The Marlowe Papers on Stage – Jamie Martin as Kit

The Marlowe Papers on Stage – Jamie Martin as Kit

Ros Barber
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Jamie Martin as Kit MarloweThe first run of the Marlowe Papers opens in Brighton on Tuesday 26th January 2016. It’s on for just five days, with the final night on Saturday 30th. The director is my friend Nicola Haydn, who helped me adapt this one-man version from the book. The adaptation was no mean feat: the audio book version (which is unfortunately read very badly and which I cannot recommend) was 9 and a half hours and the play – with original music by by Fiddes Smith – runs to 110 minutes (plus interval). I worked closely with the actor and director to hone the script for performance am loving the results. There something really wonderful about your characters being brought to life in front of your eyes.

Jamie Martin (who was most recently in the Young Vic’s very successful World Factory) is tremendous, both as Kit and as numerous other characters. I hope many people who loved the book will get a chance to see it and well as many people who haven’t read the book at all. We plan to take the play to London, and perhaps tour it across the UK, even beyond if that proves to be feasible.  Come and see if you possibly can!

***

Update: 5-Star review: “It is impossible to take your eyes off Martin’s performance – which is a masterclass in how to perform a one-man piece.” – Brighton Argus, 29 Jan 2016.

Roundup of the Year 2015

Roundup of the Year 2015

Ros Barber
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The Year In Brief

devotion novel ros barber
2015: the year of DEVOTION.

If you have limited time to spend with me, or a short attention span, here is my year in terms of firsts. Because firsts always mean you are moving forward (unless they are shit ones… no, even if they are shit ones).

First…

  • appearance on Woman’s Hour
  • review in the Times Literary Supplement
  • poem officially on an ‘A’ Level English Literature syllabus
  • drive of an MX5
  • flappy-paddle gear experience
  • trip to California as an adult
  • trip to Ashland, Oregon
  • trip to Singapore
  • national TV appearance (UK)
  • book as editor
  • Business Class flights
  • stage play in production
  • Man Booker Prize party
  • dinner with a Booker winner.

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Why the ‘new Shakespeare portrait’ is NOT Shakespeare

Ros Barber
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shakespeare nonsenseA great deal of fuss has been made about a supposed ‘newly discovered portrait of Shakespeare’ found on the title page engraving of sixteenth century botany book.  The editor of UK lifestyle magazine Country Life, in which the discovery was announced, declared it “The Literary Discovery of the Century”.  The story was dutifully picked up by BBC News Online and such is the clout of the BBC that by yesterday all major news outlets were excitedly repeating the story, leading it to trend across social media.  The botanist who made the discovery quickly morphed into a ‘historian’ and NBC news even multiplied him into ‘historians’ to add a little weight to the theory. 

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Real Human Beings: Lindsey

Ros Barber
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On Saturday I met a woman called Lindsey. Until very recently she was living in Hurstpierpoint, a genteel Sussex village. She has a job, but she currently can’t work for reasons that will become obvious. Her GP, she told me, was kind enough to sign her off with ‘stress’. Why? Because her husband assaulted her so badly that he knocked out her two front teeth. She went to a women’s refuge where she lived for 2 weeks but then had to leave – they have a lot of assaulted women, limited funding, limited rooms in their hostel. She went to the council but according to their criteria she has made herself “intentionally homeless” because there is a perfectly good house she could live in, her marital home, so they can do nothing at all for her for a fortnight. That’s the rule, apparently. Her husband was incarcerated immediately after the assault but is now out on bail. She is, understandably, too afraid to live in this home from which she has made herself “intentionally homeless”.

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Book Stoppers: What’s the Point?

Ros Barber
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what is the point of writing a bookI wonder how many books have never seen the light of day, because the potential author of that book kept thinking “What’s the point?”  Whether you secretly think it (perhaps so secretly that you keep it from yourself) or whether you find yourself sighing out loud when you sit down to write, “What’s the point?” is a serious book-stopper.

Lots of writers — both aspiring and published — suffer from ‘What’s the point?”  Anyone who has ever seriously thought about writing a book has considered the huge number of books out there.  Books in bookshops. Books in charity shops. Manuscripts of books piled high on the desks of agents and editors. All the the books that aren’t published. All the books that are published.  All the books that don’t get reviewed or win prizes.  All the books that sink without trace.

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On Not Writing

Ros Barber
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abandoned_typewriterHe wrote with all the inventive precision of a young Vladimir Nabokov. Every piece he submitted was thrilling to read. As his tutors, we discussed our most promising student over after-work drinks; wondered if we might be named in his acknowledgements, looked forward to being invited to his book launch.

Shift to the present tense. Six years after he completed the University’s Creative Writing programme as one of our ‘tipped for the top’ authors, I bump into Martin.

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Writing Style

Ros Barber
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writing styleOn April 14th I’m talking about writing style at Senate House in London, as part of the Open University’s Contemporary Cultures of Writing series.  I’m hoping to attend at least one of the other events in the series, too.  I’ll be talking about the difference between academic and creative writing styles.

I switch between the two all the time; I’ve just finished writing a 10,000 word article on Shakespeare and Warwickshire dialect, for example, in the same week that I was proofing my forthcoming novel, Devotion.  Writing style is an interesting beast.  I’m curious to know how similar (and how different) people will find the prose of Devotion from the poetry of The Marlowe Papers, for example.  I know that years of poetic compression have affected my prose, and my love of imagery is impossible to bury.  Creative style isn’t (for me, at least) conscious.  It is just how I have come to write, after thousands of hours of practice and thousands more hours of reading.  It’s what pleases my inner ear.  My academic style was learned far more recently; (what I consider to be) good academic writing styles have a lot more in common with each other than creative writing styles.  Academic style is a uniform I put on: practical, sober, persuasive.  My creative style I’m not even sure I could categorise, but it involves changes of clothes (within a recognisable palette of cut and colour) and occasional flashes of nudity.

How does creative writing style develop?  What does one’s writing style say about you as a person? How much is it about being the best (edited, revised, perfected) version of yourself?  These are things worth pondering.

Writing Retreat in France – Summer 2015

Ros Barber
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writing retreat

Writers: Escape to France!

Writing Retreat 28th June – 3rd July 2015

Come and spend a week with me in the Dordogne this summer on a fully-catered writing retreat. Each morning there will be workshops focusing on some of the key elements of good fiction.  Then we break for lunch, usually by the pool if the weather is good.  The afternoons are all yours: see me for an in-depth discussion of your works, take the chance to do some writing, swim in the private pool, go for a walk in the extensive grounds (with woodland and lakes), explore local villages, or a combination of all of the above.  No need to do any cooking; just kick back, relax, and get inspired. A real chance to focus on you and your writing for the week.

Every participant will get two one-to-one tutorials, with in-depth feedback on a short story, or a chapter of your novel-in-progress, or any other piece of writing you’d like to share.  Plus of course there’s a chance to chat over lunch and dinner, about writing, getting published, or anything else you’d like to talk to me about!

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The Best Present

Ros Barber
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Like many writers, I have used my family as material more often than they probably would have liked. For me, poetry began as a way to find out who I was, and why I was who I was, and to process difficult experiences. Through our families we discover and construct who we are, both in opposition and through osmosis. Thus, in learning who I was, I wrote repeatedly about my family.

During that process – which now feels complete – I avoided, on the whole, subjecting my children to the writer’s lens. My family of origin felt like fair game, although I recognise that on a logical level this is nonsense. But my offspring? Quite frankly it is suffering enough to be born to a writer without becoming the focus of your parent’s pen. All the time you are growing up, a writing parent is obsessively interested in something other than you. They have these other text-based offspring growing in their heads and hearts, taking up spaces that are rightfully yours. A writing parent has no right to embarrass their child publicly, beyond the standard parental actions of singing loudly, dancing badly and the like.

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