Dramatic passion and all that jazz...

February's 18° days may be rightly disturbing, but the week's sunshine worked well for Tobacco Factory's new Shakespearean offering of A Midsummer Night's Dream. I can be a tad purist about Shakespeare - in my view his timeless themes rarely need tweaks to bring them on trend - so it was a delight to find that this updated-version is superb: nine excellent actors and innovative direction ensured that the comedy is laugh-out-loud funny, plots are clear, and energy high throughout. The tripled-up roles of the cast work brilliantly, with special praise to the men: Joseph Tweedale whose gay Helen/us was not only plausible but seemed almost essential, Dan Wheeler whose Flute totally & hysterically stole the final scene, and Danann McAleer,  brutal as a fairy and charmingly ineffective as an Am.Dram co-ordinator - all memorable roles. Heather Williams’ Bottom will stay with me for some time too… I did have some reservations: costumes were not 100% successful, and nor were the fly-tip props, the fairies looked and sounded more like a tribe of crusties, and the start-&-finish ‘twist’ didn't do it for me - but the same-sex love affairs worked well and the Pyramus and Thisbe cameo was a real highlight. At a deeper level, director Mike Tweddle credibly found connections with our 'harsh and problematic' possible future: 'Sadly, in 2019 it's all too easy to see how our politically fragile society could lose its hard-won social values.' Highly recommended, on till 6 April. Images: Mark Dawson.

Chicago, based loosely on life in that city during the 1920s,  era of jazz, 'celebrity criminals' and lawyers who lucratively defended them, proved a splendid choice for a 'High School Edition' from Frome College students. Directed by Claudia Pepler, on a superb art deco set designed and built by Mike Witt, with on-stage orchestra, razzle-dazzle costumes, this outstandingly talented team of youngsters danced and sang their way brilliantly to the happy ending - for the starlet murderers anyway. Megan Wright and Cordelia Tarbrooke were stunning in these roles (Images: Mike Witt top, Chris Bailey cast shot), with Barney Nuttall great as hurt husband (front end L) and Solo Candy (front end R) unforgettable as Billy Flynn, the media-manipulating lawyer. Frome College productions regularly reach a standard that makes it unsurprising that so many participants go on to train for the professional stage - or that the dedicated team of adult supporters regularly win awards in this field. This is another memorable one.

Meanwhile, Frome was preparing to transform itself into a magical promenade theatre show for the entire weekend, as Window Wanderland decorated the town's streets with 189 (I counted the list on the back of the map!) houses created fantasy lands and fairytales on their windows. Most used coloured tissue and silhouette cut-outs, some were simple and some were impressively complex, and the total effect was fabulous. Schools and shops and businesses joined in too, and the most elaborate creations- like the projected works of Singers Foundry -had clusters of admirers around them, with passing groups offering further recommendations, in this extraordinary night gallery. This one is not the most sophisticated or artistic, but for me it sums up the spirit of the project, and our town too.


Another good week for live music as well, with an excellent Roots Session at the Grain Bar - honey-voiced Steve Loudon supporting The Spoonful, Cream-themed blues trio with an esoteric range of stringed instruments, good material, and great voices.

 Friday was a big night at the Cornerhouse: Martin Earley celebrated his 8th 'birthday' as landlord there with a session from The Critters, the 8-strong rock-&-reggae band that Carling would probably claim to have made 'if we made bands'...  Nicki Mascall led this high-energy outfit through a medley of favourites from Moondance to Stir It Up, and the entire bar instantly became a mosh-pit of dancers. An unforgettable event, huge credit to all the band.

Saturday night is always a dilemma, as there's live music in several bars, but after a long window-watching walk, I dropped into 23 Bath Street for the garage band night: Los Grebos, the 4-piece covers band with an unexplained passion for Ken & Barbie, and Unit X, tagline "Frome 3-piece doing original punky noise psycho metal numbers". Here's Ron Tree, well-known and popular in Frome, singing about the badger people ('you can't kill the badger people/ they survived the ice age/ they're the recorders of time...') - photography was initially tricky as stage set-up seemed designed to smoke the musicians out like foxes, but the dancing was good.


No Independent Market report this month, as the planned March restart was kicked off the schedule by storm Freya - but with great resourcefulness, the busking stage removed itself to  23 Bath Street where the Back Wood Redeemers gave a great show to families, friends, and surprised regulars.

And if that wasn't enough music for three days, Jazz Jam returned to the Cornerhouse for a lively session - with superb singing - hosted by Simon Sax -sadly the dim red lighting made this impossible to record without a night-vision camera, but you've probably got enough pictures bragging about Frome for one week anyway. Let's end with a look ahead to spring.... crocuses along the river path, planted by the young rangers from Critchill School. Thanks, kids!

Feminist drama, feral parades, festive glitz

A new performance of Pygmalion is always a delight, partly to see if the ending has been tweaked - against the playwright's expressed intention - to make the play an unlikely romance rather than the social critique that George Bernard Shaw intended. In this, as in many other aspects, Frome Drama Club at Merlin Theatre succeeded admirably. In director Simon Blacksell's production, David Holt's eccentric linguistic professor and Annabella Fairgrieve's utterly wonderful flower-girl do not seem likely to settle into future domesticity, even if charming Colonel Pickering (Philip de Glanville) remains to referee and she stops throwing his slippers at him. Much of the humour of the play is created by the absurdities of the concept of class status, and strong performances by the women in the team highlight this: Lynne McCaffrey is excellent as  practical, caring, housekeeper Mrs Pearce, in contrast to the silliness of snobby Mrs Eynsford-Hill - superbly played by Suzy Howlett. The men are good too, though it would be good to see more of Freddy in the first scene (he gets somewhat lost behind the umbrellas) and Alfred Doolittle, the usually rumbustious dustman, seems a bit subdued even before his unwanted status elevation. Gillie Richardson's costumes and Judy Simmons' hair design, plus simple but effective sets, ensure that this resoundingly successful production looks beautiful on stage though I can't find a promotional image which shows that, so instead here's a poster from Montreal and GBS in 1914 directing the contentious first London production.

From Shavian socialism to the current plight of the planet, or one of them: Extinction Rebellion has a strong contingent in Frome, participating visibly on the London Bridge demonstration, and on Saturday in Frome they showed there's big local support for their determination to change policies steadily, and increasingly speedily, destroying our world. A dramatic Funeral for Extinct Species set off from Rook Lane with a couple of hundred people following the hearse downhill to the precinct, where we gathered in the precinct around the coffin - respectfully carried by a bear, a wolf, an eagle and a (sort of) ram - to hear a poem listing and lamenting the species killed and threatened by mankind's activities. 60% have disappeared in the last 70 years.

The slow march continued, escorted by the Frome Street Bandits (dressed in mourning without their distinctive red), to the market place where Green Party's Theo Simon ended the event with a note of hope that while we have to accept the world is changing, we may be able to stop this mass extinction if we have the courage to continue speaking out. And then we had a song from his band Seize the Day, a bit of drum'n'dance to warm up, and hot chi, free from Mahesh on the Loop-de-Loop stall.


Extinct animals seems an unlikely segue but it actually works perfectly for Longleat festival of light this year, which the Sustrans cycle path has happily made available again to non-car users. There's a kind of Tintin theme here, plucky kids with a little white terrier, dashing around places and eras having adventures, one of them being the time Longleat House was assailed by prehistoric creatures.
Possibly that's a camptosaurus lurking by the bedroom windows, though it could be an iguanodon with a small head. I've no idea what the one with green wings is, but they all looked great in the dark as the full moon rose.

We're now at the start of the annual Gift-Anxiety festival, though fortunately - to my unreconstructed-Scrooge mind - there's been a slackening of the grip of that particular fever, and Frome anyway seems to focus on the opportunity to support its many local craftsfolk rather than tax-avoiding internationals. So we've already had two christmas markets - Black Swan hosted a lovely evening event throughout its cafe for its artisan traders, and Kate Cooke - pictured here at the Black Swan event - opened up her house for two days as well. There will be more to come!

Music this week once again shows how high the bar is set in Frome: the Wednesday Roots Session featured Keith James' skilful performance of a great repertoire which included Nick Drake & Leonard Cohn songs and poems of Lorca and Neruda. The fabulous Critters at the Cornerhouse on Friday opened with Cohn too, then ranged from country music to reggae as dancers filled the floor at this massively popular gig - 8 great performers superbly hosted by singer Nicola Mascall.

Sunday is jazz night at the Cornerhouse, always good and sometimes incredible: Frome often punches above its weight musically and this was one of those times - a  concert of capital-city quality as John Law on piano with Riann Vosloo bass, Sam Crockatt sax, and the incredible Dave Smith on drums gave us the music of  John Coltrane. I'm still quivering....

Frome Festival is Go...

Frome Festival began today, so Tristan Stevens' FITHWALL at Black Swan Arts which opened last night acted as a kind of amuse bouche to the feast to come. Tristan's exhibition invites us to "walk along the banks of the information-stream and among the sacred gifs and jpegs of the projected unconscious"and to emphasise the significance of these generated images, there's a zen garden where screens are bedded like hallowed rocks. Showing here till the end of August.
And now we're off in style, ten days crammed with so many events and displays no-one could get to even half of them. I'm planning to do as much as I can, and use the blog as a daily late-night bulletin to give the flavour of the immense variety and vivacity that is Frome Festival.
First stop the Silk Mill, which has already re-opened its famous 'festival tapas bar', where the Open Studios upstairs are sharing the extraordinary creativity of artists from clothes creators like Raggedy, aka Hayley Tresise, to the musical artistry of Tim Moore. 
There's a fabulous gallery exhibition here too: paintings of power stations by Lin Hawkins. some sinister, some almost like holy temples.
Over in Stony Street, Barry Cooper's exhibition Sonata 2014, is inspired by Bartok's 1944 violin concerto which he feels motivated every brushstroke. The graffitied newspapers are shown alongside his paintings made while listening, with thoughts of the 8.7 million British men about to go into the trenches one hundred years ago, 'a reflection of that past in the fragility of our present.'  There's resonance too with Picasso's angry sense of injustice. "All art is a kind of healing" Barry says.
On then to the talk by Will Buckingham at the Library, organised by John Payne and Wendy Miller-Williams, on the philosophy of the Moomin stories. Will says he's only an amateur Moominologist, but he's analysed the problems that troubled the young Moomintroll, like authority and apocalypse, and explains how Tove Jansson's tales carry within them solutions for us all. Then a quick dash with Rosie Finnegan and Alison Clink over to the Cornerhouse for an hour's dancing to the fabulous Critters, the band who can play anything but are supreme at ska-reggae and get the whole place bopping within minutes...  and a late ending at John Payne's party where Will Buckingham was guest of honour. A suitable conclusion to the festival's opening day: friendly, fun, and a little bit esoteric.

Sunshine on Sunday made this the perfect day for a scamper round the Open Studios trail and marvel at the dazzling inventiveness and skill of Frome's artists. Two which stood out were the vibrant collective work at Circus stands out ~ I specially enjoyed the wall poem written in wire ~ and the theatrical pieces of John M Robinson, who creates narratives drawn from fact and fantasy for his characters: here's the corrupt tarot-reader but I was also fascinated by the notion of Albrecht Dürer's portal to the future leaving him trapped in 2011...

Music has been stonkingly high standard too: mindblowing two-hour sets from fantastic headliners like The Critters at Olive Tree and Pete Gage Band at the Cornerhouse... wow. I wish I could think of more superlatives but wow, wow, wow says it all really.

Against all odds we had a balmy night for The Importance of Being Earnest in the beautiful Merlin amphitheatre. Miracle Theatre have a great reputation for over-the-top open-air performances of well-loved classics, but I remain unconvinced that Oscar Wilde's wit needs any enhancement, or that playing sophisticated Jack Worthing as a buffoon and giving suave Algy's lines to his manservant are valid adornments to social satire. Ben Dyson, though brilliant as a neurotic butler, failed to create a formidable Aunt Augusta despite vicious umbrella-jabbing. Certainly not vintage Miracle ~ but the audience laughed and the weather was perfect.
Overall verdict on Frome festival: a fantastic, if exhausting, week crammed with brilliant experiences and performances. Especially the music.

And with all that going on I nearly missed The Hollow Crown: Richard II on BBC iplayer, which would have been a pity as it was visually beautiful with some superb filmic moments. This version played much with homo-erotic and quasi-religious overtones, even to the extent of rewriting Richard's murder to evoke a Judas-style betrayal and a crucifixion image. Ben Wishaw was compelling as the King raised to believe himself omnipotently above the rivalries and intrigues that swirled around his realm, and all the rest of the cast were excellent too though Bolingbroke did sometimes look disturbingly like Corrie's Tyrone.
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