All My Sons, by Arthur Miller

The Bacon Theatre is in Cheltenham, in the grounds of a school. It’s a lovely airy building, with comfortable seating, and I’ve seen some fine live shows there. Still, it’s not quite the space where you might expect to find Sally Field, Bill Pulman, Jenna Coleman and Colin Morgan on stage.

These, though, are the days of ‘live recordings’ being broadcast in cinemas and theatres across the country. Some of the top plays, operas and ballets from top theatres are now available in tiny local venues at affordable prices.

I’d be happy to shake the hand of the person who brought this dream to life, because the effect is that I get a best seat in the house. I wish I’d seen more but I’m generally slow off the mark, and those shows sell out fast in the provinces, too. This one was booked by my friend Claire. She’d not tried theatre on the screen before.

‘That was amazing,’ she said, as the lights came up at the end of act I, ‘nothing like I expected. It really is almost like you’re there.’

I nodded. ‘Despite being projected onto a screen.’

‘And this play finished in London, last spring, but it feels as if it’s all happening right now.’ We looked up at the screen, where the National Theatre audience were milling about the auditorium, eating popcorn and ice-creams, chatting and taking photographs. ‘I wonder if they realised they were being filmed…’ said Claire, sipping her cup of tea.

The timer in the corner of the screen counted the seconds down, and I heard the bell by our door being rung, then the light in our auditorium went down, and the on-screen stage began to brighten. In a moment I had slipped back into my place as interloper in the garden outside the Keller’s house, just in time to witness Chris Keller sawing through the trunk of the fallen apple-tree.

It was a beautifully produced and acted production. I believed in all of the characters and nearly everything I saw. I forgot that I was sitting on a cushioned bench and that the talk came from lines that had been learned. I felt joy and pain and fear, and believed in the interior of the house, and that when someone went out of sight they were doing what they said they would.

The only thing that jarred me out of my belief probably says more about me than the production. It was that fallen apple-tree, which was surrounded by apples of at least two varieties.

Half looked like either Red Delicious, or Jonathans, and the others looked like Braeburns or Jonagolds. I tried to ignore it, but at moments when the action centred on the tree I began to speculate. Maybe it had two or three varieties grafted onto its trunk. Since the tree was symbolic, could the mixed apples be of obscure visual significance?

Luckily, before I became fixated on this, Chris and his dad cleared the evidence away. I slipped back into the human action.

An hour or so later, when the curtain calls had been taken, Claire said, ‘I’ve always loved Sally Field, but I never realised she could act like that. Wasn’t it amazing?’

‘It was. They all were.’

‘Yes. How do they do it, night after night?’ said Claire, ‘Not just saying a few lines, picking up laughs. This was emotion, real emotion. You could still see it in their eyes when they took the curtain call.’

Claire’s in a band. I knew she was comparing the way she feels after a gig. We’ve talked a few times about the buzz of being on stage, and how she feels in the hours afterwards.

Do I need to add that if you haven’t tried out ‘live broadcasts’ yet, you should give them a try? Too late, I have.

Advice for fiction writers…

In 2010 Elmore Leonard published a book called, Ten Rules for Writing. Since he had already earned accolades like, ‘the doyen of hardboiled fiction‘ for his novels, short stories and screen-writing, a lot of us took a look.

I’ve liked the list enough to still be recommending it to others. Reduced to a minimal form, as in the illustration on the left, it makes a useful discussion starter.

I assume that Leonard was nodding back to the Golden Age of crime writing. It was in 1928, that the American writer, S.S. Van Dine came up with “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories“. On this side of the Atlantic, in 1929, Ronald Knox compiled Ten Commandments for detective fiction writers. A year later his list became part of the oath sworn by members of the newly formed Detection Club.

Many of those rules were designed to encourage strong plotting, and reduce the use of trick endings. They required the fictional detective to be in a fair competition with the reader.

Later, Raymond Chandler produced his Ten Commandments for The Detective Novel. The words, ‘rules‘, and ‘commandments‘ hold out such promise. If writing is a formula, then all I need do is follow, or apply, the ten points and I’ll soon be writing successful fiction.

Back in 2010, when Leonard’s book was published, The Guardian newspaper decided to ask a collection of well-known writers for their rules. The points they came up with covered a range of styles and ideas that make an interesting supplement to Leonard’s, and they didn’t all produce ten. The are one hundred and thirteen to think about, though.

I’m sharing seven of my favourites – this week:

Roddy Doyle: Do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do fine, eg “horse”, “ran”, “said”.

Ann Enright: Description is hard. Remember that all description is an opinion about the world. Find a place to stand.

Geoff Dyer: Do it every day. Make a habit of putting your observations into words and gradually this will become instinct. This is the most important rule of all and, naturally, I don’t follow it.

Richard Ford: Don’t drink and write at the same time.

Elmore Leonard: Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.

And to finish, two, from A. L Kennedy:

Remember you love writing. It wouldn’t be worth it if you didn’t. If the love fades, do what you need to and get it back.

 Remember writing doesn’t love you. It doesn’t care. Nevertheless, it can behave with remarkable generosity. Speak well of it, encourage others, pass it on.

Course of Mirrors; an Odyssey. By Ashen Venema

Ana’s is a sheltered, privileged, life, but all is not well. Her parents live in separate mansions, on opposite sides of a river gorge. Ana, as go between, must carry their messages across the bridge that connects them.

I cannot recall when I first sensed the unspoken thing that mother kept from me, like an ache she passively resigned herself to. I thought my existence was to blame. The secret’s dark spell imprisoned me more than the walls surrounding Katun Court and mother’s mansion.

In fiction, a secret is a promise. Having planted it, Ana moves away, shows us scenes from her childhood in her fractured family, and tells us about the kingdom they live in. There are lyrical descriptions where personalities are developed and put into context:

…we travelled in all seasons. During winter months, the northern horizon of Kars and Estan was rimmed by snow caps resembling a parade of porcelain elephants…

I was strapped onto a pony so I could ride with him next to mother’s carriage along unbending roads through the rocky terrain of Kars. And onwards through the flatlands of Estan straight and gridded like a chessboard…

Mother was tense and irritable on these journeys. She preferred Nimrich, where narrow tracks circled copses ad lakes and riddled the ancient woodlands.

We are in an alternative reality. As the summary on the back of the novel puts it, the setting is mythical. Since myth includes all kinds of mystery the unfolding story is limitless, as Ana soon proves to be.

The formative years are soon past, and for her nineteenth birthday, Ana’s cousins arrive with an invite, ‘”Let’s climb the Gazal…” Among the mountains behind us, the Gazal was the most daunting…’ This will be her first adventure, demonstrating to herself, and us, her potential to face challenges and dangers.

After that, it’s only a matter of time before her dreams and questions lead to rebellion:

Something in me snapped. a force beyond caring compelled me to confront my father.

Ana sets out on her ‘odyssey’.

There are progressions and set-backs, some bleakly dark. The lone road is a place where Ana learns to distinguish between allies and foes, and to explore the meanings of love, friendship and betrayal.

This is a bildungsroman story, in other words, a journey that mirrors the ‘psychological and moral growth of the protagonist’. It would be tricky to tell you more of the way Ana’s story unfolds without presenting ‘spoilers’, so I’ll leave you with the Cambridge Dictionary definition for Odyssey: a long trip or period involving a lot of different and exciting activities, especially while searching for something.

Ashen says that she was inspired by 1001 Nights, and Ursula le Guin, and I can see how that has worked. There were moments when I recognised the influence of both, and more moments that were entirely Ashen Venema’s. It made an interesting and entertaining journey.

Ashen Venema is a poet, philosopher, writer, therapist, photographer. If you’d like to learn more about her, you might drop by her interesting blog, that is also called, Course of Mirrors, where she reflects on her experiences.

Ghost stories on the radio, and the page.

I listened to three ghost stories on BBC Radio 4 last week. A new decade was beginning, and I was tuned in to three fifteen minute stories that were over a hundred years old. They may have been the best bit of my radio week.

This wasn’t just about the excellence of the stories, or of the actor reading, it was a clever piece of programming that began in the Radio 4 soap opera, called The Archers. The edges of this fictional village have often blurred and blended into the real world. In its early years, this was deliberate.

The soap was developed in collaboration with The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. Then, it was billed as an everyday story of country folk.

These days The Archers is billed as, a contemporary drama in a rural setting. It’s set in a fictional village called Ambridge, in a fictional county called Borsetshire, which is somewhere near Birmingham. The story plays out in fifteen minutes slots on weekdays, with an omnibus on Sunday mornings.

As autumn 2019 drew to a close, several Ambridge residents began to ask who would volunteer to organise the village panto. Several characters were approached, but – ‘Oh no, they wouldn’t.’

Tension in the village, and amongst the listeners, mounted. Ambridge theatricals have often been broadcast by Radio 4 as a spin-off, over Christmas. Surely this tradition wasn’t going to be cut?

Not so much cut, as transformed, thanks to a Halloween episode. Jim Lloyd, a retired university lecturer, seriously spooked Robert Snell, another character, by repeating a Victorian ghost story he knew, as they were sitting in an isolated bird-watching hide. By December Jim had been persuaded to tell similar stories to a bigger audience as a Christmas Show.

We listened to fragments of the rehearsals in his performance place, the attic of a local stately home. He clashed first with his stage manager, then his artistic director. While they thrashed out artistic differences, for this listener, the surroundings became clear, even tangible.

It would be almost dark. The attic debris has been cleared to the side of the room, and seats added. It’s a place of shadows, of objects laid aside for decades: random and the once valued. Above are rafters, dusty and cobwebbed. The floor is bare boards. Jim is seated in an armchair, with his book, facing his audience.

On opening night tension mounted. Curtain-up time approached and only four people had arrived. Maybe the premise was too unusual, the setting too odd… Jim was talking of calling it off, when a busload of listeners trooped in.

The show was, of course, a smash hit, a sell out. Other characters discussed it, raved about it, regretted failing to get a ticket.

• 

• 

• 

I now know what they missed, because Jim’s tales went out in that separate slot on the schedule. The first one, broadcast on December 30th, was The Room in the Tower, by E.F. Benson. It’s a 1912 story. Lost Hearts, the 1895 story by M.R. James went out the next day, and The Monkey’s Paw by W.W. Jacobs, published in 1902, on New Years Day.

The long cold nights of winter are, of course, the ideal time for ghost stories. I first read tales like these in traditional teenage fashion, under the bed-covers, with a torch, when I was supposed to be asleep. I can still recall being aware of every sound, as the house cooled and settled into silence, and menace.

John Rowe, the actor who plays Jim Lloyd, paced his reading carefully, convincingly. His was the voice of someone recalling something they are still struggling to understand, it was perfectly suited to the confessional tone of these beautifully designed story openings: ‘It was when I was about 16...’; ‘It was in September of the year 1811…’; ‘Without, the night was cold and wet...’.

Many turn-of-the-century authors wrote as if their story were being spoken. Some actually described the family and friends at a fireside. We imagine the flickering of the gas or candle-light, turned down so that it fails to quite reach the corners of the room. Notice how those shadows are inclined to dance…

The broadcast stories needed no sound effects. They were abridged, by Jeremy Osbourne and Jeremy Howe.

John Rowe, an actor, playing a character who is taking on the voice of another fictional character, read all of the necessary voices beautifully – chillingly.