Lives of un-quiet desperation

If you enjoy a bit of meta-theatrical in your drama  ~ and I do ~ you should definitely go along to the Tobacco Factory before the month is over to see Living Quarters, co-produced by the company with SATTF and directed by Andrew Hilton.  Writer Brian Friel believed script was sacrosanct and 'a good director hones into the core of the play and becomes self effacing in the process’: this story is controlled by such a director (Chris Bianchi) who allows no deviation from his ledger as the Butler family recall the tragic ending to a night of triumph. Attempts by the anxious cast to interrupt, and appeals to be shown in a better light, are disallowed, as is one character's attempt at a walk-on part (Eoin Slattery, all too quickly walk-off).

Written over 40 years ago, the central story is timeless: an older man with a much younger wife left alone and bored.  There’s the shadow of the domineering dead first wife too, and more than a whiff of Chekhovian ennui evident in the Donegal homestead, as well as quite a bit of Dostoevskian unique unhappiness. The structure works against overall naturalism so it's up to individual cameos to engross us, and there are several outstandingly moving moments. With a performance in the round, courtesy (and probably pricing obligations) necessitate quite a bit of rotation in posture and placing which can work against the development of emotional intensity and the lighting didn’t help. But the cast is immense ~ especially the soldier (Simon Armstrong) and his two younger daughters (Hayley Doherty and Martha Seignior), in a family tale which for all its moments of empathy fails to fully connect. Images: Camilla Adams

And now for something completely different: the incredible immersive theatrical experience of Dismaland, which I finally achieved on Monday after a mere 3 hours in the queue ~ which is where the dystopian experience properly begins. Airport-style barriers with unnecessarily-repeated loops to ensure extended sight of the lucky online-ticket buyers streaming past & dividing the haves from the have-nots inevitably evoke thoughts of other queues across Europe... and when you arrive with relief there's so much around to entertain, amuse, and distract that you almost forget about the run-down environment, puddles of rain, and angry graffiti ~ in fact these become part of the entertainment.
You can queue again to see gratuitous violence, you can sit in squalor and watch a film of a teddy-bear undergoing heart surgery (a perfect mix of macabre and sentimental) or a traditional wife-abusing Punch&Judy show, you can pay to fail at fairground games, you can sit in a bar (the only places where staff are jolly) or look round the Gallery at disturbing imagery, and you can take a selfie in the place provided, where nothing is happening but you still smile. And there's more, much much more, but you get the gist. Over all of this presides the image of our prime minister with a glass of champagne. Banksy is a genius.

It's all over now, California blue...a whistle-stop tour of my last week

People around here are very friendly. I'd arrived back in El Granada after a long walk along the beach on a glorious hot day, sky unflecked blazing cerulean for about a million miles, and outside the General Stores an old guy started talking to me about the pumpkin-flavour ice-cream I was licking ("Should be more orange" - "It's lovely, it's subtle," - "That's us, stateside - subtle. Subtle and dense,") and he told me how this place had began as a railroad station with no houses here at all.When I got back I asked Mo, and from him and from the plaque at the end of Portola Avenue, I learned the early history of El Granada. The whistle of the first Ocean Shore Railroad passenger train from San Francisco echoed off nearly hills on 21 June 1908. On board were five hundred SanFranciscans, good-time-loving people... and to cut the story short, they were all lured there to consider buying lots in this amazing new development. But sadly, when the last whistle blew just twelve years later, only a few homes had been bought on Daniel Burnham’s magnificent boulevards. Ocean Shore Railroad was plagued by landslides along the ocean bluffs and succumbed to the encroaching roads, but left its rugged mark along the San Mateo county coast. 
So there's a bit of history to go with all the geography.

For my last three days here the solid blue sky disappeared and the coastline disappeared, though the beach happily was still fabulous for walking -  in fact I made my longest one-way journey ~ from Poplar to Pillar Point, about 7 miles ~  in dense sea mist. I've seen seals, dolphins, and whales, and masses of seabirds: little sanderlings, elegant marbled godwits (they look like curlews but with straight beaks and forage along the foam of the wildest seas), slow pelicans and speedy seagulls... also, sadly, scores of mysteriously dead murres on the sand (these are alive gulls in the picture, at their gathering-place on Roosevelt beach.)

I started a list of best-bits, including the Nancy Cassidy concert at Cyprus Meadow on Friday where Mo provided brilliant support... woodland walks like the ancient forest along Purisima Creek...  the fantastic Bar Bocce on Sausalito harbour-front... taking thousands of photographs of flora, fauna, and just about anything... and simply sitting in the yard on sunny evenings with Anja and Mo, sipping prosecco and watching the sun go down.

Of course Frome being the hotbed of creativity it is, I've inevitably missed much ~ music from great names including We Used To Make Things, Fat Stanley, Three Corners, and local favourites like Back For Breakfast, Steve Loudon (looking forward to tasters of all these in photographer David Goodman's archives here soon) ~ and there were no party-poppers to celebrate Jeremy Corbyn's brilliant landslide victory. But I did manage to participate in the Dismaland experience, by rousing at 4am to go online for tickets when the box office opened and finding after lots of clickings they'd already sold out, thus satisfyingly replicating the dismal experience of typical modern life that Banksy, bless his perverse dark mind, is keen to share with us.
So as I wait at San Francisco airport for a flight as yet only slightly delayed, I'll end with thoughts of England: one of the many marvellous pictures of hope, and the cover of a US magazine where news of our queen's abdication is sadly much exaggerated. Though as a republican I can't share the enthusiasm for new queen 'Duchess Kate'.