Three Sisters by Chekhov at The Young Vic

Gala Gordon: winsome

I went to the Young Vic last night to watch Benedict Andrews’ production of Three Sisters, Chekhov’s play about the decline of the privileged classes in Russia. It was an interesting staging, bare and sparse. The style mashed up grunge (with a brilliantly weird version of Nirvana’s Nevermind on piano and accordion) with tracksuits and bottle green dinner jackets. It starred Gala Gordon as a winsome, affecting Irina, drifting around the stage first in immaculate, bridal white, then in more mature yellow, her desire to return to Moscow almost primal as she clambered up a ladder made from tables. There were strong performances from the rest of the cast, including the doctor, whose drunk scene was a tour de force of blustery bile; a sexy, almost Ab Fabish Masha; a prim, sensible but affecting Olga, and a Natasha who shades from awkward, vulgar ingenue into an egomaniacal monster. In the second half, stage hands appeared to take away the stage, bit by bit, as if the very world around the actors was diminishing. The empty space left still seemed to be enclosed, claustrophobic and frustrated as the lives of the characters.

First Story Workshop with Caroline Bird

Caroline Bird: Excellent

This year I will be writer in residence at St Augustine's school for First Story, the excellent charity set up by Will Fiennes and Katie Waldegrave. We did some workshops in preparation yesterday with the poet Caroline Bird, in which we wrote poems about abstract nouns.  I don’t write poetry (well, not since I was a teenager and thought poetry meant writing down versions of Nirvana lyrics about blood and hate and so on.) I got "Irritation," and this is what happened.

Irritation

He’s so small he fits into the

Prickle of your eyelids when
You blink. I see him refracted
When I wake. He sits there,
Pleased with himself,
Holding that damned watch
He’s always winding.
Close your eyes, you say.
No good. That gives him
Full permission. Sometimes he does a
Dance, wheeling, prancing piratically.
Sometimes he pulls his baggage along
Rushing for a train he’ll never catch.
You can’t squash him - I tried once,
With a fly-swatter shaped like a
Tennis racquet. He split, calmly, into
Two - then three - pirouetted - and
They built themselves bungalows
In my ear lobes.

Interview with Sadie Jones at the Hampstead Literary Festival

 ****UPDATE THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELLED ******

Hello all,

I’m interviewing Sadie Jones, author of The Outcast, Small Wars and The Uninvited Guests, tomorrow at the Hampstead Literary Festival. If anybody has anything they’d like to ask her, let me know.

Best wishes,

PW

Boneland by Alan Garner: review

Garner: bardic

I've reviewed Alan Garner's Boneland for The Telegraph - it's a strange book, and I think I may be the only person in the world to have liked it (of the reviews I've read, anyway). It's certainly not a children's book, but it is rather weirdly marvellous.

****UPDATE: Ursula Le Guin, that great fantasy novelist, has written a great piece for The Guardian about Boneland.****

****UPDATE: Another brilliant fantasy writer, Neil Gaiman, has also reviewed Boneland, and has found it good. He did it for The Times. I've so far noted that those who write fantasy seem to like it more than those who don't.****

 

Fifty Shades of Grey gets greyer

"I do think that if they’re going to write at all, they ought to sit down and learn about sentence structure and not punctuate with ludicrous phrases like, “Holy s***” and “Holy

crap”. You have to learn to write. You can’t just decide to be a writer, in the same way that I couldn’t suddenly decide to be Darcey Bussell and jump on to the stage and do ballet, could I? It takes practice. I don’t begrudge anyone making money, but it seems tragic that people are rushing to buy these books at the expense of a lot of very good writers who are really struggling."

 

This is from the excellent and lovely Jilly Cooper in The Times, about Fifty Shades of Grey by E L James. I think that says it all, really, doesn't it?

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus: review

Ben Marcus: fiery

Ben Marcus' new novel, The Flame Alphabet, is an experimental work in which language takes on toxic capabilities. I first read a passage from it in the excellent Harper's Magazine, and was intrigued; therefore I was rather pleased to be asked to review it for the New Humanist, which I have done, and which is now available on their website. Check it out here.



 

Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Violins of Saint Jacques

This is Patrick Leigh Fermor, who may well be described as legendary. I have just finished reading his only novel, The Violins of Saint Jacques, which is a lusty, dreamy, liquid thing; a tale of humour and humanity in an anachronistic society on a Caribbean island; here the Masques of the islanders mingle with the balls of the aristocrats; little boys dressed as wizards set deadly snakes free at parties; people live and love to the full, in a way that seems impossible now. Elopements, betrayals, forbidden desires and characters drawn so vividly they dance before your eyes long after you've closed its luscious pages.