A mixed bag: Nazis, novels, birdsong, and bands.

Drama first, as Vienna 1934 - Munich 1938  written, directed by, and featuring, Vanessa Redgrave, is showing at the Ustinov Studio in Bath until August 3rd. If this seems a strange name for a play, that’s because it is not a play, it is a scrapbook - a family album, its creator calls it.  Vanessa Redgrave, a stately and sparkling 82 year old, arrives on stage from the start to steer us through her collection of photographs of family and friends projected on screen behind her. Some then become animated and arrive onstage to speak for themselves, in scripts devised by Vanessa from journals, poems, and memories. She watches these cameos for much of the time.

Her support team - Robert Boulter a charming Stephen Spender, Lucy Doyle delightful as feisty anti-Nazi Muriel Gardiner, and Paul Hilton mesmerising in all his roles (unforgettable as Koloman Wallisch at execution and Thomas Mann indicting England's collusion with Fascism) - all help to create the lost world of Europe before Hitler’s war.  It's a time of political struggle but still hope. Socialism is the language of all these people - poets and subversives, who all live to work for, and express the need for, all people to be free. ‘Everyone my father knew was a socialist’ says Vanessa in her programme notes. It is another world and, despite the atrocities, an innocent one.  

The detailed events make this a hard story to follow, even with programme notes - and don’t go if you want indulgent memories of theatre in the ‘40s and ‘50s. Go instead to see what they never told you at school, even if you studied history, as I did right through university.  There is so much here that we all need to understand, even with hindsight, about the misdirections of national leaders and the courage of individuals. Image Nobby Clark

Back in Frome, life is settling down after the festival but not without words and music. Hunting Raven Books had one of their highly enjoyable 'Author Events', this time at the Town Hall (with sandwiches!) where manager Tina Gaisford-Waller was in conversation with fiction writer David Nicholls. Hard to believe it's ten years since One Day was the backdrop to summer for just about everyone I knew, copies past from hand to hand on beaches and poolsides everywhere - I still feel hot and sandy just looking at the cover. His new novel Sweet Sorrow looks set to be massively popular too. David was an actor before he became a novelist and screenwriter, so he knows how to hold an audience, and as Tina shares this skill the discussion was highly enjoyable, giving fascinating insight into the craft of structuring storyline and creating credible character.

On Friday Black Swan Arts hosted an exhibition launch to celebrate their 'LISTEN - Summer of Sound' project, which will involve a wide range of audial treats at the gallery and beyond. Singing the World: The Dawn Chorus is the contribution from painter Mike Collier, who was inspired by birdsong heard early one May morning. The processes devised to move the sonograms to coloured paintings are complex and intriguing: even more fascinating is the complete set of neumatic notations filling one wall. Bennett Hogg's music accompanies the art. The LISTEN event continues in the Black Swan and various venues around town until September 1st - I'll be involved a talking-walk at the end of August, (and also have a presence on the 'Playlist' scheduled for Thursday July 25th, just before I head for the azure skies over Greece...) 

Only a small music section this week, as I didn't get to several gigs I'd intended to see. 'Bare to the Bones' reincarnated again at the Artisan on Friday, this time with four bands and several solo performers joining in: Hello Hopeville, The Decades and Hoodoos all enriched a regular mix that starts and ends with Paul Kirtley's famous jam sessions - totally unrehearsed, he always reminds us, and we believe him! It's a good fun night, and has so far raised around £3,000 for Paul's chosen cancer charity. Here's The Hoodoos, and a typical glimpse of our 'stage'...

On Saturday night 23 Bath Street was overrun with percussion, as Frome Street Bandits gave a fabulously flamboyant demo of their urban gypsy / funky ska style:  this was followed by 25-strong Carnival Collective, but my functioning week ended at that point so no report on that, or the protest song event A Change is Gonna Come at BOV on Sunday as I had to forgo that too. Fingers crossed for return to health in time to travel to Skyros next weekend...

Sounds, words, art - all you need to start the month.

Listen - A summer of sound is the concept of composer Helen Ottaway, fusing sensual appreciation to include not only music but sounds found in nature, in speech, and in our lives generally - the 'strange and lovely' sounds of the world around us. Black Swan Arts has embraced the idea and from July 20th till 1st September there will be a range of sound-related events to experience. Last Thursday was the launch of a crowdfunder to raise funds to commission more aural events to 'feed the voracious appetite of Frome's creative community', with Helen's sample soundtrack, taken from the streets of Sri Lanka, installed in the corridor. Here's Mel Day from the programming committee with Helen.
This initiative also includes Poetry in Motion - local walks with readings of poems related to the terrain, organised by John Payne and Martin Bax - and thus ties in nicely with the Frome Writers Collective current focus on poetry. The FWC regular programme on Frome FM Writers on Radio (broadcast May 3rd, online link here) featured interviews with three local writers with an interest in writing poetry: I was one, along with Robert Hull and Rosie Jackson, whose collaborative collection with Graham Burchell on the art of Stanley Spencer and his wife Hilda, Two Girls and a Beehive, will be published next April by Two Rivers Press. Suzy Howlett, here with co-presenter Lisa Kenright, spoke of the benefits of learning poems by heart in childhood which triggered all our favourites: personally I can't walk over any bridge in London without declaiming Wordsworth, and will chunter chunks of Keats, Coleridge and Wilfred Owen mercilessly at the least provocation. The programme was immaculately hosted by Sara Scholefield.

From poetry to prose: really great to have my tale of Mrs Rosoman's Dilemma picked for  Story Friday, Clare Reddaway's popular short-prose reading event in Bath's delightful performance venue Burdalls Yard, an invitingly cavernous venue on this occasion authentically decked for the current theme of 'The Garden'- and with real cucumber sandwiches. Six of our submissions were lucky enough to join Clare in reading, and our horticultural imaginations varied from animals' nocturnal exploits to jam mining and Eve's take on what Eden was really like, with some thought-provoking as well as entertaining tales. There's a link here so you can listen to all or any of our tales!

And still with the words, Nevertheless Pub Theatre's festival production, Where the Fault Lies, is being steadily buffed up by our four dedicated actors. I dropped in on the rehearsal for Under the Duvet - a bit of a twisty mystery with a sinister streak - and found them suitably moody... If you're in the Frome area during festival week, do get a ticket & come along to The Cornerhouse on 10th July- with four talented and energetic actors, we're confident this will be a great show. There's a link here, so you can listen to any or all of the stories.

Time for music, and masses of it, to take all our minds off the fudges and follies that climaxed on May 2nd, though they weren't far from our minds when Seize the Day featured at a TUC organised event in Bath last Saturday. Theo Simon and Shannon Smy lead this inspirational protest band which has a big following for its rousing performances as well as political commitment.  The Bell Inn garden's 'back bar' provided a perfect venue for a great afternoon. Here's a quite old version of one of their anthems No-one's Slave and No-one's Master - it sounds as good, and as relevant, today.
Back in Frome, the May weekend had an even-more-fantastic-than-usual range (do I say this every week? It sometimes seems that way.., ) of brilliant bands: The Peaky Blinders Family Friendly Music Event at 23 Bath Street gave us a long afternoon of superb performers: Rodney Branigan set the bar high with Radiohead's Creep played on two guitars simultaneously, followed by the Screaming Harlots, then Frome's new hottest band the HooDoos - they give St James Infirmary Blues the resurrection treatment - and sultry Bonne Nouvelle - then another talented composite group, JAMD.

Here's the Hoodoos (with apologies to two more talented members missing from the shot), lovely Coralie from Bonne Nouvelle, and the party atmosphere that greeted JAMD.

Then a dance night at The Cornerhouse with high-energy ska/punk band the wonderful One Tones to end the day, so what more could anyone want from a bank holiday Saturday? 

There's Sunday too, of course, and as it's the first of the month the Frome Independent market took over the town with stalls and its usual Mayday theme of fresh floral headbands. I was outside Hunting Raven Books for most of this time, promoting Frome Unzipped, (thanks Tom for the snap)
but I did catch the HooDoos' excellent set on the busking stage - though sadly missing Straight Fits, an up-and-coming young band of whom you will hear more.

Impossible to leave May bank holiday weekend without referencing the art, which burst around the town like the wild garlic and cow-parsley that have been grabbing every pathside space:

 The Round Tower is hosting Black Swan Guild's stunning exhibition of paintings, pottery,  jewellery and other craft: I was particularly impressed with Dan Morley's delicate, exact, paintings in the series of ephemeral fragments in the Sonnets series, but there's much to admire - it's on till 25 May.

And for two days only, May 4&5, Frome Art Fair took over the Long Gallery, the Silk Mill, and Rook Lane too with an extraordinarily high standard display of work by the artists and craftsfolk of Frome. Here's just one of the many striking pieces of work in each venue, by from Melanie Deegan, at Rook Lane. 

Attentive readers may note a bit of a blip time-wise in the middle of this bulletin: this is because your usually-dedicated chronicler grabbed a four-day sabbatical and celebrated Beltane in Dublin - in Howth, to be precise, a peninsular at the north end of the city entirely surrounded by seagulls.
Here I was hosted by my university-days-flatmate Jenny Sweeney (author of Encounter Ireland) so we talked of Irish poets and legends and walked the promenade, beach, cliff-tops and in the old Deer Park where Gráinne Mhaol the Pirate Queen put the garlic curse on the inhospitable St Lawrence family for closing the gates against her so even now their land is thick as snow with garlic flowers, and the Earl now always has a place laid ready in case she calls again...
and if you're ever in Howth and feeling peckish, do drop into The Bloody Stream, a fabulous fish restaurant named after the environmental consequence of a 12th century battle below its walls. It's underneath the railway station: five-star food and a centre for Irish music too. So this multi-coloured bulletin concludes here with the green headlands thick-rimmed with the molten gold of the gorse all around the bay.