Theatre: March Newsletter from the Particular Theatre Company based at The Bikeshed Theatre, Exeter

We make it our mission at The Blah Blah Blah Show to support Exeter's theatre and poetry scene. I've just received the March Newsletter from the Particular Theatre Company based at The Bikeshed Theatre, Exeter, and reproduce it here in full...

                                                   

March 2010 – Newsletter 4

Dear Particular Friend,

One month has gone by since our last newsletter and much has changed in the particular world.

The Distance is now over and we hope that many of you had a chance to enjoy this production. The end of The Distance however, has not marked the end of The Bike Shed Theatre; this is now a new performance space for the city of Exeter to enjoy and we will be packing it full of exciting shows for the foreseeable future. Read on for more details.

We hope you are all enjoying the arrival of spring, see you at The Bike Shed Theatre!

 
David, Fin and Debs

THE DISTANCE

The Distance by Bournemouth playwright Craig Norman ran at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 8^th to the 27^th of February. Alison Collinge played the role of Alex, a young mother dealing with the pressures of a changing world and her own mental illness.

I had the pleasure of playing the, to put it mildly, dramatic character of Alex in The Distance.

I was so ready to get my teeth into something and Alex was just that. My worries were of making her one dimensional and stereotypically mad, but I soon realised if I played her ‘mad’ I could go horribly wrong! I had to find her sanity and show elements of why Darby married her in the first place.  Finding the depth and layers to her and exploring relationships between the other characters was a task that lasted throughout and up to the very last performance. This was thanks to the great cast and director for keeping me on my toes. It always amazes me how different one show can be to the next, a slight inclination of a line from one character which provokes a different reaction can change the feel of a scene completely.

  The Bike Shed Theatre is such a great find, an intimate but hugely versatile space if a little cold at times. You could always find me gravitating toward one of their little heaters!

   I’m so pleased to have worked with this young, dynamic and friendly company and although my part was dark, angst ridden and distressed, I can safely say my experience wasn’t! A good balance of hard work and some great laughs, a perfect combination!

                                                                                            

THE BIKE SHED THEATRE

                                                                                                                                                                                           

. The Bike Shed Theatre will be open until the end of June and, with your support we hope to continue further and become a permanent fixture to Exeter’s entertainment scene.

The Bike Shed Theatre will be programming original theatre, music, dance and much more with a particular focus on local performers.

Upcoming productions at the Bike Shed Theatre include:

Wednesday 10^th of March: MERGE – Contemporary dance platform. 7pm. Free.

Friday 12^th and Saturday 13^th of March: Bristol Experimental Theatre Company – THE LONG LINE OF BUREAUCRACY. 8pm [£7 (5)]

Thursday 18^th and Friday 19^th of March: Theatre with Teeth – SPAM DADDY? 8pm [£5 (3)]

Saturday 20^th of March – AvantRural presents the VEGGIE BOX. Details TBC.

Thursday 25^th to Saturday 27^th of March: Jackdaw Theatre Company – double bill. Harold Pinter’s A SLIGHT ACHE and UPPISCHBAUM & THE BARD.

On Sundays The Bike Shed Theatre will be the host to Cabaret Theatrique a free afternoon of varied entertainment.

For further listings check out our website on www.bikeshedtheatre.co.uk or join our Facebook group.

STILL

 The heat of a summer night. The cool of a treacherous river. A secret place that has witnessed young love, lust and death. When a married father picks up a seductive hitch-hiker and takes her to his boyhood hiding place, the question is – has he been waiting for her all his life, or she for him? Still is a story of desire and betrayal, hate and desecration, love and redemption.

Still by Steve Lambert will be Particular Theatre Company’s next production and will be showing at The Bike Shed Theatre from the 12^th of April to the 1^st of May.

Steve Lambert’s recent productions include Showing the Monster (Theatre West, Alma Tavern, Bristol) and Aftercare (ScenePool, Camden People’s Theatre, London). He is also a member of Heads and Tales, a Bristol-based story-telling group. Steve's short plays The Viewing and The Search were produced by Particular Theatre Company in their 6/10 slots in September 2009.Tickets for Still will be on sale from the end of this week.

Cinema: Review of 'The Last Station'

I was hoping to begin this review with a celebration of Helen Mirren's Oscar winning performance as Countess Sofya Tolstaya in 'The Last Station'. The Hollywood machine being what it is, I can't even give you the consolation that  Carey Mulligan picked up the award for her charming lead in 'An Education'. Instead, the Hollywood Machine gave us Sandra Bullock  who has appeared in forty odd movies, none of which I've seen, and I catch a film most weeks, sometimes two. Make of that what you will.

Instead, I'll start by telling you that Helen Mirren was born Ilyena Vasilievna Mironov, the granddaughter of a Russian tsarist nobleman. So for those of you who consider the Dame quintessentially English, think again - blue vodka runs through her veins. Her father changed his name to Basil and was a cab driver, driving test examiner and civil servant in the Ministry of Transport and her mother was the thirteenth daughter of a West Ham butcher, so her cockney credentials are also strong.

As is her performance in this depiction of Leo Tolstoy's last year, told through the eyes of his male secretary played by James McAvoy who made 'The Last King of Scotland' but despite screen time, is peripheral here when up against Mirren, whose performance is operatic in scope and emotion -  and Christopher Plummer - 90% Lear, 10% Fool as Tolstoy himself. Next to the grand passion of these two old timers, the love of the young is  an occasional distraction.


The birch woods and long grass of a Russian summer  make a fine setting for the drama whose three acts focus on a Tolstoyan commune, the family estate and the station where he dies on the way from there to who knows where, escaping his wife and the conflict at the heart of the movie - the obligations of family, property and marriage against those of community, principle and fraternity. Tolstoy wants to leave the royalties from his books to his anarchist, christian, pacifist, communitarian movement. His wife wants it for herself and family, to keep them in the lifestyle to which she's like to become accustomed, and given she hand wrote 'War and Peace' six times and bore the old goat thirteen children, you might say she deserved a say in the matter.

Stay for the credits to catch snippets of Tolstoy himself filmed in 1910 and think for a few moments on what a long hundred years it's been, for since we've had two world wars, the rise and fall of Soviet communism, and the slow decline of the novel since it reached its height around the turn of the century. 

Cinema: Review of 'Fresa y Chocolate' or 'Strawberry and Chocolate'

Generally, the only event to lure the Blah Blah Blah crew into the Black Box at Exeter's Phoenix Arts Centre is the monthly Uncut Poets event, but the chance to see one of my favourite Cuban films - 'Fresa y Chocolate' or 'Strawberry and Chocolate' - on a biggish screen was too much to resist, even on a Monday night.

Originally released in 1994 during Cuba's 'special period' - the years following the end of the Soviet Union and Eastern European communism - the story takes place in Havana in 1979, a time when the revolutionary spirit was still strong in Cuba twenty years  on, but repression of homosexuals and other perceived dissidents was also at its height.

I don't have time today to do the film justice. Follow the links here and above to find more detailed discussion. It has elements of an odd couple or buddy movie, and works at that level as a moving comedy - but is of particular interest to anyone interested in Cuban politics and society. The very fact it was made and tolerated by a regime previously not averse to censorship was notable in itself, the open playing confrontation of differing world views (the homosexual aesthete versus the heterosexual doctrinaire communist) significant in surfacing debate that had previously been kept underground.

The achievements and compromises of Cuban society under a communist regime are also all present - the quality of the health service and education system versus the rationing of and hustling for consumer goods - and correct, but the movie is neither polemic nor documentary and works well as a cookie comedy with some fine performances, especially by Jorge Perugorria who plays the camp but charismatic Diego. For visitors to Cuba, it also features some landmarks including the Coppelia ice cream parlour which is open to all comers and a good place to chat to Habaneros in a relaxed atmosphere. More exlusively, Paladar Guarida - the apartment where much of the film was shot - is now a privately restaurant, but book ahead as it's a real celeb hangout and very popular with the diplomatic community.

The event was organised by Jane Yates who is testing the Exeter waters to gauge interest in setting up a branch of the Cuban Solidarity Campaign.  She plans further Cuban film evenings so keep an eye on the Phoenix website and this blog.

Music: March show playlist

With March 7th 2010 being International Women's Day eve and celebrations in the Phoenix scheduled for the afternoon and evening, I focused my selection on female artists. Naturally, this drew complaints from our listener, who especially objected to the 'warbling' of Joan Baez. I have sympathy - I can't listen to an entire Baez album without yowling back like a tom cat - but Baez also provided one of the finest nights in my concert going life at the Paradiso in Amsterdam and the recent documentary film of her life and work is well worth a viewing. Onto the playlist, or what I can remember of it...

1. 'Redemption Day' by Johnny Cash

We began our first show with a late Johnny Cash cut and with the release of his posthumous album 'American VI: Ain't No Grave' there was no better way in which to start this one - written by Sheryl Crow, this is now a Johnny Cash song, just like all the other American recordings he made his own during the last prolific phase of his career. I own all eleven CDs recorded during the last decade of his life and suggest you should too.

2. 'Sensual World' by Kate Bush

Our introduction to the sensual world of Ann Gray's poetry - one of Devon's great female eccentrics. That's Kate Bush who lives in the South Hams near Start Point - Ann Gray is one of Cornwall's great female eccentrics.

3. 'Lady Midnight' by Leonard Cohen

Ann was concerned her first choice might be too miserable. In Furniss Towers, we consider early Cohen party music.

4. 'Clothes Line Saga' by Suzy and Maggie Roche

It being Women's Day eve and all, I forgot to play any Bob Dylan. This is especially uncharacteristic as Dylan's European tour plans are just coming through and with his only UK date being the Hop Farm Festival in Kent, men of a certain age and disposition are considering another jaunt to the continent. Ann's choice was  a Dylan cover by the Roche sisters  which I thought I hadn't heard before  until I checked the archive and found it amongst my hoard of covers. It ain't on youtube though, so I've linked to the Genuine Basement Tapes version.

5. 'Brown Eyed Handsome Man' by Buddy Holly

Apparently not inspired by her genial host but her own father telling her she'd never marry a brown eyed boy, this was Ann's next selection. Who was at Buddy Holly's Duluth concert three days before he died on February 3rd 1959? Bob Dylan.

6. 'To Ohio' by The Low Anthem

Ann and I share the view that The Low Anthem's debut was the best album of last year. But Ann goes one better - she has seen them live. They are playing The End of the Road Festival at Larmer Tree Gardens in September. See you there?

7. 'Hasta Siempre' by Sexteto Kamaraco

That Che Guevara song I've played before in a different version. I saw this band on the roof terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra. The link is to the Buena Vista Social Club version. Postings of this song tend to attract those more interesting in the 'Che Guevara, murderer or martyr?' debate. Neither and both, if you must know.

8. 'To Be Lonely' by Joan As Police Woman'

One of those who aspire to wear Kate Bush's red shoes. I prefer he in quiet melancholia mode, naturally.

9. 'Silent All These Years' by Tori Amos

I was a fan of Tori Amos, but lost track of her around the time she started suckling piglets. The version linked to incorporates a Leonard Cohen recital.

10. 'Diamonds and Rust' by Joan Baez

It must irritate Joany no end that not only did Bob write the songs she's best known for, he also inspired the only song she wrote that has a life beyond her.

If you object to the Baez warble, try the Judas Priest version...


11. 'Madame George' by Marianne Faithfull

The Marianne Faithfull version is nowhere to be found - I played the single version released off the Van Morrison tribute album 'No Prima Donna' produced by Van Morrison... I've linked to the Brian Kennedy version instead. Not only does he sound like a girl, the B-sides on the single feature his versions of 'Queen of the Slipstream' and 'Irish Heartbeat.'

March guest: poet Ann Gray, author of 'At the Gate', 'The Man I Was Promised', 'Gronw's Stone' and 'Painting Skin'

Poet Ann Gray is our guest on The Blah Blah Blah Show on Phonic FM on March 7th 2010 from noon until two.

Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy recently featured a poem of Ann's in her Daily Mirror column:

One night you’ll come back and I’ll wake
to see you moving noiselessly in your socks,
you’ll look bewildered, nothing’s quite the same.
You’ll be hunting through the drawers,
wondering where your clothes are.
I won’t move or speak, I’ll try not to breathe.
I’ll want to say, look in the wardrobe,
I saved your Levi boots and leather jacket.
I’ll watch you lift photos in their frames,
take them to the window. Some faces
you won’t know. You’ll guess at Beth.
I’ll watch you sink to your knees,
cover your head with your hands.
I’ll hear you whisper, Nick. Nick got married.
I’ll watch you disappear to the bathroom,
hear you brush your teeth, hear you pee,
see you reappear with a glass of whisky.
You’ll sit on the edge of the bed for ages,
until you turn and lift my hair, touch my neck,
then hold your mouth there.
Then you’ll say, so what happened?
and I’ll say, how long have you got?

Carol Ann says: "This comes from the Cornwall-based poet Ann Gray’s new collection At The Gate (Headland, 2008) a powerfully moving sequence of elegies to her partner, who was killed in a car accident. In this poem, the grief of bereavement re-imagines the lover as a Lazarus figure, returning from the dead, puzzled and disconcerted at the small changes in the bedroom and the changing, ongoing lives of the living. The closing question is unbearably poignant, holding a deeper, tragic meaning beneath its colloquial surface." 

Ann is published by Headland.

Ann Gray's collections include 'At the Gate' (2008), 'The Man I Was Promised' (2004), 'Gronw's Stone: Voices from the Mabinogion, co-authored with Edmund Cusick (1997) and 'Painting Skin' (1995). She co-edited 'Having Your Cake and Eating It' (1997), an anthology celebrating food.

"Ann Gray's poetry is a measured but sumptuous revelation, like the sun coming up a few inches at a time."      Clive James

"Ann Gray writes a sensuous poetry... spans a whole range of emotions from the ethereal to the earthy."      Patricia Oxley

"This poet treads the precipice of language gracefully. The unexpected occurs throughout the book... Each poem is an individual insight."      Penelope Shuttle

The cover images of both 'The Man I Was Promised' and 'At the Gate' were painted by Michael Scott (1946-2006).

An exhibition of Michael's work will open at the Billcliffe gallery, Glasgow on October 1st with a book of his work due to be published this year.

Art Review: Dexter Dalwood at the Tate, St Ives

It isn't often one discovers a like-minded artist working in one's own medium, let alone another, but Dexter Dalwood and I seem to share obsessions, an aesthetic and an approach. Why write a blog if I can't indulge myself occasionally? I went to Tate St Ives to review their Spring show, on until 3rd May before it travels to FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in the Summer followed by CAC Malaga in the Autumn where I hope to catch it again - but ended declaring affinity.

Born in 1960, Dexter is the best part of a decade older which got me thinking what defines a generation, where the boundaries lie in time. They overlap, that's for sure, and are as much about affiliation as decade I'm going to stake a claim to those years between punk and acid house, the last of the forty year youthful rebellion that began with rock'n'roll, though I wouldn't consider many who lived their teens  through those years kin, kith would be fewer to those who grew up outside them.

By the time he got to art school  himself in the eighties - the course of art in the late twentieth century had long been set. If abstract expressionism had seemed like the only contender in the immediate post-war years, what might be called conceptual pop has dominated the last three decades. Pretty much all the 'Young British Artists' who hit the headlines in Britpop years - Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin - fit that definition as I'd write it, all children of Andy's factory, not Jackson's barn.

It is curious then to see the same artist select a show of works made in 1971 made by artists working in various disciplines across the generations productive at that time, from the dying whale of a late Picasso and the exit daub of Oscar Kokoschka to Warhol's 'Sticky Fingers' sleeve and Electric Chair Print, by way of a selection of work of artists of the St Ives school, already two decades beyond the heyday of the colony.

In 1971, Dexter Dalwood was ten and spending a formative three years living in Cornwall when Sam Peckinpah and Dustin Hoffman were making 'Straw Dogs' just down the road, fake mist merging with the real. The sixties had ended in violence and descended into decadence with the stomping boots of glam rock a proto-punk and the likes of 'Clockwork Orange' predefining its image.

The approach to curatorship that makes his 1971 show so enjoyable is not unlike the process that produces his work. Most of Dalwood's paintings are conceived through collage in the style of Richard Hamilton's innovations from the fifties, themselves owing much to dadaist and surrealist creations of the inter-war years. But while others stop there, Dexter uses those pieces as a launching pad for painting on canvases of a large-scale, rendering his cut-up in paint. The result is pure pop but with elements of surrealist dislocation.

By the time I'd achieved a decade, the Californian sunshine we see in 'Sharon Tate's House' (above) had shone on the horrors on other side of the couch. Dalwood's interiors have the ability to convey both 'Hello' (as in the magazine) and 'Goodbye' (the parting shot of Johnny Rotten). But like a good poem, they layer on meaning such that surface attraction soon melts through layers of reference and image.

I suspect I'll be standing in an art gallery years from now and suddenly make the connection between a Dalwood quotation and the original in front of me that itself may have incorporated quotation from the past. We are standing on the shoulders of giants. But what makes pop work where other, more avant-garde, conceptual art - and poetry - fail is that it takes surface attraction as seriously as it takes idea and process. I want to lure the reader into my work before they discover it is booby-trapped. So does he.

Dalwood, importantly, is also a colourist and knows how to use swathes of flat colour with painterly skill, whether it is the rich Matissian red of 'Diana Vreeland' or the indigo blue of one of the to-my-mind less successful more recent series of tragedies and suicides 'The Death of David Kelly'. Likewise, when it comes to the captivating 'Burroughs in Tangiers' that recreates cut-up on a larger scale - getting it down, tearing it up, reassembling it - making a magic ceremony of art.

Look closer and you see a sense of history at work. Most of the more effective pictures have an aspect of 'through the keyhole' - celebrity cribs with an empty cot - and the sense of absent presence is strong. A collage of time and place goes into recreating a place in time with regular quotations from the story of art merging into celebrity biography and the turning points of history. This is post-modernism, yes, but without the boredom that renders so much post-modernist literature of  no interest to anyone but fellow practitioners of the academy.

I'm taking a similar approach to Dalwood myself in my new project 'Tom Fool' in which tales of this clownish valet to the great dictators are told first in a cut-up of source materials that is then rewritten as poems that are my own reworkings of borrowed language in fictions that are born of a sequencing of images rather than the past as it was plotted. They are meant to evoke the past rather than merely describe it, and in summoning its spirit confront it. In a Dalwood painting, the real subject of the work is most often missing.

As it happens, Dexter played bass in The Cortinas - Bristol's only punk band of note - and I didn't. It is curious to note how many artists and writers who are my contemporaries started out in music, just as many musicians who emerged in the sixties got an art school grounding. I guess creatives flock where freedom is. Punk cleared the ground that post-punk - more interesting, longer lasting - grew in. In the same way, Andy Warhol raised the factory most artists of note still work in, even if we now find his work all surface, no feeling. And practitioners like Dalwood have picked up his tools and made art following hat takes us deeper into the present in our past by following his processes.

As Dalwood says, 'How you relate to other people is... contingent on sharing certain cultural obsessions, which genuinely mean something.' Whether that lasts is questionable. Whether that matters is debatable. This is your chance to dive into a David Hockney swimming pool, both flat and deep at the same time, while there's still water in it to swim in.

Art Preview: Anthony Frost and Sir Terry Frost at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton

We're hoping to feature dynastic artist, zig-zag wanderer and rag meat raconteur Anthony Frost as guest on our May 2nd show.

Many Exeter residents will have seen Anthony's of paintings and prints at the Royal Albert Memorial Museum just before it closed for refurbishment. Anthony is based in Zennor near St Ives and his work features around town with three paintings at the Salthouse Gallery, an annual exhibition at the Porthminster, and Frost family allsorts at the Tate. Visitors to London might have seen his major shows of paintings at Beaux Arts - where the Frosts have the distinction of being shown across three generations - and prints at Advanced Graphics, shortly to travel to the Armoury in New York.

Closer to our Devon HQ, Anthony has a father-son double-header coming up at the Brook Gallery, Budleigh Salterton: his own work will be shown from 27th March to 15th April immediately followed by the work of the late Sir Terry Frost from 16th April to 7th May. 

The exhibition coincides with the launch of the long awaited catalogue raisonne of the prints of Sir Terry Frost. Please contact the gallery for details of the standard edition and deluxe edition of only 100 which includes a print by the artist.

Anthony has involvements across the arts. He's painted album covers and back drops for The Fall and survived the odd night on the sauce with Mark E. Smith. He occasionally acts in the play 'Art' with Bob Devereux and Phil Bowen and is the brother of comedian Stephen Frost. And poet and novelist Simon Armitage is a friend who has contributed to his last several exhibition catalogues.

We're looking forward to some great music - Anthony works to music and is a devotee of Dinosaur Jr, Captain Beefheart and P.J.Harvey among others - to accompany the repartee as Anthony looks back over his life and career and tells us where Fast 'n' Bulbous are taking him next.