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The LitFest programme leaflets have now been printed. If you want some to give out, please email here. You could also ask for the pdf of the programme, then send it on to people in your address book.


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Peter Lorre - one of the greats

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Peter Lorre appears in the LitFest’s showing of The Beast With Five Fingers at the Cottage Road Cinema on Monday 21 March at 7.30pm. He stands out, almost inevitably, from the other actors in a strong cast, and not simply because of his reputation: he is genuinely one of the greats. The screenplay, taken from a short story by W F  Harvey, one-time resident of Headingley, is a little daft, but there’s the horror genre for you. It’s still very enjoyable.

His voice . . . face . . . the way he moved . . . laughed  -   he was the most identifiable actor I have ever known. (Vincent Price)

His ‘real’ name was László Löwenstein, and the languages of his youth would have included Hungarian, German, and probably Yiddish, because he was born in 1904 in Rózsahegy (now Ružomberok in Slovakia, then in the Kingdom of Hungary) to a fairly well-off Jewish family. He was educated in Vienna and became a bank clerk to please his father, in spite of his fascination with theatre.

Membership of a theatre group which specialized in improvisation led him to stages in Breslau (now Wrocław), Zurich and Berlin, where he became famous for his interpretation of Danton in Georg Büchner’s Danton’s Death. Bertholt Brecht took a great linking to him, and cast him in his Happy End and Man Equals Man. In 1931 the film director Fritz Lang cast him as a psychopathic child murderer in his first talkie, which had the short title of M. This caused something of a sensation, and Lorre began to be careful about typecasting. However, although he starred in a fair number of German films after M, people remembered it rather too well, and in 1933, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who was deeply interested in the power of film (just like his master Hitler, whose favourite film was Lives of a Bengal Lancer) sanctioned the use of Lorre’s image on a poster advertising the anti-semitic The Eternal Jew. Lorre was supposed to look like a typical Jew. Sinister, that is…

Lorre took the hint and got out. In England, he quickly teamed up with Alfred Hitchcock to become a villain in The Man Who Knew Too Much, then sailed to the United States to star in Mad Love and to become the Japanese sleuth Mr Moto. His international reputation, which was substantial, escalated to stellar heights when he appeared in Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon. After the War, still sensitive (rather late in the day) about typecasting, he appeared in The Beast With Five Fingers and similar films. He finished his career with a series of character parts in the likes of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Ben Okri booked for the LitFest

Ben Okri, one of the most acclaimed African writers within the postcolonial tradition, will be speaking on the afternoon of the final Saturday of the Headingley LitFest (26 March) at the brilliantly refurbished Heart centre in Bennett Road.


Often described as a 'magic realist', Okri's novels and poems are written in English but draw heavily on Yoruba myths, stories and culture.  Praised for his experiments with new literary forms, he is probably best known for The Famished Road, which won him the Booker Prize in 1991. In this, African and European literary traditions meet, in a story narrated by a 'spirit-child' who moves between the worlds of spirits and human beings, observing the chaotic history of his country. There is plenty in it about corruption - economic and political - in modern Nigeria, and about the devastation brought by war.


I was told stories, we were all told stories as kids in Nigeria. We had to tell stories that would keep one another interested, and you weren't allowed to tell stories that everybody else knew. You had to dream up new ones.


The oral storytelling tradition of Africa is a powerful influence, and Okri has added Ancient Greek legends, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dickens to the list. Those who want to do some background reading before 26 March in addition to our guest's work might like to read the classic Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe and Amos Tutuola's The Palm-Wine Drinkard. Okri's poem The Awakening, written to mark the Millennium, appears on this Oxfam Cool Planet website, and you can find a full bibliography and biography on this British Council website.


Tickets are not yet available for this, or any other event, because the programme's final details are still being sewn up, but if you want to express on interest in the Ben Okri event, email your details.  


Other guests include Rommi Smith, who works to fuse spoken word and music, the writer, singer and former television producer Isabel Losada, who will give a presentation on how to get published, Nicola Beauman, the founder of Persephone Books, which specialises in rediscovered inter-war novels by neglected women writers and a flock of female poets called Wordbirds.

Three people with the surname Brown will take part – Dr Richard Brown, who will talk about novelist and critic Storm Jameson, Ray Brown, who will talk about his plays for radio and Wes Brown, who has had his first novel published in his early twenties. 

Veteran writer for teenagers Robert Swindells (Stone Cold, Brother in the Land) will speak to Year 9 students at Cardinal Heenan Catholic High School, other high schools will hold poetry slams and the Flux Gallery will show a film about Irish writers and also host the launch of poet Genny Rahtz’s collection Sky Burial.

There will also be 'house events', following last year's successes, on Sunday 20 March. Apart from the Heart Centre, things will take place at the New Headingley Club, the Lento Café on North Lane, the LS6 (Clock) café on Headingley Lane, the Flux Gallery on Midland Road, Headingley Library and local high schools.


*Now read about what happened:

http://headingleylitfest.blogspot.com/2011/03/ben-okri-in-headingley.html

2011 Programme

The details of the 2011 programme will be with you soon - just a few loose ends to tie up at the moment. Looks exciting!

It's the Monster not the Doctor

Just down the road from Headingley is Kirkstall, and in March, on an unspecified date, Frankenstein's Wedding Live in Leeds will take place in the abbey ruins, thanks to the BBC. Wonderful idea!

Let us hope that the publicity is clear about the difference between Doctor Frankenstein and the creature he created, the one who messed up his wedding.

Mary Shelley had Doctor Luigi Galvani in mind when she wrote the original. He spent his time sending electricity into frogs' legs, but does not look like a character in a 1930s film. See below. Neither Mary or Luigi ever lived in Headingley, but they might have been tempted to move here if they had received the appropriate relocation package.

The LitFest programme will be finalised soon, and it might include the film The Beast with Five Fingers, which would be shown at the Cottage Road Cinema on an evening which did not coincide with the extravaganza down at the abbey. This is all about playing on keyboards, or not, and has no connection with the Leeds International Piano Competition.

The theme of the next LitFest is A Sense of Self. First event (at the moment) is a short story evening (personal, unpublished, between ten and fifteen minutes) at Café Lento on North Lane on Tuesday 15 March.  Final events will be on Saturday 26 March.

Galvani, the inspiration for Frankenstein.

Chinua Achebe at Leeds University

Richard Wilcocks writes:
It was not part of our LitFest, but a few of the people - mainly students of course - packed into the Rupert Beckett Lecture Theatre yesterday evening could be counted as known LitFest supporters, and the university could be described as being on the edge of Headingley...

It was unforgettable.  There was the great man himself, Professor Chinua Achebe, "the father of modern African writing", reading some of his poems to a rapt and highly reverent audience in a quiet, slightly quavering voice. Many had brought with them copies of his books. Generations all over the world have studied Things Fall Apart. He was introduced by Professor Martin Banham, who remembered his last visit to Leeds 46 years ago as part of a celebration of Commonwealth literature and who stressed how lucky we all were because Leeds was one of only two places where Chinua Achebe would read as part of his visit to Britain.

Amongst the poems was Vultures, probably the best-known, not least because it is in the AQA Anthology for GCSE English Literature in the Poetry from Other Cultures section - see this BBC website and listen to a reading accompanied by a slideshow. It was deeply moving to hear this disturbing poem from the poet's own mouth, at last.

Nelson Mandela's name was mentioned afterwards by a colleague in the audience who had first read Things Fall Apart in Uganda, and there is a definite link. Mandela read Achebe's work while incarcerated on Robben Island, and commented later that he was a man "in whose company the prison walls fell down".

LitFest poetry

Local and more than local poet James Nash has contributed to the last three LitFests most significantly, and is going to do so again, we hope and trust. He has an excellent line in sonnets. Take a look at this one, which is reminiscent of Auden and Shakespeare at the same time. Could he have just read the accounts of how the Sarkozy government is getting at the Roma in France?

And on poetry - one of the LitFest's poem-notices (below) can be seen on a stake stuck in the soil of the flower garden opposite Sainsbury's in the Arndale Centre, visible to everyone who has just used the zebra crossing. People read it, too. I saw someone doing that. He smiled. 

this is the garden: colours come and go,

this is the garden:colours come and go,
frail azures fluttering from night's outer wing
strong silent greens silently lingering,
absolute lights like baths of golden snow.
This is the garden: pursed lips do blow
upon cool flutes within wide glooms, and sing
(of harps celestial to the quivering string)
invisible faces hauntingly and slow.
This is the garden.   Time shall surely reap
and on Death's blade lie many a flower curled,
in other lands where other songs be sung;
yet stand They here enraptured, as among
the slow deep trees perpetual of sleep
some silver-fingered fountain steals the world.

e.e. cummings
 

Fresh and new

Some of the new work urged into being by, or 'discovered' during, this year's Headingley LitFest is now online at Headingley LitFest Originals.

Get in touch (heveliusx1@yahoo.co.uk) if you want to add to it.

Good to see you

Good to see Cadaverine on Woodhouse Moor today, which is Unity Day. A large area was covered with marquees and stalls, music boomed through canvas, several thousand people milled around, many with children, and dogs were much in evidence, possibly because there was a dog show, at which most of the beasts seemed to win red first prize rosettes. Throwaway barbecues were not in evidence this year.

Arts Council funded Cadaverine, which is for under twenty-fives in theory, should be making some kind of showing next March in the fourth Headingley LitFest. Its efficiently organised 'Talk Tent' today was popular and strangely earnest and sober...

Check this Guardian article for a feature on Cadaverine which includes an interview with its founder, Wes Brown.

Below, Becky Cherriman reading her poetry:

Merchant in the cloister

Richard Wilcocks writes:

There was a tiny touch of Opera in the Park about this performance. It was July, it was outdoors, it was nearly the weekend and the couple in front of us were eating lobster washed down with Prosecco. The audience, on camping seats, was much smaller than the gigantic music-loving throng at Temple Newsam, of course, but pretty substantial for the square of lawn in the ruined cloister. Which brings me to resonance and the quality of the sound…

I think challenging is the word. I’ll stick the knife in here – a vicious thing to do with Theatre of the Dales, an undoubtedly superb bunch of performers - well-known to all at the LitFest - which deserves all the bucket loads of positive comments it normally receives – aaagh those planes! Every few minutes, they came over, on course for the airport, timing their interventions for speeches we were straining to hear anyway.

After the interval, most of the planes had arrived, but the sabotage continued: hysterical jackdaws in the tower screeched, and just as Antonio was baring his chest for Shylock to take the pound of flesh, a motorbike with some kind of sawn-off exhaust system could be heard cruising up the Kirkstall Road and back again.

You could see that it was difficult enough to project in the old cloister anyway – it might seem to be a friendly space but it isn’t a wooden O, many nuances were lost, and the actors were constantly trying hard to send the words across even without the threats from the sky. Wouldn’t it have been better to do it in the round, or simply closer to one of the walls? Or on higher staging?

Anyway, I genuinely enjoyed it as a package, along with most others: it generated plenty of momentum and was strangely satisfying because it was what people call traditional, with good-looking Renaissance gear made by students at Yorkshire Coast College. Because many in the audience, I am guessing, know this play, it was all right: we could always fall back on lip-reading. Shylock wore a yellow hat, which was authentic, and was a proper villain from four centuries ago, played most impressively by David Robertson, the heart and soul of Theatre of the Dales and a reminder that great actor-managers are still thriving.

It was delivered as a historical piece, so that we could see across the centuries and place it firmly in its context, when Renaissance Christians, following on from their Medieval counterparts, perceived the Jews, the murderers of Our Lord, as revengeful money grubbers. Violent revenge was all the rage on the stage in the late sixteenth century, and a Jewish villain must have seemed like a sure-fire device, even though Shakespeare is unlikely to have met any Jews in his life. Irish villains on the stage hadn’t really caught on in his day, in spite of nasty recurring wars in Ireland, their equivalent of our Afghanistan. I bet he met a few Irishmen.

Antonio (Stephen Anderson) should have been rather more unpleasant, although he was definitely grumpy – and melancholy of course, but it’s a hard one to crack. Is his habit of racist spitting simply conventional behaviour or a product of depression caused by the loss of his ships and merchandise? Freud might help here. Bassanio (Will Tristram) was a suitably shallow gallant with a seemingly effortless aristocratic presence. Portia (Jennifer Jordan) and Nerissa (Beth Kilburn) were most entertaining – the first like a fairly modern and hard-faced businesswoman and the second as her efficient PA in period dress.

The fairy tale section with the caskets was well split up (intelligent direction from the internationally-inclined Serge Alvarez), with an amusing Moroccan prince (Stuart Fortey) who lingered after his rejection to give Nerissa the eye. The period atmosphere was enhanced by the use of Comedia-style masks at one point. All that stuff happened in the past, didn’t it? Never again, eh? In 1938 in Berlin, the thespians of the Hitler Youth put the play on as straight anti-semitic, while in the same year their Young Communist counterparts in Moscow put it on as straight anti-capitalist. Today, if producers look for a message, it is an anti-racist one, centred on the “Hath not a Jew eyes…” speech. This was the implied message of this production, I think.

Serge Alvarez, who has been directing in France and England for the last couple of decades has another Shakespeare on his horizon - an adaptation of The Tempest to be performed in English, French and Spanish in Valparaíso, Chile.

 The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare performed by Theatre of the Dales at Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds on 23 July 2010

Into the woods again

Dagmar Wood was just perfect for Midsummer Night's Dream last year. Puck and various other characters could insert themselves into the interstices of a large tree, the lovers could run through real, untrimmed bushes and Titania could choose her mossy bank from the many on offer. The audience made do with plastic garden furniture. It's more of a clearing surrounded by trees and then by century-old houses than a real urban wood, and it can be found, if you are sharp-eyed, just off Grosvenor Road in Headingley.

It has become the stamping and vamping ground of the Headingley-based Theatre of the Dales (scroll down to read more about this lovely crew), which this year will be performing The Merchant of Venice. Performances will take place on the 14th, 15th, and 16th July, and at Kirkstall Abbey on the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd July.

Now read this Guardian piece.

Feeling competitive?

Richard Wilcocks writes:

One day, Headingley LitFest will run a poetry or short story competition, mark my words. Until then the talented readers of this blog, both the bridled and the unbridled, will have to submit their work to others. How about the Brontë Society? We've got the Brontës in our memories and in our sights (Professor Bob Barnard, author of A Brontë Encyclopaedia and a biography of Emily Brontë spoke to us during the first LitFest) so why not find out about the Society's recently-launched essay, short story and poetry competition?

Naturally, the work must have some kind of Brontë connection. You can get hold of the rules and an entry form by clicking here.

It's not all winebibbing

Those of us who attended Martin Wainwright's talk at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama in March during the LitFest - and others - might be interested in his brief but sensitive background piece on the Cumbria shootings which was published in the Guardian. This puts the horrific story of random killings into some kind of context: Whitehaven and other places on the edge of the Lake District have had more than their fair share of tragedies in the fairly recent past, for example a pit disaster in 1947 which killed 104 miners. Martin is drawing on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the True North, without doubt. The article can be found by clicking HERE.

Another reminder that festivals of literature are not all about an equivalent of winebibbing, examining novels as if they were rare vintages, or clapping the local scribblers, though we do plenty of all that. Real life and real death come into the narrative. I am now thinking of Wallander's creator Henning Mankell, a master of crime fiction who is able to concentrate all human frailty and most of the world's evils into the town of Ystad, and who has now been taken into Israeli custody (as far as we know at the time of writing) for the crime of being on a Swedish boat (the Sofia) which was part of the flotilla attempting to bring humanitarian aid to the people of the Gaza strip. He was intending to broadcast directly by satellite connections to the Hay Festival, but apparently the signal was blocked. I bet he's there next year. Hay that is.

Finally...

Herbert Read is well-known to teachers, at least to art teachers, or should be. His Art and Society, first published before the War and on all good educational reading lists ever since (I hope and trust) is strong on the need for art in education, and on the virtues of simplicity, which conveys a feeling of truthfulness.

Moon’s Farm is simple, or appears to be at first, like a freshly-raked Zen garden. It was written for the Third Programme in 1955, and is described as A Dialogue for Three Voices, which on 27 March at the Yorkshire College of Music and Drama were those of Maggie Mash, David Robertson and Murray Edscer, who moved about with scripts in hand, looking… chilled, in the old sense, with hoods up, wearing sensible clothing, the sort that would keep the Yorkshire breezes out, the sort that reminds us that Read came from a line of Yeoman farmers. Theatre of the Dales (in association with Trio Literati) made sure that the atmosphere was coolly meditative, hypnotically beautiful.

David Robertson said he was delighted to work with T Lit again, because he has helped on the production side of many of their shows. He’s a pretty versatile performer, with plenty more than Voice 2 in Moon’s Farm on his programme list. TV credits include Emmerdale, Heartbeat, Cold Feet, Coronation Street and Waterloo Road, and in 2008 as King Duncan in Tim Albery’s production of Verdi’s Macbeth with Opera North.

Earlier in the evening, we heard him with Maggie Mash in 84 Charing Cross Road, the twenty year correspondence between Helene Hanff and Frank Doel. He had deftly pruned it and he sensitively read it. Maggie Mash once again reminded us that she does accents superbly, on this occasion an accent from the northern part of the United States. Difficult! They so often get us wrong (think Dick Van Dyke) and vice versa, but she sounded like the genuine article, and I should know, with a daughter-in-law from transatlantic parts. Maggie, appropriately, sounded a little prissy, and the Fifties attitudes were well conveyed by both actors.

The selection of recently discovered letters which preceded the two main courses of the evening was an excellent starter, well prepared by the chef, again David Robertson.

After the show, Herbert Read’s son Ben, a denizen of Headingley and Senior Lecturer in Art History at the University,  addressed the audience, replying to a few of my questions and providing the last voice of this year's LitFest. Issues were clarified, but mysteries remained: how, for example, could a man describing himself as an anarchist receive a knighthood from Sir Winston Churchill? The coffee beans stopped arriving, said Ben, when this happened. They had previously been regularly dispatched to Yorkshire from Soho, sent by a group of Sicilians. They were anarchists, and upset.

Below, Ben Read:

David Peace - the interview

Richard Wilcocks writes: 

During the whole of my interview with our main guest, the large audience in the New Headingley Club on Saturday afternoon was overwhelmingly sympathetic and pleasantly inquisitive. It really impressed the amiable David Peace, the LitFest's headliner, and I know that because he said so. At the end of the questioning sections, he made the point that his audience at the last Ilkley Literature Festival last autumn had been relatively dull.

This one was not, and it was also very different in its make-up from the audience in the library on Friday for Frances McNeil. We have had a good 'spread' in all our audiences this year in terms of age and gender.

The double focus was Occupied City, the second in the (as yet incomplete) Tokyo Trilogy, and GB84, on the Miner's Strike, the twenty-fifth anniversary of the finale of which is about now. After a brief introduction, the author read from the first part of Occupied City before engaging in a public conversation sat at a table with me. He read the final words of GB84, from the chapter entitled Terminal, or the Triumph of the Will. The questions from the floor came thick and fast.

It would be daft to attempt to cover all of the questions and answers on the blog, but here is a very brief taste of what was said:

On music and song titles: he talked about his time in a band when he was an Ossett teenager, and its influence on his thought processes, perhaps paraphrasing Noel Coward's famous quote that it is extraordinary how potent cheap music is.

On the often-recurring Wasteland theme: yes, he had studied T S Eliot's poem in the sixth form as part of the English Literature syllabus, and it is one background influence.

Many stretches of Peace's novels sound poetic, especially when read out loud. Is there a poetry volume in the pipeline? Sometime perhaps... 

On main literary influences: West Riding realists like Stan Barstow (also from Ossett) and David This Sporting Life Storey and more recently the American master of the staccato sentence, crime writer James Ellroy, but also Roald Dahl. He remembers being turned on to writing through the stimulus provided by Dahl's Fantastic Mr Fox, which must have brought a flush to the cheeks of any primary teachers present. "I enjoy reading a great variety of prose and poetry." he said. "Even Ezra Pound."

On the often-recurring theme of police pouncing on innocent people: he spoke about the example in Occupied City of Sadamichi Hirasawa, a watercolour artist who had died in prison forty years after being convicted of the mass murder by cyanide poisoning of almost the entire staff of the Teikoku Bank in Tokyo (The Teigin Incident). A campaign to clear his name is still going on. The real poisoner could well have had something to do with the infamous chemical and biological warfare research unit which the Japanese operated in occupied China during World War Two - Unit 731.

On researching, writing and teaching: researching for GB84 took place in Japan, where it is easy to get hold of archived copies of The Times and The Telegraph, but not other relevant newspapers, and teaching adults English (TEFL) is not like teaching in, say, a local comprehensive.

On the title of the last chapter of GB84: yes, of course, Terminal does echo the famous Germinal by Emile Zola, also about a long-lasting pit strike, and carried everywhere by The President in GB84. Germinal, however, is a name with many resonances, sending out messages of rebirth and the spring. At the end of GB84, there is no rebirth, just defeat by a triumphalist authoritarian state.

On the theme of child murders in 1974... how deeply has becoming a family man with children affected your writing? Substantially, was the answer. "I did not have children when I wrote it... I regret the swan's wings now."

There were people present who remembered the ferocious Battle of Orgreave, and who had been involved with food-runs for the families of strikers. One woman's statement of her memories was particularly moving. Others had had something to do with the Red Riding television series, and no, David Peace is not just about to write a screenplay...

I think he was charmed by the Headingley crowd. He liked the idea of a constant supply of tea and home-made cakes, the New Headingley Club and the general atmosphere.

Richard Wilcocks with David Peace