Category Archives: Arts

Arts, Broadcasting, Culture, Opera, Theatre

Fires of the Moon

MUSICAL-THEATRE

– Fires of the Moon is powerfully imagined and atmospherically shot Credit: Channel 4

This powerfully imagined and atmospheric new piece of music-theatre, with an outstanding cast of Welsh singers, is a rare creation that blends film, opera, and drama. A screening such as this rarely makes it to television.

Originally an opera commissioned by OPRA Cymru, first shown as a film at the Edinburgh Film Festival last summer, Fires of the Moon (Channel 4/S4C) is not an example of an opera setting a book, but rather a free imagining of some scenes from Un Nos Ola Leuad (1961) by Caradog Prichard – a modern classic that has become familiar in translation as One Moonlit Night. It was a novel initially criticised for its unrelenting view of Welsh life but became accepted as a realistic reflection of a changing world.

Haunting and elegiac, the visual style conjures up the bleak landscapes of Wales – slate quarries, gloomy pubs, shining lakes and distant hills, with the evocative steam engine of Blaenau Ffestiniog puffing through. In the 1950s, a son Hogyn returns by train to visit his mother who, a generation ago, was confined to an asylum. But why? The story unravels from a youthful romance between Hogyn and Jini, replayed in a cinema that he watches with Jini as the usherette, and the tale pulls no punches in its depiction of an unforgiving society.

Commencing with what sounds like a deliberate homage to the music of Elgar’s The Dream of Gerontius (and even a nod to his unfinished Third Symphony), the beautifully judged score by Gareth Glyn nourishes the narrative. Most will not know how well the Welsh text is reflected musically, except that its subtitled vocal lines sit perfectly within the framework that Glyn creates in his idiom, at once romantic and eclectic, that draws on everything from film music to Britten and Berg.

The orchestral playing by the Welsh National Opera Orchestra is vividly textured and strongly audible under conductor Iwan Teifion Davies (who is also the co-librettist with Patrick Young). The scenario by Marc Evans, though arguably lacking in contrast, allows for a choral number in the pub, a tense tea-time scene, and an intricate quartet in the car on the way to the gloom of the asylum.

Tenor Huw Ynyr is outstanding as the grown Hogyn, as is Dylan Jones as Hogyn the child, writing the story on the old typewriter as well as living it. Annes Elwy is Jini; the tormented figure of Mam is powerfully drawn by soprano Elin Pritchard. The attack by her brother and the scene of her awkward removal to the Denbigh Asylum are the most painful parts of the story.

Chris Forster directs; the black-and-white cinematography under Ben Chads is consistently excellent, and the synchronisation of the voices – always the trickiest aspect of opera with the voices shot separately for film – is pretty good.

This is an absorbing piece of music-theatre which demonstrates the distinctiveness and best of Welsh music and film-making. It also offers a way forward for transforming the medium of staged opera into compelling film.

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Arts, Books, Education, Literature, Poetry

Book Review: Look Closer

NATIONAL YEAR OF READING

Intro: Published in late 2025, ‘Look Closer: How To Get More Out of Reading’ is the latest work by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, a Professor of English Literature at Oxford.

Part memoir, part masterclass, the book is a “love letter” to the act of reading. The author argues that in our age of digital distraction and short-form content, the art of “slow reading” is more vital than ever

In the era of the smart phone and other devices, reading has become a dying art. In 2024, 40 per cent of Britons did not read or listen to a book. More than a third of adults are known to have given up reading for pleasure. In this digital age, it’s easy to see why. Small, compact devices have changed how we read: skimming rather than lingering over language, and the need to look for a quick fix of information.

Today, for too many of us, reading books has become a means to an end. We need to look no further than the armada of self-help authors promising to help you do it more quickly and, by implication, to read more overall. “Read more than 300 pages in one hour,” pledges one. “Speed Reading Faster: Maximise Your Success in Business and Study,” urges another.

The advice from literary artists is simple: ditch the idea that reading faster is better. Various movements have emerged in recent years, trying to help us get more out of life by taking it at a less frenetic pace: slow food, slow work, slow travel, even slow sex. “Slow reading” may sound rather different – the sort of thing that might evoke pity or scorn – but it can help break the bad habits into which many of us have fallen.

As the National Year of Reading is now upon us, there are certain things we can do to reverse the drift.

. Look closer at familiar classics

Some literary works have become so familiar that our eyes slide over them without stopping. But if we slow down our reading, even these works retain the power to surprise us – and to make us look at the world around us in a new and refreshing way.

Take the most famous speech in Hamlet:

“To be, or not to be, that is the question: Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And by opposing end them?”

Hamlet’s famous question isn’t carried only by what he says, but by how he says it. That’s because his speech is written in lines of blank verse, 10 syllables long, that repeatedly topple over with an extra 11th syllable – “To be or not to be, that is the quest… ion” – then start again. Over and over, it’s synonymous with someone peering over the edge of a cliff before drawing back. Listening carefully to Hamlet allows us to see life (and death) from his perspective: the rhythm represents the way he’s thinking.

. Linger on little details

Another approach is to look again at a poem that’s often reprinted or published in anthologies – appropriate, since “anthology” literally means “a collection of flowers”:

I wandered lonely as a Cloud

That floats on high o’er Vales and Hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd

A host of dancing Daffodils;

Along the Lake, beneath the trees,

Ten thousand dancing in the breeze.

Wordworth’s ambition was to awaken a more imaginative response to homely or neglected corners of the world, and that aim is captured in the smallest details of his verse. The present participle “dancing” shows how something that happened in the past is still happening in his memory. His line breaks work like double-takes, as he searches for exactly the right word for what he saw: “a crowd / A host”.

Finally, his choice of “host” reveals how he detects a divine presence hovering in the background (angels as the heavenly host), while also suggesting that the sight of all these laughing daffodils has somehow made him feel more at home in the world. It’s another piece of writing that doesn’t give us a set of finished thoughts, but instead introduces us to a different way of thinking.

. Embrace the suggestive and opaque

Some literary works are so brief they function as highly effective training aids for this much more measured approach. For example, there’s a famous short story, often erroneously attributed to Ernest Hemingway, that reads: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” That’s it – a tragedy in just six words. Written more than 30 years ago, it is still being thought about today.

Like all the best pieces of writing, it works like an imaginary dumdum bullet: it enters our minds and keeps on expanding. (If you want to discover who the original author was, you’re likely to be disappointed. Versions of this story date back to the early 1900s, and a classified ad reading “For sale: baby carriage, never used” can be found in an American newspaper published in 1883.)

. Ask yourself – or Sherlock – what a good reader is

Some books even contain helpful clues about how to read them. A character such as Sherlock Holmes is a model reader, for instance, because he notices every detail and shows how they combine into a meaningful whole. He sifts life for significance. Take The Boscombe Valley Mystery: Holmes assembles a whole series of tiny clues, including a bit of cigar ash that he establishes is from an Indian cigar, and a boot print that he deduces was made by someone with a limp.

At one point he says to Watson, “you see…”, and although it’s only a passing remark, it also works like a miniature version of the whole story. A literary detective makes us “see”, in the sense of showing us how to use our eyes more carefully, and then makes us “see” in the sense of understanding more about what we’ve just been reading (“Oh, I see!”).

In his 1881 book Daybreak (Morgenröthe), Friedrich Nietzsche explained that he was “a teacher of slow reading”. In an age of work, he wrote, “that is, of haste, of unseemly and immoderate hurry-scurry, which is so eager to ‘get things done’”, what was needed was an approach that would teach people “how to read well, that is, slowly, profoundly, attentively, prudently, with inner thoughts, with the mental doors ajar”.

Nearly half a century and a half later, slow reading is something we need more than ever. We need to break the habit of reading just for information, on the page as well as online; we must get out of that horrid, uneven rhythm of scanning and skipping.

For when we pick up a book, we aren’t only trying to lose ourselves in it. If we’re willing to look closely enough, and to leave our mental doors ajar, we might find ourselves there.

– Look Closer by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst is published by Fern Press, 352pp

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Arts, Christianity, Culture, Poetry

TS Eliot’s ‘Ash Wednesday’

ASH WEDNESDAY

Intro: The prayers of Lent are a key guide to Eliot’s obscure sequence of poetry

Sometimes, people read TS Eliot’s sequence of six poems, Ash Wednesday, in the hope of better understanding this first day of Lent in the Western Christian Church. The poem is meditative and pivotal which marks his conversion to Anglicanism, and chronicles a journey from spiritual despair to tentative faith. 

Structured around the Lenten season, the poem moves through themes of repentance, purgation, and the desire for divine, transcendent love amidst the emptiness of modern life.

Knowledge of Ash Wednesday – and the rest of Lent – which falls on February 18 this year, is a prerequisite to understand Eliot’s poetry.

Ash Wednesday is obscure. It begins: “Because I do not hope to turn again.” This is a quotation from Guido Cavalcanti, who died in 1300, a friend of Dante’s. How the reader is meant to know that, I’m not sure.

The words had been translated by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in 1861, as: “Because I think not ever to return”, a reference to Cavalcanti’s exile from Tuscany. But Eliot knew that “to turn again” is an aspect of repentance, as the Authorised Version of the Bible in 1611 translated the Greek word metanoia, “change of mind”, found in the New Testament. The Ash Wednesday Epistle, from the prophet Joel, begins: “Turn ye even to me, saith the Lord, with all your heart.”

In St Mark’s Gospel, the first words of Jesus are: “Repent and believe the gospel,” and those are now one of the forms of words to accompany the imposition of ashes on Ash Wednesday. But in Eliot’s day the Latin formula was: Memento, homo, quia pulvis es, et in pulverem reverteris, “Remember man, that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” In his poem, Eliot, with his Cavalcanti quotation, picks up both the return to dust and the turning again or repentance.

In Ash Wednesday, Eliot incorporates unsignalled quotations from church prayers. In a letter to Bishop George Bell of Chichester in 1930, Eliot addressed Ash Wednesday’s obscurity: “Most of the people who have written to say that they couldn’t understand it seemed to be uncertain at any point whether I was referring to the Old Testament or to the New; and the reviewers took refuge in the comprehensive word “liturgy”. It appears that almost none of the people who review books have ever read any of these things!”

In Part I of Ash Wednesday Eliot quotes the popular Catholic prayer, the Hail Mary.

In Part II he uses the question “Shall these bones live?” to make reference to the extraordinarily vivid passage in Ezekiel 37, where dry bones are reclothed in flesh and live.

In Part III, on the stairs, he ends with, “Lord, I am not worthy”, a prayer in the Mass before Communion: “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof; but only say the word, and my soul shall be healed,” an echo of the Centurion’s words in Matthew 8:8.

In Part IV, “And after this our exile” is taken from a medieval prayer, the Salve Regina, where Mary is asked to “Show unto us the blessed fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”

In Part V, “O my people, what I have I done unto thee” is taken from the Improperia or Reproaches in the Good Friday liturgy, based on the prophet Micah (5:3).

In Part VI, the last line, “And let my cry come unto Thee” is also in the Good Friday liturgy, from Psalm 102 (101 in the Vulgate) – in Latin: Domine, exaudi orationem meam, et clamor meus ad te veniat.

Before that, Eliot puts a line, “Suffer me not to be separated”, which is from the 14th-century prayer Anima Christi (taken up by Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits). The context is: “Within Thy wounds hide me /Suffer me not to be separated from Thee.”

All these would have been very familiar to a practising Roman Catholic, less so to most Anglicans and utterly unfamiliar to the leading critics of the 1930s.

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