Frome Festival day 2... time travel and feasting

A day of art and music in the streets of Frome: The Open Studios trail comprises 62 local artists in twenty venues around the town offering free viewing this & next weekend. I made a start with Sam West's paintings~ so well integrated with her house that this one lives above the cooker ~ the Bennett Centre, and the Old Wool Arts Store where I found driftwood angels and sea-glass jewellery.

Meanwhile authors were gathering for a signing at Hunting Raven bookshop and musicians queuing to perform at the Archangel throughout the day. Here's Bugs, aka Julian Hight, who featured in both line-ups.

Then on to Millenium Green, the start point of Time Walk ~ the story of the earth in a thousand paces, the project Annabelle Macfadyen and I have been working on for months... if not longer. From the supernova explosion that started our solar system to the present moment, "with all our evolutionary history inside us, essentially part of this Earth, made of stardust, and bacteria, and shaped by the fish and reptiles and the early mammals we once were, within the web of life, from the beginning of time." I  seriously did more research for this project than for my degree, but it was terrific fun and our group of walkers was gratifyingly appreciative. Phew. What's next.

Well, the Food Feast, of course (African Kitchen my pick) with the marvellous Street Bandits leading a parade into the market yard where free music plays all night once the mayor, wearing a bio-degradeable chain, has completed the official Festival opening, which took all of two minutes, then hundreds of us watched the Milk Street Band,  then Daisy Chapman & Sue Law, then The Pigeons... ~ that's one of them below ~ and by now evening sunshine is ceding to dusk and I have been dancing with the Lady Mayoress for some time so we all decide to move on up to the tapas bar for a nightcap... and so ends day two.

Frome Festival is Go...

Frome Festival began today, so Tristan Stevens' FITHWALL at Black Swan Arts which opened last night acted as a kind of amuse bouche to the feast to come. Tristan's exhibition invites us to "walk along the banks of the information-stream and among the sacred gifs and jpegs of the projected unconscious"and to emphasise the significance of these generated images, there's a zen garden where screens are bedded like hallowed rocks. Showing here till the end of August.
And now we're off in style, ten days crammed with so many events and displays no-one could get to even half of them. I'm planning to do as much as I can, and use the blog as a daily late-night bulletin to give the flavour of the immense variety and vivacity that is Frome Festival.
First stop the Silk Mill, which has already re-opened its famous 'festival tapas bar', where the Open Studios upstairs are sharing the extraordinary creativity of artists from clothes creators like Raggedy, aka Hayley Tresise, to the musical artistry of Tim Moore. 
There's a fabulous gallery exhibition here too: paintings of power stations by Lin Hawkins. some sinister, some almost like holy temples.
Over in Stony Street, Barry Cooper's exhibition Sonata 2014, is inspired by Bartok's 1944 violin concerto which he feels motivated every brushstroke. The graffitied newspapers are shown alongside his paintings made while listening, with thoughts of the 8.7 million British men about to go into the trenches one hundred years ago, 'a reflection of that past in the fragility of our present.'  There's resonance too with Picasso's angry sense of injustice. "All art is a kind of healing" Barry says.
On then to the talk by Will Buckingham at the Library, organised by John Payne and Wendy Miller-Williams, on the philosophy of the Moomin stories. Will says he's only an amateur Moominologist, but he's analysed the problems that troubled the young Moomintroll, like authority and apocalypse, and explains how Tove Jansson's tales carry within them solutions for us all. Then a quick dash with Rosie Finnegan and Alison Clink over to the Cornerhouse for an hour's dancing to the fabulous Critters, the band who can play anything but are supreme at ska-reggae and get the whole place bopping within minutes...  and a late ending at John Payne's party where Will Buckingham was guest of honour. A suitable conclusion to the festival's opening day: friendly, fun, and a little bit esoteric.

Madness and mutations and massive millipedes

Byron Vincent used to MC at Bristol Old Vic's monthly poetry performance events, and he was the most surreal, raw, funny, stand-up poet I ever saw. He made you laugh till your eyes stung at the existentialist absurdity of life and weep at the pain of it. Three years ago he stepped away from the spotlight for personal reasons which he reveals in his one-hour one-man (apart from onstage technician) show ironically titled Talk About Something You Like. All profits go CALM, the suicide prevention charity, and Alma Tavern's brochure gives a snappy outline: In 2011 Byron spent his summer resting in the magnolia bosom of an NHS psychiatric unit. In this show he extends the frayed mitten of insanity in the hope that you might shake hands.  As you'd expect, then: it's painful, shocking, and horribly self-exposing. It's also brave, brilliant, and horribly funny. Byron's brochure image is gruesome, but onstage despite his pyjamas he looks neat and personable, adding even more poignancy to this stream of insightful cameos of institutional life and the vortex of mental illness. This scratch performance ("that means it might be shit" defined Byron helpfully) with script-in-hand is actually a development of a piece from last February's BOV Ferment Fortnight, and it's great to see Byron going deeper and engaging more directly with the audience, even if this does get him 'panicking like a creationist at a fossil dig.' There are rich possibilities for black humour in Byron's hospital experience ~ including the display of advice to patients from which the show's name is drawn ("No no no! That's the equivalent of psychiatric entrapment!") ~ but it's the intimacy of personal detail, right back to his childhood hobby of 'collecting fears', that gives this show such scalding impact. It's on its way to Edinburgh, I hope they appreciate him. All of the hims.

Frome Festival is now only inches away, officially opening on Friday... though by the cosmic calculations Annabelle & I are using for our Time Walk on Saturday, those 2 days would be tinier than a quark, which is a particle in a neutron, which is a particle in an atom. Time Walk, the story of the earth in a thousand paces will narrate our history from the start of the solar system as a walk round Rodden Fields at the scale of one pace to five million years.  It will take an hour, with chimpanzees coming down from the trees in the last millimetres. Virtually speaking, of course.  We've paced our route in windswept winter and buttercupped spring, waded through overgrown cow parsley and paddled by flooded river, and now in glorious summer sunshine. We've found an incredible amount of scientific data, some that seems absurdly sci-fi like the trilobites with eyes on stalks and nine-metre millipedes, and developed two cosmic guides who're a bit like Vladimir and Estragon except they don't need Godot, or even Google, and they're very enthusiastic about the awesomeness of life on earth. This morning we had a dress rehearsal, with some helpful friends coming along to give audience feedback. The walk proper on Saturday is sold out.

So if you haven't booked anything yet, here's the festival link. Rosie Finnegan and I will be talking about our personal top tips on Frome FM on Friday morning ~ our pub theatre production on Tuesday & Wednesday will obviously get a puff, (that's War Zones at the Cornerhouse) but there's also drama at the Old Bath Arms on Tuesday with Tighe O'Connor's comedy contest. I'm pleased to see my short play Muffin Man was picked for production, with two more Frome Scriptwriters in the shortlist line-up as well. And there's poetry, and music, and art... oh, get a brochure!

"Beyond the touchline there is nothing" ....football & war

A sunny day plus England's role in the current World Cup now abject history combined to ensure the audience at Bristol Old Vic barely outnumbered the 11 actors for the Thursday matinee of World Cup Final 1966, but the onstage team maintained lively energy throughout this romp through footie fact & frolics relating to Alf Ramsey's famous triumph. The story starts in a church where the congregation gradually morph into the iconic roles of the manager and his team: Glyn Grimstead is impressive as Alf, and Tom Wainwright & Oliver Llewellyen-Jenkins as Alan Ball & Bobby Moore look very credible footballers to me, but the comedy from this ensemble mostly relies on what you could call counter-intuitive casting: Stewart Wright as a kind of Kung-Fu-Panda Jimmy Greaves,  Karla Shacklock a balletic Martin Peters, and Les Bubb an ingenious Hungarian manager.  I liked the device of explaining techniques direct to audience, but coaxing members onstage to model formations seemed overly pantomimey and slowed the pace to an unwieldy 2 hours 15 minutes (including interval). But this is a show of two halves, and if you’d left at half-time disappointed by time-wasting you’d miss a wonderfully inventive second act, nail-bitingly exciting despite the spoiler of historical familiarity.  This is another revival from writer/director Tom Morris who first staged it in 2004. Not over till July 12th.

Across the river at Tobacco Factory that same night there's another ten-year-on script once again now topical, similarly inspired by historical national conflict. Private Peaceful, adapted from Michael Morpurgo’s story by director Simon Reade, is closer to my area of interest if not my experience. One of the shocking statistics about the First World War is that over 3000 soldiers were sentenced to death for desertion, mostly youngsters traumatised by trench warfare. Shell-shock was a known condition and officers were treated for it in psychiatric hospitals, but their men were shot by firing squad. The programme notes are drama in themselves as Morpurgo records finding a telegram sent to a mother to inform her that her son had been shot at dawn for cowardice. Private Peaceful's mother must have had such a memento. Not one of Owen's 'children ardent for some desperate glory' when he joins up, he's only a naive fifteen-year-old caught in the the double whammy of a Sergeant Major's propeganda pitch and a woman's taunts of 'chicken' ~ probably closer to many men's reasons than the retrospective tag of patriotism. A simple, skilfully visual, script relates predictable horrors but William Troughton as young Tommo, quintessential country boy, brings passionate conviction to his journey from quiet shires to the Paul Nash nightmare landscape of trench warfare. Minimal props and atmospheric sound & lighting all enhance this profound performance: 100 minutes melts away, as the last night of his life does for loving, loyal, honest Private Peaceful.  Recommended viewing for any age, this is also on till 12th July. (image: Farrows Creative)

Fromesbury groups

Frome Station is one of those timber buildings that look like they've come from a Hornby set. It was opened in 1850 and as one of the oldest stations still in operation it's now Grade 2 Listed. Frome is only a branch line, which if you remember your Tank Engine stories means it loops off the main line, and it's only single track now, but it has a literary claim to fame: In 1912 Leonard Woolf, who was staying in Great Elm, took the train to Paddington specifically to propose to Virginia Stephen.  He must have travelled hopefully, for according to the to-be bride's younger brother Adrian she had been visibly "a little forward" with him for some months: "Her method of wooing is to talk of fucking" he wrote to post-impressionist painter Duncan Grant, "and I dare say she will be successful."  She was, of course, or he was, and Leonard and Virginia Woolf continued as core members of the Bloomsbury set.  And now there's a move to put up a plaque on our little railway station identifying its role in shaping literary history. Not quite Adlestrop, but a small significance surely worth celebrating.

The Bloomsbury Group had much to commend it: members were anti militarism & bourgeois values and pro women's suffrage & pleasure in relationships, but its cliqueyness was criticised even at the time ~ which gives me a branch line loop back to Frome because one of the things I've always loved about living here is the way the creative groups consciously & deliberately avoid exclusivity. This is one of the reasons the Town Council was able to go politically independent, and it's reflected in the huge range of events in  Frome Arts Festival. Now a new group Frome Writers Collective has formed to bring more connectedness to the diversity of small groups working in different genres and literary forms.  Here they are on their launch day, with the Mayor in his capacity as author of Flatpack Democracy beside David Lassman who has taken over leadership of Frome Scripwriters. Rosie and I started this group in 2012 and have enjoyed working on some great productions but we're both focussing on personal work at the moment. We've stepped back not away, and at a good time, with our final Scriptwriters project War Zones in Frome Festival: six 10-minute scripts from Alison Clink, Brenda Bannister, Nikki Lloyd, Sian Williams, Rosie Finnegan and me.  If you've seen previous Nevertheless Production shows you'll be thrilled that dream team Olivia Dennis and Danann McAleer are coming back to perform these very different pieces. Only a fiver, so do book and come along to the Cornerhouse 8pm on Tuesday 8th & Wednesday 9th July.

Midsummer sun, wild orchids and blackbird song

As this is mostly an Artsy & Frome-fanclub blog I don't generally comment on the weather but this solstice as been so celestially sumptuous it amounts to an event in itself. Frome quirkiness  shone at the annual Town Cryer competition in the park, each contestant picking a historical news item ~ my favourite was the Peacehaven announcement of the death of Elizabeth Barrett-Browning with an opening yell How Do I - Love Thee - Let Me Count - The Ways.
Sunshine and late dusk means parties in gardens and long walks: Cley Hill in June is smothered with wild orchids including the rare ophrys apifera, bee orchid, which lures its pollinator by pretending to have a bee on it ~ literally a honey-trap.  I haven't yet been swimming at Tellisford weir, but poet Edward Thomas did in 1913, according to his journal. He never survived the first world war but he gave us a name ~ an Adlestrop moment ~ for that sudden private recognition of the extraordinary in the ordinary. The Poetry Society had the charming notion of honouring the precise centenary of this epiphany by asking people to tweet in the sounds they hear at 12.45 on 23rd June. I was outside the Sicilian coffeehouse on Catherine Hill and heard: feet on cobbles, chatter & clatter & Lamb playing in the cafe, aeroplane overhead. If you don't know the poem Adlestrop, or even if you do, you can read it here.

I'll end this entry with a picture of the beautiful walled garden at Mells which has an amazing waterlily pond and luxuriant rose arches, and a pizza oven as well.  And for anyone struggling with a funding application / exhibition / brochure / website, here's a helpful self-promotion tool: the artybollocks generator. Here's my Artist's Statement:
My work explores the relationship between Jungian archetypes and midlife subcultures. With influences as diverse as Kafka and Roy Lichtenstein, new tensions are generated from both simple and complex structures. Ever since I was a child I have been fascinated by the traditional understanding of the zeitgeist. What starts out as hope soon becomes finessed into a hegemony of defeat, leaving only a sense of dread and the unlikelihood of a new order. As shifting phenomena become distorted through diligent and diverse practice, the viewer is left with a testament to the darkness of our future.  You're welcome!

Whales, cows, and polar bears

Whales can hear and respond to each other thousands of miles apart, singing so loudly the sound would shatter you. I didn't know that, and I didn't know there's only one whale in the world calling higher than all the others, at 52-hertz. Dumbstruck, the new show from young Bristol company Fine Chisel, takes this starting point for a story about a marine mammal biologist whose life is equally isolated. Robin McLoughlin is totally charismatic from the opening moments to the dramatic end as Ted the lonely whale-specialist who talks to the lonely-whale, addressing it affectionately as "52".  The life-story fragments he reveals vary from moving (George Williams brilliant as the troubled reverend who explains death to four-year old Ted) to raucous as pirate radio takes over the airwaves, and takes too his hopes of a companion on his marine studies. The live music is superb, especially when atmospherically enhancing the story ~ we stray overlong from the engrossing central story after the interval with a sixties on-air pastiche ~ and the energy of this talented team never flags. The production won an award at Edinburgh and audience cheers at Bristol's Brewery and comes to Frome's Merlin next week ~ if you enjoy innovative theatre and dynamic live music, don't miss it.

Brilliant Bristol comedy duo Living Spit have been touring their new production around the pubs of Somerset: Rosie and I caught it at The Rose & Crown in Huish Episcopi, a friendly pub with no bar so you stand by the pumps to pick your tipple. The show is called One Man and his Cow, which sounds bucolic and childishly whimsical but actually has more in common with one of the Grimm's dark narratives, except it's so funny the audience's howls of mirth drowned out the England match in the adjoining room. Stu McLoughlin and Howard Coggins are impressive musicians too, so a medley of instruments accompanied their rapid-fire rhyming story of Trevor the farmer and his beloved cow Judy whose special talents are speech and hidden malevolence.  Trev is dying ~ that's the cheerful opener ~ and to choose which of his three children gets the farm he hits on a test that King Lear could have told him was doomed to dramatic failure. Howard is the obtuse farmer and Stu plays each of his children, sometimes simultaneously, plus the duplicitous cow. Rhyming become increasingly outrageous and there are more synonyms for bovine than I ever imagined as this increasingly hysterical history progresses to a satisfying end that Jeanette Winterson would appreciate. (She took vengeance on the rabbit that ate her parsley, if you didn't see the news item) The lads are moving eastwards now the Take Art rural tour is over, but will be back in Bristol at Tobacco Factory in the theatre bar in July - well worth going along.

Music and merriment too at Wallace Real's Ministry of Madness, the new community production from Stepping Out which opened at the Rondo in Bath and moves on to Bristol’s Brewery next week.  This company always delivers high-energy and hugely entertaining stories that include, along with the fun & frolics, thought-provoking comments on the perception and treatment of mental health service users. "We don't change the world here," scoffs the Mental Analysis Diagnostics supervisor, "we colour-code it." But this isn't polemic: there's an exciting adventure too, albeit somewhat baffling, as Lucy embarks with her quintuplet personality into an underground movement of meta-theatrical therapy, meeting among others the Ladyboys of Bedlam and the mechanicals from Midsummer Night's Dream until, true to Oscar Wilde's decree, the good end happily and the bad unhappily ~ with a final full-cast song and dance.  This is a real feel-good show, with some terrific individual performances, great musicality, and a sense of integrity and commitment from the whole company throughout. But I have to admit my high point was Danann McAleer dancing like a bovver-boy fighting in an alley while wearing white high heels... 

Brass Works and Woolworths

Brass Works Theatre arrived on the scene last year, introducing itself as 'South Gloucestershire's first professional theatre venue', a tag which must please South Gloucestershire Council who support them but may confuse anyone unaware it's actually in Bristol (on the Keynsham side.  I'm adding this detail for benefit of Fromies, as it's only about a 40 minute drive since you miss out the Brislington snarl-up.)  Anyway, the unprepossessing exterior now contains a 90 seater venue nominated for The Stage 'Fringe Theatre of the year' award, run by Adrian Harris who also wrote, directed and acts in, their current production Flat Packed.  Rosie and I as founders of Nevertheless Productions (tag: 'Somerset's first and only pub theatre') naturally approve of all initiatives to support new writing and bring professional performances to obscure venues, so we went along. The story is played out in three scenes, each operating as a snapshot in time for three friends who thought they knew themselves and each other but who find their lives, as so often, are happening while they're making plans.... Setting the play in 2008 supports the wider social theme of the drama: the increasingly dire economic situation and immoral military invasions all began with a fatal lack of transparency.  It's a thought-provoking concept but the three actors, Dan Gaisford, Amanda Madison and Adrian, find warmth and heart in the story too ~ and quite a few laughs.  It's on till Saturday 21st June (including matinee that date) so if you too mourn the demise of Woolworths, you can book online.

Happenings in Frome, now and soon

Flames licked the artwork at an unusual preview at Black Swan Arts on Friday as Jenny Purrett set fire to a trail of gunpowder to burn through a piece of paper ~ those columns behind the onlookers that look a bit like silver birches are actually rolls of paper that have been shot with a rifle. Other artists in the dRAW exhibition use tracing, grinding, and programming techniques. It's intriguingly provocative and on until 28th June.

Frome Festival is now less than a month away with several events already sold out, so if you've got special favourites, get booking! I'm going to do a Lyn Gardner and offer my own top tips:
Nevertheless Pub Theatre is first pick (I didn't say I wouldn't be partisan) as Rosie and I are thrilled with the six 10-minute scripts we'll be producing at Cornerhouse on Tuesday 8th & Wednesday 9th July.  Here we are at a production meeting, being thrilled, and here's the flyer! Lovely Livi Dennis, who shone in our last Frome Scriptwriters show Festive Stockings, is joined by rising star Alex Poole, and ticket price is as always a startlingly mere £5. I'm also looking forward to Miracle Theatre's Tempest, on at the Merlin's amazing amphitheatre on Sunday 6th ~ their Waiting for Godot last summer was brilliant.
Moving from plays to poetry, it should be a great night at the Garden Cafe on Monday 7th as 

Hilda Sheehan is guest at the Festival Poetry Cafe and one open-mic poet will be chosen for the year-long title Festival Poet Laureate.  More excellent writerly events are featured on Words at Frome Festival  but I'm also looking forward to the Open Studios, the Hidden Gardens, and big dance nights with the Levellers at the Cheese&Grain and Seize the Day at the United Reform Church Hall, as well as great local bands like the Critters and Pete Gage Band playing FREE in the pubs every night.  Frome's speciality is accessible and egalitarian, so there's a range of events for every age and taste ~ where else would you find free-to-view events like a vintage-costumed bike ride in the park, fairy cakes in the children's library, and an international food feast followed by dancing in the market yard, alongside concerts & recitals and philosophical discussions about... er, the Moomintrolls...

To demonstrate I'm not so obsessed with Frome that I actually tether myself to the town boundaries, here's a couple of shots from my stay last week with friends in Urchfont, where one of our rural walks took us through Wedhampton, a kind of open-air house museum, with a legend on the village noticeboard to indicate the special exhibits so you can walk from end to end marvelling at their thatches, beams, manicured lawns, and guard-duty hedges. More accessible are the curios at Avebury Manor, refurbished entirely as it would have been in the early 20th Century, where you can browse through drawers and cupboards, leaf through magazines, and even play records on the His-Master's-Voice gramophone. Fascinating stuff, I wish all museums were so observer-friendly.

Intimate Apparel: corsets and other historic constraints

Lynn Nottage was inspired to write Intimate Apparel by uncovering a picture of her great grandmother and that’s where this production at Ustinov Studio begins, with a projected photo of a 'Negro seamstress' dominating the set: the room of a New York seamstress in 1905. Here Esther sews lingerie for rich whites and prostitutes alike and longs for love with quiet desperation. When George, a Panama canal workman, begins to write to her to ease his own loneliness, an inevitable tale unrolls like fabric in Mr Mark’s drapery store...

As well as evoking moving glimpses of a history largely unwritten, from a writerly point of view this play is fascinating: Lynn Nottage blends poetic monologues and political one-liners with narrative dialogue as Esther talks with the key people who define her identity. Woman is the nigger of the world, John Lennon sang, but humanity has devised a cruel perversity of oppressions and no-one in this story is unaffected. George's letters, which are a highlight for the audience as well as Esther, convey his life of labour on the canal with passionate eloquence ~ "this great fissure across the land, chaos a jackhammer away. When the oceans meet, will we coloured men be given glasses to raise?” ~ and even rich white Mrs Van Buren reveals private anguish. Performances are all superb, with Tanya Moodie superlative in the central role. The versatile set and moody sound design are great, especially the silent-movie-style piano accentuating both era and poignant moments of non-communication. Lawrence Boswell's direction is typically attentive to every detail though the reiterative fabric-inspired sensuality doesn't completely work for me, but that's a small point in a stunning production. It's on till 28th June but best get booking: this one is bound to fill the house when the starry reviews all come out. 

Extravaganza!

Le Navet Bête has been a must-see company for me since I saw their reinvention of the story of Napoleon in slapstick. I've since watched their ludicrous reinvention of the story of America's Wild West, and now their current Extravaganza, and always left the theatre aching with laughter and in absolute awe of their acrobatic skills and comic genius. This time they haven't bothered with a story, they simply fill the stage and spill into the auditorium with extraordinary antics ranging from surreal to brutal, incredibly physical to inexplicably hysterical. The conceit of the show is that we have come to watch a presentation by 'Hans' who is from an unpronounceable country and is aided by three uncontrollable performers. That's all we know, and all we need to know, as this Exeter-based company embarks on a sublime journey of mayhem. It's difficult to say what is most impressive: the sheer energy and exuberance of this charismatic team, the effortless timing that keeps threatened chaos at bay by milliseconds, or the extraordinary inventiveness of their physical feats. There's much meta-comedic play with gags like the swinging ladder, the custard pie and the banana, and that gasp-making classic: the slap-on-the-head ~ but these boys go beyond even Vivien in The Young Ones, Basil Faulty with Manuel, and Blackadder with Baldrick: to assault and revival by extreme puppetry... oh, you’d have to see it. And if you've missed it, don’t miss the next.

Extravaganzas are trending this weekend, with Frome Steampunk Extravaganza II bringing markets, exhibitions, bands, burlesque, and a Bohemian Ball to the town this weekend. Cheese & Grain on Saturday thronged with fabulously attired vampiric-looking vendors and visitors, corsets on women and moustaches on men and hats on everyone. I was one of the few Muggles, wandering round in jeans admiring the retro-galia ~ like Steampunk Engineering 'purveyors of finely crafted artefacts' from bits of old watches 'found and re-purposed.'

I'll end with a few glimpses from the super-market-spectacular we celebrate in Frome on the first Sunday of every month as the streets are closed to traffic for an explosion of independent stalls featuring arts & crafts, vintage clothes & curiosities, food & cider, with live music and lots of free tastings. Especially cheese. Here's the fantastic Swervy World street band and Anna Casserley showing how she creates her beautiful hand-carved spoons. I also recommend, after conscientious sampling, the award-winning halloumi from Homewood, White Lake goats cheese, and Wraxhall Vineyard's Pinot Noir rosé... as you see, an appropriately extravagant amount of research has gone into this week's post.

Cows, carnage, and festival creatures

In the week Gove shocked the sentient nation by extending his megalomaniac tweaks to the Literature curriculum by a purge of international classics ~ to be fair he didn't actually demand burning of all copies of To Kill a Mocking Bird and Steinbeck's Mice & Men though he might as well have from the fury evoked (including mine) ~  Lynn Gardner gave me respite from despair at our 'spoilers for sadness' culture in a delicate demurral to Alan Bennett's view of the playwright's craft. With hindsight, the National Treasure said, he should have been kinder to the audience. The Queen Mum of theatre commentary, with due respect, shifts from agreement at the joy of 'floating out of the theatre on a cloud of pleasure' to a more vigorous view:

 I also want to come out of the theatre on occasion feeling riled, angry, fired up for action or as if my heart is breaking... Yes I love being charmed and delighted in the theatre, but I don't want to be killed with kindness by artists, I want to be provoked by them and made to look at the world differently. I want to be taken outside my comfort zone. If that sometimes means they are going to risk boring me, offending me or even being cruel to me, then I'm not going to complain. Great art is seldom easy or kind.  I so agree. As Banksy said, art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. Lynn's piece used a picture of King Lear but I'm using Guernica.

Coincidentally ~ this is not one of my contorted segueways ~ Nevertheless Pub Theatre is currently preparing for our next production War Zones: six 10-minute dramas which will be performed at the Cornerhouse for Frome Festival in July, 4th-13th. We've got two great actors so Rosie & I are getting quite excited about that one. There's a line-up on the Festival website of other wordy events, ranging from Moomins for adults to Teatime Treats for children, including talks, performances, a book quiz, and poetry workshops from me and Rose Flint whose inspiring poem Elements of Healing you may have seen featured in the RUH in Bath.
Rose lives on the outskirts of Frome on a dairy farm which I rarely visit, having a psychosomatic allergy to free-ranging bovine creatures (also equine, ovine, porcine and canine... anything bigger than a cat, basically.) But this farm having recently won BBC4's Food & Farming Award for 'outstanding contribution with cutting-edge thinking and creative ideas' ~ and Rose having provided strawberry-pink Wellington boots to replace my Edina-ish high-heels ~ I ventured forth. The big thing about Lordswood Farm is that all the cows are fed on grass not grain, and even though these ones were (safely) ensconced in the dairy yard they still had plenty of grass to nosh on. So here's a happy image to conclude.

Curious: eager to know ~ arousing interest ~ made with skill & subtlety

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time, Mark Haddon's best-selling novel, has an 'unreliable narrator' now as famous as Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield. Fifteen-year-old Christopher Boone is autistic: his thought processes are by turns simplistic, logical and amazingly complex. All of this made the story sensational to read but an enormous challenge to transfer to stage, as writer Simon Stevens did for the National Theatre. The show won seven Olivier awards last year ~ including Best Actor for Luke Treadaway ~ and is now released as an Encore Live screening. And it came to the Merlin in Frome! An inspired choice and a complete sell-out, with several first-time audience members enticed by the chance to see a big London success in a local venue at local prices. There was a buzz of excitement throughout and applause at the end was as fervent as if the actors were there with us.

Certainly a superb show ~ imaginatively directed, cleverly filmed, brilliantly acted, and immensely moving.... though for me personally, live theatre will always have the edge on pre-recorded, and there's something about close-up shots that rarely comes up to the total immersion of watching whole-stage interaction. Which is why Luke's performance was so remarkable: touchingly credible and totally engrossing. Christopher's autism is a part but not the heart of the story, as director Marianne Elliott understands, finding a hero's journey and a metaphor for life too as he stumbles through messy human frailties while longing for splendid solitude in the stars.

Political shuffling has been in the air this week. Having enjoyed a year with the youngest, tallest, Mayor in the country at the helm, Frome town council has now moved into the stewardship of Sustainable superhero Peter Macfadyen, author of Flatpack Democracy, who admirably maintained his casual attire for the official portrait, though he did change his orange slacks. Here he is eschewing formality of background too, with his lovely Lady Mayoress Annabelle. 


Still on theme of recycling: did you know you can weave on a loom using yarn made from plastic, videotape, rubber inner tubes, paper, wire, and plants?  Just one of the things I learned from a fascinating exhibition of yarns at Frome Museum until July 19th. You can try little bits of weaving for yourself, too ~ I did. Great fun.

I'll end this post with an image from Stourhead, a place so redolent of English culture that even renovation work is screened with literary quotations (One of the most picturesque scenes in the world ~ Horace Walpole in 1762, and many visitors since) and with a quote from Mark Haddon which feels particularly apt for me at the moment: “You can’t drive yourself as a writer unless you have this mix of overwhelming arrogance and toxic anxiety.”