"Tonight's performance contains haze and nudity" promised posters in the Theatre Royal Winchester but technical difficulties prevented Northern Broadsides from getting hazy in this radical production of Romeo and Juliet with Staffordshire accents and contemporary street fashion. I went with Emily, as her nephew Liam is one of the multi-talented cast who sang, played, duelled, and clog-danced their way through this hate-fest so often mistaken for a love story. The real story is the conflict: family rows, city feuds, power-struggles at every level of the action. Director Barrie Rutter brought out the energy of these angry confrontations brilliantly - even Friar Laurence, often played as a doddering do-gooder, had his Ian Paisley moments. Less developed - perhaps inevitably - was the love-affair, best at showing the youth of Juliet and emo tendancies of her Mika-lookalike Romeo, rather than the poetry, tenderness, and eroticism of their encounters.
An electrifying production overall, though, surviving the collapse of the lighting system effortlessly. It's on tour now: check Northern Broadsides for venues.
We met up with Liam for lunch and a walk around the city's lovely old cathedral area. There's a Jane Austen house, and Keats apparently wrote his Ode to Autumn here, & perhaps that passionate letter to Fanny Brawne: "love is my religion - I could die for that. I could die for you. I cannot breath without you."
Romeo couldn't have put it better.

Mediaeval Verona to modern Zimbabwe, and back at the theatre, this time the Ustinov in Bath. ‘Breakfast with Mugabe’ was based on “tittle tattle”, the playwright tells us in his programme notes. This turns out to be an article headlined "Paranoid Mugabe dines with a ghost" by a journalist notoriously antagonistic to southern African liberation movements. Fraser Grace from this created a story of three brutal unscrupulous 'blacks' and a rather nice 'white' who tries to help them, and in reponse one murders his wife, one takes his land and the third beats him up. What’s the authorial message here? That Ian Smith was right? This play won the John Whiting Award for best new play 3 years ago but I couldn’t join in the applause.
Reviews I googled were bafflingly uncritical of this thinly structured piece of drama, apart from Victoria Brittain discussing the original production: "Zimbabwe in 2001 resonates with Britain in 2006. What's in Blair’s head? We know we don't have a clue. But when it comes to the same conversation about Mugabe, the old African stereotypes come up and we say that he's mad. Political theatre is now more fashionable than ever. Robert Mugabe, routinely demonised by the British media as a larger than life African tyrant - Idi Amin with brains - was an obvious dramatic target."

Time for a picture of dancing daffodils, I think, now the Equinox has ushered in summer and the season of Lindt chocolate bunnies is over. This is Longleat, where Steve & I walked in sleet and sunshine on Saturday.
And as spring is the theme for the next Frome poetry cafe, I'll end this post with a fistful of quotes:

Poetry can communicate before it is understood ~ TS Eliot

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world ~ Shelley

Poetry should strike the reader as a wording of his own highest thoughts, and appear almost a remembrance ~ John Keats

Poetry is the language in which man explores his own amazement ~ Christopher Fry

Poetry is life distilled ~ Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry is the synthesis of hyacinths and biscuits ~ Carl Sandburg

Poetry is just the evidence of life ~ Leonard Cohen

Poets have been mysteriously silent on the subject of cheese ~ G.K. Chesterton

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The wind was so wild on the way back from the Isle of Wight tonight the FastCat was nearly cancelled. Wonderfully hospitable though our venue was - it's run by Yannis Andricopoulos, also Oberon to the magic island of Skyros - I do feel the 10 participants on my course deserved better weather while finding their Writers' Voice. The Grange is only a spit from the lovely sandy coastline at Shankhill, but the rain spitted back throughout most of our weekend stay, though this didn't diminish the exuberance of a talented and delightfully goodhumoured group. You know something's gelled when the entire course reconvenes after a demanding day's work at the village inn (helpfully named The Village Inn) for late-night supper together.
The retro charm of the Isle of Wight featured in several pieces of writing: 50s? 70s? We couldn't quite decide...

Pastel shades on the seafront have the dainty dilapidated charm of Miss Marple's theme tune, but the live music at the pub was Eagles era. What will I take with me? Full grey skies, golden gorse, pewter seas. Generosity, warmth, laughter. Passion, integrity, constant coffee.

According to Ted Hughes, Ovid was interested in passion too, I'm told by the programme notes of 'Tales from Ovid: Metamorphosis', as presented by the A/S Level drama students at Frome College. It's a vibrant and unequivocal production, all the more impressive as the students apparently shared the direction as well as, literally, the characters they portrayed. This is passion in extremis, mutating through violence into something surreal... I'm trying to make a link here with the tempestuous sorrow Lorca talks about, in order to morph into a final comment on the concept of duende, which I had never heard of until this week. Duende is the kind of inexplicable sadness at the heart of many songs - not with the poignancy of tristesse, but with a force that 'jets up like blood'. I read about it in the Back page of the Guardian (which I bought for the Philip Larkin booklet): "a terrible question that has no answer...Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically with it. Tom Waits can summon it.'
...Sounds like a Writers' Voice to me.

Niamh led this month's Library Writers' Group with some canny thoughts on 'Don't get it right get it written' - how to deal with deadlines and discipline and what Zoe calls the 'inner wallpaper' of self-judgement. Learn to love editing, Niamh advises, and don't be deterred by lack of experience. "Make it a strength to come to your subject as an interested ingenue - we have enough experts."

To say that Cube's modernised version of Hamlet has been controversial round here is a like saying The Satanic Verses raised a few eyebrows. I really enjoyed it. It's true the actor taking the title role was tiresomely twitchy, and Gertrude and Horatio seemed to have wandered in from Abigail's Party, but this is a stunning interpretation of a play so full of quotations as to be almost impossible to make fresh and vivid. From the opening (Streets) track onwards, the music added energy, and the set - a silver wall variously claustrophobic, Big-Brother-intrusive, and screen for memories & nightmares - was brilliant. I loved the unexpected, sometimes outrageous, liberties taken with the script: letters as mobile texts, tequila shots and happy-slapping, that famous soliloquy sharded into dialogue. A terrific way to remind us the essential elements of Hamlet are timeless: dysfunctional families, violent passions, love, loss, and loneliness.

Serious bit this week - and I've chosen this picture because the well-known author of 'Making Cocoa for Kingsley Amis' is stroppy about website exposure, even though googling Wendy Cope gives 145,000 references. But I'm going to talk about her anyway.
What do you do if you want a smart quote, maybe a few lines of verse perhaps already half-remembered? You look on the web, right? Wendy Cope thinks: wrong. “It isn’t ok – you have to fork out for the book” she asserts, in an article on copyright which is reprinted – obviously by repayment to the author – in the current issue of ALCS news. It’s a Grumpy Old Woman rant, and I don’t know how seriously Ms Cope intends it to be taken since she admits it even annoys her that her words will still be making money after she’s too dead to spend it, but it does raise serious questions about this new world of wider access to literature. And I disagree with her at just about every level.
For one thing, I don’t agree there’s a direct & discouraging correlation between downloading and book-buying. I’d suggest that those who find and enjoy poems on the web are more, not less, likely to buy poetry collections - just as musicians recognise that initial interest from downloading & copying encourages word-of-mouth promotion and hence CD sales. "If poetry was only available to book owners we wouldn’t have our rich popular culture", Emily points out as we discuss these issues over coffee. And as it’s this accessibility to light verse that makes her the ‘good money' she so desires, what is her problem? It’s like an artist, having sold a painting to one buyer, griping that others will enjoy sight of it too. These enriching glimpses create the buyers of the future, in every area of the arts.
Another bee in Ms Cope’s bonnet – her cliché not mine – is literary festivals presenting readings of other people’s work without clearing permissions. I’ll stand up here and admit it: I am Spartacus. Arts festivals – ours anyway – work on budgets that make shoestrings look tough as towlines, and no-one makes big money out of poetry events. Clearing permissions is incredibly time-consuming and can be prohibitively costly. Last year I organised an event called Desert Island Reads at which writer Steve Voake read from a little-known collection of stories by American writer Frank Huyler. Neither Steve nor any other contributor was paid, but five of the audience went away and bought that book. And we were within our legal rights in introducing this author to a new audience, as the law is luckily not always an ass: ‘Fair comment’ specifically allows such use of material still in copyright as long as there’s no libellous intent.
So I have no sympathy with Ms Cope’s stance. There’s a lot of us out here working hard to make a world where her verse, and the poetry of others, will be more widely known and appreciated. We use real events and we use the web too. The internet has impacted our world – she’s a beneficiary, not a victim.

And finally... On 29th March, Luke "The best young performance poet around" Wright comes to Frome's Merlin Theatre. Book soon (01373 465949), bring friends - I promise you this is a knock-your-socks-off show. Appraisal above from The Observer - here's a few more reviewers' verdicts: "A rip-roaring raconteur..." "This man is a genius." "...electrifying." "Britain's brightest young bard ... hugely engaging performer, without a trace of pretension" "..genuinely funny and charming.. quick wit and blinding talent... a born performer."
Perhaps best not wear any socks...

Frome Writers' Circle soiréed this month at Elaine's house, where despite the charming viands, as Daisy Ashford would say, dark themes predominated: two murders and a (very moving) wartime atrocity. To lift the mood Mike had brought his poems of wicked passion. Sighs does matter, he assures us. Ahhh.....

Telly time again: Grand Designs returned to Il Collegio this week, to show artists David Westby and Leonie Whitton in their Paglia paradise. I used to run writing courses at their first Il Collegio, in Tuscany, so it was brilliant to see how successful David and Leo have been in building this gorgeous new place themselves - and that means literally, brick by brick, with minimal budget or hands-on help. As Kevin Mcloud says. “Human beings do not chance upon Paradise. They make it.”

Back to Bath Lit Fest on Friday for a 'Writers of the World' event: 'Words in the Snow'- 15 short pieces by 3 spanish writers, read first in English and then in their original language. Yes folks that is 30 readings in all, in an hour, and though each piece was short their authors seemed aware of a race against time that allowed minimal contextual comment. Apparently they are stories told in Northern Spain around the fire "to fight against the long dark boring of the winter days" (lovely phrase) though little sense of an oral tradition emerged from these shaggy-dog, sci-fi, fables which seemed born from the rubble of more urban times. But it's always good, as my companion commented, to get out of our parochial bubble and connect to a European context.

From Spanish snow to Glastonbury rain... (that was Dave and Ben's opening song):
Subfuscous illumination at St James Vaults on Friday night but a crackling Oh What A Performance event, led by Dave Angus and with brilliant Byron Vincent as main man. There's really no-one quite like Byron. With his Dennis-the-Menace jumper and Please-Sir-Can-I-Have-Some-More? air of anxious innocence, he opens his set with a request to the audience to 'take a moment to lower your intellectual expectations' - but not below Nietzsche or you'd miss some of the poet's absurd, painful, and exquisite perceptions of an urban alcopops generation -
"beautiful but indistinct
like a Monet viewed up close."

Best of the rest... quite a lot, actually, including musical talent, but cos I do love to laugh I'm picking Rod Marks for the ridiculous rambling introduction to his Easter Bunny poem.

Great to hear 'spoken word' stuff on the radio - PolarBear on Colin Murray's show on Monday night. PolarBear was on the Apples&Snakes 'Exposed' tour in 2006 when I was one of the guest poets.
And if you missed my story on the radio on Friday and are thinking 'Dang it! I wish I had a chance to listen again!' then Afternoon Reading is the site to visit. (Thanks so much to those of you who've texted & emailed me such generous comments!)
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PEN was founded in 1921 (by John Galsworthy) to support persecuted and imprisoned writers across the world, and still vigorously does so, now in more than a hundred countries worldwide. On Friday night, choreographed by Victoria Glendinning, a group of ten more fortunate authors and poets gathered at Bruton's Hobhouse Theatre to read some of the words of these writers, several now assassinated or suicides in exile. They write, among other things, of a swallow's twittering, a spider spinning its web in the door of the cell, and it is in these luminous glimpses we see most clearly the indomitable spirit of human soul... the generous hospitality of our organiser afterwards was so overwhelming in contrast to the starkness of these experiences I hurried home to join PEN forthwith. Voices of Conscience indeed.

"It's a great pleasure to launch the Bath Literature Festival" says BBC Producer Sara Davies to a packed Guildhall audience as the radio4 afternoon stories for next week are recorded before our eyes. Certainly a great pleasure for me, as Alison Reid reads my story 'Mrs Somerville's Garden'. I'm there with Alison Clink - we've both had stories in the festival before, and take it turns to act as each other's groupie. Gill Edwards, another Frome writer, is in the line-up too, with a quirky list of tips on how to survive that dreaded School Reunion (top tip: don't steal more glam car to impress old boyfriend...) Stories will be broadcast next week at 3.30, Gill's on Monday 25th, mine on Friday 29th - come on, you know how to listen on line later if you miss out!

"The Romantics: James Fenton on Samuel Taylor Coleridge" next day was a quintessential Bath event, and slightly sombre despite the glittering lights of 6-tier crystal chandeliers. The gist of the talk appeared to be that Coleridge could be a rather difficult character, what with the opium addiction and the clinical depression and those suicide threats hidden in the rich loam of his landscape poems. James Fenton picks his words slowly, like plum tomatoes fingered from a trailing vine. Sometimes he finds one that's a bit squidgy. "Did I say Dorothy was the inspiration for Wordsworth's writing? I meant his wife Mary, of course." Cue muted chuckles.

And now for something completely different. "Probably the most charming film you'll see all year" says some website I found while googling Juno. There isn't a duff review anywhere, and nor should there be. Cracking script, brilliant cast, who to pick out? Well Juno, definitely, and her dad too, maybe because these two shared such brilliant dialogue:
“Hey there big puffy version of June-bug, what you been up to?”
“Just out dealing with things way beyond my maturity level.”
I was empathising with her way before that though, from “I don’t really know what kind of girl I am” to “I guess normalcy isn’t our style”. But she does find out how to love 'a part-time lover and a full-time friend'.
"A surprise hit and simply one of the most delightful films of recent times" enthuses the reviewer. If you want convincing, try the trailer.
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For a writer, television can be distraction or it can be research. I want both, as Pooh said when Rabbit offered him honey or condensed milk with his bread. (Pooh was polite enough to add 'Don't bother about the bread' which is how I feel about media news coverage.) Currently I'm following Lark Rise to Candleford, BBC's soft-as-putty Sunday night costume drama, which this week took inspiration from its title, being filmed in the dim ruby luminosity of candlelit night parlours when not in dewy soft-focus through leafy glades. The storyline was especially puttyish: a little girl abandoned alone. Exquisite as a porcelain doll she was, and touched the hearts of all around including, rather belatedly some might feel, that of her mother. "Put her in your bed, Laura" said Dorcas as little Polly reached round 3 of pass-the-parcel from cottage to castle. Nobody mentioned nits, though.

And the very wonderful Ashes to Ashes, as well as celebrating the Return of Gene Hunt (regular readers may recall my ode on this subject & will envisage the throaty appreciation inherent in these words), also features a left-by-her-mother little girl. Candles too, though these are cake candles so their function here is merely poignant. Will DI Alex Drake psychologically-profile her way out of the 1980s in time for her daughter's birthday...? Frankly my dear I don't give a damn, I just love the characters, the humour, the music, the narrative pace and most of all the terse laconic dialogue. Unmissable for any writer. Taster here.

The Words@FromeFestival team met on the night of the lunar eclipse (sadly cloud-covered before the dragon began to bite at 2am) to dot the I and cross the T of 'Literary' in the summer festival. Still time to enter the story contest!

Friday is the start of the London Word Festival which the posh papers are already lauding in terms like 'gritty' and 'illicit joys'... "Rap-inspired verse" whispers the header in the Times, adding quickly that "if that thought turns you purple with rage, you are probably not quite the target audience." Tee hee. Much as I like purple as a colour, I'm more of a mint green with envy I can't get there, so if you can, do!

This week's non sequitur: Strictly Come Duck Dancing on Ice - the frozen lake at Stourhead.

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness,
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

Perfect for Valentine week.... yes, except Thou might have been a sense of internal divinity rather than a lover, though possibly both. "In the West we make too big a distinction between physical love and spiritual love" suggests poet Paul Sutherland, talking about Omar Khayyam at the Bath Royal Lit & Sci Institute. We know so little about this Persian philosopher who inspired Edward Fitzgerald to create, as 'translations', those sensusal verses now accepted as the Ruba'iy. Khayyam lived in a place of beauty at a time of danger, and the urgency to seize life pulses through his words, whether that life is sufi inner spirit or epicurean erotic passion. Fitzgerald translated only about a fifth of the 500 verses in existance, and only a tenth of these are estimated to be by Khayyam himself. "Maybe we don't need to give a name to the writer, or any of the writers,' Paul suggests at the end of his sensitive and intriguing discourse, "maybe we should just treasure these as fragments that somehow survived a thousand years."




The Merlin artists' salon this year was held in the Bath Arms on the edge of the Longleat estate - very useful when debate reaches need-to-walk-in-the-sunshine intensity. The bedrooms have intimate names like Bird-in-the-Hand (where I nestled) and Axis-of-Medievil (ok I made that one up). Artistic discussion ranged from Is The Play Dead? (conclusion: at Death's door, might yet be pulled through...) to Why We Do It: why we embark on what dance choreographer Mark Bruce so lucently calls 'the long journey of making something that's about your life, and producing something which is special, and potent, and touches people'.



And back to the theatre on Saturday, to see the current Rejects Revenge production.
"To be honest, Here Be Monsters, created in difficult circumstances, is not a classic Rejects show" writes Lyn Barber in the Guardian. awarding the play two stars. One for the acting and set probably, but the second must surely be in consolation for those difficult circumstances, it can't be for the script. Is The Play Dead? well it will be if stage wit descends to injokey jibes about arts funding.

What women want... or rather, what's wanted of them: The Herbal Bed, at Salisbury Playhouse this month, is a play I wanted to see because it's based on actual historical records. William Shakespeare’s daughter Susanna is accused of adultery and, to save her husband’s medical practice and her lover’s reputation as well as her own good name, fights the claim through the ecclesiastical court. A word-conjurer like her father, Susanna magicks the verdict she requires from the stubbornly sceptical Vicar General, and persuades her reluctant co-conspirator their embrace in the night garden has an imperative that should not be held to account in the prosaic light of day. Peter Whelan’s play raises timeless questions of love, loyalty, and integrity which are still relevant to our very different sense of social morality.
After this immersion into women's social status in Elizabethan days it was fascinating at the opening night of The Taming of the Shrew to see the Tobacco Company's interpretation of that contentious issue. A hugely successful high-energy production which grabbed attention unflaggingly for nearly 3 hours. I'd never seen an uncut version before so had always missed the point of the 'play-within-a-play' structure. Above all this complex plot is about duplicity, with much swapping of coats and assuming false personas, as well as that (in)famous storyline of the role of woman in society and in marriage. 'Altogether disgusting' Shaw called Kate's final speech of submission, and Michael Billington dismissed the whole play as 'totally offensive'. I see the Shrew as a wonderful play about social role-playing. "Love wrought these miracles" says Lucentio ingenuously, when the dissembling of these false fathers, teachers, servants, and masters reaches its climax in preposterous confrontation - and for this Kate and Petruchio it seems true, as they play their conflict games for sexual frisson once the destructiveness of anger has been shown and understood.

Tenuous link time: Luxurious twilight Bath spa date with my friend Diana, free-lance journalist and now broadcaster. "A writer has to be fearless" is one of her mantras. Lured by sun and their generosity, I extend my sleepover to include lunch by the river near Pulteney Bridge with Diana and her partner David, also a writer. And here's Burrington Coombe on sunny Friday: See the teeny weeny cars in the bottom left corner? That's how high we'd climbed...



Wicked Passions, our Valentine 'Poetry Frome' event on Sunday, was held at the Media Arts Centre so performances could be recorded. Wiltshire poet John Richardson leading, first, a full workshop of passionate poets and, later, an evening of wicked readings. A wonderful day and evening of erotica - and that includes the supper too, courtesy of the creative imagination of Nicki Deli from 'Sagebury Cheese'. More pictures on Facebook!

Russell Brand markets himself as the Marmite of the media world. Love or loathe him, he wants only your dilated gaze - which I suppose makes him not really like Marmite at all as those squat pots are inanimatedly indifferent to our taste. Perversely, I used to consider him ok but not unmissable, somewhere between Moylesy and Scott Mills in the mid-list attention bracket, until my son, rightly intuiting incipient allure, gave me a copy of 'My Booky Wook'. Stylistically it's a chaotic blend of self-help casestudy, The Merry Wives of Windsor, and Heat magazine, and must be compulsive reading for anyone who a) ever looked back at their life with mortification b) enjoys bizarre phraseology or c) likes to laugh. So that's 3 page-turning reasons for me. "I don't wanna get all Holden Caulfield about it," says our 'congenitally self-obsessed and solipsistic' hero looking back on the 'psychotropic fog' of his life, "but I do see the passage into adulthood as a betrayal of the innocent values of childhood. Even the most savage monsters that history or red-top tabloids can parade were once just soppy tots, and before that snug li'l foetuses - and I've never met a foetus that I didn't like yet."

Which segues seamlessly into writer/actor Pip Utton's double bill at the Merlin Theatre on Friday: "Adolf" and "Bacon". I much preferred the second. Frances Bacon may have been a bit on the depraved side but sadistic buggery between consenting adults is less horrible than genocide. And I liked the jazz and the TS Eliot quotes, and camp quips such as “champagne for my real friends, real pain for my sham friends”, and the underlying sense of scraping for some kind of artistic truth like smearing paint from a canvas to uncover the reality: that flesh is meat. "Art should shock," the dead painter declares, in between reminiscing of life, love and lust: "The job of an artist is always to deepen the mystery."

And this is release week for another monster, Sweeney Todd with lovely panda-eyed Helena Bonam Carter being a very naughty girl as she convinces revenge-riddled Johnny Depp to butcher his clients, starting with the plump ones: "the trouble with Poet is how do you know it’s deceased? Try the Priest."
I know the characters have other names - the demon barber has 2 - but huddling in the Westway cinema for this gothic-lit Jacobean tragedy, we're all here for the real-life talents scrolling down the screen - especially Tim Burton.

While bad weather hits the headlines nationwide, Spring continues to creep cunningly into the southwest. Here's the lanes near my house, and the canal at Bradford on Avon.
Frome Writers' Circle decamped to Bradford for a meeting at Jo's cottage, with quirky love stories and tales of independent living. Some great opening lines, like "Is it possible to sue God?" and "Stella had flue, not the sedate kind..." Starters were this month's theme, so finishes will be the focus for next time.

Coming soon to Frome, another one-man show: Luke Wright, "Poet and Man". It's brilliant - I saw it in Edinburgh - and at the Merlin March 29th. Luke mails to say he's been plagarised by a guy called Gav, which is especially annoying as the ripper doesn't get the rhythms of the poems he's ripping off. The full & very funny story is on his new blog.
News of this and other upcoming local events will be on Poetry Frome. Big virtual bouquet to Harry and Helen of Knibb.net who've created this new site to promote and archive all our writerly activities. One to bookmark.