Friday, 31 December 2021
Wynn Wheldon: BOOKS 2021
Monday, 27 September 2021
Wednesday, 7 July 2021
Romeo and Juliet
ROMEO and JULIET
Regents Park Open Air Theatre
6/7/21
Director: Kimberley Sykes
Isabel Adomakoh Young (Juliet), Joel MacCormack (Romeo)
RW, Margy, RM, Emma, NM, WW, Sian W.
First things first. “They call for dates and quinces in the pastry.” Act IV, Scene 4. I don’t remember this at all. I’m sure, given the in-depth Club conversation touching on such matters, prior to curtain, that it would have struck us loud and clear. Much was indeed cut. for reasons of Covid, we think, intervals are rather eschewed at the moment, so we ran straight through, which was, as RW pointed out, rather satisfactory in the way in which momentum was maintained. And it is a play that moves quickly.
The first scene was almost catastrophically bad – i think many of us thought, oh christ, one of THOSE productions – lots of mockney snarling and bootiness. Playing at violence. Some of us may not have recovered, but I (WW) did, especially once Isabel Adomakoh Young arrived. She is without a doubt the star attraction. I can’t remember whether she is as young as she seemed or whether her acting young was so damn good, but she gave the role the enthusiasm, impatience and odd naive seriousness that it requires. My sister Sian thinks maybe IYA is the best Juliet she has ever seen. I’m inclined to agree.
Joel MacCormack’s Romeo grew into the part, and he was much better once the action had turned from light to dark. I especially liked Emma Cuniffe’s Nurse – very un Mrs Tiggwinkle. The surprise was Peter Hamilton Dyer’s Friar, a part that is often a bit yawny. Perhaps the cutting was good, but Dyer certainly was: clear and interesting. First rate, too, was Mercutio, played by Cavan Clarke, a real presence. His death by the seriously overdone Miss Tybalt (Michelle Fox) was thankfully avenged very soon after. This wasn’t a great production, but it was a lively, engaging one, with no longeurs, and it contains one great performance. The weather might have been balmier, though there was a wonderful billowing of the trees at the moment of R & J’s first kiss.
Thursday, 17 June 2021
D H Lawrence in Taormina
Friday, 28 May 2021
Saturday, 22 May 2021
Tuesday, 11 May 2021
Saturday, 8 May 2021
Wednesday, 5 May 2021
ONLINE ABUSE
The perfect is the enemy of the good. I see Raheem Sterling has come in for more online abuse. I know I'm risking social exclusion and condemnation as a enabler of racism, fascism and any other kind of ism you care to hurl, but it seems to me that if you want this stuff to go away, and surely decent people do, the most effective response is to ignore it, to stop rising to the bait, to say 'fuck 'em'. The morons will lose interest. This may not be a perfect solution - it does not eradicate racism - but it is, I think, a good one.
Saturday, 1 May 2021
Wednesday, 28 April 2021
Thursday, 22 April 2021
Tuesday, 20 April 2021
Friday, 16 April 2021
The Shakespeare Club
Can't resist this. An extract in The Guardian last year from Robert McCrum's terrific book 'Shakespearean' in which he introduces 'the Shakespeare Club'. I am a proud member, here identified as 'the archivist' (which I'm not really, only more so than the others).
During 20 years of recovery, I slowly transformed a knowledge of the plays I had read at school into a wider acquaintance with the Shakespeare canon, and joined the “Shakespeare Club”, a dedicated play-going circle. That’s what we call it – sometimes, casually “the Club” – which might suggest oak panelling, library chairs, a dress code and a discreet entryphone somewhere in the West End, an association that might turn out to be either furtive or seedy. Actually, it’s neither; we are natural herbivores. If you spotted us in the theatre bar of the Donmar or the National, you might decide we were civil servants in mufti, or off-duty English teachers from the shires, or possibly journalists, which is approximately half right. Three of the seven who make up the Shakespeare Club – now guzzling peanuts and cheap red wine – have worked for newspapers. And yes – oh dear, yes – we are, until quite recently, an all-male, English fraternity. As middle-class metropolitans, we occupy a variety of roles: novelist, journalist, academic, publisher, actor, scriptwriter, and finally our archivist.
This club was established through the persistence of a former venture capitalist who used to go to Shakespeare plays with his college friends. When it became the tradition to have a pizza afterwards, to hash over what they’d just seen, the “Shakespeare Club” began. Today, we are a quintessentially English mix of stage-struck, self-improving playgoers with Eng Lit degrees. Occasionally, rash intruders who should know better will ask about our “favourite Shakespeare”. For the Club, this is an absurdly intimate inquiry. Any one of these plays, in a great production, can find a special place in our affections. Yes, we love Lear, Much Ado, and The Tempest, but we also cherish an independence of taste that delights in Love’s Labour’s Lost, any of the Henry plays, or Measure for Measure. Indeed, the only Shakespeare we’ve never seen, because it’s so rarely staged, is The Two Noble Kinsmen.
If there’s one unspoken club rule, it’s that when we meet, we only discuss the play in question: no gossip; no politics; no families; and no football. As an association, we demonstrate near-Olympic sang-froid. As I write, the gods are smiling upon us, but in the past decade – not to mince words – two of our number have got divorced, one of us checked into rehab, and all of us have had distressful troubles with teenage kids. But did any of us ever so much as mention, or even allude to, these torments? Did we hell! No, we are here to see the show. It might sound dull, but it’s surprisingly addictive. We argue, we quote, we tease, admonish, reminisce, and protest (too much); on a good night, we might even get swept away by what we see. We are, no doubt, typical of English audiences through the ages, hommes moyens sensuels.
Wednesday, 14 April 2021
Thursday, 4 March 2021
White in the moon the long road lies
A. E. Housman (1859–1936). A Shropshire Lad. 1896. |
XXXVI. White in the moon the long road lies |
|
Monday, 22 February 2021
Wednesday, 17 February 2021
Tuesday, 16 February 2021
PANCAKE DAY - CIVIL COMMOTION from John Taylor's 'Jack A Lent'
Moreover, it is a goodly sight to see how the
cooks in great men's kitchens, do fry in their master's suet, and sweat in her own grease, that if ever a cook be worth the eating it is when Shrove- Tuesday is in town, for he is so stewed and larded, roasted, basted, and almost over-roasted, that a man may eat the rawest bit of him and never take a surfeit. In a word, they are that day extreme choleric, and too hot for any man to meddle with being monarchs of the marrow-bones, marquesses of the mutton, lords high regents of the spit and the kettle, barons of the gridiron, and sole commanders of the frying- pan, and all this hurly-burly, is for no other purpose but to stop the mouth of this land- wheel Shrove- Tuesday. At whose entrance in the morning all the whole kingdom is in quiet, but by that time the clock strikes eleven, which (by the help of a knavish sexton) is commonly before nine, then there is a bell rung, called the pancake bell, the sound whereof makes thousands of people distracted, and forgetful either of manner or humanity : Then there is a thing called wheaten flour, which the sulphery necromatic cooks do mingle with water, eggs, spice, and other tragical magical enchantments, and then they put it by little and little into a frying-pan of boiling suet, where it makes a confused dismal hissing like the Lernean snakes in the reeds of Acheron, Styx or Phlegethon) until at last by the skill of the cook, it is transformed into the form of a flap-jack, which in our translation is called a pancake, which ominous incantation the ignorant people do devour very greedily (having for the most part well dined before :) but they have no sooner swallowed that sweet candied bait, but straight their wits for- sake them, and they run stark mad, assembling in routs and throngs numberless of ungoverned numbers, with uncivil civil commotions.
Tuesday, 26 January 2021
THE DEVIL'S TATTOO by Brett Evans
My review of this pamphlet, from 2017, for Ink, Sweat and Tears, is no longer available online, so I'm re-posting it here.
The Devil’s Tattoo
by Brett Evans
(publisher: Indigo Dreams)
Reviewed by Wynn Wheldon
It is hard to escape the feeling that Brett Evans – or, at
least, the poet Brett Evans, if you will accept the delicate distinction - was
born in the wrong place at the wrong time, or perhaps in the right place at the
right time with the wrong constitution.
He is, properly speaking, a blues singer, part Delta, part Chicago, who
has found himself instead a “fat, pink alkie” in a small town in North Wales at
the beginning of the twenty-first century.
As he says in the same poem (‘Reading Sean O’Brien in the Bath’),
“something is amiss”.
This short
collection is very much of a piece, the themes pulled “over troublesome stones”
through it, like the Gele river itself: myth, Wales, pubs and drink, jazz,
religion, poetry, and desire. And perhaps
the displacement is perhaps not so great, perhaps he’s a Celt from across the
sea, and should have been a Dubliner.
His tipple after all is stout (even in his erotic fantasies he lathers
his lover’s hair “to a Guinness foam”). One
way or another these poems are written from the Celtic twilight.
The
melancholic confessional is a hard thing to pull off without self-pity, but
there’s none of that here. The
collection’s first poem, ‘Marshes’ starts in childhood – “we swashbuckled
summers across the weir” – and powerful fantasy, and ends in two connected
sadnesses which can never be erased: the defeat of Wales and the realisation
that “we’re who we are” – an end to childhood.
Dreams and
fantasy fuel much of Evans’s poetry, the paradox being that they earth him in
the single place he writes from. He
dreams of being in bed with the great blues “moaner” Ma Rainey; he rides “on
the trail of the buffalo” with Ramblin’ Jack Elliot; he is an extra in a
Spaghetti western “with an unforgettable score”. He dreams simply “of a song”.
Do you notice?
Music is a constant – the devil’s tattoo. Most of the drunks are singing
(usually “A lament for, and from, the anonymous”), Ma Rainey is singing Jelly Bean Blues, Coltrane’s sax is here
beautifully kissing the breeze, Armstrong’s doing over ‘Stardust’, even a scarecrow sways like “a
metronome to an orchestra / of gale and sleet”.
Like the
dreams of music, the myths of Wales, and the “ugly, lovely children’s world”,
desire too keeps the poet busy. The
barmaids “come and go” (probably not talking of Michelangelo), and he dreams of
pampering them all. Or, peering from a pub window in the touching ‘Not Raglan
Road’, he watches a woman in suede boots: “There is only her moving through
this world”. The poet imagines “a
handful / of raindrops may just find their resting place / in her hair”. This image, almost clumsily described – “may
just” is perfectly awkward – is delicately erotic. As is also the “fantasized
unclothing” of the sycamore stem in ‘Carving a Lovespoon’. ‘Positions in Bed’ contains
not only “an imagined lover” but also “dream pubs”.
My favourite
poem, and one I think would do well in schools (that sounds faintly praising
but is not at all meant to), stands a little apart from the rest of the
collection. It is not confessional, and
yet, insofar as Evans does come close to self-pity it may be the most
confessional of them all. It is called
‘Scarecrow’. There is explicit analogy
with the crucified Christ – “arms outstretched, forsaken, / he wears his
unkempt crown”, and later “This son of Man // is blind to purpose, rooted in
solitude” – but here there is no redemption.
The suggestion is of a godless world, and God does pop up more
frequently in these poems than one at first notices. How could he not, given the presence of the blues,
of Guinness, of Wales? But he’s here in
passing, in ghostly form. The devil is much more real. There is, in ‘Anticipating Pints of Stout’ a
marvellous description of the drink lined up on a bar: “a lechery / of
pint-sized priests to knock back without repentance”. Drink, not religion, brings salvation.
The collection
ends as it began, in childhood, or rather in the memory of childhood, and
reflections on the present:
I haunt our stomping grounds, my shadow striding
out before me: a giant ghost, coat flapping in the wind.
And the water before the weir forever lapping at the child.
Do we have a
word for nostalgia without the fleck of sentimentality that makes nostalgia
kitsch? The Welsh word hiraeth is
often translated as homesickness, but it may also denote a longing for the
past. Might it do to describe the spirit
of these lines? I don’t know. I am not a Welsh-speaker, but maybe.
The devil’s tattoo drums through
all our lives, and the poet’s desire that “the familiar must become the
unfamiliar” – which I take to be one of the things poetry does - is what defies that beat and makes the real
tolerable. Sean O’Brien and Dylan Thomas
are both presences here, both poets capable of seeing wonder in the
quotidian. It is an ability, a tendency,
that Brett Evans aspires to, and often achieves, in this short, punchy,
thoroughly engaging and coherent pamphlet.
Wednesday, 13 January 2021
Tuesday, 5 January 2021
BOOKS 2021
Adele by Leila Slimani
The Rainbow by D.H. Lawrence
Let Go My Hand by Edward Docx
The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow
Living on the Volcano by Michael Calvin
On Chapel Sands by Laura Cumming
Right Ho, Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse
A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin
Under the Greenwood Tree by Thomas Hardy
Invincible Summer by Alice Adams
Year of the Mouse by Jonathan Tafler
Sabbath's Theater by Philip Roth
A Commonplace by Jonathan Davidson
The Wife by Anton Chekov
Left Foot Forward by Garry Nelson
Kiss Myself Goodbye by Ferdinand Mount
Burning Man: The Ascent of D H Lawrence by Frances Wilson
Memoir of Maurice Magnus by D H Lawrence
Notes on Grief by Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche
Tom Jones by Henry FieldingMonday, 4 January 2021
From'Autumn Journal' by Louis MacNeice
Louis MacNeice takes on a persona in the first part of 'Autumn Journal'.