Lights, music, curtains...

Frome Festive Poetry Cafe on Monday evening had a focus on the community aspect of these bi-monthly-ish get-togethers at the Garden Cafe: we've enjoyed some fantastic guest poets at these events, and will continue to do so, but this time the metaphorical mic was given over entirely to the floor - or rather to the creative people who come as audience. Here's me somewhat randomly allocating the gifts donated by Hunting Raven Books and Merlin Theatre but the prize for everyone was a really lovely night, rich in imagery with poems ranging from poignant memories to witty word-play. Several 'debut poets' took the plunge, including a touching 'thankyou letter to Frome' from Chloe Rayburn, joining popular regulars like Mike Grenville (with a piece inspired by the current Black Swan exhibition you can read here) humorists Moira Andrew and John Christopher Wood, and John Payne, who read and distributed a moving poem from his current research on the workhouse in Bath, consulting leather ledgers in the Guildhall basement: They list the money spent, the figures, / but not the suffering / of children, elders, the mad, the sick./ We must hold them in remembrance ourselves.  Thanks David Goodman for the photos.

Next night's illuminating imagery was the literal kind, with an evening walk over the Wiltshire border into neighbouring Longleat Festival of Lights rewarded by an awesome scene of myths and legends in massive scale filling the park right down to, and including, the lake. This extraordinary spectacle is on until Jan 5th and it really is, also literally, fabulous: I've been critical of this costly 'spectacular' in the past for tacky cartoon figures and badly re-envisaged storybook characters, but this year's theme-envisaging is truly awesome - every mythic monster and hero from legends around the world is here, aesthetically beautiful as well as posed in thrilling story-telling moments - the illuminated tags beside each were being extensively used by visitors, I noticed, to succinctly fill the sad omissions in our 'education' system. There are hundreds of beautiful images there to enthral and photograph - I picked two that chime currently for me.


For the rest of the week Frome seems to have been wall-to-wall music. Raggedy Men at the Cornerhouse were a perfect choice for Friday, with dancing from the start and lots of shout-along moments to great songs from Jonny Rotten and The Clash - classic smashing punk, but with riffs! Andy, Bugsy, Carl, and drumming dervish Pat - you were just what we all needed.


Dancing-from-the-start at Cornerhouse again next night for amazing Bristol band Flash Harry, who claim to be a folk rock-balkan-cajun band but it's not that simple (!) to describe them - they can sing&play at fast-forward, make a sea-shanty sound like Deep Purple, make a hoe-down song jazzy or the other way around, and have a penchant for hamsters. I can't find their wonderful Get Out Of Bed song online but here's a sample of their style from a Bristol gig.

Sunday afternoon Acoustic Club in the Three Swans, co-ordinated by Paul Kirtley, was a pleasantly casual affair, with a series of enjoyable performances including a great set from Mountain Speaks Fire who were joined for their version of Where Did You Sleep Last Night by guest singer Anna Callan making an early debut. (I always thought this was a Nirvana original, but it's actually traditional, first recorded in 1939 by Lead Belly)

And the tempo stayed relaxed back at the Cornerhouse for Graham Dent's Sunday jazz night, this time with Caroline Radcliffe as guest singer with Graham's regular Piano Trio and John Plaxton on trumpet.

As this is primarily an arts blog, there will be no comment about what also happened last week and I'll leave you with a seasonal poem from William Yeats: The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spirtus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man
 A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
 Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
 That twenty centuries of stony sleep
 Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

"Fantastic theatre.." ~ twitter has spoken!

 I made it to the one-day intensive rehearsal of my 'cheeky Short Trip' as Venue, Tom Phillips, and Theatre West et al have been tweeting Muffin Man, playing before Tom's second week of 100 Miles From Timbuktu. Seeing a director working with the actors to lift your play off the page is a gold-dust experience for any writer: Alison Farina's approach is to focus on the interplay between public and private personas at the heart of my play, interrogating Meghan Leslie and Andrew Kingston to find the subtext "which is how you get to the emotional truth". Fascinating.
This is week 2 of extreme convalescence, and I'm still judiciously jettisoning a lot of activities... frustrating but Virusgate has made this essential. Not, obviously, jettisoning my first night! It was great to have family & friends joining me at the Alma Tavern Theatre to watch both my play and the main feature:  100 Miles North of Timbuktu.

Tom's play is based on an intriguing premise:If you could sit at your laptop and change the weather anywhere in the world, what would you do? Create a little light mist to beautify Lake Windermere for a poetry conference? Arrange for a shower to spoil school sports day, or sunshine to glamorise a wedding? Genius nerd Zac is inundated with such requests when the world discovers he can make it rain in the Sahara, but his partner Pete knows the lucrative way to go: “Offensive weather, the ultimate weapon of mass destruction!” It's an offer the MOD can’t refuse, but as ‘Whatsisface who split the atom’ also found, such forces once unleashed can go unstoppably beyond control… this is the darker side of Tom Phillips’ chaotic, clever, farce set in a seedy office in Chapel Street, with Marc Geoffrey as Zac, Piers Wehner as social-media manipulator Pete and Kirsty Cox as Clare their MOD chum. Directed by Hannah Drake with lots of witty visual detail, the story builds up to a frenetic climax reminiscent of Young Ones anarchy combined with quite a bit of Walmington-on-Sea ‘don’t panic’ mania… a uniquely original concept ingeniously developed in a sharp script which is thought-provoking as well as very funny.