Chocolate, words, melodies and memories

Birthday celebrations last week for the Chocolate Festival, ten years old and ready for grown-up shoes - chocolate ones, of course, created by Chocolate Arthouse, along with selection boxes of artistry that tastes as good as it looks...
and most of the goodies in this extravaganza of exotic taste sensation are ethical and even healthy - raw chocolate featured strongly, with individual makers keen to show their processes. Solkiki's stall drew a big crowd avid to hear how ethical trading and purity of produce has won them masses of awards, and the emphasis overall was on high quality and hand-made.  Huge credit to Frome's Jo Harrington for inventing and organising this party-atmosphere market - and luckily the weather was fine for queues of literally hundreds of tasters & festive-gift buyers snaking across Cheese & Grain car park all day.

Music now, and several excellent gigs: On Wednesday we enjoyed an evening with The Valley, billed on the Grain Bar's Roots Sessions menu as 'string-driven drive-thru Americana, nifty blue-grass wiz, jazzy arrangements, good ol'country, and a dash of blue-eyed Trojanish/melodian early reggae stuff.' I'm suspecting Steve Loudoun's hand in this thoughtful diagnosis, which sounds a fine summary - and Nikki's singing of the band's version of The Way It Goes is heart-melting.

Friday at the Cornerhouse gave us the We Don't Scare Tribe plus one, as customer Philip White noticed as he quaffed his pint that the guys were missing their bassist so dashed home to return with various instruments, and join the jamming. Result: a really great night, with much dancing.

Frome's Hoodoos topped an impressive bill at Rye Bakery on Saturday, with superb wordsmiths Liv Torc & Chris Redmond on awesome form too - a fantastic 'Inspire' event curated by Daniel Dobbie: three superb performances inevitably creating a fantastic event.


In a sad but important footnote to this post, this was the week of Jill Miller's funeral, after she finally submitted to the cancer that she wrote about so much, in prose and in drama for her Little Gift theatre company production of Time Bomb (shown up and down the country as a learning piece for the medical profession) which also inspired her to found the charity Positive Action on Cancer, now renamed WHY but still active. I first met Jill through the Labour Party party when Tony Benn came to Frome in 1999, discovered she had written the 1980s feminist best-seller Happy As A Dead Cat, and was privileged to be her friend from then onward. We wrote much together, and always planned to do more, so I'm ending with this image from my birthday last July. Jill was the kind of amazing person who is everyone's best friend: this is her being mine.

Autumn harvest: drama, art, music & woodland mystery

Merlin Theatre Productions always reach an extraordinarily high standard for amateur performances, especially those involving a wide age range, and My Fair Lady this week was not only a visually exciting all-singing-&-dancing delight but also offered an interesting & empathetic interpretation of key relationships. Daisy Mercedes' direction, with its focus on 'chemistry' in the relationships - and, crucially,  the shift of the ex-flower-girl's ecstatic song 'I could have danced all night' to relate to her breakthrough in elocution - creates an Eliza with two fathers, the feckless Doolittle (superbly played by Graeme Barry) and the fierce linguist professor, bringing a whole new dynamic and tension to their relationship.
This high-energy show never flagged, and Act 2 reached a brilliant crescendo in the emotional tension of script, plus also the best ensemble highlight in Doolittle's show-stopping lament 'I'm getting married in the morning' - congratulations to band and costumes too, here. A very strong cast led by Richard Pugh's dyspeptic Higgins and Daisy Weir's determined Eliza. Thanks Chris Bailey for making these great publicity pictures available.

Now to another fable - Cyrano do Bergerac.
It’s a story so extreme Mills & Boon would baulk: a man who loves so deeply that he sacrifices his own longing in order to unite his beloved with the man she prefers, wooing her with an articulate passion his rival could never possess, and carrying that secret until the day he dies. And the part is written nearly entirely in rhyming verse, which really does require the calibre of Tristan Sturrock, the actor who in a 2012 production of Peter Pan managed to make it charming and not-creepy-at-all that a middle-aged man should climb through a little girl’s bedroom window and abduct her - he is always mesmeric even with a false nose the size of a turnip.

Cyrano is Bristol Old Vic’s autumn production, directed by Tom Morris, with a cast of five men and two women in roles ranging from nuns to soldiers, and with their trademark live onstage music. There’s some initial jostling of within the auditorium and at one point we're urged to join them in song, but then the action settles into consistent narrative and becomes clearer. Programme notes explain the theme as quintessential theatre - a tale of pretending, and what happens when you ‘pretend your way into the most beautiful love story you can dream of.’ But these are boys, so it’s a war story too, and perhaps more interestingly, a story of low self-esteem, as despite his lyricism and swordsmanship - displayed superbly - Cyrano's sense of self-worth can't get past his nose. There are some touching moments, like the Black-Adder-finale-recalling war scene, and some amusing ones, like the Romeo-&-Juliet-balcony-evoking love scene when tongue-tied Christian parrots Cyrano’s lyrical words, but this kind of 'pure theatre' can seem at odds with the connection to its city's people that BOV has laudably pledged to prioritise, and it can seem a little bit whimsical and irrelevant. Unless you're a bearded nun, in which case you'll feel right at home. Images: Geraint Lewis

Also at Bristol Old Vic, up in Cooper's Loft, drama from a very different era: Everyone is Dead is set in a dystopian near-future where even the rain is toxic and Mad Max style gangs roam the land while non-specified enemies are bombing relentlessly.  Rosie Finnegan & I are interested in quirky small productions and this one further intrigued as it won the recent Theatre West competition for a play by a woman writer, with both actors also female. The drama itself is as feminine as  forest fire, though, with the two women taking refuge in a basement after a violent raid on the house. Intense hostility and emotional anguish is difficult to sustain for an hour but this is a thought-provoking play, well-interpreted by Florence Espeut-Nickless and Alison Fitzjohn as her father's one-night-stand, with impressive fight direction from Black Dog.

Back in Frome, Black Swan Arts have revealed the winners of their Open Arts Competition, always one of the most exciting exhibitions of the year as hundreds of entries are sifted to create the final exhibition - here's a glimpse of the opening night. Curated by Amanda Sheridon, this has been hailed as one of the best yet, and it's on till November 16.There's huge diversity of materials, forms, and concepts to appreciate but my 'public vote' goes to The New Ambassadors by Ros Whitehouse, as stuffed with symbolism as Holbein's original painting - and is it me or does that elongated skull (with a wisp of blond hair) look undeniably like Trump? I took a mirror along on my return visit, just to check....

Music now, and Wednesday's Roots Session at the Grain Bar came from exciting 'rock-infused folk' duo Crooked Weather, with strong support from Josh Beddis. Next night's event, aptly titled Inspired & organised by Daniel Dobbie at Rye Bakery, provided a complete contrast:  Tallulah Rendall, rock-singer-turned-sound-therapist, with a mesmeric voice and presence - you can experience a sample here - with Peter Bearder, aka Pete the Temp, performance poet and generally off-the-wall entertainer with words and sounds. Here he is, treating us to strange sonic experiences like rapping in Latin and random loop effects, clad in an elegant evening dress and Ascot style straw hat. Both acts were superb, and the bean soup beforehand was good too.

The rainy week ended dry and sporadically sunny for John Payne's Autumn Poetry Walk through the beech wood to Cranmore Tower, an extraordinarily lofty folly with amazing views across the Dorset hills. This was originally planned by John, with Martin Bax and myself, for last year, but illness interfered with that plan, so it was especially good to be all together again on Sunday. As well as leaves, and mushrooms, there were  masses of fallen nuts on our path, and one of our group was able to explain this crunchy carpet: 2019 has been a 'mast' year, when forest trees simultaneously flower excessively, leading to huge increase of fruit later. Mysterious, and fascinating! Thanks John for the picture of me & Martin at a reading stop.

Two Pinters and a pick and mix

It's hard to bring anything new to the table of a Pinter play, and nor would one want novelty: those famous pauses, cryptic non-sequiturs, stripped-down brutality of human relationships are the elements that give each differently-unique drama that distinctive Pinteresque voice.  Betrayal is a love story, sort of, and a chunk of biography too, as it was allegedly inspired by the playwright's own affair with Joan Bakewell. The plot is simple: Jerry falls in love with his best friend Robert's wife, Emma, and they have an affair. The story is told backwards over ten years, from the awkward aftermath to the sensual start, the audience catching glimpses more like moments on a passing train than voyeurs of passion.
The new production at Salisbury Playhouse directed by Jo Newman superbly evokes the 1970s mood on a deceptively simple set by Hannah Wolfe, lit by Dave Marsh, with the essential separation of all three protagonists highlighted by the way each inhabits their own space like characters in a Hockney painting.
Kirsty Besterman is superb as the art dealer at the centre of the triangle, and Robert Hands brings intriguing enigma to her husband, possibly long-suffering, possibly something rather nastier. Robert Mountford as once-amorous Jerry brings out the laughs in the first act so much he seems more a hapless Bertie Wooster than a credible literary agent, but in the slow-burn climax his persona emerges: his passionate declaration This is the only thing that has ever happened is potent and poignant, as if it were the missing heart of the story.
It's only the debris of these relationships that we see, apart from a final glimpse of the tingling start of the affair which leaves the lingering question: Who betrayed who? Robert knew for years, and Emma knew he knew, while Jerry followed his heart and took his lead from his lover.  The fact that Robert Mountford looks a little bit like Harold Pinter when young is inevitably intriguing, but this play is neither a vendetta nor a personal defence: I'm not quite sure what it is, actually but it's evocative, thought-provoking and often funny, and this well-performed production is worth a visit. On till 23 September. (Production images Helen Murray)

Following this effective recreation of Pinter's era, watching The Caretaker at Bristol Old Vic felt a more arduous experience.  It's a longer and more arduous play, for a start, and 're-imagining' the story in 2017 was not to me entirely successful. There's a kind of prescient innocence in Pinter's script, written before homelessness became more familiar and more political. The cast are all superb, despite slightly awkward clowning from the tramp and the decision to make the landlord brother a kind of Puck figure, and it's a credit to all three that the fact a black man was so determinedly and irrationally racist became eventually irrelevant to a story which seemed at times a kind of Waiting for Godot situation for homeless Davies (Patrice Naiambana) and his host (Jonathan Livingstone) occasionally interrupted by wild-card brother Mick (David Judge).  Persistent sound, especially during the most poignant and painful moments of the second act, was probably a Marmite factor ~ I'm assuming some people loved it ~ but my main problem with this production was the 'explosion' concept set which dominated everything and upstaged everyone. There were some powerful highlight moments, but the subtleties in the dynamic of relationships were drowned out by visual embellishments. Directed by Christopher Haydon. (Image: Iona Firouzabadi)

 One of the best things about this time of year in Frome is that, now the holidays are over and the schools are back, the town goes into full social-activity mode. Last Saturday there were three events on the same night. One was A Late Summer Night's Dream in the magical setting of the Merchant's House Secret Garden, illuminated by night-lights and a moon only just beginning to wane. This 'casual celebration of music, literature and naked poetry' was organised and hosted by poet Liam Parker, and I hope he'll create another similar happening soon, as I was at another gathering of creatives: The Rye Bakery, in the old Zion United Reformed Church in Whittox Lane, now refurbished with many original features restored, was the splendid setting for a celebratory dinner party with poems instead of speeches.

And a welcome return this week to the Acoustic Cafe in Nunney, best way to spend a Sunday afternoon now sunny walks are off the menu ~ and an awesome line-up: Emma Shoosmith, Henry Wacey and Mike Barham among fifteen class acts, including superb headline act Maia Fry. Another high point for me was performing two of my poems in tandem with Paul Kirtley presenting the songs they inspired him to write: Crones of Avalon and Proxy Botox. (Thanks Barry Savell for the image)

Also returning after a break, Roots Sessions at the Grain Bar launched their autumn season with a stonking set from Back Before Breakfast, combining brilliant musicianship with stirring storytelling and great audience rapport. Taxi Driver's Travis, bone-collector Mary Anning, Victorian melodrama, Tasmanian tigers, and more.. all original songs, and a couple of original-crafted instruments too. A band to look out for!

Final footnote: Jill Miller has been visiting Frome on one of her visits from Spain, where she lives now in coastal Villajoyosa. When we met up she presented me with a photo from the days we were both writing fiction. In the last twenty years much has changed in our lives, we've both moved house and changed genres but still get together when we can, to reminisce, write, and plan new projects together...