Author Archives: Mark BROWN

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Harper Lee, the author of the iconic To Kill A Mockingbird, has died at the age of 89. The novel tells the story of the heroic lawyer, Atticus Finch, who defends an innocent black man accused of raping a white girl in segregated Alabama. The novel, scandalously, was removed from the GCSE syllabus recently to make room for more ‘English’ literature about drawing rooms and manners. It’s a shame, as generations of students have been given a genuine insight into the legacy of slavery and the pernicious effects of racism and have, I suspect, become better people as a result. Lee, interestingly, grew up in the same small, Southern town as Truman Capote (author of Breakfast at Tiffany’s) and helped him to research his seminal non-fiction crime novel, In Cold Blood (which we study on the Crime Scene America module).

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Atticus Finch and Tom Robinson in the Oscar winning film of To Kill A Mockingbird (WikiCommons)

Robin Hood and Marian

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If, like me, you are prepared to believe that the Sheriff on Nottingham has a sudden Marxist epiphany that there are Robin Hoods all over the country ready to topple the odious King John, that it is Robin himself who forces John’s hand to create a great charter for the people (and call it Magna Carta), and that they are all terrified into doing this by a baby dragon, then you would have had as much fun at the New Vic’s production of Robin Hood and Marian as we all did last week. Students and staff bought their extra-small students (ranging from 5 to 11ish) to enjoy the perfectly pitched and paced singing, dancing, juggling and tumbling, and proper scary sword fighting. We even had the added excitement of the set catching fire a little bit. My 7 year old was seeing it for the 3rd time – once with school, once with family and friends, and here on the departmental outing – and was still mesmerised.

Marian here is cast as Robin’s equal in sword fighting and archery, instead of just his love interest and a damsel in distress. And, because the New Vic is theatre in the round, the whole audience are within a sword’s length of the stunning fight sequences, leaving everybody on the edge of their seats. The circular stage becomes the archery target on which the struggle between the sheriff, Robin, and the brilliantly name Hubert the Archer (son of Hubert the Archer, son of ….) is played out.

This family production, which thankfully avoids any pantoness, is as impressive as the wonderful The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which the Vic put on a few years ago and productions of which are staged all over the country every year. Recent years have seen Alice, The Borrowers and 101 Dalmatians; I can’t wait to find out what next year will bring.

This spring we will taking in Northern Broadside’s Merry Wives, a new production of Pinter’s The Caretaker, and perhaps a trip to the RSC to see Hamlet.

Image by Andrew Billington New Vic Theatre

 

Godot at the New Vic

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There are many myths surrounding Samuel Beckett and his work. He is famously reported as telling a reporter that if knew what a play had meant, he would have put it in the play. A theatre critic also described Godot as a play in which nothing happens. Twice. His is an enigmatic presence in 20th century theatre; just google a picture of him and you’ll see what I mean – what a face!

You can see what the critic meant. Vladimir and Estragon are two tramps who meet by a tree for two days running to wait for the mysterious Godot. Each day a message is brought by a boy to say that Godot can’t come today, but he is sure to come tomorrow. A conceited land-owner, Pozzi, and his slave, Lucky (a slave called Lucky?), also cross the stage in each half. Beckett plays with our expectations of time and chronology (everything happens twice, challenging us to examine the notion of causality in narrative development), plot, character, and even what it means to be an audience (there are a number of meta-theatrical moments when the central characters gaze in to the crowd and question who we are – as we question who they are). The play is at once a slapstick exchange between two tramps about sore feet and boots, and an existential meditation on life, death and the possibility of being rescued from the insignificance of life by a greater power.

London Classic Theatre’s production is a fantastic interpretation of a play which has changed the way we think about theatre.

Lost Shelley Poem Found

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A long lost Shelley poem has resurfaced this year, and has now been acquired by the Bodleian Library, Oxford. The actress Vanessa Redgrave read  a very moving excerpt from it on R4’sToday progamme, and the librarian was interviewed…
The story is that Shelley got kicked out of Oxford because he published a tract advocating atheism and this poem, called ‘The Existing State of Things’, an anti-war poem. All copies were destroyed, but Shelley managed to keep one which he sent to a relative in Italy, where it remained stashed away ever since.
Below the link:
Check it out. It chimes with the situation as it still is….
Martin J

Norther Broadsides’ The Winter’s Tale

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Staff and students were at the New Vic to see Northern Broadsides interpretation of The Winter’s Tale. It was, as ever, a seductive experience of precision acting and innovative staging. It would be unfair to single out one performance from a faultless cast, but I’m going to anyway. Conrad Nelson as the king, Leontes, was magnificent in his brooding, introspective delusion. I’m sure he’s a lovely guy in real life, but he plays a baddie very well (his Iago, played opposite Lennie Henry’s Othello, was a study in malevolence). The rest of the cast were just magnificent.
Broadsides are well known for mixing drama and music in inventive ways and the turn from tragedy to romance, the ‘problem’ of this problem play, signaled the setting of Shakespeare’s verse to many musical genres, including Bob Dylan, and a folk/hippy design. There can’t been many interpretations of Shakespeare which include Irish dancing, but there should be.
We all departed stage left, pursued by a bear. Next stop Godot!
Broadsides’ trailer for the production can be found here

The new term

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Plans for the new term are coming along nicely. There will be a new module, Writing for Success, for the first years. The planning for the first year trip to Grasmere, the home of the Lakeland poets and Romanticism, is well advanced. In addition, there are plans to see The Winter’s Tale and Waiting for Godot at the New Vic and to take in the exhibition of the works of Lowry and his local counterpart, Arthur Berry, at the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery.

More news as it’s confirmed.

RIP E L Doctorow

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A great figure of American letters, EL Doctorow, has died at the age of 83. He achieved the distinction, as a writer, of being both commercially successful and receiving a great deal of scholarly attention. This is because he was both a chronicler of American history – his books explored the the Jazz Age, the rise of the Mafia, the Industrial Revolution – and an explorer of literary form. My favourite, and the one I teach, is his 1971 novel, The Book of Daniel. Here, with a thin veil of fictionalisation, he explores the execution of the Rosenbergs in 1953 for passing nuclear secrets to the USSR, and the consequences for their children in a different radical age at the end of the 60s. The book is at once an account of personal trauma and loss, a meditation on America’s post-War radical movements, and an exploration of the limits of literary form and the earlier certainties of narrative perspective and temporal organisation. The book incorporates polyphonic narratives of the persecution of both the Jews and radical thinkers over time – characteristics that both the Rosenbergs and Doctorow himself shared. The Book of Daniel is my favourite book and every time I return to it I discover something new to say about it.

President Obama tweeted this:

“E.L. Doctorow was one of America’s greatest novelists. His books taught me much, and he will be missed.

You can read the Guardian obituary here and follow links to more interesting articles and interviews.

The Class of 2015

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The English and Creative Writing staff at Staffs are delighted to congratulate the graduating class of 2015.

It was a glorious day at Trentham Gardens for our students to spend their last day as Staffs students (though we are looking forward to welcoming some back for Masters study). Lou Whotton and Atia Shafique scooped prizes, though so many students did so well and have been great over the last three years that it was almost impossible to choose.

The Stoke Sentinel were there, and you can see their pictures here

We managed to round up most of the students for our own pic, and here we all are before the ceremony.

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Our congratulations, once again, to all our students who graduated this year. We are very proud of you all and have really enjoyed teaching you and getting to know you over the last three years. Please stay in touch and let us know how you are getting on.

Mark, Martin, Mel, Catherine, Barry, Lisa, Paul and Douglas.

The RSC’s ‘Death of a Salesman’

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I was in that London at the weekend to see the RSC’s production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman (which we study in Make it New: American writing 1900-1950). During the day we took in the London Eye and the new cable car across the Thames at Greenwich. We separated these panoptical pursuits with lunch at the Tate and  some contemplative time with Rothko’s magnificent explorations of colour, shade and shape.

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