In His Own Words

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

December 3rd, 2010

I was intending to be writing this final blog Saturday rather than Friday but the snowy, cold conditions over here have kept me in Farnham this day rather than traveling to the National Archives in London. Playing hookey on my second last day in the UK! How irresponsible!

I did have a wintry adventure this week as I accompanied the Farnham Maltings travelling theatre troupe to Nottinghamshire in the Midlands to see its stage adaptation of Miracle on 34th Street at the Thrumpton Village Hall near Nottingham. (The UK's fifth largest city I understand - Nottingham, that is, not Thrumpton which I believe is the fifth smallest). The venue was lovely and friendly with the villagers streaming into the tiny hall greeting one another warmly - just like Millbrook! My adventure began after the play when I almost missed reaching the pub hotel I was to stay in in the little village of Rolleston just outside of Newark. I phoned from the middle of nowhere in our van and the lady said the pub would be open only another ten minutes and then I'd be out of luck. The three miles in the van (sans snow tires like every other vehicle in the UK) seemed like an eternity but I just made it in time - so I had a bed for the night. The next morning I walked to the village train station through snow-covered fields and roads and was welcomed into a tiny signalling box by two friendly railways workers from Nottinghamshire as I was about to cross the tracks. We chatted about the area, the coal miners strikes of the 1980s which were a big part of the local history and about the surrounding countryside and way of life. The one fellow didn't have too many good things to say about London which his wife had only been to once and wasn't impressed even then. As the track indicator on the wall indicated an approaching train I said goodbye and walked through foot-deep snow onto the Newark bound platform. Once in Newark I walked from one train station to another through the ice and snow and thought about the famous British actor Sir Donald Wolfit who was born in Newark. He was the man the play The Dresser was based on. Then I took the half-hour delayed train to King's Cross, London. This train stopped shy of Peterborough because of a 'fouled' train on our line just south of that city. After a one and a half hour delay we moved on, reaching London by 12:30, just in time for me to make my way to the Comedy Theatre in the West End near Picadilly Circus to see the stage adaptation of Sebastian Faulk's novel Birdsong. This play, about the First World War, gave me lots to think about in terms of the play Ian McLachlan and I are creating. A particularly moving section was the interval between the second and third acts when a large screen onstage scrolled the names of the British soldiers who died during the first day of the Battle of the Somme - July 1st 1916. The interval lasted five minutes and the screen had only reached the Js and Ks of the names of those killed. Then I was lucky to get a train to Farnham from Waterloo. Many had been waiting upwards of two hours for this train that normally travels every half hour. So I reached ice-covered Farnham only 15 minutes late and made it to my favorite pub to meet Janette who had been watching the news and was very worried about my travel. Many had to spend the night in 'fouled' trains, closed airports like Gatwick, and sleeping in their offices as travel was severely disrupted because of the frigid, snowy weather. Now, being a Canadian, this didn't seem like an inordinate amount of snow and ice. However, in a snowtireless society, the weather virtually crippled the UK transportation system and closed most of the schools. If we were as unprepared in Canada we'd have more snow days than non-snow days for the school kids!!

I should mention before I close that Janette and I spent last weekend in Paris. It was purely r and r. What an amazing city with stunning architecture. We visited three wonderful museums: the Musee D'Orsay, the Louvre and the Grand Palais. The latter had an incredible Monet exhibit in which his paintings have been gathered from all over the world for display. Particularly moving for me were the studies of landscapes affected by the light of different times of day and season. A grouping of haystacks in the morning light, the afternoon light, the light of summer, the light of winter (with suggestions of snow) I found really overwhelming. The mature artist searching for the truth of a particular moment in a particular setting. I suppose I was also drawn to the rural motifs being a farm boy at heart. You can take the boy out of the country but not the country out of the boy.

So my time in the UK is rapidly coming to an end. Only today and tomorrow before (hopefully) grabbing a Sunday flight from Heathrow. I say hopefully because Gatwick Airport has just re-opened after beign shut tight for the last two days. Even today, though it's open, the trains aren't running to it and the highway is closed with an accident!

I can't overstate the kindness of the folks here at Farnham Maltings led by Gavin Stride. And I so appreciate the support of the Ontario Arts Council's Chalmers Foundation which has made this research trip possible. And I must thank deeply the staff at 4th Line led by Simone Georges, Kim Blackwell and our new GM Stephanie MacMillan with the able assistance of Dana Phillips, Mark Stainback, Allena Litherland and Heather Maxwell. Thanks so much guys for holding the fort so well and even building it up in my absence. And thanks also to our board, volunteers, donors and audiences for all your commitment to 4th Line during my absence.

I hope you have enjoyed reading these blogs. I have certainly enjoyed writing them. They help me retain my experience in detail and hopefully pass on a few fun facts to you the readers. I also hope 4th Line is just at the beginning of international relations in terms of promoting its work abroad. 'First we'll take Millbrook then we'll take Berlin.'Sorry, Leonard Cohen, for changing your words.

Cheers and all the best in my last blog from Blighty!

Rob

In His Own Words



Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

 Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

November 26th, 2010

Ok, my second last week in the UK is coming to an end on this frosty Friday - hey, that used to be one of my mom's favorite expressions - 'it'll be a frosty Friday before I....' - you get the idea.

Britain is having a significant cold snap at the moment with lots of snow (for Britain) in Wales, the north and Scotland. Significant snow is predicted for this area and around London next Tuesday. Daytime highs around 0 and lows around -5 to 10 - pretty cold for England in November. I must say the colder it gets the more I feel like I'm home in Canada. That familiar freezing feeling we all hold so dear to our hearts.

After another day at the Imperial War Museum's research room I met with artistic director Ivan Cutting again on Tuesday and talked about him trying to come over next summer to see one of our shows and keep a dialogue going about developing a show for the UK. Ivan, along with all theatre companies in the UK, is facing applying in January for continuing arts funding from the British Arts Council. All companies, and I mean all, are candidates for having their funding completely cut by the British government as part of the 30% overall public spending cuts. I know in Canada public arts funds are not increasing but they're not (so far) declining either. In the UK some companies, no matter how long in existence - and this covers all the arts - will have their public funding completely eliminated. It is a very trying time here for UK artists. I hope Ivan's company, Eastern Angles, does ok in the funding round as he is a very accomplished artist and a wonderful person to boot who has been promoting regional theatre in East Anglia (Norfolk and Suffolk) actively for the past 30 years. I hope he comes to Canada and that some of you can meet him.

On Tuesday afternoon I attended the Brick Lane Music Hall Christmas show in the docklands area of East London. One of the performers, Joni Talks (hailing from Peterborough, England), is a relative of two of our enthusiastic members, Jerry and Joan Harding. Joni has a wonderful singing voice and it was really interesting to attend a music hall style show - lots of suggestive, risque humour by the MC comic/actor interspersed with standard Christmas carols. Very interesting. One of the stars of my favorite UK soap opera, East Enders, worked at the Brick Lane in the 1990s and was 'discovered' there by the East Enders director. Peggy Mitchell (the character who owned the Queen Vic pub in the series) never looked back. Fame came to her around the age of 60. Maybe I should hang out at the Brick Lane Music Hall for a year or two!!!!

On Thursday I spent the day at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medecine on Euston Road in London. What an amazing library and collection of works connected to all aspects of the history of medecine. The library itself was very beautiful and conducive to quiet reading and contemplation. My kind of place. While there, I also met Doctor Julie Anderson from the University of Kent in Canterbury. She teaches the history of disability. I was able to quiz her about my emerging play and the scenarios for the characters. She seemed to think that what I was thinking was not too far out of the realm of possibility. She of all things is about to research and write a book about Irish giants - not mythical ones but real ones. She will focus on an Irish giant who went around performing all his life and died in the early 1800s. Anatomists of the day were very keen to disect the giant when he died and followed him around. He retired from the limelight and had himself buried under the foundation of a church in Bristol to prevent dismemberment by anatomists as that would have left a legacy of people thinking he had been a criminal not to mention contravening religious practise of being buried whole. Unfortunately, several years after his death the foundation was dug up for repair and the giant's body was revealed to the nosy public after all. He was apparently over 8 feet tall - this in an age when the average height was just under 5 feet.

And to top off the week - ha ha - last night Janette and I saw The Railway Children, based on a famous children's story, at the former Waterloo Eurostar Station. The audience faced each other on either side of a real sunken train track, on which set platforms moved/glided throughout the play - and there was even the appearance (more than once) of a real antique locomotive from the period of the play (pre World War I Edwardian period). The play was magically-staged and reminded me in parts of our original staging of The Cavan Blazers where one part of the audience faced the other part with the play in alley staging in between. The Railway Children, by Edith Nesbit, contained many themes of people helping people regardless of their poverty or position ( I mean the helpers as well as the helped) and was semi-autobiographical as the writer's father died when she was a child and in the story the children and mother have to move out of London to the north of England when the father is arrested for possible treasonous activities. I imagine many of you have read or at least have heard of the book and Nesbit. It was my first exposure to her work and as I said, the staging was the kind of site-specific work I love and delight in.

We've got our work cut out for us with our Train play in a couple of years!!!

So long for now and I'll check in next Saturday for my final instalment from the UK. God willing I will be back in Millbrook soon to share my stories, walk around the old farm with Janette and Fido, and dream new plays! Thanks for listening. Cheers.

Rob

In His Own Words

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

November 19th, 2010

Just a short blog today, folks, as I am gearing up for a big week of research and meetings in London. I should have lots more to say next Friday.

However, I did manage to visit the London Metropolitan Archives this week as well as a repeat visit to the Imperial War Museum - I think I've been there four or five times already and could easily spend a month there reading diaries and testimonies of World War I soldiers, nurses, medical officers. On Tuesday I was reading the papers of J. R. Skirth a British soldier who fought in many battles from 1914 to 1918. He told a harrowing story of getting lost in no-man's land after his comrades were killed and desperately trying to find his way back to friendly lines. Also, he was concussed in a shell blast that left him with only partial memory for four month in 1917. He'll remember snippets of days but most is a blank for him even fifty years later as he writes his memoirs. He says it's like a film that is very vivid for a few minutes, then a blank screen for several - more blanks than bits in his life of those months.

At the London Metropolitan Museum I looked at case notes of psychiatric patients in London's Colney Hatch asylum circa 1915 and 1916. It was supposed that most soldiers suffering from psychological trauma (shell shock) due to their war experience ended up in specialist military hospitals for treatment. Well, that wasn't always the case, particularly in the early part of the war when shell shock was so little understood. Many were simply certified insane and sent directly to asylums in the UK, placed in general wards with all the other insane. Some spent the rest of their lives there. There are so many untold stories of war that keep coming out.

On a lighter side, I celebrated my 58th birthday this week by going to Oxford. I wandered through Balliol College, Trinity College, Radcliffe Camera and All Souls College. All Souls particularly interested me as it is for fellows - those who have completed a lot of research, academic accomplishments, etc. It is not for the young students but for those in the middle of their careers. I wish we had an All Souls in Millbrook. I would definitely try to sign up.

Oxford is a beautfiul city that can't be seen properly in just a day. Although, I also managed to see a new film there - Another Year by Mike Leigh. I highly recommend this slice of contemporary English life which focuses on the fun topic of getting older and all that that entails. Yippee!

Yesterday I went to Stonehenge with my wife Janette. She recently came over here to spend a couple of weeks with me before my return. We went on an impulse it being a sunny day and it was an amazing place. Sunny days come at a premium over here and oughtn't to be squandered.

I understand the weather back home hasn't been exactly tropical.

At Farnham Maltings this weekend there is a national pottery show which is very interesting. I am going now to take it in and try to get warm. Central heating is not an English custom in case you didn't know.

I hope everyone back home is having a wonderful fall. My brain is teeming with research, ideas and sketches for the new play I am working on and I am even meeting an artistic director in London on Tuesday to talk about how to maybe bring a show from Canada to the Uk in the next few years. Oh well, onwards and upwards! Cheers.

Rob

In His Own Words

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood



November 12th, 2010

Hi Folks,

I'm a little late on my blog this week, as I was in London over the last few days researching, as I will be during most days the next two weeks. Now that my time here is down to a few weeks I'm realizing fast that the rare documents, sound archives, photos and so on will not be available to me after the end of the month!

I'm planning to spend two more days in the Imperial War Museum, a day in each of the National Archives and London Metropolitan Archives and a day at The Wellcome Trust Library for the history of medecine. On November 25 in London I will be meeting a leading UK history professor from the University of Kent in Canterbury. Doctor Julie Anderson is a leading academic on the history of disability and I will be speaking with her about the treatment of the disabled during the World War One period. In an email she said she grew up in Canada so it will be interesting to learn about that also.

I have just finished reading the published history of Earlswood Aslyum in Surrey, written by a McMaster university professor named Wright. Nice to know that we Canadians are doing such ground-breaking research in the UK!

The night before last I saw Warhorse at the New London Theatre in the West End. An amazing production on many levels, especially the life-size puppet horses manipulated/created by three people per horse. You had to see these creations to believe them. It was special seeing this play about World War One and its effects on man and beast on the eve of Remembrance Day. If the play comes to Canada I highly recomment it to everyone. I don't know how the Handspring Puppet Company in the UK will train Canadian puppeteers to do what they did. It was a highly unusual and compelling theatre experience that comes along every once in a while but not often.

In the afternoon before seeing the play I went into Saint Paul's Covent Garden - known as the Actors' Church - on a recommendation from Canadian theatre critic Lynn Slotkin. Although built in the 18th century the walls are covered with 20th century plaques commemorating film and stage actors, dancers, directors, producers etc who have passed away. I saw plaques to Boris Karloff, Lawrence Harvey, Robert Shaw, Vivien Leigh, Charlie Chaplin to name a few. Apparently all of these artists worshipped here at one time or another or had a memorial service here. There was even a plaque to Gracie Fields. Was she English?

An older gentleman who seemed to be living in the church with a couple of tabby cats gave me a blow by blow run down of the various actors' lives including details on how Vivien Leigh died in London and how she planted flowers in the garden outside the church. The detail of his knowledge about all things cinematic and dramatic far surpassed mine and I consider myself a bit of a film buff. For example I didn't know that John Gielgud squashed Greer Garson's first professional attempt at acting in his theatre company or that Burt Lancaster produced Arthur Miller's All My Sons on the West End with Edward G. Robinson or that Elizabeth Taylor's first two husbands had no money or that Robert Shaw drove Mary Ure to suicide or....  I could go on and on but I won't.

Last weekend I attended the Guy Fawkes celebration, walking through Farnham with a lit torch along with thousands of others and witnessing a bonfire that would make even the Cavan Blazers envious. Guy Fawkes weekend is a lot bigger here than the upstart Hallowe'en which many object to.

The weather has turned blustery and nasty here, wet and windy as they say. Apparently that is the first sign of true fall. So far I haven't been hit by a falling branch but I've come close. Wish me luck on my home stretch.

Oh, and I saw the Sutton Hoo burial helmet at the British Museum in London yesterday. For those of you who are Saxon aficionados that will mean something. For the rest of you wait till 2016 and you may see me wearing something like it on stage in our biggest production yet! Cheers.

Rob



In His Own Words

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

November 2nd, 2010

Ok, I'm marshalling my forces, getting over a nasty cold and sitting down to write my weekly report.

Although I've been researching World War I a lot over the past several weeks, this past week-end I took a detour into another subject entirely.

I spent the weekend visiting Norfolk and Suffolk, staying at the home of Eastern Angles theatre company's artistic director Ivan Cutting. Ivan started this company over 30 years ago with a mandate to tell local stories and histories - sound familiar? He is a Scorpio like me, his wife an Aries like mine and he lives not too far from Peterborough - England where he has been doing development work. Kind of spooky, eh?

Eastern Angles is based in Ipswich at the John Mills Theatre, a small, intimate space seating just over one hundred. His company also tours throughout the UK. I saw one of their plays on tour, Palm Wine and Stout, and really liked it. Every now and then they also do large, site-specific productions in places like potting (plants) factories and aircraft hangers.

Ivan has done a couple of plays on the Anglo-Saxons of the Dark Ages and took me round to a couple of Anglo-Saxon sites I was interested in seeing - West Stow Saxon Village near Bury St. Edmunds and Sutton Hoo near Woodbridge. Both sites were extremely fascinating. West Stow boasts re-created Saxon houses from the sixth and seventh centuries. Sutton Hoo is a royal burial site containing the famous ship burial of King Raenwald of East Anglia.

Why am I interested in all this you ask? Well, as I looked back to The Cavan Blazers and looked further back in The Winslows of Derryvore I'm thinking of looking back even further into the Saxon Winslows of Devon, England who lived in the kingdom of Wessex. 'Winslow' is Saxon for 'friend of the hill'. It's amazing how similar these small, self-contained Saxon settlements were to life in Millbrook! I'm only half joking. Anyway, a play down the road, maybe, for our 25th season? It would be great to get Ivan over here to see our work. He is a leading and respected regional artist in the UK and I feel very lucky to have met him and visited with him. I have to thank Gavin Stride, the artistic director of Farnham Maltings here for suggesting how close in concept 4th Line and Eastern Angles are, and brokering our meeting.

Well, I must get back to my research. This week I'm reviewing all the notes I have taken thus far and they are copious. I have new lead to follow up in Tunbridge Wells and London and then begin the exciting/scary process of creating scenes and bringing dramatic characters to life.

I was so happy this morning to read my co-writer Ian McLachlan's report on the Doctor Barnardo's Children production in Goderich. It sounds like it went really well - it's the first time one of my 4th Line plays has been done elsewhere, hopefully not the last! I must say I've been talking with Ivan Cutting at Eastern Angles about a play we could perhaps create in Canada and bring over here in five or six years.

So, thanks for listening and I'll check in next week. Happy November!! I get to experience Guy Fawkes night this Saturday. And the fireman are going on strike for it!

Cheers.

Rob

In His Own Words

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director

Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

October 26th, 2010

I suppose I should wait a day for my weekly blog in order to recover a bit from my three-day tour to the World War I battlefields in France. But I think it's better to write now from the heart before too much of my conscious, orderly mind intervenes.

Walking in the driving rain in a Canadian war cemetery near Courcelette on the Somme Battlefield, attending The Last Post ceremony under the Menin Gate in Ypres, standing before the stunning Vimy Memorial to the missing Canadian soldiers of World War I, walking through a German cemetery containing 44,830 dead, visiting a newly created graveyard for Australian soldiers just identified this year after lying anonymously in a German burial pit near Fromelles for ninety years, being at the little hillside near Ypres where John McCrae wrote 'In Flanders Fields', all these experiences and many more humbled me and moved me greatly. There is no way to describe the scale of loss, pain, fear, bravery, sacrifice endured by those millions of young men who participated in World War I. There were so many stories of heroism, useless death, maiming of soul and body, triumphant victory, hellish battle that I will have to wait till I return to present some of my reflections to my community back home.

And the stories of the millions of civilians dispossessed of their homes, the experiences of the mothers and wives and fathers and daughters and girlfriends and children of the fallen, all these are part of the picture too.

What I have learned and experienced over the last three days has clarified somewhat the context for my new play about the war and its effects. By being in the places where these massive events took place gives a playwright more to work with as the imagination begins to percolate through the historical. I hope I can in a small way honour the memory of this time.

This past week I also visited The National Archives and the Imperial War Museum in London, reading through medical case files for shell-shocked soldiers and listening to many stories of war veterans at the War Museum's sound archive - testimonies given in the 1970s through 1990s by World War I soldiers, medical officers, nurses, ambulance drivers, officers. Again the context for my writing deepens and becomes more and more specific.

I also managed to take in Hamlet at the National Theatre in London last week. Very interesting production that was set in a kind of present-day police state. Apparently, Elizabethan England was a bit of a police state itself with lots of spies and surveillance of citizens and dissidents. The National Theatre's artistic director, Nicholas Hytner directed the production, which has received many accolades.

Well, I'm keeping it rather short this week and will touch base again next Monday after my return from East Anglia where I am visiting a theatre company called Eastern Angles and also learning a bit about the Saxons of what we call The Dark Ages.

Cheers.

Rob

In His Own Words

Robert Winslow, Artistic Director





Photo by Marlon Hazlewood

October 15th, 2010

Well, another week is coming to an end here in Farnham. The time is flying by with so much to do and see and research. I'd like to say it's becoming old hat for me, the London underground system, but every journey throws a new wrinkle at me. The English tube (subway) trains are much smaller than ours in Canada and like everything else over here, promote the maximum use of space. And we are packed in like sardines in rush hour! London is electric though. Sometimes I have to pinch myself to believe I'm actually walking by Big Ben or Saint Paul's or Tower Bridge. The city has so many different areas, each extremely interesting. I'll never have time to discover them all even if I were here two years instead of two months.

Research on the new play Wounded Soldiers is going well. As I think I said before any time you really dig into a topic, the stereotypes and pre-conceptions you brought to it inevitably go out the windlow - unless of course one is terminally stubborn - and you have to start thinking in new ways about the past. This exploration of course is what gives 4th Line plays their ring of authenticity. I think our audiences expect this of us and can sniff out generalizations and superficiality.

This week on Wednesday I was at the Imperial War Museum in London. Rosanna Wilkinson, a daughter of a cousin of mine from Enniskillen, Ireland, works in the photographic section. They have over 1 million photos from the two World Wars. Only ten thousand of them are digitalized. I was able to browse the collection and find amazing images from particular World War I battles. What a treasure trove! The odd specifics revealed in some of the images are interesting. For example, in one photo from the aftermath of the Battle for Courcelette on the Somme in September 1916, a Canadian soldier is seen holding a black puppy that had been lying on the body of his dead German master, an officer killed in the battle. In another photo you see the dog being presented to a nurse at the Casualty Clearing Station behind the lines by the same soldier and his buddies. Of course there are many photos of the artillery barrages and men going over the top and the dead from both sides on the battlefield. But there are also those everyday moments, like a Canadian soldier cosying up to a young French woman in charge of a railway gate in a village near the Front lines.

Speaking of Canadian soldiers I was at a local history talk the other night in Epsom. There was a large Canadian army camp and convalescent camp called Woodcote Park there during World War I. After the talk I asked the speaker and the local audience if they had any stories about the Park and the Canadian soldiers stationed there. One lady said there was a famous one about the Canadian soldiers storming the local police station and causing quite a ruckus. I am going to follow this anecdote up and find out more about what happened almost 100 years ago!

Next weekend I am traveling to France on a three-day battlefield tour to Ypres, the Somme and Vimy. I am sure I will experience something as a Canadian that I have never felt before.

So cheerio and so long till my next missive! I will report again on October 26! Take care all. I'm missing the autumn colours. They're rather muted over here.

Rob