Things to know about love, & death, & in between...

Festival time has arrived already in the Southwest, with Bath Festival offering a splendid programme across the range of classic and popular arts, though there's too much also happening in Frome for me to do more than dip in. My chosen dip was Brian Bilston, dubbed 'the poet laureate of twitter', who for many people has redefined poetry for the electronic age in the way the Liverpool poets did for the 'generation gap' era of the 1960s.  He must be used to online followers but seemed slightly surprised by the size of his live audience in the Assembly Rooms - the stewards certainly were, and made a hurried room-swap to assign us enough seating. Brian has a friendly unassuming manner, with little anecdotes about each of his poems - he shares 20 of them - 8 more than Carol Ann Duffy, he confides (and Simon Armitage doesn't do any, just stands on a dais drinking sparkling water while the audience applauds.) In between such pleasantries, and a diatribe about the Daily Mail, Brian reads from his collections, with a focus on his latest Alexa, what is there to know about love?  The hour's talk goes very quickly.

My last glimpse of Brian was behind two tables of his books with a massive line of customers snaking across the big Georgian room with its dazzling chandeliers, all the way down the stairs, each queuing to buy a signed copy of a book by the bloke who wrote a comprehensive character assassination of Boris Johnson (click here). Sometimes Bath can be surprising.

The Predicament of Jackson Scott is the new drama from Black Hound Productions, on stage at Frome's Merlin Theatre on Saturday night. Black comedy doesn't get much more Stygian than this - a warning of strangulation, blood, physical struggle, murder, scenes of a sexual nature, and grief is handed to audience members at the door - but it's outrageously funny and unflaggingly intriguing. On a set that's half nightclub, half nightmare, with a bed that doubles as a grave, Jackson (Yves Scott) is squeezing Ted (Luke Ashley Tame) to death as the play opens.  Ted doesn't take this lying down, and neither later does his sister Bernice - outstandingly well played by Mia Macleod - so the hapless haunted murderer has double the number of persistent visions than even Macbeth, not to mention the attentions of the strange Counsellor (Alex Wallacot).  Written by Josh McGrillen and directed by Lex Kaby with set design by creative producer Patrick Withey, this original and entertaining drama is on its way to Edinburgh where, given its energetic physicality and slick staging, it should be very well received. Great to see something so different on stage.

Musical performance now: The Gugg - Guggleton Farm Arts to give this wonderful  place its full name- is a bit of a shlepp from Frome, being just over the Dorset border, but it's rightly on the radar of bands looking for a popular open-mic venue.  It's worth arriving early, as the Gallery always displays fascinating original art, and the main-street based little town of Stalbridge is delightful: unfortunately it's also a main route across the south-west, but framed around with fields & woods, & with an excellent independent Co-op. This week's Open Mic night featured a series of excellent performers, including local favourite 'Twitch', aka Darryl Rushby (pictured), whose set included Time of Your Life from Green Day and Nizlopi's JCB song.  Bar and pizzas completed the party atmosphere. 

Here in Frome, Bar Lotte has become the go-to spot here on a Wednesday, with its excellent regular live music sessions.  It was the turn of Iain Ballamy's jazz trio this week - here's Dave Smith who gave us a breathtaking drum solo in Dancing Cheek to Cheek.

And finally: good news for Frome's many nature-lovers: large stretches of Whatcombe Fields, the 34-acre community-shared meadows on the western side of town, have been left deliberately and carefully unmown for walkers to enjoy the buttercups...  so now fields of gold join the hedges of white florescence all around the town.

theatre, art, music words - the 'Back in Business' one!

When theatre goes real-time live again, these free treats from London's costliest theatres will be much missed- do grab them while they're around. The Globe's offering this week was Romeo and Juliet, weighing in at just shy of three hours but superbly performed - Rebekah Murrell as Juliet and Petra Letang as her nurse especially brilliant - and thrilling viewing (unless you're one of the students whose laments that an English lesson is only supposed to be hour long littered the comments online).
Dominic Dromgoole's direction brings out the unruliness of the rival gangs and the youthfulness of the lovers, both initially naive in their notions of romance until sobered into the harsh reality of transgressing clan rivalries.  The sword fights are thrilling but have been filmed rather too close to follow the vital dynamic leading up to Romeo's fatal thrust, but overall there's good coverage of audience excitement.

Thursday night's National Theatre offering of 'Danny Boyle's monster hit Frankenstein with Benedict Cumberbatch as the creature and Jonny Lee Miller as Victor Frankenstein' was as unforgettably amazing as you'd expect from the first two names. Unforgettable especially for the long opening section of electric birth through the creature's long lonely struggle to articulate movement and sound, watching the thing grow into a humanoid and then a lover of poetry and a philosopher under the tutelage of the blind old man: this was full of charm as well as poignancy. When this connection is abruptly broken by the seeing world and the quest for vengeance begins the trajectory is set steadily for melodrama. Mary Shelley's tale of the motherless creature, completed while living in Bath, is a psychological drama as much as a monster story, and the parallels with her own life in terms of loss and disregarded needs are plangent. This brilliant interpretation of a timeless tragedy is on all week, well worth viewing.

 Bath Festival went virtual too, with a varied menu of free options including Grayson Perry's Art Club, in which he invites viewers to submit their own work, with the chance of  inclusion in his next real-time exhibition "when this is all over." His theme this week is portraits: here's one that artist Nathan Wyburn made of him, using soy sauce and noodles. Grayson was also much taken with the latest trend on facebook, even more popular than the 'ten-albums-that-define-me' one: Recreate artworks with things you find at home now has over 50,00 members and there are some fantastic efforts out there - if you haven't started following yet, you're missing a treat. And in the Golden Oldies corner. Channel 4 is releasing to the world 'Bingeable Box Sets' of comedy classics - every series of Seinfeld, and Father Ted to name but two.

As always there's masses of music online - if you don't have enough of your own favourites tune into Visual Radio Arts where Phil Moakes and Maggie Gregory continue to add new shows: here's No Fixed Abode who played last week.

Sofa continues to stream international acts for free viewing, and individuals musicians are increasingly posting on facebook: Martin Dimery, ex Sergeant Pepper's Only Dartboard Band, has made several of his Beatles songs publicly viewable. Here comes the Sun is one of my favourites.  Frome's jazz-fusion giant John Law offers a preview of his new album CONFIGURATION here prior to its release, and looking wider, Radiohead has posted their archived tour concerts.

Words now, and a fascinating talk from Andrew Ziminski's from his workshop organised on Zoom by Pippa Goldfinger, describing his work as a stonemason, with a focus on the landscape of Wessex. His slide presentation included discoveries from neolithic sites including Avebury, Fyfield Down, West Kennet Long Barrow, Silbury Hill Stonehenge and was supplemented by workshop demonstrations of skills like creating sarsen polishing stones and repairing the carvings in the temple of Sulis Minerva. Buy the book, if you haven't got it already!

From fabulous fact to intriguing fiction, with Bath's Story Friday, the popular community platform initiated by mega-skilled Clare Reddaway, went online last week and continues its Friday evening sessions on the theme of 'Dark Clouds, Silver Linings' read by a team from Kilter Theatre. This week's set included a story from Chiara Vascotto, whose sensuous, visceral, personal style I remember from last year in Skyros. You can listen to her story, read Amy Vickers, here, along with five other intriguing short tales - one by Clare herself.
Liv Tork, indefatigably innovative and creative, continues to collect submissions of 'haiflu' (haiku in time of plague) to create weekly compilations: here's week 6 online, sombre but plangently sincere. Meanwhile Frome Poetry Cafe  is open for any original poems, especially with some tangental connection to 'revenge or redemption (which happened appropriately to be our theme for April) as the page becomes virtual 'open mic' for lockdown times.

And as April moves into May in Frome, where we're lucky enough to have lanes and footpaths close enough to walk miles in any direction, I'll end this week's roundup with images of blossom - the wonderful Judas tree in Victoria park, and a small burst of the hawthorn blossom brimming on every hedge.

Mostly music and madness

Starting off with madness, and the Eradication of Schizophrenia in Western Lapland, the latest production by internationally renowned Ridiculusmus. It's an endlessly provocative, in the thinking sense, story and we get two takes on it, one on each side of a divide in time, or reality (or both) made literal by a semi-opaque wall. Half the audience sees each narrative, but disturbingly hears fragments of the other. Then we swap over, for the rest of the story, which like life has by now slightly changed, with some new bits and some bits lost and not in the order we (half)remembered it. In other words it's like life, disturbingly so. The psychiatrist, who has troubles of his own, is struggling to find answers in the works of RD Laing and there's an ongoing theme of the use & dangers of meds - 'They don't want to medicate meaning-making,' he explains to the fragile, angry, author who thinks he wrote Nabokov's books and may well be writing the play we are watching... It's an amazing, brilliant, unforgettable piece of theatre and I won't say, Go See, because it's sold out at Tobacco Factory in Bristol - and I only got to see it through an amazing gesture by Ridiculusmus when Stepping Out mental health theatre group failed to get tickets and wrote to tell them, and their response was to put on an extra show especially for the Stepping Out group, transporting their entire set to St Werburghs Community Centre on Saturday. As an associate of Stepping Out I was invited too, and after having our minds blown to Lapland and back by this amazing show, we all went off for lunch with the cast in Cafe Napolita.
   
Saturday evening, you may know if you were in Bath on this warm clear night was Party in the City with masses of bands in the parks, gardens, pubs, cafes, halls, so I hopped off the train and met up with some Frome friends for a saunter round the streets.
There were some good bands indoors but on a sultry night like this, the outside venues lured: Queens Square for wonderful atmosphere and great bands like Jupiter Owls and Agent Philby and the Funtans, and the Parade Gardens - free for this event - for The Blues Others with a magical crescent moon above the floodlit abbey... a glorious way to end an extraordinary day.
Back to Frome, and the week began with a very pleasant Frome Poetry Cafe. It's always a delight to hear the diversity of readings from the floor, and our guest Matt Duggan treated us to the first UK reading from his new collection A Season in Another World. Matt is only just back from a US tour with readings in New York and Boston, so Frome probably did seem like another world... Next Poetry Cafe will be in the Festival, which we're already gearing up for, with brochures out now and booking beginning!

Over in the Round Tower this week there's an unusual exhibition by Si Griffiths, 'pop surrealist' paintings: vivid contemporary iconography probing cultural icons from all walks of life - political, religious, cultural, evoking references to movies, music, comic books, even theatre, in a striking display on the old mill walls. Adventures in Reality? is on till 26th May - do take a look and have a chat with this fascinating explorer-artist.

A bit more music, Frome-style, to finish: Roots Session at the Grain Bar had the fabulous Fos Brothers from Belfast, plus drums and bass, bringing banter and traditional songs presented in a mostly-non-traditional way. And the weekend offered just to too much to see it all,  even if you ran from the Vine Tree to the Cornerhouse as I did, pausing only to admire the Boyle Cross in the marketplace foaming again. Sorry I missed The ShakeSpearOs following (2 of) the ever-vibrant Raggedy Men, but glad to have caught most of Rebel Heroes - a nice irony in ending one session with No More Heroes and the other with Heroes... just for one day...

away-days and sunshine

Bath Festival has been urging us to JUMP IN their ten-day event this year, a compressed version of the usual music and literature festivals but still looking pretty jiggy with a wide range of lively events. Writer Alison Clink & I checked in to Miniature Marvels, billed as a look at 'the art of the short story' though more accurately at the art of the three writers on the panel, with some overall comments from the Bath Spa lecturer chairing.
More stimulating was the screening of Psycho, original black-and-white, with a live soundtrack from the Bath Philharmonic Orchestra, and never did that eek eek eek! as Janet Leigh wriggles under the shower sound more scary... Rosie Finnegan and I had front row seats in the art deco splendour of the Forum, originally built as a cinema though since a dance-school, bingo hall, and even a church. I found I'd forgotten much about this Hitchcock classic ~ like that the second half is a whole other story with a second victim, and also how incredible Anthony Perkins is in this role.

And I also went along with Alison to hear Fay Weldon talk about her latest novel, The Death of a She-Devil, in which she revisits her most infamous character 40 years later in a sequel that interviewer Alex Clark referred to cautiously as 'rather controversial' (for which read, widely slagged off). Ms Weldon's responses were also rather controversial, which made the interview highly entertaining. 'They are young, they'll grow up' she says of her feminist detractors, and suggests 'as soon as women stop seeing themselves as victims of a patriarchy, their lives will improve.' Alex response is a sharp intake of breath and spluttered references to violence & misogyny, concluding 'Where has that all come from?'  'It may have come from the fact that men feel so disregarded,' says Fay sweetly, continuing to smile as the silence lengthens. The topic then shifts to her backlist and working habits. I'm pleased to hear that Fay's writing policy coincides with mine: 'The minute you get dressed you've had it,' she says, 'so I just don't get up.' Applause at the end was long & loud, and rightly so.

Feet First, the outdoor theatre group Annabelle Macfadyen and I co-run, has three days of bookings in Somerset for our TIME WALK with school parties in June so we've been checking out routes in our new venues... this week we had a superbly sunny day in Ham Hill Country Park, a gorgeous area of grass and woodland with some fabulous ancient trees and, appropriately, a Time Stones sculpture.

Also relishing this burst of sunshine were the organisers of the Campfire Conversations event in Frome on Thursday evening. Annabelle and Peter Macfadyen introduced this project with a real campfire in the garden of the Hubnub Centre followed by real conversations, with supper, inside in the Rye Bakery. The aim is to engage positively and imaginatively with real alternatives to present conflictive theories. It was Einstein, Annabelle reminded us in her succinct introduction, who said "Imagination is more important than knowledge" and this radical approach has grown from a festival ethos, supported by Brian Eno and led by Pete Lawrence who recognised from his Big Chill organising experience the possibilities generated by small group discussions. Also present were Indra Adnam and Pat Kane who were inspired by the Danish Alternative Party (and by Frome's 'Flat-pack Democracy') to create The Alternative UK, not a party but a platform with the aim of 'reimagining politics'. They argue that the 'apathetic majority' is a misnomer: people are simply massively dissatisfied with party-politics as a concept. Conversations from the start revealed wide range of opinions among the fifty participants, but also a willingness to listen and discuss. (Probably it helped that the election was off-limits as a topic!) My personal thought-of-the-night came from Pete Lawrence when campfire conversation turned to how long we'll have to wait for a revolution. "The revolution has happened," he said, "it’s happened in an unexpected way with unexpected people, but it has happened.” Brexit and Trump as the volcanic rumblings before the cosmic social eruption... it's a good thought.
Poetry and music were, of course, part of the mix of the night: Folk trio Borrowed Light played as we arrived, and Vicki Burke's harp accompanied supper, after which Liv Torc read a funny & euphoric celebration of Life and Rose Flint shared her beautifully hopeful poem Because. Table conversations were clearly lively and fruitful but sadly (see moan below about my ongoing lurgy) I didn't stay long enough to hear Liv's summary, wondering: What if... We become constellations of culture / Get Google maps to chart us / like a new universe / and trip advisor to rate the satisfaction / of our hearths and hearts / A roaring conflagration of voices / Grassroots twitching between our toes. It's viewable on her facebook page and it's inspiring - do take a look.

So despite some real highlights this has been a sub-par kind of week, half-full of cancellations ~ The Island at Tobacco Factory and three music sessions (trad jazz at Three Swans, Pete Gage at Sam's Kitchen, and Reg Meuross at the Grain Bar, all of whom I was sorry to miss.)
My voice is now a steady rasp rather than mostly mouthing with the odd fox-bark sound, and days have been fabulously sunny so happily I was able to end the week without missing  John Law, Pete Maxfield and Billy Weir playing breathlessly exciting jazz with Nic Sorensen at the Cornerhouse.  I'll end with a picture of this, and one from the vibrant exhibition from Artists 303 currently in the Round Tower, and hopes of full recovery next week.