Breath, Love and Masking tape.

A bit of a prosaic title, that one, for an organisation which could be called many things; but prosaic is not one of them.

The Madrid Players is Madrid's main  English-language theatre group. I've been involved ( a word which conceals all sorts of misdemeanours ) for a few years in the mid-1990s, and continually now since 2010.  Although the city is home to umpteen semi-professional or even professional outfits, each of them is a slave to the need to earn money from theatre, their performers indeed professionals, but condemned to an eternal treadmill of Alice in Wonderland in pigeon-English for semicoherent 7-year-olds, dusting off A Christmas Carol for a yuletide spin every 12 months. Marley's torment seems a picnic in comparison.

Ahem. Sorry about that - got a bit carried away, there. The truth, though, is that if you want to do real theatre in English,Madrid Players is the only game in town. Our strength is that we're an amateur group, a democratically-constituted organisation run by elected volunteers. This means that in a difficult year, we might stop squabbling amongst ourselves long enough to put up a few shows; but on the up-side, it means that whatever your dream show is, you've got a chance to do it. Irish drama so obscure not even its author is convinced he's heard of it ? No problem ! An intense narration of the life of Catherine of Aragon ? Sure to put bums on seats, go for it ! Robert Burns on ice ? Write up your proposal and present it to the committee.

O.K., I'm being flippant. We haven't done the Burns show yet, although I have high hopes. The Constant Quene put so many bums on seats people had to be turned away.. And the Players do many more mainstream shows ( I've been involved in the Crucible, Steel Magnolias, Oliver, Our Town, a good number of pantomimes now ). Not many groups in Madrid can put up a pantomime which attracts audiences of 3000 people every year. And we do have a particular tradition of evenings of musical theatre. But the group does offer a creative space the like of which I haven't experienced since I was at uni, when we used to put up and go and see the kind of shows no-one in their right mind would produce, perform in or go and see, without costumes, props or occasionally actors.

It's also an example of that aphorism - I think it's Kipling who wrote this - that there are two kinds of   people : those who stay at home, and those who don't. MPs is a pretty cool meeting-place for the second kind, and it's enriching to find yourself singing, doing ludicrous voice warm-ups, painting scenery, with assorted Irish, Americans, Scots, Australians, Canadians, and of course, a strong number of good Spanish folks ( it was a Spanish philosopher whose name escapes me who wrote that la patria de cada uno son las idiomas que habla - your native country is the languages you speak. Particularly if you speak them while dressed up as el Pulpo Paul, trying to recreate the Stade de France on World Cup night with only 6 performers and no sound effects.  ). In fact, probably more than enriching, there are moments when it feels like you've joined a slightly odd extended family : odd, because for the time of the rehearsal process, and particularly the 2- or 3-day run of a show, you work very closely with this disparate group of strangers, depend completely on each other for the pantomime or song or sketch or whatever to hang together - but of course, we know virtually nothing about each other's lives outside that strange and slightly magical theatre space.

But this, of course, is theatre. It depends entirely on everyone, performers and audience, believing intensely, for a short period , in something that isn't there at all, and by this shared delusion somehow willing it into being.That's why perhaps my favourite theatre photo is this one, pinched from Eva, which must have been taken maybe ten minutes after Steel Magnolias ended.

It sums it all up, really : whatever story you've just been telling - Ebeneezer Scrooge, Catherine of Aragon, the redemptive power of friendship in a hairdressing salon - there's nothing really there. It's all just breath, love, and masking tape.

 Shakespeare loved the precarious, wobbly-flat nature of theatre, I think. He refers to it in any number of plays, but never more beautifully than in The Tempest Act 4 Scene 1, when Prospero renounces his magic :

                           " Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
                              As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
                             Are melted into air, into thin air :
                             And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
                            The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
                            The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
                            Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
                            And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
                            Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
                            As dreams are made on; and our little life
                            Is rounded with a sleep."

I could blether on a whole lot more. Every show feels a bit like a personal Everest ( some more than others... ), and that's a second thing that I think connects virtually all members : apart from all being slightly nuts in a variety of interesting ways, we're all ants-in-your-pants types, uncomfortable sitting around when there's another corner to be turned, another mountain to be climbed, another ( God help us ) SHOW TO PUT ON.

                                       
                                          ( The view from the top. Audience not pictured. )

And finally, there's the sheer joy of creativity. We've just come off The Constant Quene, a play about the life of Catherine of Aragon, England's Spanish Queen. I signed up for singing in the choir, because that seemed like an easy option. Like, who knew ? We had a great time in the rehearsal process, all of us went some way beyond what we thought we were capable of in all directions, we seem to have picked up at least two more gigs on the way ( Spanish Renaissance music is apparently the new rock n´roll ), and there's talk about sticking together as a unit after Christmas ( I hope singing as well ). On a personal level, the combination of this and my school inspection seems to have set me off in all directions ( you might have noticed ). In particular, the combination of all those lovely Scottish names rolling off the Black Wall, and the wonderful performance of The Flowers of the Forest has reconnected me with... but that's a story for another time.

I'll shut up now.

Oh, here's a link to the website. You'll be able to read something that actually makes sense there.

www.madridplayers.org

The sundial

Not much to this post : when I went back to Wales in July, I found the sundial in the churchyard in St. George.

My Dad was secretary of the Parish Council for a number of years after he retired, pretty much until his last illness, and the good people of the village wanted to commemorate him. It's the perfect place, as he passed by there almost every day on his lunchtime walk to the pub.

The base is granite from the local quarry, and slate. Strangely enough, the materials Ailsa and I had originally thought of for the gravestone ( actually Mike, my brother-in-law's, idea ) : Welsh slate and Scots granite.

My Dad was a very private character, and like a lot of men with their fathers, my relationship with him was complicated to say the least : too different, and too similar. But on the second anniversary of his passing, I'm left with the words on the sundial : In memory of Michael de Salis, 2011; to the glory of God.  And the lines of Dylan Thomas : forever may he live lightly, at last, on that last, crossed hill, and there grow young, under the grass, in love.

Coincidences

Do you believe in coincidence ?  I remember back in the day, when I was doing a bit of Anthropology at Uni, noticing that the difference between cultures where belief in magic is still prevalent and our own, is that in these "older", "earlier" cultures, for want of better words, everything has a cause. Your goat just died ? Someone bewitched it. Maybe it died of a well-known disease - but why did the disease infect my goat, and not my next-door neighbour's ? Because he's a witch ( although he thinks I offended the gods, or whatever.) That raven sitting on a signpost in front of you ?  Obviously a sacred bird telling you something, if only you could learn the secret language of ravens.

                                       
                                                 Answers on a postcard, please.

Now, I'm a sophisticated twenty-first century man-about-town, so when my goat dies, I just put it down to my bad luck.  And I know birds don't really fly around communicating with me, they're just doing their own birdy kind of stuff, and if they happen to do it on my head, well, it's just a coincidence. It's probably a good thing to take this point of view, on the whole : I've found that accusing your neighbours of witchcraft, and telling everyone that magpies are talking to you in their beautiful avine language, gets you off on the wrong foot with your Comunidad de Vecinos. 

"Bad luck" and "coincidence" aren't proper explanations, though : they're fall-back explanations, shorter than saying twenty times a day  "Hey, I don't have a clue what this is all about." . They don't explain anything. A coincidence is a combination of two elements, events, whatever, which look like they're connected, but they're not. Except they are : they're connected by the fact that we notice them, and, since human beings are story-telling animals, we start to weave a pattern out of them.

 Just recently, I came across the mother of all coincidences.

After the Summer from Hell 2 years ago, my sister and I spent a lot of 2012 going back to the house in Wales and clearing stuff out. One day I might develop the expressive resources to explain how strange, painful, and occasionally funny the business of packing our parents' lives into boxes and throwing most of it away was. But like a lot of stuff at the business end of death, it was a job which had to be done , and we did it, a week together at Easter, otherwise taking turns.

                                               A tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of the stuff.

By September we'd got everything cleared out. Ailsa handled the last part of it, and I'm quite glad I never saw the house empty; so much of ourselves, of what we are, is actually there in the space we occupy, in our STUFF ( for want of a better word ) that I think it would have upset me to see thirty years of our life as a family reduced to memory, as if they had never happened.

Anyway, the house in Church Street went on the market, attracted bidders, we accepted an offer, endless farting-around with estate agents, lawyers ( whose activities make the secret language of ravens look reasonably intelligible ). and in April the contracts were exchanged.

We were cheered up considerably to find that the "unknown bidder" who'd been in the shadows while all the legal folks talked to each other, turned out to be Eleri, the daughter of Jane Edwards, our next-door neighbour. Ailsa and I had wanted to sell because we're too far away to really use the house, and it's a house that deserves to be lived in, so to sell to somebody local, who we knew, looking to start  a family close to her own family, was exactly what we would have wanted. Eleri had known my family since she was a child, had been to the funerals, and her Mum had been very kind to us, especially during my Dad's last illness and in keeping an eye on the house in the 18 months it had lain empty. So this was perfect, really.

Now for the strange part : when we cleared the house, the estate agent suggested leaving some carpets in place. Apparently it makes it easier for people viewing to imagine a comfortable, homely place, than just bare floorboards. So it was left to Eleri and her husband to clear the last of the carpets out and take them to the skip, and so they found the photograph.

Now, my Dad was a keen photographer, always taking an array of battered 1950s and 1960s cameras with him on walks, always on the look-out for a photo. This meant that when we cleared, Ailsa and I threw out thousands of photos : we kept a lot, but there's only so much you can keep. But one particular photo must have fallen out of somewhere more than 20 years ago, slipped down under the carpet in the spare room, unnoticed and forgotten. Which is where Eleri found it when she lifted the carpet.

It was a photograph of her, aged about 3 years old, taken round about 1986.

I don't really believe in coincidence, or in magic ( although if my Dad planned that one, it beats most card tricks I've seen ). Perhaps it's no more a message than the raven. But it is strange to think of that photograph, lying there forgotten more than 20 years in the dark as our family life moved noisily over and around it, the last 18 months in the empty house that didn't really belong to anyone, waiting for the moment to be found. And as a story-telling animal, I'm entitled to say that it feels like the old house welcoming the new family, telling them it's a good place to be and it's good for them to be in it.

King Eystein and Mr. Mourinho

Well, I wrote this really long blog entry thingy, but reading it back it just looked bloated and flatulent and self-important. So I've done you the favor of deleting it :  here's the edited highlights. I guess this makes it kind of interactive : if you don't think it's a brilliant analysis of a complex topic,, it's because you've misunderstood my genius.

1.  Press conferences after the Spanish Cup Final.

2.  Ego, the Living Planet ( with picture ).

3.  School management.

4.  Jesse's Song from Ugly Betty. See it here :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oiRBoewcU4k

5.  Two football quotations.

6. And where I wanted to finish up : King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh.

I've known and loved this poem for more than 25 years. Sheenagh took the incidents described from one of the Old Norse sagas . I love the way she uses the punctuation to say so much, and the placing of the word "kinsman" in the last line.When I first read the poem in 1985, I thought " Boo to King Sigurd ! " As you grow older, of course, and re-read the poem, the penny drops that we've all got a bit of Sigurd and a bit of Eystein somewhere in there.Oddly enough, for a poem written in the early 1980s, it strikes a chord with the whole Facebook phenomenon.

King Sigurd and King Eystein, by Sheenagh Pugh

( From an incident in Heimskringla Saga : Snorri Sturlusson ).

"When I went to fight in Saracen country,
seven times I had the victory,
and where were you, kinsman Eystein, then ? "

Northwards in Vaage, building the fishermen
smoke-houses; they have work all seasons now.

"In Apulia I did not see you
on my crusade; where were you at that time ?"

Setting up inns on the road out of Trondheim
where night frosts used to freeze the traveller.

"I saw Christ's tomb; I did not see you there."

At Agdaness the ship-grave, I had made
a harbour, to save men's lives when I am dead,
and but for my life, it would be worse for them.

"What were you doing, brother, when I swam
the Jordan river, or when I tied a knot
by the bank, and promised my kinsman should come out
on that holy journey, and untie it again ?"

I was bringing under our rule the Jemte men,
not with war, but with good words. And a man unties
the knot he finds, kinsman, where he is.


I just love that poem : also ( English Lit. hat on, kind of Shakespearean thing with a feather in the top ) full of clever, subtle music. Look at how the brothers' words echo each other through rhymes and half-rhymes. 

King Sigurd and King Eystein is taken from Selected Poems by Sheenagh Pugh, quoted here with permission. This, like all her poetry as far as I know, is published by Seren Books.  Her website is worth looking at:

http://sheenagh.webs.com/ 

Margaret Thatcher - oh good God...

Oh dear... I don't normally go in for the political stuff - but I'm not sure my point of view about what's going on in Britain right now is actually political. I mean, I don't have any faith that Labour, the "Liberals" ( God help us ), or even Plaid Cymru are going to save us, so I'm not asking for the vote for anyone, or even civil disobedience.

I've been away from "Britain" (inverted commas, not sure how far the concept exists outside the Olympics ) for almost twenty years - apparently Mr. Blobby's not so big any more. But it seems like an increasingly surreal place. In case anyone's not heard, on Wednesday there will be a state funeral ( to all intents and purposes ) for a much-loved Prime Minister, rolling through London with military guard to St. Paul's cathedral the first since Winston Churchill to receive this honour. With a level of security to match the London Olympics. Not because of Al Quaeda etc., who probably haven't heard of the lady. They need that level of policing to stop protesters from interfering with this national heroine's honours.

Now, I'm one of the few people you might find who thinks that this woman was neither a saint nor the Wicked Witch of the West. I'm old enough to remember, from a child's point of view, Britain in the 1970s : strikes, power cuts, inflation; some of what Margaret Thatcher did to begin with looks sensible to me : get the unions back under control, privatise industries which have no need to be state monopolies ( telephones etc.), even the Falklands ( described memorably by Jorge Luís Borges as "dos hombres calvos peleando por un peine", two bald men fighting over a comb ) if you accept, perhaps charitably, that the motive was to protect British citizens from a nasty right-wing dictatorship.

But legacy... when a lot of her fans talk about her legacy, how she made Britain great again, they're using words in ways that I don't understand. Now, as I've been known to tell my students, History is always about the present, and the debate about any political figure is always a conversation about the here and now. Can these people really be saying that where we are now is a good place ?

Two aspects of this legacy I think are particularly sad. It may be that these were unintended. The conversion of the UK economy from an industrial base to an economy centered on services, tourism, financial services has increasingly made it a London-centered country ( and London is more or less now an independent enclave within the U.K., gradually being sold off to Russians, Qataris, etc. ). The Scottish Parliament and Welsh Assembly are a consequence of the way the Conservative Party has become an exclusively English affair, provoked in turn by the way those countries were handled in the 1980s. If Scotland goes in 2014 - and I would bet that the "Thatcher Dividend" some newspapers are talking about is more likely to go to the SNP than the Tories, as people get to watch on Wednesday what their taxes are spent on - then Wales will go within a decade, unthinkable even 10 years ago. And that will be Britain gone.

The other ? The dangerous little idea that imposing your views on the 50 % of the population who disagree with you is somehow admirable. In fact, that was always part of the Thatcher myth more than reality; but it's been taken up by a whole raft of idiot politicians who think that if they defend a point of view which is truly offensive to a large proportion of their population, then this PROVES that they are right.

There isn't a statue of Margaret Thatcher in London : even a bust made for the House of Commons got destroyed as an act of protest some years back, I think.I hope things are respectful on Wednesday; I'm glad I'm not paying for it, although I'm annoyed my sister, an NHS nurse, has to ( and I haven't even started on how her governments set in progress the movements which put ever greater pressure on teachers, doctors, nurses, etc., while letting bankers regulate themselves ). It would be nice to think the media attention might one day be lavished on someone who brought people together, rather than divided them.

Dermot Bolger

If  you saw The Parting Glass, and you're one of the folks who were deeply moved by what you saw and heard in the Centro Gallego, then the best place to start to find out more is undoubtedly his website : http://www.dermotbolger.com/

Dermot wrote this wonderful play which moves from realism so bare and taut that it brings tears to the eyes, through the deep poetry of life and into stand-up comedy. Apart from that, he got in touch with us when he found out we were doing his play, which meant a lot.

"Fear no more the heat of the sun,
Nor the furious winter's rages.
Thou on earth thy time hast done,
Home art gone, and ta'en thy wages.
Golden lads and lasses must,
Like chimneysweepers, come to dust."

I've written that from memory, so there may be a mistake or two in there : it's the song from Cymbeline. I remember one of our supervisors on the Shakespeare paper at uni, who managed to scare the shit out of  Paul Weeks and myself with sheer colossal erudition, when we got to the last scene of the Winter's Tale, he just got us to read it aloud. Good man; there's poetry / poetic theatre whose magic runs so deep that you just have to let the words work their spell. And Delyth's playing captures this.

The rest of the CD is as good, particularly if you like Under Milk Wood.

"Llais" ( "Voice" in English ) is on Steam Pie Records.