LAURIE LEE, REMEMBERED AND REMEMBERING
A nine-part orchestra, gilded harp and flute at its apex; behind, monochrome photos of a century past show rural Gloucestershire, then the plains and forbidding splendours of Spain in its time of suffering. Downstage two lecterns, an old man and a young one, offer brief vivid memory then return to sit quiet for music. Both are the same man, Laurie Lee: his story is of childhood, youth and wonderment through the eyes and soul of a born poet
This is a beauriful thing, selling out fast but made to tour, so check the link carefully below. It has a well- thought-through simplicity, honest words and honest sentiment served wkth delicacy by musical choices. The Orchestra of the Swan,under David lePage, deals mostly in concerts but storytelling is its forte, and in this labour of love for Laurie Lee’s work and life Judy Reaves and Deirdre Shields offer short excerpts of the writer’s work with the orchestra playing between. As if , unpretentiously, each time to make space for meditation on what we have heard. It asks us to stand alongside him all the way from rustic infancy , watching close to the ground the teemings of nature, to teenage wanderings with a fiddle and the ideals and terrors of the Spanish civil war.
The speakers are Anton Lesser reminiscent in age, Charlie Hamblett the youg man’s voice. They are not overdramatic but each at times briefly becomes some third: a mother or sister, officer or deserter, someone insome moment fixed in memory, pieces in the jigsaw of his growing up, from a baby of the family bundled into his school coat by big brisk sisters to the teenage wanderer with tent and guitar, falling in love with Spain, fighting in the 1930s International Brigade.
We breathe it with him, poet and blundering, hoping, half-understanding volunteer in the fight against fascism. To see it in Wilton’s, just off Cable Street and once the dressing-station for casualties in our own domestic fight, is sobering. And fresh from news bulletins advising Britons to flee Lebanon, there was an extra frisson at the passage where young Laurie – busking, careless, unaware of the unrest but suddenly evacuated as a British subject to safety and home on a Royal Navy destroyer. But of course he goes back to help, unskilled at life and war, is imprisoned as a spy then released into hapless soldiering and invalided home.
It is extraordinary how complete Lee’s story and character feels, in such short moments. But each is amplified by the music between: deepening feeling without obviousness (though goodness, Mark Ashford’s Spanish guitar solos, falling into rapt silence, unforgettably evoke the land). The orchestral arrangements by lePage – from Vaughan Williams to Rossini and Britten – are careful, fitting every moment, beautiful use made of the flute in particular. The rendering of the Internationale, a lonely solo gathering every other voice around it, is thrilling. Altogether, it’s a lovely thing. If you can catch it, do.
Orchestraoftheswan.org. rating 5
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