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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Friday's arrival at Farncombe was in fog as thick as junket, at the mph of a hesitant hedgehog. Such is the cosseting charm of the Cotswolds Conference Centre and Chris our ebullient host that by the time the 9 members of my writing course assembled together after supper, the drive-from-hell had slipped from our agenda: from that first session till we parted on Sunday this was an outstanding group, mutually supportive as well as creatively diverse.
Some great stories were germinated, and Saturday night was an especial delight, with thought-provoking and entertaining readings varying from Nick's droll morality tales to James's 'rumble in the jungle' honeymoon blog.


Back when Kate Winslet -who played the novelist in her wayward youth- was still reading Janet & John, I was avidly devouring the novels of Iris Murdoch. The film of her life was based on her husband's insensitive memoir and consequently paid scant tribute to her luminous literary talent. To my mind, the scandalising and sentimentalising of her life story was probably the reason there was no major retrospective review of her works, and I wrote as much in The Journal of the Society of Authors. I grieved for the downgrading of her reputation from clever philosopher to barmy bag-lady. "In his book of that name", I wrote, "Milan Kundura imagines two dead writers talking about immortality. Hemingway protests bitterly to Goethe that this is no honour but a cruel sentence: Our books will probably soon stop being read. But people will never stop prying into your life. I used to think that Ernest Hemingway, with his fearful homophobia and flaky sexuality, would forever be the leading example of this ironic truth, but poor belittled ‘Iris’ has left him far behind."
The serious retrospective review hasn't happened yet, but some of her letters have been published in a collection entitled Iris Murdoch, A Writer at War, and I'm interested that editor, Peter J Conradi, writes in The Times: "Dame Iris, in life so august, remote and intensely private, was in death unwittingly reduced to two opposed stereotypes: in vulgar language, bonking (younger Iris) or bonkers (elderly Iris). If you’re American: screwing or screwy. Both sensationalisms reduced her to gross physicality, bypassing and demeaning the one thing about her that was truly remarkable – the freedom of her mind."
If you're interested, I recommend The Bell, The Nice and the Good, and A Fairly Honourable Defeat. It's not too late...
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February 2002

Bath Poetry Cafe has had a worrying few weeks but the January meeting on Wednesday was able to celebrate a future now no longer precarious. This was a medley night, with a wonderful range of great readings skilfully choreographed by Sue Boyle whose passion for poetry always illuminates the room.

And this week I had the fantastic privilege of an interview for Plays International with Tom Morris, the much-admired new artistic director of Bristol Old Vic, who really is as awesome as his reputation. We met in a cafe near the theatre on a freezing morning so I greeted him from behind steamed-up glasses and dripping blood from a cut finger which decided to re-erupt, neither of which could be called a good look. But Tom was effortlessly polite and his enthusiasm for his new role and for the creative community comes across as utterly genuine. 'Our starting point is collaborative,' he says, emphasising how he's hugely excited by the 'crucible of culture' that Bristol is becoming. One example of his own contribution is Bristol Ferment, nine days of theatrical experimentation,“a forgiving environment were people can try things out and learn from performing whether an idea has legs” - which looks simply brilliant though frustratingly I'm already committed elsewhere on every night...

“It is only when the bodies start piling up that the world takes notice of Haiti” wrote Andrew Marshall in The Independent. That was back in 2000, as a sombre tribute to Jean Dominique, Haitian journalist and human rights activist, assassinated on the steps of his radio station. I'm abashed to admit I knew nothing about this charismatic champion of the powerless and campaigner for justice, until the Haiti benefit night organised by my friend Niamh included a showing of his life story. The Agronomist was made soon after his murder by Oscar award-winning Jonathan Demme who also directed The Silence of the Lambs. Jean Dominique knew his struggle was his death sentence: he believed "You cannot kill freedom, you cannot kill justice". Savagely sad and inspiring in equal measure, this is a story of a country in need of not just donations but far better treatment by the world beyond its borders.

This week's weird footnote: A reading test!
I cdnuolt blveiee that I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuan mnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in what oredr the ltteers in a word are, the olny iprmoatnt tihng is that the first and last ltteer be in the r ghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can still raed it wouthit a porbelm. This is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the word as a wlohe. Amzanig huh? Yaeh and I awlyas tghuhot slpeling was ipmorantt!

- and a totally irrelevant image of Bristol docks on the first night of that much-welcomed thaw.

Hansel & Gretel is the quintessential tale of abandonment and child abuse. Psychologists following them into that dark forest speak of the terror of rejection and other dreads at the heart of our individual and cultural psyches but you can't have a Grimm tale at Christmas so the Kneehigh production at Bristol Old Vic gave us a much jollier version. This is a rumbustuous lederhosen yodelling romp, enlivened by song, puppet rabbits and philosophical hens, and exciting Heath-Robinson contraptions. As their parents are too ineffective to lose them successfully, the children set off into the forest themselves like Enid Blyton kids on a holiday adventure. Having dispatched the witch - who rears up like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction in a very funny protracted death scene - they head home with a picnic singing the family song Yes we are fine and we are dandy. Don't have nightmares, kids.
There's much to enjoy in this retelling, beginning before we even reach our seats with a journey through the Old Vic's underbelly dressed for the occasion with witchy decorations like eggs clamped in clawlike dangling forks. There's the live music, Carl Grosse's manic transvestite witch, Giles King who brought wonderful energy to the action as both the mother and the witch's birdlike familiar. The set, essentially a vast tower of metal riggings, seems designed to facilitate the impressive array of stage tricks rather than enhance the atmosphere of the story, and the one element that was missing was emotional engagement with the characters. To me it all belonged to a more innocent time, the era of Terry and June, tickle-sticking business from a ferret in the trousers, and the incredible inventions of Professor Branestawm. But the mostly-teenaged full house audience clearly loved it and that's what matters.
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The big freeze continues and days zigzag by in forty shades of white.
Either I'm getting blasé or cabin fever has kicked in because on Monday I set off with writer friend John Payne, who's researching a quirky city guide, to walk the Bath Skyline route... through Rainbow Wood and Bushy Norword, past Sham Castle - sounds like a Rupert Bear adventure, doesn't it?
It took us nearly 3 hours to cover 6 miles. I'll skip the full list of hazards; suffice to say that tho we enjoyed it, my top tip for anyone intending to undertake this in the middle of the most snowy snap in 30 years would be: Don't.
Stourhead is still accessible, though, unless you're a duck. Snow has turned frozen lakes into fields.

Luckily, the night Debby Holt launched Recipe for Scandal at Bath Waterstones saw a brief respite, so a posse of Frome writers managed to be there to celebrate her latest novel as it swoops off on its journey from the shelves to the best-selller lists - with a rave review from Heat magazine. Good too to catch up with Sarah Duncan, whose novel Single to Rome has been nominated for the RNA 'novel of the year' award.
Debby always gives an electrifying talk at these party-style launches, mingling witty anecdote with tough tips for writers:
"Never kidnap a person and plonk them in a book without bothering to do anything with them. And never think you know what’s going to happen...
When I started this book I thought it was about something else, but when I finished I realised it was a story about how we let our pasts control our present – and sometimes we have to jettison our past. When we get older, shock horror, we don’t get any wiser."

The power of the past is an appropriate reflection, perhaps, for this time of year, and it seems to have loomed everywhere for me lately. Everything is Illuminated was filmed 5 years ago but I only caught up with it this week on DVD: Cohn-brothers-style spiky comedy and poignant historical backstory, but essentially it's a road movie: the journey of a belligerent old man and two young men with little in common but their inarticulate mutual commitment. Like all good road movies the journeys are within. "The past" Alex concludes "is always inside us, looking out."

In Your Image, the new play by Rob Benson staged at the Ustinov as a 'Script Factory' reading, replaced the Ukrainian road with a rubbish-filled flat but the abrasive relationships, the lost boys searching for answers, the old man who walked out on his life, were all there- although the debris of the past had not been so tidily collected. Rob Benson started with the idea of disposable cameras which might, or might not, hold secrets to the past, as two estranged brothers coincide at their dead father's flat to rummage through his debris in their different ways. 'Leave those pictures there,' the older brother urges, 'it isn't our past - he's not our past.'
Director Mark Powell emphasises this is still a work in progress, but there's already much to appreciate especially in the structure, which time-shifts the father's death to the second act and slowly probes the dark confusion until everything is illuminated...

This posting's unrelated endpiece: A friend introduced me to TED - a kind of cerebral youtube. Go to 'most favourited' to hear Ken Robinson explain how schools kill creativity.

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Judging the Warminster Writers Circle poetry contest was great fun as prize-giving was convivially combined with their annual party, so having picked my favourites from a dozen enjoyable submissions I was free to pick at smoked salmon and sauvignon. Here's me with Meerkat and A.Paternoster, worthy winners.

It's been a good week for anyone planning to stay home and polish their new year resolutions, though less good if any of these plans involve getting the car out.
Niamh and I managed one of our walk-and-talks at Stourhead before everything writerly not in trudging distance was cancelled. No need to ask if our journeys were Really Necessary, they were impossible, as Frome like the rest of the southwest sparkled in subzero temperatures. So here, instead of a lively update on meetings and a contentious review of Hansel & Gretel, is the world according to January:


Appreciations to Rosie Jackson for her inspiring session at the Library on setting targets for 2010, here's mine - I've achieved the first already!

In 20-10 I decided to lose that lisping ‘thousand’ and give this year a name that chimes.
In 20-10 I went back to my roots, and fertilised them organically.
In 20-10 I found gems in old notebooks, and threw them away.
In 20-10 I found the path through the forest
In 20-10 I surprised myself.
In 20-10 I finished books I started, and reread Winnie the Pooh.
In 20-10 my private life was so glamorous I nearly forgot to write.
In 20-10 I found what I wanted to say, and found how to say it.

Tenuous link time: Cakes - but with writing on them! If you want to send a heartfelt message, ice it....

And finally: sugar-free congratulations to Sebastion Coe for scooping the Financial Times end of year award for mixed metaphor. Sebastian pulled out all the spades, levers, and lenses in his autobiography The Winning Mind to create “There are times when there is a need to dig deep and find another gear – while never losing sight of the bigger picture.” Thanks for the winning words, Seb.

The past is another country, but we can still look over the border once in a blue moon... and it was a full blue moon on New Year's Eve so what better way to celebrate than dancing through midnight with Sgt. Peppers Only Dart Board Band and the songs that were the soundtrack of my college days. Fast-forward a few years, and I'm interviewing Linda McCartney in the Apple Studio for a photography magazine. While we're talking I can hear someone coming down the corridor, whistling (I swear this is true) The Long And Winding Road.
Linda introduces me to the whistler as he enters. 'This is my husband', she says, adding helpfully as he shakes my hand, 'Paul.'
I still have the tape. Paul McCartney is saying, 'Hello Crysse' and I'm saying 'hhh... ahhhh....'




So as we lift this new decade from its wrapping, still box-fresh, all together now:
All you need is love,
All you need is love,
All you need is love,
Love is all you need.

At last, a splash of commonsense in an article about author copyright. Nick Inman, writing in The Author - the journal of the Society of Authors - points out to ranters against 'piracy' that the word itself is simplistic, emotive, and inaccurate. "Real pirates steal stuff: if they've got it, you haven't. Copiers do not deprive anyone of anything - they increase rather than reduce supply of the goods in question... and we make a grave error if we cannot see the difference between a lost sale and a sale that never was." He challenges the ethos of "obsessive insistence that using or enjoying must equate with owning." Not Captain Hooks, in short, but Robin Hoods: "Is it any wonder that the 'pirates' get the idea that copyright is wielded by the powerful as a means of economic protectionism? More seriously, also cultural protectionism - a deliberate attempt to restrict words and ideas to those who can pay for them."
Let's make this the decade that positive anarchy finds its voice - or at least the decade when writers take more responsibility for making the world we'd like to inhabit. More here.
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A decade ago… which seems the agreed vista-point for personal overview at this cusp of the new year, I was a real Bah-humbug about Christmas. Wouldn’t even name it. The solstice season, I said, and went gathering kindling for midwinter bonfires muttering incantations against the big C – commercialism – and mourning the days when my children made potato-cut cards and marzipan petit-fours and sticky-glitter tree decorations.

And now the wheel is come full circle. Actually, I still don’t send cards, make mincepies, or mull wine, and I buy shockingly few presents, but I do love Christmas again. Tree lights, street lights, Pogues, parties, crap cracker jokes, TV spinoff merchandise…
I relish it all.

So in lieu of a sensible blog update with sensitive comments about the state of the world, I’ll lick the bowl of the old year with a personal list. Here, in no particular order, are my festive Best Bits:

Writers evening, the official start of Christmas ~ candlelit gingerbread house & festive lights everywhere ~ amazing movies (Cohen Brothers & Jane Austen) on big & little screens ~ pamper day with hot tub & champagne ~ parties & dancing ~ wonderful meals peaking with Michelin-starrable Christmas dinner ~ wintry walks & yoga ~ quizzes & scrabble ~ phone calls & emails with distant friends ~ real-time contact with friends & family.

Actually, that last one is best. Can’t tell you how much I’ve enjoyed & appreciated it, so like Jim Croce (nearly) said: I’ll have to say I love you in this blog.

Kim Noble wishes he was dead. His career's washed up and he's a depressive waste-of-space. His mother says so too, or at least some bloke with a bucket on his head, speaking as his mother, does. He has a convincing powerpoint-style CV to itemise and illustrate his futility and depravity. It's cutting-edge comedy - literally: there's a lot of blood as well as spunk in evidence - but is it theatre? And is it true?
After watching Kim Noble Will Die at Soho Theatre, I'd say Yes to the first. And I'm horribly afraid the second answer might be a Yes too.

So now with only 5 sleeps till Christmas, and party season in Frome seriously underway, I'll sign off wishing you all a wonderful week with an excess of everything you most enjoy, and Rage Against the Machine at Number One twinkling in the background of all our festivities.

Panto night at Poetry Café on Wednesday saw the Garden Café crammed for Paula Hammond's adjudication of the poetry and prose performances at the annual Merlin Pantomime Poetry Café night. Eighteen contestants for prizes - theatre tickets and panto merchandise – delighted the packed room with an amazing diversity of moods and memorable moments. “That’s not my name” was the theme, since this year’s Merlin show features Rumpelstiltskin, and stories and verses all celebrated identity. Everyone had their own personal favourites, but Paula’s final pick was popular: Phyllis Higgins and Linda Perry, both with a witty take on the theme, took runner-up prizes, with Dianne Penny and Gordon Graft joint First. Both these talented performance poets brought a personal angle to the seasonal spangle, thought-provoking as well as moving.

Over in Shepton Mallet, another pantomime night as the students of Musical Theatre School gave us a preview of the future with a zany but very sweet version of Cinderella. Nicholas Morrison, totally charismatic as the king, is the one to watch out for. Kookiest moment: ensemble rendition of 'That's why the Lady a Tramp' around Cinders' mother's grave...

Bath was abuzz on Saturday, pedestrianised streets as slow-moving as an easyjet check-in, though with more entertainment, stalls selling woolly hats & world's smallest kites, and a lovely girl giving "Free hugs - because it's Christmas!" I have an urban shopping policy: never buy more than 4 things, the first of which must be a large coffee. It works fine, allowing time for trying on unsuitable glamorous garb and general browsing, and today to watch Where The Wild Things Are.
Sendak's story was a family favourite in my bedtime-reading days so I couldn't resist seeing how even the genius of Spike Jonze would stretch a slim picture book to a 100 minute feature film. The answer is: surprisingly well as long as you don't expect a children's movie. It's all about a child - the beautiful, naughty, constantly endearing Max Records as Max - but that child, you quickly find, morphs into your deepest self and probably everyone you've ever known and loved. This is not cosy viewing. We're shown in painful detail why Max made mischief in his wolfsuit. His journey through the dark night of the soul lands him in a place he can understand because it's full of rage, rejection, and loneliness - each of these furry monsters is angst-filled as an RD Laing textbook. And Max, to avoid being eaten, has promised to be their king. All is well for about as long as it takes for a chronically insecure bunch of dysfunctionals to realise that a wild rumpus isn't much cop as a regal policy, and Max discovers all over again the hostility of strangers is nothing like as bad as upsetting those you love. He admits he's not a king, only a Max. "That's not much" scoffs his fiercest, darkest, alter ego - the one he most needs to reconcile with. And reconcile he finally does, with a long wordless howl across the sunset sea. As you'll all know Max gets safely home for his supper in the end, no spoilers here - just a warning: take tissues, not tots.
Emerging from an afternoon show in winter is eerie: people-packed streets have emptied and street-lights have inherited the kingdom of dark Bath, a solitary busker on the corner strumming a song of his own devising:
Shoppers are gone
It's too late, girl, too late...

Still on a festive season theme: Carol Ann Duffy's poetic-laureate version of The 12 Days of Christmas (read it here) caused raised eyebrows for its dark imprecations against politicians, bankers, celebrities, racism and war. Fellow poet Roger McGough comments "She's using her new post in the best way." And so say all of us.
Over at Nunney, during a great afternoon of live music - with bar, Sunday papers and the spanky Frome Street Bandits- this familiar carol was also caustically reinvented by Douglas Hamilton, with an internet twist and a message that would not display... All together now!
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One of our charming, if slightly bonkers, national traits is the impulse to celebrate each calendar highlight out of doors. Perhaps there really was a time when maypole ribbons whirled gaily at the start of summer and hogs roasted undoused by autumn storms and all was idyllic in the bucolic daze of yore. Climate's changed, but optimistic exuberance lingers on. Frome's Christmas Spectacular last Sunday had a full programme from noon till nightfall. On Catherine Hill rain sluiced steadily down the cobbles as stall holders crouched under cover and the chocolate soup stand did steady trade. Over in the market yard two small reindeer stood resignedly as small hands emerged from umbrellas to pet them, and pools of water were being swept out from the Teenage Kicks tent.
And now silver snowflakes are glowing along the main street, M&S is plying shoppers with port and mincepies, the Pogues are back on the radio... it's definitely that time of year again.
Which is, in theatre world, panto time.
Most pantomimes, whatever the title, follow a simple storyline: a couple of men in frocks & wigs being silly, and a goody-goody girl who ends up with the prince. The first part is the bit everyone likes best, so why not have three men in frocks & wigs, and the girl a bit of a Violet Elizabeth Bott who eventually chooses the dwarf instead of lovely Prince of the Golden Halls despite the prince's white tights and habit of loping through the forest like a Monty Python knight on the quest of the Holy Grail?
But don't think Miracle Theatre's winter show The Revenge of Rumpelstiltskin is all just transvestites and tantrums, despite the prominence of a menopausal forest fairy: this tale, based apparently on the writings of Marie-Catherine D'Aulnoy, is embedded within a tale of an 1830s troup of travelling players, and the pantomime set is embedded in a stage set, with the actions of the actors off-stage as part of the on-stage action, if you see what I mean. It's a clever device, not only enhancing the humour but also giving us an extra chance to enjoy the dressing ups and downs, and in the Merlin performance bringing a local edge to the show by allowing a mini subplot featuring an intruding scallywag chased by a peeler, and some very sweet little girls dancing. With or without the interruptions, this is as charming and entertaining a show as you're likely to see anywhere this panto season. A wonderfully spirited cast: Ben Dyson as the effeminate prince/aka Mr Carter, and Tom Adams's Mr Ffitch singing his way through the roles of Queen and fierce fairy, are particularly splendid.

Footnote of the week: Has it come to this? another futile salvo in the gender war as Lily Allen complains she's been tagged 'the female version of The Streets.'
Lily lovey, that's because Mike Skinner came first. If you'd had a breakthrough hit in 2001, followed up with groundmaking material every year since, and he'd been the one to emerge in 2006 - with Smile - maybe people would refer to his band as 'the male version of Lily Allen'... Or maybe he'd still be hailed as "the most original, lyrical British rap in memory".
If I was you I'd wear the badge with respect.
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