So concludes a recent reflective blog entry by Samuel Cooper, a research student at the University of Sussex, who lectured in February on ‘The Situationist International and its British Fallout’ at Marsh Barn just outside Bridport.

Situationism at Marsh Barn, Bridport: "Is there a fault with reality?"

Mr Cooper was, in short, giving one of the Lectures About Everything organised by Horatio and Ioana Morpurgo.

You can see why a D Phil student obsessed with ‘a forgotten period of avant-garde activity’ (British Situationism since 1967) would regard Marsh Barn as a surprising place to encounter people who were not only enthused by his overview of such subjects as the Angry Brigade and Punk but had themselves been engaged in ‘proximate activity’ (a 68er, a workplace activist, a wobbly, a trade unionist,  a road protestor and others). But that’s  the appeal of this part of the world…

A ‘wobbly’, incidentally, is Mr Cooper’s term: I have got no idea what it means. If I’d been there, I would have asked him, but I wasn’t and I’m sorry I missed it.

In return for Mr Cooper explaining to me what on earth a ‘wobbly’ is, I could have told him that the ex-Special Branch man who cracked the Angry Brigade now lives in Bridport. As I was saying, it is that kind of place…    

Anyway, if you too missed the lecture, and you want to read Mr Cooper’s notes, you can click on this link here; or if you want read his reflections on his Marsh Barn experience, you can click on this link here.

*Situationism began in 1958 as a radical French philosophy heavily influenced by Dadaism and Surrealism. It sought a “REVOLUTION of everyday life”, most famously through the events of May 1968 in Paris, immortalised in graffiti such as: “Do not adjust your mind, there is a fault with reality” and “Be realistic. Demand the impossible”.

The artist Richard Harris has been commissioned to produce a permanent work of art in response to the construction of the Dorchester to Weymouth Relief Road. The Earthscapes exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre shows some initial ideas - and this is one

Some notes on the Earthscapes exhibition at Bridport Arts Centre, curated by Sherborne House Arts

Part 1: The Project straightforwardly Described

A SCALE MODEL of a sculpture to be sited either side of the new Dorchester to Weymouth Relief Road has gone on show for the first time.

It’s on display at Bridport Arts Centre as part of Sherborne House Arts’ Earthscapes exhibition.

The work by sculptor Richard Harris shows some 28 boulders gradually rising on steel poles reaching to 3m (10ft) above the Southdown Ridge.

All the rocks ­- weighing between one and eight tonnes ­- are sourced from the 1.6m tonnes of material moved from the site where work on the road has been taking place.

If it gets the go-ahead, the sculpture will be on both sides of the road and will curve off up the slopes of the cutting following the natural geological strata.

Lines of stones are to be mounted on poles close to where they were dug up

An aerial view of the proposed public art work along the sides of the Dorchester to Weymouth relief road

The poles will curve up the sides of the cuttings

The excavated rocks are between 160 and 65 million years old and started being formed in what would have been a tropical lagoon. The concretions are formed around small matter such as a leaf or a fossil and steadily build up over millions of years solidifying by chemical processes.

Mr Harris said: “I was asked to consider the landscape, context of the whole road and having worked on several proposals for different sites ­ this is the idea that I feel is the strongest and most appropriate. Some of the geology has been exposed by the cutting but will eventually become less visible as the grass grows.

“This proposal puts the geology back where it was ­ but visible­ continuing up above the hill indicating where it would have been before it was weathered away.”

Mr Harris said he had been involved with the project since January last year making many visits to the site and consulting with geologists.

As if an invisible car was driving through in mucky weather and spraying up stones

He said: “This idea came in the late summer and only came about when the work had started and the stones had been revealed.

“The heavier stones will rise up from the ground and will get progressively smaller as they run through the air to the top of the slope.

Big stone...

... Small stone (fascinatingly coloured and shaped)

“What I am trying to do is give an inspiring image as people come into Weymouth and to reveal the geology in a dramatic way.”

 The idea of incorporating art in relation to the road was initially proposed in the Weymouth and Portland Commissioning Plan for 2012.

It stated that public art could be used to make the £87m road ­ which is due to open in Spring next year – more attractive for drivers.

The work is being supported by Arts Council England, South West and Dorset County Council.

Mr Harris is now working with Skanska, the contractors, Dorset County Council and his own engineers to develop the project. 

Part 2: ‘Earthscapes’ as an exhibition title

THERE AREN’T many better words in the English language than ‘scape’. It means so much and is so capable of forming suggestive associations. Brickscape, prisonscape, cityscape, mudscape, hedgescape, landscape, moonscape, earthscape… It’s a brilliant word for conjuring up an external scene or, indeed, an externalised one – as in moodscape or mindscape.

Then there is the word ‘scape’ taken by itself. It’s long been used as a shortened form of ‘escape’ –  ‘scape’ breaks away and soon ends up leading an outlawry of meanings: a ‘scape’ is a fart; a transgression due to thoughtlessness; an outrageous sin; a slip of the tongue; a clerical error.

Shafted / Scaped

‘Scape’ can also be used to describe the shaft of a column, or the long stalk of a flower  rising directly out of its root.

The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins used ‘scape’ to denote an impression or reflection of the individual quality of a thing or an action; its quiddity, its real nature or essence.

So you can start to see why an exhibition called Earthscapes is always going to be appealing, even before we get started on that titular coinage.

Why earthscapes and not landscapes? Perhaps because ‘land’ speaks too much of ownership and class, of power and authority – whereas ‘earth’ still escapes from some of those human forms? The earth, physically and mentally, is a space that none of us can ever truly hope to control – not forever – and space of course is an anagram of scape. At which point – at the mention of anagram – your mind can start to run away with possibilities (yes, to scape), because earth is also an anagram of heart.

So you can have earthscapes as ‘heartscapes’ or ‘heartspaces’ or ‘hearts paces’; pluck out the word art and you get ‘she art scape’, or ‘he art scapes’; and so on and on…

Part 3: The Relief Road Art Work as a Work of Art

You might regard everything written above as rather wild, but it is all relevant to the Dorchester to Weymouth relief road, and to Richard Harris’s initial models.

They’re fiendishly difficult designs to photograph, and if you’re interested you should go to see them for yourself, but I hope for now the pictures here show roughly what’s on display.

So, scapes: relevant how?

Firstly: in the crudest way, there will be people who regard what’s proposed as arty-farty nonsense – and, remember, ‘to let a scape’ does mean to break wind…

But let’s chuff on.

Secondly: look at the way the stones are upheld on shafts / columns / stalks – call them what you will – they are all ‘scapes’ and there are many different ways of viewing their form and layout. The stones for the real art work will come from excavations along the route. They will – you could argue – look like the severed heads on poles that used to be stood at the entrances to towns and cities (Dorchester once used to be gristled with the rotting heads of Catholic Martyrs who’d been hung, drawn and quartered). From that perspective, the two lines of scapes, moving down either side of the road, represent a triumphal assertion of power by Dorset County Council and its contractors.

Look what we have done! We have disembowelled the earth! We have built this road and routed our enemies!

Thirdly: and for what?

The stones curve like a sabre tooth, or perhaps a tongue

Or in these daubs like antennae or paw prints?

More still to follow: writer is thinking (when he gets chance)!  

There’s a most interesting story behind it.

In 1978 the artist Laurence Whistler gave this bound manuscript of a poem, some 80 pages long, to the Lyme Regis Philpot Museum, where it is on display. The author John Fowles had at this point just started his ten-year stewardship at the Philpot  as Honorary Curator. From the outset he regarded The Lymiad as one of the museum’s most precious possessions – for its verve, wit, and satirical humour; its vivid evocation of the manners and pastimes of a small Regency resort; and above all for its acute observations of the town, its people, and their preoccupations.

 Sadly, John Fowles died in 2005, so he never saw his dream of The Lymiad’s publication brought to fruition. Now the Museum’s Trustees have re-visited the project, in consultation with Mrs Sarah Fowles, his widow, and plan to launch a new edition of the manuscript; not a facsimile of the original, but designed as it might have appeared had it been published in 1819 – some 200 pages, soft-back, but with stitched pages and card covers marbled in the Regency manner.

The Lymiad will come out looking finer than this. At least, it'd better do!

 The edition will contain:

• An essay by John Fowles on “Lyme in the early 1800s’, published in 2003 from his original introduction
• A general introduction and textual note by John Constable
• A transcription of the text
• Editorial notes by John Fowles, John Constable and Jo Draper, the former curatorial consultant at the Museum.
• Illustrations from the Museum’s rich collection

The cost of the entire project is estimated at £4000. Some funds have already been raised, and it is hoped to raise the balance by 100 individual subscriptions of £20, the names of all those subscribing to be recorded in the publication.

For further information on this fascinating project contact Mary Godwin, the Museum’s Curator, on 01297-443370, or e-mail curator@lymeregismuseum.co.uk

*In 1997 the manuscript caught the attention of Dr John Constable, then Professor of English Literature at Kyoto University. Over the next few years he checked and studied the transcript and wrote the introduction.

In his words:  “The Lymiad emerges as a highly political and a thoroughly Whig poem, with some leanings towards the left of that party though stopping short of Radicalism itself.”

In view of Lyme’s political history, some may be surprised that “it stopped short of Radicalism itself”!

FOR MORE than seven long years the Literary & Scientific Institute in Bridport town centre has stood empty. Now though, the Bridport Area Development Trust has been given a chance to seek new uses for a building erected in the early 1830s as a Mechanics Institute, whose purpose was to help Bridport’s working classes educate themselves. In 1855 it become a more middle-class Literary and Scientific Institute; in the late 19th century it was an art school; in the late 20th a Dorset County Council library.

About 25 people are due to look round inside to dream and to calculate what might be. The pictures shown here need little commentary, but you’ll find the occasional note of explanation and literary tag.

All pictures were taken by Vince O’ Farrell of Bridport Area Development Trust, with whose kind permission they are now reproduced.

“Classical, that’s it – it is calm and classical… No low beatings and knockings about” (Mrs Jarley in Dickens’ The Old Curiosty Shop).

One of the reasons we know that the Institute was built in the early 1830s is that a book about Baptist churches published in 1835 complained that it made the garden setting of the chapel right by it, pictured below, less attractive to visitors.

The same book (by one  J. Murch) commented nonetheless on what “a handsome and commodious edifice” the new Institute  was.

“The scene was the familiar one of grandeur and desolation” (The End, Samuel Beckett).

Old buildings “were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling” (Images, T E Hulme). 

“… And immediately

“Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:

“The sun-comprehending glass,

“And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows

“Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.”

(High Windows, Philip Larkin)

Ten interested parties have been shown around the empty Institute in East Street, Bridport, by members of the Bridport Area Development Trust, which has got six months to find a modern purpose for the historic property.

“We’re still in the very early stages,” said Crystal Johnson of the Trust.

“We’re lucky in Bridport in that we’ve got a lot of other facilities and arrangements, and we don’t want to duplicate those, so we’ve got to have something that doesn’t put the building in competition with other venues, but complements what’s already happening.

“A lot of ideas have to do with training and providing courses, perhaps working with higher and further education institutions, which are looking to deliver more courses locally.”

The building was last occupied in 2002, which is also when the last structural survey was done. Another survey now needs doing.

The digital arts organisation PVA was one of the Institute's last tenants. PVA is now based in the old building at the back of the East Street car park

Ms Johnson said: “It’s not deteriorated significantly since then but of course the costs of things have changed.”

Everyone involved with the Trust is working on a voluntary basis; the organisation does not have a lot of money or capacity.

Ms Johnson continued: “We’re hoping that people will come forward with specialist skills, for example legal or property management, skills which will help us get some kind of business plan together for the building to be handed over to the community, and help us raise the initial capital that will be required and also develop further uses that bring funding with them.

“We’ve got to think quite long term about it.” 

The building’s history

The sign outside proclaiming it to be a Literary & Scientific Institute is a bit misleading. It was that, but not until 1855. Before then it had a very interesting history indeed; it encapsulates a period of class warfare and ambitions for cultural change. 

In 1830, Bridport formed a Mechanics Institute, one of the first Mechanics Institutes in the country. London had the very first, in 1824. Mechanics Institutes were mutual improvement societies, self-help organisations, part of a grass-roots working class struggle for education and advancement.

“The time has gone by,” as one former rope-maker put it, “for the selfish and bigoted possessors of wealth to confine the blessings of knowledge wholly within their own narrow circle, and by every despotic artifice to block up each cranny through which intellectual light might break out upon the multitude…”

Restraint on “sensual indulgence”

The aim of setting up a Mechanics Institute in Bridport was (take a deep breath!) to foster “the mental and moral advantage of the inhabitants of the neighbourhood, but especially of the young men of the working classes, by affording them the means of useful knowledge, and assisting such of the members as may be engaged in mechanical pursuits in attaining a scientific acquaintance with their respective arts – providing them with improving and interesting subjects for reflection and discussion, and thereby establishing a wholesome moral restraint on their amusements, keeping them from wasting their leisure time in vacancy of mind, or unprofitable conversation, or sensual indulgence; in fact enabling them to become more thinking, and therefore more rational beings, and more useful and respectable members of society.”

This explains the origin of the East Street building. Some of the language used here (“moral restraint”, etc) clearly shows middle-class involvement, but the Institute itself was explicitly built for the working classes, between 1830 and 1835, at a time of great political unrest, especially in Dorset. (This was the time, for example, when the Tolpuddle Martyrs were transported).  

The Institute’s building was paid for by Henry Warburton, the son of a Kent timber merchant. Warburton was a Radical reformer who was MP for Bridport from 1826 until 1841. By one account it cost him £16,000; that’s more than £1.3 million in today’s money.

“Fear God and Honour the King”

Anyway,the Institute began with fine hopes, but it failed. No one really knows quite why.

It might have been because employers simply made their workers do such long hours they didn’t have enough time left for proper meetings.

It might have been because power in Dorset then largely rested with Conservatives viciously hostile to working class aspirations. In 1838, for example, the Bridport Institute sent a petition up to London supporting proposals for educational funding to be freed from churches. This gesture was denounced in the Conservative Dorset County Chronicle, which wanted clergymen still to make the lower orders “Fear God and Honour the King”. Such attitudes would have made it harder for the Mechanics Institute to survive. 

Institutes generally were also vulnerable to economic downturns, internal squabbles, problems with getting reliable teachers, and so on. Whatever the reason was, the Mechanics Institute failed and only in 1855 was it reborn as the much more middle-class Literary & Scientific Institute.

So what next?

It’s difficult to draw conclusions, and it may well be that the largely forgotten history of working class struggle in Bridport is regarded by many people as, these days, a bad omen, or irrelevant. But is it?

One of the great themes of the forthcoming General Election is going to be “mutualisation” – both Labour and the Conservatives say they want to encourage all sorts of enterprises based upon this principle.

So even though there are going to be huge cuts in public spending, Bridport could perhaps be well placed to argue for an institution that embodies the idea of mutual help.

The Bridport Area Development Trust should be bold. It should seek a use for the Institute that’s as new now as the idea of the Mechanics Institute once was.

And wouldn’t it be fantastic if the Bridport’s current MP Oliver Letwin, who wants the Conservatives to be radical and reforming, could be persuaded to contribute towards the Institute in as generous a way as his predecessor in Parliament once did?

Editor’s Note: This piece draws on The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes by Jonathan Rose and the Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History & Archaeological Society.

The Institute is on the English Heritage register of buildings at risk. Click on this link to read more.  

A portrait by George Wright of Cleo Evans, Dorset County Council's visual arts development officer

Offers so far include portrait photography by George Wright, a £100 restaurant voucher, pottery and bread-making lessons, a guided walk along the Jurassic Coast, and a police security check.

Pledges will be auctioned at Bridport Arts Centre on March 12.

Bridport Museum curator Alive Martin said she had been overwhelmed by the generosity of local people and companies.

The museum needs to raise £2,000 so that people can continue to visit for free.

Entry fees were scrapped last year for the first time in the museum’s 77-year-history, and the result was a big rise in visitor numbers.

Ms Martin, who initiated the move, said: “The response has been fantastic, people have been absolutely brilliant.

“A lot of them understood straight away what a great cause this was and were very generous.

“We still need as many lots as possible to keep the museum free, so if anyone has anything they could donate, I’d love to hear from you.

“But, judging by what people have donated so far, I think that we have gone a long way to ensuring it will be a success.

“I think people have really understood the importance of scrapping the entrance charges, ­especially after last year’s doubling of visitors.

“It not only benefits tourists, who get a chance to see our rich local history, but it benefits people from Bridport as a whole because we never forget where we come from.”

Among the offers is the chance to have a portrait done by internationally-renowned photographer George Wright, who lives in Bridport and has work in the National Portrait Gallery in London.

Other lots include a pottery lesson from Miles Bell of Symondsbury Potters, a guided walk with Richard Edmonds, Earth Science Manger for the Jurassic Coast, and computer first aid sessions with expert Mark Beed.

There is also a flight for one over Dorset, a historical tour of Bridport, a personal guided tour of Palmers Brewery, bread-making lessons with Leakers Bakery and security checks of a home and business by the police.

Other highlights include membership of the popular Highlands End swimming pool in Eype, a treatment by Beauty and Beyond, and an annual pass to Mapperton House (voted The Nation’s Finest Manor House by Country Life).

Acclaimed chef Mark Hix has donated a £100 voucher to his Lyme Regis restaurant The Oyster and Fish House, while Dorset Life is offering a year’s subscription.

Denhay Farms has simply and kindly donated £300 to the appeal.

The full list of goods and services for auction will be published in a catalogue available soon.

For more information contact Alice Martin on 07956-674866 or Tony Bonnici on 07790-020579.

Dorset County Council is working with Bridport-based arts company PVA MediaLab to appoint an artist-in-residence for the project, called ‘Domus’, using an award of £5,000 from the Big Lottery Fund.

The artist will work with local deaf and hearing-impaired people at workshops in March to develop a looped projection piece to be shown at the Town House. The work will explore the site’s history and environment through the use of digital media and light.

Julie Penfold, director of PVA MediaLab, said: “We are very pleased to be working with colleagues at Dorchester’s Roman Town House to deliver this exciting project. We hope to highlight the special qualities of the site, enhancing its qualities and encouraging pride in local heritage.”

If you are interested in taking part in the workshops on 23-25 March in Dorchester, please book through the Roman Town House officer Sarah Harbige on 01305 228241 or s.e.harbige@dorsetcc.gov.uk

The above is all from a press release issued by Dorset County Council. You can tell that from the perfectly on-message words “said” by Julie Penfold of PVA.

They’re worth noting because, in the current climate of impending cutbacks, ‘Domus’ is exactly the kind of project that many people will think is a waste of money. Do deaf people really need to experience “a moving image projection” on the Roman Town House? They’re hard of hearing. It’s not like they can’t see it. What’s wrong with reading about it, or walking around and imagining?

But PVA are going to do a job, and who can blame them for wanting to do it? What’s more interesting is the role of Dorset County Council. I would suggest that Domus should be seen in the context of years and years of expenditure and experimentation by Dorset County Council on the Roman Town House. It is a remarkable and important archaeological monument, but it’s in an odd place, tucked away round the back of County Hall, and not all that many people go it, and no one is really quite sure what its purpose should be, or how should it be promoted. Hundreds of thousands of pounds have been spent on it, and yet no one ever seems to have produced a coherent plan for promoting the Roman heritage of Dorchester and including the Town House as part of that. I know people have tried, but does anyone think they have succeeded?

You can see the official Roman Town House website by clicking on this link. At the time of writing this, it’s got Tony Robinson on the home page, which is ok, and also a horrible spelling mistake, which is not…

THIS is a story about remarkable things. Firstly, in glorious defiance of the recession, courses costing at least £265 per person start in West Dorset in February and March on the subject of the Mythic Imagination – things like daimons, fairylore, and the otherworld (“the neglected Western tradition of soul-making… described by Plato”). The first weekend course has already sold out.

The second remarkable thing is that this seemingly arcane tradition in fact links West Dorset to phenomena including the sex life of Sir Walter Ralegh, the birth of the British Empire and the Vietnam War…

Let’s start in Long Street, Cerne Abbas, with this former bakery, named Raleigh House in an anecdotal village guide put together by the Cerne Abbas Historical Society.

 “In the early 1600s,” the guide states, “Sir Walter Raleigh was summoned to Saint Mary’s parish church on a minor ecclesiastical offence. It has been told that before the meeting, the family invited Sir Raleigh [sic] to rest in their home from his journey to Cerne Abbas. Thus the name remains to celebrate their famous visitor.”

A nice enough English village story, but is it true?

Sweet Sir Walter Ralegh

Sir Walter Ralegh was a lusty man, nicknamed ‘Swisser Swatter’ after the cries supposedly moaned by a woman with whom he was heard vigorously swiving. Try saying ‘Sweet Sir Walter’ in a faster and faster rhythm and see what you end up with…      

Anyway, it was the carnal desires of Swisser Swatter that brought him down to Dorset in the 1590s. Ralegh had been a favourite of Queen Elizabeth I, but in 1592 he secretly married one of the Queen’s Maids of Honour, who were meant to be virgins.

Ralegh and his wife were punished by two months imprisonment in the Tower of London, and on his release Ralegh was forbidden to attend the Royal Court.

Sherborne Castle

He retired to Sherborne Castle in West Dorset, where such heretical and free-thinking conversations were rumoured to be held with his entourage that in 1594 allegations of atheism were formally investigated by the authorities in hearings at Cerne Abbas. Reports of Ralegh’s conversations – particularly one at Wolfeton Castle near Dorchester – had been scandalising Dorset. And scandalising is the word.

Atheism was then punishable by death.

For witnesses to suggest that Ralegh had been arguing about subjects such as “the beinge, or immortalitye of the soule” meant there was more at stake than “a minor ecclesiastical offence.”  

Ralegh got off, for various reasons. For a start, the people investigating him were mostly personal friends; one commissioner was even related to him.

Still, the affair left Ralegh even more restlessly discontented, and even more determined, as the writer John Shirley puts it, “to regain the affection of the Queen and the respect of his neighbours.”

So, he planned an expedition to Guiana, in search of the golden world of Eldorado, and in 1595 he sailed to South America (an adventure written vaingloriously up in The Discoverie of Guiana).

Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's brilliant imperial epic Aguirre, Wrath of God

Ralegh’s voyage has been described by the historian Simon Schama as “the prototype of all imperial upstream epics”. It’s passed down through time into the imaginations of such figures as Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness), John Huston (The African Queen), Werner Herzog (Aguirre, Wrath of God), and Francis Ford Coppola (Apocalypse Now).

Ralegh’s journey was a kind of alchemical, occult Neo-platonist field-trip, undertaken partly under the guidance of the magus Dr John Dee, the first person in British history known to have used the term ‘British Empire’.

It’s worth pausing for a moment to think about this: one of the reasons the British Empire began was that Walter Ralegh was fed up of living in West Dorset.

Ralegh was enthused by and infused with the magical outlook of occult Neoplatonists, whose influence in Britain peaked in the late 16th century, and whose dominant idea was (to quote the historian Keith Thomas) that “by mystical regeneration it was possible for man to regain the domination over nature which he had lost at the Fall,” ie upon the expulsion from Paradise.

All this history has now been almost entirely forgotten, but it forms the Dorset background to a series of courses being held in the 16th century panelled Oak Room at the Fox and Hounds in Cattistock. Speakers include Patrick Harpur, who lives at Frampton between Maiden Newton and Dorchester, and is the author of The Philosopher’s Secret Fire: A History of the Imagination (Penguin).

You can read more about the Mythic Imagination courses by clicking on this link.

Editor’s Note: I should add that I’m not involved with the courses, and as far as I’m aware they have almost nothing to do with the West Dorset background I’ve sketched out. I’ve written about it because I felt like it (!), and because I think it’s interesting. If any readers would like more details about some of the points I’ve raised (eg fuller references), then please send an email or leave a comment.

BRIDPORT 1/D/09/002009 & 1/D/09/002010 Conservation area and listed building. Satellite dish Electric Palace, South Street (From the latest list of planning applications issued by West Dorset District Council) 

It's amazing what you can do these days: An artist's impression of the proposed Electric Palace satellite dish. Reproduced with permission.

THIS is a cool idea. Honestly, it is. The 1.2m satellite dish proposed for the south wall of the Electric Palace is not just any old dish. It is bespoke.

It will take in feeds from the National Theatre in London and the Metropolitan Opera in New York and let audiences watch live performances on the Palace’s cinema screen. The picture quality is said to be fantastic.

First up, if planning permission is granted in time by West Dorset District Council, and if a few other issues are sorted out, there should be a new operatic production of Hamlet with “an extended mad scene… amongst the greatest in opera”. So the Metropolitan Opera promises for March 27…

Next on April 22 should be Alan Bennet’s new play The Habit of Art, about WH Auden and Benjamin Britten, from the National Theatre in London.

It was the Met in New York that first got this idea of worldwide transmission going, and it’s been copied by the National’s supremo Nicholas Hytner because he wants to provide greater access to top-class work.

His line: “I grew up in Manchester in the 60s. If I had been able to see Olivier’s National Theatre at my local cinema, I would have gone all of the time.”

Apparently it costs the National about £50,000 to broadcast a performance, and the experiment has been criticised as misguided and inevitably inferior, because there cannot be the same flow of feeling between audience and performers, but it seems to me that the Palace should be congratulated for trying to join in. Bridport needs more bold moves.

A long time supporter of the Museum, and at one time co-curator with her friend, the author John Fowles, Ann Jellicoe trained as an actor at the Central School of Speech and Drama. She was a central figure at London’s Royal Court Theatre in the sixties, taking the theatrical world by storm with The Knack: it subsequently played, and still plays, all round the world, and was made into an award-winning film which won the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

She will also talk of her work in developing Community Plays: a new form which aims to involve as many people from the whole community as possible, working together in setting up and acting a very large caste play about their own town. Many Lyme residents will remember her very first Community Play The Reckoning in 1978. Written and directed by Ann Jellicoe, it told the story of the part played by the town in the Monmouth Rebellion. Its huge success led her to set up the Colway Theatre Trust with its subsequent development of Community Plays throughout the West Country and beyond. In 1984 came the second Lyme play, The Western Women, about the remarkable role played by women in the Siege of Lyme. For this work she was awarded the OBE.

Ever the innovator, she gave a one-woman dramatised reading of The Western Women at the Marine Theatre two years ago. Of this performance, given when she was 80 years old, the Town Mill’s journal said: “This was genius…such an evening is very rare and we were privileged to be part of it.”

Ann Jellicoe has been at the cutting edge of theatre in this country for the past 50 years.   She has a fascinating tale to tell, and guests will have a unique opportunity to question her on all aspects of her work: writing, acting, directing, or creating theatre of the people, for the people, by the people.

Reservations, £25 per person, must be pre-booked by lst February at the latest so that catering arrangements can be finalised.

For further information please contact me, Margaret Rose on 01297-445503.

Margaret Rose is Chairman of The Friends of Lyme Regis Museum