June 30, 2011
A very beautifully put-together programme of poems, journal extracts, letters, newspaper articles and speeches – it was not so much a poetry-reading as a performance, with boys dressed as WWI soldiers in uniform with guns, and taking the parts of The New Recruit, the Sergeant, General Shute, Siegfried Sassoon and Soldiers.
The selection of poems was broad and excellent, the performance of them very good indeed and in some cases outstanding. I’d like to emphasize the excellence of these good points, because the performers had to struggle against a very indifferent acoustic at the venue, the Church of St John the Evangelist on the Iffley Road. At the close of the performance a solo trumpet played the Last Post, beautifully. The church took the sound, amplified it, made it soar up into the shadowy spaces of the roof and drop down somewhere by the altar a second or so later. Perfect, in other words. Sadly, this was not the case with what the church did to human voices. Mr Eve, who was so warmly congratulated by the boys for his genius in putting together the performance, was unintelligible from halfway up the aisle, and though the performers themselves tried hard to enunciate clearly, they had to fight against a combination of boom and sussuration that made it quite hard for the audience sometimes to hear their lines.
A candle-lit poetry reading sounds excellent in theory. It works very nicely for musical concerts. But where you have gone to great lengths to have your performers act out their lines and dress the part, it might be a good idea for the audience to be able to see them. Candles at floor level were very pretty but not able to penetrate the gloom of the building at 9.30 in the evening. Personally I would have liked very much to see the faces of the boys as they spoke their lines so movingly.
But otherwise, a moving and thought-provoking evening event.
The selection of poems was broad and excellent, the performance of them very good indeed and in some cases outstanding. I’d like to emphasize the excellence of these good points, because the performers had to struggle against a very indifferent acoustic at the venue, the Church of St John the Evangelist on the Iffley Road. At the close of the performance a solo trumpet played the Last Post, beautifully. The church took the sound, amplified it, made it soar up into the shadowy spaces of the roof and drop down somewhere by the altar a second or so later. Perfect, in other words. Sadly, this was not the case with what the church did to human voices. Mr Eve, who was so warmly congratulated by the boys for his genius in putting together the performance, was unintelligible from halfway up the aisle, and though the performers themselves tried hard to enunciate clearly, they had to fight against a combination of boom and sussuration that made it quite hard for the audience sometimes to hear their lines.
A candle-lit poetry reading sounds excellent in theory. It works very nicely for musical concerts. But where you have gone to great lengths to have your performers act out their lines and dress the part, it might be a good idea for the audience to be able to see them. Candles at floor level were very pretty but not able to penetrate the gloom of the building at 9.30 in the evening. Personally I would have liked very much to see the faces of the boys as they spoke their lines so movingly.
But otherwise, a moving and thought-provoking evening event.