Snowflake

This is very short but it seems an appropriate day to post it.  I wrote it late in 2011 in response to a painting (not the image above by the way).  I kicked around some other snowflakey ideas but this seemed to hit the mark I was aiming for in a very few words.  Snowflake's not the actual title of the poem but it'll do.

Snowflake

I looked for you

as a man searching for blossom in a snowstorm.

For a heart to cradle

that would not melt away.

David Millington
14th January 2013
Nottingham

Heartbeats

Someone once observed that each animal, large or small, has about the same number of heartbeats over its lifetime.  Animals with shorter lifespans have hearts that beat very quickly, 450 times a minute in the case of a hamster. Hamsters don't usually make it past 3 years. Sorry hamster lovers.  Long lived animals like whales, than can live to 80, have hearts that only beat around 20 times a minute.  A lifetime can be measured in a lot of ways, but it's about a billion heartbeats for most of the animals on the planet.

The exception to this rule of thumb is us.  About a billion heart beats would take us to 31 years of age.  We get around 2.2 billion heartbeats.  So think how lucky you are and don't waste them. And think how many of us are living on borrowed time.

I've posted this before but it'll stand posting again.

This has been kicking around for ages in my head so I thought I'd try and get it down on paper.  Possibly a waste of everyone's heatbeats.

Heartbeats

Only so many heartbeats,

Leaking like water from a drum.

Strewn like confetti over damp cobbles,

Or carried like blossom on the breeze.

Stamped into the brickwork of that midnight doorway,

Scorched into the table by the unfinished drinks,

Spinning like leaves in the rain-tide of the river,

caught in the station’s eaves with pigeons and announcements.

Yours and yours and yours all mixed with mine,

fading away until in a hundred years

all that’s left of us will be the echoes in your child’s breast.

David Millington
Nottingham
4th November 2012

St Michael's Mount

I am planning on writing a series of blogs about various books but in the meantime I thought I'd post this as I'm quite pleased with it. 

Simon Armitage said that as a poet he looks for patterns and synchronicity.  I think I had that in somewhere in mind when the idea for this bubbled up to the surface when I was in Cornwall over Christmas.  At least it gave me something to think about as I walked by the sea in the hail!

 

St Michaels Mount         

A mile or more of Mounts Bay and the billowing wind

leave only a rain carved shadow in the mist.

I can’t see where the water meets the cliff

or the crag stiffens into wall.

Just grey on grey on grey.

But I can picture that sea-glistened causeway,

leading to that midnight island,

where we were the only people in the world.

It was as if the deeps had parted for us

and the path ahead was moonlight clear.

Now the years have piled up in front of me

like so many emptied glasses at a pub table.

The memories finger-smudged

and the paths we might have taken

are long since lost to the incoming tide.

The insistent hail at my back drives me along the promenade.

Storm hood tugged low to a letter box view of the world

hunch shouldered and fists stuffed into pockets.

The wind’s grip a tender doorman

escorting me firmly onwards.

David Millington

26th January 2012

Nottingham

Quick hits

I've read somewhere that poetry is the art of saying a lot with a few words.  That seems quite a modern view and probably isn’t something that Homer, the unknown writer of Beowulf or even Keats would have necessarily agreed with but there’s something to be said for it none the less.  Often a book will try to open a door to a particular experience or feeling using sheer weight of words.  And sometimes a poem will fit easily into an unseen keyhole and open it with the slightest twist.

Scots poet Norman MacCaig used to say in reply to the question  "How long does it take to write a poem" that usually it was "about a cigarette" or "two cigarettes for a long poem". I’m rather skeptical about this as I find his work sparse, spare but beautifully crafted and I can’t believe that he resisted the urge to go back later and to tidy up. I think in many ways it’s harder to find a single word that works than it write a sentence or paragraph. When you have the freedom to write you can chase the meaning around the page before eventually pinning it down in submission. A single word is hard.

I’ve tried to be economical and ruthless with the writing and editing of these two poems. Flowers was originally twelve lines long and now it’s down to five. I thought I’d better post them while I still have something.

‘Flowers’ is about a month old, ‘Bookcase’ a little longer.

Flowers

I wished I could have curled the sunlight

around the plain stem of my words,

twisted strips of bright sky into blooms,

and wrapped them in the blue morning.

When I realised it was you that I had met today.

Bookcase

The bookcase looms

Square-shouldered.

Five gaping mouths,

crammed with teeth.

One of us will eat the other

And I’m the hungrier.

David Millington

Nottingham

23rd November 2011

Review - Poland 3 Iran 2/Births, Deaths and Marriages - 7th June 2011 - Nottingham

Tonight’s main attraction was to be 30 Bird’s Production of ‘Poland 3 Iran 2’, billed as ‘The Perfect Pub Conversation about football, fathers, revolution, swimming, chess, love and Subbuteo’, but first up was Gareth Morgan’s piece, ‘Births, Deaths and Marriages: Nottingham Forest, my father and me’.

Births, Deaths and Marriages: Nottingham Forest, my father and me

Morgan’s piece is, as you’d expect from the title autobiographical, but was performed tonight by Richie Garton, who stood in for the absent author.  It concerns details of his birth, his formative experience in becoming a Forest fan and his relationship with his father through this shared love.  The twist is that the piece is designed to be performed on a coach as it takes us to tonight’s main show at the Forest Ground, via Morgan’s birthplace in Sherwood.  And it was this twist that was the problem with the show.  Garton tried to synchronise the script with the locations we were passing but this often led to timing difficulties or to him trying to fill time as we waited to get to the next location.  The final passage, which didn’t rely on the synchronicities of narration and place was by far the best bit as Morgan/Garton rediscovered his bond with his team, his home and his father and reconciled his twin loves of theatre and Forest. 

Despite the difficulties of traffic and geography Garton brought a charm and likability to the piece that well suited Morgan’s honest and touching writing. An interesting concept that needs more thought if it’s to really work but a worthwhile and diverting exercise.

Poland 3 Iran 2

 ‘Poland 3 Iran 2’ is performed by the artist Chris Dobrowolski and writer/director Mehrdad Seyf, with the aid of a large screen and a laptop that projects photos, maps and film to support their stories.   I say performed, but the impression gained was, as advertised, more of overhearing a particularly animated pub conversation between two great storytellers with a lot of great stories to tell.  Iranian born Seyf deals with the more political aspect of the show, mixing the comic tale of his parent’s courtship, his childhood in Iran and the time his father and uncle spent in prison for political crimes.  Dobrowolski’s stories focussed more on him growing up in Essex with comic reminiscences about holidays in Poland, Panini football stickers and being the sort of child who used football as a springboard for both his imagination and as a focus for his nerdiness.  Both men were able to be funny without trying too hard and be reflective without being sentimental.

The joy of the show was the way that the two men, who’d taken very different roads through life, were able to find resonances between themselves and their experiences.  Parallels between their childhoods, their relationships with their fathers, revolutions in their countries and their love of the beautiful game all drifted into and out of focus throughout the show.  That the audience were free to sit back and enjoy the stories as simple anecdotes or to fit them into a larger narrative added to the show’s quality.  The pacing  throughout was excellent and the visual aids, as you’d expect from an artist, were very well thought out and added a lot to the evening. 

Poland may have beaten Iran 3-2 at the Montreal Olympics in the titular game, but tonight the winner was theatre.  Another great show from NEAT/Hatch.

David Millington

7th June 2011

Nottingham

Review - The Cries of Silent Men – 5th of June – Nottingham Castle (Hanby and Barrett)

For theatregoers, 9pm on a chilly June Sunday evening in the grounds of Nottingham Castle is unusual territory in all senses, but it was a good sized and well wrapped up audience who were in attendance for this production of Hanby and Barrett’s ‘The Cries of Silent Men’.  This play was originally developed as a ‘site specific’ piece of community theatre, designed to be performed outside, in a particular location, by people from that location and its surrounding communities, but had been transplanted to Nottingham Castle for the NEAT Festival. 

The Cries of Silent Men

The play deals with the events at nearby Beauvale Priory and the order of Monks who called it home, during the reformation of the mid to late 1530’s.  This turbulent period of English history saw Henry VIII, with the political and religious facilitation of Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer (another local man), split the English Protestant Church away from Catholic Rome.  These events were of immense political significance across Europe, but also cut to the heart of each devout Christian in England, who had to decide whether God’s anointed King (Henry) or God’s anointed Priest (the Pope) was his authority on Earth. 

Andy Barrett’s script did a terrific job of balancing the need for exposition with storytelling, of contrasting the affairs of state against personal religious conviction and of setting Cromwell’s worldly pragmatism against the monk’s sacred idealism.  The characters never felt like ciphers and the Angelic visions and the reoccurring symbolism of the roses and petals, helped to ground the monk’s religious convictions in a reality that made their piety understandable and plausible.  Finally some sly references to England’s laws being unjustly set by a European Potentiate showed how history can repeat itself and gave the play some contemporary resonances.

The cast, drawn from the people of the community around Beauvale Priory, handled the script confidently and well.  The language was, almost without exception, well spoken and audible, not always easy in an outdoors situation close to the city centre and despite the large cast of characters the audience were well able to follow what was happening.  Ian Baxter and Russell Waters playing monks the doubting Thomas Dookmer and the capable Richard Wakefield respectively, were particularly good.

The production also made the most of the castle grounds in its imaginative staging and direction.  A passage that saw the angel appear atop the castle wall, whilst we heard the wind rustling in the trees and chanting in Latin echoing up from the stone tunnel was particularly atmospheric and really did transport the audience to another time and place.  A later scene set on a more conventional stage, cleverly used a wooden frame first to place Henry VIII in a familiar portrait pose and then acted as first gallows and then scaffold for the bloody executions than end this tale.  Costumes, props and lighting all played their part in creating a seductive atmosphere.

This tremendous show, strong in all departments, was a wonderful example of what can be achieved by community theatre.  It showed how with the right material and creative direction, memorable productions can be staged in unique venues.  I hope that more established theatres follow this lead to create similarly ambitious new pieces.

(also available on LeftLion - http://www.leftlion.co.uk/articles.cfm/id/3708) 

David Millington

5^th June 2011

Nottingham

Review - Lady Chatterley's Lover - Hull Truck on Tour - 25th May 2011 - Lakeside Nottingham

Over 80 years after its initial publication, ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ by Nottinghamshire literary giant D.H.Lawrence is still, in approximately equal measure, as notorious as it is famous. This notoriety comes from the fact that the novel was not published openly in Britain until 1960 due to the sexual explicitness of its depiction of an adulterous relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman. Can this touring production of a new adaptation by Nick Lane of the Hull Truck Company, who also directs, make light of this baggage to get at the themes of Lawrence’s novel?

Lady Chatterley's Lover - Hull Truck Programme Image

The play opens with Lady Chatterley herself (Amie Burns Walker) walking out on her marriage to the wheelchair bound Sir Clifford Chatterley (Frazer Hammill) to be with Mellors (Karl Haynes), the estate’s gamekeeper and eponymous lover. The story then unfolds in flashback, with Sir Clifford as the main narrator but with Lady Chatterley and Mellors each taking turns to shed light on events and their inner life.

The three actors remain on stage throughout the production, taking on the parts of the other characters as needed and handling the minimal scene changes. Their performances were good, Frazer Hammill bringing out the complexities of the ineffectual and weak Sir Clifford and Karl Haynes giving Mellors the depth he needs beyond being a woman’s fantasy ‘bit of rough’. Amie Burns Walker, in her touring debut, fares less well as the underwritten Lady Chatterley who never quite feels as rounded as the other main characters but she quickly brings to life the smaller roles of Hilda Reid and Bertha Coutts.

The fragmented structure of the play allows the story to shift rapidly between time periods and viewpoints, allowing geographically and temporally dispersed events to happen side by side on stage. These rapid shifts are occasionally confusing as an actor moved from scene to narration to scene. Clearer signalling of these shifts by the lighting and sound design and direction could have helped, but this momentary disorientation is rare and generally the device is handled well. The music set the mood nicely and complimented the more emotional scenes effectively. The lighting design was less eloquent and sometimes could have been more imaginatively used. The set, a junkyard ring of clutter around the stage didn’t inform the action and seemed unnecessary and distracting.

The script was a little overcooked in places, the obstacle of class barriers between the lovers seemed to be shrugged off rather easily and the political concerns of the book are not fully explored but the production makes the sensible decision to focus instead on the relationship between the three main characters. Adapting such a well known work could be a thankless task, with those familiar with the book unhappy about what’s been omitted and those new to the story feeling that they’re not getting the full picture but Nick Lane has managed to create a play that feels self contained and satisfying and a production that, while not without flaws, is both absorbing and enjoyable.

David Millington

25th May 2011

Nottingham