Exeter was bubbling with performers last week for the IGNITE festival, where "Any space can be a theatre, anyone can tell a story." I took a trip down with writer-friend Jill Miller to see my short play The Human Angle at The Globe Inn in a production by dynamic young company Ripped Script as one of four Snapshots of life. Great fun to see my meta-theatrical anti-war comedy brought to life, and the other very different scripts, all provocatively engaging ~ I especially liked The River Lethe, contemporising an ancient Greek myth, written by Yannis Souris, a Theatre West stable-mate.


Frome FM Saturday afternoon chat show with Bo Bowman-Shaw and Sara Coffield featured the upcoming Frome Festival this week, with me and Gilly Waugh as guests. Gilly was there to plug Through the Blue Door, her open-house-and-garden event which sounds fantastic ~ sculptures, poetry, music, all free except the Pimms ~  and I was there to promote as many of the Words At Frome Festival events as I could cram into my half hour interview. Quite a few, as it happened, and a big puff for the Library promotion including our new flyers, and our facebook page.

And as teenyweeny Toolshed gallery closes on Georgie Manly's Our Turn exhibition (cat lit free to a good home), Gaynor O'Flynn opens up the vast Being Human exhibition space 'for one night only' to reveal an impressive array of work in various media. Within the warehouse there's projections and a creative draft game while outside ceramicist Hans Borgonjon is collecting fingerprints in clay within a bamboo circular structure and a dog wants to play frisby. It's the culmination of an residency from award-winning artists from Russia, USA, Greece, and Belgium as well as UK. Fascinating. And the festival hasn't even begun yet...

Blue sky days are over now. Long journey home began languorously in the posh lounge of San Francisco airport (courtesy of a musician friend who also works in the control tower) and ended with a bumpy landing direct into a war zone. Luckily however, World War II turns out to have been wildly funny and a little bit vulgar ~ at least in the slippery fingers of writer-performers Stu Mcloughlin and Howard Coggins. Adolf and Winston is the new show from Living Spit, the theatre company with a mission to "make poorly-researched historical comedy-drama about people that one of us vaguely looks like", on the grounds that Howard looks a bit like Churchill when wearing a bowler hat and a cigar. Even when that's all he does wear.

Because he's in the bath, following political events by phone, realistic crackle-on-the-line provided by a crisp packet. From 1939 to the outbreak of war there's insight into Hitler's invasion plan ~ Howard a camp Rudolf Hess as the Führer searches for ‘somewhere nobody gives a shit about’ (other than Wales) ~ and flashback with ukulele to his rejection by the Viennese Academy of Fine Art despite powerful self-expression in paintings entitled things like 'Jew with a knife in his skull.' We see Churchill haunted by the black dog of depression ~ Stu with a guitar and a fuzzy nose ~ rallying to England's call.  Insults between evil Hun and good Brit escalate into literal struggle for the spot-light until, abruptly time-aware, they decide to set a visible stop watch and tell ~ in a song ~ 'The story of the war in 15 minutes.' Ludicrous truncation brings success to the second: Howard as Mussolini, Stu with pan-brush moustache as Stalin, as Roosevelt, and in a splendid finale as 'the soon-to-be-dead dictator' in a bunker with Eva Braun, who looks remarkably like Howard, in a stomach-hurtingly funny suicide pact scene. The innovative comedy of Living Spit spills endlessly, but what's most impressive is their ability to create mercurial mood-change, terminating hilarity by producing Star of David armbands to share a genuinely moving moment of reflection on that unspeakable extermination. Clever set, witty props, great lighting, terrific musicality, no wonder the full house demanded three curtain calls, and I wish I could say still on at BOV basement, go see! but I was only just in time myself.

Is this the right time for a relaunch Strindberg's Miss Julie, a tragedy of stifled individualism from an era of rigid classism as harsh for the mistress as for the servants?  UK Touring Theatre think it is, and have spent a long time reworking the original script in a 'translation for the 21st century.' Unfortunately much of this accessibility comes across like a Carry On movie, an impression not erased by long sections of stage business with kitchen fittings. Reviewers have not been kind to the production, with one star from What's On Stage and mumblings of lack-lustre direction, clumsy translation, and some performances that wouldn't be out of place in an am-dram church hall production. He didn't think much of the sound, either. I'd agree about most of those, and throw in lighting design too, but I think good actors did the best they could with direction which, like the script, seemed over-forced into unreal realism. The result was a ponderous 'naturalism' swerving abruptly into mania, which is probably why the characters' fights were electric but their connection had no eroticism. It didn't help that Adam Redmayne was miscast as Jean, looking more Dick Van Dyke than Mellors. But, having said all that, it was a better way to spend the evening than anything on telly, and the Merlin audience were warm in their applause.

I was in America when Maria Miller made her debut speech as culture minister and, like the by-election results, found reports online depressing. "In an age of austerity, our focus must be on economic impact..." well, no. In any age the role of art for communities as for individuals is health not wealth ~ although of course by any standards other than capitalism, our health is our most valuable asset. I've started another blog (Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln...) specifically to write about theatre stuff, actually, so I'll post my further thoughts there...
... and end this posting with a last look at my Californian retreat. Lots of coastal walking ~ about two or three hours a day ~ and both my writing projects completed. And good news about two shorts reaching performance. My monologue In These Shoes is online here ~ thanks Clare Reddaway for that! ~ and The Human Angle will be in the IGNITE festival in Exeter on June 7th, produced by Jon Nash's excellent Ripped Script company from Salisbury. I hope to get to see this one!

Another timeslip week of writing and ~ mostly ~ walking along the glorious coastline here, watching the birds: pelicans cruising overhead, curlew and teeny sanderlings paddling the rim of the sea, immigrant gulls that have travelled 190 miles from Lake Mono to this shore... The wild flowers are vividly indifferent to colour co-ordination in a way that  would exasperate an interior decorator ~ orange poppies, pink and golden iceplants, yellow daisies, blue iris, maroon scabeous, and big bushes of purple-blue echium where bee-sized humming birds buzz. And as well as seals sunbathing on Moss Beach, this week I had a distant glimpse of two Big Grey whales, jetting spray and breaching the water like dolphins.
On Wednesday Mo and I went to Ocean Beach where we found hundreds of sand-dollars littering the low-tide sand. These beautiful circular formations are not shells but skeletons of animals: they're  echinoderms like starfish and sea-urchins. Live ones would have a dark red fluffy covering, a bit like a 1970s Plumbs sofa-cover, but these are definitely collectors items.

As the temperature topped 23 degrees, and I'd finished my 'month of poems', I inaugurated a 'poem space' ~ simply staring at the taffeta tones of the sky without word-shaping. My last piece in the poem notebook was a Recipe for Miramar Beach cocktail:
     1    Beat some sea foam into firm peaks and set aside
     2    Sift white sand with enough saffron to tint to the colour cappuccino icecream
     3    Take a vat of Blue Curaçao and pour steadily on the base
     4    Slowly add Crème de Violette to deepen the tone at the top of the blue
     5    Spoon the beaten foam along the base
     6    Add a twist of birdsong, garnish with golden poppies, and enjoy!


Thursday night was a trip to the city for a meal in Original Joe's and to see Beach Blanket Babylon, the world's longest running musical review, served up old-fashioned music-hall style with red-curtained stage and drinks service to your seat. It's a unique-to-San-Francisco show, billed as 'hilarious spoofs of pop culture and political characters, spectacular costumes, outrageously gigantic hats...'  and that's all true. Fast moving, funny, with gloriously OTT costumes ~ the headgear gets crazier and crazier, culminating in a massive hat comprising the entire skyline of the city in the final number. My favourite sketch was Thriller with a brilliant Michael Jackson impersonator and the English royal family as the zombies....

My last full week here ended with a great music night at Mo and Anjas, fantastic food and five hours a fabulous playing & singing from seven guitarists and a fiddler ~ including, this being California, Dylan, Paul Simon, the Eagles... today we all feel a little frail.

Meanwhile, back in my real world, good reports of the Story Friday night which included my monologue, and I'm pleased I'll be back in time to see my short play The Human Angle produced by Ripped Script for the Exeter IGNITE festival ~ it's on at the Globe Inn on June 7th, bookable here.

It was full house at Tobacco Factory on Friday for The Paper Cinema's Odyssey, a feature-length version of the mythic journey in live animation, and if you wonder what that involves, it's lots of tiny paper cutouts magically manipulated by hand at the front of the stage to create an on-screen graphic novel of fast-moving amazing adventures. There's a brief demo here of the making of these preliminary elements. While the sleight-of-hand duo create these impressive visuals in real time before our eyes, rather wonderful live music and sound effects enhance the story. There's no dialogue, but a few helpful plot notes onscreen when the narrative becomes particularly dense. The audience were vociferously thrilled by it all, and especially enthusiastic when the hero's journey found contemporary references like hitchhiking as Easy Rider bikers drive past. An ambitious concept and an amazing performance, this BAC co-production is touring nationally all November and returns to London in February.

  And now for something completely different: four short plays at Salisbury Studio, a great little theatre space I was unaware of till Saturday when Ripped Script presented An Evening with David Ives. Like Christopher Durang's dramas combining wit with psychological bite, these Pythonesque pieces twisted logic and timescale to delirious extremes, drawing us into a world where monkeys struggle with writers' block while typing Hamlet, a casual cafe chat-up is a work in progress, and Leon Trotsky with an axe in his head reads of his death in the Encyclopaedia Britannica but remains unconvinced... all hugely entertaining, but carrying too a kernel of the real world, with its absurd but painful vanities. Directors Jon Nash & Laura Jasper and their team of four lively performers did a brilliant job with these comic gems from a contemporary American playwright who, I see from the New York Times is currently working with Stephen Sondheim on a new show - how great will that be!

Next posting will be from La Gomera... where? Here. We discovered it last winter, and heading back now for long walks through ancient forests and 20-plus temperatures... Enjoy the snow, southwest UK, we'll be thinking of you.