It's a wrap...Frome Festival 2022 now golden memories...

Our revels now are ended. Frome Festival, the week when every public space offers performance nightly while homes & gardens across the town open daily to share artistic & horticultural splendours, is over for another year. Festival Director Martin Dimery has steered the show splendidly for his final time, and can step down with due dramatic pride in this year's showcase of the range and quality of events.  

And as Martin is also responsible for this festival's theatrical highlight - he wrote the book & lyrics and directed the production -  we'll start with The Haunting of Richard the Third. With music by Martin and David Hynds, Kairos Theatre Company performed this stunning drama, emotionally gripping and crammed with jeopardy and joy, on ECOS amphitheatre. It's the eve of the Battle of Bosworth Field, and Richard, last Plantagenet king of England & last English monarch to be killed in battle, is recalling his increasingly indefensible rise to power. We see his glory days, and his fall, overwhelmed by the Yorkist army of Henry Tudor, whose dynasty ruled England for the next hundred years. It's now 20 years since Richard’s body, in an unmarked tomb, was found in a car-park in Leicester. Steve Middle was superb as the degenerating king, and Sarah Wingrove genuinely moving as his queen, with all the cast of supporters & foes, nobles & peasants - and ghosts too, combining to create three hours of riveting entertainment. 

With several theatrical productions, and only one week of festival, choice was difficult: my next pick was the black comedy Silence by Moira Buffini at the Assembly Rooms, a Dark Ages drama billed as Monty Pythonesque. Written in 1999 and well received at the time (it won an award for best English language play by a woman) this production by Frome Drama definitely had its moments and was well acted and often funny but perhaps Black Adder and social media have raised the bar for dark age satire as there wasn't much edge or bite, and the thought-provoking aspect seemed lacking. 

Even the Museum became a performance space this year, as Rosie Eliot of Nevertheless Productions together with Debbie Clayton created a clever, funny, and informative drama around some of the characters in the current 'Celebrated Women of Frome' exhibition there. The Auditions imagines six of Frome's most colourful historic characters chatting as they wait for their moment to impress the judges of Britain's Got Talent: here Christina Rossetti worries that In the Bleak Midwinter will be dismissed as too gloomy while Emma Sheppard is keen to further her philanthropic work with a rendition of Bring Me Sunshine - an apt choice as her 1859 pamphlet urging workhouse reform was titled 'Sunshine in the Workhouse'.

Segueing from conversational speech to narrative, the dark horse of the festival was a one-off extravaganza at the Assembly rooms on Monday: The Magic of the Universe from the Pagan Gospel Groove Machine, led by Ed Green, promised 'an interactive immersive experience with audience participation, harmony singing, music and dancers, told with love, hope, spirituality and connection'. Think '70s 'happening' idealism, with shared intention like an '80s 'encounter group'. It was moving simply listening to the music and watching the backdrop film of galactic activity, but the hall was too full of seating for the audience to actively join the dancers - a really lovely immersive experience though.

As you'd expect, bands were playing in most of the pubs around town - Frome's popular Unit 4 had a 'Soundcheck' show on VRA, viewable here - and there was also excellent live music at nearby Marston Park Glampsite, a pleasant 40 minutes walk away, down lanes and across fields, which offered free access during festival week to locals - fabulous to lounge by the lake at sunset, listening to high quality live jazz from the Damian Cook Trio, with Bryan Posslethwaite on piano & Henrik Jenson on bass.

These were my evening highlights, but throughout the daytime there was an amazing array of art on view in venues right across the town - and beyond, too. Among my favourites were Cameron Scott's relief wood carvings, and the superb paintings of Miguel Ornia-Blanco and Dan Morley in their Silk Mill Studios, but there was much more that was hugely impressive too.

The final weekend brought another Frome Festival extravaganza/happening - the Open Gardens, when 42 private gardens in and around Frome reveal their locations and invite visitors to call in and admire them - the map plus details is a well-invested fiver, as wandering these gardens and talking to their friendly tenders is worth five times that. Lavender thick with bees, forests of hollyhocks, lily-ponds, trees, curios, and cups of tea all feature in these drop-in visits, with garden-lovers comparing notes and sharing recommendations. 

And finally... this week's artsy account of life in Frome life will conclude as mine did, on a writerly note: Frome Writers Collective gathered on the ECOS site to read flash fiction to each other - thanks Dawn Denton for this pic of me, with organisers Gill Harry & Brenda Bannister -

- and to discover the results of this year's short story competition, judged by  journalist and novelist, Keith Stuart ... and the winner was: Nikki Coplestone! And my festival, having begun by sipping champagne with Roger McGough, ended with the monthly 'Proof Pudding' book-club meeting at River House, where we share our reviews of titles sent to Hunting Raven Books for manager Tina Gaysford-Waller's consideration - mine this time was STALKING THE ATOMIC CITY by Markiyan Kamysh, a shocking yet lyrical account of the perilous life of an illegal returner to Chernobyl. 

 

Frome Festival, where rain never stops play

Despite the loss of indoor venues, the 2021 Frome Festival succeeded in providing an opulence of visuals, sounds, and activities in an incredible diversity of events - in fact it's incredible that the last ten days of brilliant entertainment right across town have been almost entirely outdoors. 

 This 10-day fiesta, which began last Friday, has been crammed with activities and performances - let's start with The Opening although it wasn't actually till Wednesday: a three-night music event on a pop-up stage in the Silk Mill yard, organised by Dave Smith whose sensational drumming was a festival highlight in itself.  All three sessions were brilliant: pictured (above) are Mohammed Errebbaa & Driss Yamdah on the second night - which also gave us sensational sisters Currer Bell - and Frome's Pete Gage on keyboard, one of five fabulous acts on the final night.

Still shuffling personal highlights, shifting to Tuesday now for the  Poetry Cafe on ECOS amphitheatre where rain threatened all evening but only delivered briefly once, and 45 people spaced themselves on the stones to listen to twenty original poems performed on the open-mic by their writers, with mega-popular Liv Torc as guest.  Liv is always brilliant and the quality of the open-mic readers is amazing: check out for instance this stunning poem from Karl Bevis about the silencing of theatre I am not viable.  I have absolutely loved the privilege of running this Poetry Cafe from its inception twenty years ago: I'm stepping down now but I'm sure spoken word/slam/standup/ performance poetry will continue in Frome, whatever name it goes by. Thanks Annabelle for the picture, taken from the far end of the amphitheatre.

Town walks are always popular in the festival, and this year they were more popular than ever, with themes ranging from biodiversity in the churchyards to Frome's history in terms of Slavery, Sedition, and Sin -  this one was led by historian David Lassman and me - here's the final stop with David expounding routines at the old workhouse in the second of our 2 sold-out trips. Eleanor Talbot's  latest Variations on a Theme programmes includes a focus on our talks - you can hear a bit of the interview at 19.40 minutes in, with the rest at 40.10. Episode 91 continues the festival tale, with more reviews and comedy clips.

Frome's quirky comedy duo Rare Species also offered a historical walk, though somewhat less reliable in factual data: here they re-enact the opening of Jenson Button bridge while actually on the footbridge.  

The Hidden Gardens trail, outdoor entertainment of the horticultural kind, is always popular - this year over 800 maps of private gardens open at the weekend were bought by avid visitors. This is an absolutely lovely part of the festival, as Frome shares its passion for nature so generously, with 32 gardens to visit - I only managed ten but they were all magnificent in various ways. Here's one of several with a sumptuous lily pond, this one attended by glittering damsel flies.

Another popular aspect of individuals' involvement is the Open Art Trail, offering festival-goers an opportunity to see the work and studios of our many local artists - fifty of them in fact, in 21 venues including outlying villages. Again, it's impossible to pick a 'best' from this amazing diversity of talent: here's St Mary's Church on Innox hill converted temporarily into a festival gallery!

St John's Church in the town centre always puts on a flower show for festival: the theme this year was 'Reconnection', expressed in displays created by members of the Frome Floral Art Society. Arrangements combined props to represent positive themes: the journey back to the outside world was expressed in various ways, one unprepossessingly adding a union jack, but this is a nicer one.

Also art, of a curious kind, was the Secret Staircase which provided private access to a location revealed after booking, and fifteen minutes of strange & strangely calming music composed by Helen Ottoway & played by Nick Sorensen. There were several of these mysterious locations around town and mine transpired as the 3 floor stairwell in the Silk Mill studios, originally nonexistent but ingeniously added by current owners Kate & Damon Moore by cutting a hole through all the floors and literally building it step by step. Just another of the curious tales of Frome's secret history. 

The final Sunday gave a chance to see a few more gardens, and art venues, and to pop into the Picnic in the Meadow where Rodden meadow was offering stalls and family entertainment - here's popular local band The Hoodoos harmonising, conveniently close to the Active & In Touch tea'ncake stall...

Ending this festival edition with a return to Marston Park for the finale, as the rain fell steadily on the lake and even the ducks scuttled into our covered stage area, and Bonne Nouvelle played two sets of their delicious mellow, nouvelle-vague style, covers. A superbly quirky finale to a fantastic week of Frome Festival.

And if one image could sum up my festival, it would be this snap by Rosie Eliot, of us happily ignoring the weather, and the state our country's in - just enjoying music and reconnecting our friendships.