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Oliver Cross: Barding up the right tree
This week's Star of the Week, which is usually either Vince Cable or Dolly Parton, is a tree, name unknown.
The tree, species unknown as well because I never paid attention during my primary school nature walks – which have probably been banned now anyway – stands, or rather spreads, in Dagmar Wood.
This, as I've said before, is a mysterious space – probably more accurately described as an interruption – in the generally built-up, higgledy-piggledy Hyde Park (or possible North Headingley, or Neverland) area of Leeds. And, just as an aside, isn't typing higgledy-piggledy a rather good way of cheering yourself up?
The wood is where the Theatre of the Dales company try out their productions before taking them to various venues mostly in (well I never!) the Dales.
The last of their productions I saw was a free preview of The Tempest, of which I wrote, not being cut out for theatre criticism, that the only way it could have been improved would have been for the company to perform A Midsummer Night's Dream (which is set in a wood, stupid) and to pay me for watching it.
I didn't get paid for watching their new production in Dagmar Wood this weekend – a captivating performance of the aforementioned A Midsummer Night's Dream – but I did get a free programme, which put me 1.50 ahead of credit-crunch penury, although I think they should have charged more – which would have made it a better bargain for me – because the programme was thoughtful, well-designed and informative and you don't see that very often, even in subsidised theatres where one advert-stuffed, gimmicky programme can cost the same as a ludicrously over-priced gin and tonic.
Cissy
Which wasn't my point. My point was the tree. Usually Dagmar Wood productions are staged in a grassy central area which can only be called a glade, even though calling it that makes you sound like a sissy.
A Midsummer Night's Dream was mainly staged on a bank dominated by an extraordinary, thick-trunked, ancient-looking tree around which, and sometimes actually in it, the characters – fairies, aristocrats, artisans and weirdoes – disported (another unavoidable sissy word) themselves.
And when the stage directions compelled some of the characters to exit into the woods, which was often, the actors didn't have to negotiate themselves past curtains or polystyrene; they just vanished into the very thick (except for the performing areas) undergrowth. It was about as magic as you can get if, like me and all sensible people, you don't believe in magic but can't help yearning for it.
And I should get back to the tree because I imagine all the cast of A Midsummer Night's Dream are slightly bridling at the suggestion that the tree, which didn't even have to learn its lines, was the star of the show. All I can say in recompense is that the mostly-young actors were all '"staggeringly brilliant" – Yorkshire Evening Post', which is hardly anything of a lie and which they can put on their CVs.
But really it's hard to compete with a tree so ancient and full of character that you could watch it all day long (well, for tens of minutes) without getting bored.
Once, in Gambia, West Africa, I saw one of those gigantic, majestic baobab trees, with roots spread around like medieval architectural features you can't remember the names of, and the taxi driver said dismissively that, 'Would you believe it? People used to worship this thing'.
Of course they did. My view is that a baobab tree looks a much more worthy object of worship than a picture of Jehovah with a beard.
Remaining performances of A Midsummer Night's Dream are at Sledmere House, near Driffield tonight (tel 01377 236637) and Jervaulx Abbey on Sunday (0113 2740461).
Uke power
MY friend Dibbs is off to a ukulele festival at an unpronounceable hamlet just outside the obscure town of Woodbridge, near Ipswich, Suffolk.
And of course it will be packed with people from all over the world because ukulele playing is a rapidly-growing international phenomenon, like swine flu.
Last weekend, for example, a charming female duo at the Chemic Tavern ladies-only open mic night in Woodhouse, Leeds, delighted everybody with a version of Heard it Through the Grapevine, which you wouldn't have thought could be performed by ukulele, it being, in the Marvin Gaye version at least, such a full-on, big production number.
However, stripped of all that, it reveals itself as a slightly paranoid, whiney moan-song, country and western rather than Motown in sentiment and quite suited to a scaled-down ukulele performance.
As I think would be the Rogers and Hart classic, I Wish I Were in Love Again, which I mention only as an excuse to quote its most potent verse:
When love congeals it soon reveals
The faint aroma of performing seals
The double-crossing of a pair of heels
I wish I were in love again
The trouble is that the only person who can sing the song properly is Frank Sinatra, who would have looked silly with a ukulele.
They can't see the trees for the carbon...
And talking of trees (which we were somewhere), the Leeds New Generation Transport scheme, which mostly means trolley-buses, involves widening Woodhouse Lane where it passes through Woodhouse Moor. The options are to knock down the old stone pavement and an avenue of trees on the eastern side of the road and reconstruct them further out or to build a trolley-bus lane through the part of Woodhouse Moor known as Monument Moor.
Either of which will generate so many letters to the YEP that I had better get in first with the observation that replanting trees doesn't really compensate for pulling them down because it takes decades to recover the look and feel of old trees.
This is why I distrust the modern 'green' fashion for treating trees mainly as interchangable carbon trading units, so that if one comes down another has to be planted nearby. If there's anything worth getting mushily sentimental about, it's trees
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 26 May 2012
Today
Sunny
Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
Wind direction: East
Tomorrow
Sunny
Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
Wind Speed: 13 mph
Wind direction: East
