A friendly and conversational tone

Wednesday Evening 19 March –HEART

Helen Burke – Leeds Combined Arts partnership event.

Doug Sandle writes:

Leeds Combined Arts was formed in 2006 and organises monthly poetry readings, arts events and projects. Founded in the former old Headingley Community Centre its monthly meetings now take place at HEART. The main aims of LCA is ‘to provide workshops and events in schools, theatres, local community centres and other organisations and to encourage and create opportunities for members and the wider community to participate in a variety of arts related events and activities’. LCA has regularly held partnership events with the Headingley LitFest and this year the writer, performer, artist and poet Helen Burke was featured reading her own poetry.

As well as providing a colourful display of her own expressive art work and original textile designs, Helen delivered her poetry within a friendly and  conversational tone that is both intimate and accessible and which, perhaps paradoxically, added to its emotional potency and expressive intensity. As feedback from the attentive audience confirmed, her work, which draws upon her own personal experiences and encounters, is “thoughtful, thought provoking and moving” and evidence of a “wonderful imagination”. Her work can also be engagingly humorous - as with her popular poem about a French cat encountered in Paris that is cleverly observed and amusingly characterised much to the delight of the audience. 

Helen’s impact was summed up by the feedback comment of one audience member who in describing it as an ‘excellent performance’, tellingly revealed that he/she ‘had never been to a poetry reading before and really enjoyed it’ - now that’s just the kind of response that Headingley LitFest finds very gratifying – so thanks to Leeds Combined Arts and to Helen for a memorable evening.

Audience comments:

1.     Excellent event. Entertaining. Intelligent. So much so that Helen is booked to appear at ‘Poetry by Heart (in partnership with HLF) in March 201.

2.      Excellent event. Very entertaining poems. Lovely evening.

3.     Loved every word. This is the second time I’ve seen Helen perform now; I am a big fan of her poetry.  

4.     Very lively. Entertaining. An excellent human being of great humour & powers of insight.

5.     Enjoyable evening in a friendly comfortable atmosphere.

6.     Helen has some very unusual poetry, some very thought provoking. 

7.     Wonder food for the soul.

8.     As always, Helen’s work is thoughtful, thought provoking, funny and moving. A wonderful imagination – lovely to have the chance to hear her in solo performance.

9.     Good event, right-sized room. Interesting mix of poetry & paintings/prints/textiles, verbal and visual. Good to have short tea break.

10.  The LitFest as a whole has been great so far, and I especially enjoyed Helen Burke’s reading at the LCA event.

11.  Excellent performance. Just the right length. Have never been to a poetry reading before & really enjoyed.

12.  A very enjoyable evening.

13.  Totally amazing.

14.  Very good poet reading some very interesting and funny poetry as well.

15.  Very entertaining and good fun. Excellent performance from Helen.  

16.  The length of the programme felt just right, and Helen’s poetry was great, and well defined between the interval.  

17.  Great. Engrossing. Captivating. 

The way theatre should be

Echoes of War - partnership event with Theatre of the Dales

Saturday 22 March 7.30 pm

New Headingley Club

Sally Bavage writes, with help from audience commentary:

Stuart Fortey

I first started to write this blog after coming home from a wonderful evening of thought-provoking drama, but realised that I had so many images and lines swirling in my brain that it was far better to write after reflection.  These two plays, scripted by our local gifted playwrights Stuart Fortey (On Scarborough Front) and Peter Spafford (The Edge of the Forest), were wonderful, engaging stories, [which] drew me in and made me want to know more/wonder what happened next.  Me too.

Three actors play in two time frames with one theme – the dilemma of how to find what you value in yourself.  In the first play, a shell-shocked Wilfred Owen eventually volunteers to go back to the front; he sees writing as an act of atonement and knew that he needed to overcome his reputation of cowardice in order to give his work weight and credence. The work lives on, of course; he didn’t and his parents received his death notice on November 11^th, 1918.  Poetic.  The second play, a longer and more complex piece, has a character called Robert, a disturbing and destabilising influence on those around him, who is both a rather unctuous modern estate agent chasing a sale from a pair of siblings and Robert Frost the American poet who influences Edward Thomas, at 37 approaching middle age, to volunteer and leave his wife and three children. Both Roberts see words and images as means to an end – their end – and it is the Roberts who survive. Did Owen really want to use the front line as inspiration for his poetry?  Did a depressed and doomed Thomas go to war because he was bored?  

Peter Spafford

On Scarborough Front was a gripping two-hander with Stuart Fortey, both scriptwriter and Lieutenant-Colonel Gray, and Will Rastall as the gifted but tortured Wilfred Owen.  Gripping...  Spellbinding... (that word again). Powerful... Highly imaginative... The audience were glad of the interval to gather their thoughts and emotions for the second half.

The Edge of the Forest was written and performed by Peter Spafford, who plays Mev/Edward Thomas.  It allows Beth Kilburn as Beth/Helen Thomas to once again display her range for sympathetic characterisation and sublety.  Will Rastall plays Robert/Robert Frost with beguiling charm that segues into mind-game manipulation. 

Afterwards, the audience lingered long to discuss and savour the nuances of plot and character with the cast and each other, belatedly filing out into the cold evening exuding much warmth for the acting and the superb quality of the drama to which they had borne witness.  As one audience member commented: I had thought - £6 for some amateur thing!  Not sure I’ll come - but was worth every penny; the stories will stay with me.  Will tell friends about it – so glad all this is on my doorstep!

Beth Kilburn

Our thanks are due to the New Headingley Club for allowing us such generous rehearsal time, to volunteer Tom Stanley from Leeds University who came along to help with the organisation and, of course, to the Theatre of the Dales who once again provided new work for Headingley LitFest of such high quality. For more information visit www.theatreofthedales.co.uk1 or ring David Robertson on 2740461.

Other audience comments – from many all so very positive - include:

Great to have two splendid but very different local playwrights in action being heard.  An excellent programme, beautifully performed.  Well worth putting on and much more important than merely a Headingley triumph.

A complex play despite the small cast which skilfully switched between characters very well.

Absolutely riveting, powerful performances and very moving.

A brilliant moving evocation of the effects of war.

I was enormously impressed by the quality of the writing and acting – this was my first LitFest event.  I will certainly come to more.

Two very different plays, both highly imaginative and very interesting ‘takes’ on a familiar subject. Great acting made for an excellent evening.

It is still very relevant to question what ties us emotionally to place and time, and whether war is an effective way of resolving differences.  Unfortunately, the question has to be asked by both sides to a dispute.

Brilliant, engrossing from the start.  The way theatre should be.  Skilled and audible.

An evening which deserves to be repeated many times during this year of commemoration.

Each play was spellbinding – each powerful with its own essence.  Authentic is the word that comes up immediately after they aired.  A sense of depth and experience that shakes me – they each hold the reality of the effect of war.  I know more about it now – even though I thought I did before.

All the right funny voices

Ridiculous Witches - Sarah Shafi
Headingley Library - 11am Saturday 22 March

It was just the right size of audience for a reading of the latest in the Ridiculous Witches series by local children's author Sarah Shafi, thirty people including parents. The children showed great interest and enthusiasm as the author adopted all the right funny voices for The Odd-legged Crashing Witch of Leeds and showed the startlingly brilliant illustrations by Tony Husband, though you would have needed brilliant eyesight to see them from afar. No matter, most of the audience seems to have become equipped with a personal copy at the end of the session.

Stories from the War Hospital - the play

Stories from the War Hospital - the play
Friday 21 March, 7.30 pm New Headingley Club

An intimate and moving evocation of the suffering and courage

                            Charlotte Blackburn, Richard Wilcocks, Katharina Arnold, Hannah Robinson                 Photo: Lloyd Spencer

Gail Alvarez writes:

I was frankly amazed that they managed to hold the seventy-strong audience spellbound for sixty minutes during a very imaginative, innovative performance which brought the personal (and true) stories to life. It was indeed a very special experience.  

These are just three of the many outstanding comments on the presentation accompanying the launch of Stories from the War Hospital researched by Richard Wilcocks, Secretary of Headingley LitFest, with the support of funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund, over the past year and a half.

Nurses and volunteers, Royal Army Medical Corps, bereaved parents, casualty clearing station staff, soldiers wounded by shot, shell and gas, stretcher bearers, maids and uniform makers … we had them all on stage by turns in an imaginative production that used effective, minimal props but maximum talent for an intimate and moving evocation of the suffering and courage.  The book gives many more stories and much more detail, including the Vedettes on p145. 

Three very talented young performers from LeedsMet – The Vedettes - supported the dramatic representation of just three of the many local stories that Richard has brought to life in script, show and book.  

Katharina Arnold, from Vienna, whose first language is German, was perfectly cast as Dorothy Wilkinson, the musical daughter of a German mother and an English father. 

Charlotte Blackburn was the impressively strict Matron Euphemia Innes and Nurse Margaret Anna Newbould as well as the seamstress Ada who marries Private Robert Bass, a lucky recipient of pioneering maxillofacial surgery. 

Hannah Robinson movingly played the lucky Robert as well as the less-fortunate Captain Clifford Pickles.  

Richard himself, like the Vedettes, skilfully took on a number of roles - Lt Col Harry Littlewood, a vicar, the musician Charles Wilkinson, a maxillofacial surgeon - that kept the pace and the stories flowing.  

Conrad Beck writes:

I have never before seen the concert room of the New Headingley Club so well set up for a performance, with a wooden apron stage erected in the middle of one of the long sides, backed by hessian-draped flats, and a really professional lighting rig. Richard Wilcocks, who wrote the book which was being launched, provided us with a kind of entertaining prologue in which he outlined the research which has taken place over the period of about eighteen months, and read for us one of the briefer articles - Help! Help, it's cold! - which was taken from a 1916 issue of the British Journal of Nursing. This made people laugh and put them in a good mood for the show, which began soon afterwords with guitar music from Katharina Arnold with a hint of melancholy in it.

The hour-long play which followed gripped the audience throughout. The action in it takes place at the Second Northern General Hospital at Beckett Park, at the Boston Spa home of Dorothy Wilkinson, at a suffragette rally, at a musical evening in Leeds, at the Second Battle of Ypres, at various Casualty Clearing Stations, in St Chad's Church, Headingley, on the Hospital Ship Formosa and at the Battle of Arras. We got all that, very convincingly, in just over an hour of performance. 

All the actors were strong: Katharina Arnold had a powerful stage presence as Dorothy Wilkinson, the suffragette daughter of a musician, Hannah Robinson was particularly effective when she played the spectre of the dead, shell-shocked Captain Pickles and Charlotte Blackburn was the perfect matron: I was really moved when she told us about the tragic cases she had helped to treat after the Gallipoli battles. Richard Wilcocks, the author on stage, was obviously born to be a lieutenant-colonel in the RAMC.

I would love to see this little theatre group again in the future, and I do hope that they will put on Stories from the War Hospital for at least a second time. I am wondering whether they will be performing it in the hospital itself - that is, in the Headingley Campus of Leeds Metropolitan University. I do hope they have been invited.

For a copy of the book: headingleyhospital@gmail.com

For the website: CLICK HERE

Cast: 

Katharina Arnold - Guitarist, vedette, staff nurse, Dorothy Wilkinson, cloud of chlorine, nurse at Casualty Clearing Station and on hospital ship, stretcher-bearer, Emma.

 Charlotte Blackburn - Matron-in-Chief Euphemia Innes, vedette, staff nurse, Gladys Keevil, gassed soldier, nurse at Casualty Clearing Station, stretcher-bearer, Vincent Boy, Margaret Anna Newbould, sergeant, stretcher-bearer, Ada.

 Hannah Robinson - Vedette, maid, suffragette, Captain Clifford Pickles RAMC, Vincent Boy, nurse at Casualty Clearing Station and on hospital ship, Private Robert Bass

Richard Wilcocks - Lt Col Harry Littlewood, vicar, Charles Wilkinson, bereaved parent, officer in trench, maxillofacial surgeon.

Director/Script - Richard Wilcocks

Stage Management/Lighting - Matthew Sykes-Hooban

Poems used:

Schtzngrmm is by the Austrian ‘concrete poet’ (Lautgedichte) Ernst Jandl.

Pluck is by VAD nurse and poet Eva Dobell.

There Will Come Soft Rains is by the American lyric poet Sara Teasdale.

Dedicated to the RAMC is by the ‘Pack Store Party’ and appeared in the Journal of the Leeds Territorial Hospitals in December 1917.

Thanks to Performing Arts at LMU for making rehearsal spaces available. Special thanks to Oliver Bray.

Audience comments:

Spellbinding show that revisits the time of the wounded and nursing services in the Great War.

Excellent presentation, skilled acting and very moving.  Thank you.

A very imaginative, innovative performance which brought the personal stories to life – moving and touching.  Admirable lively acting, beautifully rehearsed and staged.  A very special experience.

I believe that the piece was very good, especially I like the way of representing the stories by various ways and techniques.  Thank you.

Great performances from Leeds Met students.

Often poignant and moving.  Extremely well acted and mostly well articulated.  Not always easy to follow the transitions between people and phases but a very well worthwhile experience.

For just four actors, amateurs at that, to sustain interest in, and convey the many varied emotions involved in telling the complex story of a war hospital, with humour and without any props, was a remarkable challenge but one which they successfully pulled off without noticeable flaw.  I was frankly amazed that they managed to hold the audience spellbound for sixty minutes.

Very moving and interesting personal stories.

I particularly liked the use of a hospital clipboard, which enabled extracts from letters, newspaper clippings and other items to be read out with style.

A great performance and very insightful.  I didn’t know about Beckett Park Hospital and I am so grateful that Richard has worked so hard to research this past that definitely shouldn’t ever be forgotten.

Very well performed play.  A brilliant glimpse of what will be a great read.  Well done Richard!

Thank you for a moving performance with excellent music and songs.

The set - just folds of sacking at the back of the stage and a red-painted chair - looked great before the show even started.

What an amazing amount of detail to remember!  Very powerful drama, told through the eyes of people who did experience WW1.  I had three great uncles who were killed between 1916 and 1917 (one on the Somme) a grandfather who was a patient at Beckett Park and I studied there (1979-83) so found the performance very interesting and informative.

Wonderful!  Very absorbing, moving with a touch of humour

Sterling work!  The ensemble really brought the stories to life and provided a reminder of the work done by so many ordinary staff during the war.  A really enjoyable evening.

A vivid reproduction of three true stories of hospital life in WW1.  A wonderful acting quartet – look forward to seeing them again.

An intimate and moving evocation of the suffering and courage.  Many thanks

Enterprising interpretation of some very interesting material.

Fascinating stories and imaginative lovely performance.  Beautiful singing voices.

Very interesting event.  Acting and singing was a joy.  Mix of humour and tragedy.  Very enjoyable evening.

Very good group effort managing to convey the horror of the war but also moving and humorous at times.   I like the music and movement, well done!

Spirited performance. Hope it will be retold elsewhere after all the work that’s gone into it.

Had heard a little about the hospital and stories before from Richard.  The performance really brought it to life, both the ordinary and the extraordinary and tragic.  Very interesting and well done.

I attended CL&CC 74 to 77 and was aware of the history of the college whilst training as a teacher, hence my interest in coming tonight.  Well researched  rehearsed and performed play – very informative.

Very well acted throughout.  Very moving in parts.

Nurses who 'did their bit' should be fully remembered and not taken for granted. I am a nurse, so I felt really involved in this terrific play! Well done Vedettes!

Everyone has a powerful story to tell

Sharing poetry at City of Leeds

Wednesday 19^th March

Sally Andrews writes:

Michelle and Junior

Such poetry from a lovely group of youngsters!  “As good as we had heard yesterday from the Writing for Survival event held with a mixed group of creative writers from Headingley and Osmondthorpe,” said a member of the audience. True, and so encouraging to find young people prepared to read out their own work: emotional, beautiful, tense, personal.

 “I laugh – and I survive” said S.  A good metaphor for life.  And he spoke of his enthusiasm for writing poems that could be used as the lyrics of a song, encouraged by Junior Willocks, international session musician and producer, working with the likes of Damien Marley and Ellie Goulding.  Junior is a local lad, growing up in the heart of Leeds and attending Harehills dance company, Northern Contemporary Dance school and dancing with the orginal Phoenix dance company.

Survival is not a word used often, but we all find ways to survive” said K, as well as telling us about Elizabeth I – who survived her father, smallpox and the Spanish and French wars.  A young man who integrated his love of history into a third poem about 1945 and the gas ovens.  “I’m next! I’m next!  I’m next!” was a panicky last line – chilling.

L spoke of hardship and the great ambition you need to survive, whilst S’s ‘Born a Survivor’ was a poem of praise for the woman who helps others despite her own difficulties and tragedies. 

One young man told us of his lonely time living in a refuge, not able to attend school for a year and a half. How soul-destroying that is for a young boy? He, almost casually, related his recovery from swine flu, which put him in hospital for a month, and his unsupported mum into a great fright. Poetry has the power to release dark tales.

D had only recently arrived here from Sicily and had written all her poems first in Italian so she could get the words out before translating them into a shortened form of English.  Her beautiful smile lit up when we gave her praise for her English, coming on by leaps and bounds in the way that poetry often releases young people’s restraint or lack of confidence with more formal or lengthy writing. As her teacher said, “Today she has smiled and come out of herself.”

M had said of himself “I can’t write, I can’t write” but the poetry workshops had given him a space to come and enjoy listening.  He got there in the end, writing his own poem and he was so proud of it. 

As regulars at a long-established dance club which clashed with the poetry workshop evenings, two youngsters were nevertheless fired up by Michelle coming into their lessons and igniting the spark. This encouraged them to drop off their poems anyway and come and share them with us.  Dance came second today.

We heard more – the young boy who wipes his mother’s tears from his face in case someone thinks he has been crying.  Or the poem Anne Boleyn wrote to Katherine of Aragon, describing her as “a good enemy” and pleading that her daughter (Elizabeth) “must survive.”  “His smile traps faces”  and “home was the place where he was supposed to feel loved” told a dark tale.   “Surviving the loss of a phone, or your trainers – that’s not surviving.  Surviving is escaping a tragedy, an earthquake, a fire.  That’s real survival.”  An old head on young shoulders.

Our thanks go to teacher Kathleen Gallagher for enabling this work and to Michelle Scally Clarke, performance poet, who has worked so hard across the school to get these and other young people to believe they can do it. “It’s so important to celebrate young people’s voices, and to develop their skills in presenting themselves working in groups and with audiences. Everyone has a powerful story to tell.  Poetry helps you find the rhythm, see the person”

Note:  Michelle is currently Poet in Residence at  Space 2 in Leeds and Writing Facilitator for First Floor at the West Yorkshire Playhouse as well as the Ilkley Literature Festival. Her biography is published in Tangled Roots, published in 2013 as an anthology which explores six mixed race/Yorkshire heritage artists.  She is working on a new commission for a play/musical. http://www.tangledroots.org.uk/

Michelle Scally Clarke comments:

This year’s slam with City of Leeds moved me in a way the other slams had not.  I think it was the theme ‘Surviving’, for City of Leeds boasts the most dynamic, diverse, smiling, happy survivors, each person a story that has a different taste to the last, all unique.

Most of the pupils I worked alongside were survivors.  There was a young Year 8 girl who rarely came to school, but came in on the day of the poetry workshops because the teacher had said she would like it. She wrote about surviving the fact that her brother is in the army, how he loved and looked after her, and she allowed me to read this, then read it after herself to the class.  The classmate who wrote about her best friend surviving cancer, her best friend sat right next to her, the roar of empathy of love and claps from fellow classmates.

Spoken word has a great impact with the students - it is a great way to begin creative writing and free writing;  it allows you to speak to the page, it allows your voice to be owned and heard, it allows for writing and literature and language to be enjoyed first then learnt. This is very important if English is not your first language - it wasn’t for ninety percent of the students I worked with.  It allows for praise and for people to see the truth of you. These pupils humble and inspire me with their stories, poems and songs,and I have no doubt that all will continue to perform, write and grow.

I would like to say a massive “Thank you” to the Headingley LitFest and funders for enabling this valuable work each year.

Natural, convincing, gripping Alison Taft

Lily Appleyard in Paris – Alison Taft

Wednesday 19 March - Headingley Library

                                                  Photo: Richard Wilcocks

Alison talked about her relationship with publishers – she works successfully with a ‘we really do know what people like’ bunch who are apparently after ‘gritty northern stories’ – and her own father. The father bit was more interesting than the publisher bit. She outlined how her own personal experiences have influenced her writing, which is not that surprising, because vast numbers of poets and novelists, famous, infamous and unknown, have been influenced likewise, but she told her side of things so well, so naturally and convincingly, that the audience was gripped. Alison’s central protagonist, Lily Appleyard, has a father who has disappeared from her life and who refuses to meet her in Our Father, Who Art Out There… Somewhere, and she lives in Accrington. Lily has a fantasy that he will turn up one day. As the blurb on the back of the book says: when Lily’s mother dies and Lily finds her father alive and well but with no intention of ever meeting her, she has a decision to make. Should she forget about him? Or does she have a right to know her own father? Doesn’t he owe her at least one meeting?

Alison, who is originally from Burnley, told us that this almost but not exactly described a part of her own life. She was very definitely using what she knew, and it had crossed her mind that she was taking some kind of revenge in her writing.  Our Father is set in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall was breached, when Alison was living in Germany, though there’s not much about that. The novel, set in Headingley and with plenty of use of the present tense, has a strong sense of immediacy as well as a strong feel of the Zeitgeist. The focus moved from Our Father to its sequel, Shallow Be Thy Grave in which Lily has to navigate Paris while dealing with her dysfunctional family. We heard about where the murder should go in an effective crime novel, which is seven pages in, according to one recommended formula. Alison has her doubts about this kind of thing: she mentioned the tension created between author and publisher when advice is given and not taken. She has been told that there should be a new dramatic incident every few pages, or that one of her male characters was ‘an idealized man’, or that a section was too long, and she has made a few adjustments and is sometimes grateful when something is pointed out, for example a mistranslation of a Latin motto.

She particularly admires Lee Child, an author whose books tend to come with ‘noir’ on the cover. In response to the obvious follow-up question, Alison said that her books had been described as ‘chick noir’ as opposed to straight ‘chick lit’, and this caused her to smile, because it does sound like an in-joke. We smiled too. She is fascinated by plenty of the output of Jo Nesbø as well, but finds some aspects of his work upsetting, especially the graphic descriptions of murder scenes. Nesbø  is one of a number of well-known writers given the task of rewriting stories from Shakespeare. He is dealing with Macbeth. Agatha Christie was mentioned as well, but she is a given.

In the audience was a delegation from a student book group at Leeds University, who had obviously heard about the event but who were unaware that it was part of the LitFest. We hope to see you again soon, now that you know. Also in the audience were a couple of Alison’s lecturers from quite a while ago, and she was just a little worried that they might have thought that a boring lecturer in one of her novels could be perceived as one of them. Perish the thought! If the cap fitted, neither of them showed they were wearing it.

Audience comments:

Interesting insight to the background of the books

It was really enjoyable!

Great. Well-structured. Interviewer had good questions and reading/Q & As were well-timed within the evening.

Insight into driving force behind writing process, interesting to hear about process of feedback from agents, publishers, editors.

Brilliant. Loved it.

Great to showcase local talent and to inspire other budding local writers.

Enjoyed hearing how author’s background fed into her books. Very lively and personable author, willing to give of herself.

I don’t know much about the books and haven’t read them yet but it sounds interesting and makes me think I must have lived a very sheltered life a lot more than I thought. I think I should read more female erotica stuff because it needs to stick into my head for me to accept it as a normal part of life and therefore engage in the world appropriately.

Really insightful and interesting. We had read the books in our book club (thanks to Headingley Library for lending them to us) so was great to find out the background behind her writing.

I’ve always thought that books lead to a different world, but never quite found the door. Listening to Mrs/Ms A Taft (since I don’t know if she’s married) I kind of saw that door. I won’t say I hope you do more of these author sessions, because you will either way.

Interesting to get an insight into the author’s life/background. Seemed personal.

Greast to hear from a local author! Also very interesting to hear about the writing process. Never heard a writer speak before.

Very interesting session with an excerpt from her second book, and questions and answers revealing her motivation in writing.

As someone who has never thought of writing a novel, I found Alison’s account of her experiences fascinating. I hope I enjoy the novel.

It’s such a successful format to have the compere ask a series of prompting questions to get the author to open up about their work’s background. Too many authors read too many chunks out of their books. Alison is such an open, honest and entertaining speaker, which comes across in her books.

Very interesting open evening. Good tips on crime writing which is what I’m after.

Really liked the structure of the night with the range of questions posed by the library representative.

Very engaging and well-structured.

Interesting insight into an author’s work and life.

Liked the Q & A format and the chance to ask our own questions.

Very enjoyable event. Good questions. Well structured.