A week of theatrical responses & sunshine

Open-air theatre is a thing that no plague can stop, it seems, with two productions streamed this week: The Tempest from the Lord Chamberlain's Men was a jolly way to pass a couple of hours but even if you know the play, it's quite hard to follow the story as delivered by seven shouty men, especially with Prospero focused on audibility rather than tonal range, and that masque sequence which is baffling at the best of times - though the costumes, part-burlesque, part-dirndl, were fun. This production was clearly designed for performance in a large garden with a beer tent on a warm night but with a bit of imagination and a large glass of wine it was good fun.



Miracle Theatre had no problems in conveying their story: they were making it up as they went along, allegedly, so incoherence was part of the fun. The Case of the Frightened Lady gave us Bill Scott's talented team, led by marvellous Ben Dyson, creating a who-dunnit by whirlwind improvisation to meet crime-writer Edgar Wallace's deadline for delivering a new novel to his publisher. This was shot at a live performance at the Minack on the edge of the Cornish coast, which adds huge glamour, and is a wonderfully funny pastiche with great performances. Again, as often with filmed performances, it's a bit disappointing not to be able to see the whole stage at crucial moments: close-ups in farce, where everyone's reaction is part of the humour, reduce the overall effect. But it was still brilliant.

On a grander scale, National Theatre offered us Anthony and Cleopatra, all three hours of conflict and passion as envisaged by Shakespeare, with Ralph Fiennes check as Anthony (here with Tinji Kasim as Caesar) and Sophie Okonedo as his temperamental mistress (here with an asp and a death-wish). Director Simon Godwin brings a thoroughly modern lens to this tale of big personalities and complex politics, with slide-tape presentation to follow the battle plan and the Egyptian queen in costumes which reminded some in the comments of Beyonce, though to me it looked more Top Shop.

Music: most of mine these weeks is supplied by Craig Charles on Radio 6, Spotify and CDs, but there's plenty to watch too: Bath Festivals weekend roundup offers 10 virtual options from concerts to burlesque, Cooper Hall has a Youtube channel dedicated to enlivening ditties such as You Cannae Shove Yer Granny Off Bus and Al O'Kane has a new single out on Monday: I want some Peace.

Frome's wonderful Hunting Raven Bookshop doyenne Tina Gaysford-Waller continues to run her Proof Pudding Club, delivering review copies of new books herself, with feedback via Zoom meetings. We enjoyed our May session on Sunday night, with a smaller group than usual but much cameraderie.  Most interesting-sounding books, to me, were A Dutiful Boy by Mohsin Zaidi - true coming-of-age memoir by a gay Muslim - and Sex Robots and Vegan Meat by Jenny Kleeman, a look at some of the not-science-fiction developments occurring right now... This was Tina's pick and hopefully by July the author will be able to visit our bookshop, as planned. There are more recommendations and discussions on the Bookbound online festival site.

Nature notes to finish: solid sunshine all week was perfect for permitted walks around Frome. I've never seen so many wild flowers, or so much dense white blossom on verges and hedges. Insect life too, presumably in consequence, seems to be thriving. After the heatwave we've been enjoying most of this spring, it seemed likely that the bee orchids on Cley Hill might be showing early (usually they pose for my camera in June) so I used my drive-if-exercising-longer-on-arrival permission for a trip there but floral development was less advanced than the town, with hawthorn bushes still in tight bud: the carpet of ten trillion buttercups and view from the summit were both fantastic though.

silent sunshine & other strangenesses

And as sunshine and clear blue skies continue, here's another cultural miscellany to while away these strange days.
Art first, as the delayed Black Swan Young Open 2020 is now live as a virtual exhibition of exhibitors and winners. If there are virtual awards going for arts coordinators coping in times of crisis too, the Black Swan team should scoop them all: this link will show you the top prizes in all three categories (this painting is Indigo Spring by Indigo Cameron Clarke, one of the 8-11 winners) and also take you on complete tours of all the successful entrants' work, escorted by Black Swan Art's Amanda Sheridan.

On to lockdown drama:
Were you one of the 85,000 waiting to watch the inaugural free offer from National Theatre Live at 7pm on Thursday? The final viewing figure for One Man, Two Guvnors was apparently 165,595 - probably mainly lured by the chance to see James Cordon in the role that won him a Tony 'best leading actor' award in 2012.  Writer Richard Bean took the idea of a wily servant trying to serve two masters from the 18th century Italian playwright Carlo Goldoni, transposing it to Brighton in the heady days of skiffle and spivs and dolly birds with beehives. Some may find this kind of farce ideal in troubled times, but if you prefer your humour slightly surreal there's Seinfeld and Father Ted on offer free by Channel 4 on demand.   And Cornwall's wonderful Miracle Theatre - if you live in Frome you'll have seen their fabulous small-cast productions on ECOS during the summer festival - is offering a free-view production online from 7pm on the first Monday of each month throughout the coming month. Next Monday (6 April) is "Tin’ a large scale collaboration with English Touring Opera, commissioned by the Cornish Mining World Heritage.

Poetry: Frome's fabulous Liv Torc, performance poet and cornucopia of creative ideas, has made the The Times 'Notebook' column for originating the 'word of the week': haiflu. There's a selection of 50 to inspire you here.  If you forget the 5-7-5 syllable structure of this mini-form where rhyme is irrelevant, here's a helpful reminder from John Cooper Clark:

To write a po-em

with sev-en-teen syll-a-bles

is ver-y diff-ic-

Meanwhile the Poetry Foundation will email you a poem of their choice every day. This is the start of Wednesday's - you may well know it but it's good to revisit Still I Rise by Maya Angelou.

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies, 

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Music: Happily, there are already enough free music videos available to last several lockdowns, but if you've been a fan of Sofar you might enjoy some of the international sessions available now for free. No new shows obviously but literally a world of choice: here's some mellow sounds from Dublin last autumn.

This week's Little Known Character is Henry Paget, 5th Marquis of Anglesey who died in 1905 aged 29, having scandalised society and bankrupted his estate by spending thousands of pounds on jewels, furs, cars, boats, dogs, horses, toys and theatricals on a scale that staggered even the profligate Edwardians.  His passion was to dress up as Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and perform his sinuous 'butterfly dance' in German music halls; he wandered through London with a poodle dressed in pink ribbons, modified his car so the exhaust smelled of rose perfume, and reportedly 'bought diamonds as an ordinary man buys cigarettes.' Described by one acquaintance as 'an Aubrey Beardsley character come to life', the marquis did marry but the bride left after the honeymoon, although she was with him when he died. His family then set about disposing of every shred of evidence of his excesses, from roof crenellations to the pingpong balls he played with, in the infamous 'Great Anglesey Sale' which lasted 40 days and contained 17,000 lots. Even his 150 seat theatre went.  Do feel free to send suggestions of little known characters: next week will feature anonymous nudes from famous paintings.

Ending this sunny, quiet, week with a view of Frome from the western fields beyond the river. Stay happy, folks. Remember what Bob Dylan said: Everything passes and everything changes, just do what you think you should do...

Do novels make great plays? What's unmissable at Frome Festival? and other imponderables...

A balmy evening on Friday, and the ECOS amphitheatre at the Merlin proved a perfect venue for the Miracle Theatre production of The Third Policeman, adapted from the novel by Flann O'Brien. The Miracle treatment involves physical hi-jinks, improv interaction with unguarded audiences (picnics invariably raided) and super-sized characters in silly costumes. This time they had supers-sized oirish accents too. This drama starts at a bar like any drably sentimental pub-based play by Conor McPherson and quickly becomes ~ to quote a friend at the interval ~ Alice in Wonderland meets Father Ted. On this dreamlike version of Craggy Island it's not clear whether the police are fruitcakes or time-lords but there's an uncanny logic in some of their arguments. Can you be executed if you are nameless and ergo never existed? And since skin is porous surely it will eventually absorb the molecules of anything in constant contact... so who's to say a person can't turn into a bicycle? Note to NASA: This would surely be a more useful line of research than string theory...
A compact cast of four takes on all roles. Ben Dyson looking a bit like Bart Simpson is on absolute top form as a policeman and Catherine Lake is hilarious in multiple roles, but while there's much mirth and playfulness there's a dark side to the narrative too: murder, mistrust, violence and punishment are constant themes.  Flann O'Brien's novel was initially rejected, and only published after his death. There was a note in the manuscript which read "It was again the beginning of the unfinished, the re-discovery of the familiar, the re-experience of the already suffered, the fresh-forgetting of the unremembered. Hell goes round and round." And because ECOS amphitheatre has a circular stage, so too did the bicycles. I like to think Brian O'Nolan would have found a droll irony in that. The show is touring the south-west till August 26, catch it if you can.
 
Sunday was an even balmier night, with an even bigger crowd on ECOS for a return tour of  Pride and Prejudice as dramatised by Oliver Gray for Illyria, also a compact & talented touring company but rather more well-behaved regarding picnic-raids. Audience interference would be inappropriate of course for Jane Austen's etiquette-conscious characters, as created by five actors and a fabulous wardrobe of costumes, all evoking both era and personality while simultaneously looking like the sort of dreams you'd have if you spent too long studying the Boden catalogue. Pat Farmer & Curlywilly Prod are credited with these delights, and the set design ~ a backdrop of fan shapes in Georgian blue with wickedly multi-purpose seating and laundry baskets ~ is by Jill 'Wigs' Wilson. The acting team all had wonderful energy and great stage presence, with Toby Webster outstanding as noble Darcy and caddish Wickham and annoyingly bookish Mary, while also filling in as a coachman when long distances required seated jiggling rather than the (also entertaining) on-the-spot pacing of their walks.
It's all fast-paced and with wonderful visual details like the flourishing of quill pens, a frequent requirement in a story where much is narrated by long emotional letters. The original novel of course is universally acknowledged to have possibly the most famous opening line of any novel, and probably the most misunderstood. Jane Austen was no early chicklit author (Northanger Abbey was written to parody the Gothic romance trend) and idea that a man of fortune 'must be in want of a wife' heralds one of the greatest, most complex, social satires ever written. Our heroine is one of five daughters of a man whose property must, by the laws of his time, be passed on to a male, so there is a real practical urgency in Mrs Bennett's desperation to marry off her daughters ~ any of them ~ to absolutely any man who can support her and the rest of her brood should she be widowed. This adaptation follows the plot, social mores & all, with conscientious detail Janites in the audience will appreciate, and P&P virgins can enjoy the frocks and the antics (and buy a programme for plot-watch). Highly recommended, and touring till 28 August.

So that's two terrific nights of drama, and we're only three days into the 2017 Frome Festival. I barely scratched the surface of the 55 events of last weekend: like all the best fests, Frome has constant clashes and every conversation seems to start You missed a fabulous event last night... So I can do no more than show a few slivers of the sensational vibrance throughout the streets and venues.
Saturday was a big day for our writers, with the Small Publishers Fair at Silk Mill, always a great venue and with the yard converted into a Cantina, it's tempting place to linger. Writers in Residence meanwhile were tackling the challenge of writing a short story in four hours while ensconced in designated shops and cafes in the town centre. And from late afternoon until midnight, we were hijacked by music:  Frome Street Bandits led a parade to the Food Feast in the central market, where they were followed by Jamma de Samba and a bizarre and wildly popular performance from SATCO street theatre, while within the Cheese & Grain itself there was brilliant folk-rock from Julian (Bugs) Hight and punk-uke from the marvellous Wochynskis.
After all of which it was time to scamper up the hill to the Cornerhouse for a truly amazing performance from Captain Cactus and his Screaming Harlots, whose 9-piece band was nearly as tightly squeezed in the space at the far end of the bar as their audience was in the rest of it, though that didn't stop us dancing.

Sunday daytime for me was mostly about jazz. Both of Frome's excellent jazz bands were playing at the Cornerhouse throughout the day supplemented by trad jazz from the New Academic Feetwarmers in the garden of the Blue House, perfect for picnicking on cherries and prosecco. My report on the Art Trail is therefore postponed....

And having missed the marvellous Edward Thomas commemoration at Rook Lane last night, I hope to make amends at the Poetry Cafe tonight where the theme for the open mic is That Adlestrop Moment, so I'll leave you with a quick preview of the  Garden Cafe, by day a favourite with ladies who lunch, by night hosting the mordant post-punk mutant fantasies of Beef Unit...

Onward lies the way... mythical Cornwall, legendary Frome...

 It's been one of those weeks... when the sun remembers its attendance throughout June was pretty poor and determines not to lose out on gold stars... when being in Frome is so delightful the tag 'twinned with Eden' seems inadequate... when, to quote the Independent Market slogan, Something Wonderful Happens, every day. I haven't got room for them all so here's a smattering:
Sunday's monthly street market was slightly less busy than usual, possibly because the sunshine had seduced people to sit in their gardens (or for me, to battle with encroaching floral profusion) so stall-holders reported that crowds were more ready to linger and buy. As always, great music on the busking stage and in the Archangel courtyard from Partners in Crime, where Paul Kirtley introduced the audience to the concept of (my) crone poetry via his clever, funny, song Young Crones of Avalon inspired by Bungee Jumping Crumblies ~ he plans to convert more of my poems, so we may end up touring in combo.... !
Rushing on now, as I did then, to the Grain Bar where Friends of the Frome Festival were delightfully entertained by a sampler of some of shows on offer next week, with music, words, and comedy for all tastes and ages. Here's the lovely duo from La Zingerella, presenting a clip from their one-act opera, with superb live lutenist, at Trinity Church on the final Sunday.
This early-evening smörgåsbord happily finished in time for a scamper up the hill to Wheatsheaves for a gig organised by the Momentum powerhouse called Dave Clark. His band Dexter's Extra Breakfast provided support, and Canary's Kerry-anne Mendoza described how & why she set up her journalistic team to counter the manipulation of mainstream media.  Grace Petrie was the stunning headline act: a candid 'protest singer', massively talented and effortlessly charismatic, her final message was "The politics of fear is all we've had. It's time we gave the politics of hope a chance."

And as the spirit-lifting sunshine continues to sizzle, my Wednesday concluded at Bristol Old Vic watching Tristan & Yseult as re-envisioned fourteen years after Kneehigh's original production. It's become their most renowned show, touring the world for five years and then revived in 2013 for another international tour. Several of the original team have reconvened for this latest tour, and expectations at Bristol Old Vic this week were sky-high. Mine were anyway. Director Emma Rice recalls her original reluctance to tell this Cornish legend of a medieval love triangle, until she found its 'personal profound, and deeply relevant collective heart.'  This aspect is emphasised throughout: all the action is watched by the lonely Lovespotters who peer through binoculars like twitchers, witnessing passion and betrayal with envious longing and bopper head-bands. There's a bit of everything here, not just musically ~ several subplots and the denoument are straight from Shakespeare, but the story isn't really important: it's the ensemble effect, the wild dancing, circus-style fights, the sense of everyone playing in a giant invisible bouncy-castle as stand-up comedy mingles with tingling erotica, blood-soaked violence with sheer pantomime. Two contrasting moments I'll remember: the auditorium filled with floating balloons (obediently inflated by the audience), and the poignant post-coital speech of the maid, Brangian, abused not by her master but her mistress's terrible command. Nial Ashdown, who plays this role as well as Ysault's swiftly murdered brother,  has astonishing stage presence throughout. Dominic Marsh and Hannah Vassallo are sensational in the title roles, and Kyle Lima's dancing is amazing. The set looks a bit like a Cornish tin mine or abandoned playground, and also supports their aerial gymnastics. It's on till 15 July, get a ticket if you can. Images Steve Tanner

A visual art trio to conclude this post:

Pete Gage, best known around town as lead musician in a crowd-pulling band, was a friend to many legends of the 1960s & 70s. One who deserves to be better known is David Evans, a prolific watercolourist who died sadly young, and whose extraordinary paintings of places & the 'human spectacle' are now published together in collection launched at Hunting Raven Books on Tuesday. Pete, who knew the artist well and has a chapter in the book, showed us his own extensive personal collection of David's work, sharing a moving intimate picture of the artist which felt genuinely a privilege. You can see more about the book here.
Frome Festival art exhibitions are now, wisely, anticipating tomorrow's formal start.

At Silk Mill there's a stunning exhibition of 'The Amahuaca of the Amazon' by Katherine Needles, who followed in the footsteps of Magnum's Cornell Capa to show how this community still lives and thrives. The pictures all have accessible captions: here the photographer stands between 'a feisty three year old with a stick' and a woman decorated with 'ouita', a fruit-based dye to ward off evil spirits.
Over at the Grain Bar, Ann Harrison-Broninski launched her sketches with a delightfully friendly 'Meet the Artist' evening.
So now we're on the brink of the 2017 Frome Festival, an event so massive, varied, wide-ranging &  generally inconceivably superb that my reportage will inevitably be inadequate. Enjoy whatever you choose, festival pickers! Here's a non-advertised addition for anyone who enjoys walking, countryside, rivers, wild swimming, poetry, or just intrigued by a slightly strange summer picnic...

Midweek report: the persistence of glitter

With 'Angry' Sam Berkson as guest, I knew Monday's Festival Poetry Cafe would be good, and it was superlative.  After a stellar line-up for the open mic, with readers from Bristol and Bath joining local poets, Stephen Payne was awarded the title 2015 Festival Poet Laureate, and Sam had time for an extended second set from his new collection.

 Settled Wanderers is the result of Sam's stay in the refugee camps of the nomadic tribes of Western Sahara, working with an interpreter to translate their poetry. Sam's own poems are included too, and read us the one explaining Why you should never do translation in the house of your Saharawi translator, where hospitality and ritual rule supreme and it takes many greetings and cups of tea below the crescent-moon-lit, opal blue desert sky to achieve the first rough sketch of the first ever English translation of one of the great Badi's fifty years' worth of poems. It's impossible to convey this amazing book in snatches, I do recommend you buy it.

The usual festival clashes prevented me from watching Brenda Bannister win the title 2015 Bard of Frome at the short play competition in the Three Swans but she met me afterwards for a personal handover of the winner's cup, and we went up to the Magical Folk Garden at the Archangel to celebrate. Fairies at the door added literal glitter and I listened to lovely Beth Porter and the Availables feeling like Peaseblossom.

Miracle Theatre are always popular with Merlin audiences, who bedeck the amphitheatre in clusters with rugs, cushions, picnic baskets and, when required, mackintoshes and umbrellas. These were required on Tuesday: grey clouds, although enlivened by an interval rainbow, promised & twice delivered downpours. But cacti among the ECOS stones, a saloon bar set, and Ben Dyson mopping imagined sweat from the noon-day heat, all helped to transport us to the parched outback of the Wild West for the tale of The Magnificent Three. The cast are all immensely entertaining, though to be honest this piece is more a showcase for their varied talents than a story and despite their charm & skills it seems more an idea for a script than a fully developed production. No-one is complaining though, and there are some brilliant highlights, like the fake filmic slow-motion fights. And for those who like that sort of thing, there's a lot of toe-tapping and song.

From desert to forest to wild west, where next? Frome Stop the War Campaign took us to the harsh reality of international war-mongering from the build-up to Iraq in 2002 to the coast of Tunisia last week ("the perfect opportunity to bomb Syria."). Where are those WMDs? was horribly funny, in the sense that the satiric sketches while hilariously witty were almost too true to be funny at all. TV journalists Dan Glazebrook and Neil Clark gave us a series of glimpses into top level meetings between the US military and UK government: frank and cynical exchanges based on their shared objective of a permanent war-zone in the middle east. Musical interludes were brilliantly provided by Clayton Blizzard, a rapper from Bristol who claims to 'mash folk and hiphop like the long-lost cousins they are' but he's actually much better, and more political, than that.

There were so many superb events I missed during these last three days... but the fairy glitter from Monday night still faintly twinkles. Magic sparkle V Neals Yard cleanser, a win to the festival sprites.

History in the making

How can you make a comic play from the true story of Stanley's meeting with Dr Livingstone? The answer is, you can’t. According to contemporary accounts, Morton Stanley was a man who shoots Africans like monkeys, and David Livingstone was a hopeless leader; neither seem to have acknowleged the support of their team or their womenfolk, and the famous greeting was probably apocryphal. Miracle Theatre therefore in devising their current show Dr Livingstone I Presume has abandoned history for a series of absurd and very funny sketches involving song and dance, a range of costumes and puppetry, and some farting. The conceit of the show is that events are recreated by a Victorian touring company in an atmosphere of sizzling backstage tension with an increasingly intoxicated MC ~ the marvellous Ben Dyson, always brilliant when apparently about to break leash and bound for the mad hills of non-sequitur and anarchy. The company aims to 'take a swipe at 19th Century imperialism, chauvinsim, and hypocrisy' but it's a small nod really and I wished this talented team had pushed the satire further. As Alexei Sayle immortally said, you can't change the world with a silly song ~ you have to do the silly dance too...

Which segues nicely into Change How?, a one-day event put on by Compass in Islington Metalworks, a venue with the charm and amenities you'd expect from a scrap storage area now a nightclub, but on Sunday for 6 hours it was filled with excitement and coloured balloons as 100 speakers & performers, simultaneously in 6 venues and with a gong at 15 minutes, gave their vision of how to change the world for the better. It was exhausting and brilliant.
Frome's independent mayor was there to talk about the Flatpack Democracy process, with Johannes Mueler, founder of the Frome-based Edventure project helping young people design their own apprenticeships to shape their chosen futures, and our local Guardian journalist John Harris. And I went there just to look and listen. My highlights included, unsurprisingly, poets like Anthony Anaxagorou, Yusra Warsama and Angry Sam (who I hope will come to Frome to feature in the festival) ~ and it was good to end with a blast of stand-up from Chris Coltrane.

As with Glastonbury festival it was sometimes easier to stay put than push through the crowds to another location, which resulted in some great surprises like Jon Alexander, an ex-adman, inspirational about the need for a new moral logic to replace consumerism, and Spiros Rapanakis, Greek documentary-maker and member of Syriza, massively applauded as he told us We are not afraid any more. We know everyone in the world is looking at Greece and that gives us courage. The question is, are you going to join the big revolution?