I Don’t Want the Pope

In September this year Pope Benedict XVI plans to visit England and we, the British public, have to pay for it. We have to pay the costs of the Pope’s visit, including all the high security costs, yet the Pope heads up one of the richest institutions in the world.

I certainly won’t be going to see the Pope when he is here. More and more I find myself repulsed by the Catholic Church, by its treatment of women and their rights, their ignorant and intransient opposition to contraception and the use of condoms to prevent HIV, their vitriolic homophobia and the decades of covering up the sexual abuse by their priests. The Pope has proved as vocal in his reactionary views as the church he heads up. According to him, I, as a gay man, am far more of a risk to the world then global warning (!!). Before he became Pope Benedict XVI he was head of Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Canon Court of the Catholic Church, and now more and more dirt from the sexual abuse cover-up is sticking to him.

What does anger me is that my taxes still have to pay for this man to come to my country and patronise and insult me from my own land. Why can’t Catholics and the Catholic Church pay for this visit, why do we as taxes payers have to foot the bill, especially when the huge majority of us are not practising Catholics.

There’s now a way to protest. There is a petition, on the 10 Downing Street website, to sign that calls for the government to distance themselves from the Pope’s repressive views and assures us that British tax payers will not be footing the bill for the Pope’s visit. Here’s the link:

http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/ProtestthePope/

Drew.

P.S. I have Paul Burston’s blog to thank for the link to this petition.

The Doctor is Back

Doctor Who is back on our screens, and this time it’s for a full series. We have a new Doctor, a new companion and a new Head Writer. Last week saw the introduction of the new companion, Amy Pond.

Previously, The Doctor had dropped into the new companion’s life and rushed them off their feet in a whirlwind adventure. Last week’s opening episode saw The Doctor land in Amy’s life when she was seven, he only stayed for short period but at the end of it promised to come back for her; but he never did that night, not until twelve years later. In the meantime Amy became fixated on The Doctor, “The Raggedy Doctor” as she called him.

This storyline struck a chord with me. As a child I was a dedicated fan of Doctor Who, it was a terrible day if I missed an episode, though my parents didn’t share my belief. I loved the adventure and other-worldliness of the stories, but most of all I loved the idea of The Doctor’s Tardis – the vessel he travelled time and space in.

As a child, I imaged the Tardis landing in my own back garden, me stepping inside and then taken away for a world of adventure. In a magical blue box being able to escape both my life and the place I lived, I hated them both. It was a cliché but I was a very unhappy child, I had few friends and hated the place I lived in, suburban Liverpool wasn’t kind on those it saw as “different”.

Watching Doctor Who certainly filled my childhood need for escape, but it was more than that. It was the quality of the stories that kept me watching, and keeps me enjoying it now with the new series. Then I watched the first episode of this series, The Eleventh Hour, and that childhood longing came back to me. In seven year old Amy’s desperation for escape and the sadness of when The Doctor never returned for her, for a moment, I remembered that feeling of longing for escape when I was a child.

But isn’t that what good drama does, allows us to see ourselves in the lives of its characters.

Drew.

Something to Add to Your Shopping Basket

Life can inspire so much literature, and in my case so much of what I write comes directly from life; but it can also be an expression of frustration.

Back in 2007 I was taking a teaching session and in the front row was a woman who took exception to everything I said, she took exception to me just being there. As the session processed she kept up an almost constant stream of negative comments and questions. It was frustrating and made my job difficult, I just wanted to snap at her to shut up and let me finish, but I didn’t. You can’t behave like a dictatorial Sunday School teacher.

A month or so later I saw an item requesting submissions for a book of essays about why people come into nursing and why they stay in it, to be called Nurses on the Run. My submission was called “More Then Making Beds and Emptying Bedpans” and took the frustration I felt doing that teaching session as my springboard. I wrote about the change and revitalisation my career took when I left working in hospital and moved out into the community, and the completely different working environment I found there. Much to my surprise my essay was accepted and the book moved into production.

That was two years ago, book publication is a slow art and can move at what feels like a snail’s pace, but last week I received an email telling me the book was published and available to buy. When I saw that it I felt filled with the same rush of excitement I always get, that excitement that I’ll be able to communicate with so many different people, people I’d never met and who didn’t know me beyond what they are reading. It’s the same excitement I felt the first time I had something published and have done ever since.

Nurses on the Run has its own website were copies of it can be ordered, found at: http://www.nursesontherunbook.com/index.php

I know I might appear biased, but this book comes as a welcome change to all the negative press nursing has been receiving lately, because its aim is to celebrate nursing and why people chose to stay in the profession.

Drew.

P.S. I owe a big thank-you to Karen Buley, the editor of Nurses on the Run. Without her hard work this book won’t have got off the ground. I’m certainly grateful to her.

A Stately Visit

The first week of March we had a week’s annual leave (having to use it up before the first of April). We didn’t go away anywhere, instead we decided to have days out. One of the places we went to was Leeds Castle (which isn’t in Leeds but Kent, very English). Martin had been there before and thought it was a good place to take pictures.

As a child I was regularly taken to different stately homes around the country. My parents felt this was educational and a way to appreciate history, but back in the seventies stately homes were very dull places. As a child, I also had a poor interest in history, it was coloured by poor teaching of it at my school – all dates of battles and nothing about the people who lived through those times. But those stately homes were dull, long rooms with most of them roped off, lots of portraits of people I’d never heard of, and everyone wondering around in hushed tones.

Now, Leeds Castle hasn’t turned itself into an all singing and dancing theme park, it is still a very traditional stately home but what has changed is me. I now have an interest in history, but much more I have a lively imagination and love of literature.

The Castle itself is laid out as also a tour through time periods. You enter through the medieval part of the castle and pass through room after room, going through Regency Period, then Victorian and finally ending in the section of the castle that was modernised in the 1950s, the last time the castle used as a dwelling.

It was like passing through different rooms from different literary genres. The medieval rooms, all stark decoration and stone floors (rugs on the walls and no indoor plumbing), were straight out of a drama of medieval lust and intrigue: A Man for All Seasons, The Other Boleyn Girl or even The Tudors. The Victorian rooms could have easily been the setting for a Victorian Gothic tale, the ones Sarah Walters writes so memorably. But it was the rooms from the 1950s that left the most lasting impression on me.

These rooms, with their bright furnishings and straight angular lines, seemed the perfect setting for an Agatha Christie novel. The elegance and opulence of these rooms could have been taken straight from the pages of one of her stories. The bedroom with swathes of crushed velvet, were the figure on the bed isn’t sleeping and can’t be woken up. The corridor, with its panelled walls, were a hysterical maid runs down. The drawing room, populated with square furniture and an overlarge grand piano, were all the suspects sit and nervously wait for the Chief Inspector from Scotland Yard to arrive, while the body in the bedroom grows old.

Yes, I have an over active imagination but so far it has not harmed me, much. It has helped me through many overcrowded tube rides, all those times when I’ve been kept waiting for an appointment and countless of my family’s events. Also, I can turn some of my imagination’s wondering into fiction.

Also, at Leeds Castle Martin took some wonderful pictures (one them illustrates this blog). They can be seen at http://martins-day.blogspot.com/

Drew.

Laughter and Lies

“I would not advise any actor, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out... it doesn’t work if you’re gay.”

Rupert Everett.

It’s that great and lasting gossip, who’s gay in Hollywood. For many, it’s the endless speculation, which actor is really gay, which Hollywood marriage is really a sham? Hollywood itself doesn’t help matters, they award straight actors for playing gay but if an actor comes out as gay their career dries faster than a straight-to-DVD sequel.

Last night we went to see the Westend production of The Little Dog Laughed, by Douglas Carter Beane, which is about Hollywood Homophobia and how do you live within that if you’re a gay actor. This is not an original premise, other plays have looked at it before, but this time the enemy isn’t some big bad straight Hollywood mogul, the enemy here is the Hollywood system.

Diana is a Hollywood agent, a lesbian who has sacrificed her sexuality for her career. Mitchell is a Hollywood actor on the rise, and Diana’s client, but he’s also gay. Alex is a New York rent boy and Ellen is his party-girl girlfriend. On a trip to New Year, Mitchell meets Alex and the two men fall for each other; but Diana is busy negotiating producing a film that will star Mitchell and the last thing she needs is a gay leading man.

The plot might not be original but Carter Beane’s handling of it is. He shows a deep cynicism for Hollywood and the whole process of film making, painting a world where people will sell their very soul for a hit movie, but done so with such political manoeuvring and manipulation as to put the Borgias to shame. The cynicism here certainly stretches to the play’s ending, this isn’t happy-ever-after fantasy of so many other gay plays. The fast pace of the play, many of the characters talking directly to the audience, fitted well with its setting and subject matter. (I did wonder who the character of the agent was based on, she manipulates all around her with such a razor sharp edge that had to come from some insider knowledge)

The cast was certainly four beautiful people, but these were actors who were more than just good looks. Rupert Friend was insecure, needy and lonely as Mitchell. Harry Lloyd was cute but naive as Alex (his rent boy might know his way around a bedroom but was clueless about his own emotions). Gemma Atherton fleshed out the under-written role of Ellen, the character only coming into her own in the second act. But the star here was Tamsin Grieg as Diana. She was funny but frighteningly manipulative, hard in her drive for success. This was a woman you didn’t dare get on the wrong side of.

The Little Dog Laughed was certainly an enjoyable play, its sharp wit driving it forward; but its cynicism and unflattering view of Hollywood also made a dark and unlimitedly uncomfortable story. Hollywood homophobia is still a nasty and distasteful thing, propped up by so many lesbians and gay men.

As an aside: in 1988 when Ian McKellen came out as gay I was still struggling to come to terms with my own sexuality. His very public coming out meant so much to me. Here was an actor that I admired, who I’d seen on stage, and he was gay too. He was also happy to tell people so. He was the opposite of the stereotypes I had been raised with. It was one of those important, turning points in my life.

Drew.

Mr Bennett and the Gift of Art

“About the play... there is always somebody left out...”

The Habit of Art, Alan Bennett.

Alan Bennett has the reputation of writing cosy and Northern dramas, populated by strong matriarchs, put upon husbands and single, sensitive sons; but the reality of his writing is far from this. His prose and memoir writing has charted his upbringing in Leeds and the lives of his parents, but none of this could be called cosy. His drama certainly isn’t

Last Saturday, we went to see his latest play, The Habit of Art, at the National Theatre. It was about a, fictional, meeting between W.H. Auden and Benjamin Britten in the 1970’s when Britten was writing his opera Death in Venice and Auden had virtually retired to Oxford. But this wasn’t a dry and academic plot. During the cause of the play Auden has a date with a local rent boy and an interviewer from BBC Radio (Humphrey Carpenter, who would later write biographies of both Auden & Britten), who Auden mistakes for his afternoon rent boy.

Bennett has chosen the structure of a play-within-a-play for this play and it’s a structure that works very well. The play is set during an afternoon rehearsal of the play-within-a-play. This gives the opportunity for the actors to come out of character and discuss the play they’re rehearsing, to discuss the details of Auden and Britten’s lives.

On the surface the play appears to be about biography and the creation of art, one character is the biographer of both Auden and Britten, and Britton comes to Auden for help in the creation of his opera; but this is a much more person play. There is an exchange between Auden and Britten were they talk about being gay men in the public eye were their sexuality has become public knowledge, through the fact that they have male partners, but they have never officially “come out.”

The writing here shows Bennett at his best. There is his sharp comedy, which comes out of the characters he’s created and the situation he’s put them in (there’s a scene involving talking furniture which is both embarrassing and very funny). I also wonder how much is the setting was taken from real life, the National Theatre has almost become the home for his recent plays and this one is set in a rehearsal room at the National Theatre.

The performances here are of the high standard I’ve come to expect at the National Theatre, with Richard Griffiths and Alex Jennings turning in commanding performances as the actors playing Auden and Britton, but the stand out performance was that of Frances de la Tour as the Stage Manager running the rehearsal. So much of her role is to anchor the rehearsal, constantly drawing the characters back to their performance, but at the end she reveals that she was once an actress but she gave up acting because it became no longer special for her.

A new Alan Bennett play, for me, is one of those things I don’t want to miss. His writing is interesting but also emotionally engaging with a riche humour running through it. He’s certainly one of our greatest living dramatists, though he always pushes against the label of “National Treasure”, and I can’t blame him. Who would want to be put in a glass cage in museum somewhere, like a crown or a piece of parchment?

Drew.

Rain, Rain and Rain

I publish some of my short stories on ABC Tales website and, not to sound too immodest, I’ve had a lot of success doing so. My stories have been well received, and that only helps as a writer.

The latest I’ve published there is Penance on a Wet Thursday Morning (http://tinyurl.com/y8hqw6r). This story explores a theme that my writing repeatedly comes back to, the effects of religion on people’s lives. This time it is seen from the point-of-view of a woman who has lost her baby to cot death, and how she can’t come to terms with that tragedy.

If you do read this story please leave a comment afterwards, there’s a comments section on the webpage. I read all the comments and I really value them, whatever they are, because feedback helps my writing.

More of my stories and writing can be found at: http://www.abctales.com/user/drew4payne

Drew.