The no-jacket-required issue, mostly outdoors

As we in the Southwest shuffle with fingers crossed into festival season, at present time there's much to look forward to. Frome Festival has a full programme out, and Bath Fringe Festival - always influenced by the creative energy of the students as well as the city's established traditions of music, theatre & comedy - is spilling with great-sounding events and exhibitions, many of them free.  Rosie and I went along to see a late-night production of a new play by Gabrielle Finnegan (who Frome audiences may remember from our Nevertheless production Time Slides for the 2016 Frome festival) at Widcombe Social Club on Monday evening. Gabrielle joins the two actors as narrator of Cat and her Whittington, retelling the familiar story from a modern perspective & a self-avowed Marxist feminist view. Full of factual data and angry polemic, this unapologetically transgresses the general rule that entertainment shouldn't preach, but all the case-study situations are realistic and the link narration, delivered mainly in panto-style rhyming couplets, is witty as well as vehement. Personally I really enjoyed it - this is a director/performer to look out for. 

Still lingering in Bath, the Holburne Museum is reopening, but - like several theatres in the southwest, with a sympathetic eye on those still not comfortable with - or able to - travel, so there's an online exhibition of the works of Thomas Lawrence, introduced by curator Amina Wright and free on Youtube. Lawrence's reputation hasn't survived so strongly as his rival Gainsborough, whose famous Blue Boy (painted in response to his Red Boy) hangs in Dulwich Picture Gallery, a regular Sunday-afternoon-walk from my parents house when I was a child. Late 18th Century art was more admired at that time, and a reproduction of Lawrence's painting of Miss Murray hung over my bed as my father had, in a rare moment of sentiment triumphing over gloom, for some reason decided she looked a bit like me.   

And the fabulous sunshine has led to a scatter of outdoor gatherings, as well as some wonderful walks and incredible floral displays along hedgerows, fields, streets and gardens. Saturday's market was full of the usual displays of plants, craft, garments, jewellery, cakes and coffee stalls, with the Tribe busking on the bridge. Here's three popular Fromites - a writer and two musicians - spotted by an appropriate stall, and Somerset's favourite poet Liv Torc.

Live music has already returned to the streets of Frome with Frome's Tribe taking position on the bridge on market days, and on Sunday afternoon the boys took the open-air stage at Marston Park. Rosie and I walked there down the lanes and across the fields, and enjoyed a great set of rock classics from the band in this beautiful lakeside location in stunning sunshine.

If all this seems too paradisiacal, there's still danger imminent: our tranquil southern fields are under increasing threat of obliteration by a massive housing development which would destroy a rural area twice the size of Bruton. There's nothing NIMBY about the protest at this prospect: the estate will have no facilities, medical educational or social, and will simply provide easy access to the bypass for commuters - these houses won't supply local need, and many may remain vacant while developers wait for the real value - the land - to increase. StopSGC is the link to support the protest.

Ending this week with a quick shout-out to Frome Times, a local paper that reports the issues that actually matter. This week's front page features two environmental issues plus an award for the town's 'Active & In Touch' volunteer group: it's great to have a 'local paper' that follows and features the positive aspects of town life and the real issues. Frome Times is constantly an intelligent medium for actual news - you can read a digital version here. 

Arty start to 2019 and other January tidings

The arty start to the new year begins at Bath's Holburne Museum (specialism: knowledgeable & chatty volunteers) which has several temporary temptations enhancing its Georgian splendour this month: That marvellous study of '60s iconography and human nature Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy has been shoehorned into the long gallery with the silverware, where it succeeds in looking utterly stunning, glimmering beyond the teapots as you enter. Ossie Clark influenced so many of us in those ruffled chiffonny days of spliffs and parties, and David Hockney's disarming simplicity of style has mirror-like clarity. Simply staring was one of those epiphany moments, spilling over with nostalgia, and our small group of visitors, strangers on entry, began confiding in hushed voices, awed like pilgrims in Chartres when the sunlight shines through the stained glass rose windows. More treats upstairs too, with an on-loan exhibition of Gainsborough's portraits of his theatrical chums - Mrs Siddons of course, Thomas Linley, John Henderson, and others who trod the boards of Drury Lane and the Haymarket - and also the boards of Bath's own Theatre Royal, which acquired its licence through the influence of Gainsborough's friend, the architect John Palmer. No photography is allowed in this gallery but this National Portrait Gallery image of the painting of David Garrick, 18th century equivalent of Hugh Grant, shows how much more fluent Gainsborough's portraiture becomes with friends, when there was no need to give enhanced evidence of status, wealth, or lapdogs.
Bath in winter sunshine, with Wedgwood blue sky and gilded buildings, is an artwork in itself of course so with visuals very much the theme of the day, my next drop-in was the Victoria Art Gallery by Pulteney Bridge. The current visiting exhibition is On Paper: from the Arts Council Collection. The connecting notion of this small collection is that all use paper 'as a material in its own right rather than just a surface to be painted or drawn upon.' Collage seems an obvious process, and there are some examples (including a reconstruction of Wittgenstein's thought processes by Eduardo Paolozzi) as well as other more esoteric interpretations of the theme. I quite like this portrait of Sid Vicious in paper, board and glitter by Jim Lambie - the extra glow is reflected room lighting - not sure whether or not it's enhanced...

A fascinating & provocative new exhibition opened on the first Friday of the new year at Frome's Black Swan Arts: Eleanor Bartlett's paintings on the theme of Matter - challenging in that the artist (here pictured) demands 'does art have to mean anything?' and fascinating in that this seems contradicted by her premise - that 'matter describes form and form resolves matter in a continuing and unstable exchange...  the chosen vehicle of realisation, literally the stuff of imagination...'  The Words at the Black Swan workshop on Monday led by poet Louise Green found much to engage with in these impressive black blocks created by tar and wax.
Other than visual imagery, the first week of the new year has been a time for favourite local walks, well wrapped up and within striking distance of a warm inn: here's Stourhead lake early on a frosty morning.



And now as the new year limbers up for its second week, normal service is resuming in the creative corridors of Frome. Our Nevertheless Fringe Theatre Frome Festival co-production with Frome Actors Network ~ provisionally entitled The Sex and Death Quartet ~ is back in rehearsal, and Roots Sessions at the Grain Bar have restarted (hurrah!) with the fabulous Raggedy Men, on absolute peak form with our favourite punk classics and outrageously riffing up some new ones.


Final footnote for the first post of 2019: a look back at the week before christmas when Hunting Raven Books sold FIFTY-FOUR copies of Frome Unzipped - fingers crossed book-tokens may keep the roll going a bit longer... Our popular independent bookshop was on ITV West News on Wednesday too, with its manager the lovely Tina Gaisford-Waller rightly extolling her books, her staff, their customer-care, their customers, and our town.

Murder, mystery, pirates & a reborn reprobate

Last year, you may remember, was the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, but you may not know it was also for Chinese playwright Tang Xianzu. The Confucius Institute felt the coincidence deserved a play-writing contest, which Bath writer Clare Reddaway won: she and her cleverly entertaining play The Red Court, produced by Rapscallion Theatre, will go to Shanghai later this year after a couple of local previews. I caught it at Burdall's Yard as part of Bath's Fringe Festival. The plot blends the true story of a 5-year-old political murder involving corruption in the Chongqing province with Macbeth, using Shakespeare's twin themes of ambition and betrayal plus a few direct quotes to bind the two stories succinctly together. Four actors take on all the key roles: Mayur Bhatt is impressive as ruthlesss Wu, with Michelle Wen Lee the wife who, like Lady Macbeth, was wicked but not quite so ruthless... and despite the sinister theme there are moments of comedy, mostly from Sarah Curwen as a brutal Mongolian Police chief with a Yorkshire accent, also rapidly switching from oriental fortune teller to narrator. Ashley Green is strong as both the US Embassy official and the English fixer-victim. Simple and effective setting and tight directing from Carolyn Csonka ~ the Shanghainese are in for a treat.

Visiting Bath was also an opportunity to catch the Brueghel exhibition at the Holburne Museum.  Here I learned Brueghel was not a painter but a dynasty ~ a mini-factory almost, as many of their paintings are versions of Pieter the Elder’s most popular ones re-composed from ‘cartoons’ of stock characters merry-making at festivals or rubber-necking at bible stories, all re-envisaged in Flemish surroundings. Most fascinating was a Pieter the Younger painting of The Procession to Calgary, a massive landscape scene painted with minute detail and almost photographic depth of field. Legends next to the paintings are cursory but I learned a lot from an informative volunteer who pointed out the strange composition, with the central focus on a nun giving alms to a beggar, rather than the struggling christ deep in the festive procession. Other anachronistic figures representing simple charity are dotted about too, and there's a solitary observer who looks like the artist... This 1602 version of his father's painting forty years before might hide a big secret: with Flanders violently divided between Reformation and Counter-Reformation, perhaps this particular Brueghel was out of sympathy with the Catholicism of his wealthy patrons. The not-so-hidden clues point that way.

Another double-purpose trip on Wednesday, to Bristol, for a Treasure Island Story Walk around the docks in afternoon sunshine with a swashbuckling pirate in another production from Show of Strength. Our 18th Century guide entertained his group of mainly families with lots of arrrrghs and some terrible pirate jokes but the children following this charismatic Pied Piper all seemed to grasp the plot whether they'd read Robert Lewis Stevenson's yarn or not. I was one of the 'nots', having as a child little interest in doubloons, but it was fascinating see the connections with the taverns and caverns of Bristol Docks.

And then to Colston Hall, to see Russell Brand in his RE-BIRTH tour. I'd love to tell you about it but you can't describe a Russell Brand show, it's a sort of hurricane of hilarity, vulgarity, and social critique, with moving moments and inspirational moments and a massive amount of prancing. The difference between this tour, he says, and his last one is his daughter, born at the end of last year, whose arrival has changed his life. There's also the fact he's off drink, and drugs, and is now monogamous, all of which have impacted on his life ~ and also inspired some wildly funny stage routines. Russell Brand's outrage at media and consumerism is well-known but I didn't expect him to show clips of his campaigning interviews, freeze-framing to ridicule his words and antics and to marvel at his naivety in trying to bring about social revolution. So what does Russell Brand want to do now, apart from performing to wild applause? Ending on a serious note, he talks about love, loving his daughter, and using love to make the world a better place for her to live, reminding us that in a hundred years time we won't be alive but our ideas will have shaped the future... My friend Esther Nagle (we met at the Polers'n'Poets event earlier this year) managed to get a hug and a photo in the interval when she gave him her yoga book, and he mentioned that gift as he closed the show. Not a night anyone there will forget, especially not Esther.

Regular readers may notice there's no mention in this post of The Lurgy. That's because, though it's still holding my larynx hostage and kicking my energy level down to the basement, I have devised a cunning plan to co-exist with it: viz, alternating days between active and inert. So I've still missed whole days of things but it's now a plan, a bit  like the 5:2 diet you could say. And I'm posting this early because both the Brueghel exhibition and the Treasure Island Story walk are only running till Sunday so this weekend is your last chance!

They say it's your birthday...

It's been a bumper week for birthdays. First off, Bristol Old Vic at 250 the oldest working theatre in the English-speaking world, celebrating last Monday with an all-day party in King Street where circus performers, dancers, and musicians entertained the crowds enjoying sunshine & festival-style feasting  - viz, vans of international cuisine and fluffy icecream. Inside the actual theatre there were free shows on stage all day. I joined the queues to see Yesterday's Island Revisited, a script-in-hand explanation, with film sequences, about a community drama project in the 1980s.  It was all terrific fun, let's do it again in 2266 for the 500th!


Also part of the BOV celebrations, and also revisiting a previous success: Kneehigh's revival of their 20-year old show about Marc Chagall with the enticing title The Flying Lovers of Vitebsk. The romance between first-sight lovers Marc and Bella has fantastic dramatic potential ~ a young Jewish artist struggling to present his surrealist view of the beauty of life in an era of Nazi oppression and world wars. The uxorious couple (Marc Antolin and Audrey Brisson) are absolutely delightful but the downside of a show with only two actors is a huge reliance on scripted exposition, mostly in speeches direct to audience. In this long string of information, the moments of interaction, dance and song all shine like lustrous pearls. Lighting design (Malcolm Rippeth) beautifully supports these cameos, and I liked the set (though not everyone did) which for me evoked a half-ruined playground, its angled props like a broken star of David. Live music from Ian Ross and James Gow was great too but how much more magical this would all have been with more show and less tell.

Meanwhile in Bath, Holburne Museum celebrated its 100th anniversary in appropriately elegant style: a soiree on the terrace of the rather beautiful glass-walled new extension and the launch of a book of 'ekphrastic' poems inspired by art in the museum's collection. From Palette to Pen  comprises twenty poems from an impressive list of local poets including Rosie Jackson, Dawn Gorman, Philip Grosse, Claire Williamson, Carrie Etter, and George Szirtes. Prime mover in this project was Frances-Anne King who was aided by Sue Boyle, Linda Saunders & Lesley Saunders in editing this prestigious publication. On a sunny Friday evening, it was delightful to catch up with poet friends there to read or support, including our own current Festival Poet Laureate Steven Payne - who will hand on this annual nomination at Frome's Poetry Cafe on July 4th, so bring your own poem and come along..

Elsewhere in Bath there's a Fringe Arts Festival continuing till 12 June with plenty of art to inspire in the galleries especially in Walcot Street which features exhibitions of work illustrating the utopia/dystopia continuum: Walcot Chapel is brimming with colour & dangling flowers & beautiful pieces like this glass mask, while down the road you're warned to 'be aware the drawings beyond this sign would disturb some people' in a setting like a student flat after a trainspotting-style party. There's much else on too, including daily performances at Burdall's Yard from Onset Productions. It's a fantastic space for theatre - I watched Inward Ripples which features Matt Harrison who will be showing his talents again in Frome in our Nevertheless pub theatre production Time Slides - another pre-festival hint here, as tickets are now bookable...

And in a week positively pulsing with celebrations for anniversaries and birthdays, Frome had a couple too: The Artisan marked their first year in business with fantastic rock cover-band Hammervilles, and writer Alison Clink chose Absolutely Bowie at the Cheese & Grain for her own celebrations. Much dancing occurred at both events. Saturday saw a Carnival party in Victoria Park, and Sunday - blimey is it that time again? - yes, we had another Independent Market day...

Times a'changing...

Down in the tunnels below Bristol Temple Meads station something dramatic is happening. Tobacco Factory Theatres Beyond is staging the In Your Face Theatre production of Trainspotting. "I was shocked, and I wrote the fucking thing" Irvine Welsh is quoted as saying when he saw it in Edinburgh last year. But he wrote it in the '90s, about the '80s, so maybe times have changed. If you remember the novel and/or the equally controversial movie with the sensational soundtrack, you won't be surprised that the plot is basically the same as the 'advisory notes' on the flyer: "nudity, drug use, sexual violence and very strong language throughout". Key scenes are all there, shockingly gross & funny & frightening & tragic, and seven ferociously talented young actors evoke the principal characters: psycho Begbie, sweet Sick boy, sexy Gail, and Mark Renton as narrative voice for a disaffected subculture which impinges, like the flying poo, on everyone else too. ("I was going to wear these jeans tomorrow," I heard one bespattered man mutter on the way out.)
This is high-definition 'in-your-face' theatre, with audience members inches from the action and likely to be sat on, spat at, sprayed, poked or slurped at random. But however vulgar or violent, the graphic cameos are not gratuitous. From Renton's opening Choose Life speech to the final scene, it's a shout of rage for young lives at the bottom of a hierarchical society, dismissed as debris from childhood. It's theatre to shake windows and rattle walls, and Gavin Ross as Mark Renton gives such an incredible performance that when he stepped forward to speak to the audience at the end it was several minutes before he could get a word through the cheers. Staging and soundtrack are superb too, do go and see. You may have to kill for a ticket. Images Andreas Grieger

And straight on from Sandstorm, and Tubthumping in time-slip Glasgow, over the river to Bristol's 'vanguard venue' Mr Wolf for a great gig featuring some of Frome's finest singer-songwiters: Al O'Kane with support from Tom Corneill and Emma Shoesmith.

And now for something completely different. Impressionism: Capturing Life is the charming but costly temporary exhibition currently at the Holburne Museum in Bath. My pilgrimage there was rewarded by this small gem by Seurat: Une baignade, one of a series of studies for the Bathers at Asnières, on a canvas small enough to fit in the lid of the artist's paintbox as he painted 'en plein air'. Other than this, and a stormy landscape by Boudin (who apparently inspired Monet to paint outdoors) there's not much striking or even unifying in this small collection. Curator's notes on the movement explain the artists' themes while naturalistic were also glamorous to appeal to wealthy art collectors, subjects 'reclining on the banks of the Seine' to evoke frivolity & luxury. Asnières is actually an industrial suburb, the riverside buildings are clearly factories, and the group are young workmen. It's my favourite painting partly for that reason. (The final painting, in the National Gallery, is also arguably post-impressionist, in fact early pointillist. Just saying...)

as the glitter-dust settles

So how do you avoid that post-production comedown? A trip to London's Globe, of course! I've had the groundling tickets for months, and on Tuesday Rosie and I headed off to see Richard II with Charles Edwards as the fatally flawed hero-king. This play was a dangerous one for Shakespeare, as it raised the notion that monarchy has no 'divine right' and an unpopular ruler can be deposed without the wrath of God ~ a radical idea that his patron Elizabeth detested even more than our current leaders dislike any opposition to imposed austerity: it was easier to grab power from abusers in those days.
Richard II has long been my favourite play: as an emo teen I related totally to the rejected king's self-pitying speeches ~ I still have my tear-stained 1955 Penguin edition ~  and I've seen some brilliant productions. This one was the best. From the marvellous opening, when the child king is promised unimpeachable power amid showers of golden glitter, to the fantastic ending of ultimate betrayal (a bold decision to change his murderer to the one he most loved) the performance was superb. Every line seemed thought in that moment, and the traumatic meltdown as the king realises his delusion is unforgettably shocking in its quiet understatement.
So when Rosie & I noticed, while sharing a veggie platter & bottle of wine after the show, that the cast were in the same bar similarly refreshing themselves, I accosted the mufti king with camera and stammering groupie speech, and this snap is the result. Taken I think by the Earl of Mowbray. And I can report the actors are as lovely as their characters are duplicitous. Awesome day all round.

Back home, the review is out for Midsummer Dusk ~ you can read it on our Nevertheless Theatre webpage or the Frome Standard website. Thanks John Payne for your appreciative words (brilliantly crafted... magical... unexpected gem of the festival...) and thanks to official photographer David Chedgy for yours too ~  and for sharing the 'Last Letter Home' as your personal favourite picture of the festival.

Photographer Alan Denison sent me this picture of the Short Story Competition winners, with organisers Brenda Bannister and Alison Clink, to supplement my images on the Words at Frome Festival page. There will be details of their names & winning stories, eventually, on their Festival Short Story page here.

And over in Bath there's a Canaletto exhibition at Holburne Museum: a small but fascinating & informatively displayed collection of the 18th century Venetian landscape artist's perception of London ~ including the promenade in Vauxhall Gardens with its 'supper booths' and public entertainment, showing that pop-up bars & open-air theatre have long been part of our culture.

Canaletto was in London on a commission to promote Waterloo Bridge, newly opened in 1750. His images were used for guidebooks, although the manipulated perspective, with buildings shifted to enhance views, gave an idealised version of reality. But then I suppose so did Wordsworth, with his eulogy to Westminster Bridge... which brings me nicely back to London bridges, and crossing the new Millennium Bridge to come home after our big Day Out.

Art and Life

The Holburne Museum in Bath has been showing a special exhibition of works by Rembrandt and his Contemporaries which, though it could have been more honestly titled Some 17th Century Dutch Artists, was rich with social interest and included several fabulous paintings. Most stunning of these was Rembrandt's portrait of his mother, painted when he was only 23, of which the Indie review said simply This one is worth the price of admission alone. You could take a folding chair and just gaze at this picture all morning, just absorbing its humanity. 

This was a fascinating era for painters: the first generation of artists who painted for a market rather than for wealthy patrons and the Church, and subject matter was less about individual portraiture and more about society, with something of a moralistic tinge to many of the domestic scenes.  Several have narrative strands redolent of a dread of indolence and what it may lead to, while some of the landscapes show social changes with the emergence of the new bourgeoisie.  And after this enthralling immersion, there's a toy theatre of painterly characters and props to rearrange and make your very own Dutch interior... hoe zit dat!

Also in Bath, The Persistence of Memory, written by Alison Farina and directed by Nancy Medina, transferred to the Rondo after a highly successful run in Bristol. The play deals with contemporary issues ~ dementia and family breakup ~ in a classic context as Mneme, the muse of memory, arrives to oversee Dante DeLucca's decline and to use her goddess powers to console him and his daughter as his life fades away. With so moving a theme sensitively treated by the script, and such excellent lead actors, it's not surprising this piece garnered 5-star reviews: there's subtle humour from the start with Mneme's C-list-celeb self-introduction, but by the end I wasn't the only one damp-eyed as her terrible pact with Duncan Bonner's Dante is finally concluded. 

And now back to Frome, where our annual Carnival on Saturday filled the streets with pirates, music and circus skills and processions for children throughout the day, and in the evening roads throughout the town closed for an eclectic parade of Carnival Competition entries which range from elaborate floats with illuminations that would shame Sirius, to blokes with a penchant for girly underwear, including plenty of whirling twirling majorettes of all ages and sizes. It's excellent street theatre, and the best place to be a groundling is at Cornerhouse corner, where after the 2-hour road-show is over, the awesome Pete Gage Band plays fantastic blues rock that gets us all dancing.

This week's tenuous footnote: any scriptwriter wondering how to move an audience to tears with exquisite non-expositional narrative should check out the final moments of Coronation Street on Friday, as Roy Cropper watches his beloved, terminally-ill, Hayley (the first transexual soap heroine) gaily singing When Will I See You Again? with Fizz and Sean at his birthday karaoke.... which just shows, you should never disparage 'Continuing Drama' series simply because they're popular: the best have strong characters, gripping storylines, and actors like David Neilson and Julie Hesmondhalgh to ensure superb pop-up theatre on a small screen near you now!