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Susan’s Bookshelves: Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

My attention was drawn to Valérie Perrin’s 2020, warm, moving novel about love and loss by a French friend who read it in her native language. I thought about that but it would have taken me at least a year so I plumped for an English (American) translation which reads pretty well with only very occasional infelicities, That indefinable but distinctive French-ness still shines through: the wistfulness, the realism, the food, the places and above all the cemetery where Violette works as resident manager. It’s like Debussy in words.

Brought up in orphanages and foster homes, Violette becomes pregnant and marries Philippe Toussaint very young. They manage – or rather she does – a railway level crossing. It’s a very dysfunctional marriage, somehow more plausible in a French novel than it might be in a British one. He’s an absentee father, a womaniser and lazy. And his parents really are the in-laws from hell. But nothing in this novel is simple or black and white and eventually we learn more about Toussaint and discover that he’s a complex, rounded character. He behaves badly but he’s a long way from a straightforward stereotypical useless husband.

When disaster strikes – and what happens is truly appalling – Violette gets a job managing a cemetery further south. Toussaint goes with her but disappears more and more often and eventually for nineteen years. At the cemetery she grows her own vegetables and sells plants to mourners and her garden becomes a symbol of regrowth and healing. Bound up with all this is another story. A man called Julien Seul turns up at the cemetery very puzzled because his mother has left unexpected instructions that her ashes are to be interred there with the body of a famous lawyer. Gradually this back story is unravelled and Violette begins to feel that at last she might be able to move on.

It’s a subtle take on “multiple narrators”. We shift back and forth through time sometimes in the first person and sometimes the third. There are letters and diaries. But it’s all made clear with dates and fonts as the narrative winds – it’s quite leisurely –  towards an unexpected twist and a strong hint of happy ending.

Perrin’s characters are very engaging. Sasha the elderly gay man,  whom Violette comes to love like a father and from whom she takes over the cemetery and the garden, is delightfully drawn. So is Celia the woman she invites into her home at the level crossing when a train is halted by a strike. Celia lives in the Midi and offers Violette the annual use of her chalet for a holiday – it’s a longterm friendship to celebrate. The grave diggers and undertakers are memorable too. There are many others but I’m not doing spoilers here.

This book got under my skin.. “Death is not an absence, It’s a presence” is a thought I shall long ponder along with the assertion that if you love someone then nothing, not even death, can take that away. Valérie Perrin was new to me but it won’t be long before I explore more of her oeuvre.

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Charlotte’s Web by EB White

 

 

Show: Marry Me A Little

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: The Stage Door Theatre. 150-151 Drury Lane, Covent Garden, London WC2E 9LB

Credits: By Stephen Sondheim, conceived by Craig Lucas and Norman Rene. Directed by Robert McWhir. Musical Director Aaron Clingham

Marry Me A Little

3 stars

Susan Elkin | 02 Mar 2024 10:17am

This compliation of nineteen Sondheim solos and duets into a loose investigation of marriage is an interesting idea but it becomes much more of a staged concert than a musical. It’s closer to a Schubert song cycle in concept and for that, the 60 minute run time is a long time for a contrived piece without coherent narrative.

Nonetheless Shelley Rivers and Markus Sodergren are both pleasing singers and hearing them work toether in a low ceilinged confined space without radio mics is more like opera than a musical but none the worse for that. Both are good at catching mood and conveying the joys, disappointments, yearning and regrets involved in any relationship. Rivers, whose intonation is almost always accurate, brings sweetness, along with a wide dynamic range and sustained full belt when she needs it. Sodergren, also catching many nuanced moods, brings a rather touching vulnerability to the role.  And I admired their rendering of Saturday Night which is effectively a fugue and pretty tricky.

All this is done, rather impressively, without visual cues. Aaron Clingham playing piano mellifluously is tucked away at the side where I suspect he can’t be seen by either singer.

We’re in the newly opened Stage Door Theatre above The Prince of Wales pub in Drury Lane which is an attractive, quite roomy space with the audience (who can also dine) sitting at tables. David Shields’s set occupies one end of the room and presents a domestic apartment with sofa, plants, fridge, shelves and the like. The intimacy of that audience proximity works quite well.

Director Robert McWhir makes sure that every inch of the small playing space is imaginatively used with plenty of movement and different moods evoked in corners and with props such as wine bottles.

 

  • Photos: Peter Davies

First published by Sardines: https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/marry-me-a-little-2/

Show: The Canterbury Tales

Society: Studio at New Wimbledon Theatre

Venue: Studio at New Wimbledon Theatre

Credits: By Geoffrey Chaucer. Presented by Half Cut Theatre.

The Canterbury Tales

4 stars

Photo: Harry Elleston

This company has come a long way in a short time since I first saw them in a Cambridgeshire field in a distanced performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2020.

Their four hander take on The Canterbury Tales which I didn’t see in winter 2020 is cheerful and richly funny. It gives us modern versions of the characters (James Camp’s Pardoner has morphed, rather wonderfully, into an estuary speaking estate agent and Georgia Leila Stoller’s Miller is the slimiest womaniser you’ve ever met) and updates on the tales which are acted out. The host becomes a pub owner named Geoff who might, just might, write some of these stories down and Hollie-Anne Price is a flirty Alison Bath who knows a thing or two about men.

The stories are whacky but affectionate and in an odd way manage to strike a happy balance between respect and irreverence. The teenage students from Harris Academy, South Wimbledon, sitting behind me. were amazed when I told them that, yes, Chaucer’s very bawdy 14th century The Miller’s Tale really does give us Nicholas sticking his bottom out of the window … and worse. Here it’s make-you-gasp hilarious but OK for a family audience.

As we progress along the A2 towards Canterbury (which always sounds funny to modern audiences but of course that was more or less the old pilgrim route) we meet Chanticleer – cue for much stage business with inflated yellow rubber gloves and a running gag with an audience member Harry, a maths teacher who turns out (at opening night) to be rather good value. We also get a hammed up tale of chivalry based on the Wife of Bath’s Tale and a much more.

There’s a lot of actor musicianship in this jolly show with all four actors contributing on instruments. Stoller is a fine (left handed) guitarist. Her instrument is azure blue and she sings with lyricism and oodles of character. And it’s fun when a piano keyboard, which Price then plays, emerges from the bar as an integral part of Hazel McIntosh’s set.   There’s a good song based on the opening lines of Chaucer’s prologue and the four of them sing rather well in harmony: some good work, evidently, by Eden Tredwell, composer and musical director.

Those Year girls 9 I was chatting to knew nothing about Chaucer and his famous tales. They are, they told me “drama scholars” and were simply taking the show at face value as a piece of theatre. And that works too.

Half Cut Theatre, which now has some Arts Council funding,  has a big tour scheduled with this show (Essex, Suffolk. Surrey, Sussex, Hants, Wilts, Berks, Worcestershire, Northants, Bucks, Herts, Bedfordshshire, Cambs, Oxfordshire, London) until 07 April. Catch it if you can. Take your children as well as your Granny. You will all laugh a lot.

 

Show: The Human Body

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: DONMAR Warehouse. 41 Earlham StREET, London WC2H 9LX

Credits: By Lucy Kirkwood

The Human Body

3 stars

PHOTO: Marc Brenner

The war has ended and the Welfare State, particularly the NHS is moving centre stage. Dr Iris Elcock (Keely Hawes) is so passionate about equality and justice that she is pushing hard against people who preferred the status quo. Thus she is a Labour party local councillor and inching towards standing for Parliament. Then her home life and meeting an actor names George Blythe (Jack Davenport) complicate things.

First the positives: Hawes combines wide-eyed surprise with the gentle competence of a post-war professional woman kicking against the traces and there’s a lot of rueful humour – and passion of a different sort. Davenport is every inch the dishy, charismatic outsider and when we finally meet the secret in his closet (think Jane Eyre) he brings finds real depth and anguish. The two leads work well and convincingly together. Three other actors – Tom Goodman-Hill, Pearl Mackie and Siobahn Redmond – play everything else in lots of wigs, hats and voices. Dialect coaches Penny Dyer and Hazel Holder have done an excellent job. There’s a child in the cast too. Flora Jacoby Richardson, who shares the role with Audrey Kattan, was engaging on press night and got a lot of laughs.

But the play is not just a political investigation into the birth of Welfare Britain. it is also a response to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) even down to the tone of Hawes’s voice. Much of the interaction between her and Davenport is filmed by black clad stage operatives and projected in black and white onto a back screen. There’s even some Rachmaninov in Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design just in case you’ve missed the point.  And all the time this is going on, the revolve – if you’ve got it, flaunt it? – is slowly moving usually with the camera man on board as well as the action. It all gets wearisome and makes the play feel bittily unsure of what it’s trying to do. It seems to be trying to fire on too many cylinders at once and would have been better for at least 30 minutes cut from its self-indulgent two and three quarter hour length.

Because all the action takes place on the revolve props – phones, clothes, walking sticks etc –  are brought by crew to the edge of it for cast members to take and that works quite neatly.

This is the second West End play I’ve seen in a week which uses drama to force a lengthy, left wing, impassioned, standalone rhetoric on its captive audience (The other was The Enemy of the People at Duke of York’s). I suppose it provides good monologue material for future drama school showcases but in context it feels very bolted on.

The Human Body is a play with potential but it needs to be much more focused on what it wants to say or do.

 

Show: The Human Body

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: DONMAR Warehouse. 41 Earlham StREET, London WC2H 9LX

Credits: By Lucy Kirkwood

The Human Body

3 stars

PHOTO: Marc Brenner

The war has ended and the Welfare State, particularly the NHS is moving centre stage. Dr Iris Elcock (Keely Hawes) is so passionate about equality and justice that she is pushing hard against people who preferred the status quo. Thus she is a Labour party local councillor and inching towards standing for Parliament. Then her home life and meeting an actor names George Blythe (Jack Davenport) complicate things.

First the positives: Hawes combines wide-eyed surprise with the gentle competence of a post-war professional woman kicking against the traces and there’s a lot of rueful humour – and passion of a different sort. Davenport is every inch the dishy, charismatic outsider and when we finally meet the secret in his closet (think Jane Eyre) he brings finds real depth and anguish. The two leads work well and convincingly together. Three other actors – Tom Goodman-Hill, Pearl Mackie and Siobahn Redmond – play everything else in lots of wigs, hats and voices. Dialect coaches Penny Dyer and Hazel Holder have done an excellent job. There’s a child in the cast too. Flora Jacoby Richardson, who shares the role with Audrey Kattan, was engaging on press night and got a lot of laughs.

But the play is not just a political investigation into the birth of Welfare Britain. it is also a response to David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945) even down to the tone of Hawes’s voice. Much of the interaction between her and Davenport is filmed by black clad stage operatives and projected in black and white onto a back screen. There’s even some Rachmaninov in Ben and Max Ringham’s sound design just in case you’ve missed the point.  And all the time this is going on, the revolve – if you’ve got it, flaunt it? – is slowly moving usually with the camera man on board as well as the action. It all gets wearisome and makes the play feel bittily unsure of what it’s trying to do. It seems to be trying to fire on too many cylinders at once and would have been better for at least 30 minutes cut from its self-indulgent two and three quarter hour length.

 

 

Because all the action takes place on the revolve props – phones, clothes, walking sticks etc –  are brought by crew to the edge of it for cast members to take and that works quite neatly.

This is the second West End play I’ve seen in a week which uses drama to force a lengthy, left wing, impassioned, standalone rhetoric on its captive audience (The other was The Enemy of the People at Duke of York’s). I suppose it provides good monologue material for future drama school showcases but in context it feels very bolted on.

The Human Body is a play with potential but it needs to be much more focused on what it wants to say or do.

 

  • Photos: MARC brenner

It is surprising how often Radio 3’s Private Passions widens my reading. But as my own forthcoming new book (All Booked Up: A reading retrospective – 28 March, 2024 ) makes clear, everything in my life comes back to reading.

Merlin Sheldrake is a mycologist and musician. Fungi, and how they “make our worlds, change our minds and shape our futures” are his life’s work.. And, best of all, like Sir David Attenborough, he has that rare gift for communication which means he can make complex science accessible to us all. And how wonderful that his own illustrations are drawn in the ink of the black-cap mushroom. He is an infectious enthusiast.

At school in the early 1960s I was taught that fungi are plants. But the taxonomy has been changed since then. The natural world now comprises animals, plants and fungi. The key word is “network” because that’s how fungi form and mycelial networks can do some pretty remarkable things. For example, they seem to use waves of electrical activity to transmit signals round a network. Some slime moulds can find their way out of a maze.  So could this have relevance to the fast growing field of “biocomputing”?  By this time, had I been a cartoon character, my eyes would have been out on stalks.

And did you know that there’s a fungus which produces enough light – bioluminescence –   for miners to see their hands by?

Or take Ophiocordyceps and other insect manipulating fungi which have evolved a remarkable ability to cause harm to the animals they influence. It commandeers an animal body by growing inside and through it. There’s an astonishing photograph of an infected ant  in Sheldrake’s book. He reminds us, too, of all those old stories  about possession of bodies by voices and spirits – as science meets science-fiction meets folklore.  He’s interesting on the history of mushroom consumption too, especially the truffle industry and the use of mind-altering fungi, the so-called “magic mushroom”. He tries out the latter under controlled medical supervision as part of his research for this book.

Fungi have well known medicinal potential. Penicillin is, after all, a mould. They can also be grown in labs to create a very strong substitute for leather but it’s the activity most of us are unaware of which really matter. Fungi – and Sheldrake gives statistics about their extraordinary prevalence which I can’t conceptualise – are at the basis of all life. They link organisms such as trees in forests. They make roots grow. They line our bodies and ensure everything works properly. Bread and beer are discussed at some length. Symbiosis is everywhere although, interestingly the concept wasn’t recognised or the term coined until the nineteenth century.

Sheldrake has travelled the world in his pursuit of fungi and he knows hundreds of mycologists:  both the sort with research fellowships in famous universities and the “citizen mycologists” for whom he has  great respect because they too are continuously making and sharing new discoveries.

There’s an environmental message as well. Fungi are essential to life. If we destroy them with fungicides and/or by wrecking the habitats they thrive in, the cost to humankind will be huge. Fungi have been on this planet for a lot longer than mammals and, another of Sheldrake’s points is that it would be helpful to start looking at life on earth holistically rather than hierarchically because it is all inextricably entangled.

 

Next week on Susan’s Bookshelves: Fresh Water for Flowers by Valerie Perrin

Show: Sarah Quand Même

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Drayton Arms Theatre. 153 Old Brompton Road, Greater, London SW5 0LJ

Credits: By Susie Lindeman. Directed by Wayne Harrison.

Sarah Quand Même

2 stars

Image: SARAH Quand Même

An exploration of the colourful, rackety but successful life of French actress, Sarah Bernhardt who died in 1923, Susie Lindeman’s play tries valiantly to find some realism in the world’s real first female superstar.

The dramatic device is a conversation between Bernhardt and her granddaughter Lysiane, who in real life wrote a memoir of her grandmother which may be more accurate than some of the more fanciful ones. Lindeman plays both parts and, at the start of the play it isn’t clear that what’s she’s doing. The “baby” voice she uses for Lysiane is gratingly high pitched and I wasn’t convinced by the laboured French accent she uses for both characters. There is also a lot of French in the script and Lindeman does not sound like a native speaker.

Gradually – it’s an energetic performance with a lot of floating round Justin Nardella’s rather nice Edwardian set  – we learn how Bernhardt trained, joined the Comedie Francaise, played many roles of both sexes, wowed audiences in London and made friends with the big names of the day. Along the way there were lovers and a son who speaks (Patrick Toomey) as a disembodied voice at the end when she’s dying.

90 minutes (not the 80 that’s advertised) is a long time to sustain a one person show and at times the pace flags. It feels drawn out too. Lindeman is, however, rather good at diva-esque gestures and using her rather lovely white clothes to heighten her larger-than-life body movement.

The title, by the way, is a French expression beloved of Bernhardt. The play alleges that it doesn’t translate into English which seems a bit odd. I’ve always translated it as “whatever happens”.  What’s the problem? The programme gives “despite all” which isn’t, I’m afraid, quite English.

 

  • SARAH Quand Même

  • SARAH Quand Même

  • SARAH Quand Même

First published by Sardines https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/sarah-quand-meme/

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Show: An Enemy of the People

Society: London (professional shows)

Venue: Duke of York’s Theatre. St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4BG

Credits: By Henrik Ibsen. Directed by Thomas Ostermeier

An Enemy of the People

3 stars

The word “reimagined” is overworked in theatre circles but this really is a pretty radical shakeup of Ibsen’s 1882 play about a doctor who blows the whistle on the local, lucrative spa baths when he discovers the water is dangerously contaminated. It’s a conflict between morality and economics and we’re very familiar with that.  Even in the original, it’s Ibsen at his most prescient and, adapted by director Thomas Ostermeier and Florian Borchmeyer the play becomes exceptionally hard hitting.

Matt Smith is a younger Doctor Thomas Stockman than usual. Ibsen envisaged him as old enough to have two children with speaking parts – Hugh Bonneville (who was in the audience on press night) played him as middle aged at Chichester in 2016 and Ian McKellen made him quite crusty at the National in 1997. Smith’s version is a good looking, confident young father of a new baby with youthful vigour and love of truth and it’s pretty perfect casting. The contrast with his uncharismatic older brother who’s mayor of the town (Paul Hinton) and wants it all pragmatically hushed up, works well.

In the second half there’s a public meeting in which Ostermeier moves right away from the play as beleaguered Stockman takes the microphone and rants at length about the 2024 world crisis – it’s a masterly performance complete with long Sir Humphrey-like sentences and a Rossini-esque accelerating crescendo except that there is nothing funny or frothy about it. The message is deadly serious and leads to audience comments and questions – most of them “plants”, I strongly suspect, on press night.

Jessica Brown Findlay is totally natural and plausible as Stockman’s very reasonable wife, Katharina. And there’s a fine performance from Nigel Lindsay as her gruff, self-interested father. Lindsay is exceptionally good at unattractive characters: he usually turns out to be the villain in TV dramas. Here is is flanked by an equally disdainful German Shepherd dog, ably played by Leyla. Pryanga Burford is excellent as the calm newspaper proprietor too especially when she’s managing the audience and may have to ad lib.

And yet. It opens with Brown Findlay hosting band practice at home (Ibsen had that scene as a meal). The music adds little except that it provides a coherent reason for using it to cover later scene changes. It’s also rather fun – although totally irrelevant –  to hear Matt Smith sing and to note that Zachary Hart is rather good on the guitar.

First staged in Berlin in 2012, it’s a messy show. Set flats (designed by Jan Pappelbaum)  are black with white chalking, occasionally amended by cast members. Then they obliterate it all with buckets of white paint, the point of which eluded me. And that’s before you get to the paint hurled at Smith by hecklers. By chance I sat next to one of the production carpenters who told me that he has three hours’ work immediately after the show, cleaning off the paint and restoring the set to rights for the next performance. Ever wondered why West End seats get ever more expensive?

I was, moreover, not impressed by the cynical, ambiguous ending. Stockman has lost everything – job, home and his wife has been sacked from her teaching job. Will he now give in? Surely not. His moral stance is the whole thrust of the play.

 

First published by Sardines : https://www.sardinesmagazine.co.uk/review/an-enemy-of-the-people-2/

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