May Day fun, frolics & failure...

So.. an odd thing happened just as I was about to post this update: the entire entry disappeared. So instead of an a thoughtful and possibly insightful review of last week, here - one day late -  is a slightly frantic summary: 

Music first, as Saturday night was the hotly-anticipated Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal event at the Cheese & Grain: five superb acts performing to a full & friendly audience, with opening and links from DJ Patmandu. Here's The Back Wood Redeemers who followed Henry Wacey, Back of the Bus, Mighty One, and The Raggedy Men -  all brilliant. A fantastic night of dancing with friends and listening to fabulous music from these great Frome performers.

Sunday was Independent Market day, followed by an afternoon session at Bar Lotte from the truly brilliant Rosco Shakes, with daylight giving a slightly better opportunity to catch a snap of this fabulous funk-blues band. From a laconic version of Ain't nobody's business but my own, to a rocking Kansas city here I come, the Rosco team delivers superbly in its own inimitable style, with Tim literally dancing as he speed-plays the keyboard. 

This was a great week for arts: Mark Brooke's provocative and unusual images of Melissa Stanton-Matthews were on show at the Station Gallery, where on Thursday Melissa also read some of the poems from their shared collection of art and words Meet Me Inside - a candid sharing of feelings about 'being human' in a world that values beauty above other attributes.  Melissa's intimate personal poems chime with the series of portraits Mark created to show the real woman beyond the perfect model, but Melissa is actually very beautiful.

Friday saw a plethora of exciting art show openings: Black Swan has some amazing work from Simon Hitchens, whose Beyond Body exhibition explores the connection between our experiences and those of inanimate matter like rock, to ask questions about our concept of experience: "what makes a being sentient? Is a mountain or stone a being?" Simon is fascinated, he explains, by 'the difference between the human and the non-human – what passes and what outlasts.”

Showing until 26 May and well worth a visit.

Over at the Whittox Gallery on the same night, another thought-provoking exhibition opened. Endangered tells an important story about the life cycle of eels in Britain where sadly they are now close to extinction. Julia Manning's beautiful wood and linocut prints chronicle their amazing journeys from birth in Somerset rivers to finally reaching the Sargasso Sea, and she has been working in schools to raise awareness and hopefully halt their decline. This fascinating and informative exhibition, which also includes some wildlife sketches by Nik Pollard, is showing until 25 June.

Finally in this splendid arty triumvirate of Friday night openings: the Art Fair at the Silk Mill & Bennett Centre was open throughout the weekend - a delightful throng of art and craft of every description. The quality of work by these local makers is fantastic, and their ingenuity is amazing too: Paul Juillerat's felted banners incorporating personal treasures, and esoteric art created from scrap by Matthew Sowter to name just two of the intriguing practices on display along with the paintings and high-quality craft work.

So Friday night in Frome was buzzing with arty vibes but unfortunately I'd booked to see Mark Thomas at the Rondo in Bath and missed all these openings, although did manage a full catch-up around the venues in Frome next day. Mark's lockdown shows had been funny and full-on political so I was hoping for some satisfying satire on the current state of the nation, but disappointingly his focus was on other issues, like having a row with the front rows and giving a  detailed description of his annoying aged mother's toenails, so I left at the interval to enjoy a stroll back through the city and a wait for the bus at Be At One, where barmen wear ear plugs but the vibe is always friendly. Here's Bladud in the Parade Gardens, from my afternoon stroll round the city.

And finally - I think, though I may have missed something as it was a busy week - the continuing benefit of lockdown for me has been Zoom, a portal to art talks and theatre performance when live visits were banned and this week a connection to two interesting meetings hosted by Penny Hay at Bath Spa School of Education, who talked with Liv Torc about the amazing work with the Hot Poets.

 Liv is passionate about poetry and about the urgency of need for awareness of our climate crisis: the Hot Poets project she's spearheading made such an impact at COP26 that the team have been invited to join the UN at COP27.  Liv talked fluently, and often funnily, about the contribution that poetry can make to essential awareness of issues, and about her own writing process: 'I look on it like sculpting a piece of clay - you have to work on it while its wet', she says. 

Later that day  Penny Hay also zoom-interviewed Mikey Please, recent recipient of a Bafta for his Aardman-developed animated film Robin Robin,  Mikey talked entertainingly about his own animations and the process with Aardman - surprisingly, it's so complicated that no retakes are possible meaning everything you see is the first take - and gave credit to all the team who worked on the project, including musicians Ben & Beth Please aka The Bookshop Band, and, especially pleasing for me, my writer/film-maker son Sam.

So there you are, that was the week that got wiped by my system, or at least the shreds remaining in my memory - with a final footnote which is also the reason there's no report here on the May Independent Market, as my morning was shared with 400 others forming a human chain around the Saxondale site currently under threat of cynical development. There's an alternative plan on offer which would benefit us all far more (you can view it here) and the Big Mayday Hug around the site will hopefully have shown how much support this one has, and the level of concern in Frome about the future of this area in the heart of the town.

A double dose of drama, and some Hot Words

“Never boring for a split second” was Noel Coward’s view of Harold Pinter’s dramas: that's certainly true for Theatre Royal Bath’s new production of The Homecoming, arguably  the most Pinteresque of all this playwright's plays. Complex family relationships are revealed by conversational interaction which, whether brutal or benign, always seems banal. On a superb set (designer Liz Ashcroft) conveying in its spaciness the isolation of each inhabitant, director Jamie Glover ensures that every utterance contributes to the sense of non-connection and personal fantasy. The whole saga is brutal, physically and emotionally, yet the stylised unreality of speech with Pinter's iconic pauses and nonsequiturs ensure that it’s more intriguing than scary.All the men are steeped in their own delusions, never fully interacting, their speeches full of self-important fantasies. When these are challenged they crumple, several times literally. They don’t listen to each other, except to scoff. In reality these men are weak and seedy, and when Ruth arrives, the prism tilts. In a society more than ever concerned with gender roles, it’s interesting to surmise what Ruth’s effortless dominance signifies. Her husband’s passivity is as bizarre as her behaviour, and the unseen children are another insoluble: it’s almost as if Pinter didn't want his puzzling play to be ‘solved’ at all...

There are big names here: Mathew Horne - a million miles now from Stacey’s patient adoring Gavin - is impressive as Lenny, one of the strange sons of Max, who is well played by Keith Allen (Trainspotting), and the rest of the cast all have strings of credits. Shanaya Rafaat takes the role of Ruth, the wife who accepts her husband’s family’s offer to adopt her as a whore with the unforgettable farewell to her husband ‘Don’t become a stranger’; Ian Bartholomew is moving as Sam, the more-nearly-normal brother of Max; Geoffrey Lumb is touching as the quiet boxer and Sam Alexander plays Teddy, the homecoming brother.  The best thing I've seen on that stage for a long while. Images: Alan Henning

                                                                                                        

We move, theatrically speaking, now from the social attitudes of England in the 20th Century to those prevailing in 1782, when 133 men and women were thrown off the Zong slave ship as unwanted 'cargo' to preserve their drinking water. The radio version of The Meaning of Zong, produced by Bristol Old Vic, was broadcast on Radio 3 last year (reviewed in this blog March 28) and was both shocking and moving , but this full-stage 2-act version brought spectacular imagery and sound to the tragedy. Giles Terera, who took the role of the agitator for justice Olaudah Equiano (an actual 18th Century campaigner who was himself a stolen for slavery as a child) has been working with director Tom Morris for six years to bring this story to the stage. During that time Bristol became a hub for Black Lives Matter protests, culminating in the toppling of the Colston statue to join the bones of the many black slaves drowned there for their insurance money. As a case study of an era when black men and women were simply cargo, and their

killers were prosecuted not for murder but for an insurance scam, this is fascinating, but it's superb as theatrical performance too, shifting from spectacular displays of djembe drumming (Sediki Dembelo, music designer & performer) to dreamlike sequences under the sea, then shifting to eloquent arguments as the legal case is gathering momentum. Paul Higgins is brilliant as Granville Sharp, nearly worn out by his lonely role of opposition to the slave trade, but sharp enough to see the case through.  Jean Chan's stage & costume design enhanced every mood, with wooden planks a powerful link between the scenes whether as ship decks or menacing threats. Images @curtisrichardphotography.

Readers with particular interest in the theatre bits of this blog will find more on Plays International website here, and here 😊 

Moving on now to a group enterprise in environmental awareness:  Poets have been concerned about the damage caused by mankind to the earth's environment since at least 1820, when John Clare published Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Nature but since COP 26 this concern has become - in the southwest at least - a coordinated effort to create positive change, through raised awareness and informed action. Hot Poets is the result of a collaboration between performance poets Liv Torc and Chris Redmond, supported by a raft of institutions and individuals, and last year they produced a collection of 12 Poems About Saving the World.  Liv and Chris have now taken Hot Poets a stage further, with online workshops to create performance pieces about a chosen environmental project: this week they hosted two readings. At the session on Monday (thank you David Thompson for inviting me!) all of the sixteen poems presented were excellent: impressive in their research, compelling in their message, cleverly crafted, and moving in their delivery. 

The diversity of chosen projects was fascinating, as was the diversity of approaches to crafting a poem: 

Angela Higgs wrote from the future, 'remembering' the transformation of brown-fill sites to solar farms, while Tokoni mourned the sinking islands ('is it home when you can no longer stand on it?') and Jay Farley's marvellous combination of scientific research and clever word play actually managed to convince me that mushrooms can, or at least could, save the world... 

Music spot this week goes to the marvellous Brue River Band, who promised and delivered 'floor-filling funky blues' at the Sun Inn on Saturday - a friendly venue great for atmosphere but not for photos - and Sunday saw quite a lot of people at Rise Community Centre in  Whittox Lane chapel for a fabulous exhibition of wildlife recorded in Easthill, the most ancient of all Frome's undeveloped sites. As well as a large number of screens filled with superb images and fascinating information, there were quizzes to inform and intrigue, cakes and plants for sale, and music to enhance the mood. 

Signing off this week on a personal note: my devoted MacBook, constant companion for the last 7 years, had a heart attack on Thursday and has been dying by degrees. It's currently on a life support system - a new separate keyboard - but requires so many rests, and splutters for words so often, (eg this paragraph has taken 5 minutes) that I've had buy a replacement, on which, hopefully, normal service will eventually be resumed. Massive appreciation to David Goodman, without whose technical - and emotional - support, my MacCrisis would be still unresolved.  Off now to the Proof Pudding book club, for review-sharing and cake.