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Some of us have long suspected that Shakespeare was Welsh. The writings John Milton called “native woodnotes wild”  surely sprang from a land of song, of hills, trees, and tumbling streams  – a prodigious infant perhaps spirited by some hobgoblin down the drover roads to Stratford, to be left as a changeling in the home of a slumbering glove-maker? Who knows….silly speculation of course – and God knows there’s no shortage of that when it comes to Will and his world – but there’s no denying his stuff sits well amongst those hills, and among the native multitude of poets, singers and actors.

Some twenty years ago two theatre folk, Sue Best and Philip Bowen set out to provide a haven for Shakespeare’s plays on a small farm amongst the green slopes of mid-Wales. Their creation, the Willow Globe, gives focus to The Shakespeare Link – a project you can read about below, and allows actors a rare space to spin those amazing words, those breathtaking ideas and stories, for increasing numbers of locals and visitors.

Last weekend found me there, in the land of my fathers catching up with Philip – an actor of distinction, with whom I gleefully shared a stage in Scotland some decades since, and had lost touch with until a mutual friend, Alison Skilbeck, took her show “The Power Behind the Crone” to the Willow Globe, and put us back in contact.

 On Saturday Phil and Sue played host to one of Shakespeare’s more troubled couples, the Macbeths, by arrangement with a theatre company called The Factory.

This professional group has existed for over ten years, meets on a weekly basis in London, and workshops major plays in an unusual way. As I understand it, each part is learned by several actors, irrespective of gender, and for each performance the roles are played by different combinations of  performers, each cast bringing a entirely new take on the way the story is told. A 20-odd strong Factory troupe had arrived by bus and car on Saturday morning, had dress-rehearsed in the afternoon – and then gone on to perform  in the evening with completely different casting from the afternoon rehearsal!

On this occasion, for the first half of “Macbeth” the genders were reversed, the Thane played by a woman, the Lady by a man. They were both excellent actors, and we the audience went along with it all, the story unfolding clearly and arrestingly. Come the interval, it was rather wonderful to see the recently-succeeded King of Scotland chatting with audience members while clutching her recently-arrived baby to her breast….Overall it was hugely enjoyable – a big audience drawn from far and wide, the first half of the show played in the open-air theatre (which is contained within a copse of willow trees) and the second half by candle-light in the yellow open marquee beside the farmhouse. It was truly refreshing, because this was genuine, spontaneous creativity – nobody was making a big deal about the gender-swap, for instance – they just asked us to suspend our disbelief while they, a troupe of actors, acted out a story. Just as actors have always done, sometimes with all-male casts, sometimes all-female and sometimes mixed, sometimes with masks or face-paint or wigs, each and every show displaying and sharing a talent to pretend.

One of the current Factory team, the brilliantly multi-skilled Caroline Kilpatrick, is one of our Radagrads, and she’s going to keep in touch about future projects –  I will report back.

My companion this trip was my old pal Robin who, when Phil and I worked all those years ago at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre, was our company stage manager – so this was a glorious reunion, and we left on the Sunday vowing to return soon, as Phil and Sue settled to planning the next Shakespeare link…

And so in bright sunshine the Cherry Red Motor carried us north, following the River Wye along the English border, then along the River Severn, then crossing the River Vyrnwy –  stunning border country.

Did I mention the Land of My Fathers? (For non-Celts, that’s the English name of the Welsh national anthem).We were were driving through a village right on the border, when the place-name I’d just read suddenly lurched from the back of my brain to the front – Llanymynech.  Llanymynech! You have to pronounce it carefully, and don’t try while drinking, it can be disastrous. It’s a quiet, unpretentious village, with a canal, a small heritage museum, and not a lot else – but it’s where my ancestors lived, and I’d never been there! My sister Olive in her role as family historian has visited and told me about it, so when I spotted the canal-side information centre I immediately hauled over. There outside by the water was a lady singing folk-songs, and inside another lady serving coffee and information. “Is this your first time in Llanymynech?” says she “Yes”, says I, “But my ancestors came from here – it’s not easy to identify individuals – mostly they were called Bill Jones”. “Ah yes, that can be a problem for me too, I’m called Davies… ”

                                           Visitors Centre Lllanymynech – for pronunciation guide see bottom of this entry.

Then from the land of my fathers to Robin’s roots. After years of globe-trotting my pal has returned to his home town Birkenhead, on the southern flank of Merseyside, and has taken a fine apartment in a lovely Georgian Square. Useful fact for the pub quiz : it seems there are more surviving Georgian houses on Merseyside than in either Bath or Bristol. These of course grew with the wealth rolling in when Liverpool was the great gateway of empire, a constant reminder of the days of cotton and slavery, the wicked triangle of trade which swelled our country’s coffers. But once built, Merseyside spawned some good and wonderful things – amazing buildings, pioneering social reform, and of course a rich vein of art, poetry, plays and music.

                                                                         Victoria monument and Town Hall, Birkenhead

Everywhere there are reminders of the Beatles – here’s a plaque on the side of what was the Majestic Cinema, Birkenhead, now a Chinese restaurant, and around Mathew St over the river in Liverpool city centre there’s an entire post-Beatles industry, the site of the Cavern Club a scouse answer to Gracelands – plastic and nylon mementos by the score, t-shirts, wigs, guitars, the lot.

But there are other things Merseyside gave the world – its first truly public park, the first steel-framed “skyscraper”, the first mail trains  – between Liverpool and Manchester  in the 1830s  – plus the first transatlantic mail ships, started by Samuel Cunard, in 1840. Some years later Robin joined the Cunard company as a teenage crew-member, and has heady tales of trips in and out of New York in the late 1950s.

On Wednesday last we took the colourful Ferry ‘cross the Mersey. Robin said the first person to sing the song would be heaved overboard – in fact the recorded commentary on the loudspeakers inevitably started with Gerry Marsden singing his 1964 hit, tho’ only about 15 seconds’ worth, probably to limit royalty payments.

The sun shone again as we walked down the gangplank at the Liverpool Pier Head, past the life-size statues of the Fab Four, and up the hill to the Cunard building, where we looked in at the old booking hall where thousands bought their tickets to the New World. Then to the elegant Oriel  Chambers, built in 1864 by an architect with the oddly-familiar name of Peter Ellis. This was the first building with a metal frame from which were suspended outer walls of steel-framed glass – opening the door to the creation of thousands of “sky-scrapers” throughout the world.

                             Close by in Water Street is another elegant building, the former HQ of Martin’s Bank – cue for another pub quiz moment.  Did you know that in Word War 2 the bulk of the UK’s gold reserves were moved from London to the vault of Martin’s Bank in Liverpool? Robin reckons there were 3 frigates on permanent stand-by in the estuary in case of German invasion, one for the King, one for the rest of the royal family, and the third for the gold bullion – all to be whisked off to Canada.

Another first, echoing the city’s close ties with Ireland, were the sermons preached in each other’s cathedrals by bishops Warlock and Sheppard, Catholic and Anglican leaders who did so much to heal their communities after the Toxteth riots and the football stadium disasters of the 1980s, and indeed helped pave the way for the Good Friday Agreement . The two cathedrals, at either end of Hope St, are both extraordinary modern buildings, one by Frederick Gibberd, the other by Giles Gilbert Scott. If you’re in Liverpool let me know which you prefer…

Enough already – look at the time  – and I haven’t even mentioned Wilfred Owen. I’ll write more about Merseyside poetry and plays next time.

After April’s visit to Humberside (see the blog before last) it was grand to visit the “book-end” estuary, 107 miles down the M62  – and compare two rich cultures, one rooted in fishing, the other in cotton, both indelibly linked to our economy’s seminal, shameful profits from human bondage.

And now I’m off to Europe….as you know this blog tries to avoid politics, but…oh dear, oh dear what are we doing…?

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Read about THE SHAKESPEARE LINK here: http://www.shakespearelink.co.uk/about/

Llanymynech pronuciation guide:

“Ll” at the beginning – start to make a noise like a WW2 fighter plane, but only for about one second, and merge it into the normal pronunciation of the letters “la” as in “lad”

The two “y”s are pronounced like the “u” in “gut”, the “e” is short like in “get”

In this word you begin and finish with more or less the same sound – the “ch” is like a short guttural burst of a Messershmitt fighter engine, but unlike the “L”  sound at the start , it stays open.  Try not to spray the person you are talking to.

We’re in June, we’ve left May behind – well almost – is that her, not waving but drowning?

June the first found me blogging above the clouds above Iceland, and now I’m at sea, approaching the coast of Mexico. I’m on one of those unfair, stressful jobs that sometimes come my way, running acting workshops on a rather lovely ship in a rather lovely place  – so for the June 8 event I voted postally. And I’m delighted to report that Walthamstow had the good sense to award our excellent sitting MP Stella Creasy an extra ten thousand votes more than at the last election. So if Jeremy really wants to bring some meaningful unity to his newly emboldened party then he must muster the likes of Stella – a sane, intelligent and mature thinker, commanding respect across the local spectrum – into his front ranks.

Anyway, while in the air en route to catch up with the ship, I attempted to catch up April and May jottings:

Thanks to an item in Stella Creasy’s newsletter, I caught a glimpse into London’s cultural past. Did you know that in the early years of the last century east London had its own version of Hollywood, with two busy film studios around Wood St, Walthamstow? We’ve now have two new plaques on the sites, unveiled by Paul McGann. After the ceremony we all trouped down to the Duke’s Head, where the early directors recruited their extras. “Anyone sober enough to earn sixpence?’

Back in April I went to Stratford on Avon to help celebrate Will Shakespeare’s 253rd birthday,  which this year fell on a Sunday, so most of the events were on Saturday. My pal Charlie and I started the day with buck’s fizz and buns in the circle bar at the theatre, and a birthday breakfast toast. We then escaped into bright sunlight and joined the crowds lining up for the Birthday Parade.

It’s all very jolly and colourful, with bands and banners, folk in Elizabethan fancy dress, mayors and civic dignitaries in even fancier dress, and parties of Shakespeare lovers from all over the world. There are lots of flowers, which are paraded through the streets to Holy Trinity Church to be laid on and around Will’s tomb. Then people disperse, some to picnic on the river-bank, some to sup ale in the many pubs, others this year to boats to carry them upstream to the Crowne Plaza Hotel and the Shakespeare Birthday Lunch.

                                           Collective noun for civic dignitaries? A float of mayors?

Two mutual pals, Jay and Paul Norris, tireless globe-trotters both, had chosen to celebrate settling into their new Warwickshire base by very generously hosting a table at the said Lunch, and had kindly invited Charlie T and me. It’s a prestigious affair, with more toasts and talks, and this year a special lifetime achievement award to Sir Anthony Sher. Our table was not without distinction, it must be noted, the party including highly-regarded teachers and writers, an actor or two, and a retired Senior Mariner – Bernard Warner, formerly the Cunard Commodore. Bernard, his wife Tina and I reminisced about former days on the ocean wave, when my companies of RADA actors whiled away the Queen Mary 2’s passengers’ sea-miles with plays, poetry and the odd game of Call My Bluff.

On Sunday to yet another Special Lunch, in honour of – wait for it, a delegation from China…suddenly there was I once again in a chorus of Mandarin chatter, cameras clicking selfies and v-signs, New Year in Soho all over again…The Chinese City of Fouzhou has commissioned and presented to the Stratford Shakespeare Birthplace Trust a fine bronze sculpture depicting Shakespeare and his Chinese contemporary, Tang Xianzu.  So to the clicking of cameras the sculpture was unveiled by the eminent Shakespearian scholar Professor Sir Stanley Wells.

(By the way, there is a nice link with this blog’s previous entry, as Sir Stanley is a product of Hull, and indeed like Townsend and me, a graduate of that city’s Kingston High School. We Old Kingstonians now proudly include in our number two knights theatrical, Sir Stanley Wells and Sir Tom Courtenay)

Back in London,  I saw a play or two. What are we going to do about the current wave  of Intrusive Directors? I have been asked to record that Emma Rice’s decision to quit next year as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe was her own, not that of the theatre’s board. I have no further comment, other than to say that my latest Bankside experience was wearisome. The current “Romeo and Juliet” is infected with every “avant garde” cliché of the last sixty years – meaningless charades of characters dressed as clowns, scenes of pointless prancing to pop music, etc, etc No sign of the story, no chance for actors just to do their job. (And this hapless cast included at least one fine actor from my RADA days, Edward Hogg, utterly wasted as Romeo.)

In front of me sat a young girl with her mum and dad. She had clearly been told she was coming to see a famous, glorious love-story. I’ve never seen on a young face such growing bewilderment and dismay, gradually slipping into misery. When the huge loudspeakers above the stage started to pump out the Village People’s “YMCA” at the opening of the ball scene I could take no more. Can these directors not realise that this sort of stuff isn’t innovation, it’s old hat! These devices were explored years and years ago by much cleverer directors, who sometimes back in the sixties did indeed bring some welcome illumination, along with charm and wit, so lacking in this bleak Bankside event.

If we ever get a government again in this country, I will urge legislation to require – on pain of exile – the likes of Mr Kramer (who inflicted on us this R & J) and other “innovators” like Mr Van Hoe – to sit quietly in the Apollo Theatre and observe how little obvious direction there is to witness in Trevor Nunn’s exemplary production of Terence Rattigan’s “Love in Idleness”. And to note how the audience is allowed to enjoy a brilliant piece of theatrical storytelling delivered with meticulous acting, supported by beautifully crafted blocking, pacing, use of carefully chosen period props, etc – all of which serve the text and don’t distract from it, by screaming “Look at me, I’m a director! Look, look – I’m bringing on an actor dressed as a big teddy bear! Look at me I’m making an actor vomit blood over an actress….”

If you can, try and catch “Love in Idleness”. It’s a real treat, and has Eve Best on top form – what else needs to be said?

Photo: Catherine Ashmore

Breathe, Jones… there is a world elsewhere. Indeed there is, and a part I’d never been to is Hawaii, where I spent a couple of days waiting for the ship. The biggest of the islands is dominated by the world’s most active volcano, although life-threatening major eruptions are quite rare. The volcanic fabric of the countryside creates amazing colour-splashed gardens, and lovely black sand beaches. It’s a far cry from the reservoirs of Walthamstow, and that poor bewildered lady, sitting in dismay in Downing St, her broken toys strewn across the carpet. Maybe by the time I get home, she will have withdrawn from the field. Maybe we’ll see Boris, the white knight  on a crippled horse – or a broken bicycle – riding to the nation’s rescue…Maybe ….

Hawaii images:

The crater at Kona Hawaii, volcanic garden, Old Kona Airport, and the Richardson Beach Park, Hilo Hawaii

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Such sad, sad news that Roy Barraclough has left us. We’d lost touch in recent years, but Roy became a dear friend back in the days of “Pardon My Genie”, the children’s comedy series we were in together in the 70’s. He was my boss Mr Cobbledick and I was Hal Adden, the sales assistant in Mr Cobbledick’s hardware shop who in episode one had found an old watering can in the store-room, with the original Genie of the Lamp living in it, now reduced to being the Genie of the Watering Can.

Hal became the Genie’ s new master (he was played in series one by the late Hugh Paddick, series two by Arthur White) but because he’d been asleep for several centuries, some of his magic was a bit rusty. Mr Cobbledick didn’t know about the Genie – cue opportunities for Mr Cobbledick to be caught in a range of totally bewildering circumstances, seized upon with glorious
gusto by Roy.

I’ll write a more detailed tribute very soon – this written in a state of shock while I’m in a hotel bedroom on the other side of the world. He wasn’t just a unique, special comedy talent – a superb panto dame in the theatre, always brilliant in TV comedy shows with Les Dawson and others, bringing a wry sparkle to “Coronation St” – but a distinguished serious actor as well: for example I was lucky enough to see him give a powerful, moving account of Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman”.

A unique talent and a dear, kind person – shrewd, sharp, warm,  gifted with a rich, gleeful wit. A special light has gone out.

            The sun sets over north-east London, May 2017

As the last post closed, my local football team was sinking. Now it’s sunk: it seems Leyton Orient was both the victim of old-fashioned asset-stripping and of eccentric, unpredictable behaviour by its owner. Ironically, having passed the point when demotion from the Football League was unavoidable, they promptly went out and won a game. And meanwhile, struggling amongst the lower rungs of the Premiership, Hull City – the team I have supported since I were a lad on Humberside – were gifted a home tie against no-hope, already relegated Sunderland – and promptly lost, so now themselves cower beneath the shadow of the guillotine.

Clearly Hull is not currently a place to seek sporting glory – but look, it’s the City of Culture, and my old school pal Townsend and I set off on a Quest, a latter day Quixote and Panza, cruising north in my elderly-but-still-elegant Cherry-Red Motor, which could, come to think of it, rather suit the name of Rosinante….

Our journey took us first to Stratford on Avon, to catch a performance of Richard Bean’s play”The Hypocrite”. This was a collaboration between the Hull Truck Theatre Company and the RSC, a production which had played to sell-out audiences in Hull prior to transferring down to the Stratford Swan.

The play treats on the life and times of Sir John Hotham, a seventeenth-century Sheriff of Hull, whose decision to close the city’s gates against King Charles 1 triggered the English Civil war. Now Mr Bean is a skilled farceur – “One Man, two Guv’nors” has been a huge success all over the world – and his script finds a lot of fun in the vagaries of Hotham’s life. But ultimately – although many in the packed audience at the Swan clearly loved every minute, I came away feeling a tad uncomfortable. After all civil war is a horrible thing, with neighbours slaughtering neighbours – there must have been parallels in our times for instance not long ago in Bosnia, where events didn’t produce too much in the way of comic material.

However, as always it was good to be in Stratford – and my tale returns there imminently. But the day after the play we took farewell of our pal Charlie Twigger, our ever-cheerful and generous Warwickshire host, and made our way north and east, through the fenland shires to one of the great legacies of 1960’s Labour Party politics – the Humber Bridge.

Townsend  (who is a life-long politics addict)  tells me that this startling, majestic construction  – still one of the longest single-span bridges in the world – was given the green light in 1966 by Prime Minister Harold Wilson in an attempt to generate pro-Labour sentiments on Humberside during the run-up to a crucial by-election. The message to his current successor as party leader is clear – “Go Corbyn, go build bridges….”

Before crossing the bridge, we stopped for a cuppa in Barton on Humber, the small township at the southern approach . Have you heard of the Ropewalk Museum? We hadn’t. A firm called Hall’s started making ropes there in 1787, and continued supplying British navies, both royal and merchant through wartime and peace right through until 1989. Now the long narrow factory building combines art gallery and fascinating museum. When we were teenagers – oh so many years before the bridge (which wasn’t completed until 1981) – we would often take the paddle-steamer ferry from Hull to New Holland, sometimes to play football against Wintringham School in Grimsby. But we weren’t aware of the Barton rope-makers, who at that time would have been supplying the now long-defunct Hull trawler fleet –  in those days our town, as our Headmaster constantly reminded us,  was the Biggest Fishing Port in the World.

The ferryboat trip cost two bob, as I recall (ten P to you) and lives in my memory as indelibly romantic. You could buy a tea or a Bovril and sit on deck as you sailed the mile-wide water to Lincolnshire, or go below and watch the great brass-and-copper pistons driving the paddles as they churned the dark brown, mud-filled estuary swell. After the bridge made the ferries redundant, one of them – the Tattershall Castle  – chugged south to become a floating pub on the Thames next to Waterloo Bridge. A couple of years ago it returned to Hull for refurbishment, and will shortly be again in place beside the Albert Embankment – so check it out when you’re in town (link below).

And so we crossed the bridge, paid a £1.50 toll and drove into God’s Own County. We’d checked on-line, and found that, notwithstanding Hull’s Year of Culture there were no professional theatre shows at all that weekend – the local producing company Hull Truck being between productions, and the big touring house, the New Theatre, was closed for refurbishment – the timing of which seemed a bit odd, to say the least. (However, it’s due to re-open in September, so there will be time for three months’ worth of Culture before the year’s end.) Nothing daunted, at the City Hall we found the real Humberside culture we knew in the fifties  – a programme of professional wrestling!

New Generation Wrestling at Hull City Hall – see link below.

Wrestling isn’t quite what it was in the old days – it’s now much more family-friendly (lots of kids in the audience) and there’s an awful lot of sparkling Spandex, but the shameless posturing, the wonderfully fake suffering is on full display, and surely provides we theatre buffs with a link to ancient traditions, when for example a professional would be hired by the guilds at York and Beverly to rampage as the Devil in the mystery plays! The modern wrestlers are clearly all highly-trained gymnasts, governed by strict health & safety régimes. I found this poster from yesteryear for wrestling at the Madeley St Baths, which gives just a hint of what it was like in our day – the sweat and the swearing, the beer-fumes and fag-smoke, the men howling and grunting, the ringside women baying for blood.

After the wrestling we retired to the Old English Gentleman in Worship St, which despite the current closure of the theatre still functions as a classic stage-door pub. It was at the Hull New that my life in the theatre began, as a student assistant stage manager being paid a princely one pound per week. I’ve been back to the New a few times over the years, and was I must confess a tiny bit gratified to find on the pub wall a framed relic from my days as something of a “TV name”, meriting a billing on a tour poster (just) above the title…..

But there’s a lot more to Hull culture than sweating, Spandex and acting – there’s poetry! Two great poets are forever linked to Hull and its history – one by being born at nearby Winestead, the other by serving as the University’s librarian for several decades.  Your starter for ten – who “by the tide of Humber would complain” and worry about “Time’s winged chariot”? Supplementary question: which great modern poem has its opening line engraved on the floor of Hull’s Paragon Station, and its closing lines on a wall-plaque at London’s King’s Cross? These pictures provide clues

We had a great time in amazing weather. As the summer and autumn unfold, if you get the chance – hie you to Humberside! There are lots of cultural goodies in the pipeline – Barry Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company doing “Richard the Third”,  a sea of Hull citizens’ naked blue bodies in Spencer Tunick’s pictures at the Ferens Art Gallery, a new work for voices by Opera North,  inspired by and performed at Winestead Church  – and lots, lots more.  The old city at the junction of the River Hull and the Humber Estuary is rich in history of ancient maritime trades, of protest against the Crown, against the Roman church and above all against slavery. There are ships’ chandler stores turned art galleries, there is a spectacular deep-sea aquarium called The Deep, there are waterside restaurants, ancient pubs – and still the best fish and chips this side of Whitby…

The nearby countryside of the East Riding is glorious, its crown jewel the exquisite town of Beverley, technically a market town but essentially a miniature cathedral city, the Minster at its heart one of the gothic glories of western Europe.   And Beverley now has its own repertory company, the East Riding Theatre – watch this space.

This post has turned into a travelogue  In Praise of Hull – there’s a lot more to come  – what’s going on in London, how we celebrated Shakespeare’s Birthday in Stratford, and – unavoidably –  the Great Chinese Shakespearian Take-away….Don’t go away. Part Two will be along shortly.

Wrestling link: http://www.ngwuk.com/events.php

Tattershall Castle floating pub on the Thames: http://www.thetattershallcastle.co.uk/

East Riding Theatre: http://www.eastridingtheatre.co.uk/about-east-riding-theatre/