Author: Neil Rathmell

Another evening at the theatre, another travesty. Henry V this time, at Leeds Playhouse. No chorus to welcome the audience with ‘O for a muse of fire’, instead a scene of the director’s own devising. What makes directors think they can do better than Shakespeare? What makes actors think they must speak Shakespeare’s poetry as if it were prose? What makes me go on thinking that one day I will see Shakespeare performed as Shakespeare intended?

Cold and damp and foggy. The ground is too hard to dig. No gardening is possible, only watching and waiting. Late afternoon. The fog lifts a little. The sun, low in the sky, looks like the moon, until the fog covers it again.

That time of yeeare thou maist in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few doe hang
Upon those boughes which shake against the could,
Bare, ruin’d quiers, where late the sweet birds sang.

Shakespeare’s Sonnet no. 73

When I was a boy in the 1950s, children’s voices were part of Christmas. We heard them every year on Christmas Eve as they struck up Once In Royal David’s City or Silent Night outside the front door and dad went out to give them sixpence. But those days are gone.

Now I listen instead to Benjamin Britten’s Ceremony of Carols or, better still, Friday Afternoons, the twelve songs he wrote for the boys at the prep school where his brother was headmaster. So called because he practised with them on Friday afternoons.

I believe he must have enjoyed writing songs for them to sing in much the same way that Vivaldi must have enjoyed writing music for the girls at the Ospedale della Pietà to play, or Shakespeare writing female parts for the boy players to act.

How much more exciting and satisfying it is for an artist to show what can be achieved when innocence and experience meet on equal terms. It is the real life equivalent of what always happens in an artist’s imagination.

Boy players and boy sopranos must have had more in common than the fact that their voices hadn’t broken. Children are great mimics and it’s that, I think, that lets anyone who writes for them give free range to their imagination. The boy sopranos’ angelic voices, the young girls’ precocious musicianship, the boy actors’ ability to be and not to be female, are all of a piece in a world that is entirely imaginary. The boundary between reality and imagination grows blurred.

Never never land! Wonderland! The Land of Counterpane! What country, friend, is this? This is Illyria, lady.

Tomorrow is the opening night of a four-day festival of writing by (mainly) Yorkshire based writers. All four days are broadcast on FM and online from Chapel FM, an independent radio station in East Leeds.

I have one piece in it and my wife, Jaspreet Mander, has two. The first, ‘Bringing Up Home’, a lyrical reflection on the renovations we undertook when we bought our house in West Yorkshire earlier this year, goes out on Wednesday at 2.30pm.

The second, ‘Grandma’s Kitchen’, memories from her childhood, follows mine, a dramatised reading of my short story, ‘There Was A Man’, on Sunday, 2.00-2.30 and 2.30-3.00.

If you miss them, you can listen again any time on the Chapel FM archive at chapelfm.co.uk.

Mrs Mander (my wife, Jaspreet Mander, keeping her own name instead of taking mine, adhering to Indian traditions instead of British) went with me last night to The Leeds Library to a reading of ‘A Christmas Carol’ by Gerald Dickens, great-great grandson of the author.

‘Not so much a performance,’ she said in the interval, ‘as a phenomenon!’

If his great-great grandfather had been there, as the Ghost of Novelists Past, he would have been very satisfied with what he saw and heard. All the drama, the multitude of characters, the humour, the pathos, everything was just as it should be and as one imagines it must have been when the novelist himself performed it on his many reading tours, here and in the USA.

‘A Christmas Carol’ is still touring here. Catch it if you can.

We were enchanted by The Leeds Library too, an 18th century library in the heart of the city, a maze of shelves three storeys high in pristine condition, filled with books old and new. We needed no persuading (though the lady sitting next to us was persuasiveness itself) that the price of membership would be well worth the freedom to drop in whenever we liked and pass the time of day (or yesterday) with the ghosts of librarians past, present and to come.