Spectrums and celebrations as we move into winter

A spectrum in terms of colour perception, 'blue-orange’ is also a psychological term for a kind of amorality most often found in alien fictions. Such characters are not exactly immoral, but their actions are random and not codified in socially normal ways.  A new production of Blue/Orange by Joe Penhall at Bath's Ustinov Studio revisits the dilemma facing two psychiatrists as they argue over a patient who may be one of these: Chris (Michael Balogun) claims to be a son of Idi Amin, and his main carer Bruce (Ralph Davis) thinks he should remain in psychiatric care, but Bruce's superior, Robert (Giles Terera) insists his detention was based on ethnic prejudice - the topic of his upcoming book, for which he needs another case study. Who is right?  The drama swings painfully between the arguments, and so does Chris. The only thing he seems sure of is that the inside of an orange is blue. Is he mad, or is the playwright evoking the surrealist perception of Paul Eluard that the world est bleue comme un orange?  

A stark, dark, set defined by strip lighting (designer Simon Kenny) holds the three volatile conflicting personalities, each fighting for acceptance of their own reality.  Previous productions have cast both carers as white so it's interesting that director James Dacre has gone another way, perhaps to encourage his audience to disconnect from any preconceptions - in which case, would it have been even more interesting to challenge perceptions even further by swapping roles after the interval? With or without such permutations, this 21-year-old 'best play' winner continues to raise questions about the use of incarceration in society, and whether labels are helpful, and who has the right to decide... much to ponder while waiting at Vino Vino for the last bus home. images: Marc Brenner 

Art now, and lots of it, starting with In Movement from Marian Bruce at the Gallery at the Station, where Thursday's opening was filled with fascinated viewers. Marian has long been widely respected for her representations of the plight of the oppressed and the dispossessed, but these vibrant images show a different aspect of her empathy: the passion and vigour of  Cuban dance, which she experienced while in Havana as the designer for Rooster, Chris Bruce's acclaimed production with Acosta Danza in 2018. The energy in these tiny figures and drawings is incredible - a highly recommended exhibition open Wednesday till Sunday until 27 November, late nights Friday and Saturday. 

The Whittox Gallery is hosting Somerset Printmakers in an exhibition which opened on Friday and has already proved popular: this group formed in 1998 to promote their passion and professionalism and showcase 'the best of printmaking' in the county. Using a range of techniques, eleven of the artists in this group are showing one-off unframed prints and cards for sale. Here's Gail Mason with one of her imagined landscapes, and the splendid gallery - a superb arena for art.

 

- and also in the in the list of don't-miss shows in Frome, the pandemic work of Frome Wessex photographers, Closing Down and Opening Up, first exhibited in Corsley (& reviewed by this blog in the October 24 posting) has now arrived at the Round Tower Gallery at Black Swan Arts. Intimate and moving, these images are really worth seeing.

Final exhibition piece for this posting is the Sinking House above the weir in Bath - a tourist attraction as well as a message to the leaders at COP26 and a warning to communities throughout the world.   

Words now, as another Frome author from the Hobnob Press stable prepares to launch their debut novel: John Killah, well known in Frome as an erstwhile 'legal bulldog', is now writing fiction and his first book is a biting tale about shenanigans in a lawyers office leading to a crazy chase to catch the culprits...  STRUCK OFF is a comic novel with many elements Frome inhabitants may feel they recognise in the setting, and a plot that is outrageous, clever, and totally gripping.                        

Here's me and John discussing his plans for an exciting launch on publication day - 9th November - now sadly struck off, so to speak, by the possibility of Covid closures, but you can read more about the story here.  Look out for the classy cover - you may see it in the posh paper reviews soon, too!

A musical fanfare to finish the week, as one of Frome's most popular bands took over the Cheese & Grain bar/cafe area on Saturday night. Back of the Bus is brilliant at creating a party atmosphere, and although the line-up was one short (condolences, Mary) their performance was hi-energy from start to finish, with costume melodrama for White Wedding and closing their set with the magnificent menace of Hazel O'Connor's Eighth Day...

And our first-Sunday-of-the-month Independent Market busking stage presented its usual range of talented performers: I'll leave you with Francis Hayden, plus Danny Shorten on bass, singing his brilliant though gruesome tale of The Carpenter Ant, with its ominous final line: "the one who runs the show may be the parasite..."  Horribly apt, as our chaotic year totters towards an infectious end.(You can find the full cordyceps history, and Frances' lyrics here.)

Wild wuthering and other fantastic displays

 

FORGET WHAT YOU KNOW, the preview for Wuthering Heights at Bristol Old Vic urges, THIS IS NO PERIOD DRAMA, and director Emma Rice's version of Emily Brontë's gothic fantasy of passion revenge and redemption, enhanced with music, lighting, fights, dance and puppetry, is indeed no ordinary remake. It's spectacularly wonderful, especially in the first act - in fact you could practically leave in the interval: the recovery strand doesn't grip or intrigue as much as the dark themes of child abuse and Bristol's own connection with slave shipping. 

The storytelling follows the original version in that it's all narrated to Mr Lockwood who, after being blown in by spectacular stage effects and set upon by dogs, is curious to know why a ghostly woman comes screaming at his window. Some of the visual devices, like the birds flying past for every death, do effectively enhance the storytelling but the personification of the moor by various cast members with spiky headdresses as a kind of Greek chorus didn't for me create any real sense of its presence or significance. But overall this is an amazing achievement with a superb cast: Lucy McCormick plays a psychotically disturbed Cathy, and Ash Hunter is stoic as abused, vindictive, Heathliff - both with terrific singing voices. Also particularly engaging are Tama Phethean as both the young Earnshaws, Sam Archer as a lissom Linton and Katy Owen as his adorable little sister Isabella. 

This National Theatre, Wise Children, Bristol Old Vic & York Theatre Royal co-production is at BOV until Nov 6 and the last four performances will be streamed online book here - highly recommended. 

(The pic at the top is the end of the first act, as sneaked from my camera - the others are promo shots from the website.)

This has been a theatrical week in other ways too. 

Frome's blackbirds', previously featured on several TV channels and in the Guardian, are preparing for their protest at COP26 and toured the town on market day to raise awareness.  Their message is simple: if the conference doesn't succeed in changing policies, all birds will die and so will the rest of the life on earth.  We're lucky that our town council supports this message, as do many local groups which monitor our river and local wildlife and, encouraged by our Green councillors, take a practical role in cleaning our streets and general environment. So it probably won't surprise you that there was no town-sponsored firework display to mark Halloween: much better than that, we had a drone display over the old Showfield, watched by thousands. This was designed by Frome-based Celestial using a fleet of 256 drones to create glowing coloured images in the sky to a moving soundtrack of poems read by local children, the best civic event since Jenson Button scorched up and down the high street doing donuts in our 2013 festive celebrations. After sensationally reforming in various ooh-ahh images, the display concluded with a love-message to the town that none of us here will forget. And no dog-owners were enraged.

Moving on to less volatile, though also performance-related art now: and an up-coming exhibition at the Gallery at the Station currently in preparation. 

Artist Marian Bruce is know for her powerful figures, often life-size and embodying a sense of mute suffering. Currently, however, her Frome studio is full of the energy & skill of the dancers of Havana, as Marian prepares for In Movement at the Gallery at the Station - an exhibition of drawings & sculpture inspired by her collaboration with Acosta Danza in 2018. Marian was in Cuba as designer for Chris Bruce's production Rooster and became fascinated with the body postures of these flexible dancers. She showed me her initial sketch: "I was sitting in a bar on a warm night sipping a mojito, sea salt on the breeze and music all around, and I picked up a black biro and on the back of a novel I was reading, I drew these, each of them in one continuous line - that's the Zen influence." You can see the stunning result here and the exhibition will be opening next week.

A double helping of splendid music this week: in Bar Lotte on Wednesday evening it was the sensational combination of saxophonist Iain Ballamy joined by Anders Olinder (keyboard) and Henrik Jenson (double bass). All three of these performance giants are also composers, and a fair amount of creative improvising appeared happening throughout their set, which was hugely exciting. 

Also dimly lit - or actually in this case, erratically & with savage smoke-effects - was the mightily-anticipated return of the magnificent Back Wood Redeemers, hosted by The Cornerhouse on Saturday evening. All our favourites were there - Right Thing Wrong, Hold On, Chocolate Jesus, and other irreligious scurrilousness - with the redemptive line-up further enhanced by Sarah Hobbs on loan from the Hoodoos on double bass.  

With a definite feeling around that the window for shared activities may soon be closed, either by legislation or winter wariness, such events are treasure. Ellie and I snuck in another cocktail night on Monday but most connections are outdoors.  I'm constantly careful, using masks & frequent flow tests and opting for a 'safe' performance of Wuthering Heights instead of press night, but as we all know human contact is a vital aspect of maintaining health. Breakfast chat meetings and coffee catchups can all still be outdoors, and the writers of the 'Fromesbury Group' managed a meet-up after a long break, so I'll leave you with the selfie Debs took of her, me, Emily, and Debby at the Archangel. Other pub gardens are available!

 

Begin again

A short medley this week, and future blogs will be sparse for a while as researching my current project is taking about 23 hours a day.  'Research' is the grand name for a labyrinthine process, as googling leads me instantly into a web of fascinating irrelevances. Chat sites especially are glitterballs of distraction, as when I somehow landed, while searching for something entirely different, on an old mumsnet thread about choosing books which included the comment "There is a writer called Crysse Morrison, one of whose books looks quite interesting and whose articles I have seen in magazines. But I won't read her book because she spells her name such a daft way."  'Unquiet Dad' sounds delightfully like my father, who would never read anything by a woman or an American.
So here we are in a new year, looking in Frome today pretty similar to the one we just kicked out. Short sunny days, good company and great music - here's an afternoon jam in the Three Swans with a mash-up of bands plus various acoustic instrumentalists and a bit of electric too.

And here's a powerfully evocative new figure created by Marian Bruce, who gave me permission to share. This one is unnamed, but her other figures represent consequence and this one also resonates a sense of human suffering. Marian says people find her art 'hard', but viewers struggled with Guernica too: Picasso said the purpose of art is not please, it is rather to bristle with razorblades.

We live in a world that dreams of ending, says Brendan Kennelly in Begin, his sublime celebration of mundanity, yet something that will not acknowledge conclusion insists that we forever begin.  I usually quote that poem in full to end the year but for a change here's a little ditty inspired by research: another distraction that won't make the final cut, but it seems appropriate now I'm going dark, as the theatre folk say:
The coffin path passed through the pub
and as each corpse's journey paused,
pall-bearers & grievers shared a round 
before proceeding to the waiting grave. 
This cadaverous custom must
have comforted mourners as dust returned to dust, 
and probably enlivened the funerals no end.
That's it from me, now a new year is out of the box let's see if we can keep it nice this time.

Trending this week: Deadly females

Frome faced the first frost of winter flamboyantly with a plethora of varied creative enterprises this weekend: Friday's brilliant Acoustic Plus night at the Cheese & Grain featured the legendary Bugs as well as Frome Afrobeat Project ~ a town-sponsored scheme for young musicians led by Lekan Babalola. Saturday was the 5th birthday of Deadly is the Female ~ internationally famed since Nigella Lawson's twitter endorsement~ celebrated in quirky baroque style with tequila cocktails and live mannequins in the window... great fun ~

~ and strangely surreal to go direct to Marian Bruce's exhibition a few doors away... "Studio Collection" is what the title suggests: an assembly of random items from the artist's working area, in various media. I've worked with Marian on several projects and it's almost impossible to find words to express the life-vision her work embodies or the dark energy that emanates.  The small pieces cramming The Parlour stir memories, evoke myths, and dig deep into feelings of human endurance and frailty. They are provocative, disturbing and inspirational. Picasso said art should 'bristle with razors' and these disempowered, dismembered, silent heads and small sewn-up bodies have that power.

Another woman artist's exhibition opening too: Charlotte Moore, taking classic paintings 'Off the Wall' at the Black Swan, presenting familiar images from art ~ mostly naked women ~ recreated as daubed figures on wire mesh, cut and layered to offer spaces for the intruding viewer. Words at the Black Swan group found much to discuss and debate in this challenging re-making of cultural iconography. Our responses when shaped into poetic form will displayed with the exhibition, which runs until 24th December.

And, loosely connected with surreal journeys through time & place, a quick plug for the next Frome Poetry Cafe on Monday December 2nd, themed to tie in with the Merlin Theatre winter show,  Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass.  By then Frome will be all a-glitter with festive lights switched on by local hero Jenson Button, Nevertheless Productions will have moved into top gear with our seasonal Pub Theatre production Festive Stockings, and it won't be long before the mayhem begins...