A week that wasn't, ending with drama and a Big Bash

I'll begin at the end of the week, because that was the best bit: The Merlin Short Play Competition had its superb finale on stage, with rehearsed readings by Frome Drama Club of the six winning plays. Here's the final line-up, chosen from seventy-seven submissions and a very strong long-list, and here's Claudia Pepler who initiated and master-minded this brilliant celebration of new drama, in role with Philip de Glanville in the gentle mystery Meet me at the Nightingale. 
Allison Herbert and Dan Gaisford here are in the dystopian satire Post Truth, and Tracy Ashford is looking askance at Nick White in Plan B, a comedy with an unexpected twist.

These versatile actors also took on Hot Tub Blues, a comedy of bickering with a happy ending, and Not Dead Yet, a very unusual vampire story. Mhairi Milligan's reading of Just of the Boat, a moving monologue of our times ended the performances, and a short Q&A afterwards confirmed audience appreciation of this varied & entertaining selection of winning plays. Congratulations to all the writers, who can list this success on their CV in future submissions, and hopefully the two able to come and see their scripts 'go live' found the experience a valuable part of the process of play-writing. Win-win all.

Friday night was also the Mayor's Charity Bash, an important night in Frome when the outgoing mayor organises a public entertainment with all proceeds to local organisations, and this year Mayor Toby Eliot had a new Town Hall to do it in.  So after the show at the Merlin we scooted across town to join the celebrations organised, too late to hear the excellent set by Deputy Mayor Al O'Kane but in time for the excellent set by Mayor Toby's fabulous band Back Wood Redeemers. As well as mandolin, those chains in no way impede his harmonica skills either!  We were in time too to see Des Harris win the hat competition, here he is with Stina Harris, and here's the one he took of me in my hat, looking like I think I'm still holding a glass of prosecco... After the band there was disco & dancing till midnight ~ a great way to finish a week that had up till then been pretty rubbish.

My persistent cold-&-throat thing had become unignorable, revealing its true colours (lurid) and literally silencing me. Most of this week has therefore been about cancelling: a meeting about a play, a meeting about a performance, a writers' group meeting, a theatre visit for review, the Last Tree Dreaming commemoration plaque unveiling, and an open-mic night of 'perilous reading' to celebrate Dracula's 120th publication-birth, and the Roots Session at the Grain Bar, where I really wanted to hear the Fos Brothers who grew up in Belfast in the troubled '70s not far from where I lived at the start of that era.

So here's two snippets from the week before - plans for future events - when my lurgy was gripping but my voice hadn't gone completely awol: I had a useful meeting with Phil Moakes, founder and organiser of Visual Radio Arts in his revamped home in the Old Fire Station, to discuss a future live on-air performance poetry session with four local poets.
And I was privileged to stand in for Stephanie Cole in a read-through of John Payne's script for the Life and Work of Edward Thomas event in Frome Festival, here's me with James Laurenson and Martin Bax.

Footnote to this ravaged week: I did manage a quick dip into the Museums at Night national project supported by Frome's Black Swan Arts, involving evening events at several galleries including The Good Gallery where Kate Cochrane is showing her splendid paintings of Tasmania. I'll leave you two images from the Cornerhouse, always a friend to live music: Graham Dent's new jazz line-up, and marvellous Blue Midnight, extraordinary ska/dub rhythms blended with a touch of scottish and turkish... Here's hoping for more happenings to report on next week.

Beltane bulletin: summer ahead & the Greater Good

To begin in the middle: This week was the 10th anniversary of possibly the most momentous moment in the impressive history of Wells: the special premiere of Edgar Wright's Hot Fuzz, with unmistakable town locations thinly disguised as the Sandford, the rural village that made murdering Midsomer look like sanitised Stepford.
So significant a date clearly required celebration, and what better way than hoisting a giant screen in the Bishop's Palace Garden and inviting a few hundred people to park their chairs on the billiard-table smooth & verdant lawn to enjoy a Hot Fuzz quiz, Hot Fuzz fancy-dress contest, and ~ of course ~ a late night screening of Hot Fuzz. The event sold out in days. It was all tremendous fun: the rain stayed off, organisation was amazingly smooth, speedy & good-humoured, and ticket price included barbecue, drink & goodie-bag. Now I want to go back for the Hot Fuzz walk...

Back in Frome, it's been another busy week.

Spoken word first: Frome Poetry Cafe enjoyed two terrific guests and an outstanding open mic session.  Matt Duggan read from his new chapbook Metropolis, evoking the moods of Bristol life through sounds and visual details: glass shards, city sirens, and no stars...  Lindsay Clarke, our other guest, reading from his recent collection A Dance with Hermes, imagining the trickster god still present in our world, timeless and deathless, reminding us the only remedy for life is love. Poems from the floor chimed with these powerful themes of time & place and life & death: there were moving memories and inspiring glimpses as well as delightful lighter moments. Huge thanks to all who came and all who read, including Rose Flint and Rosie Jackson who shared the her award-winning poem in the 2017 Hippocrates Competition.  (Thanks Matt for the picture)

Not one but two great bands at the Grain Bar this week: Wednesday's Roots Session featured fabulous blues trio The Spoonful, and on Sunday night we had a fantastic jazz special from John Law's Re-creations. This virtuoso quartet comprises John on (double) keyboard, James Agg on bass, Sam Crockatt on sax, and drummer Billy Weir, dynamically 'recreating' other composers' tunes like you've never heard them ~ just check out their Norwegian Wood...

Now here's the thing: we all know Frome is twinned virtually with the Eden and the national press bubbles with adulation for for its quaint cobbled streets, entrepreneurial market, entertainment options and general creativity, but the outcome of this,  combined with market profiteering, has pushed the cost of a house up by an average of £36,000 on last year's prices, scarily out of reach of most young local people wanting to buy or even rent.  Fair Housing for Frome, a community group run by volunteers with support from the Town Council, held a public meeting on Saturday afternoon to outline the problem. Solutions won't be easy, but there's clearly support for finding initiatives and answers.

Merlin Theatre 'Short Play Competition' performance of the winning submissions, fully-rehearsed script-in-hand, is coming up: the winning scripts have been picked from a strong long-list ~ in fact so strong, there was no short-list as such: these six very different scripts should create a fascinating evening of dramatic action.

Looking further ahead to July: an exciting but somewhat confusing headline appeared on Frome Festival website last week: FROME FESTIVAL RECEIVES EU AWARD. Nope, our town hasn't been exempted from Brexit doom, but our festival did pass the rigorous application procedure of the EFA, a prestigious organisation of arts festivals part-funded by the EU. The ECOS stone circle helped: built in 1992 to celebrate the European Union, this amphitheatre hosts summer productions, with two in the festival ~ check the brochure, out now, for these and other July delights.

So now it's May, and officially summer. Beltane is traditionally celebrated with bonfires but we celebrated it here with a dawn trip to Saxonvale, an unofficial park/wasteland hidden in the heart of the town, part public dump adorned by amazing creativity, part woodland waist-high with cow parsley and thick with the scent of wild garlic.


We sang a few songs, in old English and rather randomly in French, and listened to the birds, and then had an excellent picnic of home-made bread and marmalade, with coffee, all provided by members of the East Mendip Green Party. They public-spiritedly stayed on to do a big litter-picking blitz of some of the messy bits, and I went back home to bed.