The first thing that I feel like saying about Alan Bennett’s latest play is that it is clever as a barrel load of monkeys, not clever in a self conscious way but understated and self assured. Here is someone writing who knows from experience what works and what doesn’t. There is no need for him to bang any drums about it. It shows a complete mastery of structure and contrast, something which is used to great comic effect. We have a company on stage who are rehearsing a play about a fictional meeting between Benjamin Britten and W H Auden, and we follow their trials and foibles as they struggle to get things right. There are lots of wry theatrical touches and irony as alongside this we see parts of the play which they are rehearsing during an early run through. The whole premise of The Habit of Art is a kind of double take. The audience are given an insight into the process of creativity by both the present day characters and by watching Britten and Auden as they meet again, following a long and acrimonious fall out, when Britten comes to ask for help with a libretto for a new opera, Death in Venice. The long scene in the second half where we are allowed to settle and watch Britten and Auden talk about life and creativity is beautifully done, and it gives the play a weight and focus which it would be lost without. I also found the scene where Britten is auditioning a choirboy as Auden talks with a rent boy very moving. Nobody else would write a scene like that and if they tried to it wouldn’t have the same effect. Watching the play I felt that a lifetimes experience had been distilled into the writing and only someone with that depth of experience could have done it, but at the same time it felt like a young man’s play, fizzing along with wit and energy. It is sometimes blissfully funny.

The actors have to keep up with Bennett’s pace and a lot is asked of them. Richard Griffiths (playing Fitz and W H Auden) and Alex Jennings (playing Henry and Benjamin Britten)  have to constantly come in and out of character as Auden and Britten to stop the run in order to question or complain and they both do this with complete conviction. You are never in any doubt the second that it happens who you are listening to. Alex Jennings is wonderful. You can see exactly why Henry has been cast as Britten but he is also a distinctly different character who watches what is going on with great concentration and sometimes frustration and he has his own back story. We don’t hear very much of it but his performance is so beautifully realised that we can fill in the gaps for ourselves. Adrian Scarborough, another fine actor who can do far more than is asked of him here, plays Donald and Humphrey Carpenter, and he is also delightful. Donald has been stuck with the thankless task of playing a “device” (Humphrey Carpenter wrote biographies of Auden and Britten and appears to comment on the action) and he needs lots of reassurance and patience from his stage manager Kay (Frances De La Tour) as he attempts to part build and fret about something which simply isn’t worth fretting about. He knows that and so does everybody else, but he has his moment- a typical Bennett one- at the start of the second half which I won’t spoil.

The way that artistry can be given to a person who seems unattractive and undeserving of it, that someone downright unpleasant can make work of great sensitivity and beauty, is an interesting subject. Peter Shaffer tackled it in Amadeus and I am glad that Alan Bennett turned his mind to it for this play. I just want him to keep writing forever.

Although it has been performed in many settings there is no better place to hear The Messiah than in one of our great cathedrals. It is a sacred work which fills a sacred space to perfection and completes it, adding a soundtrack to the still vaulted space which reminds the listener of its meaning and purpose. Hereford Choral Society’s concert in Hereford cathedral was a lovely example of something which will be happening all over the country during the weeks leading up to Christmas. Handel’s best known oratorio has always been popular and it still is. The cathedral was packed and the choir was large and enthusiastic, enjoying their chance to sing it with an orchestra and four talented soloists. The Messiah is often thought of as a Christmas piece, and it is, but it also tells the whole story of salvation and God’s plan for the world. Whether you believe it or not its a tremendous story and it carries you along, building through one musical climax after another, as the tale unfolds. Possibly we don’t need to believe it in order to be moved because when Handel wrote this music he absolutely did, and those people who listen without faith can be moved by his.  It is a work of enormous bravura. There is no room for doubt or questioning here. God is great and he has saved us all and we can be gloriously sure that one day we will be with him in heaven. That statement demands the biggest amen in music at the end and it gets it. Handel was writing as a direct response to his faith and his confidence in his God shines out from every note. It is humbling to think that this response to his faith is still speaking to people and drawing crowds around 250 years later. After writing the Hallelujah chorus he famously told his servant, “I did think that I did see all heaven before me and the great God himself” and that window onto heaven that his genius showed him is still there for us now. It takes your breath away when you hear it in the proper setting and the beautiful, simple declaration which the Soprano soloist makes immediately afterwards, “I know that my Redeemer Liveth” is a perfect response to what we have just been shown, a statement of quiet humble confidence in the face of God’s glory. This was the start of my Christmas for 2009 and I can’t imagine a better one.

My maternal grandfather Robert (Bob) Shipley was the guiding light of my childhood. He farmed with shire horses on the vale of York all his life and fought with the 161st battalion of the Royal Artillery ( in charge of the horses) through the first world war, coming out unscathed. I first got to know him after his retirement. I was born in 1957, the year after he retired from farming his rented fields and moved to the house that he had been saving up to buy all his working life. For the next 25 years my parents and I lived with Bob and his wife Annie as he enjoyed a long healthy retirement.

Bob was tall, well built and strong with a ready smile and a quick temper. If you didn’t mess him about he would move heaven and earth for you. Everyone around him knew him and liked and respected him. Throughout his life he rarely left home, content to root himself securely in the soil where he had first been planted. He continued to wear what he had worn to work in the fields for the rest of his life, gardening in a collarless shirt, loose cord trousers with a thick pile held up with a belt and braces and an old suit jacket. He always called this jacket his “smock”, and it was only replaced with a thinner cotton jacket- his summer smock- when the weather warmed up. After a day in the garden he would come in, dirty the towels in the kitchen with half washed hands, sit in his Windsor chair, stretch out his Wellington booted legs towards the fire and twiddle his thumbs until you could smell the rubber heating up. When he did dress up for a whist drive or one of many day trips to the seaside nobody else could shine boots like him and he would put on a tartan tie and a gold tie pin with a fox running across it. His favourite foods were tea made with tinned carnation milk and plenty of sugar, and fruit pies. Our larder cupboard, which had a mesh window out to the open air, was permanently stocked with apple or rhubarb pies made from fruit from the garden especially for him.

Aside from his garden Bob’s interests were simple. I never saw him with a book in his hands. He liked to watch the wrestling late on Saturday afternoons, shouting at the television and calling Mick McManus a “dirty bugger”. The house was made silent so that he could watch songs of praise each week, although he only went to church on high days and holidays. He cut other men’s hair and had a full set of hairdressing kit in a polished wooden box with brass edging. He loved to go to house contents sales, a regular local attraction when someone died and a house needed clearing, and brought all kinds of things home from clocks and ornaments to handkerchiefs which he would pick up in the road and expect to be washed and used. His main gift to the village was a bowling green which he made from scratch where there had been rough farm land- a major achievement which only someone who has tried to do it would really appreciate. It included a fierce fight against the local mole population. He trapped them and strung them up on the wire fencing around the area where he was working, in order to show that he was doing his job. He was a countryman to his fingertips who liked to shoot pigeons and follow the hunt on his rickety bicycle and he had no sentimentality whatsoever. His retirement job was de-beaking turkeys at a local turkey farm, and plucking turkeys and pheasants in the run up to Christmas, and our cat’s kittens were killed ( not drowned as he thought that cruel) by an expert blow from a spade.

Bob loved spending time with me. When he bought me a colouring book he would buy a second identical one for himself and we would sit together and have colouring competitions. I had my own patch of garden and a small plastic greenhouse which he built for me and I never tired of getting under his feet as he weeded, sowed, watered, raked, mowed and mulched. He could make anything grow. The house had been chosen for the large plot of land alongside it ( another house sits on it now) and he just continued to do what he had done all his life. It wasn’t a retirement really, just a downsizing. Retiring from farming would have been like attempting to retire from his own life. He was very pleased that I was fond of horses and liked to ride. That was the other thing I remember him telling people over and over again; “She’s ‘oss mad.” He used to tell me that if he had still been at the farm I could have had a pony. It was only during the planning talk for my mother’s funeral with the vicar, many years later, that I found out that he had got a piece of land lined up to graze a pony on for me. My father stopped him from going ahead.

Bob didn’t just have one shed. He had a whole row of them. There was one for coal, one for wood, one for me to play in, one which was chock full of stuff with no purpose whatsoever, and a very large one with glass windows which was his workshop. I spent hours in there banging pieces of kindling into each other and playing with the vices and tools. Absolutely everything was kept, from the smallest piece of string to a wood-wormed chest of drawers which was turned out of the house and found itself in the dark filling up with tins of nails, screws, saws, pliers and hammers.

Bob may have adored me, but he was also a tough disciplinarian. He only once threatened me with his belt, when I had been throwing his apples over the huge privet hedge into the track separating us from the next house with the boys from next door. I was afraid when I heard him coming up the stairs (he had already taken his belt off) but he would never have used it. I was known as a good girl. I have a Torquay pottery mug with “For a good girl” written on it in slip glaze ( a present from one of only two proper holidays that he and my grandmother ever had together) to prove it. They went to Lands End and John O’Groats. My mother had been a late baby and I was his only grandchild. As the youngest of a family of twelve this was a surprise to him. When he paraded me around the village on the front of his bicycle, which had homemade stirrups and a second seat fitted for me to sit on, he would announce the fact to people over and over again. “She’s the only one I’ve got.” The unique status that this gave me was a matter of huge importance to me and I didn’t hear the disappointment in his voice, only the pride which went with it. I was the only one he had. More special than anything.

Dalton Trumbo was an American screenwriter, one of the Hollywood Ten, who was convicted of contempt of congress and blacklisted by the house Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 after refusing to provide information for them. After an eleven month sentence in a federal penitentiary he and his family were forced to flee to Mexico where he continued to write under assumed names in order to get his work on screen. He won an Oscar in 1956 (which was given to someone else) for The Brave One, but it wasn’t until 1960 that he was finally given a screen credit again for Exodus. He produced a distinguished body of work for the American cinema under hugely difficult circumstances and never let anything stop him writing. As he says in the play, “writers write”.
Dalton Trumbo’s story has been turned into an engaging two hander by his son Christopher. He puts himself on stage as a narrator figure, with his father, to tell it and while there is little direct interaction between the two of them their relationship is warm and clearly defined. Both of them carry scripts and although this takes a little getting used to it is also an appropriate device for a play which is about the power of words. We hear some of Dalton Trumbo’s letters and speeches verbatim and as we listen we are given a portrait of a man who is awkward and angry but also sensitive and loyal. It is a kind of exasperated tribute to his father, written with no attempt to judge or complain, even though Christopher’s life would probably have been much easier if his father had been less principled and bloody minded. Towards the end of the play he sets out for us a series of seemingly contradictory adjectives to describe his father which you would never imagine could be embodied in one person, but we have already been shown that they can and were.
Dalton Trumbo is a star part and thankfully Corin Redgrave is still here to play it. He has the air of a wounded bear about him on stage, listening carefully to everything his son says and setting out for us the evidence which he refused to give the committee at the opening of the play, evidence which shows us a man who deserves to have his worth recognised and his work given due credit. He is very moving whether he is giving vent to his righteous anger or mourning the loss of a friend and above all we see the stubbornness and tenacity that will never allow him to stop him working.There are some great speeches for him in the second half of the play and he wrings every bit of emotion out of them. There is also a sly humour in his writing and he takes great satisfaction in sharing it with us.
Nick Waring plays Christopher Trumbo and gives a performance of real sensitivity and charm. It is an unselfish performance too, in the way that he supports Corin Redgrave watching him and reacting to him truthfully, never losing sight of the need to tell the story without distraction or over-elaboration. It would have been interesting if the play had allowed him come out of his role as narrator and share his feelings openly with us in a more private setting but that would be another play. This is his father’s story and nothing is allowed to get in the way of that.
An unusual and engaging play then, and a great chance to see both Corin Redgrave acting with great subtlety and power, using every bit of his 47 years experience, and two actors working together with great honesty and sensitivity.

This is a strange little book, a tale of bright young things in the London of the nineteen twenties. It is very funny, razor sharp and easy to read. It skims over the surface of life delightfully and on one level it can be read without thinking too much, as you take in the surface glitter and charm. There are no engaging characters for you to empathise with, but that is not a criticism- there are not meant to be. You can laugh at the idiocies and follies of the aptly named characters, who are written as types, without needing to worry too much about them. It’s all too too fun making. The dialogue is absolutely killing, and for somebody who loves to read between the lines as I do it’s a real treat.
And then you start to think more deeply………………
This is an indictment of a society which Waugh was a part of. He has observed the selfish hedonism of those around him and this is his condemnation of them. It is written with the lightest of touches and a smile on his face, but that doesn’t stop him nailing every one of those rich young hedonists, taking them apart with prose as sharp as a scalpel. The bright young things were the gossip column fodder of their day and lived for the moment without considering what consequences that might have for those around them. Their wild parties, drink and drugs excesses and treasure hunts which caused chaos around London were legendary. It was a high spirited and careless response to the old order who seemed to have given them nothing but suffering and chaos. If the present moment was all that they had then they were going to live it for all it was worth and nothing and nobody stopped them until their bright flame burned out with the arrival of the more serious times of the nineteen thirties. This is a fine record of that era, a young mans book, written with savage wit and bravura, but there are also dark undercurrents when you search for them underneath the surface gloss.

There has to be something not quite right when you are watching a three hander with William Shakespeare as one of the characters and he is the least interesting person on stage. For All Time is set at the end of his career. He is portrayed as tired, dissolute and disillusioned, no longer able to access his creativity or even remember the names of some of his plays ( “the snake play”). During the course of his writing session on The Two Noble Kinsmen with John Fletcher we are given a quick trot through the basics of his life, his fathers financial ruin, his distant relationship with his wife, his dual life in Stratford and London, his success, the rumours that Marlowe was still alive and writing his plays for him and the loss of his son Hamnet. We also meet his mistress Margaret, a wench with a heart of gold, who is keeping the fact that she is pregnant with his child secret and see him admitting to Fletcher that he is going blind. The dialogue is by no means Elizabethan, Marlowe is described as gay for example, and in spite of some of the nice touches in the set and costumes I never quite managed to believe that I was watching a little piece of Elizabethan england, or seeing the man who wrote the plays in front of me. Three days ago I saw Peter MacQueen give an excellent performance so I am going to come off the fence and blame the writing. It simply isn’t good enough. What it needs is certainty of tone. You are either steeped in Elizabethan england or you are not.

The play is saved from disaster by a charming and cleverly judged performance from Dennis Herdman as John Fletcher. He is an overtly stylish gay man who somehow manages to be a very recognisable and modern figure as well as one who belongs in the world of the play and his acting has bravura and sensitivity. This is exactly what the writing doesn’t manage to do for the character of Shakespeare. We know that he has lost his creativity now, but it is important to believe that it was once there, and I never quite did. It was good to see John Fletcher and Shakespeare’s mistress Margaret together in the second half when they play with his latest toy- a telescope- and have a tender scene together as two people who both loved Shakespeare and knew that they were not loved in return. Margaret is a touching character and very well played by Aimee Thomas, who finds more in her than the stereotypical tart with a heart barmaid.

The set and the lighting are lovely. There is not a false note in that side of the production at least, everything is very well judged and used effectively.

In the programme the writer, a first time playwright called Rick Thomas, asks us to forgive him for making some of it up, given that virtually nothing is known about Shakespeare. Given that he set himself a very difficult task, I do……… but only just.

It was an absolute joy to see a cast of twenty on a set which dominated the large open stage of the West Yorkshire Playhouse. This was the grand canvas that a book like John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath deserves. It describes how the agricultural society of mid 1930’s Oklahoma was torn apart by dust storms, crop failure, illness, poverty and ruthless bankers, and this production had the scope to do it justice. The Joad family are just one of many farming families who are thrown off their land and forced to become migrants, “Okies” who nobody has any sympathy or charity left for. We follow their journey as they travel, shoehorned into an old jalopy with what is left of their previous life, hoping to find work in California. It is a tragic journey which ought to be completely without hope, they are just one more group of vulnerable, despised people, vagrants who are fair game to be abused and exploited, but this is a celebration of the dustbowl poor and their strength and courage, a hymn to the dispossessed. Sustained by the simple faith and practical love of their matriarch, Ma Joad, they face every hardship and setback with a simple determination to stay together and keep moving on. What else is there to do?

Quite a story then, and enough suffering to break your heart. There were four of the people on the journey who I particularly felt for. Granma Joad was beautifully played by Jennifer Hill. In the short time that she had she managed to paint a whole picture of a woman and her long marriage which was truthful, detailed and touching. This is something that only an excellent stage actor can do with a small part and it’s a joy when it happens. It lifts the whole ensemble onto another level and provides depth and veracity. Tom Joad is a young man who is destroyed by a single flaw. He is unable to prevent himself from fighting back against injustice, and there is enough of that around to ensure that trouble has a way of finding him very quickly. It was a strong convincing performance from Damien O’Hare, and he had a great scene with Sorcha Cusack as his mother when he is finally forced to leave the family and go on the run. Ma Joad is the beating heart of the Joad family, the still calm voice at the centre of everything, holding them together. It is a wonderful part for Sorcha Cusack and she makes the most of it, giving a great performance. She is an untiring and luminous presence who will do anything for her loved ones. Jim Casy, who tags along with the Joads, is another fascinating character, a veteran preacher who has lost his faith, no longer able to find answers in religion to help him face the suffering he is seeing. His natural sense of justice and his good heart has survived alongside his cynicism. He is the most complex and interesting character in the play and Oliver Cotton had the right presence and charisma to play him. Altogether it was a fine ensemble (one or two accents which were shaky from time to time are easily forgiven when the character is there and the acting is heartfelt) and the company showed us a believable family and a believable suffering community.

The family jalopy (which was a moving realistic car) and the background set of a large collapsing wooden slatted house were both tremendously important, filling out the picture of the journey and giving it a context. All the colours on stage were those of earth and sky, in the muted tones of the familiar photographs from the dustbowl era, and combined with the clever lighting the costumes and the set made a savage kind of beauty from decay. Advertising posters were projected onto the top of the house wall, and their blind optimism provided a bitter contrast to the reality of the lives which we were watching below them. They were a constant reminder for both us and the Joads that the American dream was well out of their reach, even if they would never stop striving for it.

The original music, which was performed live, was haunting and evoked the period beautifully. I knew that it would be very special as soon as I saw John Tams name in the programme.

The final image of the play is both hopeful and heartbreaking. I am not going to spoil it for anyone who has not read the book or seen this production, even though I would love to describe it.

Una has found a photograph of a man in a magazine advert who she had an affair with fifteen years ago, when she was twelve years old, and decided to track him down at his workplace. She wants some answers and during the course of an hour and three quarters of this highly charged, claustrophobic two hander, played without an interval, she gets them. They are not the kind of answers which lead to certainty or a resolution of the damage which has been done to her self esteem and her capacity to love, and they are not the kind of answers which will make up for the social stigma which she was left with. They are the kind of answers which simply lead to more questions and more confusion. Her abuser, Ray, has spent the fifteen years since the affair reinventing himself with a new life and a new long standing relationship, and the answers which she needs have to be dragged out of him painfully, little by little. She makes him repeat the word abuse as though to validate what they have told her, since it didn’t feel like that to her at the time, and also to make him understand the consequences of his actions, consequences which he never had to see. She is still painfully confused. Nothing is simple. You can see her enjoying the power she still has over him and mourning a relationship which she felt was real love, and at the same time trying to understand the confused, damaged twelve year old that she once was. She may even want him back. The affair came to an end suddenly, when Ray ran away in guilt and confusion after taking her away to a small hotel and she was left to face the court case alone when he was prosecuted, and be made to re-evaluate what she had felt was love in front of a psychologist. She has carried her pain with her for a long time and there is only one place where she has a chance of dumping it and moving on. Ray is a frightened and broken man, afraid of what he might hear and terrified about what might come next. Neither of them are strong enough to prevent more confusion and indecision stirring up strong feelings and resentments which have been hidden under the surface of their lives. There are no rights or wrongs here, and no neat endings for me to spoil, just two confused, flawed, deeply unhappy people locked into the past and trying to make sense of what happened to them.

If this is the subject matter you choose you had better be able to write an extraordinary play and David Harrower has come pretty close to doing that. It won an Olivier award in 2007 and it is easy to see why. The dialogue is masterly, naturalistic and heartfelt, and avoids cliché, not easy when you have dialogue as highly charged as this. The dialogue carries almost the whole weight of the structure of the play, as there is little but words to take us through the shifts of power between the two characters and define the peaks and troughs of the narrative. It is a great opportunity for two actors to show what they can do, and Janine Hales as Una and Peter McQueen as Ray rise to the challenge well. They both give truthful understated performances which allow the play to do its work and they are also well able to let the emotion and the anger rip when it is needed.

David Harrower is insistent that Oleanna is not an influence on this play, but it is hard not to be reminded of David Mamet’s powerful and emotional two hander as you leave. There is one big difference. Oleanna sends you out onto the street ready to argue a case and potentially angry with those who take an opposite view. Blackbird sends you out of the theatre knowing that in life there are no easy answers and that right and wrong are sometimes difficult to define and too easy to pontificate about. This makes it a more truthful play, and I would suggest a greater one.

I am writing this after an act of remembrance in our little town centre. It was a large turn out this year, perhaps because Afghanistan and those in danger there were at the forefront of peoples minds. Filey is a retirement town and many of those around the memorial gardens also had memories of other wars. There has only been one year since the end of the second world war when no British lives were lost in conflict. I also have a long memory, even though I am a bit younger than many of those who were there this morning, and this is why I will be back there in a few days time to commemorate armistice day, the day when the biggest slaughter of a generation of men that has ever been seen finally stopped. Great efforts were made to mark the passing of each of the men who died, whether at the front or afterwards on one of the war memorials which scatter our towns and villages, but this did not prevent Wilfred Owen’s words being horribly true. “What passing bells for those who die as cattle?” I stand there each year and think of him.

When I was a child the elderly men who stood around the memorial in my village were those who had come through that carnage. My grandfather was one of them. Each armistice day (and that is most definitely what it was for them) he would shine his boots and his medals (discs to make eyes close, Owen said) and put on his best black coat and hat. The old Haig Fund poppies came in pairs in those days, they had silk petals and foil stems, delicate and pretty. Each year a new one would be bought and kept pristine for the day itself. His friends would arrive at our house and they would sit together sharing memories, all ready in good time because the thought of being late was intolerable. It was the only time that there was any talk of the first world war in our house, even though a huge black and white photo of my grandfather and his comrades had pride of place in the front room, along with an engraved artillery shell. Nobody went into that room for the first time without that shell being pointed out. He claimed that he had stolen it from a German officer and I believe him. He only went abroad once in his life and that was to fight on the Western front, looking after the horses in his Royal Artillery battalion who worked alongside the men and died in their tens of thousands. What their suffering must have done to a dedicated horseman I can only guess. He never spoke about it and being young and foolish I never asked.

The act of remembrance itself has changed little since then. Today the vicars surplice still flapped in the wind, the legion flags were dipped, the words of remembrance were spoken and the trumpeter played The Last Post and Reveille under a clear blue sky. It was a heartfelt and romantic scene, as far removed from the chaos and suffering of war as could be imagined, perhaps an attempt to make sense of something which is essentially wasteful, tragic, and senseless. Those touched personally by the sufferings of war have to fight to believe that there is a meaning in their suffering in order to carry on.

We used to sing a beautiful old hymn, O Valiant Hearts:

“O valiant hearts who to your glory came
Through dust of conflict and through battle flame;
Tranquil you lie, your knightly virtue proved,
Your memory hallowed in the land you loved.”

Somehow I managed to believe that sentiment alongside Owens bitter and more truthful version, when he calls “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” (it is sweet and right to die for your country) “the old lie.” I did this for my grandfather’s sake, and I still do. He spent the rest of his life remembering his one trip abroad and as long as I am here I shall stand in his place each Armistice day even if it is Owen’s words rather than the comforting sentiment of a hymn in my heart. He would want me to.

This was our book group choice for this month and it was disappointing. It was badly written and one dimensional and given the subject matter this isn’t something it could get away with easily. It needed some emotion and some heart. The lead character was a vaccuum who I found it very difficult to know and sympathise with, and the photographer who she was researching never came to life for me. The dialogue and sentence structure were particularly awkward and there was a dry distant feel to the narrative voice. Too often I felt that I was being told things rather than shown them, whether it was the characters feelings or aspects of the plot. It isn’t enough, for example, to be told that the photographer had talent and list his pictures- you need to explain why. I have a feeling the prints were included in the book to make up for this lack. The whole book was a set up for the final pages and it wasn’t worth it- I just didn’t care enough.