Meanwhile, at the West Yorkshire Playhouse

Sally Bavage and Mary Francis write:

 Saturday afternoon saw a huge audience hear Benjamin Zephaniah (author of the book Refugee Boy) and Lemn Sissay (adaptor of the work for the stage) in conversation - and what a joyful occasion it was! A fascinating session in which both writers were thoughtful, informative and funny.

Eight years after Zephaniah first received requests for a stage adaptation of his book, he had agreed and, because he knew Sissay, had then left it all to him. On Saturday last he had not at that time even seen the play, though was to do so later.

We learned a great deal more about the two men as they talked and responded to a host of questions, including some things quite surprising - to me, at least. One such snippet was that when poet Benjamin Zephaniah was about to attempt his first novel he asked for advice on how to begin from a friend of his, the very successful writer of historical novels, Philippa Gregory - and her advice was spot-on!

.. and so to the play itself.

Powerful.  Thought-provoking.  An emotional journey.  All well-tried phrases but nevertheless very apt descriptions of a must-see new performance in the Courtyard theatre.  Above the display of art in the Courtyard foyer is the phrase: “A story about arriving, belonging and finding home.”  This adaptation explores this theme through the eyes of Alem, the Refugee Boy, whose arrival and wait for family to claim him takes us all on a journey.

The sense of displacement starts with the ingenious set of many piled suitcases and there are many narrative metaphors for the changes in Alem, his new friends and his families whose lives subtly intertwine. Politics determines his journey from Africa to England and his moves round the south.  What is the meaning of ‘home’ when yours is destroyed, moved, changed? Your cultural references change?  Your food and language adapt?  You will ponder as you leave the theatre to go home – wherever that is.

The play runs until 30 March.

Tell It Your Way, with the Yarnsmith of Norwich

Sheila Chapman writes:

4pm, Saturday 16 March, New Headingley Club

We were called from our lovely tea and cakes (thanks to Leeds Voice Day) by the beating of a drum to meet our mediaeval tale teller, Dave Tonge.

We sat in a semi-circle around Dave and the children sat on the sheepskin rugs on the floor. Dave started by asking us to solve a riddle. It was a long riddle (as befits a story teller) involving a bird asleep on the branch of a tree, our desperate need for the wood from the branch and , here’s the catch, the fact that the branch needed to be taken without disturbing the bird, for if the bird was disturbed  something nasty would happen. All our suggested solutions to the riddle were useless and we grew increasingly desperate. Someone even suggested shooting the bird but we passed on very quickly from that being all very sound Headingley anti-blood sport types.  In the end a wise-woman in the front row suggested we might wait until the bird woke up and flew away – of course that was the answer, doh!!!

And so the afternoon went on. Robin Hood won an archery competition (we gasped as he and his opponents demonstrated their skill and we applauded the final winning shots), a young man searched for and found his luck (it was NOT a happy ending), a man regretted finding a voice for his beautiful wife who had been previously dumb and, finally, it was proven that women are definitely brainier than men – wild cheers from the audience!

Throughout the event the children wriggled and squirmed on the rugs, they shot their hands in the air to answer questions, made off-the-wall suggestions for plot improvement and were so captivated by Dave’s performance that when he suggested, at one stage, that we might all draw closer they practically climbed in his pockets.

It was a terrific afternoon and Dave truly earned his title – Master Storyteller.

Sally Bavage writes:

Witty raconteur?  Life and soul of the party?  Dinner party leading light?  Thought not!  If you haven’t got one of those endless self-help books, then you should have come to this entertaining workshop giving hints and tips for those wishing to be any/all of the above, or intending teachers, or conference speakers …

One thing stood out amongst all the others at this afternoon event in the New Headingley Club – the sound of laughter.  Not polite, either – appreciative and joyful.  From first to last, Dave Tonge managed to coax a group of strangers to listen to him raptly, then interact with and perform to each other.

Tips on breathing, changes in voice, the use of gestures (appropriate for the age of the audience), the stance you use, using your eyes to capture and hold inclusive attention -  were all rehearsed.  The group tried telling a short story without using their hands or body movements – almost impossible.  Visualise the story you want to tell, chunk it down into comic-strip bite sizes – for if you The Narrator can ‘see’ the story then you can ensure your audience gets the picture too. And stories are pretty universal; there is not much alteration of the plotlines involved, more the adaptation of the tips above to carry the story to a mixed range of ages.

Record your story to hear it as a listener might, then refine it for pace, pitch and tone.  Write down keywords if it helps you to string it together coherently, using pauses and repeats to get the “Ooh”, the “Boo” and the “Hurrah” that you want. Above all, be yourself and share rather than perform.

Our Yarnsmith did indeed share and left a happy workshop wanting more. They got more too, as Dave went on to put his mouth where his tips were and, after tea and cake, led another session entitled Tavern Yard Tales. But that’s another story….

Our thanks to Leeds Voice Day who sponsored this event.

Hilary Spurling - Burying the Bones

Linzhu Deng (Felicity) writes:

Hilary Spurling

Before the lecture, I didn’t know Pearl Buck's work very well. I knew her name but I’ve never read her book, to be honest, because what I’ve read during my school years are those famous books written by Chinese writers like Mao Dun and Ba Jin. Today, I’ve heard a lecture about her life and books and I’ve got really interested in reading them, but one thing that I find very interesting is that she was the public enemy in China at that time and at the same time, not very welcome in the US because she stood up for China. The words “public enemy” caught my mind, and after the lecture I did a little bit of research about her and found that some of our well-known Chinese writers at her time accused her of being unrealistic in writing about Chinese society and of her limitation of vision which was from the perspective of a missionary’s daughter. Controversial as it is, it’s impossible for me to judge anything unless I read her books on my own. However, this lecture has indeed given me some views about China from a brand new perspective.

Jing Zhang (Maggie) writes:
After the talk, one word emerged in my mind: “bridge”. Pearl Buck built a “bridge” between the western world and China. But now my perspective has been directed to another way that it was indeed a difficult task to build this bridge, because she spoke Chinese with yellow hair and blue eyes in China, and she found herself failing to fit into American society when she had to go back. Nobody but Pearl herself knew how much misunderstanding, stress and other hardship she had suffered. Fortunately, she was accepted by both sides: she became a Nobel Prize winner as well as a great friend of the Chinese people

Li Hu (Lily) writes:
The speech given by Hilary Spurling is quite fascinating and inspirational, which is not only about Pearl Buck and her lifetime, but also a sketch of China's 20th history. At first, she talked about
her interest in China, which originated from a book read by her mother, The Chinese Children Next Door. Hilary thought Pearl Buck's books, especially The Good Earth, open a door for westerners to learn about China, which was not possible back in several decades. Nowadays, even most Chinese people have no idea what looked like in China in 1920s, because most people that time are illiterates so that they could not put down their daily life and their feelings. But Pearl Buck did the job, and to some extent, she offers a differing perspective as an American.

Besides, there are two things which drew my attention. One is the novel (The Good Earth) itself, which is somehow not qualified for some critics, as the language itself is quite magazinelike. But
what makes it extraordinary is its unique setting, which build a connection between the west and the orient. It also help people think the misunderstanding between peoples and possibly try to find a way to warm up relations. The other thing is that apart from the fact that the Pulizer Prize and Nobel Prize for Literature Pear Buck had won, the thing makes her so extraordinary lies in the fact that she did make huge contribution to understanding between the two worlds and few people have managed to do it. The realistic condition Chinese farmers in 1920s had endured arouses empathy among different groups, especially those who have similar life experience.

Sally Bavage writes: 
A chilly evening but a very warm welcome for a slightly jet-lagged Hilary Spurling, just back from Texas, as she braved the stand-up journey from London (no seats, no manners) and the flakes of snow to come to Headingley LitFest and give a rapt audience an insight into an extraordinary woman.

Her book, entitled Burying the Bones, outlines the life of Pearl Buck over the earlier part of her life growing up in China (and speaking Chinese, the ordinary language of farming folk, before she spoke English).  The title refers to the Chinese habit of burying the traumas of their life - 'inscrutable' is often used - as well as young Pearl's exploits as she played outside her missionary parents' home in the surrounding fields and interred, with dignity, the bones (and other gruesome body parts) left after feral dogs had devoured the mostly-female babies left to die or rot outside the village.  Her childhood and early years of marriage to John Lossing Buck (another extraordinary person committed to China and its people) were spent in a range of places, all providing endless degrees of hardship along with fascination for the society  and its culture.

Pearl S Buck

However, Hilary first outlined what had brought her to writing this biographical tour-de-force, winner of the James Tait Black prize, many five-star reviews and serialisation recently on Radio 4's 'book of the week'.  As a pre-school child she had adored a simple book The Chinese Children Next Door, where Pearl had used the many stories she had heard told to her missionary mother when a small child herself to craft a thinly-disguised fiction.  This picture book showed - to a child brought up in the wartime grey dullness of Stockport - an astonishing life full of colour, games, and exoticism.  Hilary's lifelong fascination for China began at three years old and has lasted for seven decades.

Hilary also gave the audience a brief contextual account, gleaned from her many research travels in the China of today, of the world that Pearl had inhabited and just how it has changed.  Pearl was always a passionate advocate of China, knowing the rural lifestyle from within, and foresaw it becoming a 'superpower' as early as 1925.  A pity, then, that she was regarded with some suspicion in the America to which she had to return in 1934 and which ignored her observations.   She was to become a Public Enemy in China, after the Cultural Revolution, where it was considered her frankness in writing about sexual mores and grinding, brutal poverty was unacceptable.  She was also outside the norm in an America that first rewarded her with a Pulitzer prize for her most famous novel The Good Earth, awarded her the Nobel prize for Literature and then put her under FBI surveillance for her advocacy of China.  Good, then, that in modern China there are now 'shrines' marking the places where she once lived.  There is still some ambivalence towards her in official circles but it is clear that her record of life during the early part of the 20th century is, quite simply, a unique record that could only have been written by the sharply-perceptive bilingual author who lived in two worlds.

In the end, Hilary felt, Pearl had cared more about her campaigning - for many causes unpopular at the time, including women, blacks, minorities, children - than fine writing.  Although she could have been a first-class writer she used her writing to explore the real lives of ordinary people - and became rich in fandom and finances in the process.  “I am an American by birth and by ancestry … but my earliest knowledge of story, of how to tell and write stories, came to me in China.” 

Pearl's writing style, immediate and vivid, was exactly mirrored by Hilary's prose in her biography and in her presentation; pacy, colourful, full of anecdote and brio, expertly built on the record of evidence that Pearl's many books and articles left us. The audience were treated to a real insight (I was going to say 'pearls of wisdom' but thought better of it) into the commitment a writer needs to illuminate the lives of others.  Pearl and Hilary both. 

Ray Brown - Maria's House

Richard Wilcocks writes:

In  a warm front room, we ate wedges of a chocolate cake which would have made Nigella green with envy, cursed the weather outside and listened to Ray Brown. It was my idea of a house event: friendly, intimate, stimulating and… sweetly nourishing.

Ray Brown

Ray began by talking about work in progress, about how writing plays is totally different from writing prose and about how playwrights often steal from each other. David Nobbs had, in fact, once slunk up to him to apologise for stealing a single word - 'seemly'. He told us about the creative writing class he had once run and about the rules he set: every member had to bring what they had written to every session and read it out, at risk of exclusion from the session. “It's always the ones who don't write anything who criticise the most.”

Then came the flash fiction, flash because it didn't last long and flashy because it was well honed. The first was set in the seventies, at a time when the leaders of the RAF (Rote Armee Fraction) in West Germany - Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof - had yet to commit suicide, and was about a mysterious someone traveling out of Germany to Schipol airport in the Netherlands who may or may not be a terrorist or a drug dealer. The second was set in Headingley, “which has always been a mixed area full of interesting people - the Hampstead of Leeds as it were…” Entitled The Gift, it was written, like the first, at a time when Ray lived in Headingley. “I used to write about dying and making love,” he said, “and I was fascinated by the heartbeat in this story. It has a basis in a relationship I had.” The repetition of words and phrases helps provide the heartbeat.

Maria's House came next. It is not flash fiction, but a longer piece which came out of a time when Ray was working as a writer-in-residence at Dove House in Chamberlain Road, Hull and another  hospice just outside Lincoln. He turned the story into a play for radio, which has never been produced. He read beautifully, using a credible Lincs accent where necessary, and explained to us that the character Maria was his opportunity for an imaginative link with a place which is like another home for him - Mala Brda (it means 'little hill') which is in Slovenia, near the famous Postojna caves, and not too far from the Italian city of Trieste. 

He gave Maria, an old woman who lives in a hospice, a really convincing Italian accent in his reading - she calls him "Ha-Ray". She had, long ago, been part of the Italian community in Istria, which had once been overwhelmed by Mussolini's fascist forces and which had now been reclaimed by Slovenia and Croatia. Ray is a frequent visitor to those parts, so when, in his fiction, he visits Maria's house, having been given the key by Maria, he is visiting a real house from his experience. It is “overshadowed by a giant chestnut tree” and he rides a Tomos moped (the headquarters of the company which makes them is in Koper, Slovenia) on the roads near it. “Sretan Put!” he is told: “Pleasant journey!” in Croatian. Yes, Ray knows those parts, and something of the tortured history: one character makes a reference to when “Stalin was threatening to shake his little finger at Tito”. 

“I wanted to hint at the enormous richness of experience in that country,” he told one questioner when he had finished.

Theatre of the Dales - Literary Lovers

Jane Oakshott, Dave Robertson, Maggie Mash 

Mary Francis writes:
This was a performance by members of Theatre of the Dales in association with Trio Literati - and, as always, they were a joy to watch! Literary Lovers is the very apt title for the adaptation of letters between George Bernard Shaw and two very famous actresses of the day - Ellen Terry and Mrs. Patrick Campbell (who seems to have been known to her friends as Mrs. Pat).

Dave Robertson was a wonderful Shaw, with his delightful leading ladies being Maggi Mash as Ellen Terry and Jane Oakshott as Mrs. Pat - both inhabiting their roles beautifully.

From today’s perspective, it is quite remarkable that Shaw - a prodigious worker in so many literary fields, - should have written over 250,000 letters apparently and conducted such amazing correspondences with a range of different people. Over 3000 letters survive from his relationship with Ellen Terry, whom he vowed never to meet in person, and in them he is sometimes loving, sometimes chiding, sometimes full of advice, sometimes exasperated. With Mrs. Pat he seems to have begun, in his role as theatre critic, by praising highly or criticizing strongly her various stage performances, but later became quite infatuated with her. With both women, though sometimes they appear to have been grateful for his advice and suggestions, one senses his exasperation as they ignore his business ideas in particular - and indeed his feelings about the men in their lives!

But it is not only Shaw’s character that comes across so strongly from these letters and their adaptation, for the two actresses write with equal affection, passion and, very often, equal conviction, - and they generally know their own minds very well indeed! They are very real women and it is so good to hear their voices.

Many thanks to the three performers for an entrancing show! 

George Szirtes and Kim Moore in HEART Café

Doug Sandle writes:

Kim Moore and George Szirtes

The yellow daffodils on the HEART café tables provided a freshness and uplifting ambiance to contrast to the damp and cold of a winter outstaying its yearly visit, a fitting setting for an evening that lifted the spirits and warmed the soul with readings from George Szirtes, ably supported by Kim Moore.  Bringing together one of our foremost poets with a prodigious body of a lifetime’s work and literary achievements with a young poet, successfully emerged rather than emerging but one nevertheless at an earlier stage of her poetic journey, worked very well for a LitFest whose aspiration is both to bring to Headingley established writers and also to encourage and nurture younger talent.

I was delighted to introduce George, having been one of his lecturers and tutors at the Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Metropolitan University) when from 1969 to 1972 he was a fine art student. Both his life at Leeds and continuing interest in visual art featured among several of the poems he presented. A connection with his former student days was the poem Poet about Martin Bell, who was Gregory Fellow in Poetry at Leeds University 1967 to 1969 but who thereafter taught at Leeds Polytechnic for a time and who was very influential in nurturing  creative writing among the students (and staff) of the art and design department. Poet makes reference to James Thompson's City of Dreadful Night which was parodied in the title of Martin’s powerful response to and critique of the Leeds of the sixties, the City of Dreadful Nothing. Bell’s poem refers to the  ‘Merrion Centre with its special subways for mugging’ and the Merrion Centre receives a mention in another Leeds related poem read by George, Chuck Berry Live, which begins

            Too tired to dance with anyone right now

            After the gig, here in the Merrion Centre

            Where Chuck Berry has just taken his bow.

The poem goes on to describe a bleak experience of Leeds, which has much of the tone of

Martin Bell’s City of Dreadful Nothing.  Another poem, Girl Flying recounts an incident when George witnessed a girl student caught by a fierce wind on the steps that led up to the Leeds Polytechnic’s H Block, to such an extent she was blown into the air and which stirred his imagination to imagine her flying:

            When she stood at the top of the stairs by the door

            of the college, the wind caught her up and so

            she flew all the way down, as if no more

            than a micro-detail on a map that any breeze could blow,

            and if she could have flown of her own will

            at any time she chose, this was how she’d go,

            

These two poems are one of five grouped together under the title Yorkshire Bitter and another read was Night Out, about his experience of a notorious Leeds Pub of the sixties, The Hayfield, a poem, which as in several of his poems, contained references to popular culture of the time with mentions of Jack Palance, Pat Phoenix and Leeds United footballers Sniffer Clarke and Norman Hunter. The poem begins:

            Everyone wears drag around here. The barman

            In gold lamé and vast peroxide wig

            serves pints of Sam Smith to a local Carmen

           

            wearing the cruiser’s full authentic rig

            of white blouse, fish-nets, tiny leather skirt,

            with three day’s stubble, mouth like a ripe fig.

                                   

Visual art, the visual and the painterly is also still a concern as exemplified by poems from A Howard Hodgkin Suite and also from  Minimenta –postcards to Anselm Kiefer. The sensual synaesthetic relationship between colours and the sound of words was evident in a poem entitled Colours, which beings with fourteen lines of colour names – some as in common use and others made up.

            Burlywood, Charteuse, Gainsboro, Ghostwhite, Greenberg,

            Maroon, Orchid, Moccasin, Peru, Demosthenes, Snow,

            Papayawhip, Popper, Peachpuff, Hotpink, Hothot,

            Darkred, Darkgrey, Dodgerblue, Drudgery, Derrida,

         

Some of the poems presented also related to photographs and film or were structured around a  

celebration and exploration of the interrelationships among the forms, patterns and sounds of words. His final poem Say So was much enjoyed by the audience for its musical resonance.

However while the imagery and pictures in his poems are powerful as such, they often rapidly develop and lead us on a journey into the metaphysical and in the case of his reading Seeking North from a sequence entitled Northern Air: A Hungarian Nova Zembla a journey is itself the means for this. His poem Allotment from the Mimimenta –postcards to Anselm Keifer is another example, which begins

            When I glimpse from the train a clutch

            of allotments, a tight row of cabbages or spuds

            or garden peas, I think there are gods

            beyond gods who live in the bones

            of men and women, shivering at their touch;

            that when rain falls it weeps hailstones;

There was much variety in the reading and a personal and moving Prayer for my Daughter will have resonated with parents in the audience and such as Madhouse had political implications.

All together it was a very powerful and inspiring reading and while it was George Szirtes’ first visit to Leeds for a long time, let us hope that it will not be too long before the next one.

Click here to hear six early love poems. 

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Two things in particular struck me as I was listening to Kim Moore read. The first was that she, a mistress of the lyrical, should team up with another musician, or an ensemble, to create new material for new performances: Teaching the Trumpet would be an obvious starting point. It provides good, professional advice:

Imagine you are spitting tea leaves

From your tongue to start each note

 

So each one becomes the beginning of a word.

Sing the note inside your head then match it.

It’s advice which is brought into a new dimension by the closing lines about remembering… the man who played so loud/ he burst a blood vessel in his eye… lines which invite much surmise. Who? When?

The second was the confident way in which she can speak from her own dark depths, like a cave-based oracle or a priestess well in touch with the lupine side, which has been noted by plenty of commentators, lifting off from the terrific title poem of her 2011 pamphlet If We Could Speak Like Wolves. Lupine could indicate sensual or fleshly, but it’s a lot more than that: Today at Wetherspoons demonstrates how tellingly she observes the people she encounters on the shore, in the street, on trains, in pubs:

…The women tilt

in their chairs, laughter faked,

like mugs about to fall, cheekbones

sharp as sadness…

The poem goes on to address matters lupine, or perhaps just seedy:

…My feet slide towards a man

with one hand between his thighs…

The key poem for me on this particular evening was Hartley Street Spiritualist Church. The interest in the dark depths is in there, of course, how could it not be when the church in question has a psychic artist, shudder-inducing mediums (who were trainees, we were told afterwards) and a voice whispering to her that a drawing of an elderly woman with a perm is a depiction of her grandma? But the poem is not really in any gothic domain: there is a hymn by Abba (I believe in angels) and a spirit dog wandering around. The dry humour is delicious.

Her personal narratives – for example one of her more recent poems which is centred on when her husband had a nasty fall in the bathroom – often celebrate the unexpected, or the odd, and then there is always the landscape of  her part of Cumbria looming somewhere behind the characters, a cloudy cyclorama.


Photos by Richard Wilcocks