly... now that - via my son's DVD - I've discovered Stewart Lee , I'm addicted to the Comedy Vehicle reruns on BBC2.
His take on quality of life is still on BBC i-player if you missed the magic "Prawns prawns prawns", now my mantra for the summer.
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2011-05-30T23:59:00.003+01:00

"Welcome to Theatre West Bank Holiday Extravaganza" Alison Comley says cheerily to the crowded Alma Tavern auditorium on Sunday morning. I've never watched 39 plays in 2 days before, and extravaganza sounds like the mot juste. Packaged in eight batches over two days, these ten-minute salami-slices of drama all represented, as co-director Anne Stiddard put it, the seeds of their theatre company's 2011 autumn season. Only eight will be pricked out and encouraged to grow, and of these only five will be ultimately shown at the Theatre West equivalent of Chelsea Flower Show. The term for a collection of competing writers must be 'a tremble'.
We'd all been given a photograph as starter-fertiliser - hence the project name: Picture This - and most of the writers kept impressively close to their images. All the 'starts' had points of interest, many were really good and some were brilliant; some were successful as short pieces but hard to envisage extended, others clearly had potential to intrigue and entertain as a full-length play. (Marietta Kirkbride's Semiprecious Eggs I just wanted to watch for the rest of the night.) And the acting, throughout the entire two days and nights, was brilliant: a terrific team showing how to pick up a script and breathe life into a character - 115 characters, to be precise.

My entry, Fairytale Ending, was in the first set of the second day, and I was lucky to have Natasha Pring cast as my protagonist - she pulled the part off the page like she'd not just rehearsed it but lived it. Once that was out of the way it was easier to relax and enjoy all the others, and to spend our breaks discussing faves and noting zeitgeist trends: hauntings from the past and matrimonial discord featuring significantly. An exhilarating two days, not least because I've now got four new friends - Elaine, Natalie, Ionnis, and Martin, don't forget to write!

And finally: I never thought I'd blog-link a church, but for All Saints with St John, Clifton I'll make an exception. Emily, who deserves brownie points and actual brownies too for driving into Bristol to support me, alerted me to the vast and utterly amazing stained glass windows here, designed by John Piper. Another highlight from an unforgettable Bank Holiday weekend.

2011-05-28T23:59:00.076+01:00

"Your dreams are potent fields of creativity, understanding, and wisdom."
Esmé Ellis has finished her new book Dreaming Worlds Awake, an intriguing patchwork of reflections about the elusive but palpable connections between our conscious and unconscious worlds. We use the term 'dream' both for imaginings in sleep and conscious aspirations, and Esmé explores these interactions in a fascinatingly personal way. I'm delighted my poem Jacob and the Angel is included among her fragments of synchronicity.

Back in Frome, The Lamb is no more! Well not with that name anyway: Martin Earley, charismatic host and owner of the pub where Nevertheless Pub Theatre began, has changed the name to The Cornerhouse with a cool new look to match. Launch night with the Zoe Francis Trio playing Gershwin to Frome's glamorati gave a foretaste of sophistications ahead.

Back to Bath again for something very different: 24 Hour Plays at the Ustinov. "24 hours ago", project director Shane Morgan reminds us after the cast have taken their final bows at 10 pm tonight, "not a word of this production existed. In the last 24 hours, 6 plays have been written, learned, rehearsed, and performed." It's an amazing and wholly admirable achievement, and though the writing was understandably variable, the acting by each team of five was superb. The same props - a venetian blind and a suitcase - featured in each play, as did the notion of wind, and there were thematic synchronicities too: motherhood, both surrogate and abandoning, with the end of the world threatened twice. My favourite was Maria by David Lane, both for strongly developed characterisation and pacey direction: all characters on stage from the start allowed Sam Berger to avoid the dozen or so blackouts that fragmented the opening play Tiny Little Lost. Chris Loveless also did well to create a sense of cohesion with his slightly Am-Drammish comedy material Exit Only. And despite any personal nit-pickings, overall this event was an absolute triumph: two hours of engrossing dramatic entertainment, whipped up by six inventive writers and a cast of thirty talented actors. Bouquets all round.

And as we freeze in bitter winds, I see Skyros island is set for another week of 22 degree sunshine... roll on June 11th, when I'll be in Atsitsa Bay, watching the water, smelling the oleander, tasting the retsina, feeling the warmth, listening and talking about writing to anyone who wants to hear and share.

2011-05-24T02:00:00.050+01:00

Ovid's Metamorphoses, according to Pants on Fire , are as relevant to the modern world as to antiquity. Man is still violently destructive and continues to ignore the most elemental of all truths: that everything in the universe is made of the same 'stuff' and to destroy nature is to destroy ourselves. Setting the myths in the 1940s allows this classy production to contrast girly glamour with war-time action as metaphor for brutal destruction. Narcissus is a screen idol besotted with his own image, Echo a smitten usherette, and Theseus a shell-shocked soldier sent to slay a Guernica-like Minotaur made of crutches and gas-masks. Pants On Fire have been touring this slick production for eighteen months and it arrived at the Ustinov this week with a collection of awed reviews from both sides of the Atlantic: not surprising, with six dynamic performers, clever set, stylish costumes, and tales as witty and ingenious as they are poignantly provocative.

FairyMonsterGhost is Tim Crouch's trilogy of monologues ostensibly to clarify Shakespeare's plays for young audiences but the Bristol Old Vic studio was packed with a largely older audience all rapt as children for most of the three hours the triple performances require.
I, Peaseblossom, dressed for a muddy Glastonbury and sounding like Ab Fab's Bubbles, was the least gripping, but I, Caliban and I, Banquo were both fascinating interpretations impressively acted: Jimmy Whiteaker moving - and definitely cast against type - as the monster and Adam Peck powerful as the murdered Scot. Tim Crouch is bringing a fourth play in this series I, Malvolio to the theatre in the autumn - one to watch out for.

Back in Frome it's party time, and the erratic sun chose to shine all afternoon on Rosie Jackson's 60th birthday gathering, a wonderfully convivial event with live music and poetry performances. Rosie had invited me to join poets Rose Flint and Sue Boyle to reflect on this celebratory occasion with cronelike wit and wisdom, so we did our best and it all seemed to go down well.

And the weekend just keeps on going... Monday was a 'Word of Mouth' event at BOV featuring Dub Queen and Punk King aka Jean 'Binta' Breeze and Byron Vincent. Frequent droppers-in on this blog will know that I'd go a long way to hear Byron, who presents his achingly acute and witty life commentaries with a slightly baffled air as if he's got no idea where all these surreal similes came from or are heading, and then while we're still yelping with mirth he can silence us all with a seriously savage satire like Alchemy in Nowhere Town. Jean 'Binta' Breeze has a contrastive style, equally personal but with reggae rhythms and more specific political passion. She writes about soldiers dying in Iraq and Afghanistan with the same sad intensity as she speaks of the plight of Jamaica, yet somehow with a sense of enduring love for humanity. Sometimes I think there's nothing a play can do that poetry can't do better.
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2011-05-19T19:30:00.107+01:00

Exeter Northcott has always had a reputation for punching above its weight for a small university theatre, and despite last year's financial quake their programme is impressive. SATTF took The Comedy of Errors there last month, and now Sell A Door have chosen this venue to open their national tour of the controversial rock musical Spring Awakening.

It's a passionate show in every sense, with an exuberant young cast and some strong erotic moments from the lead couple ~ Jonathan Eiø as Melchior and Victoria Serra as Wendla.
Based on a German play written in 1891, it was banned for over fifty years for its frank look at adolescent sexuality and the inadequacy - and hypocrisy - of available guidance. It’s Skins meets Cabaret, the press release enthuses but from the start it's more like West Side Story as the teens hang around a playground and a starry-eyed young girl sings alone. Wendla is no Maria anticipating passion though: what she's yearning for is the truth about babies, which her prim mother refuses to impart. Repression is just as bad for the boys, stuck with a sadistic Latin teacher and sexual confusions summed up by Melchior: ‘The entire world is fixated by penis and vagina – well, I am’.

Inevitably these rites of passage are more wounding than wonderful, and the action is strewn with casualties before the Capulet-crypt-like final scene. Abused children, pregnancy from ignorance, homophobia, school-induced suicide... wouldn't it be great to think, 120 years on since Frank Wedekind shocked society with these home truths, we'd have got all that sorted? And actually if I had one reservation it'd be that this moral fable relied too much on ciphers to represent social issues rather than developed characters.
Nevertheless an exciting production well worth the long drive from Frome.

Equally as shocking an indictment of 19th century social attitudes, this time about real lives, Brontë is at Bath Theatre Royal in a Shared Experience production directed by Nancy Meckler. Polly Teale's play digs deep into the psyches and secrets of this famous family, showing the bickering and loneliness as well as the vivid imaginations that created a crucible for their iconic writings - and the reason for brother Branwell's tragic failure too. "We should be grateful for our obscurity," Emily comments candidly, "nothing was expected of us." Invading the intense minutiae of their actual lives are the writers' alter-ego characters, passionate and wild, articulating their longings and violence. Brilliant scripting and powerful performances from all the cast especially Charlotte (Kristin Atherton) and Emily (Elizabeth Crarer) whose mutual love, like their antipathy, is always painfully lucent.

And my one reservation: the aggressive air-con system in the Main House. I noticed scarves appearing in the shivering stalls but wasn't sufficiently equipped myself, it being now May, to withstand the icy assault. So, go see Brontë! - but wear your thermal vest.
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2011-05-15T14:30:00.008+01:00

It's been a good month for nostalgia: no sooner back from Dublin than off to stay a few days with my student-days flatmate Helen who now lives with husband Tony in leafy Hertfordshire. Lots of reminiscences over lingering lunches in her sunny garden, including a visit from Mag who shared our Dublin digs.

Helen dug out this snap of us revising for our finals, an OMG-44-years ago, and Tony took an updated image of us in similar pose but I managed to delete it on our woodland walk so here instead are my friends sitting on a badger.

Back in Frome, and a great night of dancing with Orkestra del Sol at the Cheese & Grain, with Frome's own wonderful Street Bandits providing a terrific curtain raiser. Think gipsy rhythms, street-theatre clowning and flamboyant outfits, and you've got the picture for both these great bands.

Over in Bristol it's Mayfest time and I went with Alison to see The Summer House, billed as a comedy thriller and featuring three talented performers in a shambolic romp through male mythologies both contemporary and ancient nordic. A wonderful comedy - original, physical, and very funny - but despite the fights, portents, hints, and Viking visitations this stag-party romp never ticked the thriller box for me. Alison felt a Lord of the Flies vibe as booze and testosterone flooded the action but there was no Piggy, only Loki, and no real menace among this endearing trio. After 90 minutes the show ended with a song while loose ends remained shimmering like the Northern Lights in the Icelandic sky, to rousing applause from the Bristol Old Vic Studio audience. And jolly well deserved too.

2011-05-08T09:00:00.034+01:00

Bliss it was to be alive,
but to be a bit less ill was very heaven, as Wordsworth might have mused in East Woodlands bluebell woods at dusk and a new moon rising. Thanks Emily, thanks everyone. And more reason to be cheerful in the inspirational success of Frome Independents in the town council election - sweeping in with 10 out of the 17 seats. As world-travelling writer Roger says, Tunis, Egypt, Frome.... maybe hope for all of us - although, with the dejecting news our nation sees no point a fairer voting system, maybe not.

To brighter thoughts:

NIE is the wonderfully innovative theatre group that knocked my socks off last year with their promenade show Everything Falls Apart, so I was avid to see their new production Tales from a Sea Journey at the Tobacco Factory as part of Mayfest. Like all their shows, it's fast-paced, high-energy, and hugely entertaining, using live music and intermingling various cultures and languages to create a colourful patchwork of emotional experiences. Their inspiration this time is a real sea voyage taken by the group in 2009, embellished with tales both encountered and invented. These range from ferociously funny black comedy to moving domestic cameos, and combine to create an exciting show that despite its random elements feels satisfyingly complete.

2011-05-02T22:00:00.006+01:00

It was touch and go till Saturday morning whether I’d make the trip to Dublin to convalesce with my long-time friend Jenny. I knew I couldn’t have a kinder carer, so took the chance: after all it’s only a short flight, what could go wrong....
Well for a start, the woman at Aer Lingus check-in decided my tiny bag was too big for carry-on, and I had to pay £17 fine despite the fact it was way too small for the hold, as obviously noted by the baggage handlers since it failed to emerge with the larger cases on the carousel at Dublin. Aer Lingus desk was deserted but there was a phone on which I became embroiled in a MontyPythonesque exchange with a voice which insisted I must be outside the Spa and at my plaintive insistence I was still in Arrivals, decided it had no idea where I was. It put me on musak-hold for a while, returning to announce I was in Terminal 1, as though of all the places the flight from Bristol might arrive who’d have thought it would choose that one! The voice then became efficient and took details, and eventually I bundled out of the airport, bagless, into the late afternoon sun and climbed into a taxi. I related my woes to the big Nigerian driver as we cruised towards Howth. ‘They will bring it to you.’ he told me in a very deep voice I found immensely reassuring.

And sure enough, after a lovely evening of catchup & supper with Jenny, I got a text to say my bag was being prepared for delivery.
Next morning as hours passed and the sunshine beckoned ever more insistently, I phoned Aer Lingus to query their optimism. ‘I’m only here for the weekend, we had plans for today,’ I said, coming over all plaintive again. ‘Ah sure, but you know what they’re like,’ said a soothing voice as if I were whining over the non-appearance of lions at nature reserve.
So what with Aer Lingus charging me £17.00 to lose my bag, not bothering to return it till over 12 hours after they found it, plus providing the unique flight experience when I struggled with a coughing fit of a stewardess solicitously asking if I’d prefer to pay €2.50 or £2.00 for a glass of water, and you can see why my overall impression of this airline is not good. Easyjet next time.

The bag arrived at last and off we went to Howth Demesne, where Deer Park Golf course replaces the classic landscaped gardens of the Gaisford-St Lawrence family. It’s a lovely view anyway, right down to Malahide, and out across Dublin Bay. We walked among the wild rhododendrons and saw the Neolithic portal tomb and the masses of wild garlic - the curse of Gráinne Ní Mháille, 16th Century Pirate Queen, who fell out with the Baron. When she called at his castle he ignored the ancient Brehon law of Ireland giving hungry travellers the right to claim sustenance and barred his castle against her. In retaliation she captured his little boy and held him hostage until the family agreed to set an extra plate at the supper table every night in case she would ever pass that way again. And the promise is honoured to this day. ‘God be with the old days’ says Jenny.

Then after broth and bread & cheese, we walk on Howth Head, thick with the egg-yolk yellow and coconut smell of the gorse, looking out over the sea to Ireland’s Eye. Lots of talking, good food, and sunshine: perfect recuperation.

2011-04-25T16:10:00.000+01:00

It all began with zumba. You can laugh if you want, I would, if I could without coughing. I love zumba, I bound around the room like Tigger in the Ten Acre Wood attempting ersatz cha-cha-cha, convinced it's all really good for me. Unfortunately I have a constitution like one of the more irritating minor characters in 19th Century novels - Jane Austen's weedy Mr Woodhouse, or EM Forster's tiresome Charlotte. (Actually Room with a View was 20th Century, just, but vaporising females are timeless and probably inspired the routine treatment of all women's ailments as hysteria.) Anyway, I can't stand drafts, and I knew as I felt the fan fiercely on me in lovely Linsey's class a week last Wednesday that what others were finding a nice cooling breeze on our perspiring breasts would probably, for me, be the start of something sinister. One hot shower later and I'd already got sore throat. After two days this had simmered painfully into what is politely called a 'chesty cough' but I had a busy week of walks, visits, theatre trips... Well Mr Woodhouse and Charlotte Bartlett could have warned me of the folly of that! By Good Friday I had to admit defeat. I've now withdrawn from everything nice lined up for Easter and still feel, in the words of my father, like a corpse resenting the resurrection.
So this is the under-cover edition. Duvet cover. Nothing worth reporting but I feel better for getting it off my chest. Ha ha, get the metaphor? Hope it works.

2011-04-23T17:00:00.008+01:00

Bedlam- the movie at the Brewery is this year's 'big show' for Stepping Out Theatre Company, and as ever it's a rumbustuous ensemble piece featuring songs, belly-dancing and insanity - this time ghosts too. Written by Mark Breckon, it's a play about a film about a drama that's haunting the writer and putting a fatal curse on each director... lots of gags and goodhearted fun, bound to delight the many fans of Stepping Out. The Bristol Evening Post found it 'hard not to be won over by the relentless charm and sheer unpredictability on display... Bedlam is a blast." See more here.

Adam Peck has returned from the American badlands of Bonnie and Clyde to more local terrain for The Unremarkable, his play in development at the Ustinov. "I was interested in the mundanity," Adam says, "I wondered if you could make a play about the minutiae of life." His protagonist Tom narrates his outer and inner landscapes as he stalks an unknown woman along the streets of Bristol for six months, mostly in monologue with occasional intrusions from her physical manifestations to remonstrate, counsel, or attempt seduction. Opinions in the audience discussion afterwards varied as to whether this was perfectly normal behaviour for a bloke feeling a bit low - the playwright was in this camp - or the initial self-grooming stage of a psychotic misogynist murderer-in-the-making who was scarily in denial about his own darker aspects. Guess which seemed more likely to me. But everyone from Bristol thrilled to recognise the street names and recycling bins and the script was considered bold, witty and really lovely.

I don't generally dip into personal stuff in my blog but on this beautiful Easter Saturday I'm making an exception: I'm SO FED UP with this chest infection, it rumbled on all through the cold weather and now, despite sunshine, blue skies, birdsong, and assorted budding foliage, it's returned in full throttle, making me sound like a dying donkey and wish I was. Not witty but accurate. Here's an image of the tantalising world outside I want to see more of, I'm back to bed with my lemon & honey.
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2011-04-18T13:00:00.012+01:00

The night I went to see Frankenspine at Bristol Old Vic studio someone in the audience fainted and had to be carried out, apparently, but I never noticed: I was so utterly gripped by the performance.
“I’d like to tell you a story” begins Tristan Sturrock disarmingly, stepping on a sparsely-set stage wearing trousers with braces and slightly Buster Keaton make-up. The story is extraordinary and true: Seven years ago on Mayday in Padstow he fell ten feet on his head, breaking his neck and paralysing himself, it seemed at first, for life. His fall, rescue, operation, and recovery are related with high theatricality and a multiplicity of characters: as well as gothic voices from the shadows, in the 'real' world there's fast-talking northern Russ "I’m your ambulance man for tonight" and Mr Germon the surgeon "I have my off days - any questions, no? Good." Tristan learns his options are halo brace or 'intervention', which he chooses - a long and dangerous operation which merges with the creation of Frankenstein, as characters from Mary Shelley's story crowd in to the room and operatic music rises to crescendo.
"How fragile we all are. Some of us are lucky, some of us are not." Tristan reflects at the end, and thanks with red roses all who contributed to his total recovery.
It's an incredible production, by turns moving and hilarious, cleverly scripted, well-directed with atmospheric lighting and music, and brilliantly performed. Tristan Sturrock is a superbly talented actor: he was outstanding in BOV's Juliet and her Romeo and in Far Away last year, he's a regular with Kneehigh, and this one-man self-written show is simply awesome - it's on till the end of the month, go see if you possibly can.

Exciting though it is, I wasn't going to mention the launch of Theatre West's competition for the Alma Tavern autumn season, because - though I'm thrilled to have been invited - it's a bit scarily X-factor. Fifty writers, five finalists...
But there's no point in being coy now the photos are out on facebook. We've each got a picture to work from: mine's a fountain in Germany. And as soon as I get over this bloody annoying chest infection, I'll be diving in...

2011-04-13T23:40:00.006+01:00

"Poetry is the business of words and silence" says Philip Gross at the start of his reading for Poetry & a Pint. It's a real privilege to listen to this T.S.Eliot Award winning poet in the tiny space of St James Vaults, sharing words from The Water Table (I forgot to bring my copy for signing so Philip graciously autographed my arm) and also, excitingly, from his next collection which will be about his father. Can't wait.
I went with lovely Rose Flint and Wednesday found us in Bath together again for another poetry reading: Helen Jagger Wood brought her Indian King poets from Cornwall to the BRSLI lunchtime readings. In my fiction days I ran novel-writing master-classes for Helen down in Camelford so it was good to meet up again, and to hear her poems. Mostly about nature, they are wonderfully sensuous but with consummate hidden craft.

You can't go wrong with small-town teen coming-of-age movies, I always think, and Submarine had so much critical acclaim I was gagging to see this 'refreshing, urgent, and original' debut movie from Richard Ayoade. It starts with Oliver's death-obsession recalling Harold and Maude but not so funny, continues by recalling Catcher in the Rye but not so deeply layered, and then settles for recalling Gavin and Stacey but more verbose. Much has been made of the film's 'confidence' but it's a fine line between self-confident and self-satisfied. Pleasant enough but unimpressive.

Fatuous footnote of the week: Alan Partridge is following me on Twitter. He facebooked me to tell me. As a huge admirer of Mr Partridge's work I'm thrilled and delighted to see him at the top of my twitter page, looking roguishly avid for my tweets. Maybe I'll write something there one day.
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2011-04-11T09:00:00.019+01:00

"Nice to see the place come alive isn't it?" comments a local passing me on the coastal walk from Shanklin to Sandown on Saturday, and I agree. Enthusiastically.
I've never seen the Isle of Wight other than in wintry hibernation until now. Sun bleaching distant cliffs, white blossom, topaz sea trimmed with milky spume, dazzling blue sky streaked with vapour trails - it's a picture postcard from another continent and era. The long beach is vibrant with families avidly trenching and castling, picnicking and paddling, basking and wading... this is proper seaside.
I'm here for a writing session at The Grange, where we've been scribing in sunshine on the patio above the lovely gardens all morning.
A delightful group with a range of interests and masses of talent, they created poems and stories from fragments, lists, and even pebbles... In the evening all ten of us went to the Thai restaurant in Shanklin Old Town to glow contentedly from sunshine and stimulating shared readings.

2011-04-07T23:30:00.018+01:00

Burlesque night at Frome Poetry Cafe had April Follies as our theme and lovely Muriel Lavender our hugely popular guest. The Garden Cafe was completely crammed to watch Muriel in frilly bloomers declaiming her satirical gems, all in the best possible taste and accompanied by props from Dolly Parton hat to W.I. knitted knockers. For anyone who can't wait till Frome Festival in July for another dose of Lavender linctus and glimpse of gusset, Muriel is performing at The Bell in Rode next Thursday (14th).

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, written and set in the 1960s, has dated in the same way Shakespeare's tragedies have: we may thank our stars things like that don't happen nowadays, but we know human nature hasn't really changed. It's a brutal story of institutionalised bullying that culminates in suicide and murder, but nevertheless manages to end on an exuberant high that a broken but indomitable spirit can survive oppression with just a little help. The help, of course, is R P McMurphy, a reprobate who acts crazy to get out of the Work Farm, and opens the eyes of Nurse Ratched's 'boys' to her tactics of psychological abuse in the name of therapy. It's a play that needs a strong male lead, and Frome Drama Club found one in Stephen Scammell whose charisma electrified the entire action. The crazies were all terrific, each actor inhabiting his role totally at every moment, and the scene when they defy their tormenter to watch the World Series on a switched-off television is fantastic. (Thanks Mike Witt for the picture) Also unforgettable is the party scene that precipitates a tragic climax. Director Calum Grant, who also designed the effective set, comments in his programme notes that the fishing trip in the Jack Nicholson movie can't be shown in a stage version, but for me the containment within the men's ward is what builds the claustrophobic atmosphere to inescapable climax. A full house at the Merlin gasped, laughed, cried, and gave this brilliant production prolonged and well-deserved applause.
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2011-04-06T01:30:00.010+01:00

I feel a bit bad admitting I wasn't bowled over by After the Accident at the Brewery. It was well acted, and the situation - joyrider kills best friend and random small child, parents unable to recover - is certainly harrowing. The notion of putting culprit and suffering parents together for Restorative Justice, with us the voyeuristic audience as onlooking coordinator, is simple and strong, and the mix of eloquent soliloquy and intense argument should have worked really well. But I never felt able to inhabit the emotional heart of this story - it remained a case-study, violent and tragic but oddly two-dimensional. I think the static and cerebral directing was one factor, and another was that the script simply failed to convince at key places when cathartic shifts were necessary but not really credible. And, for such a deluge of raw pain, it went on a bit too long .

Being frequently bang off-trend when it comes to movies I've only just seen Social Network - what an amazing movie, deservedly taking Oscars for best script and best editing and should have won best film too if we weren't all sentimentally besotted with royalty. Zuckerberg in the movie registers quite high on the autistic scale of emotional illiteracy - presumably to add a more complex dimension, since the real Zuckerberg comes across in interview as a total hero. His concept was radical: facebook as an agent of worldwide democracy, users as communicating individuals rather than consumerist prey. No wonder he was sued.

And finally... banging the drum for Frome again: Matthew Graham (think Life of Mars and Ashes to Ashes, not Bonekickers, please, we all have off-days) revels in living just outside the town.
In a recent interview he said he'd pick Frome over Bath any day "- of course! Always go for the underdog. It's a treasure trove of unusual shops and its arts festival draws the likes of Eddie Izzard... Unstoppable Frome!"
Deadly is the Female, which along with our independent record shop and cinema were among Matthew's list of unmissables, is currently commended in Vogue for 'a shopping experience designed to make you feel like a Hollywood starlet from the golden era.' As Muriel Lavender, starring the Poetry Cafe tomorrow night, will agree.
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2011-04-04T10:00:00.004+01:00

Frome was officially twinned with The One Show back in that programme's glory days, but I've always maintained it should be twinned with Eden - at least if your idea of paradise is an incredibly creative town made up of bitesize bits of urban energy mingled with local friendliness. When I arrived here and Frome had me at 'hello', I was told my adoptive home doesn't count as Somerset, it's known in that county as The Peoples' Republic of Frome. How great it would be, then, to be literally self-governing - or at least to be able to make future-focussed decisions not ruled by the palsied hand of bickering party politics.
If only we had enough energetic imaginative individuals to stand as independents in our wards at the May elections.... ooh we do. That sounds like something to sing about. It's flashmob time!

2011-03-31T18:30:00.031+01:00

A funny thing about The Comedy of Errors is that it's not the slightest bit amusing for any of the characters, who become progressively more irate, berated, and beleaguered: it's the privileged information of the audience alone that turns the action into hilarious farce. The premise is beyond absurd, combining extreme mistaken identity with bizarre coincidence, but this wonderful production energetically trounces any such nitpicking cavils.
Pay full attention to the opening speech though, because without this nothing makes sense: Egeon, a merchant of Syracuse, explains he is seeking his son who, with his faithful manservant, is seeking his identical twin brother and his identical twin faithful manservant. Little does Egeon know that they're all now in Ephesus, busily mistaking each other’s identity all over town.
Andrew Hilton's inspired direction shows this early Shakespeare play is ideal for in-the-round production: minimal set details give plenty of space for physical action and the story cracks along at a spanking pace. 19th Century costumes (designed by Harriet de Winton) not only look fabulous but subtly underline the brutality below the surface of an elegant era. Comic timing throughout is superb - some moments so funny they sparked spontaneous applause. All the actors are terrific so it seems wrong to pick out individuals but I will: Antipholus of Ephesus and his passionate wife (Matthew Thomas and Dorothea Myer-Bennett), Angelo the baffled goldsmith (Alan Coveney), and the mistreated menservants (Richard Neale and Gareth Kennerley). Both sets of twins looked uncannily alike, which really helps too. Oh, and so does the live music. This is SATTF on five-star form and it's on till the end of April, then transferring to the Northcott Theatre Exeter, so GO SEE!

If you've ever sniggered salaciously while seasoning with cumin or discussing kundalini, you'd love Julie Mullen's erotic poetry. Julie is an actress as well as a zestful word juggler, and Bradford on Avon's poetry cafe positively thrilled to her raunchy off-the-wall style. I went with lovely Muriel Lavender, who though not in her best underpinnings nevertheless caused quite an erotic frisson herself.
Anyone seeking the full corset experience should come to Frome Poetry Cafe next week, when Muriel will be the star of our Burlesque night.

2011-03-26T16:00:00.032Z

Hull Truck Theatre brought their current touring production Lady Chatterley's Lover to an optimistic Merlin audience on Wednesday. Sadly, despite the dark glamour of the programme image, this was more of a plot recital than a drama. (Picture by Peter Byrne.)
Everyone knows the basic story and this could have worked in favour of the adaptation, but it didn’t. There was obvious intention to address issues of class and gender struggles between the wars but the steady pace and stagey delivery made for an insipid performance and, devoid of Lawrence's exultation in cunt as vital to life, the story became a depressing case-study of matrimonial difficulties. The lovers' discreet fondlings lacked any erotic energy and seemed inspired by that much-parodied potter’s wheel scene in Ghost.
The set really didn’t help: a dense circle of country-household clutter was presumably designed to show how Connie was fettered by her status, but allowed no sense of the freedom of the woods or the elemental thrill of the rainstorm. Here, as in the adaptation itself, there seemed too much reliance on explanations rather than physical or emotional impact.

By contrast, Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell at Bath Theatre Royal featured classy acting, especially Robert Powell who brought charm and unexpected warmth to the title role of the misogynist alcoholic journalist whose column was famed for its frequent absence. Set in a superbly credible Soho pub early one morning, the play is a rambling monologue of reprehensible anecdotes and acid reflections. "Choked on his own vomit – what a disgusting phrase!" he muses, "when did you ever hear of anyone choking on someone else’s vomit?” Keith Waterhouse wrote his tribute in 1989, showing the cult of celebrity was obsessed with the degradation of idols long before Heat and circles of shame. There's contempt too for affluent county living, as 'Mr&Mrs Backbone-of-England' come in for hefty lampooning: cue prolonged laughter from all the Mr&Mrs Backbones-of-Bath massed in the stalls...

The first ever Merlin New Playwriting Competition reached a triumphant conclusion with the presentation of the winning plays as fully-directed rehearsed readings on stage last Thursday. Members of Frome Drama Club played all parts in the five winning plays and did full justice to styles and subjects ranging from a very-American modern tragedy to a very-English 19th Century comedy. Sets were minimal, but effective lighting and imaginative direction from Claudia Pepler combined with a varied programme of superb writing and strong acting to create a fantastic theatrical evening.
The quality of entries was clear from the start with Silent Columbine by Bristol student Hannah Williams-Walton, a brilliant script and a powerfully convincing psychological study of the two boys who massacred thirteen people in 1999. Patrice Gerrard, also in the younger category, evoked a ‘waiting-for-Godot’ atmosphere in One Long Interval as a restless teenager waits with his father in hospital for news of his younger brother. A clever and succinct script with compassionate insight into family dynamics as well as some very funny moments.
From the over-25 category, The Zapper by Frome writer Brenda Bannister took an initially realistic situation – a let’s-be-civil discussion about divorce – to create an admirably crisp and witty script with a satisfying conclusion. In a change of mood again, Heartsink by Geraldine Lindley from Bath dealt with the difficult topic of Munchausen’s syndrome. The final play of the night The Fearful Adventure of the Fishing Excursion was a diverting duologue set in a Victorian bedroom and involving extreme storytelling Lemony Snickett might envy. Playwright Jonathan Collings found his ideas in a collection of Victorian tall tales and wove them together with preposterous charm to create a highly individual finale.
After the performances, audience members joined writers and cast in the foyer for an informal feedback session and a chance to express their appreciation and enjoyment. Merlin director Claudia Pepler, who had the initial idea of a New Playwriting competition as well as overseeing the project and selecting the winners, intends to make this an annual event. “Next time we'll aim for full production,” she said “The whole process has been brilliant.”

2011-03-18T20:00:00.023Z

"Thankyou for coming to this and not wandering around Bristol in a green felt hat, getting pissed in the name of St Patrick." This is Bristol Old Vic's Word of Mouth, about to prove once again that a poetry performance can move, amuse, and thrill every bit as dramatically as a play - and more succinctly & intimately too. Byron Vincent compèred with his usual enchanting dialectical dexterity, recalling a scary '80s childhood contending with waving gladioli, stranger-danger, and Mr Noseybonk.
First guest was World Slam Champ and BBC radio4 fave Elvis McGonagall who, having applauded our Paddy's day choice, metaphorically rolled up his tartan sleeves to give every aspect of modern culture a pasting - especially politics. Ferocity and wit in equal measure scythed through the coalition, banking, Cameron's Big Society ("how patronising is that? Enid Blyton meets George Orwell") and Operation Undying Conflict in Afghanistan.

Luke Wright has called his brilliant new show Cynical Ballads and performs his 'seven caustic tales from Broken Britain' as a powerpoint presentation with visuals ranging from Searle-like cartoons to quasi-lecture notes on the history of the ballad form. “Some poems work on the soul, some poems work on the funny bone” Luke says, but his do both: they're passionate and satirical, but every light jest has a dark shadow - as in his tale about The Luck of the Brungers which ends bleakly
If you’re wondering what the moral is, I’m afraid I’m wondering too.
Trolls like this will always win. And there’s nothing we can do.
Luke doesn't think Britain is really broken, he says, despite this collection of misfits and monsters, and he sees his show as a kind of angry nagging love-letter. And that's how it comes across, despite the yobs and the snobs and the drunks on the train - as a series of deeply felt and turbulent tales about the painful poignancy of human life.
Like Byron said at the start: “Everything’s ok really – well it isn’t, but it’s always been horrible, so that’s nearly the same.”

Four In A Bed has had its last outing - in Southsea, somewhat bizarrely, at The Cellars in Eastney. A great little pub venue, providing our actors for the first time with a stage & lighting to enhance their frolics. Performances peaked - great to end Nevertheless Productions short tour on such a high note.
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2011-03-16T14:00:00.014Z

The Merlin One Act Play competition closed at the end of February, leaving us just three weeks for the tough task of deciding a shortlist from 55 submissions, and for director Claudia to pick five finalists and organise rehearsed readings of their winning plays. First read-through went really well: actors from Frome Drama Club animatedly discussing the plays, acknowledging 'great writing, great dialogue' and disagreeing over their favourites. Which is exactly what I hope will happen among the audience when the winners are staged. All seats free, 7.45 on Thursday 24th, so do come along if you can.

From drama to poetry: Bristol poet Tom Phillips was guesting at Poetry & a Pint in St James Wine Vaults on Monday. Tom is an editor at Venue, our local version of London's Time Out, recently threatened with closure and then last week dramatically 'saved'. Future issues will be Venue, Spock, but not as we know it. Our much-loved anarchic & informative weekly will amalgamate with a 'lifestyle' magazine and mutate into a monthly freebie. Tom referred to this trauma only once and obliquely, in his excellent set, when he introduced his poem Pyrrhic Victory: "The writer of this is on his knees before the emperor - I think it's about my present employment situation."

And a couple of previews:
Frome's April Follies Poetry Café on Wednesday 6th features brilliant burlesque poet Muriel Lavender, whose wicked wit and sensational attire are raising eyebrows and spirits across the southwest.

Looking further ahead, Westbury Festival is introducing poetry events this year -organisers Maggie and Helen visited Frome for ideas how.

Finally: Being Human has reached its last gory episode and Monday mornings won't be the same. (I'm generally out when it's screened so watch on Demand at first possible opportunity.) Facebook is crawling with mournings for Mitchell, the vampire who ironically managed to be human after all when he found self-loathing, surely the sole ability distinguishing us from other animals. Can the next series survive without its key players - or did Herrick lie when he said there was no way back... "He was flawed, he was adored, with him we were never bored": John Mitchell, here are your best bits.

2011-03-14T09:00:00.015Z

Entertaining
Pithy
Engrossing
Offensive
Surprising!
Fabulous
Brilliant
Different
Intriguing
Imaginative
Thought-provoking
FANxxxxxxTASTIC!
Four in a Bed - drama quartet written by me and Rosie, co-produced with Bootleg Theatre Company - finished its Frome run on Saturday with sell-out audience and post-show party courtesy of Martin, new owner of Upstairs at the Lamb and big supporter of our pub theatre venture Nevertheless. Friday night was an unexpected sell-out too, and feedback has been amazing, from one-word responses (typical selection above) to emails texts & calls. "Thank you for a wonderful evening, innovative and enjoyable, Frome so needs this!" "Really good writing - absorbing, touching and funny!"

Massive thanks to Stew, Kerry, Sara and Joe for their strong acting and to Colin for bringing it all together. There's a final performance of this production on Wednesday at Eastney and then in festival the fun starts again when Bristol's Stepping Out company brings Lullabies of Broadmoor to Frome Festival.

2011-03-07T09:00:00.028Z

Mark Thomas reckons he looks like he's just bagged a rambler in his promo image for Extreme Rambling - Walking the Wall, his one-man show about walking the Palestine border wall: a ramble, as he points out, requiring more than a bobble hat and boots - like an inside contact at UN. For over two hours Mark paces the stage in front of a map of the West Bank, recounting through facts and dramatic sketches the story of this epic journey with energy and passion that never flags. It's an amazing performance - a wildly funny show about shocking realities, deeply felt and inspirationally well-crafted.
Mark calls his trip a mixture of devilment, curiosity and rambling, though he's been warned to claim officially he's writing about birds and wild flowers. It's a journey full of learning. Like, although the border is 315 kilometers, the wall is more than twice as long, deviating wildly in order to include the illegal Israeli settlements. Like, the cruel absurdities of this route include a football pitch split in half, villagers separated from their shops, and children walking to school through a tunnel they share with sewerage when it rains.
There's much to grieve and rage over in his tale but it never becomes a lecture or a rant, as Mark peoples the stage with other characters too: his supporters, opposers, and random companions. We meet juggling Israeli anarchists who quote Monty Python, Palestinians queuing through the night at the border crossing, conscript soldiers, an orthodox Jew estate agent, the dapper Consulate General and the colonel who designed the wall - 'a man who doesn’t let the facts impinge on his life.' We recognise the voices of his hippy cameraman, his exasperated fuck-up sorter Nava, and Mark's inner Hugh Grant.
And the wall's final obscenity is to end at Beityatir, incomplete despite '723 kilometers of national self-delusion'. Mark's journey ends as it began, with an Israeli soldier shouting out a challenge. This time, fired by fury that 'this land so obsessed with identity robs everyone of his own', he yells back a summary of his experiences, concluding with lung-breaking belligerence ‘and I’m writing about birds and wild flowers.’ Brilliant entertainment with lasting impact.

Big contrast at the finale of the Bath Literature festival: Griff Rhys Jones discoursing on his trips to mountains and rivers, which turned out to be mainly a smugly superficial ramble through the peaks and streams of his ego. Thank Groupon for Royal Fizz champagne cocktails at The Lounge.

Saturday was World Book Night, with bedtime stories for children and free books for all at Frome Library. Over a dozen Fromies applied successfully to be donors, which means a total of more than 600 books supplied by the scheme. The big handout was followed by Books Please! - a chance for bibliophiles to share their most-loved reads. My own special favourite was Robyn still in her Where The Wild Things Are costume reading Kubla Khan.

And finally: Only 4 days now till Four in a Bed opens Upstairs at the Lamb. Rosie and I took Alison in to admire the framed poster in the downstairs bar...

2011-03-02T08:40:00.009Z

Probe, the dance company that extends performance into contemporary drama, is now an Associate Artist of Merlin Theatre and what a coup for Frome’s theatre to be linked with this exciting group. Currently they are touring with May, a stunning production featuring mesmeric words from Tim Crouch made excitingly visceral and vivid by dance sequences. (thanks Matthew Andrews for the pictures)
The story takes us to terrain that fascinated the writer in his previous award-winning plays My Right Arm and The Author : the relationship between mind and body, and the emotional connection between audience and actors. We seem initially to be in a non-demanding poetry reading, encouraged into comfortable laughter, until the reader’s subject becomes gradually graphically apparent. May, the girl he is writing about, is a self-harmer, and nothing in this gentle social worker’s experience has prepared him for her pain, expressed in struggle to find words and in passionate primal dance. He begins to understand her ‘ecstasy of agony’, how ‘each jab an endogenous spurt blocking out the pain.. a unifying simplicity.’ The poem becomes a love story, mingling empathy with the violence, until we are suddenly back in the drab hall of the readings with a call for the owner of a blue Mondeo to move it please…
Fantastic live music from Scott Smith, who was also the bemused compere, supported fabulous dance from Ben Duke and Antonia Grove, and a brilliantly disturbing script. I came out shaking, after the most extraordinary hour at the theatre for a long time. You can see a clip here, and see the show (or see it again, as I will) in Bristol’s Mayfest. Five stars.

2011-02-27T09:41:00.009Z

Voices in the City is the collective name for spoken word in Bath Literature Festival, or as they put it: 'poetical events', since Bath is a city because it has a cathedral, rather than urban eclectic energy. The poetical event in the Central Library from 10am to 4.30pm last Friday, meticulously organised by Sue Boyle, provided readings ranging from Greek myths to Eliot's Wasteland, free to anyone with time to spare. I was a brief drop-in, but managed to catch a superb set by BlueGate Poets from Swindon. Travellers without Baggage is the name of an anthology they have been working from, and their presentation combined some of the original poems by Valerie Clarke with their own responses and was both lyrical and moving.

Paul - the new movie-genre spoof from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, if you've been distracted by Baftamania and the name doesn't ring a bell - is not getting many stars from broadsheet reviewers who find its sci-fi geekiness not as funny as zombies or rural cops. Over in the states there's a different concern: the miraculously-healed bible-belt babe, liberated into extreme expletives and intention to fornicate, apparently introduces 'a risque series of attacks on Christianity that will be unpopular.' (Paul: “My existence doesn’t necessarily disprove religion, just all Judaeo-Christian denominations.”) I loved it, although most of the sci-fi filmic in-jokes went over my head, because the story is rich in other gags too: it's a bonding-style love story, a thriller, a nerds-triumph story and most of all a road movie, with lashings of self-discovery along the way. Why it's Little Miss Sunshine but with a kindof benign supersmart skinny Gollum on board.

Back in the day when I strutted my performance poetry stuff about a bit, Hazel Stewart and I were Live & Lippy - and before that, with wonderful guitarist Laurie Parnell, we were Liquid Jam. In fact some of our words are still knocking around Youtube (onomatopoeia had 6260 hits last time I looked.) Hazel now lives in Cumbria so duets are off the menu, but when she journeys south we always meet up for walking and writing and talking of past times. This weekend we had another reminiscence-fest, looking back on our 'artist date' city-breaks in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and New York.... must be time for another, Haz!

2011-02-24T11:00:00.005Z

“The nice thing about writing a book is you have to really think” says Debby Holt at the crammed launch of her totally engrossing new novel Friends Lies and Alibis at Toppings in Bath, a charmingly ingenuous comment from a writer who is actually extremely erudite, and crafts her domestic dramas with psychological insight as well as witty social observation. This story, she tells us, started out as the exploration of a toxic marriage, but ended up more about the relationship of the wife's two friends who made it their mission to release her by wrecking it. They have mixed motives in this but Debby points out breezily "I've never had an unmixed motive in my life." It's Debby at her best, with a storyline that never dips and characters you could recognise in the street - my favourite is Leah, feeling after a bad night: "Her future lay before her like the sea at Chesil Beach on a particularly gloomy day."

Just two weeks now to the opening night of FOUR IN A BED, Upstairs at the Lamb, Frome's first and only Pub Theatre. It's organised by Nevertheless Productions, the Theatre Company I coorganise with founder Rosie Finnegan (whose creative energy and vision was recognised in recent nominations for Frome's 'Person of the Year') and our first co-production with Salisbury's Bootleg Company. We're particularly excited because we each wrote two of these four short plays, all featuring a bed in very different ways - and director Colin Burdon tells us rehearsals are going really well. Tickets are just £5 for an hour of lively dramatic action, Thursday 10th, Friday 11th, and Saturday 12th March. So come along and find out 'How they did it', discover where 'the Girl with Blue Hair' has gone, see if Marie in finds the freedom she craves in 'A Single Bed', and learn Jake's secret in 'Mirror Image' ... Please!

2011-02-19T23:30:00.010Z

StageWrite Café presents... DRESSING UP BOX at the Merlin, last Thursday, was a more-than-sellout success, as our bistro-style seating onstage spilled into several rows of the auditorium - a fantastic tribute to the twelve wonderful writers who workshopped their creative imaginings and memories into a vivid and varied performance night. Huge appreciation to everyone involved, especially Howard for our visual effects as well as performing, and Niamh for the technique tips - ooh I feel a Bafta moment coming on... I'll condense it to a big THANKYOU to all who participated and all who supported, especially Flourish Homes who made this project possible. And thanks, Jill, for the photos.

A quick break in London with Christine Coleman finds us on South Bank where the skyline mists into glittering soft-focus as we pop into Tate Modern to prowl among the galleries admiring the way everyone is an installation and even the escalators become art when you stare at them. Supper with Roger Jinkinson, the only writer I know who chats on facebook with Greek fisherman. In Greek. His new collection of island tales will be out soon.

And finally: epic applause to Laurie Parnell, Tracey Ashford, and Philip de Glanville, who lifted an AmDram night to almost inconceivable heights while winning best actor, best actress and best production at the Somerset Fellowship of Drama awards tonight at the Merlin. A clean sweep for the Troupers, immensely well deserved.

2011-02-17T14:00:00.002Z

Like Brian Friel, Harold Pinter was a master of unreliable narration. “The past is what you remember, imagine you remember, convince yourself you remember, or pretend to remember,” he once said, and the characters in his short plays Landscape and Monologue in this sense inhabit Faith Healer terrain, though without the same empathy or lyrical elegance. In both these plays, though Landscape is notionally a duologue, there’s a sense of complete and bleak isolation, with speeches so enigmatic it seems superfluous to attempt interpretation in terms of what has actually happened. More significant is that the couple in the second play have no more connection than the unnamed man who talks to an empty chair in the first. The actors were all strong but what is most interesting is why these radio plays were revived at the Ustinov despite – or perhaps because of - the fact that theatre compels an attentive stillness which radio-listeners rarely attempt. Chris Goode's impressive direction brought theatricality to these static pieces, underlining their nonreality by featuring technical set changes, and using lighting to create shadows lurking at the sides of the stage like silent onlookers.

Oddsocks, the company that aims to make Shakespeare accessible, brought their current production Hamlet The Comedy! to Bristol’s QEH Theatre, promising a hologram of Paul Daniels as Hamlet’s father and zany family-friendly hilarity... And yet I went. I’m so glad I did, and I’d happily go to anything else this immensely talented troupe decides to tackle with similar absurd impropriety. Hugely entertaining with wonderful physical sequences, clever set and technical wizardry, yet five charismatic actors managed to convey the lyricism and emotional energy of Shakespeare's language despite the liberties they took with the script. Music by Jamiroquai's Rob Harris – including a rocking version of the famous soliloquy - was the icing on a scrumptious performance cake.

The ever-excellent SATTF team have begun their spring programme with Richard II, considered one of Shakespeare’s ‘histories’ but it could equally be seen as one of his finest tragedies. The fatal flaw of this Plantagenet tragic hero is a strangely innocent one: he believes in his Divine Right to rule, so the morality of his decisions is irrelevant as kings are above conscience. The conflict between Richard and Bullingbrooke goes beyond the justice of the disinherited cousin’s claims, with deep-seated certainties challenged by the volatile energy of opportunism. In this new order you can be who you choose, but what if you are vanquished and unthroned yet still believe you are king? In the current production at the Tobacco Factory, director Andrew Hilton highlights the poignancy of Richard’s struggle to find his identity in a rebellion he can scarcely comprehend, and John Heffernan plays the traumatised king with immense sensitivity and subtlety. In such a strong ensemble piece it’s hard to pick out any individual since all played their roles superbly, with menace, pathos, and humour all there and beautifully dressed.

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2011-02-11T01:00:00.013Z

Ever tried to borrow a bed? Rosie and I are on the hunt for the sole but vital prop/set for Four In A Bed, the next Nevertheless production Upstairs at the Lamb in Frome early next month. We found this eminently portable one in the local bed shop but sadly failed to negotiate custody. The quest continues as the plays go into rehearsal - two by me and two by Rosie, each written to feature this as-yet missing item. Watch this space - and lets hope audiences find it filled by March 10th, our opening night.

“In the guise of a smart comedy of manners, The Constant Wife is in fact ablaze with anger about the injustices of the married state,” begin the programme notes for this Salisbury Playhouse revival, so you might think this study of hypocrisy among the upper class is a kind of early stab at feminism but – as Somerset Maugham’s own wretched marriage could confirm - that would be an oversimplification. Written in 1926, set in the London of Bertie Wooster's aunts, this is a wealthy world where a woman who decides that living off her adulterous husband makes her feel like ‘a prostitute who doesn’t deliver’ can turn her hand to interior design and make her own fortune. Although the play is overlong, with too many speeches to represent attitudes rather than create three-dimensional character, this production delivers some notable highlights. In the first act these came mostly from Maggie Steed as Mrs Culver, mother of the pragmatic Constance, who brought Wildean aplomb to her one-liners, but by the third act (bizarrely crammed onto the second though set a year later) the pace began to liven overall. The final scene is a scorcher, with Constance in full revolt against the values of her age (“Men are meant by nature to be wicked and deceive their wives, women are meant to be forgiving” expostulates her mother vainly) and what seemed a brittle revenge plot becoming suddenly moving when Constance speaks of the lure of feeling loved. And it’s here her previously preposterous husband (David Michaels) steals the scene, creating a real sense of personal journey as well as the comedy of his come-uppance. Colin Falconer’s set design, all opulent creams and golds, is sumptuous.

When you're talking about plays, which I seem to do quite a lot these days, you stand on unshifting - albeit subjective - ground. Commenting on a television series is different, because scripts can vary week by week. I positively trilled about the first episode of Demons, and look what a load of old tosh that turned out to be. I'm reveling in How TV Ruined Your Life, but Charlie Booker's hyperbolic spleen is perilously close to rant overload. Nevertheless I'm going to take a deep breath and declare this series of Being Human, after a shaky second episode, is shaping up to be the best yet. This weeks's brilliant episode subtly explored dimensions of 'being human' - copy-cat killers and damaging mothers - which sadden even monsters, while providing some of the funniest lines yet.

And finally: there's a ditzy and delightful exhibition on at Frome's Black Swan gallery till March 20th: well worth a browse on a grey day.