Arts in the Recession: Pub Theatre

I'm not going to pretend to my more metropolitan readers that pub theatre is a new phenomenon. In the capital, theatre spaces began to establish a permanent presence above the downstairs bar in the early seventies. But then alcohol has always been part of the theatre going experience: the south bank in Shakespeare's day was alive with beer swilling, whore chasing, bone chewing gamblers and thieves who chose between Hamlet and bear baiting as forms of popular entertainment, while music hall was a riot of gin drinking that began in saloon bars in the early Victorian era.

But what I have noticed in recent times is the new variant of pop-up pub theatre: a company takes over an upstairs - or downstairs - room for a month - or a week or a day - and puts on a play or two before moving on. Theatre professionals may sneer at the idea - they have their subsidised venues to protect - but whatever these productionslack in extravagance, they make up for with intimacy.

I know you have an image of amateur dramatics fixed in your head. Let me try and disabuse you of that notion. These days, we have more trained actors and allied professions than we know what to do with. The academies churn out far more media professionals than the media can ever use. Many of these creative types will spend a year or two eking out a living on the fringe before surrendering to a more lucrative career. Even then, most will want to keep their hand in in their spare time. Of those that make it, some will retain a romantic yearning for their days travelling from small stage to small stage in a transit van.

Let's take the Partcular Theatre Company's recent production of Forsaken at Exeter's Hour Glass Inn as an example. The Hour Glass has long used its cellar room as a place of entertainment. During the last World Cup, it became a sports bar for those who hate sports bars. On Sunday afternoons it has served as both a secret cinema and party venue. During peak periods, it reverts to the kind of restaurant that might be a harem canteen. But in September it became a fifty seat theatre not for one but eighteen performances of an original piece of theatre.

What is more, if the evening of my visit was any indication, it was a sell out - for an unknown company putting on a new piece of writing at a venue with no theatre history. That demonstrates an appetite for endeavours of this kind in our more bohemian provincial towns, but what were the secret ingredients of this particular recipe? Theatre audiences eat and drink: they like to meet first to catch-up socially then hand-out afterwards to discuss what they've just experienced. The Hour Glass encouraged these traits by putting on plates of pre-theatre food at a time that didn't interfere with it's always-busy restaurant. The producers helped out by laying on bite-sized performances at 6pm and 10pm - poetry, stand-up, sketches, music. These were free-to-all, but encouraged ticket holders to turn-up early and stay on late. They gave locals and regulars something not to moan about. And the performers could try out material on a willing audience without the pressure of a paying crowd,

The production team did a good job on the publicity, with distinctive posters up all over town and local press and radio backing the venture. But otherwise they didn't pander to the lowest common denominator. The company specialise in new writing and this piece by Helen Davis took on the unlikely prospect of a nun falling in love with a gay man, managed to avoid the potential for farce and prompted those in the stalls to question their own paths through life, so close were they to the characters doing the same on stage. The setting had a cave-like ambience that could contain a simple set design and create some of the magic of theatre. All of those involved had both professional training and experience and no one left disappointed.

Which isn't to say the truly amateur doesn't have its place. Earlier in the year, a local troupe took over the upstairs room of the Globe Inn in Newtown and put on an evening of Pinter and Beckett. Neither were great, but neither were bad either, and those two playwrights have plenty of badness potential. I predict that over the next few years, not all of our large-scale arts will survive pressures on public funding. As punters, we'll be less willing to pay big ticket prices, more interested in cultural soirées that combine a show of some kind with the opportunity to drink and chat with friends. And if we look back on the history of most art forms, it is out of those small scale scenes that most new work has emerged, away from the spotlight where it has a chance to grow without the need to do big box office, just make enough to get by.

Cinema: A Serious Man

'A Serious Man' sends the Coen brothers back to where their careers as film makers began: set in a nineteen-sixties suburbia of clapper-board houses, parking lots and strip-malls; costumes and interiors are lovingly recreated in grained or patterned sages and browns; spectacles show themselves to be as good a guide to a decade as its architecture. With a soundtrack of pop-psychedelia that dominated the charts that summer that perfectly scores the stoned atmosphere of the movie, you know you're in safe hands from the outset.

Autobiographical parallels are striking: the directors' father was a professor at a midwest university, just like Larry Gopnik, superbly played by Michael Stuhlbarg; his dope-smoking, bar mitzvah taking son Danny is of the age Joel would have been circa 1967, Ethan being three years younger; the brothers saved up for their first Super 8 camera by mowing the kind of well-groomed lawns that carpet the set; in other words, after more than twenty years of movie making, the Coens are bringing it all back home.

Larry is in a bad way. His wife is leaving him for a recently widowed but supremely smug elder from the synagogue. His kids are breaking whatever picket fence boundaries he puts in their way. His brother is taking up sofa space, making himself unpopular, hogging the bathroom to drain his sebaceous cyst, while working on kabbalistic mathematical theories that will only get him locked away. Larry himself is waiting on the faculty tenure committee while fending over student bribes and threats to his plot from redneck neighbours whose life is spent hunting and fishing, not pondering equations and suffering every angst known to the twentieth century. These ordinary woes of the common man are played out in his dreams as the sufferings of Job.

Larry seeks the advice of three rabbis, from junior to senior, getting little but platitudes and shaggy dog stories for his troubles. All he aspires to is respect from his family, community and synagogue, and a place in the academy - is that too much to ask? We're never quite sure. As a tornado heads towards town, some of life's dilemmas have been resolved, but new ones present themselves. The Coens realise their world, establish its characters and then leaves them - and us - to their own devices as the credits roll. As I walked out of the cinema, I felt underwhelmed. And yet I find myself quietly haunted by it. Why?

Perhaps it's because Larry, for all his neuroses and calamities, seems on the verge of a breakthrough rather than breakdown that we never witness him reach. If the folk tale that begins the film is a clue to its meaning, its one that I've yet to unravel; more likely, Ethan and Joel are playing an elaborate joke on us, the audience, but not one that I resent. If anything, the elusive nature of the film is its strength. That, and and its punctuation with more than a few laugh-out-loud moments that will appeal to those of us who like our humour dark; our confrontation with life's mysteries and mortalities unflinching. One of the few certainties in life is that we can rely on the Coen brothers to deliver their original vision while others offer pale imitations that fade from our attention before the lights come up. 'A Serious Man' is a serious piece of work you shouldn't miss.

Cinema: Where the Wild Things Are

Wicked uncle? Looking for an outing to trouble the little ones and their parents over the Christmas period? You could do worse than march them off to 'Where the Wild Things Are', Spike Jonze's adaptation of Maurice Sendak's 300 word masterpiece into a full-length feature.

When talking movies, I've had plenty of parents extol the virtues of some animation or other, even persuaded me to watch one in the company of their darlings. Most often they're written-by-numbers, producers standing over the scriptwriters with their checklists, ticking down the demographic boxes. Yes, I did notice the adult joke no child would ever get - but I also saw it coming, put there to ensnare me into saying just that. It's grown-ups that buy the DVDs and pay for the tickets, you see. And if you can keep them in the movie theatre rather than round the corner having a snifter, all the better.

Spike Jonze turned down my favourite film of the year - he produced, but opted not to direct, Charlie Kaufman's 'Synecdoche: New York' - to work on this project, so it better be good. He also turned down the usual suspects to write the script with Dave Eggers, whose 'A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius' grew out of the death of both of his parents, leaving him to bring up his eight-year-old brother Toph, giving him more empathy than most for a child coming to terms with personal tragedy - in Max's case, the divorce of his parents and isolation from his sister and peers - by going wild.

Not that Max is so out of control you can't immediately imagine yourself as him in his world, at least if you have known the sadness of a life lived in the imagination, and the satisfaction of knowing it is the only life worth living. Max is a lone wolf, but he also wants to sleep in a pile, just like the rest of us. He bites his mother, but doesn't intend on eating her, and is so disturbed by the prospect of the wild things eating him, he resorts to building a secret place in their shared space, triggering calamity in his wild paradise.

This is a movie that is about childhood, rather than for children, which isn't to say your children won't enjoy it. My walk down the aisle was serenaded by the merry chatter of kids at the cinema but once the lights went down, my viewing pleasure wasn't interrupted, so they were either enchanted or had settled down for a nap, probably doped up by mum with a teat or two of mulled wine. The first twenty minutes depict a child's life as it is - at least, how I remember it, not how most adults want it to be - lonely, mainly; craving attention but not knowing what to do with it; challenging, often, those he feels betrayed by.

Max introduces himself as 'an explorer who travels a lot.' When he runs away from home, his sailing over a year and in and out of a week and through a day to and from the night of his own room is a dream, so what - or who - are the creatures of his dream world? They are wild things, of course, but whereas in the book, we only grow to know and love them through their portraits - here, wonderfully rendered in three dimensions and voice by the likes of James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker - in the movie, we spend over an hour in their company.

The wild rumpus of the first island scenes leave us concerned for the wolf boy's safety as the assorted wild things roar their terrible roars and show-off their terrible claws, but by the conclusion of their first confrontation with our little hero - so well played by Max Records, he may well join that short lineup of child Oscar nominees - they are revealed as a collection of awkward neurotics as sad and lonely as he is. This is the gamble on which the success of the movie depends: if you're disappointed by that thought, you'll be more so by its execution; if it's the inner workings of the mind that interest you most, you're probably already intrigued enough to be reaching for the listings pages in your local paper.

When Carol - the most confused, lovable and dangerous of the creatures - picks out a crown and scepter from among boyish looking bones to hail Max the new king, you worry for the boy, but as the action proceeds, his moments of danger are those of accident rather than design, being crushed chief among them. If the film struggles to retain the attention, it is in stretching this sequence of adventures, few of which appear in the illustrated 1963 original or its later animation, to fill 101 minutes; alone on the island, you sometimes forget what's going on back home, which is what the film is really about.

I'm still trying to get to the bottom of who - or what - these furry manifestations of human psychology are. They are strange rather than scary, the chase and fight scenes fun rather than frightening. Max's imagination is so vivid we know his imaginary friends include a fence post, but these cuddly but cantankerous big softies have no antecedents in his bedroom we're made aware of. Spike Jonze was the right choice as director, bringing much of the charm and novelty of his early video work to proceedings, but maybe he should've waited for Kaufman rather than gone with Eggers to make these horny teddy boys real. Ultimately, they seem to show-off more of the hang-ups of adults than children, perhaps explaining Max's decision to go back to his mum, proving that even for a boy pretending to be a wolf pretending to be a king, heart is where the home is.

Arts in the Recession: Creating a Scene

Times are hard and the public purse is empty. Arts organisations that have previously relied on subsidy to stay afloat might find they have to throw away their water wings and swim for their lives. We on The Blah Blah Blah Show are planning to do our bit by publicising much of what's happening on the local scene and the best of the great beyond. But when I was searching for inspiration for the first of my series on arts in the recession, I didn't have to look far - across the Phonic desk, in fact, to my co-host.

I didn't see her at first. While I survey distant lands, Rachel McCarthy is, shall we say, more grounded. But in under a year of activity, she's made quite a bang on the local poetry scene and now she's getting national recognition, the Poetry Society recently naming Exeter's Stanza the most active group nationwide. How has she done it and what can others learn from her example?

It's not that Exeter was doing badly when she arrived. My first introduction to the world of poetry activists was at a small press festival in the Phoenix Arts Centre in the early nineties when magazine editors and publishers gathered together from all over the country, swapped their publications and even sold a few items to wandering poets or unsuspecting members of the public. We have the monthly Uncut series at the Phoenix's Black Box that combines guest poet and open mic and - in various incarnations - has been going for a couple of decades now. The Language Club in Plymouth runs to a similar format, and a carload or two often makes the trip between Devon's two cities. The Wondermentalist performance poetry cabaret was born in Totnes but now holds regular events in Exeter. Tall Lighthouse still hold occasional readings in the Picturehouse while Andy Brown's creative writing MA at the university means we get regular visiting writers of international repute. The Poetry School holds regular courses and workshops at various Exeter venues while several huddles of poets meet at each other's houses to share their work and wine. Exeter is also the home of Shearsman Books, one of our country's most innovative poetry publishers, with an international reputation and list. And poets got to Phonic FM before us - check out Waves With Words every Wednesday morning and hear their interview with Rachel on youtube.

But there was room for a little one, and some of us began to notice a fresh face among the us ageing hacks, offering her card and hustling for email addresses. Now this was unusual behaviour for a poet. We generally like to serve an apprenticeship before daring to open our mouths, let alone taking on the organiser role. But email and the internet has given us new opportunities to gather together like minds - setup a website and mailing list and you're away. They haven't replaced the leaflet and poster, but they've probably had more impact. And while the press and radio - especially alternative local community radio, of course - have their place, it's targetting the likely suspects that has most impact, that and word-of-mouth.

Of course, you have to have something worth marketing, otherwise you'll just get added to spam lists, soon forgotten. Excite got going with a launch event featuring Greta Stoddart reading from 'Salvation Jane', then shortlisted for the Costa Prize. Choosing the Devon and Exeter Institution as a venue didn't just add credibility to the enterprise, it has real atmosphere, its walls lined with leather bound volumes, its armchairs - and some of their occupants - stuffed with horsehair.

There are three things we don't talk about on The Blah Blah Blah Show - politics, religion and money. So I don't know all the secrets of the Excite treasury. But Rachel is a canny northerner - and former bookie - so I'm prepared to take a few bets. If you offer a performer a set fee, you've got to be prepared to make a loss. Now losing grant money is one thing, but shelling out from your own pocket is quite another. So if you offer a performer a cut of the takings, the risk is split with the added bonus that they are encouraged to promote the event, not just you. Given Rachel has put on a series of more-or-less monthly readings, I'm guessing the percentage approach is one she's adopted. While we're on finances, you've got to get the ticket price right for the night, in the fiver to tenner range depending on the box office appeal of your guest. The good ones will sell a few books to boost their earnings. Open mic is a blessing and a curse - think open audition for the poetry X factor - but probably a necessity for all but the best known main readers - they don't just turn-up, they even pay and often bring a friend or two. Besides, it's how even well known performers cut their teeth and sometimes try out new material.

I'm all for added incentives. Wine, for example. If there's no bar, certain poetry lovers will reconvene at the nearest pub, their devotion to alcohol even greater than their love of the spoken and written word. Certain venues have their own alcohol facilities, of course. Speak to them nicely and they might agree to give you a room for nothing on the understanding your punters will be theirs. Poets and poetry fans are heavy drinkers, that's what you need to tell them. And being other-worldly sorts, none of them drive. But for unlicensed venues, you'll have to provide the booze with the ticket price, a donations jar placed accusingly nearby. And truth is, for every wino there's a couple of water drinkers and all those two-for-the-price-of-one offers on cheap plonk help while they're still legal.

Rachel has been especially innovative when it comes to matching venues to events. That weather girl cheek has got her a long way. If one of her friends has a space big enough for an audience, she's probably filled it by now, and if she's not asked you yet, she'll be calling soon. Whether she crosses their palms with silver, I've no idea, but shops and galleries depend on footfall and getting known so why not offer to get a crowd through their door in return for a rent-free room. The Paragon Gallery has hosted both readings and workshop nights. Her partner in crime Piran Bishop has been persuaded to open up his studio in the recent team-up with Overstep Books. And she's held regular open mike nights at Otto Retro - everything is on sale including the chairs you sit on, and the glasses your drink is served in - the most recent being a Liv Torc book launch reviewed elsewhere on this blog.

The Excite brand is already branching out. Blogs have their place, and Rachel is a blogger in her own right. Its first poetry competition was recently won by David E. Butler. And then there's The Blah Blah Blah Show, of course, the first radio arts magazine to be presented by a one host under five years old and the other under five foot tall...

Poetry Review: Liv Torc at Otto Retro

I like Lic Torc. She does what she does - sassy performance poetry, off by heart, acted not just recited - and she does it well. I'm not the only one who says so. She won the South-West final of the Radio 4 Slam, is one of Matt Harvey's Wondermentalist cabaret troupe, and is an indefatigable presence on the local spoken word scene.

I like her work, or rather I like her performing her work. I like the title of her book too - 'Take Your Monkey and Get Out of My Life' - which isn't to say I bought a copy. Truth is, I'd only read it to remind me of her bringing it to life on stage. That's the problem with performance poetry on the page - with an active local scene giving plenty of opportunities to check out its good - and not so good - practitioners, and youtube as a backup if I ever feel like a fix of the same, I reserve my reading hours for other stuff.

Which isn't to say I don't regard Liv as a poet, I do, her and some - though not all - of her tribe - Amazonian and otherwise. Several were up there with her at Otto Retro - Exeter's funky junk store, one of the several homes of East Devon's poetry Stanza, Excite. In a funny kind of way, the setting was like the inside of her mind - eclectic bric-a-brac you probably don't need, but find yourself being charmed by all the same.

Some had her pizazz and the ones that didn't, at least they had a go. I can listen to the worst of them for five minutes, once, on an open mic. By the third or fourth time my democratic instincts are being tested, but I don't begrudge anyone the opportunity. It's how wannabe poets test themselves against an audience, alongside other wannabes, the odd should've-been and the occasional real thing. It's like eating canapes - if you don't like what you've got, there's another one coming along to soak up your glass of wine.

And I kind of regret not buying a copy of that book for the title alone. It would have made a quirky present for one of my younger sisters or elder nieces. I might just have done that but then she was chaired as the Bard of Exeter, made to wear robes and take a vow after a long speech by the Grand Bard about what the recently interred tradition should mean to her and us. That sickle lacked a cutting edge. So I slipped out the door and rushed home to watch Larry David's 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' instead. And I'd advise performance poets with a comedic wit and sense of the ridiculous to do the same.

Playlist: December 2009

I don't recall all that Rachel McCarthy - my co-presenter - and our guest - Emma Bishop of The Paragon Gallery, Gandy Street, Exeter - played on the show, but these are the tracks I chose and reasons why:

1. 'Must Be Santa' by Bob Dylan from 'Christmas In The Heart'

I'm still coming to terms with the concept of a Bob Dylan Christmas Album, let alone its execution, but this seasonal polka, driven by the accordion of David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, is my highlight. Check out youtube for the video featuring a good-time-was-had-by-all house party with our beloved grouch in a blonde wig and eccentric selection of hats dancing the night away while reeling off a list of American Presidents in place of a roll call of Santa's reindeer. What's not to like?

2. 'For Emma' by 'Bon Iver' off 'For Emma, Forever Ago'

I'm introducing all of our guests with an apt tune, whether they realise it or not. Legend has it Bon - Justin to his mum - recorded this in his Dad's log cabin, living off roots, berries and cuts of moose meat. True or not, the record has backwoods atmosphere and a lovelorn lilt that plaid shirt boys and buckskin girls love. I saw him at 'The End of the Road' festival in 2008 and he was still coming to terms with an audience that knew every word.

3. 'Rise' by Public Image Limited off 'Album'

PiL are back on the road; whether their latest incarnation is to my liking I'm as yet unsure; Johnny can still do his cockney Richard III Act for the Sex Pistols Reunion tours but whether his Country Life Butter persona can handle the emotion of his post-punk incarnation is yet to be seen; his appearance on 'The Culture Show' left me unconvinced. This was arguably his last great moment, although 'Open Up', his collaboration with Leftfield, still gets me on my feet.

4. 'Wolf Kidult Man' by The Fall from 'Imperial Wax Solvent'

The Fall played The Phoenix, home of Phonic FM, last month and I'm still recovering from the after show party, an intimate soirée Chez Smith and Poulou in the company of Anthony Frost, cover artist and future guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show.

5. 'I Don't Wanna Be Nice' by John Cooper Clarke off 'The Very Best Of'

To celebrate our induction of JCC into The Undead Poets Society, we span this platter. More on him elsewhere in the blog.

6. 'Fifteen Feet of Pure White Snow' by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds from 'And No More Shall We Part'

'Dark, funny and yet strangely moving' is my modus operandi for writing poetry and this track comes out of the same box.

7. 'What's He Building In There' by Tom Waits off 'Mule Variations'

Never seen Tom Waits live, never likely to given he plays rarely and sells out in thirty seconds but he has a live album out from his 'Glitter and Doom' tour featuring a bonus disc of his between song spoken word shaggy dog stories. This isn't one of those, but it's the closest he gets to a poem, albeit with musical backing.

8. 'The Outdoor Type' by The Lemonheads from 'The Very Best Of'

I saw Evan Dando at The Port Eliot Festival this year. He's the kind of guy posh girls want to mother. Proof was in the front row, offering him their world. Apparently he's married an heiress, so has a world of his own. I also saw him bottled off the Acoustic Stage of the Glastonbury Festival in 1995. Portishead were on after and they were late. Great song for a campfire and easier to strum than a Portishead tune.

Cinema: An Education

Usually, I go to the cinema alone. Sad, I know, but it's a fact. Sad too that it might mean I miss out on films like 'An Education'. When selecting which movies I see, I don't just apply a judgement of personal taste, I also gauge popular predeliction, asking who else will be there, a factor in my enjoyment of the occasion. If teenagers are the core audience, forget it. Individually, teenagers are often acceptable company in the way that a dog alone is a personable companion. But gather teenagers - or dogs - into a pack and they behave like a pack: all flying popcorn, giggling conversation and bleeping mobile phones. Given teenagers are the core audience of most movie theatres, I don't just strike out whole genres as options, but chains of venues. Where they gather, I avoid.

Not that many teenagers are likely to see 'An Education'. More sophisticated female sixth formers maybe, adolescents more like the heroine of this story, a coming of age tale come older-man-grooms-younger-woman morality piece based on Lynn Barber's autobiography of the same title, set in a pre-Beatles 1960s London, but scripted by Nick Hornby. However, based on the poster alone, I might have assumed this was marketed at dates for couples where the female is the dominant partner or groups of women who gather monthly to gossip, drink wine and have a slice of culture with their cafe latte. In short, the kind of people I'd like to hang out with were I not a sad solo male movie goer, understandably considered untrustworthy company.

Naturally, I empathised with the predatory male at the centre of the story, when the audience is expected to side with the young female protagonist, a superbly nuanced performance by Carey Mulligan that deserves to win a clutch of awards. In the Lynn Barber book - which began as an essay length piece in Granta - her older man is an altogether less sympathetic character: over the cusp of middle age, without the physical appeal or rogueish charm that Peter Sarsgaard brings to the profession of the slum landlord. His character has more elements to integrate and he almost succeeds, especially in the central mystery of book and film - how did aspirational middle class parents who encouraged their only child to study for Oxford come to accept this man into their home, their daughter's life and ultimately encourage her to be his wife, a proposal she chose not to accept, but only because he was not only spliced, but a Daddy twice over.

Lynn Barber ultimately published her memoir while her elderly parents were still alive, exposing their small mindedness and duplicitous values to all; now projected onto the big screen. It says a lot about the mores of pre-feminist England: ultimately, a father's duty was to find his daughter a good man, goodness defined by means rather than morals. In truth, the book is much crueller, denying mummy and daddy the sympathy that Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour bring to their roles, but it is a cruelty they deserved - in any era, parents who collude in the seduction of their daughter by such an unsuitable suitor deserve cross-examination at the very least, if not abandonment.

This story within the story isn't majored in the film which plays on the romance of trips to Paris and life in a London society somewhere between the opera and the greyhound track. That is it's failing but also its success - Nick Hornby plots a course between authenticity of source and setting, and the darker heart of fifties suburbia, an era now bizarrely celebrated as a golden age. Carey Mulligan as Jennie Miller exposes the lies of her seducer and the hypocrisy of her parents herself, returns to her books and escapes to Oxford an independent woman, ready to claim her own life and live it on her terms, something Lynn Barber has done ever since, becoming one of the great journalists of our times. Her older man was never much of a lover anyhow, preferring baby talk to love making, living so many lives in parallel, he never quite knew who he was.

The film is made for a more forgiving audience: the girl is prettier, her seducer handsomer, the story arc'd rather than jagged, pitched somewhere between escapism and exploitation. What it captures is the end of an era, where the fifties meets the sixties and is found wanting. Women would soon have different choices to those offered by Lynn Barber's parents, and it was Lynn Barber's generation that won them for those that followed. This is an end of innocence movie, but its hard won experience was put to good use in making a life on her own terms, something the movie only hints at with its open ending. An alternative was almost chosen: a final confrontation eighteen months later that never happened in life, or thankfully, on celluloid. Possibility, not closure, is the best way to finish.