Habits of art & writing, to warm a freezing week

It's almost the law, or a by-law at least, for a writer to be a fan of Alan Bennett but having never really appreciated the 'darling of middle England'  I hadn't planned to invest in Original Theatre Company's screening of The Habit of Art, but as the freezing fog continued and news shifted from dismal to dystopian, with live theatre  off the menu for the foreseeable future, the option became more appealing. 

So I'm happy to report it's immensely enjoyable, whether or not you know much about WH Auden or Benjamin Britten, whose relationship is the central strand of a play that's witty, moving, and very funny. The dramatic structure of a-play-within-a-play allows for a double helping of personalities, with sharp contrasts in tone & mood - and also ensures the audience can enjoy quite a few full-stage views rather than just close-ups.  Two of the 'cast' are played by temporary stand-ins - leaving scope for comic cameos worthy of Shakespeare's mechanicals  - everyone dislikes their role and has their own ideas about how to play it, while the writer is furious at the producers' cuts. Yet through all this, the habit of art is maintained, and the habit of the habit of loving too.

In a strong cast, Matthew Kelly and David Yelland were convincing and moving as the actors playing the poet and the musician, both lives dominated by the illegality until 1967 of homosexuality. The mood of the story ranges from emotionally charged encounters and arguments - between actors, the characters they play, and the playwright) - to comedic moments as stand-ins act as items of furniture with all the panache of Shakespeare's mechanicals.  Available here till 28 February, recommended.

Aloneness is a Many-Headed Bird is the intriguing title of a collection of poems by Rosie Jackson and Dawn Gorman, who wrote in collaboration to create "a conversation in poetry between two women about things that matter in a deranged and damaged world."  Hedgehog Press has published this, and the two poets hosted the book's zoom launch on Thursday. Elegantly introduced and perfectly pitched by the hosts, this event gave a taste of the collection by reading ten poems and discussing the shared experience of collaboration. Originally combining to explore 'what it felt like to be an older woman', the poets had found that, as with a play, 'other characters had wandered in.'  The poems dig deep: darkness, bloodlines, death,- and love.  'We are capable of more love than we know' Dawn found.  Also fascinating was the story of their quest for a cover illustration, revealed by cover artist Gina Litherland, who joined the launch from her home in Chicago. Copies available from Rosie or Dawn.

No music to report this week - a sad omission so here's the Unravelling Wilburys' fabulous version of the Dylan song If Not For You - it's on dropbox so I hope the link works for you.  

And if you haven't already included this site on your search for uplifting posts on facebook, do follow Chris Packham's Self-Isolating Bird Club which daily provides images of wildlife - mostly avian - to bring a smile to your morning scrolling - owls, kingfishers, finches, tits,  robins... this one's actually mine, spotted in Rodden Meadow.

Also a facebook-accessible resource to hopefully raise a wry smile in these grim days, Steve Pottinger's political-satiric dialogues are now published online. 

And Liv Torc has put out another callout for Haiflu in response to this latest quasi-lockdown, so do share your thoughts & feelings, in 17 syllables, on her page here.  (If you forget the 5-7-5 format, it's like this: Catkin colonies / along the road to Nunney / chubby with new hope.)

Ending, courtesy of the Fortnightly Review - always an excellent miscellany of poetry and fiction - with a poem by Johanna Higgins called Ghost but could might well be called Now.

It's the breathing out that kills
The drawing in throughout
The love that spills.
The reddened love
That
Turns and tears
At flesh, at
Some adhesion,
Where the blood meets
Ghost and reason.

 

Don't blame Beckett

"Godot has a lot to answer for, attributing tramps with gnomic wisdom" complains Alan Bennett although admitting his legendary Lady in the Van has somehow "a vagabond nobility about her." Alan Bennett’s dramas gravitate frequently to ageing English ladies, giving voice to their genteel struggles in monologues like Cream Cracker under the Settee and A Woman of No Importance, and other poignant Talking Heads. Here the voice is more like Rod Hull’s Emu. Mary Shepherd is cantankerous, demanding, belligerent and malodorous, and she is real, having famously lived in the playwright’s front garden in posh Primrose Hill for fifteen years. Maggie Smith brought her antics to the screen and now Theatre Royal Bath concludes their summer season with a staged version of the story of  The Lady In The Van.
The playwright steps into this account himself not once but doubly, affable in the time-line of events and more caustic as retrospective observer and analyst. The film had the real Mr Bennett for this second role, so director Jonathan Church has had to make the best of this device, though it's hard not to wonder why we need a second, non-lookalike, Alan Bennett when we have a perfectly serviceable Alan Bennett on stage already. My other niggle with the script is that the connection between the disreputable old woman he tolerates in his life and the ageing mother he puts in a Home is so palpable and poignant that it's gratuitous to have it spelled out by Bennett-the-commentator.
As with all Theatre Royal productions, the cast is impressive: Sara Kestelman touching as well as terrifying as the irrational and tragic Lady, and Sam Alexander endearing as the hapless version of her patron. Minor characters are so steeped in parody it’s difficult to see them as other than 2-dimensional though Cat Simmons does a superb job with the social worker.  Designer Robert Innes Hopkins provides much to entertain visually, with an array of startling costumes and effective set and those total scene-stealers, the vehicles: that infamous van and, mysteriously, a scarlet Reliant, whose arrivals and (especially) departures are unforgettable high points.  Showing till 2 September. Images Nobby Clark

Lives of quiet desperation... existential angst in Yorkshire 1980s

 Alan Bennett's Talking Heads, first broadcast nearly 30 years ago, is the current production at Theatre Royal Bath.  Radio seems self-evidently the most appropriate medium for narrative monologue, so any such transfer is a challenge, especially as the writer himself observed "the more still and even static the speaker is, the better the monologue works". Visuals, in his view, beg the question 'who are you talking to?' as the intimacy in these confidences is different for public viewing than as private musings.
Siobhan Redmond (Miss Ruddock in Lady of Letters), Karl Theobald (Graham in A Chip in the Sugar) and Stephanie Cole (Doris in A Cream Cracker Under the Settee) are superb choices for these tales of loneliness and suppressed desperation. I can't imagine these characters better performed, though Siobhan Redmond is so charismatic she couldn't help making Miss Ruddock delightful despite being a vicious troll. (This is the most upbeat of the trio, ending with her happily incarcerated and learning to swear.)

Direction compromises Bennett's views on staging with quite a lot of business involving teacups & clothing accompanied by music and lighting changes. A surreal set (Francis O'Connor) evokes the lonely minds of these three characters all mulling over the big issues of existence through detailing painful trivia. At the end of each section the curtains close from top as well as sides, effectively shutting down our window on their lives.

This is a production that will undoubtedly be well received and the performances, especially of the first two, deserve admiration, but I have a problem with the lionising of Alan Bennett. It’s clearly an outrage of Lord Sewell-style proportions to question this writer's mastery, but I do. There can be quirky charm in his humour but, unlike Peter Kaye’s ‘overheard-up-north’ observational comedy, it often teeters gratingly into the patronising. There is pathos beyond the banal, true, but it takes a long time coming.  There's insight in his perception of relationships & religion as props, but his take on mothering borders on misogynistic. And there's something intrinsically uncomfortable about the way his Helen-Mirren-aged women have false teeth, partial dementia and snobbish obsessions. I believe Alan Bennett was a very kind man but last night it seemed he'd probably agree with Katy Hopkins there are just far too many old people around. 

Back to (sur)reality

Franz Kafka was so ambivalent about his work he begged friend & fellow-writer Max Brod to burn it all when he died. Max’s betrayal, paradoxically, became his own main claim to fame, while Kafka himself is now considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th Century. A thought to ponder, and Kafka's Dick at Theatre Royal Bath does just that. In fellow-Czech Milan Kundura’s novel Immortality,Hemingway and Goethe meet in heaven to discuss the downside of endless fame and Hemingway protests bitterly “Our books will probably soon stop being read, but people will never stop prying into your life, down to the smallest details.” Alan Bennett’s Kafka, metamorphosing into a suburban Yorkshire living-room via a tortoise, has similar concerns. Surreal fantasy combines with 1980s sit-com as Kafka faces both his fame and his father, imposingly played by Matthew Kelly as a kind of vicious version of Alfred Doolittle arriving to claim his own perks from his child’s unexpected new status. David Grinley’s direction has some great staging: notably Kafka’s ‘trial’, and physical comedy between Max Brod ~ who has materialised by pissing on the tortoise incarnation of Kafka, get it? ~ and Sydney the insurance man obsessed with Kafka ~ who was also an insurance man ~ I’m sure you get it… as they vigorously attempt to hide all the tell-tale biographies before Kafka can see them. 

But it’s not all post-modernist cleverness and social cliché: in the second act the playwright gives the most telling lines to the ditzy housewife while her wannabe-famous- writer husband insists “Gossip about writers is what passes for culture.”  All the actors are superb, especially the double-act of Daniel Weyman’s Kafka and Elliot Levey’s Max Brod, who in the opening (pre-death) moments set the scene for dark absurdist comedy with Monty-Pythonesque half-looks to audience. Robert Innes Hopkins’ excellent set surprises till the end, and Jason Taylor’s lighting design deserves a mention too.
“Man doesn’t know how to be mortal,” was Goethe opinion in Kundura's heaven, “and when he dies he doesn’t even know how to be dead.”  A good thought to conclude another 'frivolous fantasy' on immortality, and whatever existentialist angst Kafka endured in life or dramatic reincarnation, his eventual exit was absolutely sublime ~ if that dance macabre was on Youtube, I’d play it on a loop. Showing in the Main House till July 26th.

I always thought Alan Bennett's forte was tracking the underbelly of ordinary life and laying bare the subtext of trivial conversations - humour with compassion, rather than macabre farce. Enjoy, arriving at the Theatre Royal Bath from the West End, disabused me of that notion. It's been hailed as a lost gem, a prescient, blackly comic modern classic, but I realised I wasn't going to do as instructed by the title from the opening word. ('Sweden', if you were wondering, repeated several times because of Connie's dementia, though it turned out it was really Swindon anyway. Oh the hilarity.) For all the sniggering at senility and penises, this is a dark story of abuse, betrayal and denial as observed by a transgendered son returning to spy on his dysfunctional family. "A writer has to use whatever is to hand in the way of experience" Alan Bennett has said, "You don't put yourself into what you write - you find yourself there."

Over at the Alma Tavern, The Game of Love by Mark Seaman also reaches into marital failure and incest. It's another ironic title: Carol is a sex worker and has asked lonely Tony to stay and talk only as protection against her loitering pimp. The life stories they unfold slowly over instant coffee are plausible but unremittingly sad, and the decision to set this case-study in 1967 was never fully clarified or explored.

Out in the real-time world, there's burgeoning and bird-songing and budding occurring as spring finally gushes in like a great severed artery of sunlight, spilling lascivious blossom and optimism everywhere. These are days for walks and cycle rides, and about time too. The next Poetry Cafe theme is Wild in the Country, with marvellous nature-celebratory poet Rose Flint leading the revels on 5th May.

Always gratifying when people say 'Simply the best...' as they go, and satisfying too to see half a dozen of the audience sitting on the floor 'cos we ran out of chairs... "Madabout Words" in the Merlin foyer on Friday night was a fabulous smorgasbord of stories, poems, and songs. Effusive thank-yous & virtual bouquets to Hazel, Howard, Niamh, Rosie, Alison and Willow, Gordon, Dave, Tracy, and Jill and Mick, for an evening that everyone – performers and audience alike – enjoyed so much. This was also the launch of the ‘Live and Lippy’ DVD, poems from Hazel & me with Howard’s amazing graphics, and I’ll post the Youtube link to the newest track as soon as I’ve got it. More pix at Haz's blog here.

Also this week: An 'Evening with Alan Bennett', billed as 'a great honour and a major occasion for the city of Bath'. Disappointing, even though I didn't expect much. A Forum-full of the city's burghers and a lion of the middlebrow establishment is a recipe for sychophantically cosy rather than stimulating. 'Literary musak' Peter put it, kindly. The readings were anecdotal to the point of trivia, embellished with name-dropping ("Prince Charles was in the audience, laughing loudly") and the sort of louche humour that works better at dinner-parties or on Scott Mills show. It's only that trademark flat fastidious voice that lets him get away with it, I thought, as the auditorium shook with yelps of mirth at the word 'scrotum'. Alan Bennett wrote brilliant observations of ordinary absurdity but this wembley-esque setting simply showed that Peter Kaye does it better. Perhaps authors need a self-help group to protect us from self-exposure beyond our skills. But when so many people are rattling their jewellery, or at least their books for signing, would any resist?

Did you know - and why should you? - that Pride & Prejudice is named as a favourite book in 18,000 blog profiles? I found that out by citing it myself in a retro moment. If the percentage of readers who also blog is quite small, that means around 250,000 people might also rate P&P as a favourite. And many more readers will have enjoyed it. In fact, using the curve-of-normalcy model, about 6 million. Not bad for an English spinster.

And finally... not a cute-cat tree-rescue but a photograph taken by a fireman in California and sent me by Mo. I thought it needed wider viewing.
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