The scrapbook edition: sunny walking, and talking about theatre

Picture of the week was a tough choice now that sunshine and car-repair allow a wider range of walking as spring brings bluebells and wild garlic along the paths and may-blossom dazzling in the hedges, with birdsong everywhere. Frome market yard on Saturday was a pop-up picture-book of enticing stalls, with creative crafts as well as food and flowers. Irrelevantly, but a new discovery to me, this majestic elm not far from the town centre is probably the last local survivor of the 1960s Dutch elm disease blight that killed off an estimated 20 million trees in the UK. Constable was mad about elms: his famous landscapes are thick with them and the V&A has a painting of an elm trunk by him that looks exactly like a photograph - you can see it here. 

As indoors venues are still off-limits and sunshine is enticing, the only performance to report this week is A Winters Tale from the Royal Shakespeare Company on BBC4. Although officially regarded as a romance and one of Shakespeare's comedies, the storyline is very dark.  A sad tale's best for winter, declares the little prince: his mother is thrown out by his deranged father and he dies of grief, so you could say he got what he wanted, but transposing the action to the 1950s & '60s - despite some powerful tableau moments and jolly revelry in the second half - doesn't alter the grim storyline and resolution takes nearly 3 hours with much angry shouting and that famous death by bear-pursuit. This BBC Lights Up production is available on iPlayer here, with a more comprehensive review here, and a couple of screenshots of from the opening and final acts. 

 

Speaking of the bard's works, Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory has issued a series of podcasts focusing on the speculation What Would Shakespeare Do? in a pandemic, comprising recitations of speeches that have uncertain relevance and interviews with Bristol residents about their dreams and opinions. The first two - both out now - are quite niche, in a Home Service way, but free to listen here.

National Theatre more entertainingly offers filmed conversations of Life In Stages, with episode 1 on Thursday featuring its Artistic Director Rufus Norris talking with actress Olivia Colman. There's no attempt to make this seem an informal chat at a casual encounter, and both seem a bit uncomfortable out of their professional role, but the rapport is good, and interesting insights emerge about the apparent glamour of their profession - both admit to stress, and familiarity with 'imposter syndrome'.  Insightful and interesting - you can watch the series here. 

Also free, static but very well illustrated: a Webinar talk on London Theatreland from Andrew Warde, swooping entertainingly through the history of the city's 241 buildings, their owners and designers, their dramas and dramatists, their technicians and traumas, plus a peppering of spicy anecdotes. Our oldest theatre now is the Bristol Old Vic (opened 1776) but the first was built 200 years before that by Richard Burbage, and playhouses have survived closures for plague and civil war, often rebuilt after fires - they often burned down as stage lighting was by large candles until Drummond's 1816 invention of 'limelight'. The entire talk was crammed with fascinating detail and tasty soundbites - Samuel Pepys' view of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Kings Theatre in 1662, for instance ("The most insipid ridiculous play I ever saw in my whole life,") and Sheridan's response when reproached for drinking as in 1809 he watched the Theatre Royal Drury Lane ablaze: "A man may surely be allowed a glass of wine by his own fireside?" A fascinating dramatic time-tour from Mirthy - worth checking out their topics.

Clare Reddaway, playwright, fiction writer, and since lockdown organiser of the Storeopathy online fiction events currently has a story with the Tempest Productions story project: Living in the Shadow of Venus, a delightfully quirky and satisfyingly upbeat tale of our times. Clare would have been one of the writers in I'm Talking to You, the planned event by Nevertheless Pub Theatre for the Frome festival last year.  It hasn't been possible to revive this project for 2021but there's plenty of good stuff in the offing for the festival's return, with a Frome Poetry Cafe session in ECOS, the town's famous amphitheatre - look out for more details of a whole raft of other events coming soon. 

Still with words: this week has been a good one for me, with the conclusion of a poetic project - wonderful to reconnect zoomily with my Live & Lippy partner Hazel Stewart for this - and the start of a fiction-related one. Partial release from lock-down still feels strange, neither total freedom nor the seclusion that allowed us - me anyway - to indulge in private pastimes like jigsaws, painting, online games and reading.  Several irresistible books are still as yet unfinished: the brilliant Book of Trespass and Who Owns England now joined by The Assault on Truth, countered by the optimism of Human Kind, and the compelling, sad, funny, account of his journey to death & back by Michael Rosen: Many Different Kinds of Love.  For a daily dip into etymology there's Susie Dent's Word Perfect (word of the day today was guillotine, which despite its menacing connotations was actually introduced in 1792 with the aim of reducing the unnecessary suffering of botched-job sword and gallows executions.)  Final footnote: if you go to this website and paste in a paragraph of your own work, you receive a comparative analysis of your writing style. Apparently my fiction is like award-winning novelist David Foster Wallace, while my non-fiction is more Arthur C Clarke, noted for his sci-fi. I tried to catch it out with an obscure chunk of Salinger, but it wasn't fooled, so maybe there's something in it... 

The cafe edition - short, but with an otter.

The  Barrel House Ballroom in Totnes has been home to the Word Cafe created & run by Julie Mullen since 2019, and on Thursday Julie introduced a 30-minute film of poetry and music from local poets and performers which hopefully will stay on YouTube because it's delightful. Beautifully filmed in a variety of enticing local locations (cinematography by Chris Plant) this features poetry and music by local creatives, including Matt Harvey, with an acrostic about Totnes to compensate for his recent move to Dartington, and Brian Patten, still ruggedly scouse. Brian Patten was one of my poetry heroes - the title my published collection Crumbs from a Spinning World is derived from one of his poems - and his book launches unmissable, a fact I confided to him after his eighth, Storm Damage, and received the sighed reply 'Yes, we're all getting old.'  That was back in 1995. Here he is now, and here too is Susie David reciting her poem The Sea Calls.

Back in Frome, Black Swan Arts is preparing to reopen its gallery and the cafe reopened on Friday as the River House Cafe relocated - lock, stock, and staff - from its popular but cramped location on the bridge to the spacier premises - with courtyard seating too - of the Black Swan building. It's another upward step for this 17th Century alehouse, nearly demolished in 1974 until rescued & reopened in 1986 as an arts centre. Here's me looking very happy to join the queue on the official opening day. Thanks Emma Warren for the snap! 

Also in Frome: Our last couple of weeks' sunshine has coaxed the swirling mudscape beside the river bank to regain its role as a path, thus widening the range of rambles available in town and beyond. Frome's online Wildlife Watch group, a treasure trove of birds, butterflies, and recently beavers,  been getting excited about otters, and I was lucky enough to spot this sleek-headed little guy in the exquisite garden of Marston Mill on the Mells River after a writing group meeting. 

Drama has been coming at us from all sorts of places since our theatres, initially muted apart from pleas for donations, have regrouped and come back with online options and now National Theatre has premiered their Romeo and Juliet on the telly - Sky Arts on Sunday night. Directed by Simon Godwin and commendably contracted to 90 minutes, this pandemic production of Shakespeare's violent love story becomes a timeless tale of families and passions. Josh O’Connor and Jessie Buckley are the lovers, but it's Tamsin Greig as Juliet's powerful mother who stands out in a production that changes relationships and scythes speeches but creates the constraints of family dynamics and social controls in a fantastic, and memorable, way. Look out for repeats.

This blog, or rather this blogger, is determined to chicane through our present Troubles, as the Irish so eloquently delineate stuff too big to name, without discussing either of them, nor the western religious calendar,  so this spring holiday bulletin will conclude with a 'poem for today' as chosen by Poem for the Day (1) ed. Wendy Cope which is by Maya Angelou: Still I Rise was written 1978 and is shockingly still relevant, read it and weep. More cheerful is the other choice for today, from Poem for the Day (2) ed. Andrew Motion, which is Adrian Mitchell's ditty to Celia: 

When I am sad and weary
When I think all hope has gone
When I walk along High Holborn
I think of you with nothing on

They later married & lived happily ever after, which shows there's more than one way to look at Easter.  

    

Bumper music week! from Mozart to Oasis, and a reason for hope.

Amadeus this week concludes the National Theatre's summer season of streamed classics, and made a fitting finale. Being anhedonic where opera is concerned, that meant mainly a Falco song to me but the nearly-three hours of this 2018 production were sensationally gripping. For any other ignorami, Peter Shaffer's play is an epic tale of obsession in 18th Century Vienna as young Mozart's genius arouses the jealous rage of the court composer, who sets about ruining his career. Lucian Msamati is strong as envious Salieri, Adam Gillen plays Mozart as a cross between Vyvyen from The Young Ones and a Beatrix Potter squirrel. Mrs Mozart, the very pretty Karla Crome, was my other favourite, and also the dim Emperor Joseph II who apparently had even less musical appreciation than me.  Showing till 7pm July 23rd. 

Hunting Raven Bookshop has not only re-opened in real-place but is also maintaining a strong online presence, as Tina Gaisford-Waller takes to the screen to promote some of her most fascinating new releases with zoom meetings. Friday's session featured The Compassion Project, with a talk from Dr Julian Abel the Director of Compassionate Communities UK who, with Frome writer Lyndsay Clarke, wrote this 'true story of the town that beat loneliness.' Frome is immensely lucky to have moved in this direction through various initiatives and practices and the town's medical team led by Helen Kingston is a national leader in innovative health care. A fascinating session, as Julian explained how mutual compassion, rather than 'survival of the fittest', has always been deep in mankind's social psyche, and discussion also looked at experiences among indigenous peoples of Canada, and communities in Mexico and Columbia.

Music now, as one of Frome's most active bands returned to live performance - but first quick look at online guitarists. Tuesday offered an hour from the very entertaining Boothby Graffoe - his brilliant parody of our government can be enjoyed here - and  Thursday's unexpected find was Belfast lad David Browne Murray who plays sensationally well.
Also on Thursday: Young Somerset hosted a session in their series Bert Jansch 80 Plays around the world - gigs to raise funds for the Music Venue Trust. Back in the '60s, I saw Bert Jansch with John Renbourn at an all-nighter in London, and emerged blinking into the early morning sunlight to be met by a bizarre lady pushing a trolleyful of carrier bags which, she told us cheerily, held all her possessions as she lived on the street. (Ralph McTell also met her later in the decade, and wrote a song about her.)  It seemed extraordinary in 20th Century, wealthy, England... with more than 25,000 homeless now, that encounter in Leicester Square seems from another, much nicer, world. Anyway, here's a link to the original Angie.
 And now the exciting live reveal!
 Paul Kirtley's current talented 'Bones' crew ('crew' seems a more appropriate than 'band' as they never have a set plan or rehearse, and personnel vary) put on a brilliant show for the outdoor diners at Rode Mill on Saturday afternoon. Social distancing - immaculately established by owner John and maintained by soundman Steve - didn't impede the barbecue or bar, and the session developed into a request set with dancing by early evening.

The lawns around this lovely old restaurant are perfect for picnics, too, with the river curling round them.

Returning summer sunshine has allowed more long walks again: from the southern meadows right along the reclaimed river path through Frome town, and beyond to the northern fields - there's a crop circle in one - with bursts of woodland and masses of wild flowers. Other routes like Vallis Vale and Nunney Brook, are within striding distance of my house too, and after so many discoveries it's a mystery now how there was ever time to organise any events and why I ever wanted to travel anywhere else...

Meanwhile my house waits patiently for the promised springclean - so I gave it some lilies instead, from Stuart's stall in the market place (which is now inaccessible due to road changes by the way. )

Dreams dramatically dashed - words, spoken & writ - it's another lockdown medley

Small Island, the National Theatre production staged last year, is an especially timely offering for streamed viewing, not just as a shaming reminder of recent treatment of families of those 'Sons of the Empire' lured to post-war Britain, but also with the current spate of retrospective sensitivity about historical terminology: as the producers put it "Please note that, as part of depicting the experience of Jamaican immigrants to Britain after the Second World War, some characters in the play use racially offensive terms."  Andrea Levy based her 2004 novel on her own experience of growing up in London as the child of Jamaican immigrants: it won several major book prizes and was picked by The Guardian in 2009 as one of the defining books of the decade As in the book, the action of the play moves across two continents, and the minimal set changes plus effective lighting effectively convey Hortense's culture-shock as she relocates from a sunny small island where she could consider herself both British and middle-class to a chilly, damp, small-minded island bereft of respect for her qualities and seeing only her skin. Online till 25th June, well worth watching.

And there was another dream of midsummer magic at the Globe this week, with a 2013 production directed by Dominic Dromgool three years before the Emma Rice extravaganza reported in my last post: a more traditional version of Shakespeare's drama with the fairies a darkly ominous presence in a world where mortals, both noble and lower class do all be fools in their desires and their passions.
Renaissance costumes and more traditional staging both work well for this interpretation,  the adolescent immaturity of the lovers explaining their passionate tempers, and the merging  between the mortal and fairy overlords also fits this interpretation of the drama. Matthew Tennyson plays Puck as a wayward and dysfunctional teenager - he won an award as 'best newcomer' - and the mechanicals adlib, mess about, and shove the chaos of their 'Pyramus and Thisbe' play to the limits of absurdity.  The audience clearly loved it all. These streamed shows have definitely made me avid to book live tickets for Globe's pit as soon as it's permissible.

Poetry corner again features Liv Torc, this time as hostess of the Take Art supported Rainbow Fish Speakeasy sessions - the next one in September will presumably be back in Yeovil, so this has been another zoom benefit for me.
Crammed with great contributions, this featured a totally brilliant headline set from Bristol rapper Dizraeli who introduced us to city characters like John the Baptist and Ben who sleeps under the railway bridge. Other poems ranged from powerful reflections on current issues to Mary Dickens' list poem 'I am returning this item...' compiling suggestions she felt more useful than the usual options, and the event ended with an audience-inspired poem entitled The cake of human kindness - congratulations deserved by all.

And my personal congratulations to John Chandler of Hobnob Press for lightning-fast turnaround of my error-strewn pdf into a proper-looking proof copy of The Price of Bread - already in his listings and pictured here in my hands, in John's very smart cover design featuring art work by Frome's marvellous Mutartis Boswell. If you dipped into this blog at the end of May you will have seen the image already, rather more clearly, and if all goes well for me, it will probably feature here again...





In the meantime, back from 1970s Belfast to 2020's Somerset summer glory: walks through fields of ripening corn and along river banks where bees and butterflies this year are abundant - one of pleasanter outcomes of lockdown.

Stay well, y'all.

Strange days indeed...

Let's avoid the politics of realtime and open with the treat-of-the-week for lockdown theatre fans as National Theatre streamed their 2012 production This House, written by James Graham, directed by Jeremy Herrin:   2 hours & 40 minutes of fast-moving, well scripted, engagingly acted, brilliant drama - funny and edge-of-chair tense by turns, entirely set in and around the Whips offices in the Houses of Parliament. As well as a gripping account of the turbulent five years of government in a hung parliament from 1974 until the draconian years of Thatcher, the play shows the mini-dramas and learning curves of each character, and what stays with me most of all is the final moral dilemma: would you sacrifice your party's future to save a man's life, probably only for one more day? Is retaining your human compassion more important than loyalty to your political tribe - even if it will mean they lose power and the entire nation will suffer when the self-seeking opposition with their harpy leader take the helm... ? It's a tough call.

With hindsight, though at the time she shocked me, I tend to agree with the most ruthless Whip of all, Ann Taylor, (Lauren O'Neill) who favoured calling in the sick MP to make up their essential numbers in the vote, and snapped back at appeal 'He'll die!' from Bob Mellish (Phil Daniels) with 'He'll die happy.' Strong comedy scenes too, with some reminiscent of the Riot Club in POSH - the public-schoolboy-mentality satire, as the Mace is hauled from place and swung around like a caber in an inter-party brawl.

Miracle Theatre also dug into its 2012 archives for this month's Monday streaming for The Importance of Being Earnest and I wish they hadn't: it's impossible to improve on Oscar Wilde's elegant wit in this satire of society manners and values. Making key characters clumsily buffoonish, transposing speech from master to servant, and decorating the action with silly dances and yoga poses is a directorial misjudgement, even for an Open Air Theatre Company with an eye on the kids in the audience, which perhaps explains Ben Dyson's unusually unimposing performance as Aunt Augusta.

 BBC Radio 4 programme The Spark, where 'Leading thinkers posit solutions to the structural problems of our age', featured Frome's Peter Macfadyen last week, discussing the impact of the 'Independents for Frome' invasion of the town council in 2011 with a brief to revitalise local politics.
'I've never been a member of a political party,' Peter explained, '- they clearly don't work. They create an environment of conflict and a system that's dysfunctional. We just wanted to do something that would work.' Once Peter's motley group of wanna-be game-changers had taken every ward in the town, they were able to start changing the status quo, abolishing sub-committees and generally making procedures more informal and understandable. In a very honest summary, Peter remembers problems and regrets as well as successes and the growing interest, in UK and abroad, in the Flat-pack Democracy ideal. Here's Peter in one of the home-made chains of office donated to him as Mayor - so many and so diverse they featured in an exhibition at the end of his year in office - here's just one.


Also words: with no live audiences available, indefatigable poet Liv Torc has created a poem for the Radio Somerset website: You Make A Difference. As mentioned last week, Liv continues to collect and compile 'haiflu' reflecting feelings about lockdown, posting a film of a selection at the end of each week ( Week 10  here).

With literally months of lockdown dominating life, it seems weird to now report on a music event in real time. In an ingenious feat of engineering and after consultation with his neighbours, soundman Steve Tomkinson set up a trio of Frome's musicians to perform at the front of his house to a - social-distance-meticulous - live audience. Paul Kirtley's version of Tom Petty's famous Breakdown song as Lockdown and Bob Dylan's You Ain't Going Nowhere (with a few pithy comments about Durham) were supported by fabulous guitar riffs from David Goodman and Carl Sutterby's evocative harmonica. A blast of normal energy in our strange, static world.

And after a weekend of solid sunshine touching 28 C here in Frome  - that's 82.4F to you Mo - these May bulletins will end with some glimpses of the scandalously lovely scenery around Frome last week: the proliferation of birds, bees, butterflies, sunshine and serenity, all contrasting irreconcilably with the 'reality' on our TVs and phones in these strange days. 'Stay well' is the new goodbye.

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.