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... 

meanwhile in a quiet corner of the world...

Much Ado About Nothing directed by Christopher Luscome in 2014 is another of the great Royal Shakespeare Company productions now streamed for home viewing, and it's another goodie.

With its 'inciting incident' of trickery and deceit this can be a difficult play to consider a comedy, but this version focuses on the suggestion of the title: it's all just 'much ado'- banter and teasing and titillation ('no-thing' in Elizabethan days was slang for a woman's vagina) until there's one trick too serious, and the insecure young lover, only a day back from battle, reacts by reverting to conflict stance - but only till the trickery is unwound by the buffooning guards on watch. These 'low-class' caricatures are often the weakest link in the bard's comedies, maybe because there's less enthusiasm for ridiculing the disadvantaged in society now, but also since Shakespeare didn't fully script these scenes, allowing his comedians like Will Kempe (who played Dogberry in the original production in 1598) to improvise on the theme, and no copies of any of the plays emerged until 1623 - seven years after the playwright's death. These extended parody scenes slightly weaken the suspense of the plot, but we know it will come right in the end, and the overall performance is a delight. Sets and scene changes are superb, from glamorous to grandiose, all offering ingenious opportunities for the eavesdropping that moves each plot along, first salacious, then serious, and ultimately revealing. Setting the entire story in 1918 works well for both the class divide and the heightened emotions after a war, and the cast are all excellent.

Live  on Zoom - an intimate performance with each member of the audience individually ticketed, a one-off performance, never repeated in quite the same way... that's what Fuel Theatre offers with their show Love Letters Straight From Your Heart, and the innovation definitely seemed worth a look. From 20 May to 26 June, Bristol's  Uninvited Guests are offering an hour of readings from love letters - your love letters. Hosts Richard and Jess are personable and charming people but that is literally the extent of the show: they read out emails from night's audience and play their chosen track, even if it's Que Sera, Sera, while smiling kindly into the camera. If you want to have a go, probably best to do what I omitted, and send your own letter & song request, then you can leave the once it's over as many clearly do: the 'watching' number dwindled before the end.

Story Friday in Bath posted another excellent batch of short stories on Friday, chosen by organiser Clare Reddaway and presented by the Kilter Theatre team.  Some tales took the current situation as their theme - Making a Mask poignantly and Flouting with an unexpected twist - and I also really liked Zorbing, a powerful image for a personality in crisis (by Chiara Vascotto, read by Alice Barclay) and Casting with WB Yeats (by David Mathews, read by Adam Fuller), lyrical and with a delightfully satisfying ending. An absorbing collection, well worth a click to hear these and browse the archives too.

A new collection of poetry, Two Girls and a Beehive, from Rosie Jackson with Graham Burchell, had a Zoom launch this week: sadly my laptop curtailed my connection with an overheated hum, but there's a Youtube taster here.  Both poets share a fascination with the life of Stanley Spencer with his wife Hilda and these poems aim to explore and illuminate their lives and art.

June is usually the month when Frome Festival preparations step up a gear, with the brochure out and rehearsals & promotions under way... so it feels reassuringly normal to see creativity around town being promoted - even though the Frome Art Trail is a virtual one this year.

All of the 51 artists represented have websites you can see direct from the link: an impressive display of diversity, skill and talent. Big appreciation to the team who compiled this, led by Kate Cochrane, whose landscape paintings include this view of White Sheet Down.

Ending this blog in a week when anti-racist riots and virus crises both move closer to our home town, with a quiet moment on the walk across the fields and through the woods to my weekly writing group session.

wind in the tall trees

sounding like a waterfall

crashing on sunshine