Happenings in Frome, now and soon

Flames licked the artwork at an unusual preview at Black Swan Arts on Friday as Jenny Purrett set fire to a trail of gunpowder to burn through a piece of paper ~ those columns behind the onlookers that look a bit like silver birches are actually rolls of paper that have been shot with a rifle. Other artists in the dRAW exhibition use tracing, grinding, and programming techniques. It's intriguingly provocative and on until 28th June.

Frome Festival is now less than a month away with several events already sold out, so if you've got special favourites, get booking! I'm going to do a Lyn Gardner and offer my own top tips:
Nevertheless Pub Theatre is first pick (I didn't say I wouldn't be partisan) as Rosie and I are thrilled with the six 10-minute scripts we'll be producing at Cornerhouse on Tuesday 8th & Wednesday 9th July.  Here we are at a production meeting, being thrilled, and here's the flyer! Lovely Livi Dennis, who shone in our last Frome Scriptwriters show Festive Stockings, is joined by rising star Alex Poole, and ticket price is as always a startlingly mere £5. I'm also looking forward to Miracle Theatre's Tempest, on at the Merlin's amazing amphitheatre on Sunday 6th ~ their Waiting for Godot last summer was brilliant.
Moving from plays to poetry, it should be a great night at the Garden Cafe on Monday 7th as 

Hilda Sheehan is guest at the Festival Poetry Cafe and one open-mic poet will be chosen for the year-long title Festival Poet Laureate.  More excellent writerly events are featured on Words at Frome Festival  but I'm also looking forward to the Open Studios, the Hidden Gardens, and big dance nights with the Levellers at the Cheese&Grain and Seize the Day at the United Reform Church Hall, as well as great local bands like the Critters and Pete Gage Band playing FREE in the pubs every night.  Frome's speciality is accessible and egalitarian, so there's a range of events for every age and taste ~ where else would you find free-to-view events like a vintage-costumed bike ride in the park, fairy cakes in the children's library, and an international food feast followed by dancing in the market yard, alongside concerts & recitals and philosophical discussions about... er, the Moomintrolls...

To demonstrate I'm not so obsessed with Frome that I actually tether myself to the town boundaries, here's a couple of shots from my stay last week with friends in Urchfont, where one of our rural walks took us through Wedhampton, a kind of open-air house museum, with a legend on the village noticeboard to indicate the special exhibits so you can walk from end to end marvelling at their thatches, beams, manicured lawns, and guard-duty hedges. More accessible are the curios at Avebury Manor, refurbished entirely as it would have been in the early 20th Century, where you can browse through drawers and cupboards, leaf through magazines, and even play records on the His-Master's-Voice gramophone. Fascinating stuff, I wish all museums were so observer-friendly.

Nevertheless ventures and adventures

"Women have been taught that for us the earth is flat, and if we venture out we will fall off the edge. Some of us have ventured out nevertheless, and so far we have not fallen off."
I don't often quote Andrea Dworkin,  anarchist, feminist & anti-war activist, but it seems appropriate for this posting which is all about Nevertheless Productions.  It's only three years since my amazingly dynamic, entrepreneurial and all-round gorgeous friend Rosie Finnegan asked me to join her in bringing pub theatre to Frome...  we had no funding, no production company, and no idea how this would work but nevertheless we went ahead using an upstairs room at the Lamb, now The Cornerhouse and probably the most popular venue in town.  Rosie and I made countless theatre trips to find shows with the kind of edgy writing and professional production values we wanted, and last year founded our own group, the brilliant Frome Scriptwriters, and also linked up with Bristol's inspirational Stepping Out Theatre Company.  We've now given Frome 12 productions, mostly sold out and all receiving enthusiastic audience feedback, and there's another show simmering: On Thursday & Friday December 19th & 20th you can enjoy an hour's original entertainment comprising short plays written by Frome Scriptwriters ~ and this one is definitely the best yet.  Festive Stockings features four 15 minute plays chosen by director Chris Loveless: Kate's Story by Eddie Young, Who is Santa? by Tim Addams, and Letter Home by Emma Stadon will be performed as rehearsed script-in-hand, and Ackroyd's Christmas Stocking by Alison Clink fully produced.  And we have a dream-team of actors: Olivia Dennis, Danann McAleer, Gerard Cooke, and Kim Hicks ~ so get your name on the list for a seat now!

And even before the tinsel is down Rosie and I will be deeply involved in another drama, which will be be premiered at The Cornerhouse before its 2-week run at Bristol's Alma Tavern Theatre 28th January to 8th February.  Rosie and I were commissioned by Stepping Out Theatre Company to write a double-bill, and Media Monsters is the result.  Director Marc Geoffrey is holding auditions on December 6th and rehearsals start early in the new year! Is there anything as exciting as seeing your play in a Casting Call in Theatre Bristol 'Jobs' section? Talk about Christmas coming early...

ACTORS WANTED - MEDIA MONSTERS

Salary: £300 per week Application Deadline: 30.11.13 17:00

Bristol

DREAMWEAVERS IN ASSOCIATION WITH STEPPING OUT AND CHRYSALIS THEATRE PRESENTS 

MEDIA MONSTERS

A double bill of new writing

Directed by Marc Geoffrey

MY BIG FAT TV BITCH by Rosie Finnegan

An original and comic satire on Reality Television 

and 

FIXING IT by Crysse Morrison

A complex, subtle and fascinating look at the erosion of personal ideals and the changing face of sexual mores over the last 40 years set against the background of the Jimmy Saville scandal.

Rehearsals begin 6th January 2014 

Performance dates : 

Fri 24th & Sat 25th January 2014 at The Corner House, Frome. 

Tue 28th January to Sat 8th February 2014 at The Alma Tavern Theatre, Clifton.

Nearly a week ago since I watched San Francisco receding into blue distance: touchdown in Frome has been hectic but pleasant, beginning with a meeting of Frome Scriptwriters whose latest scripts will be performed next month at the Cornerhouse. When She Imagines is a trio of monologues, directed by Nevertheless producer Rosie Finnegan, which was commissioned as 'fringe' to the Imagine events at Rook Lane. Are Frome Scriptwriters resting cosily on their laurels? No of course not: they're already deep into the next project, Tales of the Tunnels, for Frome Festival.
Apropos things dramatic, here seems a good place for the link to my newly launched theatre blog: for some reason that now eludes me, I thought a good title would be Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln...

And while I'm at the self-promotion, Frozen Summer is now out on Kindle ~ it costs a quid, but think of the postage saved! And the trees... I've been recommending this free-to-use form of self-publishing for ages so it seemed only reasonable to try it. Provided you have a correctly edited Word file (no page breaks except for essential separation like new chapters and acknowledgements etc) publication takes literally only a few minutes ~ I did it in the departure lounge at San Francisco. I know some writers fear the stigma of 'Vanity Publishing' but self-publishing these days is not only respectable, it's a valuable contribution to diversity. 'We are the Farmers' Markets in a supermarket world' I like to say, with suitable fervour, and there's now even a major award solely for 'indie' writers, as non-commercially published authors are now termed.  The Guardian Books Blog quotes wonderful Kate Tempest as good practice: she self-published her first collection and subsequently hit the headlines by winning the Ted Hughes Award for her poem-play Brand New Ancients. Kate is interviewed in ideas tap, and her philosophy is one I completely relate to: If I felt something, I’d write it down. I never knew what it was for but actually all that writing has enabled to me know my palate and my writing style. If you’re a writer, then write constantly. Not for anybody to judge it but so you’re more comfortable at the page than away from it.  

On Wednesday Writing Events Bath organised A Gathering Of Writers talking about their work in support of Dorothy House, a cause as popular as the six authors contributing so the BRLSI was crammed.   Debby Holt, Lindsay Hawdon, Andrew Miller, Lesley Pearse, Nathan Filer and Tania Hershman proved a very successful medley of different voices, each with an interesting take on their personal craft, and all picking fascinating extracts to share. I liked especially Debby's view that 'writing is a way of making sense of our lives', and Nathan's reading from his debut novel. I've been a fan of Nathan for nearly a decade, since he came to Frome to contribute to Urban Scrawl ~ a night of performance poetry I organised as the climax of my year as Writer in Residence at the Merlin Theatre ~ and it's no surprise that now he's turned his writing hand to prose there was an 11-way auction battle for The Shock of the Fall. HarperCollins won. It's out in hard-back - but you can get it on Kindle at half the price...

Eighteen is a magic number associated with both conflict and stories in Hinduism, so perhaps there's extra significance for The Three Snake Leaves now it has been performed by the same trio of storytellers for eighteen years. There was certainly something magical about driving into the snow-bleached Welsh mountains for these 'fairytales grownups from the Grimm forest' performed by Hugh Lupton, Sally Pomme Clayton and Ben Haggarty, supported by two musicians and a score of instruments ranging from a water-warbler bird whistle to a four-tiered rack of bells. The tales are all fantastical, word-pictures swirling like dark robes glinting with gold, but lies like beauty are only skin deep and when every twisted thread is finally woven into place the message is redemptive.
This was the piece, I learned from my story-teller friend Lisa, which reintroduced the classic oral tradition into performance: as Hugh told us at the start, behind every story-teller are the shadows of those who through the ages told these stories before.  I can't find an image that evokes in any way this extraordinarily powerful presentation so here's a picture of Abergavenny, where we were transported deep into the extraordinary and often painful psyche of humanity in the Borough Theatre while the world outside froze.

Frome Library, which has been closed for a month, reopened on Wednesday with cakes and a speech explaining that Frome has now been Are-eff-eye-deed, which meant very little to those of us unfamiliar with Radio-Frequency Identification use of electro-magnetic fields to transfer data for the purpose of automatically tracking tags attached to objects.  (thanks, Wiki.) After some strummed Wordsworth and an excellent taster workshop on Writing for Wellbeing led by David Goldstein, it all began to feel more like the Frome Library we know and love, despite the reader-focussed kiosks in the entry which have replaced the book-borrowing-focussed desk.

Is every art work an expression of its artist? How do characters arrive on canvas, or in scripts? Christopher Bucklow was talking about his Talking about Painting exhibition with Steve Hennessy at Black Swan Arts  on Wednesday. Chris wanted to explore the similarities in their creative process, as painter and playwright, and reflect on a shared perceptions of their characters as part self & part myth. 'Part of creating anything is to make ourselves well,' as Steve succinctly said.  Dreams and metaphors are 'part of the cats-cradle' too, and Chris's idea of art as belonging to 'the theatre beyond the paintings'. Fascinating stuff ~ though not for the audience member who used the Q&A to opine "It's a flat surface, get used to it." Brecht might have agreed.

Frome Scriptwriters have been working on monologues for actress Becky Baxter to perform at The Cornerhouse as a fringe event for Celebrating the Imagination, and the chosen scripts were announced at our meeting this week. Becky, who picked the pieces she felt had most theatrical scope for her,  was wowed by the writing standard of our fledgling group and we were wowed by her brilliant read-through, so after an exciting evening we're all looking forward to When She Imagines... on May 16th. By which time ~ we hope ~ Frome Festival brochure will be on the streets, crammed with amazing and quirky events. Nevertheless Pub Theatre has award-winning contemporary drama with What's the Time Mr Wolf?, there's no less than THREE unmissable poetry nights, there's a book quiz, workshops, talks from publishers & meetings with agents, in fact everything's unmissable so clear July 5th-14th for one of the top 5 small festivals in one of the top 10 small towns!

Now here’s a thought. Since Shakespeare’s sonnets explore every aspect of love ~ passion, pain, tenderness, vulgarity, violence, madness, sadness, lust and loss ~ then maybe strung together they would add up to a play... or at least a theatrical performance. Swansea-based physical theatre company Volcano thought so, in fact Paul Davies deviser-director of L.O.V.E thought so back in 1992 and this twenty-year on revival is now touring with a new cast and “subtle and not-so-subtle” changes from the original. The genital rubbing & sniffing may come under the not-so-subtle heading, and perhaps also the extended snog-the-audience episode ~ not that I’m complaining, the kiss was lovely even though the Dark Lady did then swig deeply from my wine.
And this show doesn't claim to be a play as such, it's a series of dramatic cameos using Shirley Bassey songs, playfulness, balletic physicality, bawdy comedy and brutality too. The trio are amazing performers, especially Andrew Keay as the lovely boy, and bring ambiguous depths more often cruel than touching to the familiar sonnets: Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? becomes a fight and My mistress’s eyes are nothing like the sun contemptuous homo banter. From seductive to (literally) biting, ardent to murderous, in Auden's words mortal, guilty, but entirely beautiful. There's madness, but maybe not like Will knew it, more Psycho than Ophelia, and by the end everyone is stripped to their undies ~ though white as a detergent ad and the Dark Lady's with a touch of Bridget Jones.  Back in 1993 this was hailed as dangerous theatre, obscene and erotic: maybe Beyonce videos on screen in every High Street Curries since then have redefined our terms but it’s exciting, skilful, performance with beautiful visuals and well worth seeing.

 Segueing loosely through Keats, who admired Shakespeare for his "Negative Capability, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason" and inspired by a piece in the Indie, I want to suggest that people who complain Wikipedia isn't definitive or even unbiased are missing the point. We are, thankfully, moving away from the Age of Reason with its absurd focus on facts and certainty. So what if inaccuracies clamber in with more valid hypotheses? Reality is porous, truth is variable. We've all got a filter against the malicious, mendacious, or plain crazy: it's called instinctive intelligence. So bring on Wiki-world, and let's all remind ourselves how to use the mind-skills we used to have before the pernicious school system brainwashed us into believing learning meant being taught, education meant being told, and thinking meant second-guessing to conform. Scientists, or at least one esteemed geneticist, reckon our appraisal skills & hence intellect are in decline, maybe Wiki-chaos will show us the way back to evaluating situations as our ancestors did and honouring experiential learning over received wisdom.

 Looking ahead: Frome Scriptwriters are thrilled our next production, Flaming Crackers, short plays with a festive theme, will again be set alight onstage by a talented team of actors provided by Stepping Out Theatre Company ~ and this time our rehearsed-reading event will be on in Bristol too!   More details with next posting.
 And looking even further ahead, 2013 may be a vintage year for me for courses in spectacular places: check my website if you're interested, and pick between Spain, France, Greek islands, and two rather lovely venues where you don't need euros...

Final meeting of Frome Scriptwriters before our festival debut event Flaming Voices, last readthrough of some cracking pieces. Bristol's Stepping Out Theatre Company stepped in to supply professional actors & direction for this rehearsed read-through ~ a fantastic & exciting support for our fledgling group. As Rosie says,"New writing is always exciting because you just don't know what gems are hidden there." All that glitters will be revealed 8pm Friday 13 July at the Cornerhouse, and it's FREE so come early for a seat!

Still on the subject of new writing: Short Shrifts is the collective title of twelve short plays by Peter Oswald ~ we're talking really short here, 90 minutes for the full dozen with an interval thrown in ~ which are bizarre and often beautiful. The writing is superb, both real and surreal: clever, lyrical, and often savagely funny. Meet the couple who discover when meeting on holiday they share the same town.. street... house... name.. ("small world!") and the husband who reads out crazy newspaper items that reflect his own broken relationship, the wife who taunts her husband with his inability to do anything ("you can forget about death Donald you're not up to it, death is a leap in the dark and you've never been able to leap.")...a ventriloquist, a trumpet player, cannibals, and Medusa. And more. Despite the disparity, these pieces hold together through an enchanting discordancy: however absurd or baffling the situation there's always a thread of uneasy but palpable connection with human feelings of frustration and longing, hope and disappointment. I absolutely loved the cadence of language and the theatricality of form in this boundary-pushing writing, and the actors ~ Josephine Larsen, musician Nemo Jones and the writer himself ~ are stunningly good. It's on till July 7th at the Brewery in Bristol, go!

Scoring poetry is arbitrary bullshit, says Jack Dean in his introduction to the National Slam Final at the Bierkeller on Thursday: the poetry is the thing. And, with teams from Bristol, Bath, Birmingham, Cardiff and London, the thing was mostly brilliant. There were a few new-wave formulaic recitations with fluttering hands and heart-stopping pauses, a couple of William Burroughs-stylee rants, but most were funny, funky, and original. Bath's poets, including and especially Robbie Vane and Liv Tork, did themselves proud but despite the judges' sometimes baffling corroboration of Jack Dean's thesis, no-one could deny team London deserved their first place. Fantastic stuff Keith Jarrett and the rest of the trio!
..

Oddsocks, famous for seizing the sails of Shakespeare’s best-loved plays & ripping them down the middle, have turned their mischievous minds to The Merry Wives of Windsor, which arrived at Bristol QEH on Saturday. In the persona of a 1950s television theatre company - with onstage studio screen monitoring the action – they perform a contemporary version complete with snatches of skiffle and interruptions from their sponsor, Mrs Quickly’s household remedies. Elli Mackenzie and Andrew McGillan shone in a quintet of jolly performers, delivering the ever-popular high-level of audience interaction, and some memorably funny moments: Mistress Page shuddering with orgasmic glee as the Bendix where Falstaff is hiding goes into full spin, the inept ‘product placements’, and a marvellous final woodland scene as the lascivious knight meets his come-uppance from romping night-sprites and Anne Page flees with her lover, fortuituously called Fenton – giving the best gag of the night as her father dashes off roaring ‘Fenton! Fenton! Fenton’ and Falstaff takes off his antlers to quip that many a dog runs after deer… (the youtube clip made national news in November – what a gift!)

But there were bits that didn’t quite work so well: slapstick comedy that should be slicker, silly walks in lieu of characterisation, gratuitous bunion-munching & a pointless radio horserace sequence padding out the second act, and - most importantly - Shakespeare’s words. The play within the parody seemed to become almost an incumbence, scenes scoured for chances of mockery and speeches milked for ridicule. Yet it is possible (as Oddsox showed with Hamlet a couple of years ago) to show pathos even in farce, enhancing hilarity while engaging more intensely with the story. More could have been made of the difficulties women faced in a society controlled by men, and my particular disappointment was Falstaff’s ludicrous Tweedledum outfit: I wished he'd been shown in fat-Elvis glory to introduce the poignancy of misplaced aspirations. Without these elements it’s a tale that’s tediously one-dimensional.
But the audience laughed and clearly love this endearing troupe, which is what matters.

Frome Scriptwriters, a new group for local writers developing work for stage or radio, launched this week at the Cornerhouse. This is another initiative from Rosie Finnegan, enterprising entrepreneur who brought Nevertheless Theatre Company to Frome, and once again I'm chuffed to be on board to support this venture. We started small, but aim to grow. It's a cliché but true: there's much talent in this town - and, unlike other places I've been, much goodwill & mutual support. Meetings will be monthly, democratic, free, and open to all.

Interesting developments for all who hanker for an effective library service: the anti-closure protest has won its case against Somerset Libraries on grounds of European diversity legislation. Opening hours in 23 libraries have been reinstated and 11 are no longer headed for closure, but councillors remain defensive about their plan to 'pass the least-used libraries into community hands.'
"The world is changing and we need to change with it," said Cllr John Woodman, Conservative, citing pressure from a 'zero book budget' - a claim corrected online to £200,000. Another comment suggests: "Somerset library service has been one of the worst managed in the whole of England for many years... Now the council has a chance to rethink the whole future of its libraries the first item on the agenda is to dramatically improve the quality of the management. What (John Woodman) has said is such rubbish it hardly is worth the ink used to print it."

Frome Library, under the tireless and imaginative stewardship of Wendy Miller-Williams, has a high profile for community book-related events and is always at the heart of the summer Arts Festival. The coldest day of the year so far - we're talking minus 7 degrees - saw a posse of local bibliophiles and writers converge in the library foyer for tea, biscuits, and book sharing to celebrate National Libraries Day. Travel writer John Payne signed copies of his new book on Bath, which opens with another wintry scene, from a walk we did last year: The city is there, somewhere beneath us. Thick snow beneath our feet and a swirly misty frozen rain falling gently from grey skies stained with yellow... How very apt, on a day that began subzero and has now shrouded the town with snow.