Wicked drama, splendid art: a vividly visual week.

Greed, powerlust, and violence… Macbeth’s story hits current themes with disturbing impact, and this production from Beyond the Horizon highlights these aspects in the tragedy of misgovernment by a leader seeking glory without integrity.

Impactful and esoteric, this highly unusual production brings a new edge to Shakespeare's famous tale of 11th Century power struggle in Scotland. With James I on the throne and magic his favourite theme, the bard celebrates (and exaggerates) his Scots lineage, and adds supernatural embellishment too. The fateful predictive witches are a real highlight, all created by volatile fingering as - somehow combining Lear's Poor Tom with the Cabaret emcee in a dazzling spangled jacket - Luke Hardwell (pictured below) takes on their personae with his long white gloves... one of the production’s imaginative highlights for me.  Visually there seems no dominant overall design scheme: costume ranges from antiquarian fighting kit (there’s a thrilling start to the final battle as warriors spring on stage brandishing a diversity of shields) to Man at M&S, the apparent choice of Ross, but the stark scaffolding of the set seems to suit every scene, creating an atmosphere of tension both in the violent interactions and the equally terrifying quiet intensity.

The seven acting members of this ambitious young theatre company are a strong team, successfully doubling disparate parts:  Katherine Aldridge’s Lady Macbeth is convincing in her ambition and poignant in her collapse, and director/producer Adam Lloyd-Jmes in the title role is mesmeric in every scene. With its radical approach and adventurous interpretations, the upcoming tour of this young company deserves massive success. Bath's Rondo Theatre hosted this production, which will now tour.

Back to Frome now for the opening night of Portrayal of a Pandemic, a fantastic multi-media exhibition at Black Swan Arts. Active and In Touch Frome, a charity offering support to anyone lonely or in need, had the inspired idea of creating an art exhibition to reflect 'the emotions of lockdown in the community, both positive and negative.' Resulting submissions are on display in the Round Tower all week, and represent a marvellous range of interpretations in a range of media from contributors of all ages.  Here's Heath Date with his winning portrait of Captain Tom, and David Thompson, winner of the written word category, whose poems will now be published by Hobnob Press. 

Some entries focus on 'comfort' aspects of isolation with impressive craftwork, others engage specifically with the plague, creating pictures of the virus. The awesome image below is The Mental Health Garden by Nicole Medin, representing nine of the recognised disorders: bipolar, anxiety, ADHD, bulimia, dyslexia, insomnia, depression, Meige syndrome, and Alice in Wonderland syndrome. This last condition, causing visual distortions and 'derealization and depersonalisation' was only identified in 1955 and is sadly on the increase - apparently Dodgson suffered it himself, so his little heroine was facing his experiences defeating his dragons by proxy. 

The Patsy Gamble Blues Collective arrived at The Sun on Saturday night to deliver their 'jazz funk saxy fusion' to a severely under-attended audience (though nice for those of us anxious about crowds) and lived up to all expectations. As a sessions musician Patsy has worked with top names and toured extensively at home and abroad and her line-up for this little gig in our local was superb, with Mike Hoddinott defying the speed of light in his epic drum solo.

Also in Frome: On Saturday Mayor Andy welcomed the Afghan Refugee support group at the Town Hall, where hot tea (with non-lactive milk alternative) was on offer ("Only in Frome" we murmured). Support from the town council was assured, but not from our MP Mr Warburton, but he does live thirty miles away...    

This week heralded the return of the famous Frome Independent after its long covidic absence. On one of the sunniest days of the year, the town's streets and alleys were again filled with stalls and entertainment. The busking stage featured several excellent performers including newly-formed Unit Four, pictured here, and a temporary skittle alley in the market square urged passers-by to help break the current world record for the most participants in an 8-hour game of skittles: here's local celebrity 'wellness guru' Cheryl Sprinkler taking aim for her first shot...    

Ending back at the start of the week: Bank Holiday Monday is the ideal time to swerve holiday destinations - especially when the sky is doggedly grey - and stay under a roof, like the glorious one of Gloucester Cathedral.  As a lifelong baffled atheist, places of worship don't usually lure me but a guided tour with the Wiltshire Lifetime Award winner for historical study Dr John Chandler (a title not as terminal as it sounds) was too good to miss. The interior of this massive edifice of vaulted cloisters is crammed with centuries of tombs and sculpted monuments, all surrounded with glorious stained glass windows.  The Great East Window, installed in the 1350s, was once the largest in the world - this credit moved in the 1960s to Illinois - but being as big as a tennis court is impressive enough.  Edward II is buried here; Ivor Gurney, first world war soldier, poet and composer, has a stained glass window in his honour, and there's an extraordinary monument to Robert Curthose, William the Conqueror's eldest son, which apparently represents the active battle pose of a crusader. The whole place is spectacular, within and without. Coffee at the docks afterwards was nice, too.

Nights in and days out...

Once again this week's round-up opens with a gang of blokes in Elizabethan-style dressing-up-clothes, shouting and romping dramatically in the open-air: The Lord Chamberlain's Men have now released for free online viewing their 2019 version of A Midsummer Night's Dream, an incredible 425 years after this theatre troupe was first created.  It's really good.  There's huge potential for buffoonery in this play, and the three squabbling story strands - lovers, fairies, and buffoon 'mechanicals' - are separate enough for seven men to create each strand without confusion. They are excellent in all of them,  and bring big energy and laugh-aloud-in-the-livingroom humour to the mishaps in the forest as well as the legendary story of Pyramus and Thisbe.   My screenshots here show the spat in in the forest when the young lords - who've been relishing the cat-fight - leap in to drag Hermia off her rival,  and a moment from the mechanicals' tragic play-within-a-play. The soldier Pyramus, aka Bottom the Weaver, also played lovely Hermia in one of the best multi-tasking switches I've ever seen. Recommended viewing.

Thursday was a busy night, with a 2018 Royal Shakespeare Company production of Macbeth followed by Ibsen's A Dolls House adapted by Tanika Gupta, with additional dialogue, into an Anglo-Indian drama for Lyric Hammersmith. Perhaps this evening schedule was a little ambitious, especially after the hottest day of the year so far, and a smattering of fast-forward was involved but, in my defence, many in Shakespeare's day never saw his plays in their entirety, and apparently Chinese theatres used to double as tea-houses where people ordered refreshments and carried on chatting during the shows. A darkened room with serried rows of silent spectators is a comparatively recent development in the history of theatre, and perhaps on-line at-home viewing will find new audiences for live - ie filmed in one live take - performances as the rules of how to watch are inevitably relaxed - there's a great article here about how 'stupid' silent reverence is killing theatre for the future. Anyway, here's the wonderful Christopher Ecclestone hallucinating the friend he murdered while watched by his wife Niamh Cusack in a strong 2018 production directed by RSC which manages to make the witches really scary by presenting them as creepy children.
And here for contrast is Elliot Cowan with Anjana in Ibsen's exploration of gender politics transposed to 1879 Calcutta in a set that looks neither Russian nor Indian, just a place for dour argument and mind-games. Dark, but well-reviewed by critics as an expose of the consequences of English colonialism, racism and sexism

One final theatre recommendation, as you probably have your own choices by now: A Streetcar Named Desire on Friday as presented by the Young Vic for National Theatre, a superb production that also highlights the problem with my hope that home streaming may revive live drama - the difficulty of recording a night of intense interaction. Brilliantly acted with atmospheric set and dynamic direction, but the negative aspect of filmed productions was overwhelming: endlessly altering angles, close-ups and lens-elected choice of observation all worked against the theatrical experience, controlling the interaction that makes theatre live, fragmenting the experience and wasting a clever set by isolating areas of attention.  That’s just my take, many will disagree - you have till May 28 to decide.

In Poetry Corner: Liv Torc -whose amazing Haiflu Project is collecting responses to the coronavirus in haiku from around the world - this week created a Zoom version of her Rainbow Fish Speak-Easy, with some splendid contributions from the floor as well as guests including a set with piano accompaniment from Francesca Beard. And Steve Pottinger, who like Liv has been a popular guest at Frome's Poetry Cafe, had an online launch on his facebook page for his new poetry collection with the delightful title thirty-one small acts of love and resistance -'celebration and defiance in politically turbulent times' he claims, which sounds right for now, though are there ever others?
In other 'word' news: when not walking from my house in every direction on a daily basis while this glorious weather persists, my lockdown focus has been to complete a novel about Belfast at the start of the 1970s 'troubles', a time when I lived there. The characters are imagined, but the events aren't, as there's no shortage of historical accounts of this era of simmering conflict to supplement my memory. Anyway it should be out next month, published by Hobnob Press, with a powerful cover image created by Paul (Mutartis) Boswell. Sneak preview here...

Ending this week's rather late posting - I blame the distraction of tracking Dom Cummings as he darts like a Hermes parcel van around the country humming 'doo da dee, lockdown's not for me' to the tune of the conga song - with a couple of photos from my permitted-exercise explorations along the river Frome.

In do-what-thou-wilt-be-the-whole-of-the-law week...

Starting the week with another Shakespeare play, Macbeth, in contrast to last week's epic at the Globe, was a streamlined version of how to change the fate of dynasties: monarchs speedily despatched, soliloquies with no lingering,  ghosts keeping up a good pace and witches not lurking about waiting for a forest scene, just leaping in. Characterisation was novel too, as if director Cressida Brown had started rehearsals with a warm-up exercise asking the cast to 'pretend it's a comedy' and then was so tickled by the Private-Walker-cockney-style Banquo of Samuel Oatley and the Harry-Potter-geek that Aidan Cheng created as Malcolm that she said 'Don't change it!' and they didn't.

And, live on twitter, the ever-entertaining Luke Wright, who is reading poems for about half an hour every night at 8 o'clock. They are his usual droll observations of life and quirky character studies, with a bit of amusing banter in between - just like his live shows, in fact. It's free, but donations welcomed - as with every performance as our valuable Arts culture faces an ever-more difficult future.

It's difficult to keep social media out of an social-arts blog these days since, apart from TV (I've just discovered Sky Arts) these sites are where accessible things are notified. National Theatre Archives gave us Barber Shop Chronicles by Inua Ellams, imagined stories from six different barber shops moving and funny by turns - makes you wish you'd seen it live! Many more ideas here, too.

Frome is famous for dissenting, and pretty good at street-art too, so when I spotted this sign in our town centre it seemed worth a wider audience.  It's become my most popular online post ever, and has been shared (at last check) 2,683 times. So this is a revival of my brief 'little known characters' spot which began as a blog filler and then faded when the internet took control of our waking days: Whoever stuck this on what appears to be an old meter box, at the bottom of Gentle Street, take a bow.

And on a more serious note, despite protest and pre-empting a currently-disputed planning permission, many in Frome were sad and shocked to find to a protected meadow alongside the river has been illegally levelled. So this post concludes with a thought from John Clare, from his 1827 poem The Mores - and on a happier note, a picture of a glorious holloway from one of my rural walks.

And birds and trees and flowers without a name 

All sighed when lawless law's enclosures came

And dreams of plunder in such rebel schemes

Have found too truly that they were but dreams. 

End of May celebrations...

Bristol's little Wardrobe Theatre is always a delight to visit. For one thing, the Valentine bridge behind Temple Meads railway station, which takes you to it in ten minutes, is a thing of beauty so you arrive saturated with river views and the image of the Eye against a smoulderingly blue sky...   And the productions in this punching-above-its-weight fringe studio theatre are usually brilliant, as on Tuesday's magic-realistic drama How My Light Is Spent,one of Bristol Old Vic's Director's Cuts to showcase graduate work. Director Nikhil Vyas chose this Bruntwood Prize short-listed story of disaffected lives somehow connecting, and Robin Davis designed the clever abstract arena of their dual narration. Jonathan Oldfield and Eva O'Hara give beautifully nuanced performances as the adult chatline worker, the donut server, and all those with whom their lives collide. It's a confident and clever production, beautifully performed - in fact the last time I saw so delightful and touching a love story was David Grieg's Midsummer, but this was more magical and remained unexpected right to the end.

"You've never seen a production of Macbeth like this before" promised Anubis Productions of their gothic reinterpretation 'set amongst a druid wilderness... dark powerful and blood-thirsty, combining traditional theatre, mult-media, spell-binding, physical theatre, and stage combat.' Georgina Nelson-Troy directed this unusual production on the Merlin stage with an adapted script, backdrop imagery and interpretive dance. Drug-fuelled witches took a high profile role and there was much blood. Six multi-tasking players supported the murderous Macbeths in their tragic downward spiral: congratulations to all especially young Caian Gregory, a heart-breaker as the fated son of Macduff in a powerful scene with Georgina as his mother.

And before moving from drama to music, a sneak preview of the Nevertheless Pub Theatre production for the upcoming Frome Festival: for one night only, Where The Fault Lies,a quartet of quirky short plays by me and Rosie Finnegan, performed by Frome Actors Network in the upstairs room of The Cornerhouse on 10 July (tickets only £5 but essential as the venue is what's technically termed 'intimate'.)

My main music events this week were outside town. On Friday, the Three Horseshoes in Bradford on Avon hosted two terrific Frome bands: Back Of The Bus feisty purveyors of post-punk pop - with attitude, and the incomparable high-energy foursome The Raggedy Men, classic 70s punk with panache. Both bands are massively popular, and there were probably more Fromies there dancing than in the audience for Question Time recorded at the Merlin a couple of nights earlier. The ambience was atmospheric rather than lucent, but you can just about make out the bands.

The end-of-May bank holiday inspired a plethora of terrific free entertainment options locally: deciding which to support was tough but on a day of dazzling sunshine, the Packhorse Fair, all along Bruton's lovely riverside green, turned out to be the perfect choice, with great music at both the acoustic tent and the main stage. Fantastic funky Cut Capers never disappoint, but hiphopera was a novel experience for me, as Josephine and the Artizans blended extraordinary arias with rap to marvellous effect. Local heroes Ditto concluded the afternoon - congratulations Bruton on a day of delights in a fantastic atmosphere.


Meanwhile Frome had been enjoying a Rhythm and Blues Festival with some impressive names - here's Nick Lowe with Los Straitjackets on the final night at the Cheese & Grain.  Festival season starts early in the southwest!

Wintry Wanderland, Wordplay, country rock, art & blood

On a freezing weekend evening the town's streets in every direction saw friends and families all out and about appreciating Window Wanderland as Frome joined this international project and around two hundred homes and businesses transformed their windows into illuminated showcases for every kind of imaginative tableaux up to & including complex fairytales like Rapunzel - even the Town Hall joined in. Big appreciation to all who took part, and to Lisa Glass for bringing this illuminating & wanderful idea to Frome.

Poetry - another Word Play recording at Visual Radio Arts for your delectation: four poets shared words and chat live on air on Saturday afternoon. Dawn Gorman, Josephine Corcoran, Jennie Gilling and Louise Green can be enjoyed on the archive link here - many thanks to Phil and Mags for their awesome commitment to supporting creativity. And I should also give a quick plug to an Open Mic at Three Swans next Saturday, organised by Edventure.

Music corner: I couldn't resist a break from writing to see the marvellous country-rock band Shootin the Crow at the Grain bar on Wednesday, and Sunday's jazz at the Cornerhouse when the John Law Trio played melodies as arranged by Bill Evans - both really special events, the kind that get people saying, isn't it amazing you can walk around Frome and hear stuff like this every week, for free? (well, there is a hat, but nevertheless!)

Art now, and an art & craft exhibition at Silk Mill all weekend in support of refugees with funds going via RAISE - I loved the big compilation picture created by visitors and stall holders contributing their image of 'home' - some fabulous evocations of family and safety, all a big contrast to the camp at Calais
and a new opening at Black Swan: Here's Kate Cochrane, one of the organisers, with the result - framed free by Mount - which will be auctioned.
And another art display opened at Black Swan on Friday with the spring exhibition of Frome Art Society, as always a huge range of styles and subjects depicted by talented local visual artists. As always also, on the Monday following an opening Words at the Black Swan offered a poetry workshop inspired by the art in the gallery. Dawn Gorman who led this session invited the group to respond to the overall vibrance of the works with a focus on colour, reading Choosing Yellow as further stimulus just as Liam bizarrely arrived with a random yellow rose. One of Frome's little moments... and another inspiring session.

Now, through snow flurries, whirling but light, to Bristol, to see the first Shakespeare at the city's Southville theatre since Andrew Hilton retired from Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, the separate company he founded in 1999 to bring a double drama season to that in-the-round theatre space. His directorial approach was strong but subtle: Lyn Gardner summed it up: "Hilton .... is a plain cook, whose unadorned approach – no concept, the barest stage possible, music used sparingly – pays dividends," and, in another critic's words, "It is tiresome a small, unsubsidised company in the suburbs of Bristol beat the great RSC, but one lesson ....is that it is time to return to basics." Some of the best bard productions I've seen have been there, often with local actors in lead roles.
Perhaps I'm grieving the end of an era, or maybe this Macbeth came too soon after the stunning wordless performance by Mark Bruce Dance Company, but this Blood Means Blood version, without Hilton's sure hand restraining over-embellishments of symbolism and sound, didn't do it for me. Awareness of audience seemed an unresolved issue, with actors circling throughout their speeches, and some casting seemed designed to baffle anyone unfamiliar with the play (the women dressed like Miss Marple's maids for soldiers, priests, and the drunken porter). And who'd have thought the old play to have so much blood in it?  Everyone seemed to be puddling their hands in blood and pawing the next person they saw.  Katy Stephens as Lady Macbeth though was extraordinarily impressive. Perhaps you should go & decide for yourselves what to make of it - on at Tobacco Factory till 7 April.

The land we live on, the town we live in

When Birnam Wood to high Dunsinane came... a tale of treachery, murder, and scots ballet moves.
Multi-award-winning Mark Bruce Company is now fully established in Frome with a superb home here in a fully-fitted out dance studio, so we're privileged that their current opus Macbeth premiered here before its highly anticipated tour. Like their version of Dracula, and their Odyssey, this is powerful dramatic story-telling, the lack of voice increasingly irrelevant and paradoxically more powerful as the story unfolds. The dancers are amazing, the special effects are stunning, and the second act becomes a horror film nightmare of remorse, recrimination, & retribution: Shakespeare fans, this is the best Banquo's ghost scene you've ever seen.

The Land We Live In - The Land We Left Behind curated by Adam Sutherland is the newly-opened exhibition at Hauser &Wirth, an 'ambitious survey exploring the contradictory nature of society’s relationship to the rural telling the story of humanity’s evolving connection to the land, our perception of, and reliance upon it.' There's a huge range of evidential artefacts, from tiny woodblock prints to a wall-sized film of modern farming methods, pointing up every aspect from sentimental to sensual, from exploitative to indifferent, some exhibits puzzling & some deeply moving. Opening night fizzed  and this deserves a second visit for proper scrutiny - on till 7 May.

Land, coincidentally, is one of my current themes so I was fascinated by Angela France's semi-dramatised presentation of her new poetry collection The Hill: tales of Leckhampton Hill and the struggle of Gloucestershire people over a hundred years ago to save their footpath rights. The land wears time as a mantle, bending briars over paths, growing trees to fill a slope, change encoded in every seed and speck of earth.  Several other excellent poets too at Words & Ears, Dawn Gorman's always-excellent poetry night in Bradford on Avon, including Robert Walton and a fine open-mic.

And on Saturday, three Frome authors shared a presentation of their recent titles under the title Bookends of Time, all firmly rooted in locality and soil: Julian Hight explained how the land around here was all part of Selwood Forest, Annette Burkitt talking about the deep history of this area, and Carolyn Griffiths telling the fascinating story of woad in local cloth industry. Flesh & Bones by Annette is a fiction set in the pre-Roman kingdom of Dumnonia, and Carolyn has written a scrupulously-researched account entitled WOAD TO THIS - a traditional instruction to the dyer. Residents of the Blue House knitted this cloak in varying shades of woad-indigo which apparently has the property of losing visibility when mist descends, which enemies must have found disconcerting. I faded my shot to test the theory, and these blues definitely disappear more than other tones. (Makes you wonder why so many cars are silver...)

Currently I'm still in full-on project mode so again this post will barely skim the surface of  the last two weeks in Frome. But there's been too much music to ignore all, and though I've missed jazz & blues (& also King Sporks who promised 'hand-crafted artisanal funk, seditious jazz and ungentrified reggae in an outrageous night of original live music' at the Griffin), here are the events I just could not pass up: the totally brilliant Raggedy Men at the Grain Bar ~ new boys on the music block shaking up the scene with extraordinary vigour ~ also the even newer Borrowed Light, who shared their exquisite traditional songs and melodies at the Three Swans. and a Sofar Sounds Frome session ~ three excellent guests, introduced by the man who, with Anna Dina  and Beth Monk, brought the concept to Frome: singer-songwriter, town councillor & general rep for creativity, Al O'Kane.  Sofar is an excitingly quirky concept which transports anyone of my generation back to those magical '70s days of wandering night streets looking for a party you knew must be somewhere, following the people who had a bottle in hand because they must know, and always ending up somewhere with great live music playing... it's a lot more organised these days of course, but there's still a sense of secrecy and passion for music and a great buzz ~ and Frome is the only town in the southwest to have joined this international initiative. And I can't miss a mention of the rock & blues jam session at 23 Bath Street since (it was research, honest) I somehow ended up on stage with Elaine Pugsley knocking on heaven's door with the jammers.... thanks David Goodman for snatching my camera from the bar and grabbing some shots of this unlikely occurrence.

Final footnote: it did look published but it wasn't properly (because self-publishing on Kindle is not as easy as it looks, folks!) my second novel with Hodder & Stoughton Sleeping in Sand now an e-book, thanks to David Goodman who not only created the cover but tidied up the text within. It will cost you 99p to verify this, but you can't get a coffee anywhere for under 2 quid these days - go on, spoil yourself!