BlogCatalog

BlogCatalog

The best place to write

There is nowhere in the world (that I know of) that is quite like St Deiniol’s Library in Hawarden, Flintshire. It was founded by Gladstone as a place where people(mostly academics and clergy) can stay and study in the excellent (and beautiful) library. Not unlike Dr. Williams’s Library, another amazing place, it has large holdings of theological works (though with a more Anglican and less Dissenting slant than Dr Williams’s), but St Deiniol’s is also wonderful for those with an interest in nineteenth century studies, and is perfect for me. Every time I look up a book on the library catalogue, expecting that it won’t be here, it almost always is. I would stay here forever if I could. Not only is the atmosphere conducive to study, but the food is good, and all one has to do is eat meals and work in the library – my idea of Heaven! There are always interesting people with whom to chat at meal times, and, should you need some fresh air, there is a beautiful park nearby for walks (although it’s very muddy sometimes!) I’ve been here twice before, and am amazed at how many of the very friendly staff remember me (and my fondness for the breakfast porridge!) At mealtimes one can have the most fascinating conversations with people who are here for meetings, or working on obscure PhDs (even more obscure than mine!), writing theological books or just here for a break and a bit of reading. In a day and a half I’ve probably already written more than I do in the average week. And, moreover, it’s somehow so much nicer to work in such conditions – none of the aggravations of university libraries, and so peaceful. At 9pm last night I was still sitting here in a little turret-like bit of the library (which I refer to as my Baptist turret as I am – randomly – surrounded by books on Baptists), with a lamp on in an otherwise pitch-black library, and I feel as though I’ve stepped back in time. I highly recommend a stay here! (oh, and did I mentions the fantastic cakes…?

Mrs Warren’s Profession

Last night was the last Birmingham show of Mrs Warren’s Profession, Theatre Royal Bath’s production with Felicity Kendal. It was good to see a full house, and the production really deserves it, too. In many ways it’s an awkward play, perhaps, because it is so much of a period piece, and because the central part of Vivie Warren is difficult to play credibly, but the performances from the whole cast are remarkably strong. Felicity Kendal is excellent – humorous and light but with obvious distress as the play reaches its conclusion, but she does not steal the limelight from Lucie Briggs-Owen, who plays Vivie.

The play was written in 1893, but banned from the stage until the 1920s due to its references to Mrs Warren’s profession, the details of which come out during the course of the play. The plot follows Vivie’s discovery that her (largely absent) mother has been making her money through a less than respectable profession (she was a prostitute, of course, and ends up running brothels across Europe). Vivie is at first forgiving, as she learns why her mother chose this way of life, and then shocked as she discovers that it still continues. This discovery affects her own life choices, including her own profession and potential marriage. The play is notable for its insight into the difficulties faced by women wishing or needing to be independent; I remember arguing in my university interview that Bernard Shaw uses his characters (notably St Joan) as mouthpieces for his own political and social views, and that’s equally true here, yet they are much more than puppets.

This production, with its beautifully crafted set and strong cast, brings out the nuances of humour as well as tragedy and social injustice. It’s on tour now; I recommend you see it.

i-witness

Volcano Theatre’s play i-witness is currently touring, and if you are interested in fiction and its effects, this is a play to see. It’s based on – or rather, inspired by – WG Sebald’s loose and sprawling novel, The Rings of Saturn (2002). The members of the theatre company read the book and then responded to it, in remarkably different ways. Of course, this is a book that lends itself to a range of interpretations – it could be a novel about walking; it could be about academia; it is also about dozens of other things – what it’s ‘about’ is perhaps not a good question to ask of this novel. But in their different responses, the four performers draw out quite different aspects of the novel in a way that is not only enlightening for fans of Sebald’s novel, but also for those who are interested in fiction and its meanings more generally.

I can’t explain the play properly; but it opens with a film, accompanied by noises from the cast, during which I went from thinking, “This is unusual” to “I hope this isn’t how the whole play goes”. It wasn’t; the play is a ragbag of fragments, responses, criticism and facts, mixed up in a way reflective not only of the novel but also of the reader’s response to it. The cast took questions after the show and explained that little of the play is scripted; it is intended to evolve in front of the audience, which is an appealing idea, and it certainly seems to work well.

I was particularly attracted to the closing scenes, in which Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson (left) is projected onto a screen, while a copy of Sebald’s book is placed on a table under a light, and delicately dissected, then hammered, nailed down, attacked and finally torn to pieces. The inference is clearly that a book should not be anatomised; to dissect it, to attempt to pin down a final meaning, to pull it apart in works of criticism, kills it entirely and removes any possible anjoyment. It’s a great image and analogy, and also a salutory lesson for literary critics and academics!

National Student Forum 2009 Report

The National Student Forum recently launched its 2009 report to Government, covering a wide range of issues which we have discussed over the last academic year. You can read the full report here; it particularly looks at issues around teaching and learning, employability, postgraduate students, mature and part-time students, disabled students, and student accomodation.

The NSF are generally pleased with the report’s reception so far; there has been some interest in it at all levels, from other students to universities to policy-makers. The Independent featured an article about our report launch recently, and today has a feature on postgraduate concerns in particular (for which I was interviewed last week – read it here). Times Higher Education also picked up on our postgraduate issues. It’s great to feel the NSF is being taken seriously, especially at a time when things are difficult for students and change (or, perhaps, revolution!) is in the air.

In the coming academic year, in the context of the launch of the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills’ document, Higher Ambitions: The Future of Universities in a Knowledge Economy, the forthcoming fees review, and the investigation of postgraduate provision in the UK launched by Peter Mandelson in July, we are planning to look particularly at teaching quality and undergraduate fees.

Pride and Prejudice

Pride and Prejudice, romantic comedy for the erudite, has been adapted for theatre by Simon Reade for Theatre Royal Bath and is currently touring. This week it has been in Birmingham, where I went to see it last night. I’m often sceptical about adaptations of books, but (as countless BBC adaptations have shown) Austen’s social comedies with their light touch and sparkling wit, not to mention romance, tend to lend themselves to good adaptation. There is no point in being a purist about it; no book will be the same once it’s adapted for a different medium, but as a play Pride and Prejudice works well on many levels.

Susan Hampshire, of course, is an ideal Mrs Bennett; she demonstrates the avarice and foolishness we know to expect of the character, but manages to do so with a twinkle in her eye and apparent delight with the goings-on of her daughters that is utterly convincing and quite infectious. Her daughters, meanwhile, are well-differentiated despite the speed at which the plot must move to fit the novel into less than two and a half hours; Jane’s quiet dignity, Lizzie’s vivacity and Lydia’s headstrong flirtatiousness come across particularly well.

The production plays well to the innate comedy of the book, though the flipside is that some 0f the more serious and more detailed elements are necessarily omitted. Mr and Mrs Bennett are hilarious in their interaction; the obsequious Mr Collins is deliciously smarmy; and yet Elizabeth and Darcy seem to generate real affection and warmth for each other. The play is a thistledown confection, light, humorous and appealing, which may not be quite as Austen intended, but it’s a play that can hardly fail to appeal; even if Austen is not your thing, there’s still enough here to raise a laugh and warm the heart. That said, one might dare to venture the suggestion that it is occasionally a little cheesy – all the period dances grate on me after a while – but with its minimal set and toned-down costumes, it’s not too predictable. I hardly see how it could have been done better.

The Page 56 Meme

I am unashamed to say that I copied this from the Victorian Geek blog, who in turn purloined it from someone else. That’s why it’s a meme, I suppose.

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence along with these instructions.

Don’t dig for your favourite book, the coolest book, or the most intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Well, for me that would be the wonderful line:

“The bridge to platform 4 is to me less interesting than Bifrost guarded by Heimdell with the Gjallarhorn.”

I doubt many people would guess what that’s from!  I read this when I was writing my chapter on children’s literature, and found it fascinating; it contains Tolkien’s essay “On Fairy-stories”, as well as one of his early short stories, “Leaf by Niggle”.

Turner as you’ve never seen him

On Saturday I went to see “Turner and the Masters” at Tate Britain, which seems to have unanimously glowing reviews so far, and I am completely in agreement with them. I took pages of notes so will attempt to condense them here! The premise of the exhibition is that Turner engaged publicly with other “masters”, learning from them, building upon their work, testing the conventions of art and even competing with his contemporaries. His paintings are displayed alongside those of other artists including Rembrandt, Poussin, Claude and Constable, to name but a few, and the effect is remarkably enlightening.

Where Turner paints intentionally from a similar subject as another artist, such as Dutch Boats in a Gale, a companion piece for van d Velde’s 1672 Ships in a Stormy Sea, he demonstrates a modern-seeming boldness of light and colour which gives the picture not only its appeal but also a unique appearance of Turner-ness. Not that he always improves on the original; his companion piece to de Loutherbourg’s Glorious First of June, The Battle of Trafalgar, whilst emanating a sombre tone appropriate to the loss of life of the battle, also contains less life and movement than the original.

Even when actually copying a painting (the traditional Royal Academy method of learning) Turner’s versions remain entirely Turner’s. The exhibition is arranged so that one can see the effect of, for example, Rembrandt’s use of lit areas in gloom, in Turner’s works, and I was particularly struck by the pairing of Rembrandt’s The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (right) with Turner’s Moonlight: A study at Millbank (top left).

The exhibition shows, more than anything, Turner’s development as an artist, something which would not be possible without the inclusion of the picutres which influenced him. From Piranesi he learned perspective, we see; from Claude, classical structuring of his work, and from his contemporaries, he learned the importance of colour and simplicity. Turner was well-known for use the “varnishing days” at the RA to slightly alter his paintings, which is clear from the pairing here of Turner’s Helvoetsluys (left) with Constable’s The Opening of Waterloo Bridge, exhibited together in 1832 and reunited here for the first time, where it becomes obvious that Turner’s restrained use of colour (including the red spot in the foreground added at the last minute) and clean lines triumph over Constable’s detail. As he said himself, “atmosphere is my style”.

Conscious of the art of past masters, the work of his contemporaries, and even of his legacy, this is an exhibition which shows Turner the working artist in a new light. As John Ruskin, possibly his biggest fan, wrote, “consider for yourself whether there was ever any other painter who could strike such an octave. Whether there has been or not, in other walks of art, this power of sympathy is unquestionably in landscape unrivalled….”

 

The Grapes of Wrath

Frank Galati’s adaptation of Steinbeck’s mammoth novel The Grapes of Wrath is currently on at Birmingham Rep. I have to say I was intrigued to see how a lengthy novel which covers so much ground (literally and metaphorically) could be adapted into a play, but I was impressed with how it worked.

The plot is outlined on the Rep website thus: “The Joads, a family of impoverished Oklahoman sharecroppers, lose everything when their farm is repossessed after a devastating drought and are driven from their home to make the monumental trek Westward to California. Seduced by the prospect of opportunity and dignity, they invest everything they have in the journey. When forced to face the possibility that California may not after all be the promised land, they have no choice but to go on; nothing is left for them in Oklahoma.”

As you can see, it’s quite a challenge, but one that was met with aplomb. Galati keeps the essence of the novel in his script, using some direct quotations from the novel, and is helped enormously by the fantastic set, which gave the impression of covering great spaces even on a small stage, and adding some irony by featuring contemporary advertising hoardings about “the American Dream”. Set in the Depression of the Thirties, this play is a harsh lesson about the economics of recession, from the issues of strikes to the value of workers when there are thousands too many looking for work.

As the Joads journey on, their loss of faith is evident – faith in God, in America, and even in humanity – in many ways the play was nearly 3 hours of unrelenting misery, and yet the faintly shocking but absolutely redemptive act of humanity at the end allows the play (and the book) to offer a genuinely cathartic experience in the tradition of classical tragedy. I was afraid that the play would have so much to cover that the audience would fail to be properly engaged with the characters, but I shouldn’t have worried – this is an adaptation well worth seeing.

On historical fiction

This year’s National Academy of Writing lecture, in conjunction with Birmingham Book Festival, was given by popular author Robert Goddard. His lecture was entitled “What History Does Not Tell Us” – an intriguing title, and one of which he made good use. He talked widely about his own writing of historical fiction, proving to be an entertaining and lively as well as an informative speaker. He pointed out that historical novels tend to overstate the influence of historical events on their characters in a way which novels written in any given period do not, taking such things as read – as he rightly says, a writer doesn’t think s/he is living in the past, at the time of writing! He is clearly well-read and enthusiastic about a wide range of literature, proving most amusing on Sherlock Holmes (for example, discussing why Holmes cannot be found in the records of Cambridge University, though the novels say he went there; of course, this is because his arch-enemy Moriarty removed his name…)

His own novels he describes as “historical thrillers”, and suggested many reasons why plots are better set in the past: the old staples of nineteenth century fiction such as entails and disinheritance, now rendered obsolete by UK law, and the existence of capital punishment, are great plot devices. Modern writers, however, have escaped the problems of serialisation which led to inconsistencies in many Victorian works. Moreover, the modern police investigation requires a great understanding of science, which can cause problems for the unscientific writer.

Plots are tricky things, he says, which have to present a kind of toned-down reality; critics are keen to complain about use of coincidence in novels, yet coincidences happen all the time in life (as he said, no one ever says, “I’m sorry, it’s a coincidence” in real life!) – but if it is  reality, there’s no point in arguing with it – perhaps as good a reason as any to draw plots from history.

Goddard is keen to point out that he never alters established historical facts in his novels, which is perfectly possible because of what history “does not tell us” – the unknowns open up a vast array of plot possibilities. As he rightly says, historians speculate, necessarily, and this begins to blur the line between history and fiction even before a novelist gets involved. Speculation can be as valid in fiction as in the history books – and, he added, historians don’t get it right all the time anyway. The question, perhaps, is what is historical truth – a debate that could go on forever.