2014 January

The ghosts nestle, rustle, pinch and pierce the psychology of the five characters.   Terror brushes across the face of Helene, wealthy wife and mother, as she catches the noise of her son giggling softly with the maid, a shuddering reminiscence of her husband’s adulterous behaviour.   The son, dying of syphilis, is hastened on his way as his mother reveals that the maid, Regina, is his half-sister.   Pastor Manders may have ignited the fire that consumed the new orphanage erected to celebrate the memory of Helene’s husband.

This is not melodrama.   Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s play, in fresh language, is subtle, taut and completely absorbing.    The text is full, but played without an interval it drives relentlessly through the emotional tissue of the play’s characters.   Lesley Manville’s Helene, the centre of the play, is utterly believable as she reveals her own and the other characters’ secrets and repressed memories and hopes.

Hiding and revelation are built into the beautifully conceived and constructed set, in which firm, enclosing walls fade into opacity and then translucence.   Snow and rain give way to pale dawn.   Stately, bourgeois surroundings are shown to enclose desire, anguish, brief moments of joy and of understanding.

The pace is everything.   The inexorable bass notes and deep rhythms of the play are given shape by the different characters, in time with each other, then suddenly out of time, jarring us into awareness of a new emotional revelation.   The rhythms merge and part, crossing more and more fiercely as the play builds to its climax, followed by a dying fall, that lets us out into the night.    The faces of the actors at the curtain call were marked by the effort of creating and inhabiting the highly charged world of Ibsen’s Ghosts.

Sinead Morrissey’s collection of poems Parallax, published by Carcanet, won this year’s T.S.Eliot Prize.

At the preview readings of the ten short-listed poets, the public study group attended to Morrissey’s poem, Baltimore, selected by the session’s chair and leader, Professor Vicki Feaver. In the poem, Morrissey creates the sensation of listening for a child’s voice at night, imagining it hidden beneath other extraneous sounds, or even in the sounds of silence.   Each word, rhythm, pause and beat is part of the sculpting of language that delivers a detailed, telling rendering of human experience.

“…silence itself
its material loops and folds enveloping
a ghost cry…”

In the public performance of her work last Sunday evening, Morrissey was the only poet of the short-listed group to recite rather than read.    This gave her performed work a measure of greater immediacy than the readings of the other poets, fine as they were.   It edged closer to the connection between artist and audience to which theatre aspires.

In Bloodshot, currently playing at the St James Theatre in London, Simon Slater performs his heart out in a noir detective puzzle set in seedy 1950s Notting Hill and Belgravia.    The play connects because of the central character, a mid-life talented but undisciplined photographer, a former CID officer inclined to drink, who narrates the action and wants to draw his audience into complicity with his highs and lows.    Slater plays all the characters – the photographer, the three suspects to a murder, the investigating CID man who is his former boss.   His fine acting skills build our belief in the characters, his musical prowess on ukulele and saxophone adding to the richness of the characterisation.     Lyn Gardner’s review in The Guardian is complimentary.

It is a complex and sustained piece of building with words, sights and sounds.   It makes and conveys characters and emotions.  We respond by listening intently and working with what we hear and see.   To Morrissey we respond by listening intently to her public voice and to our inner voices as we read.

Two solo artists taking flight, relishing and risking exposure to communicate.

On January 1st 1962, Dick Rowe , head of A&R at Decca Records, said to the manager of the group he had just auditioned, “Go back to Liverpool, Mr. Epstein. Groups with guitars are out”.   Organised by date, 99,000 music facts (count them) from Johnny Black and his colleagues at MusicDayz  lead to many hours of wonderful wandering in the archives – music, video, text – of this inimitable collection.

It is impossible not to be sucked into the video recordings of bands and artists that have formed the soundtrack of our lives.   Clips from movies, studio sessions, concert performances – holiday hours are consumed.    Don’t put this link onto your business computers (except for professional research purposes, of course).    The text is succinct, just to the point.    The organisation is simple and the navigation straightforward – yet one can reach the facts and the music from a number of different angles – day, date, year, theme, artist, genre and so on.

Johnny has been writing great pieces on music for years as a journalist – and the MusicDayz site lets us benefit from the never-ending research which has produced the huge archives that exist in Johnny’s basement.   From the basement to the cloud – I recommend we join the journey that Johnny is taking day by day with MusicDayz.   Let him know you’re on board.