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

Blake Morrison - Fiction or Life Writing

 Rebecca Cronin writes:

Softly spoken Yorkshireman Blake Morrison, in conversation with Richard Wilcocks, began with an introduction to Life Writing – what it is, and most importantly, how he makes it interesting. He shared anecdotes concerning his two books about his parents – Things My Mother Never Told Me and When Did You Last See Your Father? – and read passages from both. He centred his discussion around the use of embroidery, which he asserted to be important when fictionalising your characters, yet also spoke strongly about how the personal truths he experienced, and detailed in both books, often resonate well for other people.

Blake Morrison signed dozens of his books

Life writing, when the subject and main characters are not only no longer with you, but are also your parents, would perhaps strike most of us as odd, and perhaps even a task that could be beyond difficult.  But Morrison carried the notion of how for him, writing about his father, and then mother, proved to be a therapeutic and helpful experience, and in many ways, a coping mechanism for their deaths. Writing, he said, is a way to let someone tell a story they need to tell, as well as shaping it, and keeping control of it. Oddly enough, in the beginning, writing existed for him as a mechanism to escape his family, but they ended up being the main characters and roles within his work; they were inescapable. 

When discussing Things My Mother Never Told Me, he explained how his main plot line had revolved around a box of letters his father had left him. The letters provided the majority of the details which make up the book, but naturally left gaps that needed filling. As a forty year-old, reading about the lives of his twenty year-old parents, he expressed almost parental feelings towards them, and often felt that their marriage and his birth were exceptionally unrealistic results of their growing lives. 

The novel of his mother’s life was never something he had expected to write, and he described her as an elusive woman who didn’t enjoy being the topic of conversation. Yet his motivation for writing the book was concentrated around the growing question of why she had buried her Irish Catholic past; a question he strove to answer after learning more and more from the letters. He followed the discussion about the book with a harrowing reading about the immensely high infant mortality rate his grandparents experienced with their own children.

When the discussion turned to the film adaptation of When Did You Last See Your Father?, starring Jim Broadbent as his father and Colin Firth as himself, Morrison spoke earnestly of how impressed he had been with Broadbent’s portrayal of his Father. Before filming, the two had met and discussed his father at length– his clothes, accent, mannerisms  - and as a result, Morrison thought that Broadbent brought a new understanding to the role that he himself had not fully realised in the book. His parting remark about the film was that now, when he thinks of his father, he sees Broadbent’s face, and finds it difficult to see past that. His only regret is that when he looks in the mirror, he does not similarly see Colin Firth staring back at him.

The evening drew to a close with Morrison speaking briefly of his time working for The Observer, where a passage from When Did You Last See Your Father? appeared, alongside a photograph of the two of them. Seeing his work there, he remarked, proved to be shocking, as he often felt possessive over the story. By the time the film adaptation appeared fourteen years later, he had accepted how he could, and would, share the story with the public. A final round of questions concluded with “can you imagine your own children writing about you in a similar fashion to how you wrote about your parents?”, to which he answered, with an astonishing truth, “when writing about real life, and people in your real life, you have to be careful. But I’d hope they’d cast me in a good light – the truth is important, after all.”

The Hunchback of Notre Dame at Cottage Road Cinema

Partnership event with Far Headingley Village Society and Cottage Road Cinema

It was originally known as The Headingley Picture House

 Sheila Chapman writes:
We came in from the street muffled up to the eyeballs to escape the freezing cold and occasional snow of this March evening. We entered the panelled foyer of this 100 year old cinema complete with its ticket booth and ‘authentic’ tickets to be greeted by the welcoming warmth of its staff who were resplendent in evening attire. What a great start to an evening full of the atmosphere which you can only find in a cinema of this vintage!
We had come to watch The Hunchback of Notre Dame, chosen by the cinema (together with its partners, Far Headingley Village Society and Headingley LitFest), to reflect the Headingley LitFest’s 2013 theme – Lives and Loves.

But before the film we were treated to the adverts. Normally cinema adverts could hardly be described as a treat but these were vintage and so were tinged with nostalgia and, from this distance, were very amusing.

This version of the Hunchback of Notre Dame, based on the novel by Victor Hugo, is a testament to Charles Laughton’s portrayal of Quasimodo. Laughton’s performance, though often caricatured, drives the film by engaging us with the desperate and abused character who is the hunchback.  The film tells the story of Esmeralda, a gypsy girl in fifteenth century Paris, who becomes entangled in the machinations of the evil judge Frollo who both desires and hates her. She in turn loves Phoebus, a philandering soldier, while Quasimodo, the hunchbacked bell ringer of Notre Dame, loves her because of her kindness to him (she gave him water)  after he had been publicly flogged and left in the stocks.  Quasimodo demonstrates his love by saving Esmeralda from hanging. The greatest tragedy in the film is that of Quasimodo. He is mocked and brutalised because of his appearance and denied love despite the greatness of his heart and his courage.

The film’s plot differs considerably from that of the original novel – including a happy ending for Esmeralda. In addition, much of the social commentary in the novel has also been ‘Hollywoodised’ but sufficient remains to portray, in a fifteenth century setting, the social ills of poverty and exploitation and the corrupt use of power.

Quasimodo’s physical relationship with Notre Dame and its bells is a constant presence in the film. He clambers in and around the cathedral with ungainly dexterity. He plays the bells (which have deafened him) by lying on his back and pushing them with his feet and in one scene he actually jumps onto a bell and rides it. This physical portrayal of Quasimodo by Charles Laughton together with his evocation of the hunchback’s bewilderment and humanity is the lasting impression of the film.

As one member of the audience said ‘I can now appreciate why this film is a classic’.

The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1939), RKO pictures – directed by William Dieterle 

Museum of Untold Stories - in HEART Café

Richard Wilcocks writes:

Urwin Watt (U Watt?) begins the show with an energetic warm-up, as the children are still coming into the HEART Café, already bubbling. He looks like the sort of person who could fix everybody and everything, prancing up and down, eyes glittering with what we hope is good humour, leather belt loaded with interesting tools. So what might happen? Any time traveling involved? The door of the structure in the corner which brings Tardis to mind - for some parents anyway - is apparently locked, and can be opened only when the right buttons are pressed. There is a countdown, with five minutes to go. Long minutes, giving time for a steel colander to be worn by volunteers, which might bring electrical strikes and cause explosions, not to worry…

There’s someone in there! You can tell by the noises. It turns out to be Stokely Pilgrim, teleported from Brazil, whose naval uniform signifies some kind of rank but who spends his time in an engine room stoking a ship’s furnace (cue for child to make an arch with his arms and become its entrance) and inviting people, all of them “sir” and “madam” in spite of the fact that some just about come up to his knee, to think about what the world would be like without stories.

Not much fun, of course. Soon, aided by an Urwin who is now called  ‘Mother’, he is addressing a gang of pirates (Ha – haaarr!) and then a sea full of sharks. Invisible bottles are picked up and hurled into the water, all of them containing stories to be found. “Do mermaids, do mermaids!” nags one of the tinier participants, dancing in and out of the action.  The ship’s bell clangs loudly. A broken crown is brought out. Who could that belong to? Could it be…

It’s obvious to nearly everybody: “Richard the Third!” they shout en masse. “Mermaids!” shouts a lone voice. A king in waiting is found – no matter about the gender – and a story about how the crown came to be broken is found. It seems that it fell off the king’s head when he (she) sneezed. That’s what the kings tells us, before ordering everybody to go to the castle on the hill immediately, or else their heads will roll.

And so the show continues, some of its elements constant, but with plenty which is unique to this particular performance, a tune with improvisation. Alive and Kicking Theatre Company Leeds has worked in primary schools, more recently in Kirkgate Market (just the sort of thing to revive the place), but to my knowledge does not do cafés very often. They’ll be doing this one again soon. It was terrific! My only criticism is that they didn’t get around to the mermaids.

To book Alive and Kicking ring John Mee at 0113 265 8631

www.aliveand kickingtheatrecompany.co.uk

And here is a photo of the performance the following day (14 March) sent by Liz Fox: