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

Have a go!

Mary Francis writes:
On Saturday, Chris Mould, author and illustrator, entertained both children and adults with his lively talk, his slideshow of illustrations and characters  and then his drawing, in front of us, while he talked and while the audience put questions to him.

His career began with illustrating other people’s picture books, before he began to produce  - writing and illustrating - his own works, including the wonderful Something Wickedly Weird series. He has also worked on pop-up books and we learned how the illustrator works first and then the paper engineer comes on board and it becomes a collaboration. This was fascinating - and we saw a version of a pop-up book currently in production - one that was originally going to be much longer in size, before the recession struck!

The finale had him drawing as we watched - amazing was the speed with which the piratical character appeared before our eyes! In answer to the many questions on the subject, Chris emphasized that you can draw with all sorts of unlikely materials - he uses Bic biros, Tipp-ex pens and cans of spray paint amongst other things - and the importance of ‘having a go’ and not being ‘precious’ about drawing.