Feminist drama, feral parades, festive glitz

A new performance of Pygmalion is always a delight, partly to see if the ending has been tweaked - against the playwright's expressed intention - to make the play an unlikely romance rather than the social critique that George Bernard Shaw intended. In this, as in many other aspects, Frome Drama Club at Merlin Theatre succeeded admirably. In director Simon Blacksell's production, David Holt's eccentric linguistic professor and Annabella Fairgrieve's utterly wonderful flower-girl do not seem likely to settle into future domesticity, even if charming Colonel Pickering (Philip de Glanville) remains to referee and she stops throwing his slippers at him. Much of the humour of the play is created by the absurdities of the concept of class status, and strong performances by the women in the team highlight this: Lynne McCaffrey is excellent as  practical, caring, housekeeper Mrs Pearce, in contrast to the silliness of snobby Mrs Eynsford-Hill - superbly played by Suzy Howlett. The men are good too, though it would be good to see more of Freddy in the first scene (he gets somewhat lost behind the umbrellas) and Alfred Doolittle, the usually rumbustious dustman, seems a bit subdued even before his unwanted status elevation. Gillie Richardson's costumes and Judy Simmons' hair design, plus simple but effective sets, ensure that this resoundingly successful production looks beautiful on stage though I can't find a promotional image which shows that, so instead here's a poster from Montreal and GBS in 1914 directing the contentious first London production.

From Shavian socialism to the current plight of the planet, or one of them: Extinction Rebellion has a strong contingent in Frome, participating visibly on the London Bridge demonstration, and on Saturday in Frome they showed there's big local support for their determination to change policies steadily, and increasingly speedily, destroying our world. A dramatic Funeral for Extinct Species set off from Rook Lane with a couple of hundred people following the hearse downhill to the precinct, where we gathered in the precinct around the coffin - respectfully carried by a bear, a wolf, an eagle and a (sort of) ram - to hear a poem listing and lamenting the species killed and threatened by mankind's activities. 60% have disappeared in the last 70 years.

The slow march continued, escorted by the Frome Street Bandits (dressed in mourning without their distinctive red), to the market place where Green Party's Theo Simon ended the event with a note of hope that while we have to accept the world is changing, we may be able to stop this mass extinction if we have the courage to continue speaking out. And then we had a song from his band Seize the Day, a bit of drum'n'dance to warm up, and hot chi, free from Mahesh on the Loop-de-Loop stall.


Extinct animals seems an unlikely segue but it actually works perfectly for Longleat festival of light this year, which the Sustrans cycle path has happily made available again to non-car users. There's a kind of Tintin theme here, plucky kids with a little white terrier, dashing around places and eras having adventures, one of them being the time Longleat House was assailed by prehistoric creatures.
Possibly that's a camptosaurus lurking by the bedroom windows, though it could be an iguanodon with a small head. I've no idea what the one with green wings is, but they all looked great in the dark as the full moon rose.

We're now at the start of the annual Gift-Anxiety festival, though fortunately - to my unreconstructed-Scrooge mind - there's been a slackening of the grip of that particular fever, and Frome anyway seems to focus on the opportunity to support its many local craftsfolk rather than tax-avoiding internationals. So we've already had two christmas markets - Black Swan hosted a lovely evening event throughout its cafe for its artisan traders, and Kate Cooke - pictured here at the Black Swan event - opened up her house for two days as well. There will be more to come!

Music this week once again shows how high the bar is set in Frome: the Wednesday Roots Session featured Keith James' skilful performance of a great repertoire which included Nick Drake & Leonard Cohn songs and poems of Lorca and Neruda. The fabulous Critters at the Cornerhouse on Friday opened with Cohn too, then ranged from country music to reggae as dancers filled the floor at this massively popular gig - 8 great performers superbly hosted by singer Nicola Mascall.

Sunday is jazz night at the Cornerhouse, always good and sometimes incredible: Frome often punches above its weight musically and this was one of those times - a  concert of capital-city quality as John Law on piano with Riann Vosloo bass, Sam Crockatt sax, and the incredible Dave Smith on drums gave us the music of  John Coltrane. I'm still quivering....

Classic drama plus a surge of sunshine (& music)

Over to Bath, where Theatre Royal is hosting a touring production of Shaw's Pygmalion in a collaboration between Headlong ~ tagline 'creates exhilarating contemporary theatre' ~ with NST and West Yorkshire Playhouse. The story of the phonetics professor who turned a flower-girl into a duchess may be better known in its romantic reincarnation as My Fair Lady but Shaw's intention was avowedly didactic: He believed our consonant-based language required reform, famously declaring 'It is impossible for an Englishman to open his mouth without making some other Englishman despise him.' This production, directed by Sam Pritchard, brilliantly skewers the phonetic heart of Shaw's play from the first moment. Before we see the actors we hear them preparing their voices, and the opening scene is entirely focussed on the impact of speech and our expectations of others from their voices alone. Playfulness by exaggeration pervades throughout: the professor's mother is 'At Home', as Victorian society required, in a transparent container like a hot-house cubicle or specimen box, where her guests politely raise teacups in unison and even her dress blends with the wallpaper. And Alfred Doolittle, who'd probably be doing standup these days in clubs if not on Live at the Apollo, grabs a mic to make a direct-to-audience appeal to support his plea for a fiver for Eliza, him being one of the Undeserving Poor and not requiring a tenner. Ian Burfield is great in this role.
Media resonances & references both underpin and overlay this contemporising of Professor Higgins' experiment, with filmic interludes segueing the scenes, a spot of selfie-Youtube, a tardis-like box for Eliza's journey and distinct essence of Big Bang's autistic Sheldon in Higgins himself ~ indeed the overall concept of blending Victoriana with modern mores evokes the impact of BBC's Sherlock. The cast led by Alex Beckett as Higgins as are all strong, but this is a production that will be remembered more for its interpretation than any single performance ~ and it will be remembered. This kind of touring show, rather than filming big names on big stages, is how theatre will stay alive.

Moving forward a decade to 1923, Arnold Ridley (aka Private Godfrey in Dad's Army) spent a scary night in Mangotsfield railway station waiting room and was inspired to write Ghost Train. The only play to with a fairground ride named after it, this comedy-thriller also launched a dramatic genre, the group of stranded strangers in jeopardy, and Frome Drama Club brought this classic story to the Merlin last week ~ drama so cleverly constructed it's

impossible to give any outline of the plot without spoilers, other than to say that tension builds at every turn for the six passengers forced to spend the night in a dingy waiting-room apparently haunted by a deadly supernatural presence. Set and costumes are superb, evoking the era as effectively as the dire slang in the script ~ in fact some of those 'old boys' and 'old girls' could have been tweaked out and performance pace tightened. This is a great ensemble piece and very entertaining, combining entertaining social comedy with disturbingly eerie effects, brilliantly contrived by sound and clever filmic effects. A well-chosen piece for team production with some fine individual performances.

Frome live music scene now, as always with a focus on the fabulous proliferance of free sessions our town is famed for: Wednesday's Grain Bar Roots Sessions featured the Three Pilgrims whose powerful set featured original pieces as well as traditional airs. On Saturday Galleons had a gig at the Granary, along with popular local singer-songwriter Phil Cooper. There were bands at the Cornerhouse and Artisan too, and a great jazz session at Griffin, but these venues need to get better lighting or Your Correspondent will have to get a costlier camera. So here's a snap from the Nunney Acoustic Cafe on Sunday with featured guests Ethemia, a lovely duo who perform their own songs and are radio favourites of Gaby Roslin who gave them the great quote: Ha ha Graham Norton you don't have Ethemia. I liked what Berny Poulton, one half of this duo, said about song-writing: "It's a funny thing ~ you don't find the song, it finds you, a bit like a cat."

And after a week of stunning sunshine, using the fragile excuse of a lovely, merely mildly melancholy, Philip Larkin poem, this week's post ends with images of some fabulous walks with friends:

The Trees

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said;
The recent buds relax and spread, 
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too,
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In fullgrown thickness every May.
Last year is dead, they seem to say,
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

Philip Larkin

15th Century grief & 20th Century grooming

In 1401 a Bohemian clerk called Johannes von Saz lost his wife in childbirth and next day wrote a dialogue with Death as full of vivid grief and rage as you'd expect from such an outpouring. Death and the Ploughman has been translated by Irish writer Michael West into a dramatic diatribe for voices, an argument by turns lyrical and chilling, with unexpected shifts and even dark comedy, and The Mechanical Animal Corporation with Tobacco Factory Theatres has taken this into Bristol's Arnos Vale Cemetery for an extraordinary piece of site-specific promenade theatre.
 'Promenade' always makes me think of strolling with parasols, but here we trooped by torch-light up muddy forest paths between tombs where dim-lit figures could be glimpsed tending their graves and decorated figures mourned on their own headstones, as we followed the ploughman in his contentious pursuit of Death deeper and deeper into her dark realm. Death disdains his protests. "Man lives in this world a stranger in a strange land: from the moment you enter this world you are old enough to leave it." The language is often biblical but the debate about love and suffering is timeless, and Death's speech of scorn at mankind's use of life is, though short of fracking and bankers's bonuses, as fresh as this week's facebook. Director Tom Bailey and his cast have created a gripping & unforgettable theatrical event, with a satisfying final verdict from the strange chorus: "The honour is to the ploughman, but the victory is to Death." It's on till Sunday ~ if it's not sold out dig out your warmest clothes & go.

I haven't seen Pygmalion since the movie of My Fair Lady in 1964 and I'd forgotten how seriously political a statement about the unpalatable nature of class distinction the play is intended to be, so it was interesting to see this unsaccharine production at Theatre Royal Bath. The allusion in the title seems deliberately ironic: Professor Higgins did not fall in love with Eliza as an artwork and make her real, he remained obsessively infatuated with his own skill and made a real girl miserably artificial, which makes a truly satisfying outcome difficult. Shaw had problems with his directors over this from the 1914 opening night on, but director David Grindley finds an ending the writer might have accepted while emphasising the situation comedy and verbal wit throughout. Effectively simple sets and beautifully muted costumes evoke the era superbly and there's a strong cast, with Rula Lenska as Higgin's mother and Jamie Foreman as Eliza's father excellent and Alistair McGowan as the high-functioning sociopath professor outstanding.

This week's Frome-fact: Hot on the heels of the Sunday Times accolade, The Times has published a list of the 30 most glamourous places to live in the UK with Frome at number 7 ~ just ahead of Primrose Hill. Their rational is based on occasional celeb-spotting rather than town life but it's nice to be popular, even with journos who praise house prices and the fact 'commuters from Bristol and Bath live here.'

And I can't post without a farewell to Tony Benn whose funeral is today. His image is featured in the window of the Health Food shop in Cheap Street, with a quote of wonderful simplicity and wisdom.  "If we can find the money to kill people, we can find the money to help people."