Romance, carnage, stillness & sounds

If you adored Amélie and love chocolate, you will be completely besotted by Wise Children and Plush Theatricals' Romantics Anonymous, the delightful musical love story of a shy chocolate creator and her gauche chocolatier boss, now playing to enraptured audiences at Bristol Old Vic. It's an Emma Rice production so there's copious electric lighting to designate scene changes throughout this sweet story, wittily narrated by a brilliant ensemble cast featuring Carly Bawden and Marc Antolin. Highly recommended if you can get a ticket before February1st - there was a full house standing ovation when I saw it, so you may have to kill. Image: Steve Tanner

Marital discord and middle-class mores have always been considered fair targets for drama, and Yasmina Reza goes for the jugular in The God of Carnage, a play about the savage antagonisms simmering below the civilised veneer of two married couples who meet to discuss a playground fight between their respective sons. If that doesn't sound much like a comedy, it's because it isn't really one, although we are invited to laugh at the bourgeois-style assaults: Christopher Hampton, who translated the script from French for this production at Theatre Royal Bath, reports that the playwright fears humour will make her work too entertaining to be taken seriously. Yet there is humour, of a very bitter kind, in this tale of escalating friction as both mismatched couples are confronted with their own unresolved differences as well as the antagonism of their opponents. It's very well acted, especially by the men, Nigel Lindsay and Alan Paisley Day, whose roles give them more light and shade to work with than do the women's (Elizabeth McGovern and Samantha Spiro, who's impressive at projectile vomiting). Lindsay Posner directed and the set, featuring a symbolic spear-ball above blank walls, was designed by Peter McKintosh. Image: Nobby Clark

Moving on to art: Hauser & Wirth do openings in style, on Thursday celebrating Don McCullin's superb exhibition in a party atmosphere with live music and fires in their lavish garden. The stillness of life comprises mainly Somerset scenes: the photographer himself, who lives locally, was at the gallery with friends. He was known at one time for  images conflict, and these stark landscapes seem to me to have a resonance of restless energy, even when unpeopled. His work is brilliant.

Keith James at this week's Grain Bar Roots Session brought a small team of guitars to supplement his solo performance, playing profound songs for deep winter days: existential reflection from Leonard Cohn, protest from Bob Dylan, poignancy from Joan Baez some of Lorca's dark poetic words and, more than ever a song for our times, Joni Mitchell's 1970 anthem for Woodstock: We are stardust - we are golden - and we've got to get ourselves back to the garden...

Frome's lavish habit of providing an embarrassment of riches most weekends sadly meant passing on the The MellowTones, a new band already with a hot reputation, to join in with the dancing at the Cornerhouse where Tempting Providence provided a lively selection of classic rock, including a fabulous mash-up of Wicked Game with White Wedding and a breath-taking version of Wagon Wheel that raised cheers. Here's the team: Paul Kirtley, David Goodman, and Colin Ashley, with Peter Barnes and Nicki Mascall- icing on the cake provided by popular bar managers Tom and Amy's classy jive!

Lights , sound, action...

BBC's Country file last week was all about Frome, with chatty little snippets about our local incredible edibles, from Lungi Baba's bajees, sold from a refurbished loo in the market yard, to the town's Food Assembly creating customised variable veg boxes. The programme seems designed for viewers' taking tea breaks so there's a lot of data repetition but it's good to see the green side of 'one of Britain's coolest towns' extolled instead of the usual rhapsody about retro-chic bargains.
Bath writer Debby Holt is such a fan she's including our 'jewel of the southwest' in the launch tour for her new novel The Soulmate early next year, which segeways nicely to my next report:  Mr B's Emporium of Reading Delights in Bath is according to the Guardian one of the 10 best bookshops in the world and though by non-zero probability there may be an equally fine bookshop somewhere in an infinite universe, it's certainly a great venue for the 2015 Bath Short Story Awards. Short fiction was my first passion as a writer and I still believe it's a great way to learn essential elements of the craft so I went with Frome writers Alison Clink & current 'Bard of Frome' Brenda Bannister to share in the party and listen to sparkling extracts from the winning stories of the new collection. Here's Mister Bee himself, as I couldn't pick a favourite from among the excellent reader-writers. 

There will now be a short break from my usual eulogising and a Man's-Inhumanity-To-Man interlude.  

The Age of Stupid, which in 2008 tracked the progress of destruction of life on earth & identified 2015 as the tipping point after which no recovery may be possible. So with the (now overshadowed) UN conference on climate change in Paris, plus renewed threats of local fracking, East Mendip Green Party and Frome Anti-Fracking organised a showing in Westway, Frome's brilliant little independent cinema. If you haven't seen the movie you either realise it's all horribly true and don't want to think about it, or just don't want to think about it, so I'll confine my comments to this question posed at the end: Why didn't we save ourselves? Is the answer, we weren't sure we were worth saving? We know how to profit but not how to protect. The final act of civilisation was suicide.
Still on the sombre theme of "every prospect pleases and only man is vile", Bruton's best known art gallery Hauser & Wirth has an exhibition of Don McCullin's photographs from the last fifty years, mostly recording horrific conflict or appalling poverty, with three Somerset landscapes which somehow look like war zones. This amazing, brave, compassionate photographer has long been a hero of mine but I wasn't allowed to take any pictures of the gallery so this is a googled iconic compilation-shot, but I did get to see the actual Nikon that caught the bullet that would have killed him. You'll probably recognise all these marvellous and tragic images but seeing them together is something else, sad but well worth doing.

To conclude this post on a lighter note, literally, the winter spectacular at Longleat is a Festival of Lights which David & I wandered into accidentally after an extended footpath walk, finding the dusk suddenly filled with fabulous constructions ~ mythical creatures, wild animals, palaces and pagodas and much more ~ all made out of silk lanterns.  Look out for the Chinese Dagon boat and the leaping dolphins...