Leap Day

I know it's been a topsy-turvy winter/spring, but I was still taken aback the other day to see a patch of Cow Parsley in full flower - in February! The spring flowers have been all over the place, with many lulled into early blooming by an unseasonably mild December. Little in the way of real winter followed (down here in Surrey suburbia) until recent weeks, when we finally had a good run of single-figure daytime temperatures and overnight frosts - and Met men say there's more to come (so perhaps it's about to come to an end). This late taste of winter has certainly slowed down the premature onrush of spring - but it hasn't stopped the Cow Parsley.
Tomorrow it will be March and, by a simple metric, the first day of spring - first day, that is, of the three spring months. But the borderland between winter and spring is nothing if not porous, with the two seasons intermingling and coexisting in various ways. Sometimes spring surges into winter, other years the traces of a hard winter linger into spring. Edward Thomas describes such a lingering with his charactersitically acute eye for detail - an eye well adapted to the sharp revealing light of early spring...

But these things also are Spring’s—

On banks by the roadside the grass
Long-dead that is greyer now
Than all the Winter it was;

The shell of a little snail bleached
In the grass; chip of flint, and mite
Of chalk; and the small birds’ dung

In splashes of purest white:

All the white things a man mistakes
For earliest violets
Who seeks through Winter’s ruins
Something to pay Winter’s debts,

While the North blows, and starling flocks
By chattering on and on
Keep their spirits up in the mist,

And Spring’s here, Winter’s not gone.  

Frank Kelly RIP

Sad to hear that the Irish actor Frank Kelly has died. He will always be remembered for his jaw-dropping portrayal of Father Jack, the foul-mouthed, cantankerous and wholly repellent alcoholic priest, in the classic sitcom Father Ted (a part he had mixed feelings about, but which he performed with absolute commitment).
 Kelly died exactly 18 years to the day after his co-star Dermot Morgan, who played Father Ted.
Here are the two of them in a scene in which Ted valiantly attempts to extend Jack's four-word vocabulary (drink, feck, arse, girls) ahead of a visit by a group of bishops. (In the event, Jack masters his new phrase and greatly impresses one of the bishops with his acute insight, while elsewhere the idiot priest Dougal unwittingly destroys the faith of another bishop...)

A Night at the Theatre

On Thursday evening, I found myself in a theatre in a Buckinghamshire town watching a live relay from another theatre - the National in London - of their current production of As You Like It. I was not there from choice, a night at the theatre being a long way from my idea of fun. Still (I consoled myself), at least it wasn't that eighth circle of Hell known as the West End, and it might even be a good production; one must, I told myself as I downed a second pre-curtain snifter, keep an open mind. It is surely quite possible that a theatre director can do justice to Shakespeare, throw new light on his work, bring out subtleties of meaning and characterisation that might escape us text-readers. Let's give this National Theatre As You Like It a chance...
 Alas, my generous frame of mind dissolved with the first sight of the horrific, high-tech, dayglo-coloured, fantastically elaborate set. It was the image of a frantic, strip-lit modern office or call centre, with everyone not hammering away at a computer keyboard engaged in pointless scurrying to and fro (the supernumerary cast was huge - heaven knows what this production cost). And then there was a cleaner mopping the floor - a gormless young man who turned out to be Orlando, for yes, this was, despite all appearances, As You Like It by William Shakespeare.
 A little later, I removed my head from my hands to find the weedy Orlando engaged in a wrestling match with a huge black man, to the accompaniment of cheerleaders, flashing lights and thumping music. And so it went on. Virtually nothing we were shown bore any obvious relation to the lines being spoken, and the modern costumes and bizarre casting (much of it 'colour-blind') made it extremely difficult to work out who was who or what was going on.
 Maybe, I told myself with no great conviction, things will improve when they get to the Forest of Arden. Then, with an almighty crashing and bashing of metal on metal, the entire set was hauled up into the gods and left hanging down to the stage in a tangled mess (with some of the poor supernumeraries still at their posts, obliged to keep still and silent in the shadows). This, I realised, was to be the Forest of Arden, and there the rest of the action played laboriously out. At some point before the final act I retreated to the pub over the road for a much-needed double.
 This As You Like It was, it seemed to me, a classic case of the production entirely overwhelming the work - and even, perversely, rendering much of it incomprehensible. A comedy that demands a light touch and close attention to the words and their delivery has been crushed underfoot up by a director's rampaging ego. God knows it is not the first time this has happened to Shakespeare, and it won't be the last. But why apparently sane people pay good money to go and see it done to our greatest - the world's greatest - poet and dramatist I cannot understand. I can only put it down to the absurd prestige and kudos The Theatre - and Going to the Theatre - have in this country.
 Never mind - Shakespeare of course towers unscathed above everything that is done to his works and in his name. And even in this lamentable production there were a couple of performances I enjoyed - Patsy Ferran's Celia and Paul Chahidi's Jaques. Rosalind too was good, though the modern dress meant that she looked much the same as Ganymede and as herself - Orlando would merely have taken her for Rosalind with a new hairstyle. Thus, as in so many other ways, did the production make a nonsense of the play. I don't think I'll be beating a path to the West End any time soon.

The Archers: It's Complicated

Well, it's a funny old world on Facebook, I must say. After years of manful resistance I've finally succumbed, and so far I'm rather enjoying it. The Dabbler is there now, of course, which is the main reason I took the plunge (or 'leap in the dark', as the pro-EU lot would put it).
Today The Dabbler named its three current worst programmes on Radio 4 as You and Yours (agreed, though I do love Winifred Robinson's voice), any sitcom with Lenny Henry in it (to which I would only add any programme at all with Lenny Henry in it) and, er, The Archers. Hmm.
There's always a lot of anti-Archers talk around (mostly from people who don't listen to it), but I think it misses the point. Hard-core listeners like me (it's been in my life for six decades) know perfectly well that a lot of what goes out on The Archers is bad, even very bad, excruciatingly, infuriatingly bad - but that only adds to our listening pleasure. If ever there was a classic love-hate relationship, it's that between The Archers and its serious listeners. We love it because we hate it; we hate it because we love it. It's complicated.
How many times have I vowed never to listen again? After Nigel Pargeter's rooftop plunge, for sure (Wendy Cope has never listened since), and after John Archer's equally unnecessary death, after Ruth Archer's preposterous fling with a cowman, the ludicrous disappearance of Matt, further back the all-Ambridge coach trip to London for Gay Pride, led by Mrs Antrobus (anyone remember that?)... The list is endless, and sometimes I do actually stop listening for a while. But I always come back.
The Archers, unlike any other 'soap' (the term doesn't really apply), has a deep, felt continuity - nothing is forgotten; the past is always present. However ludicrously and inconsistently characters and plotlines swerve around, the gravitational field of this deep continuity always hauls them back. In musical terms, the 'ground' is so strong and persistent that the melodic lines can go where they will. They will come back. And so will we.

Douglas Slocombe RIP

The last living link with the golden age of Ealing Studios - the great cinematographer Douglas Slocombe - has died, at the age of 103. Slocombe worked on a string of notable post-Ealing films, from The Servant and The Italian Job to three Indiana Jones movies (and, along the way, Polanski's crazy The Fearless Vampire Killers) - but the work of his that he always remembered with most affection and pride was Kind Hearts and Coronets. I wish I'd remembered to mention his brilliant cinematography when I wrote about Kind Hearts a while back...

Waldemar's Renaissance, Kamal's clifftop

This startling image is of one of the figures from a breath-taking terracotta mourning group by Niccolo dell'Arca - the Compianto sul Cristo Morto in Santa Maria della Vita in Bologna. Astonishingly it might date from as early as 1460. This, anyway, was the date plumped for by Waldemar Januszczak in The Renaissance Unchained, which I caught on television (BBC4) last night.
 I always enjoy Waldemar's programmes, not least for his strong views and punchy (to put it mildly) delivery - and his new habit of stumping away from the camera, talking over his shoulder. He speaks entirely in italics and bold italics, with plentiful pauses for breath - 'I don't know about you. But when I look at Renaissance paintings. I like to know what I'm looking at.' Well, quite - and he sets about illuminating what we're looking at by focusing on the context, especially on theology and inconography, rather than on the aesthetics. What does this mean? rather than Isn't this lovely?
 After Piero della Francesca and Fra Angelico, Waldemar makes a change of direction. 'See that snow on top of that mountain?' he says, pointing to a distant mountain top. 'That's not snow at all. It's marble.' And so we're on to Michelangelo, but Waldemar wants to direct our attention to Pietro Torrigiano, the man who broke Michelangelo's nose, and who went on to introduce Renaissance sculpture to England (his posthumous portrait bust of Henry VII in Westminster Abbey is astonishing). Torrigiano, Januszczak contended, was underrated both in his own time and after because he didn't work in the noble medium of marble, but in lowly terracotta. As did Niccolo dell'Arca.
 Thank heavens we still have BBC4. Without it there wouldn't be much home-grown TV to watch.

Talking of television, also last night I caught a news report by that elegant fellow Kamal Ahmed on the subject of - well, you know the subject, it's the only subject just now: 'Europe'. He was standing, Brian Cox style, on top of one of the white cliffs of Dover, while a helicopter circled expensively overhead, filming him as he declaimed his lines. Why the location? Well, apparently the Channel is our border with continental Europe. Who knew?
There are four months of this referendum campaign to go. Four months. It really doesn't bear thinking about...

Auden: Oxford and Martinis

To celebrate the birthday of W.H. Auden - born on this day in 1907, in York - here is a short (originally rather longer) poem about the place where his literary career began, and which remained part of his inner geography, for good and ill. These descriptive, or rather evocative, poems - of people as well as places - seem to me one of the best and most distinctive parts of Auden's huge output.

Oxford

Nature invades: old rooks in each college garden
Still talk, like agile babies, the language of feeling;
By towers a river still runs coastward and will run,
  Stones in these towers are utterly
  Satisfied still with their weight.

Mineral and creature, so deeply in love with themselves
Their sin of accidie excludes all others,
Challenge our high-strung students with a careless beauty,
  Setting a single error
  Against their countless faults.

Outside, some factories, then a whole green country
Where a cigarette comforts the evil, a hymn the weak;
Where thousands fidget and poke and spend their money:
  Eros Paidagogos
  Weeps on his virginal bed.

And over the talkative city like any other
Weep the non-attached angels. Here too the knowledge of death
Is a consuming love, and the natural heart refuses
  The low unflattering voice
  That sleeps not till it find a hearing.

[Among Auden the man's more endearing characteristics was his devotion to the six o'clock martini. On one of the few occasions when Richard Wilbur met the older poet, the talk was of martinis:
'Auden had ordered a martini and I had ordered a martini, and we talked about martinis, and we discussed the fact that if you are devoted to martinis, it's very hard to get a good one away from home. I think that was the essence of our deep conversation, but it was heartfelt.'] Cheers!