Retaining the late 50s Nottingham setting on Alan’s novel, Matthew Dunster’s new production – his return to the Royal Exchange following his headline-grabbing adaptation of George Orwell’s ‘1984’and the Bruntwood Prize-winning ‘Mogadishu’ – promises to fuse kitchen sink realism with his acclaimed capacity for exciting theatrical immediacy.

Perry Fitzpatrick, who has already chalked up an impressive slate of film and TV credits, gave a break-out performance in Channel 4’s ‘This is England 1986’, directed by Shane Meadows. The cast also includes Graeme Hawley (John Stape in ‘Coronation Street’), Clare Calbraith (Jane Moorsum in ‘Downton Abbey’), David Crellin (another ‘Corrie’ alumnus; he played Colin Fishwick), Chanel Cresswell and Jo Hartley (respectively, Kelly and Cynthia in the original film version of ‘This is England’), Ryan Pope (“Psycho” Paul in the sitcom ‘Ideal’) and Tamla Kari (Lucy in the big screen version of ‘The Inbetweeners’).

So: a high-profile cast, the authentic working-class novel by way of source material, and one Britain’s most dynamic theatre directors at the helm. It’s a safe bet to say that this will prove unmissable. The production runs till Saturday 7 April. A new generation of theatre-goers can take advantage of the Royal Exchange’s Happy Mondays offer with tickets at just £5 for under 25s. There are also audio-interpreted and BSL-described performances. For further details, please contact the Royal Exchange box office on 0161 833 9833 or visit their website at www.royalexchange.co.uk.

Matthew Dunster kindly spared the Alan Sillitoe Website some time to answer the three questions uppermost in our mind about the production:

Your striking version of Orwell’s ‘1984’ was memorably described as “Kafka meets Kraftwerk”. Can we expect an equally iconoclastic take on Alan Sillitoe? 

MD: I don’t know. My interpretation of ‘1984’ was as focused on the book, its themes and tone as I thought possible. In that respect I’d argue that “Kafka meets Kraftwerk” represents the scale of Orwell’s imagination – psychological horror meets crude technology.

I’m attempting to focus on Sillitoe’s novel. I want to bring out the elements that surprise me – the iconoclastic attitude to empire and the army, the colour of working class life, the extreme nature of the sexual betrayal, the horror of DIY abortion, mixed race sexual relationships.

I guess I think Sillitoe is the iconoclast; I just need to stay as true as possible to his vision of working class Nottingham in 1958 and to my idea of exciting theatre.

Perry Fitzpatrick plays Arthur Seaton; will there be shades of Albert Finney in the classic film adaptation, or will this be a very different Arthur? 

MD: Perry is grappling with a rich, detailed portrait as provided by Sillitoe. We have never discussed Finney. And I made a decision not to re-watch the film while working on the novel. And I told the actors to avoid it too.  What he shares with Finney is the working class authenticity and an edgy instinctive talent.  But Perry has two elements of Arthur’s character nailed that were beyond Finney: he’s tall and he’s from Nottingham!!!

Why do you think Alan Sillitoe’s story of working class belligerence in the late 50s still chimes with modern audiences? 

MD: Well I guess I don’t know! I’m working-class. I’m belligerent. But I’m 42 years old. What are today’s youth? Lost? Angry? Underpaid?

Arthur resents and fights the system. I’d argue that the system has a firmer hold on all of us than ever and that we’ve seen with the recent UK riots that there is a group of people who feel angry and excluded.

There is a connection – but it’s up to the audience to make it.

How best to describe it? Imagine if Terry Gilliam had re-imagined ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ with a Stalinist twist and brought in his erstwhile Monty Python colleagues to ramp up the absurdist humour, and you’re halfway there.

It left a good few readers and critics baffled. Not so Andy Partridge, founder member and principal songwriter of groundbreaking new wave band XTC. Responding to Alan’s dementedly imaginative depiction of a topsy-turvy society in which motorists are legally required to be intoxicated (“drink Nihilitz, keep death on the road”) and sports cars replace tanks in an attempted coup d’etat, Partridge found inspiration for two songs.

In an interview with Todd Bernhardt, reproduced in full on the XTC Myspace page, Partridge discusses the novel’s impact:

TB: Let’s talk about ‘Travels in Nihilon’. Where did this song come from?

AP: Well, the title came from the title of a book by Alan Sillitoe, which I bought in the mid- to late-’70s. I was still reading novels at the time, and this is a novel about a non-existent vaguely Communistic-type dictatorship somewhere deep in Europe called Nihilon, which was run by a fellow called President Nil.

TB: Here comes President Nil again!

AP: There you go! So, I borrowed two things from the ‘Travels in Nihilon’ book – the actual title, which refers to nihilists and nothing, and I nabbed the title of President Nil for the ‘Oranges and Lemons’ song.

If I remember correctly, you never get to see President Nil. Whenever a photograph of him is put in the paper for some reason, it’s always a different person, and/or sometimes an animal, like a gorilla or something like that. You never really know what this supposed President Nil looks like.

So, it was a great book, but the actual song isn’t about the book – the song is really about traveling through the land of nothingness. It’s a song about a con – that enormous con of Pop Culture and the con of religion. 

‘Travels in Nihilon’ is a great song – it provides an atmospheric conclusion to XTC’s brilliant 1980 ‘Black Sea’ album.

The novel remains arguably the most offbeat and experimental entry in Alan’s bibliography, hilarious and horrifying in equal measure with an off-the-scale bizarro denouement that makes the last episode of cult ‘60s TV oddity ‘The Prisoner’ look like an exercise in formalism. Intrigued? Track down a copy and prepare to be entertained, inspired and weirded-out in roughly equal measures.

John’s Nottingham-set Inspector Resnick novels need no introduction. Critically acclaimed bestsellers, they earned him a reputation as one of the leading lights of the BritCrime literary movement. ‘Lonely Hearts’ and ‘Rough Treatment’ were memorably adapted for TV with Tom Wilkinson as Resnick.

His new series, featuring Detective Inspector Elder, is garnering equal acclaim.

His latest novel ‘Good Bait’ is out now, and Waterstone’s Nottingham are hosting An Evening With John Harvey on Tuesday 7th February to promote this new book.

John is also an accomplished and widely-published poet. You can visit John Harvey’s Website here.

The Alan Sillitoe Memorial Lunch will be held at Welbeck Banqueting, Welbeck Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7QW, on Saturday 21st April, 12.15pm for 1.00pm. Tickets are £22.50, including a welcome drink on arrival, a display of Alan Sillitoe’s life and work, raffle, and free car parking at the venue.

For more information, please download the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Lunch Leaflet (PDF). To book a ticket, please contact Viv Apple at 38 Harrow Road, West Bridgford, Nottingham NG2 7DU. Cheques should be made payable to The Alan Sillitoe Committee. Please make your booking no later than 7th April.

We’ll see you there!

The Alan Sillitoe Committee announce winners of the Alan Sillitoe Open Poetry Competition at the Nottingham Contemporary, Weekday Cross on Friday 2nd March 2012. The winners will be announced on the night; their poems will be featured on the website shortly afterwards.

The competition closed to entries on 10^th January, with submissions flooding in right till the last minute. The final total was a staggering 468 entries from as far afield as Singapore and France, with the majority of poems coming from every corner of the U.K.

The standard was exceedingly high, with adjudicator Ruth Fainlight facing a difficult task in selecting the winners and runners up.  The Committee would very much like to thank all those who supported the competition, which raised over £850 for the Alan Sillitoe Memorial Fund.

Ruth Fainlight will be present at the prize-giving event, supported by Cathy Grindrod, former Derbyshire Poet Laureate, and Jeremy Duffield, Chair of Nottingham Poetry Society.

The event features acoustic roots band ‘Blue Yonder’.

Admission is free and there is a bar available. We’ll see you there!

Download Poetry Prize-giving Flyer (PDF)

Over £112 raised in donations at a performance of John Aram’s jazz suite inspired by ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’

which took place at the Bonnington Theatre, Arnold.

With projections and dialogue from the film version of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ accompanying the performance, and the proceeds of the band’s raffled CDs kindly donated to the statue fund, it was a night to remember. Our thanks to everyone who donated, and congratulations to the raffle winners!

You can find out more about John Aram’s work at www.johnaram.com

Committee member Viv Apple writes of the evening:

Only at the very beginning did we catch a glimpse of the late Johnny Dankworth’s brilliant score to the film Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, but those few notes were enough to set the pace for John Aram’s jazz suite, which he conceived and wrote over four years. It was performed by John (trombone), Graeme Blevins (saxophone), Tom Cawley (piano), Arthur Hnatek (drums) and Phil Donkin (bass).

As they played, a huge screen backdrop showing fast moving shapes and colours ‘told’ the story, occasionally punctuated by snatches of pivotal dialogue from the film itself. The climax came just before the end: a long riff with explosive screen effects, representing the scene in which two squaddies are beating up Arthur Seaton.

After the performance, three of the Alan Sillitoe Committee stood with collection buckets as the appreciative audience filed out, and the band generously gave us over £50 from their raffle. Total raised for the Statue Fund was £112.60. Grateful thanks to the band for their musicianship and for their support.

The evocative photographs above were taken by David Sillitoe. That indispensable journal of Nottingham culture, LeftLion, were in attendance and you can read their review here.

The judges, David Sillitoe and Nicola Monaghan, were impressed with the standard of entries and the variety of approaches to the subject of ‘What would Arthur Seaton be like in 2011?’

They considered the first three stories to be equally good in content and style, so the decision was made to award the writers an equal share of the prize money, £60 to each winner. The two runners up received a selection of books, kindly donated by publishers Little, Brown and Random House.

Many thanks to all those who entered the competition – your support is greatly appreciated.

The winners were:

‘Password, please’ by Ann Featherstone

‘The Assistant’ by Neil Fulwood

‘Pay As You Go’ by Andrew “MulletProof” Graves

Click on the highlighted titles to read the winning stories.

Runners up were:

‘This isn’t Skeggy’ by Gill Blow

‘The Way I see Things’ by Richard Moore

Members of the Alan Sillitoe Committee hosted a commemorative exhibition featuring memorabilia, first editions, rare photographic portraits of Alan and displays chronicling his life and work.

The winners of the Short Story Competition were announced and excerpts of their stories were read. Please visit the Competition page for a list of winners and the chance to read their stories.

Thanks to everyone who attended, contributed and spent time with us.

£313 raised from the screening of ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ at Antenna.

James K Walker of Nottingham’s indispensible LeftLion magazine was the driving force behind the event.

James gives an evocative account of the evening on his blog:

“Friday night saw Antenna host their biggest event to date as just over a hundred people came to celebrate the life of Alan Sillitoe. For the fundraising event, we showed ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ on an enormous screen, a Q&A with Nicola Monaghan and David Sillitoe and music from Blue Yonder who we’ve shoehorned into events due to their Arthur Seaton-inspired song ‘Propaganda’. I can’t emphasise how proud it felt to see so many people, particularly given that most would have seen the film countless times before.”

Click here for the full blog post.

Pictured are Nicola Monaghan and David Sillitoe during the Q&A.