West Bengal and Rajasthan

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100_5037 100_5038West Bengal and Rajasthan

Here are the Baul singers and musicians arriving on deck to entertain us. I was enjoying a cruise on the Hoogli, part of the great Ganges river, when a mysterious boat drifted up alongside and several men clamboured aboard.

 

I’d been aware in the early morning of single male voices raised in a haunting song as we drifted past the settlements on the banks and here was the explanation. Baul singers tell the tales of their folk culture in song and each will play an instrument to accompany the singing of others.

It was great to hear them up close, but a wonderful shivery feeling lying listening to them in the misty and dark early mornings.

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Corner 1st Gate

Rajasthan brought the chance to further my acquaintance with international puppetry. Round the road from 1st Gate, a marvellous boutique hotel, in Jaisalmer, there is a Museum of Folk Arts and culture.

Museums are hard to come by in India and I tend to fall on those there are. The gentleman who set this one up is a retired history teacher and he was around on the night I visited. The ticket entitled one to browse the museum and watch the puppet show.

The puppet show specialised in dance. we saw several dancing puppets telling the story of The Boy Who Lost His Ball, The Camel Dance and the Male/Female nature of humanity.

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Stars of the Show

A narrator told the story first in both Hindi and English and then handed over to the musicians and puppeteers.

 

 

 

 

One of the items on display was this travelling shrine or theatre. I hope you can see how the panels slide in and out. Religion has often had to rely on drama and pictorial representation in early or primitive societies where literacy is not high. I encountered another, bigger, version of these theatres later in my trip.

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Travelling Theatre or Shrine

The Geese Are Getting Fat – Free Tinsel Tale for you

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The Geese Are Getting Fat won me a flash fiction competition on the old Writelink site in 2009. I think Maureen Vincent-Northam was the judge. When Rhobin suggested we put up a free story or extract for our readers in the December round robin, I remembered this series of competitions, Tinsel Tales, and having found a paper copy of The Geese Are Getting Fat, I’m going to type it out for you all.

Happy Christmas, dear readers. Enjoy this little gift from me.

THE GEESE ARE GETTING FAT by Me – Anne Stenhouse

Brenda watched the geese waddle across the farmyard enjoying their last day of a well fed life. The boss would start filling Christmas orders tomorrow.

She turned to the open wardrobe door and gathered the dress that hung there into her hands. Its satin bodice was sewn with sequins and the net skirts flared from a cinched in waist. She sighed. surely Will would ask her to marry him when he saw her in this sparkling dress? Red was her colour.

There were only seven days till Christmas. Had she done enough? Twice weekly trips to the gym and starvation rations had turned her country figure into a svelte picture of sophistication.

She glanced at the wedding photograph of the boss and his bride, Rachel. City slim and glamorous, she smiled into the camera. Brenda gathered her cleaning things before going down to join her for coffee.

In November, when the dress arrived after a shopping trip, everything in Rachel’s wardrobe fitted her perfectly. Today, she was most often seen in trackie bottoms and a sweat shirt.

‘I’ve brought millionaire’s shortbread this morning,’ Brenda said.

‘Anyone would think you were fattening me up like one of the geese,’ Rachel protested. ‘There’s no point in taking that red dress with me when we go to Mum and Dad’s for Christmas. I must go on a diet when we get back.’

Brenda smiled and toyed with the farmhouse keys in her apron pocket. She’d done enough.

The end

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Marci Baun http://www.marcibaun.com/ is next up in this round robin, but I’ve posted everyone’s link below in case you feel like dropping into several.

Now, if you enjoy my kind of slow, wry humour and would like to read more together with some sparkling ‘between the sexes’ dialogue, you may. Here are some links for your e-readers:

http://goo.gl/4LWt1H Mariah’s Marriage UK

http://goo.gl/JjY907 Mariah’s Marriage US

http://goo.gl/cW71Lv Mariah’s Marriage B&N

http://goo.gl/P3lmzk Bella’s Betrothal UK

http://goo.gl/7mh8FI Bella’s Betrothal US

http://goo.gl/HQjANo Bella’s Betrothal B&N

Ginger Simpson http://mizging.blogspot.com/
Beverley Bateman http://beverleybateman.blogspot.ca/
Fiona McGier http://www.fionamcgier.com/
Diane Bator http://dbator.blogspot.ca/
Rachael Kosnski http://the-doodling-booktease.tumblr.com/
Margaret Fieland http://www.margaretfieland.com/blog1/
Helena Fairfax  http://helenafairfax.com/
Anne Stenhouse  http://annestenhousenovelist.wordpress.com/
Marci Baun  http://www.marcibaun.com/
A.J. Maguire  http://ajmaguire.wordpress.com/
Victoria Chatham http://victoriachatham.webs.com/
Kay Sisk http://kaysisk.blogspot.com
Skye Taylor  http://www.skye-writer.com/
Lynn Crain  http://www.awriterinvienna.blogspot.com
Rhobin Courtright http://www.rhobinleecourtright.com/

Connie vines connievines.blogspot.com

Excited Are us – Nothing to do with Christmas

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I can’t tell you how excited I was to open a mail from the lovely Sarah Quirke and discover she wanted Mariah’s Marriage for Ulverscoft’s Linford Romance line. 

I read Sarah’s interview on the Romantic Novelists’ Association blog  October 17th and was struck by her answer to who was her typical reader. She thought there wasn’t one as so many people have eye problems. Everything is considered and this chimed exactly with a family memory.

Diabetes left my mum’s sight seriously compromised but, after cataract ops, she was able to return to reading Large Print books. We found a box of discontinued ones at a church sale and I was truly surprised by her choices from it. If I’d simple bought some and taken them to her, she wouldn’t have had some that she turned out to be keen on.

So, a double celebration, because romance was my mum’s favourite genre. Large print and Talking Books were a Godsend for her in her later years. I’m really thrilled that one of my titles will be appearing in large print in due course.

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Plot:Structure:Characters

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Plot, structure characters, but the greatest of these is characters.

I’ve been struggling with a plot glitch for some weeks now and sinking into what’s looking seriously like writers’ block. I could not find a way to write the scene I saw so clearly in my mind’s eye. Why?

BECAUSE THE CHARACTER I HAD CREATED WOULD NOT DO THAT.

That’s why. You (generic writer you) can always tell that the plot is frog-marching everyone to a conclusion when the characters begin to grimace. Then they girn and then they go back into lurk and everything stops.

So why was this? The answer – and I really hope it is an answer- was in the structure. Cart before horse again and I saw it, but I didn’t see it. And now I do. So lots of hard work just when the Festive season is making demands.

Are you a writer? What stops you in your writing tracks?

http://goo.gl/4LWt1H Mariah’s Marriage UK

http://goo.gl/JjY907 Mariah’s Marriage US

http://goo.gl/P3lmzk Bella’s Betrothal UK

http://goo.gl/7mh8FI Bella’s Betrothal US

Street Theatre

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Street theatre. Three toddlers just released from keeping the mummies company at coffee find Sainsbury’s Christmas tree. Shake bottom branches and baubles drop. Kick baubles/chase baubles/kick baubles/go back to get more baubles. Mummies arrive. Mortification sets in and baubles are rescued.
Been there, ladies. Thanks for brightening my morning.

Also La Cenerentola at Edinburgh Festival theatre. Rossini’s great comic opera was a delight. Russian mezzo-soprano Victoria Yarovaya, winner of the 2013 Mercedes Viñas Prize sang the title role, Cinderella.

Loved the stage set with its many doors for opening and closing.

 

The Bondagers

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The Bondagers by Sue Glover is the current production at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre.

I wonder if Mark Thomson has a master plan involving all female casts alternating with all male ones. Kill Johnny Glendenning did have one woman who played a pivotal role, so perhaps not.

There’s something attractive about single sex casts. Something about the non-verbalisms of single-sex living and the unspoken ways of behaving, thinking, reacting when the battle of the sexes stuff is removed is deeply interesting. At the same time all the women are acutely aware of their male counterparts and the pressures of the differences between the sexes.

The Bondagers begins slowly and for my getting a bit older hearing, a bit too quietly. Soon, however, we understand and separate the petty jealousies and the lowering storm clouds of communal living. We watch the playing out of biological imperatives with their inevitable spiral into tragedy. We listen to the characters tell of what is good (babies) while refusing to have sex with their husbands (no more babies, thank you). Characters who gradually allow reason into their blinkered thinking. characters whose reason was never strong and eventually deserts them.

The Bondagers is a warm and uplifting play about a way of life that must have been hard beyond anything a modern mind can encapsulate. Cleverly staged, beautifully written and thoroughly engaging. If you saw it before, go again. If you’ve never seen it go now.

Run continues  – 15 th November ’14

 

Kill Johnny Glendenning by DC Jackson

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Bad language, choreographed violence, sectarianism, non-pc themes, drugs… Kill Johnny Glendenning by DC Jackson, directed by Mark Thomson, has it all. But Auld Jim is very good to his mum. He even sleeps with her now that the farmhouse has only one bed.

If the script doesn’t get you, maybe the catering will. How many times do you re-use a tea-bag? Skootch hates the country and tea. Wannabe gangster’s bad manners or self-preservation tactics? Judge for yourself.

There are more plot twists than you can imagine possible and they’re all delivered in a script of sparkling wit and many laugh-out-loud one-liners. I puzzled over the reversed time-scale of Acts 1 and 2 as one is supposed to do. Stay with it. You will be rewarded.

Kill Johnny Glendenning is a superb opening for the Royal Lyceum’s winter and spring programme. I almost forgave them for the new start time of 7.30. Having enjoyed the extra fifteen minutes for over thirty years now, it’s a big ask.

Run continues till 11 October.

The Glass Menagerie by Tennessee Williams

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I first encountered The Glass Menagerie on paper when I read it as part of my American Lit course at Edinburgh University. It’s a play to trouble and disturb but enchant from the first word spoken by Tom, our narrator and thinly disguised manifestation of Williams himself, to the last breath Laura uses to extinguish her candles.

What can be done to safeguard the future of an adult child without any skills needed to survive alone – a vulnerable adult, if you will? How can a mother protect that person? How can a loving brother escape with any hope of making a life without guilt?

It’s a play about memory and illusion and we agonise over the memories that drive the lives of Amanda, Laura and Tom. Jim comes into their desperate world and even illusion is shattered.

Exquisitely played by Irene Macdougall, Millie Turner, Robert Jack and Thomas Cotran, the play haunts our own memory long after the curtain.

Run ended.

PASSING PLACES by STEPHEN GREENHORN

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Passing Places by Stephen Greenhorn, has always been on at the wrong time or in the wrong place for me so I was really glad to be able to catch it last Saturday evening at Pitlochry.

It did not disappoint. Richard Baron’s fast moving direction made excellent use of the unusual set by Adrian Rees.

The programme note by Baron refers to the different aspects of Scotland the play tackles such as “geography, its industry, history, and ethnicity,” One thing, however, I found in the play was an underlying hymn to the break-up of family and the reconstituting of ‘family’ for those abandoned or ejected.

Alex seems to have no Dad. Brian had a mum, who destroyed his life-changing project, but she dies, Mirren has a dad and no mum either. Mirren’s dad has no wife and now his daughter can’t bear to live with him. The villain, Binks, has a mum he clearly adores in the sentimental way that gangsters are often portrayed as doing. How did they get so far off the rails, then?

There’s no sense that Greenhorn is advocating the ubiquitous ‘family values’ beloved of desperate politicians, but there is a strong sense of how people fit in. It’s a poignant moment when Diesel tells Mirren she’s not right for his commune.

Coming of age was never more beautifully depicted – oh, and that’s an important word in this script.

Dates until Friday 17th October 2014. Treat yourself, and the family, whoever they are.

Mr. Bolfry by James Bridie: Pitlochry Festival Theatre

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Mr. Bolfry by James Bridie is in the 2014 season at the Pitlochry Festival Theatre. It’s directed by Patrick Sandford.

It’s really hard in this age of anything goes behaviour to remember what it was like to be discreet on a Sunday, to avoid offending the ‘man of the house’ or of ‘the cloth’ and to listen while an elder told you his philosophy of life. Plays that use exposition are definitely in the minority.

And yet…

In Mr. Bolfry, Bridie captures so much of what shapes our humanity and our relations with other humans. The Meenister is on his pedestal, but he’s had an inner demon to overcome and is all too ready to see Mr. Bolfry as a dream spectre and manifestation of his own disordered mind. Bridie was a doctor, remember.

Mrs. McCrimmon, beautifully rendered by Isabella Jarrett, is a character who has a position to uphold, but that position depends on the man she married. As sometimes happens, it becomes more important to her to keep the rhythms of her household unchanged and unchanging lest the Meenister be in any way unsettled.

The catalysts for bringing all the seething to the surface are two-fold. Jean. a wayward niece, is recuperating with her aunt and uncle after a bomb scare in London and the two engineers billeted on the manse are bored nearly to death by the Highland Sunday.

Summoning up devils seems like a really good lark until Bolfry, in the commanding presence of Dougal Lee, appears among them.

I loved the open stage set with its views of the endless mountains and the encapsulated closeness of the manse. I thought the second world war was brought to the stage with a light hand. I enjoyed the niece’s pointing up of the immeasurable gap between her and her relatives. I’m glad the theatre re-visited this piece.