REVOLVING HEELS

I discovered the other day that the man who began the company that became Norwich Union Insurance - and later Aviva - developed an idea for shoes with revolving heels.

Or maybe they were boots with revolving heels. I’m not sure. Anyway I gather the idea didn’t catch on, though I am not sure why. Heels are always the most vulnerable part of the shoe and if the heel could rotate, well it might wear down evenly across its surface, though eventually, presumably, leaving a protruding pin in the middle of the heel which might do serious damage to a polished floor.

Since those very early days I’m not sure that any more work has been done on heels though a cobbler could perhaps rapidly put me right on that. Whether work has or hasn’t been done, heels still seem to wear down apace and that is without any serious walking.

And when I think of serious walking I think not of people in boots with trousers tucked into their socks, striding upwards over the Brecon Beacons, but of William Gladstone who thought nothing of a twelve mile hike from Chester to Hawarden carrying a suitcase or more probably one of those large bags that bear his name. His shoes must have worn out quickly and I suppose the cobbling trade in those parts must have been profitable.

Three or four times a week I trudge up the local hill above the town here in pursuit of exercise and it is on such treks that my brain, let off its humdrum leash, begins to rehearse such thoughts. Are they valuable? I don’t know. They seem to be the counterpoint to the ‘useless’ knowledge that schools used to try to drum into the heads of sixth formers whose minds were otherwise engaged with ‘A’ levels and university entrance papers. The phrase ‘Useless Knowledge’ (or something very similar) figures prominently in Alan Bennett’s play ‘The History Boys.’

Is 'Useless Knowledge' - useful? After all, it seems to be a question that many people in and out of education have spent a long time worrying about. The fact that you can’t define useless or useful seems no hindrance to the debate. Nor in fact does the fact that the useful versus useless dimension is but one aspect of the question. I’d prefer to pose the question: is useless knowledge fun? Does it contribute to human happiness? That seems a more relevant line to debate.

Had I been a cobbler I could perhaps have written a technical blog about mending heels, which I doubt would have interested anyone outside the cobbling fraternity; and I would look silly learning about such technical aspects and trying to regurgitate them if I weren’t a cobbler. But anyone can write about revolving heels and can imagine the eccentricities of direction they might imply. That seems infinitely more fun and in these days of economic drift - someone suggested we might be in this mess for the next twenty years - fun is perhaps all we have left.

THEATRE THOUGHTS

Some of you may know that I adapted (with her very kind permission) one of Rose Tremain’s award winning radio plays recently and we put Temporary Shelter on the stage here at our little theatre in July.

I am pleased to say that it was a success. We had full or almost full houses and the feedback was excellent. For that credit must go to the original author who created a great show. Nevertheless, the amount of work that went into the adaptation was considerable, writing and re-writing lines and juggling their positions (is it better if he says this before she says that?) Moreover, moving from a radio to a stage show involved creating a whole complex choreography.

Even after the play had been performed I knew I would have to do another re-write: certain things work in performance and other bits don’t. When you hear lines spoken and actions acted, you look at what you’ve written anew. So you polish and improve - or anyway try to. At least I do

The Drama Committee have now asked if I would do another Rose Tremain adaptation next summer and I have been giving some thought to this. All depends on finding something suitable and.......she giving her permission.

The work that kept bouncing before my eyes was ‘Restoration’ perhaps her best known novel which won a variety of prizes when it first appeared in 1989 and was short-listed for the Booker prize. Restoration is a wonderfully creative and inventive novel - a theatrical creation if ever there was one. I knew it had been made into a film....but a play?

All the same as I turned it over in my mind, wondering how I might put this scene on the stage, or that; mulling over what characters I would need, how the action might divide into acts....and so on. I realised it would be difficult with our small and ageing group of actors and the limited resources of our stage and theatre. (The novel embraces a mental institution and the Great Fire of London - but, what ho! - playwrights like a challenge!). I had inner doubts (was I being wise even to think about it?) but, floating in my brain, remained a burning desire to try.

Part of the reason, I knew, was my feeling for (and indeed identification with) Merivel, the seventeenth century physician and fop, who is the main protagonist of the novel. For in many incidental details - to do with our mothers, our education, our early professional lives, the parallels between this literary creation and myself, despite three intervening centuries, seem uncanny.

I won’t go into all that here now but let me give you another, which I have only just realised. The surname I use as a nom de plume is Somerville - you will see that word has Merivel embedded in it, and practically in plain, too; while my email address - fensomerville (@hotmail etc) - is an anagram of ‘Lens of Merivel.’ (The Fens also happen to be where Merivel is exiled). Is this serendipity or what?

Of course, all this means nothing at all. It is pure coincidence and would not lead me to write a better or a worse play. All the same it is interesting don’t you think? Besides I know I am not in any way really the same character as Merivel. I cannot, for instance, as he can, fart at will. Not that I have seriously ever wanted to, you understand.

Still I learned yesterday that Restoration has in fact already been adapted for the stage, and professionally too - so probably a lot better than I would ever be able to do it. So that avenue is closed. At first this disappointed me - but then I knew I was relieved. A great burden of making elegant bricks without much in the way of straw had been taken from my shoulders. Thank you Francis Matthews and the Salisbury Playhouse

Old Merivel, however, refuses to go away. He is sitting in the back of my mind having sneaky ideas. Farting, too, probably.

Picture shows the Chapel at Peterhouse, Cambridge, a building familiar both to Merivel and Me

THE HOUSE WHERE THEY PROMOTED DISQUE BLEU

The imagination plays tricks, does it not? There is more going on inside the brain than is dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio! Even inside a tired old box of grey matter like mine.

My sister has been married forty-years and her children had kindly organised a surprise party for her to take place in what is now the family home of her eldest daughter. We were invited too and last week we stayed chez our eldest daughter in Frome en route across England to the fastness of East Anglia. Sleeping on the sofa bed I dreamed a dream of being taken in a bouncy small bronze-coloured car to see the place 'where they promoted Disque Bleu' - that being a brand of French cigarette common about forty years ago. Why I was being taken there I was not told: dreams don't always provide much by way of explanation.

So there I was sitting on the leather back seat of this car while in front rode a man and a woman with thick black hair. We drove down an avenue lined with plane trees, the sun shining and hot, the road dusty and eventually we came past a tall red brick house at the end of a row. It looked like the house of some mid-nineteenth century industrialist, imposing but in a rather grim sort of a way, with a great bay window and next to it a forbidding black front door towering above broad stone steps.

Although mainly built of brick, and therefore red, the architect had specified stone facings and mullions for the windows. At some point it had also been divided into two - 'the place where they promoted Disque Bleu' being thus semi-detached. Only one half of the house thus boasted a confectionery of advertising slogans, none, this being the modern age, had anything to do with tobacco.

Le voilà shouted my companions as we sped past looking now for somewhere to park; but I knew as soon as I had seen the house that I had been there long before. I had visited this very house. I could describe to you what lay beyond those stone steps and forbidding front door; what you could see inside that bay window.

I knew that the interior, as that of so many French houses of the period, would be dark and gloomy and smelling of that mixture of garlic, coffee and black tobacco so typical of France. Inside the room with the bay window, a large enough ‘salle de jour’ incidentally, was, and perhaps would still be, a café-style bar taking up much of the space. Someone had tried to reproduce a café in this front room.

When I had been there before I’d taken a beer and sat down on one of the nondescript chairs at a small table and lit a cigarette: Disque Bleu in all probability for it had been at the time that everyone smoked. I remember no other visitors, the bar had been empty except for the gruff man with an apron who had poured me my beer and who appeared to be ‘le patron.’

I had been there some minutes when from somewhere in the interior arrived a sharp-suited fellow with a little attaché case. He too had been smoking and he talked fast and quickly to the ‘patron,’ occasionally looking round and lowering his voice as though he were discussing business of a kind that visitors shouldn’t hear. He drank pastis, I seem to remember, and wore a Trilby, and looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant.

Someone even then had told me then that this was the house from which the entire marketing operation for the cigarette company was run - it seemed unlikely, but looking round the walls I could see faded photographs and certificates that looked, I supposed like those you might expect to find in some under used board room, faded photographs and the odd curling and yellowed certificate. Perhaps I had arrived in the town and someone had said I could buy a drink there and I suppose I had gone in the hope, if not the expectation, of some largesse of cigarettes. But none was to be forthcoming. I left and forgot the episode. Maybe I had been about eighteen or twenty at the time.

But now the memory came back with a start as the driver found a parking slot and skidded the car deftly into it. I got out. The man and woman talked animatedly, but not to me, but I followed them back down the hot and empty road with the light dust blowing on the wind. Looking up, I saw a paper sign high on a gable end, black and white. It read LOT . I wondered if that was where we were. But the letters might simply have been the first three or the last three letters of a longer word. I didn't know and it didn't seem to matter.

And I was never to learn either. For at that point I woke up.

Now I was back in England and time had rolled forward to the present. We were off to my niece's house in Suffolk which had once belonged to my brother-in-law's parents. I had, it is true, once been there briefly during the time it had been left unoccupied and semi-derelict, its steps and terraces overgrown with weeds, its timbers ravaged by rot; That had been perhaps about twenty years before. I had forgotten completely what it looked like other than we approached it via an avenue of trees. Still this is an imposing house. Built around 1850 - the same age as my French house - and it is built of red brick. Moreover the mullions around the windows are stone and there are steps up to the door.

But if my conscious brain had forgotten this house, my unconscious brain clearly hadn't. Indeed, it had remembered it on cue and bolted it into my dream. I was even being driven, too, for younger daughter, who has dark brown hair, was driving. It is all uncanny and spooky. But who was the fellow in the Trilby that looked like a cross between Humphrey Bogart and Jean-Louis Tritignant? And where is the woman with the thick black hair?

BROKEN PLATES

I heard a sad tale the other day from a friend whose collection of fine pottery had vanished in a thousand shards when the dresser shelves of her new kitchen collapsed. Apparently each shelf fell in turn on the one below, triggering what I now know to be called a 'progressive collapse.' A clean break you might mend with glue but something shattered is beyond repair and yet larger shards still have the ability to trigger memories and associations. But who keeps broken and irreparable pottery? Well, I suppose some people do, but my friend didn't and its despatch to the dustbin became an occasion of great woe.

She told me that her perception of the world had retreated into slow-motion as the progressive collapse was taking place and I can well imagine the feeling for something similar happened to me once, too. My pottery was Bridgewater, rather than the antique Swansea pottery of her case and only one shelf figured in my story: a sorry account of an attempt to repair hairline cracks in the kitchen plaster during the course of which I had leaned - lightly of course - on this display shelf with its cargo of collectables; one end then became detached and the entire contents slid off the shelf one after the other smashing to smithereens on the tiled kitchen floor. Like lemmings leaping off a cliff I thought later.

You might ask why I did not spring from my ladder on which I was perched and rescue some of the finer pieces. But I was afflicted by the same slow-motion paralysis and could only watch dumbstruck.

What is this slow-motion effect that you get when watching a disaster unfold. What triggers it? Is it a surge of adrenalin? Or what other mechanism? I've never seen this discussed. But it is quite common. I must have experienced the effect several times in my life but I remember it most notably during the one occasion when I rolled a car, a manoeuvre that involved climbing a bank and then executing a sort of barrel roll before finding myself back on the road again and the right way up having executed a perfect 360 degree flip.

This must have taken no more than a second, two at the most. Yet I can remember the radio playing until the car was upside down and then cutting out. The battery, I thought, correctly as it turned out. Two seconds seemed to stretch into two minutes and then I was back again where I had started. And so was time.

I should add that the accident was entirely the fault of a lack of maintenance by South Glamorgan County Council, as it then was, who presented me with a cheque on the basis that we both maintained the fiction that it came from the goodness of their hearts, rather than a collapse in the roadway the size of a horse trough.

Wikepedia says "that during accidents, our brain receives massive amounts of data to process and it alters the way we perceive time. It is a mechanism developed by our brain during evolution to increase chances of survival so that a person undergoing an accident can get enough time to make a decision and react appropriately," which may be the case, though to me it seems unlikely. My own experience of this slow-motion effect is accompanied by a feeling of powerlessness. In so far as one reacts at all one reacts instinctively. And when I do suffer an overload of information - an opaque report for instance - rather than getting me more time, my brain sends me to sleep.

Anyway, slow motion effects aside, the original sad tale caused me to dig up the history of the Swansea pottery whose days of glory matched pretty well those of Napoleon. Its trade mark back stamp is a half horseshoe with the name 'Dillwyn' indented inside it after its owner - Lewis Weston Dillwyn - a remarkable man who combined his pottery with being a naturalist credited with the identification of various new species of algae and a Fellow of the Royal Society to boot with being an MP and Mayor of Swansea. Despite the name, his father had been a Pennsylvanian Quaker from Philadelphia who had returned to England during the American War of Independence.
Such is the knowledge that comes from broken plates.

Temporary Shelter - the End

You will know that all theatres have ghosts. It is something to do with bringing characters to life. An energy goes out into the ether; it clings to the walls and the set, so that even long after the final curtain comes down the characters tend to sit around on stage chatting between themselves. In this case Trist (the ex-actor) Larry (the ex-salesman), Marje (his wife) Jean-Louis (the French poet) and Annette (his Polish muse). When I went down to the theatre last Sunday morning they were all talking avidly - their last breakfast together. This is what I heard.

Trist By the time Larry and Marje emerged blearily from their tents. I'd already been up for a couple of hours, helping with the clearing up from the 'Grand Bal des Roses.' Claus, the baker and badminton freak, was up, too, to bake the bread. Larry, however, seemed different. He went off to buy his baguette without being prompted and nor did he seem to care anymore what JL and Annette were getting up to in their tent.

Marje Nescafé, dear?

Larry Good show, Marje! Last night. Got it right for once.

Marje Good audiences - we were full weren't we? Everynight I'd say.

Larry Almost every night, dear. Unheard of I’d say. My suit, you see, girl. They liked my suit.

Marje I wonder why they did come? I mean, it's not as though we got it all right did we?

Larry They still laughed though Marje. And Trist told me that people came up to him afterwards to say how good they thought it had been.

Marje Do you think it was the play then, dear?

JL and Annette emerge from their tent

Anne Bonjour, Marje! Most excellent breakfasting to you! This after the show day, I mean.

Marje Come and join us, Annette dear! We've got to celebrate.

Jean Did Marje sleep OK, Larry?

Larry As cool as the pale wet leaves of lily of the valley she lay beside me in the dawn.....

Jean Well remembered, Larry. I see you are a changed man. A poet.

Anne (with Polish feeling)It is his inside heart.

Marje Let me pour us some Nescafé.

Jean No, have some of ours. You should learn to drink French coffee, Larry!

Marje So, were they pleased? Do you think?

Larry Who, Marje?

Marje Well the Director, you know, the crew?

Larry Sold a lot of tickets, Marje. Made a lot of money no doubt. So I’d say they were very pleased.

Jean You can’t judge a show by the money it makes, Larry. It’s an artistic endeavour.

Larry Good selling job though. Couldn’t have done better myself.

Marje Who’d have thought so many people wanting to see us? And in an eighties play.

Anne If they are ever doing it again I would be watching it myself, I am telling you.

Larry No accounting for taste, Marje. Mind you it was an eighties sort of audience. Took them back no doubt to their own camping days.

Marje We went wrong occasionally, though didn’t we? Got several pages in the wrong order. Do you think they noticed?

Larry Audiences never notice, Marje.

Marje Lucky for the Director then.

Anne Especially with the very experienced actors.

Trist The Director told me afterwards that Annette had never acted in a production before, though you would never have known it. And as for experience, the lighting engineer was a beginner as were the sound engineer and the stage manager. Moreover, one of the actors only became available three days before the play opened and the director had to play one of the parts; while the position of the tent meant that an actor had to open and close the curtain. They also had only in seven weeks to put the show on.

Marje Oh the poor director!

Larry Salesman's pressures, Marje. Now you know why I smoke.

Anne Sounds worse than Warsaw on a Friday. Why then are they doing it?


Jean Louis They are doing it for love. To renew themselves. To reach new understandings. To begin again.

Larry And do you know Marje, I’m beginning to understand what he means. When we return now to Bressingham St Mary........

Marje Your coffee will be cold, dear.


An stage adaptation of Temporary Shelter, an award winning radio play from 1984, by Rose Tremain, was performed by Cowbridge Amateur Dramatic Society last week. Photo shows Lloyd Lee as Larry

PASSING THE BOOKSHOP

Along the road there's a little red post box that hangs on a telegraph pole. I wander down to it in the afternoons when I have a parcel of labels to post, or other mail for that matter. The parcel has to be small or it won't fit through the narrow slot with its overhang cleverly designed to keep the rain away. So then I have to prolong my posting excursion by walking down to the Post Office in town. I don't mind this at all. The sun shines, the folk are friendly. I can look about and observe. And the folk observe me, I suppose.

I see people I know or even that I don't know. They come up and smile, or wave to me from cars and I wave back to them, return the salute without having very much idea who they are. Still, I am content. It isn't troubling.

I conclude from this that I am becoming 'known,' but haven't altogether made up my mind whether I like this for in truth I am a very private person, content to let the world drift by beyond me. In another life, I might even make a good spirit, for I am happy now, at this stage of my life, just to watch and observe.

One of the advantages of growing old is that one is no longer compelled to rise to every occasion, answer every slight, join every competition, seek the glittering prizes. Sunshine and the dappled light through the trees, a flowing brook, a few friends, a chilled glass of white wine, an entertaining story, plenty of sleep - these are the real prizes with the extra benefit that there isn't any need to reach for them.

Didn't someone say that the past is a foreign country? I believe it was LP Hartley in 'The Go-Between' that lovely, savage book that I must have had in my sub-conscious mind writing the previous paragraph. Or maybe not for I missed the cricket altogether. Thwack. The dull-sharp crack of leather on willow that is inimitable and which seems to say 'don't hurry.' Don't sweat! Or anyway not the small stuff.

Certainly Leslie Poles Hartley knew what he was about when penning his famous quote. The past really is a foreign country. We know it exists, we even have the faded souvenir of our journey - a 'journey without maps,' perhaps. But have we the remotest understanding of what happened, or why, or why we behaved as we did? Do we? I know I don't.

For instance in the past there were plenty of times when I wanted to be 'known,' principally when I used to fight elections, but of course I wasn't, even though my photograph was pushed through everyone's front door. The punters still didn't recognise me or greet me or even want to hear how my party would liberate them from all their travails. It was a source of constant annoyance.

But today I have no understanding as to why I ever became involved in politics at all, gave up a good civil service job even, to chase a will 'o' the wisp. "And I say again to you today, that the future lies, not in the past, but in the present. In the strength of our families, our friends, our colleagues, which we must draw upon if we are to be bold and deliver a better life for all in the next millennium." Such vacuity! I didn't really believe it all even then.

The things one does in one's youth! A far away foreign country indeed of which we know little no matter how much of it we may remember. The idea of fighting an election today is such anathema that I'm not sure I wouldn't really rather buy a single ticket to Zurich. If ever there were an activity 'full of sound and fury signifying nothing,' it is fighting elections. We should perhaps be more grateful to those who do it for a living.

But now, as I have said, when I walk to the Post Office people I don't know wave and greet me. I suppose the reason is the theatre; or it may be the talks I have given; or it may even be the politics of long ago. Of course, others are far better known - and better liked. But I just find it remarkable that the public, even in this small, forgotten town, should notice me at all.

In truth the reason that people are coming up to me just now is because of the theatre and the play I am directing and when the curtain goes up tomorrow night it will be like the opening of a ballot box. How many votes? How many punters? Since last night another dozen tickets have gone. It's looking good. Had there been this level of response thirty of forty years ago I might even have been elected!

So I muse as I saunter along, my parcels in a big leather bag. I am passing the bookshop where sometimes I buy books and I wave at the proprietor inside. He waves back. He has our poster in his window. The sun is shining. I am content.

STRUTTING AND FRETTING

This is going to be a blog about the trials and tribulations of the theatre in general and our little theatre in particular. I shan't be in the least offended if you turn away now, for I ask myself constantly, "why am I doing this?" - by which I don't mean writing a weekly blog, though I suppose the same question could be just as usefully put in relation to Corner-Cupboard as to the Market Theatre. 'Why, O why?'

When I am acting, forcing myself to learn the lines and then forcing myself again at the end of a hard and long day to remember them on stage while simultaneously trying to remember what the director wants me to do, I say to myself - 'acting is the hardest job in the world.'

My brain positively throbs with this imposed activity. If someone were to cut out a slice it would glow red and yellow with all the neurones firing off at the same time, as I struggle through those lines. My heart goes thump, thump, thump, like a rabbit startled at the approach of a farmer. I strut and fret (oh how Shakespeare put it well).

Of course it gets easier. At some point you know the lines and the movements and how to say what you have to do in a way that holds the audience's attention and doesn't send them to sleep. Or so you hope. It can even be enjoyable then as you slip comfortably into the skin of a villain, a monarch, a witty raconteur, a lover or whatever is called for.

But through those long weeks of rehearsal I feel like Winnie the Pooh who, if you remember, was dragged backwards down the stairs by one leg each morning and thereby hit his head on each successive step - thump, thump, thump. 'There must be a better way,' he said to himself 'if only the thumping would stop long enough for me to think of it.'

And of course there is. And it is to be a director. You miss out on the congratulations at the end of the show, on the adulation - no-one notices the director until you get to the Hall or Spielberg level - you can sink quietly into anonymity. But this is a small price to pay for power without responsibility. The director never has to face dying on stage.

Rather than strutting and fretting yourself you let others strut and fret while you sit in the stalls with your feet up, making occasional notes and encouraging noises. Easy and relaxing. That, anyway, is how it seems to the poor fretting actor.

I last directed a proper play about seven years ago. And just as you forget your lines after a performance so you forget just what a horror directing really is. It is like trying to organise a battle and finding half your troops have better things to do.

So you rush around in desperate Red Hen mode running yourself ragged to find people to cast and do all the other jobs - lights, sound, stage management, props, prompt, costumes, design, front of house, bar. There are tickets to sell and publicity to organise and the theatre to clean and theatre suppers to arrange and all this away and beyond the direction of the actors and the choreography of the play.

Of course lots of people are involved in a production but the director is very much in the position of Owain Glyndwr who boasts in one of the Henry IVths that he can summon spirits from the 'vasty' deep. 'Of course you can', says Hotspur - 'and so can any man - but when you call them do they come?'

And that is the problem - as a director you have all the levers of power in your hand but frequently the levers are not connected to anything. People are on holiday, or won't respond to emails, or can't be fitted on the stage, or things just collapse, or actors don't know their lines, or change their minds or simply give you nightmares.

Then there is the problem of ideas. When people have ideas they assume they are good ideas by virtue of the fact that they have had them at all. It is the supreme example of 'all my geese are swans.' But, quite apart from the fact that it is not ideas that are in short supply but people to do the routine and boring jobs, most ideas that people present you with are not very good. The ratio of good ideas to bad ideas is about 1 to 20 in my opinion. Nevertheless you have to allow people to have ideas.

I don't exclude myself from the above criticism. I have more bad ideas than anyone. But in most cases conventional and boring wisdom will get you further and faster than some clever 'idea.'

So I worry and fret late into the night, wondering whether we shall sell any tickets at all. We have sold six so far out of a possible 280. Whatever possessed me to want to direct again, I say to myself, and I long for the responsibility free domain of the actor. The wheel will turn full-circle again.

Ah well it was ever thus. If you have been, thanks for reading.

Should you be wondering the play is 'Temporary Shelter,' an intelligent and imaginative comedy by the novelist Rose Tremain. Originally written as a radio play (in which format it won the Giles Cooper prize for best radio play of 1984) We have adapted it for the stage and shall be presenting it between 13 and 16 July at the Market Theatre, Cowbridge. Tickets £6. Come if you can - an evening of sparkling comedy awaits you.