Durham night and day

Or, if you prefer, come rain, come shine. The rain fell not last week but on Durham’s first LUMIERE festival two years ago; the biggest brolly in Matthew Andrews's top picture belongs to the diplo-mate and gives a good plug to the European Commission which made a substantial contribution to feature European artists (this year, 30 of them from nine member states plus two from elsewhere). The sun shone, on the other hand, on the day this year’s jamboree officially began, giving us the perfect autumn take on the cathedral from the surrounding, wooded banks of the River Wear.

I’ve written about Artichoke’s inspired advocacy of a great civic-pride event that turned out some fine art too over on The Arts Desk, so this is a chance just to rhapsodise intemperately about one of England’s most perfect small cities, and certainly its most imposing, awe-inspiring – though not necessarily its most beautiful – cathedral. I hadn’t returned since the early 1980s, when I was part of a group of Edinburgh fellow-students who travelled down to hear friend Ruthie’s brother Patrick Addinall play the Haydn Trumpet Concerto in the cathedral with his then orchestra, the BBC Philharmonic. We then all drove off – in a minivan, can memory serve me correctly on that one? - to spend a night at the Addinall homestead in Carperby, Wensleydale.


I’d been to Durham for the first time a few years before that, to audition and be auditioned by the university town through the UCCA process. It was second on my list; Oxford, the first, I’d flunked in fifth-term entrance attempt. York wouldn’t consider being third, but it was the fourth – Edinburgh – which I'd already seen a month earlier and loved at first sight. Durham had charm but much as I enjoyed my weekend jaunt, staying with my ma’s goddaughter who was studying there, I couldn’t really envisage being walled up with only the occasional excursion to Newcastle for the Big Arts. Edinburgh had two orchestras and an opera company – that was vital at the time. And I’ve never regretted a moment.

Still, I wonder what being in such a beautiful place as Durham for so long does to your psyche. Certainly I’d never thought of it as more like an Italian walled city, and the cathedral towers as not so much grim-grey – Walter Scott’s description of the 'mixed and massive piles', as inscribed on the Prebends Bridge – as the sandstone colour they really are.


The enchanting walk along the forested riverside – all a perfect nature reserve thanks to cathedral ownership – allows 280 degree perspectives around the building. Actually the towers are later than I thought, 1500s rather than Norman like the bulk of the building – but all is so massy in intent that it seems pure Romanesque in feeling if not in reality.


And so we moved on past the west façade of the cathedral, accompanied by autumnal rowers


And dazzling beechscapes.


I couldn’t resist a peek into the church on the left bank, as it were, in the district named Elvet or ‘Swan Island’. St Oswald’s was opened for us by a nice chap from Leeds up to earn a bit of cash from festival stewarding – ‘the organeer’s in there practising, I’m sure he won’t mind if I let you in’. The church is most interesting, perhaps, for its dedication to the Northumbrian king who founded Lindisfarne. He ties in with two other local saintly worthies – Hild of Whitby, whose day it happened to be, and Aidan – and his head was brought to Durham in the coffin of the man who made Durham rich through pilgrimage obeisance, St Cuthbert. Ford Madox Brown’s window executed by William Morris & Co. shows Oswald felled at the Battle of Maserfield.


Other than that, the church seems to have been much loved and tended since the mid-19th century, when vicar Dr Dykes of hymn-composing fame imbued it with the spirit of the Oxford Movement. I liked the feel of the place, and especially the late 16th century chancel screen and the 15th century poppyhead bench ends in the choir.


Then round the head of the Wear’s horseshoe and across the Arup bridge which had looked so wonderful by night with Canadian artist Peter Lewis’s Splash tumbling from it (another photo by Matthew Andrews, much better than mine).


Heading up to the porch, we met Artichoke press officer Anna Vinegrad, who said how amazed she was by the daylight appearance of Cedric Le Borgne’s Voyageurs lining the South Bailey that winds down to the river around the cathedral. So we had to take a look, and she was right. By day


and by night (didn’t get to see these in the dress rehearsal, alas).


I especially liked the wraith-like figure on a garden wall, barely decipherable in the autumn morning sunshine (though I put up a clearer image from the side in the TAD piece).


Equal to the splendour of the Lindisfarne Gospel projection on to the cathedral in the nocturnal Crown of Light by Ross Ashton with its dynamic soundscape from John Del’Nero and Robert Ziegler were the rising and falling of medieval glass


though little remains inside the cathedral itself. What there is has been fabulously arranged in the Galilee (Lady) Chapel at the west end where the Venerable Bede is buried, my favourite part of the building with its imposing chevroned arches.


Alas, no guide tells us what’s what in the glass, but could this be Oswald?


And the trumpeting angel is splendid


along with the surreal arrangement of fragments.


By day, the suspended miners’ vests of Compagnie Carabosse’s installation detracted a bit from the massy space; nothing can outshine those massive incised pillars.


But the ball of fire in the central tower was a good addition


and by night, you can see how magical the illuminations looked both in the nave


and in the cloister.


I must say the cathedral’s been a bit tackified by most of its own more recent art; by all means inject a living contemporary presence, but make sure the craftsmanship is at least partly equal to what’s gone before. Anyway, the evensong I attended – choir-wise disappointing after recent Hereford and Christ Church Oxford experiences, for an all-girl treble section just doesn’t make the same sound – incorporated thanksgiving for the Cathedral Broderers, who were all trooping off to the Gothic Nine Chapels behind the altar for the extension of the service. I discreetly slipped out at that point, but I’d be happy to spend more hours in and around this most extraordinary of edifices.


Nightshots of LUMIERE all copyright Matthew Andrews except the last, from the plinth of Jacques Rival's tongue-in-cheek snow-shaker ridiculing of the pompous Marquess of Londonderry statue in the Market Square; that and the rest of the photos (interior ones all sans flash, please note) are mine.

Supping in Wonderland

Dining with Alice was the focal point and original purpose of our two days in Norwich, though it was bracing to crack the nut of at least a handful of city churches, and no doubt Moroccan-tumbler-team-in-artshow Chouf Ouchouf, which we caught in the Theatre Royal, outstripped the dramatic side of the Wonderland experience.

Yet strange and disconcerting, at times, Alice certainly was, and impeccably handled as a logistical nightmare of what has now become hugely popular as 'site-specific theatre'. Let's not forget that the Bubble company got there first, and my benchmark for wanders around old houses and through park and woodland with a purpose remains their Chiswick House Midsummer Night's Dream (Through the Looking Glass in Greenwich Park running it a very close second). Dining with Alice's motley crew of Carroll characters and their random knockabout couldn't compare, but maybe that's not the point; this was chaotic and without the logic a more prominent Alice would have brought to it, and no doubt deliberately so. In terms of the 'script', I can only agree with the shrewd theatre critic who turned up on one of our tables, Susannah Clapp, and her comment in yesterday's Observer that 'it is too light on incident and too leisurely always to capture the disconcerting jostle, the eerie fright of Carroll's nonsensicality.'

But I haven't explained the setting or the concept. We were bussed out from Norwich in the company of Mad Hattered youth - some, perhaps, encouraged by the sellout Punchdrunk experience - to Elsing Hall, which as you can see from the above is a (much-restored) 15th century house in the country. The show is the enterprising Artichoke's resurrection of a 1999 hit at the Salisbury Festival, presumably much re-adapted.

I'm told I should put in a *spoiler alert* here for anyone who's going and wants to be surprised. If not, read on. Next two photos, more people-friendly than mine, are by Sophie Laslert for Artichoke.


You walk through a formal garden with a darting Alice and a wood with amplified sounds of peacocks, crows and unidentifiable birds to a marquee where you quaff gin and ginger ale. The show begins. The actors spout some slightly alienating, half-Carrollesque nonsense. It's the melee of the two Alice books I always get a bit hot-under-the-collar about. But no matter; the tale isn't being told and Alice only pops up at a late stage to protest at her own inventions. I would have liked flamingoes and hedgehogs on the croquet lawn, though, Humpty Dumpty perched on the wall above the herbaceous border and perhaps a helium-filled Cheshire Cat. But that's my production, not theirs.


A gong sounds. 56 waiters in turbans of diverse colours come to lead the 240-odd guests to separate tables. That's right: one per person. It's like the Mad Tea Party - so many places laid, the visible guest at one end - except for the fact that you're completely on your own.


Solo musicians serenade you with assorted Victoriana: a viola here, a cornet there, sometimes counterpointing in Ivesian manner. The nine characters dart around, declaiming their little set-pieces. You're not really supposed to interact or comment; largely they ignore you, though when I asked the Duchess if I'd change shape on drinking the little phial, she managed 'I do hope so!' before bustling off.


The mock turtle soup, not what the Victorians made of it which was a calf's head dressed with condiments and sauces to resemble a turtle (which is why the creature in Tenniel's illustration is a combination of the two), consists of 'potatoes, olive oil, onion, watercress, spinach, vegetable stock, lemon juice, perfumed quail's egg [which I took up expecting to bite into a radish], basil seeds, nettles'. It's accompanied by the 'drink me' phial of quinine and bitter orange.


Gong sounds again. Your waiter leads you to another table under the trees (this one I liked, overlooking a grand old oak, though truth to tell it was cold and damp, Norfolk having that afternoon experienced its first downpour in months. But beautiful skies atoned). I think the idea was that the table should be for two, but I was still alone, which I didn't mind at all.

Third gong. This time we reached the walled garden, and our nearest and dearest fellow guests. Cue one more Laslert/Artichoke shot of the White Queen (Tamsin Dalley) accosting diners.


There I found J and our Norwich friend Kate sitting ready to share an excellent Holkham Pie. This is where Susannah joined us. Queen of Hearts and White Rabbit had an unseemly spat before us.


Fourth gong. Now the real magic began: lights everywhere as darkness fell, not least across the waters of the moat as we all processed to tables on a pontoon. There we watched a masque or divertissement of the Alice folk played out on a stage in front of the house.

Don't you like my nippled violet-and-elderflower Jellateena?


Surely that's the piece de (non) resistance of Bompas and Parr's food experience. And it was just as well we were all so chilled in both senses now, because the entertainment went on at purposefully purposeless length. We all sang 'Come into the garden, Maud'; a (deliberately?) banal setting of the spider's invitation to the fly went on for ever; we liked the White Rabbit's idea of a good trick, pulling a man out of a hat; and a raucous screechfest was terminated by the five Alices, who like the waiters had not perhaps played as big a part as the flagging up of local involvement might have suggested. Here's a final Laslert/Artichoke shot of Queen of Hearts (Di Sherlock) and Duchess (Heather Keen) in full vocal flight.


And so back on the bus after a chat in the field with Susannah and Lyn Gardner, who saw the original back in 1999 and thought some intimacy, but not the splendour, had been lost on this occasion. As for me, well, I gave up on the expected telling link between book and drama, and eventually succumbed to the weirdness of it all. One fact will surely be true for all: the experience will stick in the mind long after more shapely and better-performed theatre has vanished from the memory.