Paradise Retailed

For a bit of fun we were challenged by the Bournemouth Poet Laureate James Manlow to write a glosa.

The glosa is a poetic form developed in Renaissance Spain. The opening quatrain is taken from the work of another poet that we want to acknowledge.  This is followed by four stanzas, each of which is generally ten lines long, that elaborate or "glosses" on the cabeza chosen. Each ending line (10th line) of the four following stanzas is taken from the cabeza.  I’ll leave you to guess which poet I am paying tribute to. (The spelling is as in the original.)

Paradise Retailed

The World was all before them, where to choose

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

That dewy morn among the endless shelves

Of Tesco, ASDA or that other one,

That adamantine chain with carpark dire

The dismal Situation waste and wilde

No light but rather darkness visible

Each hell more sulphrous than the other ones

As far remov’d from God and light of heav’n

As any fruit flown in from Afric’s shore,

They took the easy path through racks of booze

The World was all before them.  Where to choose?

Then pausing, sought a respite from the crush

But found Another hell with queues that stretched

Nine times the space that measures Day and Night.

The pimpl’d youth, he with his horrid crew

That witness’d huge affliction and dismay

Mixt with obdurate pride and stedfast hate:

Allowed them precious little time to choose

Designless from the list and thus they sate

And contemplating Eden side by side

Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:

Then back among the throng in effort wide

A struggle Just to snatch an apple from the shelf

Among the jars and jaffas and the jeans

Our parents’ parents struggled with the lines

For all the world like serpents at the tills.

They stood enrapt by horrid writhing scrums

With hundreds and with thousands trooping came.

They shook their heads and headed for the door.

Whilst others pushed and shoved just anyhow

They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,

At last had gain’d the portals of that place.

The outer world seem’d now a beauteous park

Like  paradise regain’d In contrast stark.

The gleaming chariots in lines array’d

To carry off the booty from the store.

Our Adam and his Eve from seeming hell

Had ’scaped th’eternal madness of that place,

Eschewed the driven path that others took,

Envelop’d in the blessed aer of day,

Through Eden took thir solitarie way.

The Illusion of Theatre

In the early nineteenth century it was generally agreed that playwriting was a bastard art form. Jane Austen regularly attended playhouses to delight in all manner of dramas, some of them we would regard as being fairly robust comedies and melodramas.   

     It was at this time the critic Leonard Smallpiece wrote an interesting diatribe against the practice of writing plays.  He described it as:  “The off spring of prose and poetry but a low, snivelling sort of story-telling donning showy rags and prancing about trying to catch the attention of the basest sorts of the populace.”

    That may be so but there is real skill and artistry in the writing of the play, an art that is so subtle that it goes unnoticed and is often relegated to tyros and tired executives who haven’t anything better to do with their lives.  But the whole art, that of manipulation of an audience’s awareness and expectation is far beyond what any novelist or poet can imagine. 

   Smallpiece goes on: “We persuade an audience to spend an hour or two in company of rogues and mountebanks who might as soon cut their throats as admit to their art.  These dissemblers pretend to be kings and princes.  The show themselves to be living in castles and airy palaces and they seek to convince their guests that they are attending great matters of state, battles, secret love trysts and are privy to plottings and all manner of knaveries.  And just when the watchers are about to lose patience and cast the tawdry game aside, our cheats essay an even greater illusion, removing them at once  to foreign lands and distant places.  All this with a few yards of lath and canvas, some moth eaten rags and the mesmerising power of words.

And not any words but words assembled with such care and contrivance that the watchers are unaware of how they are being directed; of how they may think this man to be a truth-speaker and this other one to be a liar; How of this woman we must be careful of because she poisons the ear of anyone she speaks to even though she is beautiful and finely dressed.

And sometimes these will come forward and say “we are but humble actors. Do not believe a word we say.” But again they are creating an illusion because they are not the actor you suppose them to be and may indeed, only be the local butcher or smith.  And when they remove their full bottom wigs and sit with you and tell you it is all a sham it is even more of a sham because that very revelation has been devised and rehearsed and practised.

   And the playwright is the most deceitful trickster of all.  He will tell you that this is so when it is manifestly not so and you will believe him. He is subtle because he will only show you what he wants you to see.  Why does he want you to witness this meeting, this passing of secrets and not another?  Why does he build your hopes only to dash them and then raise them again?  How does he engineer matters so that he asks you to consider a thing and then declares that there shall be a change of scene or, worse, an intermission so that your asking is held back and can only be answered in another way at another time.?

   And so the illusion is to make we, the watchers believe what we would not believe and to divert attention away from the very trick itself. It is the most underhand sleight worthy of any card-sharp. We are only shown what we are required see for the sake of the game even though we think it to be the whole world itself.”

   It amuses me to note that Smallpiece says “we” when referring to the audience.  He obviously enjoyed being hoodwinked as much as everyone else.

A lesson From History

It is always worth reminding  governments when their policies have become too egregious that the Middling Sort in Britain have, from time through history, said "Enough's enough"

Very soon the middling sort

Will rise against your arrogance

As we have done before:

Your fifth form economics,

Your bike-shed sniggering at the poor,

Your gradgrind education,

Founded on some mystic lore.

You believe your own ill-found

Stupidities. And now there’s more; 

You want to break the very things

We’ve worked a life-time for.

Poke the British lion and you

Will hear a muted British roar,

But be careful if you rouse the beast

Better scramble for the door

Be thankful we don’t bite off the heads

Of traitors any more.

Wildlife Cruise

 The record of a trip round Christchurch Harbour UK looking at the wildlife after the floods of 2013-2014

My father always said
“Before you go to sea
Take a long walk”
And so we did on Sunday,
Two miles at quickstep pace
In the unexpected January sunshine.
And when, Breathless and legsore,
We scrambled on the landing stage
Ten minutes late
Everyone was smiling and forgiving
Which, as you know,
Is more difficult to cope with
Than outright hostility.
And so with rictus smiles
When I said I hoped to see a hippopotamus
We set off on our wild life cruise
Round Christchurch Harbour.
The little dory groaned and slapped
Over the wake of bigger boats
And little flocks of Lasers scurried
Before us.
The marsh was drowned in the flood
And dishevelled groups of oyser catchers
And lapwings clung to the tiny spits of land still above the surface.
Dying trees implored for respite from the water
And well kept lawns of waterside mansions
Were strewn with detritus from forests upstream.

A black cloud swept up from the South West
And we could see the deluge being dumped
Out to sea and moving closer
Blotting the sun with a sudden Squall.
Then we noticed the flood moving down stream
With menacing purpose against the tide
We saw the whirling and swirling
Down pulling pockets of dark
Unseeable Underwater hazards.
The rain and wind hit the small boat
And we raced for the landing stage
Where we disembarked and ran for shelter on the shore.
On the longer walk home
We mused on what wonders we had seen
On our Sunday wildlife cruise.
We saw five varieties of gulls
Black headed, herring, greater black back, little and common.
The black headed heads were chocolate brown
The herring gulls were eating worms on someone’s lawn
The greater black back and little
Were more or less as advertised
And the common was a rarity.
We saw wigeon, teal, and mallard,
Herons, egrets and cormorants drying their wings
Like down at heel undertakers flashing
Unsuspected Sunday sailors with their rags.
We saw a two headed horse
And we shivered at the memory
Of the cold rain from above
And the swollen sucking deep below.
But there were no hippopotamuses.

The Playwright's Christmas Do

The howling wind will make the music for the do,
The rain in diamond drops to make a bit of sparkle.
The door bell rings
They’re here.  I’ll put the kettle on.
It’s Mrs Iago
“The whole Knitting Circle?”
“As many as I could muster,
There’s something going round.
And Michael’s outside in the van.”
“I’d better open something.
This Chilean red?”
“That’ll do. Not too expensive.
I’ll check there’s no-one watching from the street.”
The bell again.  it’s Holmes,
Or is that Conan Doyle?
I never could tell the two apart.
He’ll entertain himself with a puzzle
To which there’s a seven percent solution.
Now they’re coming thick and fast:
Nanny Eve.  Arthur is already behind the curtain
Staring out the window at the past.
I know what she’ll have
There’s a bottle somewhere
For her to find.
Now Emma Hardy limping up the stars
Her hat a crumpled meringue.
Mary Anning, a few drops of laudenum
Just to keep her going for the day.
Oh here’s the panto crowd
Where?  You know very well where they are.
And someone from the very distant past
“Mr. Scrooge, isn’t it?
Still in the party mood?”
And so on in their hundreds
Filling the air with chatter.
The Hurdy Gurdy Boy, I’m glad he came.
I can’t see him, of course,
But Tamara is here to play the fiddle
And get that old Scrooge dancing
And Angelo to lurk darkly in the kitchen.
He’s cooking up something.
That lot from the house on the marsh
And the Foundation crew,
One missing, but which one?
That was the mystery.

And when they’re gone at last,
The final curtain fallen,
I’m glad the lads from the Pig Unit
Weren’t here to cause a stink.
The Time Traveller
Will come yesterday.
And many just couldn’t get in.
All in all Not a bad do.
Now back to what I love the best,
The music of the howling gale
The diamond rain drops on the pane.
And the kettle’s just boiled.

Suspension of Disbelief

Please tell me if this is a copyright image.

I was watching a programme called Mystery Maps on television tonight in which a psychologist mentioned the role of "Suspension of disbelief" in people who see ghosts or witness UFOs and suppose them to be aliens. In other words, their readiness to believe is so heightened by being in a suitably spooky environment such as a dark wood and having recently seen a film about aliens, even the most innocent of sightings of a light will be interpreted as something other worldly. The term "Suspension of disbelief" was coined by Samuel Coleridge Taylor in 1817 as a necessary condition for any narrative be it film, novel, play or even just a nursery tale. We have to disregard the fact that we are actually only seeing flickering images on a screen or reading some very abridged description of the world, or even that we are hearing something utterly preposterous.  In the theatre world suspension of disbelief is our stock in trade; the audience are required to believe that this is not a stage but the battlements of a Danish castle, that this person is not an actor but is Hamlet Prince of Denmark, that he is experiencing genuine emotions not that he is just reciting lines of text.  Some people find suspension of disbelief a tricky idea and cannot become totally immersed in the play, but the vast majority of people will.  I would go as far as to say it is an inherent capacity in the human make up. Quite why that should be, I can't say, but after years of playing with it, I know it does work.

This is an example that happened in a play I was directing and it still astonishes me to this day.  We were performing a quite serious version of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. It was written by a very clever playwright, Jem Barnes. In the particular scene I am thinking of, Doctor Frankenstein is in his laboratory.  He has just animated the creature who is still lying on the experiment table.  Suddenly, there is a knock at the door.  Not wanting anyone to see this abomination, the Doctor covers the creature with a sheet before going to open the door. It is a colleague who wants to know what Frankenstein is up to.  Frankenstein is loath to tell him.  Eventually the visitor goes to the table and snatches up the sheet but the creature has vanished. At this point there was always a gasp from the audience and after the show people would ask how the disappearance was engineered.

Here's how it worked.  We were a small company of four actors and so everyone had to play several parts. In order that these changes of character didn't appear comical, they were done in full view of the audience. No clever lighting effects, just actors changing roles.  In this scene the same actor was playing the creature and Frankenstein's colleague.  He was lying on the table when Frankenstein covered him with a sheet. There is a knock at the door. The actor then stands up in full view of the audience, replaces the sheet and then walks round the set to enter from the other side as the colleague.  It is he who crosses to the table and is astonished when there is nothing there.  The point is that the audience became so used to the convention of role swapping that somehow they edited it out of their consciousness.  They had immersed themselves in the story and their suspension of disbelief was total.

In other words the audience had chosen to follow the artificial narrative and disregard the patent, obvious truth that the actor had just walked from one place to another.  I can believe utterly that there is a parallel effect at work with sightings of UFOs and ghosts.  We see what we choose to see. It is still a genuine experience, we really have seen a ghost but the reality is that of a narrative not of the measurable everyday world.  The programme also pointed out that numbers of sightings of UFOs always coincide with the release of alien films at the cinema. A reasonable explanation as far as I'm concerned and that's from someone who has seen a ghost in a theatre.  But that's another story altogether.

Deputation to Bournemouth Council on behalf of the Arts

September 17th 2013

Deputation to Bournemouth Full Council

On behalf of Bournemouth Creatives.

Arts by the Sea and future investment

Peter John Cooper - theatre professional and writer.  I have run companies in Oxford and North Wales and other part of the UK.  I have been chair of a number of County wide arts organisations.  Resident of the Borough for three years. Speaking on behalf of Bournemouth Creatives and other arts organisations.

A few weeks ago I was honoured to be asked to represent the creative peoples of Bournemouth and Boscombe here. According to The Council Procedure Rule 38(a)(iv) I may not refer to the tragic demise of the Boscombe Community Centre for the Arts. But I would like to pick up and develop a few incidental ideas from that presentation about the future arts provision in the Borough.

Firstly I would like to applaud the Council for its far sighted support for the Arts by the Sea Festival

Let me quote “The aim is for the Festival to become a major cultural event in the international calendar: an artist-led festival that enables regional, national and international artists to create new work, and showcase their best work, encouraging local, national and international visitors to Bournemouth.” Hurrah.

This is a marvellous opportunity for the Borough to kick start its commitment to regeneration. In order to do this we must encourage a growth outside the weeks of the festival itself to encompass the arts as they impinge on our residents on a day to day way by the artists living and being educated here. Bournemouth and Boscombe have always been the home of significant writers and artists from Robert Louis Stephenson to Aubrey Beardsley to Tony Hancock.  We need to harness the heritage and skills and connections of these and living artists, the whole arts community, to deliver that vibrant renaissance we all seek.

The Arts by the Sea Festival has thrown up an interesting conundrum. the regeneration officer from the council, has been asking local businessess for use of premises for the festival as the precinct which they were using has filled up.  We just don’t have the venues.

We do have some brilliant small spaces such as the Winchester in Poole Hill But it is a fact of life that Small, temporary spaces church halls and night clubs do not encourage investment or create the bigger international scale buzz that we need. The South West Dance centre is a useful guide to what can be achieved.

But we are one of the only towns (and one with city status ambition) that has no community arts hub. look at Southampton, Newcastle Gateshead. In fact it is a sad fact that we have less arts provision than Sturminster Newton.  There is a lack of provision for public gallery space or space for music making or theatre production. And we are certainly lacking a wet weather general arts centre that will exploit the skills of local artists for the benefit of visitors throughout the year.

Margate with its problems of high levels of drug addiction, Houses of Multiple Occupancy, poverty, and a High Street of empty shops and businesses is now listed in the top ten gallery destinations world wide and the whole area is benefiting from the additional tourists, jobs, created by its newly opened Turner Gallery. It can be done.

It will take money – lots of it but One of the great resources we have at our disposal in the Borough is a large number of artists who are significantly engaged in their fields of enterprise, writers, film makers, poets, painters  and performers. I urge the council to make use of this resource in advancing its plans for the future regeneration.  We are at your disposal.  Make use of our knowledge and expertise and let us not have any more disasters like the one which befell the community so recently.