Renaissance to Resurrection, and a town less ordinary

From A Very British Renaissance I learned it was Thomas Wyatt who made poetry one of England's most dynamic art forms, after visiting Italy while Petrarch was busy pioneering the sonnet as the perfect love poem. Wyatt took the form (eight lines to lament love unattainable, six to find resolution) and added passion: His line It was no dream: I lay broad waking is apparently unique to love poetry at a time when sexual union could only happen in reverie. "He captured the messy quality of life as lived, setting the tone for English poets from Shakespeare to Larkin" says glam guide Dr James Fox, though I'm pretty sure it wasn't a direct line to the Bad Sex Awards from here on. John Keats was scolded by contemporaries for allowing Madelaine to enjoy her swain's 'solution sweet' in The Eve of St Agnes, and as Martin Amis points out in his book England, early novels didn't allow heroines to copulate or even think of it: the exception is Jane Austen's Lizzie Bennet, whose father tactfully takes her aside to check she has the right chemistry with Darcy:"I know your lively talents, Elizabeth. You could be neither happy nor respectable in a loveless marriage." The BBC2 programme is on iPlayer for a while,  if you want to see why Holbein's painting of The Ambassadors tells the quintessential story of the era man discovered the world through art.

Art was the question, if not the answer, on Saturday morning in Frome where a banner outside Rook Lane Arts promising Something wonderful is happening, and it did, for after a burst of hail there was a rainbow in the sky above the banner in town with the same '70s-style message, commissioned as a 'new motto' for Frome (artist Ruth Proctor was apparently unaware the town already has the motto A wonderful place) and flown around towed by a small plane.

This was part of a day of concept art organised by Foreground Instructions for an Ordinary Utopia to "make an ordinary town a little less ordinary"~  not an overly ambitious mission as Frome has once again been named in national media as ~ for 'creative energy' ~ one of UK's best places to live. Like the hippy happenings I remember from 50 years ago, except with 'names' in the art-world bussed-in (literally) from London, this wasn't much known about by those not involved, and facebook discussion has been lively.

There's always excitement around new initiatives, but for some this was tempered by the Marie-Antoinette-ish nature of the opening event: throwing pennies down the streets for the locals to pick up. Artist Peter Liversidge provided a hundred quid's worth of small change to realise this whimsical proposal inspired by a nursery rhyme, though he annoyed locals by misprouncing the name of the town he was making 'a little bit more special' in this manner.
But Frome is a small town with a big heart, as the show-biz cliche goes, and there's interest in anything 'arty', especially the exploratory and contentious. As local painter David Chandler said: "It brings people together, and if it does that, it's doing it's job.'

Meanwhile Black Swan Arts was jampacked as results of the Young Open Art Competition were revealed, with fifteen children & teenagers winning workshops with local artists. So perhaps the ideal is to embrace all and avoid a 'hierarchy of excellence': art observed is inevitably a commodity, but we don't need to put higher value on what is esoteric and fashionable over what is accessible and ordinary.

Over in Bath the 3-week Shakespeare Unplugged Festival ended with Resurrection, a retelling by local writer David Lane of themes in five different plays, performed by the Engage Shakespeare Company.
Coincidentally this experience too began with a coach journey, as the audience was collected from Bath Egg and ferried to Burdell's Yard for a promenade-style performance in awesomely atmospheric settings, each suited the theme and mood of the scene. The concept is intriguing: What if these famous characters had evaded the death delivered by Shakespeare and lived on ~ in King Lear's case for 29 years, psychotic & inarticulate, tended by a now-cynical Cordelia. Ophelia resents her totem status, Titus' daughter has wrenched her father's tongue out to voice her vengeance, and two children, both princes usurped, have processed trauma in very different ways. Programme notes say the aim is to 'haul Shakespeare's themes into the 21st Century': there's much madness and murderous rage though in places the haulage maybe slightly lost in translation to anyone unfamiliar with the plays. That's not of course what matters ~ the monologues are gripping, and the stories vivid and visceral, timeless rather than merely contemporised, shifting through different rhythms so this almost seemed more like a symphony than a play. This exciting and richly theatrical production ends as it begins with a call to find our own tongues: Shakespeare would have appreciated this full-circling wheel.

How do you pass the time when house-arrested by a throat virus gone viral? Sounds like a good chance to catch up on reading but trying to follow a linear thread for more than 5 lines turns my mind to mud. Writing ditto. So this has been a week devoted to sudoku, online scrabble, and trawling FB for Briterati comments and witty clips, in between reluctantly cancelling plans and answering sympathetic enquiries with a determined 'Improving!'
And in a Descartian sense it must be so, because I made it to the finale of The Incubator day of plays in development as part of Shakespeare Unplugged at the Ustinov, to see David Lane's brilliant re-imagining of Coriolanus with the Young People's Theatre. I Am England evoked a near-future England at odds with the rest of Europe and teetering on the brink of war. The disruptive populace, represented in classic tradition by a chorus, are workless hungry and half-feral, and their iron-lady leader sets up conflicted young war-veteran Marc to rally them. Urged on by his belligerent mother to be a hero, warned by his girlfriend he'll be a martyr, Marc chooses finally to speak his own truth, but no-one in the yelling crowd listens: he's irrelevant now 'there’s a version of you out there that's bigger than you ever were.’ Huge energy and passion from the cast of 20 script-in-hand YPs and a strong script combining colloquial language with occasional lyrical grandeur made for a gripping production, which - according to those who know more about Coriolanus than I do - also illuminated the major themes in the original play.

Speaking of gaps in my Shakespearian comprehension, I'm really appreciative that Andrew Hilton, director of King Lear, took time to contact me to explain the costume concept I described a bit disparagingly in a previous post. He writes that change to modern dress towards the end was to express the central theme of a cyclical element in the growth, maturing and collapse of society. I've never not enjoyed a SATF production, and if one of the reasons is their ambitious adventurousness in expressive interpretation, then Lear in a string vest is a small price to pay.

Thanks to Katy Duke, indefatigable illustrator of town life on the Frome People site, for posting images of Frome Poetry Posse on the Westway Stage during the folk festival.
And there's a poem of mine currently featured on Mediterranean poetry, a deliciously cerulean site to browse on a wintry UK day. The link was sent to me by Roger Jinkinson who I met intially on Kythira as a participant on one of my writing courses. Roger, like his fellow course member Christine Coleman, has gone on to publish very successfully and remains a friend - in fact a visit to Chris in Birmingham was one of the plans cancelled by the virulent virus.

Coincidentally, I've had two other reminders of past courses in beautiful locations this week.
Richard Gould who writes graciously of receiving 'encouraging and inspirational tutoring' at The Grange has published his first novel The Engagement Party, and Teddy Goldstein spoke equally charmingly of 'excellent tutelage' at Gardoussel in Languedoc when he wrote to tell me his novel Toxic Distortions has been nominated for the Amazon First Novel award.
Flattery may not get you everywhere but it gets you a link on my blog, boys.