Dancing with Death, and more cheerful things

"The Dance of Death is August Strindberg’s landmark drama about a marriage pushed to its limits," explains the promotion for the current production, adapted by Rebecca Lenkiewic, at Bath's Ustinov theatre. On a small island, an irrational tyrannical army captain controls his gloomy wife who regrets giving up her dramatic career, both snarling at the other but somehow feeding off this enough to survive. They are joined after a while by the wife's cousin but there’s no real shift in the unpleasant dynamic: it’s like Waiting for Godot without the subtlety or humour.  

Hilton McRae is powerful as the appalling husband; Lindsay Duncan as the appalling wife is more stagey, frittering sympathy by being generally annoying, while the cousin (Grainne Dromgoole) doesn't have much of a role except as a butt for their vindictive games. The set (by Grace Smart) is just that, a set. Changes  to the original play (the gender of the visitor, the repeatedly shouted expletives) seem repellent without resonance and the tone remains level throughout despite accelerating mini-dramas, with a sense of hopeless despair over the entire proceedings.  In short, this is a story of rage and recrimination, irreparably damaged relationships, mistrust and self-inflicted chaos. A story for our times.  photos Alex Brenner

It's always a pleasure and a privilege to be invited to join Eleanor Talbot on her weekly online programme Variations on a Theme and this week's upbeat show features the new-out poetry-&-pictures compilation from Caldew Press, words by me & Hazel Stewart and images from Mel Day. This image is her show's promo: us performing as Live & Lippy back in the day, and us on a weekend trip to Lille a couple of years ago, plus our book covers and launch promo. Her interview starts around 29 minutes into the show. As well as recording us reading some of her favourite solo pieces, Ellie has cleverly managed to create one of our shared poems - What's it like for you? - by splicing our recordings - and also included the soundtrack of one of the videos of us made by Howard Vause - you can view Onomatopoeia here, it's currently registering 8,910 views. Howard also made a great little vid of the poem that's (one of) the title(s) of this odd little volume - online here. It's one of my favourites. 

Black Swan Arts enjoyed a double opening on Friday, with Lucinda Burgess' exhibition On Repetition in the Long Gallery, and the Frome Creatives in the Round Tower.  Lucinda was a garden designer for many years and feels this has significantly informed her interest in materials that appear to change form, sometimes over time as with rusting metal, but also in different viewing conditions - as with poles viewed side-on.

 

In contrast to these thought-provoking large-scale pieces, the Frome Creatives have filled their exhibition area with a huge diversity of work of an extremely high standard - paintings and prints, photographs, ceramics, fabric creations and artefacts in every kind of media - a busy, friendly launch with much chat and bowls of chocolates. Postcards & cards available - recommended.

Music now, and a folksy vibe from Bama Mine from Bristol at Bar Lotte eon Wednesday. The monthly Independent Market survived, just about, the weekend rain, and provided some excellent performers on the Band Stage, including the trio Cura -who will be performing on this year's Farmfest. Sunday evening at The Cornerhouse put on its monthly jazz jam with the usual performers - here's Simon with singer Nicola Maskall, and Dave Wallace on bass.  

Ending this June medley with some out-and-about-this-week images: walking to Mells along the river, and a preview of three novels by Frome writers (to be featured later) displayed in Hunting Raven Books! 

and the roses in my garden. Just because...

Bumper bundle week - words, words, words. And some icicles.

Murder at the Circus on zoom is the concept of Sharp Teeth with Bristol's Wardrobe Theatre: a ‘Sherlock Holmes’-style intrigue with interaction developed to the point where audience contribution becomes the major part of the show. We were divided into zoom gallery groups to solve the crime, interviewing the five 'suspects', so the dialogue of the performance became primarily our own sleuthing debate. Part murder-mystery spoof, part parlour game, constructed with extreme technical ingenuity and a clever team of actors, there was enough essential theatricality in the production to tick all the boxes of dramatic entertainment. Here's one of the audience screens at the end of the show, with our murderously deceitful but entertainingly delightful cast along the top row.

This week the focus is mostly on words. Alison Clink, founder of the Frome Festival Short Story contest, joined Frome FM's regular weekly Writers on Radio to give sound advice for competition entrants, now online here, and the Frome Writers Collective monthly meeting devoted Thursday evening to the topic of diaries. This was a very successful session, well-organised and cram full of fascinating material, from historian David Lassman's on Pepys as a somewhat unreliable witness to the Great Fire of London in 1666 ("I thought it far enough off, so I went back to sleep") to the 2020 lockdown diary of John Payne, whose latest title A West Country Homecoming has earned review praise as 'a fascinating mix of local and national history.' 

Among other intriguing insights we heard about Peter Clark's life in Damascus, Sian Williams during the 1980s Greenwatch, and Jonny Griffiths at an East End school; Michael Riggs shared the pages of his illustrated diary, Nikki Copleston revealed how hers triggers ideas for fiction and Ann Phillips' journal, begun in 1972, was beautifully laced with Yeats poetry.  My pitch was recommending blogging for writers of every genre: to encourage a regular writing habit, provide practice in editing (free from the constraints of word-count) and even lead to wider publication - my chronicle of the life & times of Frome led to a commission and Frome Unzipped was born!  As examples of personal style, try Sally Gander's The Unwritable - her current post on apophenia is fascinating - and Maria Popover's award-winning Brainpickings.  

And still in Frome, our superhero bookshop manager Tina Waller is on Nub News talking about Hunting Raven Books - she does have a face, actually, but seems to like my snap of her taken in passing during her prep for the pre-Christmas rush. 

Two poetry events on zoom this week: Frome's fabulous Liv Torc joined Wolverhampton wonder Steve Pottinger for their Literary Festival Fringe on Saturday, sharing her personal story of the last year as well as talking about the sensational success of her HAIFLU project. Liv is always not only sparklingly glamorous, but also superbly well-prepped, and her twin themes of distress and success were movingly conveyed in screen shots illustrating her talk. 

Liv's succinct summary of her experience of 'some big things' last year included bereavement and serious illness as well as banana poems and inventing the project that National Poetry Day described as 'a spectacular collective act of poetry, photography, music and film involving more than 8,000 crowd-sourced haiku, more than 500 'citizen artists', 13 films and a newly-minted artform uniquely adapted to the nation's creative needs during pandemic: it's been featured on BBC 4's Today programme, in The Times, and continues to inspire hundreds of people to write poems.' 

She is still working on the project: you can submit words or images on her facebook page here. Two of the weekly chronicles of submitted moments were shown: I picked this moment because the image is mine but it's the collation, not the individual frame, that makes this such a stunningly successful art form. 

A few hours later there was another poetic triumph to celebrate as  Caleb Parkin, current Bristol City Poet, held a launch party to celebrate the publication by Tall Lighthouse of his new collection Wasted Rainbow. It's some years since Caleb & I performed an impro collaboration-poem about lipstick in Bath, and I wish the film of the outcome had survived but, like lipstick, these things roll out of one's life. It was great to hear Caleb's sensitive, sometimes surreal, words - there's a lovely example here - and his reading was supported by invited open mic-ers and guest poets, all strong voices: I particularly enjoyed Keith Jarrett & ordered his collection from Burning Eye (which I hope includes the poem concluding we have learned to build bridges, we have learned to cross those bridges even as they burn, we have learned to love...)

With temperatures lingering round 0°(and a 'feels like' dipping as low as -11° according to my app) after the weeks of rain, this week's local landscape view shows Nunney's Donkey Lane (much of which came home on my boots). 

The sunshine flickerings on our subzero town bring stirrings of hopefulness. I didn't write another novel during this lockdown but words haven't entirely shrivelled like my amaryllis bud: a new short story was taken by an anthology, another earned a prize in the FWC winter competition (shared 3rd actually, but a certificate & book token to show for it 😊) and I've enjoyed few 'commended's, including a poem in the Corsham swan-theme contest and some of the mini-contests in the King Lear Awards (in which bulletins incidentally Frome's David Thompson is frequently named and quoted.) And, excitingly, I'm back in collaboration with my poet friend Hazel Stewart, reviving our Live & Lippy collaboration via zoom.. It's a long time since Howard Vause collected some of our performance pieces for a DVD but a few are still on his page: here's Weird, and our signature piece: What's It Like For You?  We don't know yet where this will take us but it's good to be working together again.

So now that I've illustrated Pascal's precept that brevity takes more time than verbosity (plus also my point above on the irrelevance of word-count to a blogger) I'll end, appropriately for the date, with a   Valentine project created by Frome's Summer Harwood to support Child Poverty Action. She's already raised over £700 for her hand-crafted valentine cards! So that's the visual art spot for this week. 

Voices in the City is the collective name for spoken word in Bath Literature Festival, or as they put it: 'poetical events', since Bath is a city because it has a cathedral, rather than urban eclectic energy. The poetical event in the Central Library from 10am to 4.30pm last Friday, meticulously organised by Sue Boyle, provided readings ranging from Greek myths to Eliot's Wasteland, free to anyone with time to spare. I was a brief drop-in, but managed to catch a superb set by BlueGate Poets from Swindon. Travellers without Baggage is the name of an anthology they have been working from, and their presentation combined some of the original poems by Valerie Clarke with their own responses and was both lyrical and moving.

Paul - the new movie-genre spoof from Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, if you've been distracted by Baftamania and the name doesn't ring a bell - is not getting many stars from broadsheet reviewers who find its sci-fi geekiness not as funny as zombies or rural cops. Over in the states there's a different concern: the miraculously-healed bible-belt babe, liberated into extreme expletives and intention to fornicate, apparently introduces 'a risque series of attacks on Christianity that will be unpopular.' (Paul: “My existence doesn’t necessarily disprove religion, just all Judaeo-Christian denominations.”) I loved it, although most of the sci-fi filmic in-jokes went over my head, because the story is rich in other gags too: it's a bonding-style love story, a thriller, a nerds-triumph story and most of all a road movie, with lashings of self-discovery along the way. Why it's Little Miss Sunshine but with a kindof benign supersmart skinny Gollum on board.

Back in the day when I strutted my performance poetry stuff about a bit, Hazel Stewart and I were Live & Lippy - and before that, with wonderful guitarist Laurie Parnell, we were Liquid Jam. In fact some of our words are still knocking around Youtube (onomatopoeia had 6260 hits last time I looked.) Hazel now lives in Cumbria so duets are off the menu, but when she journeys south we always meet up for walking and writing and talking of past times. This weekend we had another reminiscence-fest, looking back on our 'artist date' city-breaks in Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and New York.... must be time for another, Haz!