Sunny daze as festival season nears

Sunny days have tentatively arrived again, in time for festival season so it may seem ungracious to point out that the nights are already lengthening now we're past the magic solstice, celebrated with a massive music jam at the Artisan for Paul Kirtley's Bare to the Bones ongoing charity collection. This session enjoyed only the Bones regulars but two other Frome bands, The Decades and Hello Hopeville, plus washboard virtuoso Alexandra and mellifluous flutist Shehzad, resulting in something of a challenge for sound man Steve and four hours of varied medleys... great fun though not ideal for cameras - here's Paul leading a melange of regulars and visitors in All You Need Is Love...

Saturday continued the supply of music from great local bands, with an excellent 'Sofa Session' on Catherine Hill in the afternoon from Crossing the Rockies followed in the evening by sensational Rebel Heroes, local brilliant Bowie tribute band playing with passion and real authenticity... another great dancing night at the Cornerhouse.


Sunday focus was on the youngsters, with Frome Children's Festival offering a host of activities from graffiti, games, and performance skills to pump track action and a zip wire across the river - face-painting and street bands naturally obligatory - a very popular event and big credit to the dedicated organisers and talented contributors.

Children were on the menu in Bath too, with the Forest of Imagination in Sydney Gardens and Holburne Museum - 'a series of multi-sensory pop up events and installations along the theme of 'lifelong inspiration from nature'. I especially liked the egg of the Giant Ogulon, and the amazing clay creatures created by excited young participants.

Roots Session on Wednesday featured Harbottle & Jonas, a young husband and wife team who seem to have redefined folk music, writing and performance vibrant and exciting real-life tales with superb harmonies. Their current album is all about the sea, with a range of true tales like the shipwreck rescue by Grace Darling in 1838, the cocklers' tragedy on the Morecambe shore in 2004,  the lost village of Hallsands and, a favourite for me, the movingly imagined final night in 1912 of Scott in the Antarctic Was it You?  I like this picture, though it's not the best of either of this couple, because it has something of the powerful-seeming rapport between them throughout their set.

Over at the Cornerhouse, the Saturday night session was a Pink Floyd mini-spectacular from James Hollingsworth, who impressively recreates that iconic sound solo using loop technology with live percussion, voice, harmonica and guitar to build complex arrangements in real time.

 And on a balmy Sunday afternoon, what could be better than a stroll along the abundantly floral riverbank into Bath and fetch up at The Bell listening to Alamo Leel's sensational 'lunchtime session' blues featuring, as well as guest singer & saxophonist, Frome giants Pete Gage on keyboard and Paul Hartshorn on guitar.

Moving to theatre now, where on the still-warm Sunday night, ECOS amphitheatre was filled with sounds of thunder as Illyria Open Air Theatre company evoked sea-storms and the fantastical world of The Tempest. What you get from Oliver Gray, who directs these small-cast re-envisionings of Shakespeare's plays, is a script largely-uncut and conscientiously edited,  masses of costume changes with a proliferation of increasingly bizarre hats, and at least one episode of audience-invasion for picnic-basket raiding. With a cast of only five some liberties are inevitable, and this production went further and redefined the exiled duke & sorcerer Prospero as not Miranda's father but her mother, Prospera, who has the seething self-certainty and strong address-style of an ex-headmistress, & thus comes across as pretty scary. As the programme points out, this alters the relationship to a single-mother issue, though on a remote island with potato-peeling the focus of their shared mum/daughter time and only a dancing sprite and a chained monster for company, there’s not much option to explore the sociological impact of this shift. However as always, it's all very well done, with a strong cast and action pitched perfectly for outdoor enjoyment. Shakespeare laced this dark script with pantomime humour in the drunken butler scenes, and the cast made much of these, also added their own touches of mirth from the start as buckets of water drenched the shipwrecked sailors. Ferdinand and Miranda’s whirlwind Love Island romance is charming, Ariel’s final flight is a triumph to flare in the mind forever, and - in short - once again the intrepid Illyrians (despite unexpected realism in one of the fights: big respect to David Sayers for maintaining role as the blood visibly dripped down his face) have definitely pulled it off.

Meanwhile, preparations for Frome Festival intensify and Frome Writers Collective has already set the glitter-ball rolling with their Writers in Residence event - thirteen scribes in cafes and shops around the town, all equipped on Saturday morning with a surprise topic on which to create a story in four hours...  here's long-hander Tim Bates nicely settled in The Settle with scones and favourite pen, and on the other side of town Suzy Howlett teching it up at Black Swan. The resulting scripts have been collected for prize allocation and there will be a night of shared readings in September.

So now with less than a week to go, tickets are flying from Cheese & Grain Box Office and Where the Fault Lies, our Nevertheless Pub Theatre production on Wednesday, sold out completely and after hasty discussions with the Cornerhouse and the Frome Actors Network team, there will be second performance later in the evening - so seats for the 9.30 showing are now on sale - and early grabbing is recommended. Oh, and Frome Festival Poetry Cafe has achieved the highest echelons of esteem - we are in the LIST RECOMMENDS! If you're anywhere in or near Frome on Monday 8th July, I hope to see you at the Garden Cafe...