Six shows, two openings and a market

From April till December, rain or shine, the first Sunday of the month is Independent Market day in Frome, so it was specially delightful that October's market enjoyed glittering sunshine on a balmy day. As always, roads are closed to traffic and the streets filled with a medley of stalls offering everything imaginable from retro frocks & elfin caps to tastings of cheese & chutney & chocolate (lots of chocolate). There's cider & churros, bicycle-tube earrings & candelabra made from plumbing, vintage cutlery & Victorian mementos, hippy Barbie dolls & crème caramel tartlets filled with fresh raspberries (I can vouch for those) and great live music too: local acts on the busking stage, and the Archangel hosting a lively ceilidh band in their courtyard. Frome Writers always have their stall out, and this Sunday there was also a Nude Commute signing at Hunting Raven Books, despite their current brief closure for refurbishment.
And David Lassman, creator of the Regency Detective series featuring Mr.Whicher-ish Jack Swann, led a series of short walks around the town to identify historic features  in his books, as impressively researched for his latest mystery The Circle of Sappho.  Fascinating to imagine ghosts from the past striding these cobbles as wool bales are loaded onto the London wagon outside the coaching inn on Gentle Street, to find the old lock-up (1798) at the end of Christchurch graveyard, see where Frome's own poet, Elizabeth Singer Rowe lived - and the two columns that stand as monument to the ambitions of Thomas Bunn who longed for Frome to vie with Bath in architectural style...

The Edinburgh-acclaimed Nottingham Playhouse production Tony's Last Tape came to Frome's Merlin Theatre on Sunday.  Written by Andy Barrett, this is performed by Philip Bretherton who is surprisingly effective as he doesn’t actually sound, look or move like Tony Benn or even any octagenarian. As evoked by the title, the piece starts as Samuel Beckett’s play did: an old man among his recording devices, with fumbling in pockets, peering and muttering, and even - as Krapp’s stage directions require -  takes out a banana, peers at it, strokes it, peels it, … meditatively eats banana.   But unlike Krapp, Tony Benn listens to few of his tapes as he contemplates his next speech ~ apparently an obituary for a colleague ~ and tries to avoid retelling old jokes, repeatedly sidetracked by nostalgia or distracted by gadget, remembering moments both glorious and tender, angrily mourning ‘the Blair terror’ and the market-branding of his party that strangled even the word socialism… (image Robert Day)

Not just homage to a hero, this piece is also extraordinarily relevant and everyone in the audience must have had goosebumps to hear that sneer ‘if you carry on we’ll be completely sidelined and unelectable’….   From ‘the most dangerous man in politics’ to ‘national treasure’, these real recollections from Tony Benn’s diaries show a man of huge integrity, who loved his wife and family (though he does seem to have doubted whether Hillary was suited to politics), who never forgot his brother’s death, who enjoyed Ealing comedies, and tea, and his pipe, and always believed Parliament is utterly useless as an agent of change - on the ground, in the streets is where it starts.  You have to be hopeful. Because there is no final victory, just the same battles that happen over and over... And here he is for real, at a Frome Labour Party party in 1989,  that's me looking dazzled next to him. It was my room at Frome College too. O the pride!

Monday was Autumn Poetry Cafe night in Frome with guest Hannah Teesdale whose new collection Laid Bare is out now, published by Burning Eye Books.  Hailed by reviewers as 'eloquently and endearingly brutal', 'vivid and visceral', Hannah's poems have quirky humour too and she's one of our most popular visitors at the cafe. A great open-mic session included pieces on seasonal subjects from the joy of toast to the savagery of grouse-shooting: good to welcome back regular favourites, like Dawn Gorman, John Christopher Wood, and Bee Brooks, and to hear new voices too (hello young Molly Turner, whose 'Dad can't cook'...)
Over to Bath now, for more theatre:

“All we ask is to remain being the writers of our own story, to retain the freedom to shape our lives in ways consistent with our characters” wrote Atul Gawande in Being Mortal, his 2014 bestseller on ‘illness, medicine, and what matters in the end’.  Canadian John Mighton is a philosopher and mathematician as well as an award-winning playwright, and his 2003 play (set in 1999) Half Life, at Ustinov Studio Theatre offers case-study drama on a crucial contemporary problem: how do elderly parents deal with being infantilised by their children and carers? This is a play about the duties of care, and loitering in institution corridors, and the importance, or not, of memory. The cast of eight are excellent ~ Helen Ryan as the early-stage-dementia mother is so sweet you want to take her home as a pet, though she would probably rather be released into the wild. Timescale charts her late-flowering lust, action is crafted from existential dilemmas about morality and mortality. 'What is the point of growing old?' demands her life-jaundiced son: answers he gets are all about the need for some kind of remembering, but perhaps God will do that for us as the farcical Reverend believes, or perhaps it ultimately doesn't matter who tucks you up at the end of the day as long as your pillows are soft (and there’s still money in your bedside drawer.) Director Nancy Meckler emphasises realism in this zen-like world of wilted colours and wet-playground games and waiting, the set designed by Janet Bird adds surreal chairs on every plane.  On till 5 November.

Also at the Theatre Royal Bath: another dramatic study of social mores but in a different era: EM Forster's turn-of-the-20th-Century novel A Room With A View. Most of the promotion features Felicity Kendal as silly spinster Charlotte Bartlett  ~ she is superb in this role ~ but the heroine of the tale, naive Lucy Honeychurch, is delightfully played by Lauren Coe. In fact, as always at this theatre, it's a strong team, with Charlie Anson's obnoxious Cecil Vyse outstanding among the men, and the cream-and-honey costumes are lip-lickingly gorgeous.
Simon Reade, who adapted the novel, is sensitive to EM Forster's radical feminist views and the social critique at the heart of this story, but the difficulty in a staged version of a great book is that authorial voice matters as much as plot or dialogue. Or more. What I love about this novelist is his underlying compassion and the subtlety of his social anger. Even the most sympathetic and creative adaptation ~ and this is both ~ can suffer from too much overt parody, and the first act certainly did. The scenes in Florence were over-egged, with awkward little street scenarios and an unimpressive slideshow of the sights. In Act Two the action settles much more satisfyingly in the Home Counties, and the skinny-dipping scene (inevitably a challenge since the 1985 movie), is absolutely brilliant ~ no wonder the matrons of Bath were audibly cheering. Director Adrian Noble, on the main stage till 8th October then touring.

A miscellany of launches to conclude this post: New Frome eatery From Perú To You celebrated in international style on Friday night with pisco cocktails and the delicious tones of Bonne Nouvelle, while although Cheese & Grain bar refurbishment was actually completed some time ago, this was the week of the grand launch on Roots Session night with bubbly and music from DLM.
And there were no less than three art exhibition openings: Adam Birtwistle's launch party night at the Silk Mill for The Gathering, his paintings on a theme of Punch & Judy on till 20th October  ~ here's Adam posed with his favourites, the judges ~ and Friday evening was also the official preview of Colour in the Landscape at Stourhead's First-View Gallery, on till 19th October. Frome Artist Kate Cochrane with Annette Burkitt and Geraldine McLoughlin have combined to create an impressive display of glass and gorgeous paintings, including personal responses to the poetry of Rosie Jackson, here with Kate. The third opening was at the Black Swan, but what with walking round Stourhead lake and the pisco sours, that has to wait till next week's bulletin.

Brilliant bonkers ~ from blue to purple

Over to Bristol first, where Tobacco Factory Theatres have combined with Orange Tree Theatre for the first revival of Blue Heart, Carol Churchill's duo originally produced in 1997.  It's a bit of a Marmite play. It could be said to explore the essential incoherence of human interaction or it could be called simply bonkers. Either way, for anyone with an interest in theatre, this is one to see: it's the first revival of a key work by a major playwright, and the superlative cast combine great comic timing with sharp emotional impact.
In Heart’s Desire the action moves stutteringly towards a daughter's return from Australia, in Blue Kettle a man deludes needy women into believing he is their son, but both plays put sharp focus on the challenges of communication. In the first, none of the waiting family can explain their thoughts, and the action constantly repeats, often with comical truncation, as if to give them another chance. In the second play, irrelevant words increasingly intrude making unacknowledged nonsense of everyone’s attempts to explain their feelings. As audience we become voyeurs unable to help these floundering people in situations sometimes moving and sometimes very funny.
Director David Mercatali uses the challenge of the in-the-round venue, where faces are always unreadable from some angles, to enhance this mood, and the lighting design (Chris Swain) is literally brilliant, giving brittle edge to the action. The ten actors are all great, extreme and absurd but somehow creating inherent realism from these perversely unreal situations. In Bristol until 1st October, then at Orange Tree Theatre from 13th until November 11th.
Images The Other Richard. 

Somerset Open Studios is now ending its second & final week ~ 210 venues across the county, offering free access to an amazing range of contemporary artists' work. I'd like to say I viewed at least half, but in fact I only got to see 1/26th... a fascinating range, even in this sample. My personal picks would be Amanda Bee and Sarah Hitchens in Frome, Paul Newman in Castle Cary, and Richard Pomeroy in Bruton, who creates wall-sized acrylic paintings using his own body-print.
This fantastic one, foetal but somehow fearful, was made on White Sheet Hill, the Klimt-like flowering surroundings created later in his studio. "Shockingly, I paint them all individually."  Of everything I saw, and I saw some skilled and exciting work, these massive enigmatic paintings are the most impressive - it would be fantastic if they could come to Frome... They've already been to Russia, so why not?

Also in Bruton, the quirkily bohemian Art Factory celebrated the last weekend of Open Studios with an Open Mic event ~ poems, readings, and story-telling, with sultry sax 'to give it a beatnik flavour'. Carl Sutterby from Frome's Wochynskis played punk classics on the ukulele, and flying the flag for Frome performance poets were brilliant rapper Jake Hight, and me...  Congratulations organiser Bee Brooks ~ a fun event with a party feeling, hope there are more.

And now for something completely different: an author's talk at Spike Island from debut novelist Nadim Safdar with readings from his book Akram's War. It's based on his own experience of growing up in the 'Black Country' and although the radicalisation of disaffected muslims is a key theme, Nadim says 'I didn't set out to write a story about a suicide bomber - it was about love, I thought.' Interesting insights, well steered by director Helen Legg.

Back to Frome to conclude this post with that familiar comment: it's been a great week for music... Roots Sessions at the Grain Bar featured Mark Abis and his Three Pilgrims, an amazing blues trio with a particularly excellent version of St James Infirmary Blues.
And fabulous Purple Fish ~ 'the ultimate classic rock band' came back to the Cornerhouse! And there was dancing...

The carnival is over, it must be autumn

There was much to celebrate on Saturday but as this is an arts blog I'll keep all that for facebook and just tell you, if you weren't there, that the annual Frome Carnival was as glittery and quirky as ever, and the streets were thronged to watch the colourful paraders prance, dance, cartwheel or totter down the hill and through the town centre.   In typical egalitarian style, the mayor & his lady chose to walk with the collectors rather than wave regally from a posh car.

This lively event was a great finale to week with arts in the spotlight, as Frome Town Council concluded a series of meetings to define the priorities for a 'performing arts' policy. Consultations with venues, performers, promoters, and potential audiences all culminated in this week's round-up, led by deputy mayor Al O'Kane who instigated the initiative, and a six-point practical summary for enhanced renaissance will go forward to the council.

Meanwhile the Roots Grain Bar sessions continue to give the best value evening entertainment for a hat donation you'll ever find on a Wednesday, this week featuring superb song-writer and performer Phil Cooper with his band.

And for spoken word fans this week there was Story Friday, the popular bimonthly event presented by A Word In Your Ear at Burdall's Yard in Bath. This session's theme of Outsiders particular interests me so I was delighted my story was one of the seven chosen. The standard is awesome and it was a genuine privilege to be in a line-up with Clare Reddaway and other superb writers - look out for Conor Houghton if you enjoy droll fast-moving Irish humour, a new star who may well go supernova soon. Stories now all on audio - listen here!

So now autumn has officially begun ~ it arrived astronomically on September 21st, also allegedly International Peace Day (don't get me started) ~ here's a couple of events to look forward to: Frome Poetry Cafe on October 4th has Hannah Teasdale as guest poet, and local writer Rosie Jackson will be launching her memoir The Glass Mother at the Merlin on November 4th.  Nevertheless Fringe Theatre isn't planning another production this year as Rosie & I are both involved in other projects, but there are exciting new theatre initiatives around as well as to the Merlin's eclectic autumn programme. Marc Cox is starting a script-in-hand writers group at the Atheneum in Warminster, and Simon's Blakeman's impro group now meets each Tuesday upstairs at the Cornerhouse. And for film fans, the good news is that new owners will reopen the Westway as an independent cinema again. And there's still one more week of Somerset Art's 'open studios' ~ venue list here! 

All men are Bavarians...

Sheridan's famous comedy The Rivals is set in 1775, which was 'a glorious period of indulgence and frivolity' according to Tom Rogers who created the designs for Bristol Old Vic. 'Overblown and excessive' was his aim, impressively achieved in this lavish ~ and very funny ~ current production, with wigs as high as Oklahoma corn and flamboyant costumes in silk taffeta with extravagant trimmings. The set, basically a dressing-room where everyone preens, is interrupted for scene changes by vast frames to suggest different locations, enhancing the sense of show not substance, and a social milieu where everyone dissembles ~ even hero Jack Absolute who pretends to be a humble ensign to get his girl, romantic Lydia Languish. There are secrets overheard, notes intercepted, lies rebounding and deceits unmasked at every turn of this complex plot. Even Mrs Malaprop, despite her pride in her 'oracular tongue and nice derangement of epitaphs' is at it, posing as her ward to lure one of her suitors...
The story may hover between pantomime and farce, but Sheridan was a noted radical and there's satire too in his depiction of tyrannical landowners, and of women who despite their status have no other powers than beauty and perversity.
 Director Dominic Hill finds gags and innuendo in hidden corners of the script, and spices it with visual humour: anachronistic touches like polaroids and a typewriter, landscape-painting-style sheep, and a mysterious macaw.  More importantly, he has assembled a superb cast in which Lucy Briggs-Owen's Lydia Languish, a bizarre combination of Tim Burton's Red Queen and Lauren Am-I-Bovvered? Cooper, takes comedic caricature to the outrageous limit. She is marvellous. And all, of course, is unravelled at the end as Through all the drama — whether damned or not — Love gilds the scene, and women guide the plot. On till October 1st, hugely recommended.

from the edge of the ocean

Frome how big you are! How full of roads & cars & houses, and how overwhelming damp & colourless... apparently there's been an Indian summer here last week but I've returned from Atsitsa on Skyros island into the season of mists and a 10 degree drop in temperature.
No blazing cerulean skies here, no strobe-bright dazzle on an indigo sea, no stark dark pine-tree shadows. No nightly views of the sky glittering pink and the ocean silvering as a big red sun drops like a blob of ketchup below the horizon, no more red moon rising above Juicy Bar beach on a warm evening, with mojitos. No more mealtime bell announcing trays of banquet-luscious food arriving, no more extreme (Irish) yoga, or demos group appreciations, or oikos groups and, big on this miss-list, no more marvellous shared words from the writing group.

My  awesome octet met each morning in Adonis taverna on the beach to drink greek coffee and write, and each morning they astounded me, and sometimes themselves, with memories & inventions, feelings & observations, stories & poems.... meanwhile the fishermen mended their nets & drank grappa and the local ladies gossiped & laughed loudly and the sea methodically slapped the white pebbles and the sun shone. Miss that? Just a bit. That's litotes - understatement to emphasise an affirmative. And this is flow, which is only allowed ten minutes (Ted Hughes says so too) so I must stop. Normal service will be resumed next post.  In the meantime in the words of physicist Carlo Rovelli, which I read aloud in the warm full-moon darkness beside a bay on the island after our starry starry night walk, Here on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and the beauty of the world. And it's breathtaking.

Flying in & out of Frome

So I got back home from San Francisco late on Monday realising there was no real point in emptying my case, more sensible simply to take remove the warmer layers and replace with books & course notes as I head off to lovely Skyros after four days enjoying Frome's warm sunshine.  It's autumn here, crab-apple & berry time, but apparently hot & stormy on the Aegean...

My  brief check-in included a terrific gig at Wednesday's Roots Grain Bar where Steve Loudoun and the Saboteurs covered an amazing range of styles with terrific vocals from Charlotte Egmore & Steve himself, and two very different art exhibitions.


Guy Watts is showing some of his fascinatingly complex 'detailed, dreamy' pen&ink works at La Strada until the end of October, and Paul Minott's exhibition of massive monoprints at Black Swan Arts had its launch on Friday.
In total technical contrast, Paul creates his designs on iPad and then each element is lasercut from thin plastic to be inked and etched and placed together to create a unique print. Well worth going to see, folks, and in the gallery till 8th October. Some lovely landscape photographs by Mahtola Eagle-Lippiatt in the cafe downstairs too.

I've been keen all summer to catch Frankenstein in Bath, the nightly 'theatrical walking tour' from the ever-innovative Show of Strength Theatre Company. The street performances of stories and histories I've seen in Bristol and Wells are always enjoyable, but this true tale from 1816 had extra appeal as it overlaps the Persuasion year featured in my play for Frome Festival Time Slides.  Creative Producer Sheila Hannon wrote this dramatic investigation and on Thursday led our intrigued group in the footsteps of Mary Shelley, revealing liaisons, tragedies & scandals along the way. Mary, as well as the poet Shelley's bride and the creator of Frankenstein the monster-maker, was the child of influential early-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft who died when she was 10 days old, so there's a particular  poignancy in her obsession with an unmothered creature whose life became a long frantic quest to find its creator. This saga of still-hidden secrets is totally gripping, evoking huge empathy & compassion as we hurried along the dark streets, pausing to eavesdrop fragments from letters of love & despair while the moon glowered above the plumes of our narrator's Regency headdress... It's on till the end of September, and it's a real treat. No booking, just turn up by the fountain outside the abbey at 7.30.

And finally this week: the exciting news from Burning Eye Books that my poetry collection Crumbs from a Spinning World will be published next month. I'm thrilled with the cover design by Mutartis Boswell, and more than chuffed to become, as Hannah Teasdale puts it, "another BE club member". With the tagline Never knowingly mainstream, Burning Eye scooped the Saboteur 2016 award for 'Most Innovative Publisher' - I'm thinking of making a lapel badge from that image... And in case you were wondering, my title was inspired by one of my favourite poets Brian Patten: it's the song of the slow, sad bird in The Translation:

"From my nest among moments 

Where I keep a spinning world 

I stole one crumb of joy 

But lost it coming here.”

So now I'm off again to join the team leaders in Atsitsa Bay for their penultimate week on the island. Smiley face!

The pelican days are over...

This week the Bay area suddenly remembered California is the Golden State and offered dazzling sunshine for most of my walks. I've spent hours each day on coastal trails from Moss Beach in the north to beyond Poplar in the south, each about 6 miles from my central point in El Granada. Mo has taken me further too, up to the Devil's Slide (still part of the Cabrillo Highway on my first visit, but after constant landslides it's now an environmental reserve) and down to Bean Hollow, where the rocks of Pescadero are transformed into strange creatures by wind and salt erosion.

The phenomenon is called tafoni, and is rare and mysterious especially since, unlike the rest of the coastal rocks, these patterns are resistant to further change. I compared the tiny squarish corn-circle-like etching in this picture with my photo from 8 years ago and it's identical in every detail.
As well as extraordinary rocks I've seen amazing trees: avenues of cedars, creeks overhung with massive ancient eucalyptus, and slim pastel-barked younger ones in elegant rows all the way down from the hills to the sea. I've been dazzled by the range of flower colours continuing up the Highway verge as well as along the dunes and gardens... but more than all that, this trip has been about the birds.
 I've spent literally hours watching them fishing along the shore: mincing sandpipers, shrieking gulls, terns and cormorants, elegant herons and snowy egrets, diving murres and endless gangs of pelicans, and inland there are wrens and tits and blackbirds along the paths and dunes, while above the ocean seahawks and buzzards circle high then drop suddenly to glide the thermals like surfboarding teenagers.  Oh and let's not forget the seals: I often saw them basking on rocks along the coast & several times swimming in the bay, lifting their musky muzzles to stare around like curious puppies.

I have of course had people contact too, and trips to places other than the long beach and its wild rocky outcrops, like Alice's Restaurant (of Arlo Guthrie fame), the farmers' market where Mo & his musician friends play & sing, and a fascinating afternoon with the 'Coastside Life Story Writers' hearing their moving memories of wars around the world from Bolivia to Iwo Jima and Vietnam. And I also did quite a lot of writing on my current drama project, though that's still at design stage... but my book project is now close to launch: my editor has sent page proofs & the publisher loves Mutartis' cover design, so I hope to set off the fireworks for this one soon!
Meantime, here's a last look at the bay, and goodbye USA. Thanks for having me, it's been great.