Yet more summer celebrations: drama, art & music

Remember Treasure Island? A coming-of-age story, about desert islands, buried gold, pirates, and a parrot? Exeter's physical comedy theatre Le Navet Bete are touring with their version, at Bristol Old Vic until the end of the month and strongly recommended.  All the elements are there, except the parrot is called Alexa and is just as inept as that cloud-based info-system, and a raft of extraneous characters are also integrated, including Captain Birdseye and an erotic mermaid who steals every scene - a difficult task as the four multi-tasking performers are all fantastic. 

Director John Nicholson has somehow retained a key element in the story - the innocent young hero seeking buried treasure - throughout this hilarious mayhem, even when plot progress at one point depends on the outcome of a game of 'Play Your Cards' right with the audience. Matt Freeman is outrageously memorable, but all the cast are brilliant, interacting with each other and with the audience to make the whole show a giant party. I've never heard an audience laugh so much - strongly recommended.

A different dramatic mood now from  Black Hound Productions, as Frome's fearsomely talented young theatre company has created An Edinburgh Fringe Double Bill previewed at Merlin Theatre on Wednesday.  Both plays use sensitive insight and humour to explore life experiences typical today.  In Seeds of Memories, a young man reminisces in the garden of his much-missed grandfather, finding a kind of magic as well as many memories; in Alright?, a disaffiliated teenage boy struggles to cope in a school-and-home void without support - again, with humour as well as insight. 

 The first play is a virtual monologue for Ollie J Edwards, supported throughout by Lesley Hayes who morphs between beloved Nan & less-adored Mum, and by Lisha Allen as a glamorous evocation of Nature. There's clever puppetry and evocative, neatly-choreographed, scene-shifts evoking natural magic as emotions swell and shift.

The second play is even more engaging, and did actually drag a couple of tears from me as teenage Noah, played by Thomas Price, flails between the tedium of school and home, with a disaffected school counsellor, an inept father, and a dotty grandmother as his only support. This too is extremely well staged as Noah's isolation is evoked by the total absence of any 'key connections': the school psychiatrist is conveyed by a small recess - "because mental health is an afterthought in eduction" while Gran is a voice from the overly-plush corner where 'like some sort of confused pickpocket,' she drops hip-flasks in Noah's pocket in lieu of any real contact. He's heading downwards until the night his dad snaps & rants at him, and Noah realises 'this is the most we've ever spoken', and achieves an awkward, but realistic, breakthrough.  Both plays are written and directed by artistic director Patrick Withey, who also designed the imaginative sets.  

Summertime in the Southwest is as thick with festivals as Edinburgh's Royal Mile is with performers. The Frome Festival of Photography was speedily overlapped by the multi-inclusive Frome Arts Festival, and now Black Swan Arts Open 2022 has filled every available wall and surface in the building with nearly 200 visual art works from over 1000 submitted from far & wide as well as locally - you can see them all in online shop. There's a big buzz around this exhibition, which has insisted on a ceiling price of £1000 from all artists, even the most established - some already showing online as sold.

Theres an exhibition also at the Good Heart Tibetan Memories Cafe, where Lockhart Murdoch  has filled the walls with photographs of Tibet from his archives. These are mainly historic press photographs from his vast collection at One A gallery and shop in Frome town centre, intriguing to visitors at the opening and thrilling to chef Namdi, who recognised the figure featured in one - his own lama and friend. (That's him in the background, behind Namdi's happy grin. ) Alison Murdoch, founder of the Good Heart, also spoke of future plans for this pay-it-forward cafe with a focus on community support

On a personal note: as well as all the above delights, it was my pleasure this week to be interviewed by the truly wonderful Eleanor Talbot about my latest novel Blow-Ins, for her weekly international online show Variations on a Theme (also broadcast on Frome FM next week, link to be posted later). Eleanor's insights are always incisive so our conversation was in-depth & quite challenging - it's great to be quizzed by an enthusiastic fan who also asks questions like "How do you manage balancing the funny with the darker themes?" Perhaps because art is, after all, like life...

This week's landscape is from the riverside at Freshford, at the end of a family walk on Sunday, with the recent intense heat now ebbing into a very pleasant languid warmth.

Although Upton Blues is a week behind us now, in another world below the Malvern Hills where a campervan-village among golden 'cat's ear' field flowers waves with colourful flags, it's been great reviewing my photos of that festival... if you don't have facebook, here's a screenshot of a few snaps...

And finally, another in my series of occasional alerts to fantastic online music you might not already be aware of: Peter Bence, officially the world's fastest piano-player. He's Hungarian, travelling Europe giving live concerts & on Youtube too: here's his version of Don't Stop Me Now - there's more fantastic Queen performances on his page here.  

Autumn harvest: drama, art, music & woodland mystery

Merlin Theatre Productions always reach an extraordinarily high standard for amateur performances, especially those involving a wide age range, and My Fair Lady this week was not only a visually exciting all-singing-&-dancing delight but also offered an interesting & empathetic interpretation of key relationships. Daisy Mercedes' direction, with its focus on 'chemistry' in the relationships - and, crucially,  the shift of the ex-flower-girl's ecstatic song 'I could have danced all night' to relate to her breakthrough in elocution - creates an Eliza with two fathers, the feckless Doolittle (superbly played by Graeme Barry) and the fierce linguist professor, bringing a whole new dynamic and tension to their relationship.
This high-energy show never flagged, and Act 2 reached a brilliant crescendo in the emotional tension of script, plus also the best ensemble highlight in Doolittle's show-stopping lament 'I'm getting married in the morning' - congratulations to band and costumes too, here. A very strong cast led by Richard Pugh's dyspeptic Higgins and Daisy Weir's determined Eliza. Thanks Chris Bailey for making these great publicity pictures available.

Now to another fable - Cyrano do Bergerac.
It’s a story so extreme Mills & Boon would baulk: a man who loves so deeply that he sacrifices his own longing in order to unite his beloved with the man she prefers, wooing her with an articulate passion his rival could never possess, and carrying that secret until the day he dies. And the part is written nearly entirely in rhyming verse, which really does require the calibre of Tristan Sturrock, the actor who in a 2012 production of Peter Pan managed to make it charming and not-creepy-at-all that a middle-aged man should climb through a little girl’s bedroom window and abduct her - he is always mesmeric even with a false nose the size of a turnip.

Cyrano is Bristol Old Vic’s autumn production, directed by Tom Morris, with a cast of five men and two women in roles ranging from nuns to soldiers, and with their trademark live onstage music. There’s some initial jostling of within the auditorium and at one point we're urged to join them in song, but then the action settles into consistent narrative and becomes clearer. Programme notes explain the theme as quintessential theatre - a tale of pretending, and what happens when you ‘pretend your way into the most beautiful love story you can dream of.’ But these are boys, so it’s a war story too, and perhaps more interestingly, a story of low self-esteem, as despite his lyricism and swordsmanship - displayed superbly - Cyrano's sense of self-worth can't get past his nose. There are some touching moments, like the Black-Adder-finale-recalling war scene, and some amusing ones, like the Romeo-&-Juliet-balcony-evoking love scene when tongue-tied Christian parrots Cyrano’s lyrical words, but this kind of 'pure theatre' can seem at odds with the connection to its city's people that BOV has laudably pledged to prioritise, and it can seem a little bit whimsical and irrelevant. Unless you're a bearded nun, in which case you'll feel right at home. Images: Geraint Lewis

Also at Bristol Old Vic, up in Cooper's Loft, drama from a very different era: Everyone is Dead is set in a dystopian near-future where even the rain is toxic and Mad Max style gangs roam the land while non-specified enemies are bombing relentlessly.  Rosie Finnegan & I are interested in quirky small productions and this one further intrigued as it won the recent Theatre West competition for a play by a woman writer, with both actors also female. The drama itself is as feminine as  forest fire, though, with the two women taking refuge in a basement after a violent raid on the house. Intense hostility and emotional anguish is difficult to sustain for an hour but this is a thought-provoking play, well-interpreted by Florence Espeut-Nickless and Alison Fitzjohn as her father's one-night-stand, with impressive fight direction from Black Dog.

Back in Frome, Black Swan Arts have revealed the winners of their Open Arts Competition, always one of the most exciting exhibitions of the year as hundreds of entries are sifted to create the final exhibition - here's a glimpse of the opening night. Curated by Amanda Sheridon, this has been hailed as one of the best yet, and it's on till November 16.There's huge diversity of materials, forms, and concepts to appreciate but my 'public vote' goes to The New Ambassadors by Ros Whitehouse, as stuffed with symbolism as Holbein's original painting - and is it me or does that elongated skull (with a wisp of blond hair) look undeniably like Trump? I took a mirror along on my return visit, just to check....

Music now, and Wednesday's Roots Session at the Grain Bar came from exciting 'rock-infused folk' duo Crooked Weather, with strong support from Josh Beddis. Next night's event, aptly titled Inspired & organised by Daniel Dobbie at Rye Bakery, provided a complete contrast:  Tallulah Rendall, rock-singer-turned-sound-therapist, with a mesmeric voice and presence - you can experience a sample here - with Peter Bearder, aka Pete the Temp, performance poet and generally off-the-wall entertainer with words and sounds. Here he is, treating us to strange sonic experiences like rapping in Latin and random loop effects, clad in an elegant evening dress and Ascot style straw hat. Both acts were superb, and the bean soup beforehand was good too.

The rainy week ended dry and sporadically sunny for John Payne's Autumn Poetry Walk through the beech wood to Cranmore Tower, an extraordinarily lofty folly with amazing views across the Dorset hills. This was originally planned by John, with Martin Bax and myself, for last year, but illness interfered with that plan, so it was especially good to be all together again on Sunday. As well as leaves, and mushrooms, there were  masses of fallen nuts on our path, and one of our group was able to explain this crunchy carpet: 2019 has been a 'mast' year, when forest trees simultaneously flower excessively, leading to huge increase of fruit later. Mysterious, and fascinating! Thanks John for the picture of me & Martin at a reading stop.