Theatre: 'The Distance' by the Particular Theatre Company

In our ongoing series on arts in the recession, we discussed the phenomenon of pub theatre and its potential to deliver productions of merit, to an audience beyond regular theatre goers, on a budget relying on little or no subsidy. I reviewed 'Forsaken' by the Particular Theatre Company who'd recently staged a three week run of a new piece of writing - together with before and after shorts of comedy and poetry - in the basement of The Hour Glass Inn in Exeter, ending with the wish that they'd extend the experiment to future shows.

My wish was their command and they are back with 'The Distance', a new play by Dorset writer Craig Norman, described as a poetic drama in which a married couple struggle to maintain fractured relationships with each other and their parents, in a world where land is precious and you don't know who you can trust. Featuring an accomplished professional cast and crew in an intimate space, the show should share many of the elements that made its predecessor a commercial and artistic success, but this time they've created their own seventy seat space - the Bike Shed Theatre just off Fore Street in Exeter, right in the centre of town. They are licensed for drink and have done a food deal with the nearby Flying Pig, maintaining the elements that make pub theatre a social night out.

Just as importantly, they've kept to their philosophy of exposing their audience to new work by encouraging us to stay on for 10 o'clock slots, one act plays by local writers that change every day or two. It's a win-win of a concept. The theatre ups its revenue by selling a few drinks while the punters wait for the stage to be reset. The audience gets an add-on to the experience if they want it. Playwrights and actors get a chance to try out new work in front of a paying crowd while the producers can gauge their reactions to new talent.

'The Distance' runs from 8th to 27th February and starts at 19.30. Tickets are available online at 10 pounds and if you're reading this on the day of posting and are quick off the mark you can still get them at the early bird price of a fiver. I'll be there for the preview and hope to add a short review below while there's still time for you to get seats for a night later in the run.

On Sundays 14th and 21st of February at 17.00 they are also hosting free evenings of comedy, music and poetry - Antidote/Anecdote - which sound a good way to end a winter weekend.

Cinema: Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll

'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll'

Ian Dury was the bastard offspring of a three-way between Richard III, Max Wall and Edward Lear. His act was pure music hall with a musical backing that owed more to funk than punk and yet he was the clown prince of the punk movement, had the look and attitude before either were safety-pinned onto the various pub rock combos that followed in the wake of the Sex Pistols. They revered him and his original band, Kilburn and the High Roads, set the scene, along with the likes of Dr Feelgood, and were also a major influence on the London ska revival led by Madness.

At the risk of packing the Undead Poets' Society with lyricists and performers, however talented, Dury deserves induction because, he like John Cooper Clarke, was a funny man but had something of the night about him. More importantly, he had a dextrous and daring aptitude for rhyme and was demented in his disruption of syntax to get syllables to dance to his rhythm four-to-the-floor funk rather than garage band punk, giving his words far more space to work in than most lyricists of the movement.

In the guise of Andy Serkis, previously best known for his turns as Gollum and King Kong, the just-interred look is more apparent in the actor's whey-faced weaselyness than in the bucket-headed Dury but the impersonation goes much deeper than clock and clobber. Serkis inhabits his character physically such that the transformation in his voice seems to come from something more life-rupturing than mere manipulation of the vocal chords. Sure ,you get the charming loser and battling boozer who becomes a combination of Lear and his fool on stage, but if Dury had a tribute act - and some might say that the modern-day Blockheads with a revolving cast of celebrities in the lead role is just that - you'd expect and get nothing less. The key to the success of the film is unlocking the heart of the man on stage to see the shadow-plays staged there and how they informed the art and craft we are already familiar with through his archive of vinyl and celluloid.

Many biopics have no arc and no dynamic and rock biopics are generally those that struggle hardest to least effect. In part, that's because we are still too close to the practitioners of the now fading era of rock'n'roll to get perspective, to see the story in the pile of clippings and clips too easily amassed as research. Sight does not necessarily give insight. Dury was a student of Peter Blake at the RCA and taught at art colleges himself after graduation but didn't pursue that route, saying "I got good enough at art to realise I wasn't going to be very good." Not all film directors are able to undertake such self-criticism and the now usual route to the clapperboard of an apprenticeship commercials and pop videos is rarely the best preparation for the two hour treatment.

But also, as with our discussion of poets in the movies, a creative life is not necessarily the best source material for creativity, and in bad hands can just be an excuse for the sort of cut-and-paste treatment that all-too-often masquerades as rock biography or the thinly disguised adaptation of source materials that lazy dramatists claim as plays - they may have a willing audience and guarantee sales but don't merit serious attention beyond the fan base who'll fork out the ticket price for anything with the right name on the package. If I had the time and inclination, I'd digress into a few paragraphs denigrating the missed opportunities of past efforts and speculate on what future projects might best fit the movie format, but you can spare me that effort by doing the job yourself with a few mates down the pub.

In Dury's case, the writer Paul Viragh had more than most to work with. Central to the script is the son-of-the-father who becomes the father-to-the-son with all the complications of the paternal dynamic that tend to come with absence. Baxter Dury is now a musician himself, but in the film is portrayed as a boy old before his time who never grows up -  literally, as Bil Milner is asked to act out almost a decade of his young life without aging more than a few weeks. But the bass drum beat of this kit is the mother rather than father figure. Dury's own features little in the movie but was the one constant of his childhood, the upper-middle class daughter of a doctor and Celtic bohemian Betty who raised him as much in Cornwall and Essex and whose role in his life is replicated by both his wife and girlfriend who are expected to shift gears from carer through creative foil to lover on Ian's whim.

Not that any disabled kid in fifties Britain grew up spoilt. Dury's education in the Chailey Heritage Craft School and Hospital really was one of hard knocks and always getting back up for more. Returning to the institution in the eighties to mark the Year of the Disabled, Dury wanted to give the pupils some of his spirit of rebellion but by then they had less to rebel against and his cripple pride anthem 'Spasticus Autisticus' seemed to many derogatory rather than celebratory, too twisted to ever become the 'I am Spartacus' of the raspberry ripple kind. Dury took his dark and bitter anger into Grammar school where, smaller but older than his classmates, he took out his rage on any that got in his way, a habit he perpetuated as band leader where even working partnerships with talents such as Chaz Jankel were riven with more tensions than creativity itself demanded.

The movie ends a decade before Lord Upminster's early death, sparing us the worst of his alcoholism, the degradations of liver cancer, the decline in his artistic abilities and output, and the pirate and villain film roles he took on to keep the money coming in - Dury is the only actor I can name who made films with both Bob Dylan and Tom Waits, and he turned down the 'opportunity' to work with Andrew Lloyd Webber on the libretto to 'Cats', missing out on Richard Stilgoe's millions - all hinted at, but not overdone in the closing scenes of the movie. Its faults are mainly stylistic. There is more pop art frippery than is strictly necessary to deliver the story and the framing device of Dury's narration from a stage beyond the grave only fills the gaps the script should have covered integrally. But it seems unlikely that rock music will deliver us another Dury and 'Sex and Drugs and Rock and Roll' does a good job of telling us why.

Poetry, Theatre, Music - 'Village' with Josephine Larsen, Alice Oswald, Martin Holland and Peter Oswald

For those of you who aren't regular readers - or listeners - we had Alice and Peter Oswald on The Blah Blah Blah Show in January to promote this pamphlet and its Exeter launch organised by my co-presenter Rachel McCarthy, accompanied by a well designed poster and programme that may prove to be as collectible as the signed chapbook many in the audience left clutching.

Alice Oswald's poetry will need no introduction to those who keep in touch with the contemporary scene. She had two collections - one a commission, the other a collaboration - published by Faber in 2009, adding to her previous three collections and the two anthologies which she has edited.

Her poem for several voices 'Mrs Eaves phones her sister' closes the pamphlet and closed last night's performance, but on this occasion she was one of a company of four, each making significant contributions to a performance that combined theatre, music and verse - sometimes in combination. That piece brought the four of them together and in its weaving of character and tongue, we were left with the strangeness of an English village in winter, its people as unpredictable as the weather.

Her husband Peter Oswald is best known as a dramatist - his plays have been performed at the Globe, the National Theatre and on Broadway - but the pamphlet 'Village' features seven of his poems, three read to us on during the evening. His work reminds me most of Weldon Kees - a compliment in my book. Given most of his drama is written in verse, it is no surprise he has a facility for rhyme and metre, but so subtle you hardly register it on first reading. His style is conversational - natural words in a natural order - but  the tone is often dark - as dark as nature itself. 'Early morning hald asleep' reminded me of Kees' 'For My Daughter'. 'Cat' has an unassuming title but begins 'I'm walking through the rooms of my dead body...' a line as bleak as any Weldon came up with, and also has something of Kafka about it - the old officials on the landing, the almost empty statue room - that defies the merely domestic. 'Moonflight' is a sparser piece, aligning the trajectory of earth's satellite with man's journeys to it so effectively, I've found myself returning to it several times in the night/day/night since I first heard it.

Jospehine Larsen has a compelling presence and the ability to make each of the three short plays she starred in - alone in 'Pram', with Peter, their author, in 'Greenviolet' and 'Miss Bratty', stand alone in the memory of what was a compendium performance of fifteen parts.  The latter provided light relief that shaded and shadowed what came before and after it and was both the lynch pin of the evening and the piece that seemed to owe least to those around it. Peter Oswald the ventriloquist, Josephine Larsen his dummy - the double act combined to speak to us of relationships, their breakdown, and being alone whilst being together in a way that was more Beckett than end-of-pier show but had more laughs than most variety acts.

I hadn't heard Martin Holland play before but will seek him out again. More than an accompanist, he was both the first and last on stage, whether in combination - his call-and-response with Alice on 'Interview with the Wind' could give jazz-poetry a good name - or solo, if that is the word for a musician with the talent, timing and facility to layer guitar and trumpet into compelling duets with himself, as in the opening 'Bossa Grrove Improvised' or the experimental 'Minor Loops'.

The drama studio at the Phoenix Arts Centre is an intimate space of forty seats - sold out in advance - that would benefit from more sympathetic lighting. What the evening gave practitioners - and aficionados - of all the genres featured was an example of how they can be combined to the enrichment of each other. Although featuring two poets, promoted as an evening of poetry, and launching a pamphlet of verse, it was perhaps that of the three art forms that was least dominant on the night, made-up for by subsequent reading on the page. Poetry is a quieter art form and while I'm the first to criticise extended commentary on poems in performance and admire brevity of both contextual and biographical introduction, something was needed to give them the prominence the writing deserved when up against the more immediate dramatic and musical forms. 

That said, 'The Attention Seekers' have devised a format with legs - eight of them - that deserves wider exposure and a larger audience. With little refinement, they have a show that could tour arts centres and, with the right promotion, attract a paying crowd without diluting artistic intent. Considerable effort clearly went into preparing this performance and I hope it is one of many, a memory to repeat and not just cherish. For those organising literature festivals, it would make a fine revue to breakup the procession of talking heads with an hour or so that manages to be both entertaining and accomplished, its heterogeneity a welcome antidote to more homogeneous formats, but its content consistently of the highest quality.

I am also pleased to note that Alice and Peter intend 'Village' to be the first of several pamphlets in the Chiquita Books of Dartington imprint that will range across written art forms. The chapbook format lends itself to experiment, but in this instance it is far from disposable. Let's hope they maintain the quality, while delivering on their promise of diversity.

Cinema: Up in the Air

'Up in the Air'

What if you desire to live in transit, tied to nothing, nowhere and nobody? In this Jason Reitman ('Juno', 'Thank You for Giving Up Smoking') adaptation of Walter Kirn's novel of the same name, George Clooney plays a corporate downsizer who lives his life in airport lounges, hotel rooms and identikit meeting rooms, laying off workers whose bosses are too timid to do the deed themselves. He also has a sideline in selling his philosophy of life - keep your backpack below cabin size, travel light through life - to those same bosses who like to attend motivational sessions to escape the monotonous grind of their managerial responsibilities. Unlike them, he practices what he preaches.

For girls who love Clooney, you need not fear he's had to sacrifice some of his trademark charm to play Ryan Bingham, this lone wolf of the skies. He might be a shark, not a swan, but it's Clooney's cross-gender sex appeal that enables us to empathise with a man who most of us wouldn't ordinarily spend two hours in the company of voluntarily. I can think of no other actor alive who could've carried this film, and it is a film worth carrying, having elements of romantic comedy - more thorns than rose - but tackling the economic downturn in a way that both both provokes and entertains.

The other key roles in the movie are female, and all well played: whether his occasional lover (like him, 'but with a vagina', one with surprising offspring) Alex (Vera Farmiga); his ingenue sidekick Natalie (Anna Kendrick) who threatens his ambition of being the seventh and youngest man to clock up ten million air miles by revolutionising the recession's most successful industry with dismissal by webcam (she gets dumped by txt and changes her life as a consequence, but not before disrupting Bingham's ever changing, never changing routine); or his two sisters Kara (Amy Morton) and Julie (Melanie Lynskey), the latter on the verge of marriage, so long as Bingham steps in and does the elder brotherly thing, one of life's many roles he's not accustomed to fulfilling, turning his gift of the gab against his own philosophy.

But many of the film's funniest and most moving moments come not from the central and professional cast but through scenes involving, and interviews with, those who've recently lost their jobs in real life. These talking heads were plucked from the dole queues to share their experiences, each unique but somehow universal. It is them that elevate standard rom-com fare into a state-of-the nation movie. Filmed mainly in St Louis but set in the airport cities of several states across the union, aerial shots give you a sense of this county that is a continent, while what's going on on the ground is indicative of the times we're still living through and hints at the individual actions that ,when accumulated, were the cause of our current economic malaise.

You can see where this is going - the man who's spent all his life avoiding connections, let alone commitments, begins to have them forced upon him, then discovers that maybe that's what he's wanted  all -along -  but only maybe. He is after all touchingly loyal - he's worked many years for a single corporation, flies with one airline, sticks with a favourite hotel chain, only drives the cars of one hire car firm and has the gold, platinum and graphite cards to prove it. He packs the same way for every trip, has a home more functional and less personal than the rooms-for-hire he spends the majority of his nights in, and believes dressing casually is removing one's tie - everything you hate about business travel, that's why he loves it so.

When he confronts the departure board at the end of the film and watches his life flip over before him, all and yet nothing has changed. If our best moments are spent in the company of those we love and are loved by, we are left with uncertainty - maybe it's too late to put that lesson into action for a man like Bingham, so set in his ways that for him perhaps life really is a solo journey, made without the security  of a co-pilot and ending at the destination we're all flying towards so rapidly.

Poetry: Tim Allen at Uncut Poets, Exeter Phoenix - Thursday January 28th 2010

Tim Allen is guest poet at Exeter's Uncut Poets at the Phoenix Arts Centre this month on Thursday January 28th at 7.30pm in the Black Box - £5 (£3 concessions and readers).

Uncut Poets is presented by Tony Frazer, editor of Shearsman Books, and James Bell, published by tall-lighthouse. In an evening of two halves, sets from the guest are preceded by five open mike slots - to book call James on 07879 888319.

Tim Allen is a poetry activist and provocateur. Founder of the much-missed poetry magazine Terrible Work, Spineless Press and Plymouth's The Language Club he has been a catalyst in the south-west's poetry scene for many years and many local writers owe a great deal to his challenge and support, his friendship and enmity. He is a critic in the truest sense - he has opinions, expresses them and justifies them by example and by argument. He may not have written more reviews than anyone alive, but he has written more than any man I know, and when you read what he has to say, you know his motive has integrity, is not a means to some other end.

He takes sides, and that is because poetry matters to him. I disagree with him as much as I agree with him - more often, probably - but that is why he is worth reading, should be listened to. His analysis of the contemporary poetry scene is informed and thought through. He is acute on the dynamics of poetry publishing, and engages with movements in literature as others might with political ideologies. Indeed, to him, writing is an expression of personal politics; aesthetics has an ethical dimension.

This comes through in his own writing, and he cherishes negative reaction as much as he enjoys positive response. His performances don't compromise or shape themselves to the tastes of his audience and this is exciting - you confront and are confronted by another mind at work, electricity surging through its own circuits, as likely to trip you out as light up a bulb inside. He is also smaller than me, which is reassuring - if he outwits me, I know I can always lamp him one.

To learn more about Tim and his work try the following links:

Shearsman Author Page

'Settings'

Review of 'Settings' in Stride Magazine

Buy from Amazon

Salt Author Page

'Don't Start Me Talking: Interviews With Contemporary Poets' co-edited with Andrew Duncan

Review of 'Don't Start Me Talking' in Stride Magazine

Buy from Amazon

'Swindon Switches On' in Brink

Interview in The Argotist Online

And interviewing Tony Frazer

Plymouth's The Language Club

Guests January 2010: Alice Oswald and Peter Oswald

When we pitched The Blah Blah Blah Show to Phonic FM, they were looking for more spoken word content, we were looking to establish an arts magazine radio show that respected its guests and their work but would fit into what is primarily an albeit eclectic music station.

We have recorded and hope to make available all of our interviews with guests who are selected for having a south-west connection and being genuine practitioners of the art forms we focus on - literature, cinema, visual arts and theatre.

In the mean time, I'll catch-up by making a posting on each of our guests so far, not attempting to summarise their careers - or our interviews - myself but by providing links to other material on the internet we accessed in preparing for our conversation, enabling curious listeners and readers to explore further.

Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald are based in - and committed to - Devon but have an international reputation. Whilst they are widely acknowledged in their own fields - theatre and poetry respectively - they are increasingly collaborating in their work - sometimes with each other - and exploring where these and other forms meet.

Their appearance on our show precedes an evening in the Phoenix Arts Centre, Exeter on 23rd January when they will be reading from their new pamphlet 'Village' - featuring eight poems by Peter and one longer piece for several voices by Alice - performing with their ensemble 'The Attention Seekers' with trumpet played by Martin Holland and previewing three short plays with members of Hearts Tongue Theatre.

Details are now posted on Rachel McCarthy's website and have been sent out to the ExCite contacts list which you can join by emailing your details to stanza at rachelmccarthy dot com


Peter Oswald is due to perform 'Birdsongs' with Hugh Nankivell at Dartington on 14th January.

Alice Oswald is on the shortlist for the T.S.Eliot Award for her book 'Weeds and Wildflowers.' The winner is announced on January 18th.

She hosts regular poetry evenings at the Sharpham Centre.

'Village' by Peter Oswald and Alice Oswald is available from Word Power Books for £3.00  

ALICE OSWALD

Career resume
Faber Author's Page
Books on Amazon
Independent feature
Observer feature
Telegraph review
Poetry Society feature
Shearsman review
Observer review
Tower review


PETER OSWALD

Career resume
Poetry blog
Books on Amazon
Play database
Guardian interview
The Golden Ass
The Storm review
Lucifer Saved
The Ramayana
Heart's Tongue past projects

Cinema: Avatar - 1D in 3D?

Avatar

I don't usually do event cinema. It's not that I'm a misanthrope. I like people, I just don't like to be among them watching a movie. Maybe it's why I prefer obscure foreign language films in back street art houses at odd hours of the day. It's the nose bags of popcorn that do it, the troughs of ice cream - I just can't concentrate with all that scoffing going on in my peripheral vision.

Avatar is a foreign language film. Much of its dialogue is in Na'vi - the tongue of the ten foot blue aliens that are the heroes of a plot that turns the old cowboy flick on its head and gets you rooting for the Indians. It's easy on the ear and is already more developed than Klingon - your friends will be speaking it at dinner parties next week, thrashing around their long blue tails.

It is also so beautifully visually realised, some among the millions who've spent 160 minutes in its 3D world have been depressed ever since, yearning to get back. No wonder many return to reimmerse themselves in its phosphorescent deep forest setting. If you've seen 3D film before, you'll be expecting all the scenes that show off its technology - the chases and battle scenes - but this is the first time I've sat back and pleasured myself on pure visuals. In the quieter moments of the movie you suddenly realise that you feel the close confinement os space travel or a science lab, and that's before we've even entered into a foreign body on an alien world when the adventure really begins.

There are two kinds of Sci Fi fans: the freaks who read books in their own private worlds and the geeks who watch films and attend conventions in costume. As a kid I read plenty of space opera and fantasy novels, but was deprived of video or cinema, never even seeing a Star Wars film, which makes me a bedroom freak, with only a record player for company. There's not enough going on upstairs for you Philip K. Dick lovers. You might see Pandora in your dreams but your brain matterwon't be troubled too much. This is one for the Trekkies and Jedi but it's also girl-friendly enough for the geeks to take their mums to.

All surface, some feeling, what meaning? If you don't expect anything other than a join-the-dots plot then you won't be disappointed. The crippled marine who becomes the na'vi super-being is standard hero material, and after his wheelchair entry he's blessed with very long and flexible legs. There's a star-crossed lovers storyline that will be familiar enough to anyone who's watched James Cameron's Titanic, not that I have - that was released in 1997 and he's been working on this ever since, although two sequels are on the way to capitalise on the investment. This film - its spin-offs, products and sequels - will keep the industry buoyant for some years to come. And there's no point in seeing it on the small screen - its a must-see movie theatre 3D experience.

Although this could have only been made in Hollywood, it has a subtext that is riling the American and Christian right. With the USA still fighting two wars on foreign shores, it's not short of innuendo about neo-colonialism. Although the marines of the movie are mercenaries in corporate employment, their flag is no less the Stars-and-Stripes than that of the East Indies Company was the Union Jack. The human heroes, whether in their own bodies or in Na'vi incarnation, are US citizens too of course, but its those big blue tree hugging hippies that are the good guys - if they're American, they're native and pre-Colombian. And if Avatar the movie has wound up both Fox News and the Vatican, James Cameron must be doing something right. That commie bastard is probably a Canadian.


As for those bad boys in the green berets - robot suits and gunship space choppers - greed is their motive, cultural awareness not their strong suit and spiritual sensitivity entirely absent from their jar-like heads. Mean time, the alien folk are so tuned in to their environment and each other you could be in Totnes. The capitalism vs the jungle plot is reminiscent of The Emerald Forest but while in that eighties Brazilian braves versus bozos in bulldozers version the good guys could only lose, on Pandora they win and send the marines home without the hoard of precious energy-giving metal they'd come for. Damn, I've given the ending away - but then you'd guessed it already hadn't you? Let's hope in part two Uncle Sam returns to nuke the place. Or Pat Robertson curses them voodoo blue zombies with a Richter 7.3 earthquake. That'll shake them Satan suckers out of their sacred tree.