Lifting the lid off the Psych ward, and a sunny afternoon in London

Standup poet Rob Gee brought his multi-award winning show FRUITCAKE to Frome on Friday for a very successful "Poetry Platter" event at the Merlin, with an appreciative audience on the stage simultaneously enjoying Keren's amazing suppers and Rob's rapid-fire insights and 'commandments from the Psych Ward.' The material for his performance, all taken directly from Rob's experience as a psychiatric nurse in acute wards, is preposterously funny but also moving, shocking sometimes, and always delivered with genuine compassion for anyone who at some point in their lives finds themselves "knitting with one needle.""
Rob has no respect for the pharmaceutical industry and makes no judgement on those who explore alternative self-medication: "It is a point that we're not meant to be toxic-free, that's why the good lord gave us pleasure receptors, and livers."

A great finale to a busy week for me, with a reunion trip to metropolis which included among other treats Sunny Afternoon at the Harold Pinter Theatre,  a brilliant evocation of the life & times of four lads from Muswell Hill with 'a certain unwashed je ne sais quoi' who came to be known as the Kinks. The actors, especially slumbrous-eyed John Dagleish as Ray and George Macguire as crazy brother Dave, are also fantastic musicians, and as our seats were unexpectedly upgraded from budget balcony to front stalls, we were right in the party atmosphere at the finale, when the entire audience rose to their feet to clap along and dance.










And, three minutes walk away, here's the current incumbent of the 'fourth plinth' of Trafalgar Square: it's Gift Horse by artist Hans Haacke (not sure why Greater London Authority specifies that Hans Haacke is an artist, maybe they fear tourists will one of the Queen's stable failed to win at the Derby and was hoisted up there to starve.) The interesting thing about this installation is that the ribbon on the horse's leg is a live ticker connected to the London Stock Exchange 'completing the link between money and history'.
 I had my own sunny afternoon atop that plinth once, as part of Anthony Gormley's One and Other project.  It doesn't seem like six years ago, but it was. I recited & read poems, mine and other peoples', for an hour and had an absolutely thrilling time ~ my blog entry the next day (July 19, 2009) brings it all back, and among the lovely comments from friends and strangers there's a link to my One&Other webpage, archived forever, with 139 little <3s. 

Midsummer at Soho Theatre is billed not as a musical but "A Play With Songs". How does that work? you wonder. The answer is, brilliantly. A lyrical & erotic story of a lost weekend, a comedy of manic manners, and a mesmeric, moving, metaphor for that extraordinary process we call falling in love. Written by David Greig and Gordon McIntyre, events unfold at an exhilarating pace veering from breathless physicality to tender reflection: moving, funny, unexpected, delightful - 2 hours of theatrical magic enhanced by genius casting: Cora Bissett as the disillusioned divorce lawyer with a penchant for rom com and recklessness, and Matthew Pidgeon as the small-time crook who'd rather be busking, can melt your heart from their first words.
Which incidentally are sung:
Love will break your heart...
but sometimes you want it to...
... and like the parking machine says, change is possible. Contagious midsummer madness that sends you out into the winter night with a luminous smile.

Luke Wright's Petty Concerns turn out to be difficulties around balancing slight conceit with overweening insecurity. His hour-long solo show features 7 poems - all new - among the rapid rueful reminiscences. From the scatter-gun self-assault to the painstaking trawling through Google for disparaging comments by others, this is an ego stripped bare. More than poetry, more than stand-up, his performance has the audience rocking with laughter while showing us humanity as scathingly as Eliot's Prufrock. "The best thing I've seen since.... ever!" said my friend Roger as we left The Old Red Lion Theatre where Luke's foppish buffoon act finishes this week - catch it on tour if you can.

Another reason for my London visit was the annual-ish reunion with two writer friends, both of whom have a book launch very soon: for Christine Coleman, her new novel Paper Lanterns, and for Roger Jinkinson a biography of the Kevin Andrews, another Hellenic travel writer. Roger's Tales from a Greek Island is about to hit Greek bookshops too.
Chris was one of my Plinthathon supporters last July, so we included Trafalgar Square in our itinerary, and found the One-and-Other space now occupied by Air Chief Marshall Sir Keith Park, GCB, KBE, MC, DFC, DCL. So, the idea of breaking the monopoly of militaristic men in the heart of London has melted like a dropped lollypop in the fountains. It's a dreadful statue, too.

Current affairs corner: Christopher Reid is the surprise winner of the Costa Book of the Year for A Scattering. Asked how he planned to spend the £30,000 prize money, he said "as frivolously as I can", which is also surprising since his collection of elegies was reviewed as "understated, elliptical, glowing with restrained passion."

And finally: "Boy when you're dead, they really fix you up. I hope to hell when I do die somebody has the sense to just dump me in the river or something," says Holden Caulfield. No chance of that for his creator. Newspapers this weekend bulge with images of J D Salinger, all movie-star-eyes in his youth and wild-eyed recluse in his old age, together with analyses of his works and his womanising.
The curse of immortality again...
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Words@ Frome Festival goes into recess for the rest of the summer once the bunting is down for another year. Mega congratulations to all involved in the hugely successful literary events - you can see the reviews, compiled by Wendy, on the festival website. The debrief meeting is traditionally a bit of a knees-up too and this year Alison, who hosted, created a unique Plinth Cake: that's me on the top, complete with icing-sugar mic. Ahhh...

Somerset lacks focus in terms of cities, learning institutions, and cultural centres. Discuss.
The theatre practitioners' meeting at The Academy Theatre in Shepton Mallet did just that, with varied opinions as to whether decentralisation is a weakness or a strength. Either way Take Art, who convened the meeting, is doing a grand job to thread our isolated pearls onto some sort of circlet of reciprocal awareness. Coffee, cakes, and networking opportunities supplemented the discussion, concluding with a flurry of post-it notes & hopes for continued contact.

Writer/performer Rob Benson brought Borderline, billed as 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest for the ecstasy generation', to Bristol, giving Alma Tavern audiences a chance to see why this one-man show collected rave reviews at the Edinburgh festival.
His character is a Stone Roses fan who pops pills like Pringles ("once you start, you can't stop") until he lands in Mental Health Ward 206, off his head now on medicinal instead of recreational stuff. It's not just drugs to blame, he says. He's borderline schizophrenic, borderline victim, borderline recovered. Maybe his life will always ricochet in and out of paranoia, even though he longs for the normality of 'Ikea and Dixons' - and love.
Black comedy, physicality, raw emotionalism, and Streets-style poetry, all disturbingly enhanced by the extreme lighting design of director Jennifer Lunn, took this piece beyond era case-study to essential integrity. Next stop New York, but Rob will be back in the spring with a new play developed for the Ustinov's 'Script Factory'.
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24 hours on and I'm still high as Nelson's hat after my plinthathon in Trafalgar Square yesterday. I asked for messages and poem requests and they came by email, text, and facebook, from across the world. Great fun theming the hoard but even though I timed my 'script' l still didn't get through it all before they came to take me away...
Huge thanks to the 31 contributors whose words I used, hopefully not too gabbled or garbled, and apologies to the 5 who got squeezed out... you were there in spirit, prittsticked into my lagoon blue book.

Watching my hour on the webcam I squirmed at the fluffed words and faffy bits, but I think it shows I'm happy to be there... and there's pix on the plinth watch (page 2) that are close-up and hi-res enough to challenge my poetic claim to relish my wrinkles as tidemarks of mortality...


Best bits for me:
Smatterings of applause that showed I wasn't entirely inaudible, despite fire-engines, praying Christians, cheering open-top busses and general Londonny hubbub. Ecstatic reception of the gay wedding bus! Seeing my friends at the foot of the plinth. And, overwhelmingly, the extraordinariness of being there, high above the crowds and the fountains, allowed - no, REQUIRED - to blow my own trumpet to the world.

The view from my room in Finca el Cerrillo says it all really: luxurient gardens, blue pool, olives and vines on the ochre hills, and the mountain tops of the Sierra Almijara beyond.
That's my room, beyond the white jasmine (believe me I'm not gloating, just... smiling.)

My writing group is small but perfectly formed; we have all morning together in the cool studio as a 'master-class', then meet again before supper for what's become known as the 'aperitif session'.
Although this course has a fiction focus, the gorgeous gardens, rural architecture, and distant mountains all inspire lyricism, and our evening readbacks are filled with poetry as well as stories, so thanks Elaine, Collette, & Helen for a wonderful week of word-exploration.

In the afternoons... well, there's the pool to laze beside & within, there's cushions beneath the big carob tree.... and there's the meals for which this place is famed, along with the wonderfully relaxed hospitality of our hosts Sue and Gordon Kind.



And now I'm leaving all this & heading back to the Real World, where it's not 32 degrees every blue-skied, blue-pooled day, - and where there's a plinth in Trafalgar Square I'll be standing on next Saturday, and where like Christopher Robin and his bear, the web-link is forever playing.

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And as the heatwave continues, Winchester Writers Conference events are hotting up too. Here's my delightful and very talented group, taking a break from a long and intense day with a focus on dialogue in fiction - thanks guys for wonderfully entertaining readings and fascinating discussions. Lovely too to stay overnight with conference inspiration-cum-fairy-godmother, the gracious and generous Barbara Large, who coordinates delegates' every need, even including lifts to the station and gypsy creams at tea-break.

Plinth update: a photo-call for the frock. Closest we can find to a plinth is this stone by the Merlin Theatre. (Thanks Somerset Standard for the pic.) I'm hoping to take to Trafalgar Square, as well as my stuff, a fistful of words from others - not just poems but quotes, quips, messages, greetings... anything. So I'm sending out a call - any fave limericks, haiku, maxims... anyone's birthday coming up around 18th July? Here's your chance to hear your words on Sky.... actually it's all too scary to contemplate, so I'm going to forget about it for a week...

...because I'm heading off to Spain tonight, to run a workshop in the foothills of the Sierra Almijara in Andalucia, a place I've never been before which is all the more exciting. So there won't be any Frome Festival bulletins from me this year: for those, click here.
And have a great time.

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“Could we get any more British?” asks Duke Theseus, emerging as the umbrellas go up in Ashton Court Manor Gardens just before the start of A Midsummer Night's Dream on Sunday.
Open-air theatre is not like theatre and I don’t just mean the drizzle; it brings out the territorial imperative in the cultural classes as they impose their own auditoriums on the lawn rather like Libyan forces invading Chad. Nearly all the grass was covered with predatory blankets laid out by a stentorian-voiced man urging his party to “maintain the line”. Children trail soft toys, parents eat paella from plastic plates, pies from wrappers, salads from Tuppaware, crisps, cakes, scotch eggs… waiting for curtain up is one long munch-fest. Corks pop, babies cry, mobile link-ups are arranged: “you’ll see us at the front, it’s not Glastonbury!”
Shakespeare's Globe on Tour has responded to the challenge by doing the whole play as a flapper-era end-of-pier show, with something for all the family: teddy-bears & percussion for the kiddies, Puck dressed as a pole-dancer for the Dads, and for us girls there was Chris McGill as Lysander/Quince/Moth, somehow managing to be equally irresistible whether a bold lover, rude mechanic, or gigolo elf.
The 8 actors in Raz Shaw's production play every part, morphing deftly from aristocrats to clowns to fairies, so there’s plenty of opportunity for inventive displays of versatility though less for costume change: adding aprons worked well for status downsizing but tailcoats and cigarette-holders for Peaseblossom’s posse didn’t do it for me. The production worked best when it stuck to the stage, creating a magic box that had everyone, even passersby peering over the railings, wide-eyed; the de-rigueur racing around the grass seemed like a slightly desperate, and unnecessary, crowd-pleasing tactic.
It’s a long play, made all the longer by William Mannering’s extemporising Bottom - I can see why the bard fell out with Will Kempe who first took the role – but at the end, despite the weather, numb bums, and no interval refreshments, the enthusiastic applause was rightly raucous. The Tour continues till 31st August: Fiona Moorhead's photo courtesy of the Globe.

Plinth preparations continue: declaiming practice on Cley Hill, and lovely Mandie Stone from Love Arts is kitting me out in retro prom frock with custom-made headdress (purple red & green) for my hour at Trafalgar Square on July 18th. I'm almost starting to look forward to it...

Two nights after Moonshadow, I'm back in Bristol at the Tobacco factory for another play on social repression based on a true life incident, showing that just because you're not sectioned doesn't mean you're not trapped.
In 1928 Ruth Snyder was executed in New York for the murder of her wealthy husband. Journalist Sophie Treadwell followed the trial & wrote a play based on the case. Machinal was on stage within a year and still has impact today as a feminist statement. Helen, intelligently interpreted by Polly Barsby as naïve and mentally frail, is caught relentlessly in a loveless machine, unable to relate to her mother, husband, or even daughter. Her emotional dysfunction is triggered by - and powerfully expresses - the materialistic society and social expectations that combine to entrap her. Mechanist patterns are vividly created in both soundtrack and visuals, with a series of memorably brilliant Hopper-inspired tableaux at the speakeasy bar where Helen meets Dirk and her first taste of freedom. Director Sue Wilson wanted to show the skills of the graduating students from Old Vic Theatre School- 'not just actors but designers too ' and this provocative play showcased an impressively talented ensemble. I can't find any images from the show so here's a Hopper which evokes something of the sense of loneliness & oppression created by the set, lighting, and tonal range - oppressive monochrome, with seductive slashes of scarlet and elusive glimpses of purple night air. Credit to all the cast too, especially Piers Wehner as Helen's lover and John McGrellis as her victim husband.

Plinth update: by post, a large, card-reinforced, envelope containing an A5 booklet with 24 pages of information for us plinthers including a map of Trafalgar Square and helpful tips like "Before you leave home do take a look out of the window or consult the weather forecast. This is Britain after all!" and "London is well connected to the rest of the UK - you can get there by plane, train, bus or car." There's a whole section on how to avoid sinking into debt over travel costs too: "Hold a car boot sale - you'll be amazed what people will buy!... do odd jobs in return for small sums. You could wash cars, walk dogs, baby-sit, mow lawns, or deliver leaflets... or bake some cakes, and ask for donations when it's time for tea-break!"
So, be thrifty, dress warm, and bring an umbrella if it looks like rain. Who ever said Arts Funding pays people to sit around devising patronising twaddle?

Despite the delights of Frome, I do sometimes find myself yearning for the busy, fizzy, Bristol buzz. Totterdown was busy, fizzy, & frankly sozzledy, on Sunday with a mini-festival at the Shakespeare, where I was one of the performing poets. The Plastic Rocket also featured popular Bristolian Rosemary Dunn, who often makes passes at men who wears glasses...

Ten years ago the big topic of the summer was how to get down to Cornwall for August 11th. Rumours were rife: roads would be jammed, trains crammed… my solution was to cycle from Frome with my son Sam as companion, tent-bearer, and map-reader. I watched the milky silence of that strange defining moment of solar eclipse from a games field temporarily converted into a campsite by its enterprising fooball club.
A decade on, Steve Hennessy’s play Moonshadow is being revived at The White Bear in Kennington, and is still – disturbingly – relevant in its potent critique of psychiatric practices.
John wants to see the eclipse and feel the touch of the moon’s shadow but in the Catch-22 craziness of his sectioned existence, the more he wants to go, the more he’s seen as proving he can’t be allowed. Dr Brown diagnoses paranoid psychotic delusions and refuses leave, so the only way John will see the eclipse is by astral projection. A minimalist set enhanced the impact of celestial lighting effects as John sails over Taunton, defying his dead, but still monstrous, stepfather to swallow the sun. “If you’re ever going to come out into the light you need to go into the darkness.”
As with most of Steve Hennessy’s plays, the central theme is that psychiatry dehumanises, and creates a system in which the only differences between carers and cared-for are the labels and the salaries. Four lonely people wrestle with the pain of living and the damage of their pasts, but only John has the astral motorbike. He may be prone and drooling, but when the ECT has worn off, he’ll be riding high…
Brilliant performances by Michael Dylan and Annabel Bates as the endearing patients and Oliver Hume and Beverley Longhurst as their equally ‘sexually disinhibited’ but better paid (and without files & labels) authority figures. Insightful direction by Chris Loveless brings out the bleak realism as well as highlighting moments of wry humour in this powerful play.

Theme for this solstice week was sunshine, and about time too. While up in London I took the opportunity to check out the Fourth Plinth, since I'll be up there next month. My co-plinthers in the other corners are King George IV, a Major, and a General... there's the Admiral too, but he's about a mile high. Here's my plinth, under the scaffolding, and here's me wondering what to do if I don't get a portable PA. Hurrah for Patrick Dunn and Nick Waterhouse, who stepped in to supply the goods!
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