Category: Events

Worklight Theatre

Worklight Theatre in Stroud

Torches and performers set the stage alight as Worklight Theatre presented a narrative and analysis of the Summer of Discord, 2011. A speedy hour whizzed past as we witnessed the spectacle of that confusing time: just 2 years ago and it already seems like another age.

Yet the play reminded us how ‘the political rhetoric’ surrounding those riots has a history stretching back through the 20th century and to the Industrial Revolution. Talking of which, here’s an open offer to Worklight Theatre and Spaniel in the Works Theatre Company: let me know if you would like to get heads around the decade of Chartism in the Stroud Valleys, or the periods of weavers’ riots or food riots. That might be something too.

Fringe Review2012: ‘Theatre so spell-binding yet brutally honest and brave that it actually gave me goose bumps’

Broadway Baby 2012: ‘Professionally stunning…’

All of us in our group who went, from teenagers to  citizens of seniority, would totally recommend seeing this whilst in our area:

26th, 27th, 28th, September, Cheltenham, Everyman

Tommy Atkins and the Canary Girl

Outside: a wet Friday afternoon in Stroud; inside: a spare set, two tables, two chairs, John Bassett and Kim Baker in ‘Tommy Atkins and the Canary Girl’.
Outside: muffled drone of traffic, occasional motor bike and bicycle bell; inside: letters, telegrams, postcards, duckboards, trenches, no man’s land, mud, shell holes, barbed wire, mustard gas, the dead and dying, lice, shell shock, rationing, girls with phossie jaw and yellow hands, 12 hour shifts, 25 bob a week, ambulances, hospitals, nurses, barrenness, conscription, unemployment and a war to end all wars.
Kim and John transported us all utterly into the internal above with their interplay of characters, snatches of songs and poems. If I was that nervous about the fact that I had forgotten about turning off my mobile ‘ phone, what must it have been like waiting for that whistle to send you over the top or waiting for that telegram?
Totally recommended – I am looking forward so much to teaming up with John and Kim next year on our 2014 Stroud and Gloucester WW1 centenary productions and workshops.

Folk in a Box

You get home from Southwold after a 5 hour drive and you’re slightly tired, even though you don’t drive. The fields resemble a Kansas harvest breadbasket, Keats whispers in the wind: ‘Where are the songs of Spring?’ and Seamus Heaney is dead, school’s back on Monday, war clouds are gathering. The holidays are well and truly over.
But a walk up the Albert on Stroud Fringe Saturday night restores your faith in humanity and the infinite possibilities of friendship. Not just old friends from ‘No Pasaran!’ like Becky and Dell, but also a new welcome from Folk in a Box. Out the back of the pub was a a group of bohos and hipsters even more boho and hipster than the usual for even the Albert. Behind them was a box.
I entered the sepulchral gloom within the portmanteau and sat opposite an invisible minstrel. What might happen? What could happen? Friend or foe? Confusion is the usual handmaiden of darkness – what if humiliation is the consequence? Robbery?
Instead, the troubadour strummed a guitar and sang me a song straight from the heart. Two strangers lost in darkness, yet establishing a union through the medium of music, a harmony where none existed before. ‘Folk in a Box’: singing inside a box, yet making waves through seven handshakes wherever they go.

Giffords Circus, Minchinhampton Common, August 2013

Radical Stroud - Gifford Circus

When Giffords Circus pitches up on your green,
Conventional wisdom is mesmerised:
Enter the Big Top’s strange circumference
And Euclid’s straight-line space-time dissembles
Before your very eyes, Ladies and Gentlemen!
All is magick, spectral, alchemical,
Performers and audience conjoined in spectacle:
Clowns, dancers, musicians, tumblers, artists,
Balancers, acrobats, aerialists,
Fire-eaters, madcaps, funambulists,
Calumniators, vituperators,
A faux dancing bear, contortionists,
Backbiters and nonchalant trapezists;
A post-modernist rewrite of ‘Hard Times’,
Coketown, Bounderby and Gradgrind vanquished
By Mr. Sleary’s travelling circus:
What is your definition of a horse?
‘Quadruped. Graminivorous.’
‘You musn’t fancy,’ cried the gentleman …
‘Fact, fact, fact!’ said the gentleman,
And ‘Fact, fact, fact,’ repeated Mr. Gradgrind;
But welcome to Giffords Circus:
Fantasy, insight and ingenuity,
Invention, intelligence and imagery,
Chimeras, inspiration, flights of fancy,
Where nothing is what it seems,
And certainty is a fool’s paradise,
In Giffords Circus, Theatre of Dreams.

Rodborough Fields 9th July 2012

It was just another sultry Tuesday
At the Clothiers Arms on the Bath Road,
Beer and fags and crisps and mobile ‘phones,
When a flash contingent of walkers popped up,
All arrayed in Stroud Scarlet uniform:
T-shirts, frocks, dresses, jackets, tunics, leggings,
Seventy -five people demonstrating
Their commitment to Rodborough Fields,
With a meander through time and space;
William Cobbett and weavers’ riots
(‘I have the sweat of the brow, but no bread’),
Mills, ponds, canals, bridges and viaducts,
Kingfishers, dragonflies and butterflies,
Fronds and ferns by the shaded River Frome;
We ascended side by side through the fields,
To listen by our venerable oak tree,
Stroud scarlet stretched on shared tenterhooks,
Sunlight shimmering through the scarlet flags,
A silent evangelical procession,
Pilgrims’ Progress on the straight and narrow path,
Memories recorded by the gateway,
A pitched camp of symbolic resistance,
Standing sentinel in Rodborough Fields.

Thanks to Mike and Richard and John and everyone for making this such an utterly memorable occasion – and thanks to BBC2, too, for their appearance.

Weavers and Workhouse Walk, Sunday May19th, High Noon

Before I give details about the next walk, I do recommend a visit to ‘Water – The Miniature Museum of Memories’ at Stroud Museum (throughout May) and also ‘Walking the Land: River’, discussion 10-noon at Stroud Brewery, Thrupp, Saturday 18th May.

RADICAL STROUD WALK SUNDAY MAY 19th

Meet mid-day in front of the cinema.

We then look at the 1825 weavers’ riots whilst meandering along the canal to Cainscross.

We then ascend to Ruscombe, where we look at poverty in the 1830s and the local alternative to a cash-economy.

We descend via Callowell, so as to amble along the Slad Road with the intention of reaching the top of the town via Libby’s Drive and Baxter’s Field.

We discuss the workhouse and the 1839 Miles Report about the poverty of the handloom weavers whilst at the cemetery.

We then skirt the Heavens to descend to the canal.

We walk back into town to look at the poor law guardians’ plaque in the Ale House and have a chin-wag.

No charge – hand-outs provided – mystery guest – please bring own victuals.

Stroud Workhouse Plaque

Next Walk, Sunday, March 10th: Stroud, the Heavens and Flann O’Brien

Who Needs Google Earth?
I know that debate rages, dear readers, within you and without you, as to the respective merits of Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman” and his wonderful “At Swim Two Birds”. Personally, I probably enjoy re-reading the latter even more than the former; be that as it may, it is the Policeman that we need to guide us on our next walk: Mothering Sunday, March 10th. Meet outside the Prince Albert at 11.15 or outside the Crown and Sceptre at 12.30 for a walk around the Heavens and the Edgelands of Stroud – three hours at the most, then into Number 23 in Nelson Street for a chinwag in the bistro.
But here is your preparatory reading:
Chapter 3 in Flann O’Brien’s “The Third Policeman” has a diverting section on walking, emanating from the pen of the imaginary mad-savant, de Selby. O’Brien’s eccentric, but, alas, fictional genius, saw roads as “the most ancient of human monuments, surpassing by many tens of centuries” the most ancient of stone edifices created by humanity. De Selby talked of “the tread of time” and how “a good road will have character and a certain air of destiny, an indefinable intimation that it is going somewhere, be it east or west, and not coming back from there.” The unconstrained thoughts of de Selby led him to the conclusion that “If you go with such a road…it will give you pleasant travelling, fine sights at every corner and a gentle ease of peregrination that will persuade you that you are walking forever on falling ground.” I am sure you can see the converse: “…if you go east on a road that is on its way west, you will marvel at the unfailing bleakness of every prospect and the great number of sore-footed inclines…”
De Selby also wrote of urban walking, of “a complicated city with nets of crooked streets and five hundred other roads leaving it for unknown destinations.” Needless to say, “a friendly road” “will always be discernible for its own self and will lead you safely out of the tangled town.” Thus, I think we can say that we do not need Google Earth or even an OS map to guide us both into Stroud and out towards the Heavens or Rodborough Fields or the Slad Valley. Instead, we might carry a copy of Colin Ward’s “Talking Green”, stopping to look at paragraph two on age 44: “Cherished corners of the landscape can be changed beyond recognition in a few hours. Trees, streams, footpaths, buildings, symbols of permanence which transcend ownership, may suddenly disappear.”
Just as the price of liberty might be eternal vigilance, so might be the price of the right road.

12th Night Walk

Our first Radical Springs Walk today was a great success. Eighteen of us wandered through the Toadsmoor Valley, hoping to locate and name six springs in the tumbling landscape. In the end, we discovered seven.
We gathered at the first spring and named it ‘Bella’; we stood in the mud as we talked about how on 12th Night, we would turn the world upside down by discovering the subterranean sources of our civilization, and naming these, up to now, anonymous springs.
Our second spring was named ‘Holly’, where a tincture was bottled and where Shiraz swigged the lot; another tincture was taken. Young people were given the chance to name the third spring and in the interests of gender-balance, we asked for male names: Noah’s Spring and Bob’s Spring duly followed. Another tincture was taken at Noah’s Spring, in a broken bottle, stopped with a mouldering ash twig.
The fifth spring was named Voles’ Spout; the sixth spring was designated Ash Spring; an artificial water-course was called ‘Shiraz’s Fall’. This appellation was made in honour of Shiraz, the only one to seriously slip with theatrical pirouette, in an otherwise safe peregrination.

12th Night Walk

The seventh spring provided a moral instruction to all those who rush through life, seeking a destination. The majority of the group walked on in that absence of mind that so often accompanies the end of a walk, when thoughts turn to food and drink; the more mindful members of the troupe, pyschogeographically focused on the here and now, noticing the next spring, which was aptly named ‘Forget-Me-Not’. Travellers dropped down into the water to record and video this aquatic issue.
Our eventual intention is to have a springs exhibition in the Brunel Goods Shed, with a cabinet of curiosities of labelled spring water, video installations, audio recordings, oral history reminiscences, creative and historical writings, re-imaginings and a pop-up restaurant.
After that, we leave the search for the natural genius loci of Stroud and the Five Valleys and move on to more conventional radical history. But for the nonce, our next springs walk will be on Sunday March 10th, meeting at 11.15 outside the Prince Albert, when we will map the Urban Springs of Stroud and its Edgelands.

Meet at 11.15 a.m. on Sunday 6th January outside the Prince Albert

Rendezvous Prince Albert for our first springs walk and organise cars. It seems oddly contradictory to ask for a dry day when we track six springs in the Toadsmoor Valley, in our search for the genius loci of Stroud and the Five Valleys, but there we are. Please give us a dry day, Fate.
As the Guardian editorial put it today: “It’s the soundtrack to 2012. The hammering and splatting of rain on roofs and umbrellas, the plonk and the hiss as it falls into swelling puddles, the swish of passing cars on sodden roads, the swirling suck as it disappears down the drain – and the ominous gurgle as it comes back up again. This year, it has rained stair rods and cats and dogs and then it’s drizzled and mizzled…The result is often startlingly beautiful…And in the literary imagination…It is a wild, roaring, uncontrollable force…So farewell, 2012, and here’s to a dryer 2013. Not too dry, of course.”
Hope to see you on Sunday the 6th, ready to reconnoitre, record and re-imagine our landscape.

The Prince Albert Pub Exterior