Colour VE Day
by Keith Wait
A commemoration of VE Day 75: 8th May 2020
The sky, precious platinum mirror,
Silvers itself,
Reflects today’s sun, not fire of waging war,
Runs red as brother’s blood in ‘45
VE day
Early May
Not yet light, white rubble dust covers Rheims
A grim General puts pen to paper
Black on white
The sky’s leaden canopy shatters.
From a gold and white palace, two figures,
A future queen runs amongst the soldiers
They too are in khaki and olive drab
And walk down Whitehall with cheering crowds.
Men in grey trilbies, women in dowdy brown.
Now silk headscarves and contraband nylons
Once hidden in mahogany cupboards
Grace their cheering heads, red lips, dancing legs.
The shining black of Watney’s stout foams free
In Victoria’s pubs, while in Mayfair
Vintage Veuve Clicquot labelled in orange
Secreted in cellars, dark since ‘39
Spurts sparkling silver to the evening sky.
As searchlights become spotlights for the King
A steadfast symbol to the crowds below.
Despots love their colours.
The Corsican corporal’s pompous pride, bright blue,
The Munich beer hall bully, scarlet, black,
The Brussels bureaucrat a stealthy grey
Suffocating Europe with their colours
As their empires grow.
2020 vision sees no colour
To its silent despot, unseen and new.
Electron microscope, not eyes, can scan
Its colourless invisibility.
VE arc-lights, fire watch, needed colour
To see the coming enemy approach
However pale. No Enigma machine
Decodes our invisible enigma,
Suffocating lungs of prince and pauper,
Pulmonary pestilence.
But today’s the day to wave the rainbow,
Fly the flag, red, white and blue.
Remember loved ones lost
For freedom.
Wars continue, then as now, but today
Colour it bright,
Thank God,
And shout
“VE Day”,
Hurray,
The platinum mirror to all our past
When Europe was freed, and … in peace … was coloured.
Keith Wait
May 2020
Photography by Francis Coles
Relentless, Ruthless, Riveting
Grenade Genie
by Thomas McColl
Review by Heather Moulson
The second collection from innovative poet, Thomas McColl, Grenade Genie takes us on a surreal journey into four profound sections, with an abundance of intelligent and humorous observations from his twenty-five poems. There are also deep black connotations, and he is ruthless with his words: truly relentless but far from unwelcome, and very compulsive. He takes us straight through to the first section headed Cursed.
This intriguing roadway gives us the surreal, yet sympathetic, branch terrorism of No Longer Quite So Sure. A bus ride will never be the same. Followed by The Evil Eye, a father’s chilling advice to his son about Social Media, the desperate and gripping Carry My Eyes, and the contemporary horror of The Bunker highlights the real risks and vulnerability of a tower block.
The Greatest Poem, with references and paranoid comparisons to TS Eliot, is laugh out loud material. Followed by the disturbing Grenade Genie, the title poem.
We leave that section and take a right into the next road which is Coerced. The self-doubting, bordering on paranoid Security Pass. Joined by Jackpot and Invisible Twin, full of innovative strong notions, Nightclubbing in Brum 1988 tells us a beautifully spaced and human story.
The situation remains human as we leave that section with Jan, Jen or Jean. Sharing the writer’s sheer discomfort, making us anxious to move on quickly!
We drive into the strong heading of Combative, and are welcomed by the wonderful, intelligent and witty Shopping with Perseus. An original take on the fashion victim involving the Greek Myth hero.
Common observations, things we don’t mean to ignore, are lit up by Socialist Workers on Oxford Street. Quite certain I will never take that endless street for granted again.
Then we are embraced with one of the highlights of the collection Statement by the Pedestrian Liberation Organisation. Wonderful wit, terror and vivid observations.
The Phoney War is tender, frightening and ends heart-wrenchingly. The image of the sobbing grandmother at the stove will stay with us.
Our journey takes us on to the last section, Corrupted, no less enticing than the other three chapters. Just One Comma Away is clever with meaning and punctuation, and Said Contents is true and sinister. Hooked is very chilling, but the last thing it leaves us is cold.
The Surgery I Go to Has a Two Headed Doctor is simply a great work of black humour. It is an enjoyable read, as it is with the First Kiss, despite its discomfort. However, Thomas McColl never promised us a smooth ride.
The climax of Literal Library is extraordinarily surreal, and profound. And like all of this collection, acute.
These poems travel flawlessly from the witty to the terrifying. Well worth the bus fare!
Can I go round again please?
Heather Moulson
May 2020
Grenade Genie
by Thomas McColl
Fly on the Wall Press, £8.99, 80 pp
ISBN 978-1-913211-13-4
Photography by BarnImages (© CC 2.0, Underground Bunker) and Christa Neu
Through the Gates of the Senses
The Smell of Purple
by Dónall Dempsey
Review by Heather Moulson
The latest collection from vibrant and prolific poet, Dónall Dempsey, gives us a hundred pages of insight into an emotional wallet of fatherhood. Yet it goes further than that, as we live our experiences through Tilly, the small child at the centre of this book’s core, and the poet’s ‘makeshift’ fatherhood. The sheer love for this magical child comes through strongly, but it’s never overtly sentimental. We are simply presented with human nature. These words are emotional Polaroids, with all their faded colours. Dónall sets off a daisy-chain of haiku’s growing organically into poems and vice versa.
Nothing gets away unscathed and no stone is left unturned, with dolls being repaired, a father shaving, crayoned houses, an ice cube melting. Things we’ve tended to ignore or forget rise up and greet us again. For instance, the line of a rag doll weeping in Sticks makes uncomfortable but not unwelcome reading. The memory of being scared of a Jack-in-the-box makes us face our own childhood bêtes noires. It’s these references that turn this collection of poems into the strong and vivid picture it is.
We go on a detailed journey from Becoming Tilly, sharing the wonder of this child coming into the world, to real life. In tangible love in And the Sun Always Shines Magenta, Dónall takes on so many elements of nature, yet never once does this overshadow his devotion to Tilly. Being Adam in the Garden of Eden gives us such loving detail of animals and the magic of a farm.
Many Children Ago makes one misty-eyed sharing the sadness of a broken forgotten doll, while in Many Remembers Ago we are with Tilly from the child to a young woman – “her hand fallen from mine” would resound with the most hardened observers.
Makeshift Daddy cleverly unravels Tilly’s story. And we are swept along with the simplicity of As Above So Below, explaining the stars and moon to a child. The Rain’s Language makes slick reading, with a fascinating footnote. The witty haiku Weather Forecast, and the sheer painfulness of trying to dress a small child in Girl Squirrel resonate more than we’d like.
More Tea with Aunt Mabel borders on sitting room farce, and Granny gets involved too with Being Little, one of the elements that make these recollections far from insular.
There are poignant moments in Cuddle, taking Tilly to see her real Dad’s gravestone. And her interpretation of the father she will never know.
Tilly’s relationship with the cat – talking about cat things (Girl Talk) and that “Cats is people too!” (En Lakech!) – is warming, along with the intimacy of Ponds cream and contact lenses, that a family captures in Mummy Dyes Her Eyes.
Being Tilly opens such a picture of childhood, but it is not painted as idyllic. Despite wording these things so succinctly, our feet are kept on the ground. Word Bags and the Smell of Light are astonishingly vivid. These are things that seem obvious, and yet they’re not. And the wonderfully titled Stew of Déjà-vu was a stunning highlight.
A Fairy Tale of Rain is an image of soaked little girls metamorphosing into disdainful and embarrassed teenagers. Box of Memories – the grown girl now young woman who weeps over Tilly’s memories box. The observer wants to comfort her too.
If Paradise is Half as Nice is the sheer realisation that the little girl has actually grown up – a gradual dawning for most parents.
The last poem, Now I Hold You, travels from holding the newborn to comforting the heartbroken teenager. This cleverly comes full circle.
Such an insight into a father’s deep love. Thank you Dónall for taking us through these gates.
Heather Moulson
May 2020
The Smell of Purple
by Donall Dempsey
VOLE Books, £10, 107 pp
ISBN 978-1-913329-07-5
Photography by Dempsey Windle, Neal Obstat and David Kanigan
Lies, Damned Lies and Rumours
Mozart and Salieri, a Whodunit
Reflection by Mark Aspen
Michelangelo killed to gain the commission to paint the Sistine Chapel. Was this just an idle rumour? Some whispers at the Vatican at the time thought not.
The current global contagion has proved a breeding ground for idle (and not so idle) rumours that are spreading faster than Coronavirus itself. Some of the more ludicrous come from the whisper machines (“It is caused by 5G wireless networks.”), to what we should expect to be authoritarian sources (“Could we try injecting Dettol?”). A quick trawl of YouTube will yield dozens of conspiracy theories that could easily take in the more gullible.
These thoughts made me recall seeing, quite a few years ago, a short opera at Covent Garden, a production in the quirky old Linbury Studio in the basement of the Garden, long before the new posh state-of-the-art theatre opened in January last year. It was Rimsky-Korsakov’s Mozart and Salieri, which was a beautifully performed and strikingly staged piece of theatre.
The libretto of Mozart and Salieri is based on a rumour that Antonio Salieri poisoned the younger Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart because of artistic rivalry, a rumour that was still doing the rounds over a century after Mozart’s death, when the opera premiered in the soon to be demolished Solodovnikov Theatre in Moscow early in December 1898. Set in Vienna, where Salieri basks in his acclaim as a composer, it is apart from a dumb and blind fiddler, a two-hander. Along comes the upstart Mozart, whom he sees as idle, but secretly he jealously admires Mozart’s work. At the end of the first scene of this one act opera, Salieri plans to poison Mozart and he invites him out to dinner. The second scene takes place at the inn where they have dinner. Mozart is, not atypically, agitated. He had been commissioned by a mysterious masked figure, clad in black, to write a requiem. Mozart knows that Salieri has been working on his opera Tarare with the polymath playwright Pierre Beaumarchais as his librettist. He believes (correctly in fact) that Beaumarchais is involved in espionage and all that went with it at the time, and asks if the rumour is true that Beaumarchais once assassinated someone with poison. Mozart is reassured that genius and murder do not go together, even as Salieri drips a potion into Mozart’s drink. As Mozart plays some of his Requiem on a harpsichord, Salieri weeps. Mozart starts to feel unwell and leaves the room, whilst Salieri recalls the rumours about Michelangelo. A genius can’t commit a crime, or can he?
Now, hold on a minute; doesn’t this plot all seem rather familiar? Many readers of Mark Aspen Reviews will have seen Peter Shaffer’s 1979 play, Amadeus, or at least Miloš Forman’s film, which followed five years later, and played even faster and looser with the facts than 
the stage version. A recent production by Teddington Theatre Club was described in these pages as “sensitive and revealing”. The basics of the plot are the same as Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera, but in both stage and film versions Peter Shaffer tells the story from Salieri’s perspective, recalled three decades later from his demented death-bed. There is a larger cast than the opera, including the Viennese court and the women in their lives, more details that allow more intrigues of sexual and power-play. Both versions again play fast and loose with the facts and, although (rightly) receiving wide critical acclaim for their artistic excellence, both attracted the venom of historians and musicologists for succeeding in shredding the reputations of both Salieri and, to a much lesser extent, Mozart.
Where then did this, some might say libellous, twist come from, to be legitimised in theatrical works? The answer is from someone whom many consider to be the greatest Russian poet and playwright, Alexander Pushkin. Mozart and Salieri is his short verse drama, written in 1830, thirty years after Mozart’s death and merely five years after Salieri’s.
Pushkin’s Mozart and Salieri is clearly the prototype for Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera. The plot is almost identical and it has 
the same economy of characters. In the original play however the blind fiddler appears in the first Scene and Mozart invites him into the room. The fiddler plays a poor rendition of voi che sapete, Cherubino’s aria from Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro. It seems even a lowly busker knows Mozart’s works. Already though in a soliloquy before Mozart had arrived, Salieri has admitted to himself, “I am an envier. I envy; sorely. Profoundly now I envy.” Mozart is presented by Pushkin as much more equitable. Mozart says of Beaumarchais, “He was a genius, like you and me. While genius and evildoing are incompatibles. Is that not right?” immediately before drinking the poison.
These portrayals of Salieri, and by Shaffer, of Mozart are factual proven to be unfair and blatantly untrue. Contemporary documentary account show that, while there was some good-natured rivalry between them, Mozart and Salieri’s relationship was one of mutual respect and cooperation. Salieri often conducted Mozart’s work and was a music tutor to Mozart’s son, Franz. One authority has noted that “it may prove difficult to dissuade the public from the current Schafferian view of the composer as a divinely gifted drunken lout, pursued by a vengeful Salieri”. The chief music critic of the Sunday Times, speaking after the launch of the film railed against “myth-mongering”, baulking at the portrayal of Mozart as “two contradictory beings, sublime artist and fool”. Other factual distortions in Shaffer’s version is that Salieri was not celibate; quite to the contrary, he was married, had eight children and probably two or three mistresses. Moreover, Mozart’s Requiem Mass, in fact unfinished, was commissioned by Count Franz von Walsegg, not by an agent of Salieri disguised as the spirit of Mozart’s father Leopold.
Take a look at the portrait of Salieri by Joseph Mähler. You will see the face of a modestly proud and kindly man, not a jealous monster. Equally, Johann della Croce’s famous portrait of Mozart shows a calm and intelligent face, not a petulant brat.
Why then the misinformation spawned by Pushkin and spilling over to Rimsky-Korsakov and Shaffer? I think the answer lies in the Russian political climate at the time. Pushkin’s plays were not performed contemporaneously in Russia. Even his famous Boris Godunov had to wait forty-one years to escape the clutches of the Tzar’s censors. Why? Because it was critical of an earlier Russian ruler, Boris Godunov. Written as the new Emperor Nicholas I came to the throne amid mutiny and civil unrest, it was not in the spirit of that time. Nicholas’s autocratic reign brooked no dissent. Mozart and Salieri is believed to the only one of Pushkin’s plays that was staged during the author’s lifetime. It is an allegory on the danger of unchecked rumour mongering. The doctrine of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy and Nationality” was imposed on Russia to counter the bubbling unrest in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, in a time of uncertainty, a time when rumours and “fake news” abounded.
In the final words of Mozart and Salieri, Pushkin has Salieri asking, “And [Michelangelo] Buonarotti? … Or is it a legend off the dull-witted, senseless crowd?”
In a time of uncertainty, poisoning, be it by human agency or that of a virus, seems to create rumours. It this is so, Mozart and Salieri is currently very pertinent.
Mozart and Salieri was published in 1832 as one of Pushkin’s four short plays called The Little Tragedies. Uncannily, another prescient play in this mini-anthology has the title Пир во время чумы, A Feast in Time of Plague. Now, there’s another thought for reflection … …
Mark Aspen
April 2020
Photography by Sarah Carter and Clive Barda
Images by Joseph Willibrord Mähler, Johann Nepomuk della Croce and jszm
Hold What Distance His Wisdom Can Provide
Shakespeare’s Lockdown Birthday
A retrospective by Thomas Forsythe
As the sun warms a hot spring day, we can escape the shackles of pestilence, at least culturally and within in our own mind, to enjoy this most English of days, St George’s Day. Of course in the English mind 23rd April, apart from being our patron saint’s day is also the day we celebrate our supernal of poets and playwrights, William Shakespeare, who was born (Happy Birthday, William!) 456 years ago today. Well, er, we know he was christened three days later, but in 1564 baptism was an urgent matter, for in that year an outbreak of the plague killed a quarter of Stratford-upon-Avon’s population. Now we are able to sympathise at first hand with those times as the plague seems all too real. Pestilence of one sort or another was to dog England throughout all of Shakespeare’s life, right up to the year he died, 404 years ago in 1616, co-incidentally also on 23rd April.
So Shakespeare knew the frustrations of lockdown. But what did he do? A widespread contagion in 1592-93 closed London’s theatres, which could have been disastrous to an already famous playwright. However, he had a quite lucrative side-line in love poetry and his most famous, apart from early sonnets, written during this time was the long poem Venus and Adonis. During the first two decades of the seventeen century, all London theatres, including the Globe, were closed in total for 78 months. One year of lockdown in 1606 produced some of the later poems and the texts of King Lear, Antony and Cleopatra and Macbeth. So, lockdown can have beneficial effects!
In my own lockdown, and noting that Shakespeare’ longest lockdown period was 25 months, I have taken a look at Mark Aspen Reviews, wondering how many over the same period of time have mentioned Shakespeare. I was staggered to discover that 52 reviews have mentioned Shakespeare! Of these, fourteen are directly or indirectly by Shakespeare. “Indirectly” includes two operas and three adaptations.
A year ago, Benedick’s “giddy thing” Much Ado about Nothing at The Rose, set in a five-star hotel in Scilly, brilliantly involved both the Mafiosi and a mad cow; whereas Richmond Shakespeare Society set the same play to the background of the suffragette movement in its Twickenham open-air production last summer, almost concurrently with Shakespeare Wanderers’ “effortless” open-air Bloomsbury production, set under khaki bell-tents between the Wars.
Shakespeare is nothing if not versatile.
The Winter’s Tale green-eyed monster has come a-roaring out of his den three times. Teddington Theatre Club’s January 2019 Regency setting with Neelaksh Sadhoo’s “genuinely tormented” Leontes, contrasted with Helikon Theatre Company’s adaptation. Presented at the OSO in Barnes in March last year, this presciently foreshadowed events twelve months on, with Hermione’s adultery trial taking place by video conference. Zooming (as it were) back to another adaptation in August 2018, the Youth Music Theatre UK’s “West End worthy” musical version at The Rose Theatre moved from conflict to “heart-warming magic” as the statue returned to life.
Shakespeare is nowadays considered to be very malleable by plenty of innovative directors, but, as examples of bending it without breaking it, was the Bedouin Shakespeare Company’s The Merchant of Venice. This came to the Duke of York’s in October 2018, via the Globe in Rome, and wove in music, clowning, and physical comedy. Last autumn, Richmond Shakespeare Society’s Hamlet cross-casted … well just about everybody, while YAT’s Romeo and Juliet had the Capulets running a car repairers, both plays running with great success.
For some unfathomable reason, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems to be put on even before spring comes. Katie Abbott’s thematically overextended adaptation, Dream, produced by the RSS Young Actors’ Company this February was “a visual delight” with its teenage cast “giving their all”. Two years ago Questors’ equally “colourful and highly imaginative” version in the Judi Dench Playhouse in Ealing was described as “a night not to be missed”. Also in March 2018, English National Opera’s production of Benjamin Britten’s “feast for the eyes” gave an “otherworldly and magical” experience.
Of course opera does add another dimension to Shakespeare, a point thoroughly understood by an octogenarian Giuseppe Verdi when writing Falstaff, his long awaited first comic opera based mainly on The Merry Wives of Windsor. The Grange Festival’s “priceless production” in June last year was “blustering, big, boisterous and brilliant”. As Falstaff, bass-baritone Robert Hayward was “outstanding in all senses”. Of all the Shakespeare interpretations of the last two years, Falstaff was a winner. Mark Aspen’s verdict was “If you only go to one country-house opera this summer, this must be it!”
Sadly, this year there is to be no Grange Festival, no Shakespeare, no live theatre, and even if we see a friend we must, to quote from Macbeth “advise him to a caution, to hold what distance his wisdom can provide”. However, if in our mind’s eye we see William Shakespeare in these pestilent times, we can, from our two metre social distance, call out, “Happy Birthday!” The Bard will understand.
Thomas Forsythe
April 2020
Photography by Mark Douet, Chris Marchant, Simone Best, Sarah J. Carter, Sally Tunbill, Jojo Leppink, Tom Shore, Robert Workman and Clive Barda
The True Pain of Tragic Loss
Car Crash
by James Joseph Hunter
Critique by Quentin Weiver
Statistics! We get a lot of statistics at present. It’s almost like a scoreboard, various universities’ analysis how the growing deaths, country by country. It can get too easy to forget that these numbers represent real people, with real lives, with real loved ones. It is also perhaps too uncomfortable to ponder how awful and painful each of those deaths are, for those left behind, and for that person-statistic the process of such a death.
In mid-March, just as the impact of coronavirus was beginning to make its evil presence felt, I was privilege to see a production at the Exchange Theatre in Twickenham that was to be the last theatre event locally before the lockdown. The Young Writers’ Festival 2020 was a showcase of some of the best pieces of literary work by child and teenage authors, all still school pupils.
This year’s Senior Laureate, drawn from the winners in all categories was James Joseph Hunter, a sixth-former at St. Benedict’s School, Ealing, a school in fact renowned for its literary and dramatic prowess. His vers libre poem, Car Crash has kept returning to my mind in the past few weeks as I think about COVID-19, maybe in the light of my own painful experience of trying to breathe with pneumonia. The lines that seem particularly relevant occur in the middle of the poem.
“I call out to the silent air, to pall me in darkness,
In thick, numbing fog – to constrict me in its coils ‘til
I can’t think, can’t breathe. But life weighs heavily on
My lungs, shackles me like its prisoner.”
Perhaps this is what it is like to die of COVID-19, I muse.
Although this poem, written towards the end of last year, seems prescient, it in fact refers to a death caused by serve chest injuries, to the driver of a car. James Hunter’s poem is full of insight, but what it represents probably took a lot of courage to write, as he has let slip that the poem relates to the true experiences of two people close to him.
Ostensibly written in as one voice, closer examination reveals that there are two people involved, but symbolically one of these may speak in the first or third person. Indeed, the acting company at the Exchange dramatised the poem for an actor, speaking in first and third person, as the dying driver, and an actress, who plays the pain-wracked passenger.
For the passenger, though, as much pain comes from the memory of the accident, as from the crash itself. The sound “still / Roars in my ears and dances in the corners of my mind“, “fervid grief” recalling “the tarmac / Of the motorway scraping against my back.”
The descriptions though of the crash and the effects of the paramedics’ morphine are gut-wrenchingly explicit. Blood tastes “sharp on the tongue”, knotted brains are “stuffed with cotton”, with the morphine “memory is melted … like honey”. The phrases are beautiful in their horror.
Car Crash is a memorable poem, candid in its exposition, skilled in its expression and brave in its sharing.
Quentin Weiver
April 2020
Photography by J.L McPortach
Car Crash
Deafening crash and all is silent momentarily as
His head lolls lifelessly to one side.
A face contorted with fervid grief is screaming, screaming his name,
But his eyes dart around, his mouth opens
Wide to scream, all his words are blood.
The taste is sharp on his tongue, but his brain is
Dull, stuffed with cotton.
Then the pain pierces through, intense and
Nauseating, and the knots of his brain, my brain unravel…
I call out to the silent air, to pall me in darkness,
In thick, numbing fog- to constrict me in its coils ‘til
I can’t think, can’t breathe. But life weighs heavily on
My lungs, shackles me like its prisoner.
They brace me, strap me- inject the miracle boy to
Halt the truck that ploughs through my dreams, to
Dull my nerves that shriek at every sound.
Until the memory is melted, softened and
Flows like honey to fill up the crater in
The car – to sweeten the taste of blood.
But the sound of forty tonnes of tanker, still
Roars in my ears and dances in the corners of my mind.
And every time I lie down on my bed, I feel the tarmac
Of the motorway scraping against my back.
James Joseph Hunter
2019
Poem reproduced by kind permission of Arts Richmond
The Future Speaks
Requiem
by Simone de Almeida
an appreciation by Matthew Grierson
Though our attention is now rightly focused on one clear and present crisis, other global emergencies remain ongoing – and the poem Requiem by twelve-year-old Simone de Almeida, a prize-winner in Arts Richmond’s Young Writers competition, is a salutary reminder of the changing climate.
It’s a poem that contrasts big abstracts – ‘fragmentary quandaries’ – with urgent particulars – ‘ice melting’, but which still manages to turn an image of despair into one of hope with the suggestion of frozen hearts warming together. In the connection they make before ‘falling apart’, it even finds an unexpected resonance in the lockdown, when environmental activists are having to take to their keyboards rather than the streets to get their message out.
The grown-up world of ‘desires’, ‘promises’ and ‘smiles’ is seen through as ‘counterfeit’, and shown simply as a children’s pastime, ‘Hide and seek’. The narrator is therefore able to turn dismissive accusations back on the accuser, pithily responding with ‘We are the future/But you cannot perceive it yet’ in contrast to the clear-sightedness of the young.
She also demonstrates an eye for the paradoxes and hypocrisies of political cant, finding grim irony in ‘Losing sanity,/To find yourself’, and skewering talk of ‘The last time – / Though we’ve heard it countless times’. When the adults can’t tell you ‘we’ll be fine – / In the darkness of [their] silence’, the generation to come must have their say – as this poem does.
Matthew Grierson
April 2020
Photography by Joe Stockwell and Victor Walker
Requiem
by Simone de Almeida
On the edge of insanity-
Blind to the fragmentary quandaries,
Ice melting;
Yet we heat our frozen hearts-
Connected yet we fall apart.
Materialistic desires,
Empty promises and counterfeit smiles.
Hide and seek,
In the game of your lies.
Naïve, is that so?
Incompetent and inept?
We are the future-
But you cannot perceive it yet.
Losing sanity,
To find yourself.
As ever, disregard:
The history book on the shelf.
The last time –
Though we’ve heard it countless times.
Say we’ll be fine –
In the darkness of your silence.
Simone de Almeida
The Paparazzi of the Mind
March
by Lilla Radeck
Critique by Quentin Weiver
Life sometimes breaks in on us, kicks the door down and, like inquisitive paparazzi, threatens to reveal something of us, of our intimate self, to … to whom? … those who affect our lives, to the world… to ourselves?
Lilla Radeck’s March is a prose poem that packs some punch. It is a remarkable piece of work. It is remarkable for its style, its author, and its prescience.
It is prescient in that, although it was written on a dull November’s day last year, it relates to the events, or rather non-events, of 3rd and 4th March. Written in the first person, but clearly referring to the first person narrator, it tells of a girl confined to one room. These were the days when the coronavirus pandemic was concentrated in China, over 80,000 confirmed cases there, whereas the 750 case on the Diamond Princess cruise ship was more that the totals in France, Germany and Spain combined. But two weeks later in the UK, schools were forced to shut and the current “lockdown” measures began.
The protagonist in March is confined, not by the advent of a deadly virus, but by the presence of an equally deadly affliction, depression, but one that, although usually catalysed by events, is self-inflicted. The girl in March is struggling to find the motivation to get out of bed.
Stop! Before you switch off, thinking all I need in these troubled times is a polemic about depression, let me reassure you that here is a piece that ends with burgeoning hope. Therefore I would count this as a piece for our time, when we need to see the light at the end of … whatever the coming months might bring.
March is remarkable in that its author, Lilla Radeck, is a young lady in her mid-teens from Richmond. Her piece is one of two dozen shortlisted for the Arts Richmond’s Young Writers’ Festival 2020, which in mid-March showcased some of the best pieces of literary work by authors of school age in a professional presentation at the Exchange Theatre in Twickenham that proved to be the last theatre event locally before the lockdown.
Radeck’s remarkable style in writing this piece is in its oneiric approach, the realities of waking life intruding into the shelter of sleep, the articulated buzz of the alarm clock, or the inspired intrusion of the “click, zoom” of surreal cameras. The acting company at the Exchange chose to dramatise this as a sinister pair of paparazzi, who manifest themselves in the bedroom of the girl (played by Lauren Anthony) or rather in her mind. This inspired model of directing by Keith Wait gave the whole presentation a film noir feel. The paparazzi lunge and stab with their cameras, as the girl tries to retreat from the harassments of real life into the comfort of her dishevelled bed.
Of course, this presentation picks up Radeck’s portrayal of the scene in her prose poem, where the description of neglected hygiene and hopelessness is, in all its brutal directness, Tracey Emin meets Otto Dix. However, the use of sibilant syllables and fleeting alterations contrast the sense of the girl’s withdrawal from the realities of life.
There is the packaging of the piece in diary-like sections which are hinted at in the two halves entitled March 3rd and March 4th. The second day however brings a nadir in the girl’s self-regard as she imagines “why someone would bother to inconvenience themselves for … garbage”. Moreover, when we later find out that she had been contemplating “the iron-clad comfort of eternal rest”, it brings the reader up with at start.
The suddenly, light breaks through the gloom. “You can’t sit here all day”, a voice tells her. “You need to go out and live your life”. Reading this piece, with its beautifully bared insight, one almost jumps with joy as “the leaden covers are thrown back…”.
What wonderful optimism pierces the darkness! A great parable for these troubled times.
Quentin Weiver
April 2020
Photography by Terry Richardson and Tamara Sellman
March
by Lilla Radeck
March 3rd
Pallid sunlight reaches through a half-open window; it freezes, grasping coldly, then falls behind thick curtains.
Click, zoom.
A dreary, viscous pair of camera lens focus and un-focus, fluttering, mechanical.
Click, zoom.
A girl breathes.
Click, zoom.
And then – awakening.
Patterned sheets fly across the breadth of an aging bed, caught in a frantic flurry of effort powered by frustration; a mess of limbs jumps forward, extends-
and falls back down again.
It’s cold, the girl murmurs, a sudden breeze passing by in lieu of any confirmation and she shivers, pulling the comfortingly twisted duvet closer around paper skin.
Her auburn hair snakes along the linen, touching the skewed pillow, the stained cotton, the overhanging layers – it doesn’t leave a single trace.
It’s cold, she repeats.
She sits up – not so much a graceful, swan-like gesture but a dull, automatic jump-start – and falls back down again.
I’m okay, she whispers to no one.
I’m just…tired.
She clumsily reaches for glasses, glasses that haven’t have been cleaned in days, glasses that are scarred with stains of tears and food and the occasional fleck of blood and equips them, a shield against the coming day.
It’s hard to move, she notes and, like every day, the comforting sheets melt into lead.
It’s cold.
I want to sleep forever…
March 4th
BZZZ!
BZZZ!
Camera lenses flicker to life again and focus on that stain on the ceiling the girl said she’d clean.
She moves the overgrown hair she said she’d cut to the side and half-heartedly grasps the dying alarm clock she said she’d replace.
It’s cold, she notes, and though the window is closed this morning, it doesn’t feel that way.
I won’t be missed, she tells herself, ignoring the soft buzz of her phone in the corner of the room.
It’s fine.
They’ll understand – sooner or later.
She knows that eventually someone will come to check on her and pull her out of bed because that someone came yesterday and tomorrow, and all she can do is shrug and say, What’s the point? because she can’t imagine why someone would bother to inconvenience themselves for garbage.
And yet at the same time, through all the what’s the points and why go through the same motions every days, the girl can’t help but feel guilty about lying there, doing nothing and being nothing.
She thinks of what that person would say to her, sighing.
You have things to do.
You can’t sit here all day.
The girl recalls plans she has made for the day, plans that would remind her of something that wasn’t the iron-clad comfort of eternal rest and decides on something.
“Let’s begin our daily routine.” she tells someone, herself, and it feels real because it is and for once she feels real because she is.
You need to go out and live your life.
In one final, desperate attempt, the leaden covers are thrown back…
and she gets out of bed.
Lilla Radeck
November 2019
No Squeak in the Nub
Waiting for Godot, the Silence
Nocturnal Productions at the Passin Theatre until 1st April
Review by Avril Sunisa
How could one have imagined, when reviewing Nocturnal Productions’ annual outing this time last year, the extent that the whole world would have changed in a few brief weeks leading up to the company’s unveiling of its Waiting for Godot, the Musical.
Last year’s premiere of Waiting for Dawn, Nocturnal Productions inaugural masterpiece of hypo-minimalistic theatre, left the audience gasping with vacancy. On that memorable occasion, finding myself part of this specially invited audience at the ephemeral non-venue specific nocturnal production, I was utterly transfixed. The forgone feeling at the end of a night filled with anticipation left me hungry to see what Nocturnal Productions’ 2020 offering would lack.
Alas; the social distancing rules, which have brought down an early curtain on the theatre season everywhere, have meant that Waiting for Godot, the Musical has not been able to be created in its all its intended postposterogenus glory.
However, fortunately for the aficionado, the theatrical conceit on which Nocturnal Productions whole philosophy is built, lends itself, in all its scarcity, to social distancing. The tenet behind the company’s genius is that the performance should not take place in a fixed acting space, be uncluttered by the physical encumbrances of traditional theatre, and that it should take place before sunrise, as its magic evaporates at noon.
Since so much rehearsal for the musical had taken place, it had been decided that a cut-down version would be presented, Waiting for Godot, the Silence.
It would be an act of lese-majesty to reveal the exact location of the Passin Theatre, which was only posted to me during the late evening of March’s closing day, hours before the production went up. In fact, it would not be possible, for the set, such as it wasn’t, was not static, moving like a land yacht in the night’s gentle breeze. This is of course entirely in line with Beckett’s description of the setting as “the idea of the lieu vague, a location which should not be particularised”.
Just after midnight, the clouds parted just slightly enough for the crescent moon, waxing towards its first quarter, to almost light the inspired set of designer Boreas Pagoma. One of the new wave of eco-designers who aim to lower the carbon footprint of their creations, Pagoma’s particular skills were obvious in this respect, as he took the ethos of hypo-minimalism to its ultimate conclusion. Returning again this year was Scandinavian lighting designer, Elifrop Pots, whose paraperceptible lighting plots are reputedly inspired by the winter skies of his North Cape home. Another designer celebrated for his energy-saving approach, Pots made full use of his favourite colour, ultra-ultraviolet in his deconstructive lighting design.
Nocturnal Productions, a company renowned for its green credentials, would of course be expected to have a heightened sense of social responsibility in these testing times. To enable social distancing, the audience was kept to a minimum and, in line with government advice, to less than two. From a theatre critic’s point of view, not having the distracting barometer of audience reaction was, I found, refreshingly liberating.
In those moments before the performance opened, I was able to appreciate the skyscape on this just below freezing spring night. I was grateful for the advice of the local council to those currently self-isolating … to count clouds. (I quote, “Clouds can be seen from the garden or through a window. Look for different shapes and patterns and notice how they change over time.”)
Such is the anticipatory frisson just before curtain up on such a landmark piece, the epitome of the mould-breaking perception of hypo-minimalistic theatre. I almost underdosed on adrenaline.
Beckett’s play, voted the “most significant English language play of the 20th century”, was called En attendant Godot at its premiere early in 1953 … in French …. in Paris. Such is the sine qua non enigma of this work, which Nocturnal Productions exploited in burrowing detail.
Director Nemo Knightman has distilled the very quintessence of Beckett’s work in reducing the number of characters. Stripping out the irrelevancies of Estragon, Lucky, Pozzo and The Boy concentrates the dearth of action into one character, Vladimir, Beckett’s “an ineffective man of the world”. This is of course a brilliant condensation of plot and plot-makers, getting to the nub, nay the squeak in the nub, of the play’s transparent message, and thinning its transparency.
Moreover, director and producers have had proper perception of the propriety of social distancing, by this astute presentation of the work. Audience and cast were never closer than two metres, or six foot six in human terms, both of us maintaining ten times that distance for good measure (not the poor measure of those, deprived of a tape-measure, who have erroneously been putting around that 2m = 6 feet). This aurally extending approach, or rather absence of approach, is truly homeopathic.
Enter past master of the thespian art, Cyrus Bender as the hapless Vladimir. Speechless with admiration of his art, we await, our breath held in anticipation, and Bender, true to form responds likewise. What can we say? Or he? This was minimalism taken to new heights, stratospherically depleted.
Bearing in mind that Waiting for Godot, the Silence was originally intended as Waiting for Godot, the Musical , how much true to intent is it to dispense with extraneous music and all that goes with it (musicians for instance, huffing in the woodwind, slobbering in the brass, and scratching at the catgut). Besides, Bender has long since been capable of dance, having suffered a strangulated splitch some years ago. And the singing, initially intended as Sprechgesang, has been relieved of both Sprache and Gesang, much to the enhancement of the purity of the work and the post-penultimate expression in its title.
In the production’s tenebrous setting, the body language of this consummated actor underlined the sheer microscopy of the character’s impetus: Bender more than inhabits the vitiated psyche of Vladimir, a man of magnanimous immobility, while the scale of Bender’s stage presence remains staggering in its imperceptibility. Priceless is a word that percolates up into this reviewer’s mind. There is no vocabulary sufficient to express such a performance.
Right from the very beginning of this portrayal of impotent paucity, the pregnant pause that heralded more, one was wishing it would go on. And indeed it certainly did. We waited hungry for those immortal words that open Act Two, “well, that passed an hour or two … … well, they would have passed anyway”.
Here is an incomparable piece of theatre that will lodge its microtudinous moments in my memory. The phrase, “I have never seen anything like it”, seems overworked. For this reviewer, Waiting for Godot, the Silence is incomparable. The words “like it” are superfluous.
For a production that does what it says on the tin, this musicale manqué delivers. Silence says it all … loudly.
Naturally, one of the advantages of hypo-minimalistic theatre is that it weighs lightly on the soul. Making my way back from this fugitive theatre in the dawning rays, as April came creeping in on the lassitude of this pestilent world, I returned to self-isolation, knowing that from Waiting for Godot, the Silence I took nothing away … but one thing … if only I could remember what it was.
Avril Sunisa
April 2020
Photography by Lisa Erin Brown
What Happened to Poor Mum?
(Spoiler: She went to the theatre.)
A cogitation by Mark Aspen
Mothering Sunday has been a day of celebration ever since the Middle Ages. Here’s the tradition: the fourth Sunday in Lent is the day to go “a-mothering”, which originally meant going back to the church where you were baptised. Since you might well find your own mother there, the idea of Mothering Sunday soon transferred to dear ol’ mum herself. Mothering Sunday is also exactly half-way through Lent, so you can have a break from what you gave up, time for celebration indeed!
Although nowadays usually confused with the American Mothers’ Day (which is mid-May in the United States) and ruthlessly commercialised, we still love this happy day when mothers and motherhood spring to the fore, as Spring itself comes in.
Alas, in 2020 the pestilence of COVID-19 has cast its ominous shadow over poor mum, and many mums, particular the septuagenarian ones have not been celebrated in person.
This led us in Mark Aspen Reviews to cogitate that we have seen so many plays (and operas) over the past twelve months, in which mothers have featured strongly.
So here is a thespian celebration for Mothering Sunday 2020
We start a year ago with My Mother Said I Never Should, which toured throughout March and April last Spring. Grandmother, mother and daughter relationship, so two mothers for the price of one.
In
June, Paula Young played Mrs Beech, a “damaged and dangerous” mother in Edmundians’ Goodnight Mr Tom, a real tear-jerker.
Out into the countryside in June for the Grange Festival’s remarkable production of Handel’s opera Belshazzar. The feisty Nitocris, Belshazzar’s mother, is savagely protective of her son, but what a son!
Opening the autumn season, the Best family have a very busy 115 years of troubles, tribulations and titillations in Questors’ Table. Who come out the strongest? The mums of course.
In A Taste of Honey the mother, Helen, is no sweetie. Even her daughter, Jo thinks of her as a “semi-whore”. “Brash, bold and brassy”, Helen is alas not an ideal role model.
RSS confused traditionalists with its gender-bending Scandi –Noir production of Hamlet. Gertrude, Hamlet’s mother may have been robbed of the role’s ambiguity, but Jane Marcus played it to the hilt.
If you want tragedy laid on with a trowel, Euripides is your playwright. And Women of Troy is as tragic as you can get. In the plush surrounds of the Athenæum Club, the Actors of Dionysus presented some hard-rending depictions of tragic motherhood. Grandmother Queen Hekabe and mother Andromache must part with the baby Prince Astyanax to be killed by the Greeks.
At the end of November Sarah Crowe gave us the “frazzled and hollowed-out” Phoebe, the ultimate put-upon mother, trying to keep a crumbling family together in The Entertainer .
In the New Year, Blood Brothers, has another stretched mother Mrs Johnstone, played by Lynn Paul, in Bill Kenwright’s “somewhat darker” take on the musical.
Another set of heroically tragic mothers were found in The Revlon Girl, a moving account of the 1966 Aberfan disaster.
ENO’s revival of Puccini’s Madam Butterfly, one of opera’s many tragic mothers, “threw the nerves in patterns”, until it was tragically cut short by the shadow of coronavirus and the London Coliseum, as all London theatres closed its doors for the foreseeable future.
Our dramatic mothers this past year are all pretty strong characters, but not one of has had a happy story to tell. In retrospect, for our real mothers, isolated by the novel coronavirus, Mothering Sunday 2020 doesn’t seem so bad.
So, let’s give thanks for mothers. Happy Mothering Sunday!
Mark Aspen
March 2020
Mark Aspen 