Saturday, October 30, 2010

My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman

 

Jean McConville with two of her children shortly before her disappearance.


My hero: 

Jean McConville

 by Amanda Foreman

30 October 2010

J

ean McConville died in December 1972, but her mutilated body remained hidden for 30 years. It was only in 2003 that her skeleton was accidentally unearthed by beachcombers in County Louth, Ireland. She is now buried in St Paul's Catholic Church, Belfast. But even now, almost 40 years on, no one has been brought to justice for her torture and murder. This even though we know who did it and why.

Wednesday, October 27, 2010

Kate Mosse / Top 10 Ghost Stories


Kate Mosse's top 10 ghost stories

From Henry James to Susan Hill, the author of Labyrinth selects tales that deliver 'the fun of the shudder'
The Turn of the Screw
Shudders ... Rebecca Evans in English National Opera's production of The Turn of the Screw. Photograph: Tristram Kenton

Kate Mosse is the bestselling author of five novels, two books of non-fiction, short stories and a play, Syrinx, which won a Broadcasting Press Guild award in 2009. The first novel in her Languedoc Trilogy, Labyrinth, won Richard & Judy's Best Read award in 2006 and topped the bestseller lists for six months; the second, Sepulchre, was also an international bestseller; and the third, Citadel, will be published in 2011. Her current novel, The Winter Ghosts, is published in paperback this week.




             "Spirits and apparitions, headless monks and white ladies, the traditional ghost story still exerts a hold on our imaginations. Their habitat is ancient woods, ruined abbeys, isolated old houses and crumbling monasteries. But what makes a ghost story? Though purists might quibble, I'd say there are three distinct types of ghost story – as opposed to tales of horror, which have a different dynamic and purpose, or novels that have ghosts in them, such as Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude or Ben Okri's The Famished Road.
             "The traditional ghost story is often inspired by folklore and a sense of decaying history, and is similar in tone to the Gothic novels that came before it. In the psychological ghost story, the emphasis is on the mental state of the victim rather than the actions – the existence, even – of the ghost or poltergeist. These stories implicitly, sometimes explicitly, question the reliability and sanity of the heroine or hero, and often reference social or political issues of the day. Finally, there's the antiquarian ghost story which is associated with a certain sort of Edwardian Englishness. Like their traditional counterparts, they draw on old mythologies and folklore, but are rooted in realism and the sense of the ordinary disrupted or made extraordinary. I see the influence of all three traditions in my own books – though The Winter Ghosts is my first pure ghost story – but in the end, as with the choices that follow, what matters is that each has what the great Edith Wharton called 'the fun of the shudder'."

1. "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe (1843)

From the master of the morbid imagination, this gem of a story blurs the edges between horror and ghost fiction. A murderer's guilty conscience gets the better of him, driving him to confess his crime. The unnamed narrator murders an old man with a "vulture eye". He plans carefully and hides the body by dismembering it, but his guilt will not let him rest. Is he imagining the beating of the heart beneath the floorboards or is there something there? Gripping and horrifying, the perfect mix of horror and Gothic, the forerunner of the psychological ghost stories that were to come into vogue.

 

2. "The Signalman" by Charles Dickens (1866)

This perfectly balanced, beautifully judged story both preys on both the anxiety provoked by the new technology of railways and deeply held beliefs that a ghost can be an alarum for events to follow. Three times, the ringing of a spectral bell is followed by the appearance of a ghost, harbinger of a dreadful accident. Creepy, clever, and has you looking over your own shoulder.

 

3. "At Chrighton Abbey" by Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1871)

Another classic of ghost-story writing, with a doomed family and a crumbling, historic house at the heart of it. The narrator, Sarah, returns to her childhood home as a guest, having been obliged to work as a governess. There, although the halls are brightly lit and the old servants delighted to see her, a sense of disaster hangs over the festivities and Sarah's glimpse of a ghostly hunt forewarns of tragedy to come.

 

4. "Canon Alberic's Scrap-Book" by MR James (1894)

This is the very first story in the first published MR James collection, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary. A young Englishman and scholar leaves his friends for the day to spend time alone in a claustrophobic, decaying French cathedral city in the Pyrenees. He is encouraged by the sacristan to buy an antique manuscript volume which is possessed of older and evil memories. Wonderfully atmospheric, wonderfully creepy.

 

5. "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James (1898)

This is, possibly, the most exquisite and perfect of all psychological ghost stories. Again, an unnamed narrator, another governess, a different manuscript that claims to tell the story of mysterious country house, a widower and his children and two ghosts of former servants of the house. It is never clear if the ghosts are real or the product of the governess's increasingly unstable mind. And here, unlike in many ghost stories, there are several strong and engaging characters, not least of all the strange children, Miles and Flora. Simply, a masterpiece. 

6. Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories by Algernon Blackwood (1912)

Blackwood is the neglected master of the Edwardian ghost story renaissance. Gentlemen travellers and scholars fill his pages, but always with a psychological – often animist – slant on things. For Blackwood, Nature always has a capital 'N' and was a living, breathing thing, sometimes benign, but often sinister. This collection is the place to start, even though my favourite story is "The Man Whom the Trees Loved", where a wife finds herself powerless to save her husband from the trees he loves. The forest does seem to be alive, getting closer and closer to the house, until the husband vanishes all together. Atmospheric, beautiful, a very subtle story of a peculiar haunting.

7. "The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare (1912)

De la Mare was a significant writer of ghost stories, publishing some 40 supernatural tales in collections such as Eight Tales and On the Edge, but I'm choosing perhaps his most famous work, this lyrical and haunting poem. It's never clear what bargain the traveller has made, and with whom, only that he has kept his word to come to the deserted house in the wood. The opening line still makes my hair stand on end: "'Is there anybody there?' said the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door."

 

8. "Bewitched" by Edith Wharton (1925)

The celebrated author of novels such as The House of Mirth, Wharton was also a terrific writer of ghostly tales. A blend of Poe, Hawthorne and Henry James, she has a lightness of touch that belies the often very grisly tale. This story, first published in the Pictorial Review in 1925, has a fabulous sense of place and is a revenant story with a twist. It leaves the reader doubting their interpretation of events. Clever stuff.

 

9. "The Ghosts" by Antonia Barber (1969)

This is my favourite children's ghost story, a wonderful time-slip novel set during the first world war. Lucy and Jamie Allen move with their mother and baby brother to the country, where their mother has been engaged by a mysterious gentleman, Mr Blunden, as caretaker of an abandoned house until the rightful owner can be traced. One day, Lucy is walking in the garden to explore and to pick flowers when she meets Sara and Georgie. It becomes clear that the children are ghosts, children of the house who died 100 years ago in the fire that destroyed the estate. It's a gentle, thoughtful ghost story, of parallel time and the chance to make amends for mistakes in an earlier life. The novel won the Carnegie Medal and was filmed in 1972 as The Amazing Mr Blunden.

 



10. The Woman in Black by Susan Hill (1982)

For my money, the greatest of the contemporary ghost writers. Hill creates believable period characters, she creates a hermetic world that yet speaks of wider superstitions and histories, and creates plots with tension, pace and jeopardy without ever becoming heavy-handed. This is a story of vengeance, of an old curse from an embittered woman, all centred on the brooding Eel Marsh House, gloomy and isolated and cut off from the mainland at high tide. As the tension of premonition and disaster builds and builds, the ghostly screams of an accident long ago will haunt the reader's imagination long after the last page has been turned. Perfect.






Saturday, October 23, 2010

My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton

 

William Beveridge addressing a group of housewives, 1944. Photograph: Hans Wild


My hero: 

William Beveridge

 by Will Hutton


Sat 23 Oct 2010

I

n 1942 William Beveridge's report on social insurance was a national bestseller: with memories of the 30s still vivid, wartime Britain had an enormous appetite for the promise that the postwar world would be different. The scant support for millions locked, through no fault of their own, in the "five evils" – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness – had been a disgrace. There had to be change.

The Arbor by Andrea Dunbar / Review

 



The Arbor – review

This groundbreaking study of the life of troubled playwright Andrea Dunbar merges documentary and performance to mesmerising effect

Peter Bradshaw
Thu 21 Oct 2010 22.00 BST

V

erbatim theatre is a new form of contemporary political drama, in which the proceedings of some hearing or trial are reconstituted word-for-word on stage, acted out by performers. Now artist and film-maker Clio Barnard has experimentally and rather brilliantly applied this technique to the big screen, ventriloquising the past with a new kind of "verbatim cinema". She has journeyed back 30 years with a movie about the late Andrea Dunbar – dramatist and author of Rita, Sue and Bob Too – who, physically weakened by alcoholism, died in 1990 of a brain haemorrhage aged 29.



Dunbar came from that part of Bradford's tough Buttershaw estate known as "the Arbor". Barnard has interviewed Dunbar's family, friends and grownup children and then got actors to lip-synch to the resulting audio soundtrack, talking about their memories. Passages of Dunbar's autobiographical plays are acted out in the open spaces of the very estates where she grew up, surrounded by the (presumably real) residents looking on. The effect is eerie and compelling: it merges the texture of fact and fiction. Her technique produces a hyperreal intensification of the pain in Dunbar's work and in her life, and the tragic story of how this pain was replicated, almost genetically, in the life of her daughter Lorraine, who suffered parental neglect as a child and domestic violence and racism in adult life, taking refuge in drugs in almost the same way that Andrea took refuge in alcohol. The story of Lorraine's own child is almost unbearably sad, and the experience of this child's temporary foster-parents – who were fatefully persuaded to release the child back into Lorraine's care – is very moving.

Dunbar's story, and her success as a teenage playwright in Max Stafford-Clark's Royal Court, challenges a lot of what we assume about gritty realist theatre or literature from the tough north. In many cases, it is produced by men whose gender privileges are reinforced by university, and who have acquired the means and connections to forge a stable career in writing. However grim their plays or novels, there is a kind of unacknowledged, extra-textual optimism: the author, at least, has got out, has made it. Dunbar hadn't got out; she did not have the aspirational infrastructure of upward mobility. In the end, she was left with precisely those problems she depicted. Barnard has created a modernist, compassionate biopic: a tribute to her memory and her embattled community.

THE GUARDIAN



The Arbor by : In the footsteps of Rita, Sue and Bob

 

Andrea Dunbar

The Arbor: In the footsteps of Rita, Sue and Bob


By Liam Allen
22 October 2010

Innovative documentary The Arbor uses lip-synching techniques to give life to audio interviews telling the story of tragic playwright Andrea Dunbar.

The raw, working-class realism of 1986 film Rita, Sue and Bob Too - written by Dunbar and set on Bradford's Buttershaw estate - has helped to make it a cult classic.

Her story of the friendship between two schoolgirls who begin an affair with a married man was straplined: "Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down."

Rita, Sue and Bob Too
Image caption,
Rita, Sue and Bob Too was straplined: "Thatcher's Britain with her knickers down"

"I really love the film, I really love the friendship between the two girls, I really love the fact that it doesn't really moralise about them enjoying sex," says the documentary's director Clio Barnard, also from Bradford.

"But I suppose I didn't really know much about Andrea so I hadn't really realised where that writing came from, or where that talent came from, and I didn't know her plays."

The director's journey of discovery began with visits to the Buttershaw estate and Dunbar's street, Brafferton Arbor, to meet those who knew the writer - a heavy drinker who died of a brain haemorrhage in 1990, aged 29.

Interviews were recorded "to create a sort of a screenplay that you listen to rather than read".

Insightful reminiscences from figures from the writer's past - and two of the three children she had with three different fathers - are brought to life by actors who mime along.

"The actors did a phenomenal job because they had to learn it like a piece of music - technically it's very challenging," says Barnard, 45.

"In addition, they had to give a nuanced performance so I think they really did a remarkable job."

The "verbatim" technique used by Barnard was partly inspired by Dunbar's ear for raw dialogue that is such a central part of her autobiographical writing style.

"Part of what I really like about Andrea's writing is it uses peoples words as they say them, that it's verbatim - it felt important that it was in people's own words."

As Barnard's unique documentary progresses, the focus shifts from Andrea to what became of her eldest daughter, Lorraine, now 29 - the age her mother was when she died.

The interviews with Lorraine, a former drug addict, were recorded in prison where she was serving a sentence following the accidental death of her two-year-old son, who died after ingesting drugs.

Manjinder Virk
Image caption,
Lorraine Dunbar is played by Manjinder Virk

Lorraine's interviews in The Arbor - mimed by actress Manjinder Virk - show that she shares Andrea's way with words, succinctly putting across her feelings about her mother's work, her bitter childhood memories and her own troubles.

"I think she can talk about very complex, difficult things, very directly with very few words - I think she's got a real gift for that," says Barnard.

Lorraine's younger sister Lisa, whose voice is also prominent, says watching actress Christine Bottomley mouth her words was "very strange - I had to keep pinching myself 'cos I thought it was me".

Lisa - who was 10 when Andrea died - has a more idolized view of her mother than sister Lorraine, who she says she has not spoken to for years.

"She used to always write at night-time in her bedroom," she remembers.

Andrea Dunbar
Image caption,
Dunbar had three plays produced - The Arbor, Rita, Sue and Bob, and Shirley

"In the morning, you'd go in and there'd be a little bedside bin and it would just be full of screwed-up paper."

Her abiding memory of the first time she watched Rita, Sue and Bob Too is of feeling "disgust at all the swearing".

"When I was 14, I saw it for the first time and everyone at middle school had seen it at about that time and everybody wanted to talk to me and sit near me."

Although Andrea Dunbar's masterpiece was made into a film by Scum director Alan Clarke in 1986, it was originally performed as a stage play - the writer's second - four years earlier.

Barnard's documentary is interspersed with both archive footage and excerpts from a modern-day performance of her first play - also called The Arbor.

Her debut work - which she began as part of a school project - was premiered at London's Royal Court in 1980 after her raw talent was spotted by theatre director Max Stafford-Clark.

Like Rita, Sue and Bob Too, it explores themes familiar to Andrea including abusive relationships, teenage pregnancy and alcoholism.

Jimi Mistry and Natalie Gavin
Image caption,
Newcomer Natalie Gavin performed alongside Jimi Mistry in an open-air performance of The Arbor

For the treatment featured in the documentary, open auditions were held on the Buttershaw estate ahead of an open-air performance to residents of the Brafferton Arbor.

The cast is led by former Buttershaw resident Natalie Gavin - a theatre studies student at Huddersfield University - who gives a wholly believable performance as a young Andrea.

Gavin, 23, says the atmosphere while filming the play on Brafferton Arbor was "kinetic" because residents "were involved in it and they were allowed to be in it, and it made it magic".

She says her involvement is fated because of the connections she shares with Andrea - they went to the same school and her father lived on Brafferton Arbor where he knew Andrea.

"I want to pursue my talent and she wanted to pursue hers," she says.

"She went out there and did it and that's exactly what I'm doing, through her, as well as being in her surroundings."

For Andrea's youngest daughter Lisa, meanwhile, the project has been "amazing - weird, but in a good way".

"I'm very proud of my mum.

"When I was younger, nobody really spoke about the film but, after she died and I understood more, it was like: 'That's her whose mum wrote Rita, Sue and Bob Too.'

"The only thing that upsets me is that she's not here to have this fame for herself.

"She didn't get much fame when the film first got released - it's after her death that it's all taken off."



BBC




Saturday, October 16, 2010

My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

Stanley Spencer . . . 'In painting after painting he made a paradise of Cookham, which in reality is no such thing.'
Photograph: John Pratt

 

My hero: 

Stanley Spencer

 by Howard Jacobson

Saturday 16 October 2010

I

loved Stanley Spencer's work from the moment I saw two nude studies of himself and his second wife, Patricia Preece, on show next to a number of more familiar Lucian Freuds. Freud had obviously learnt from Spencer, but he is too aloof and knowing ever to make you feel you are seeing a woman's body with the blazing eyes of a lover, as Spencer does. Spencer stares at the woman's flesh – "like an ant crawling over her body", in his own words – as flesh has never been stared at before.