In 2016 Martin Wimbush gave his A Meeting of Minds at the Rye Festival; I missed it and was very happy that this celebration of John Betjeman and Philip Larkin returned to the Community Centre last Sunday, October 8 and was very well supported.
Rightly so, as it was a very entertaining and enlightening compilation by Martin Wimbush of poems by the two very English poets, linked by illuminating comments from the pen of Alan Bennett, who, despite his own comments in Radio Times a little time ago, is an astute critic. Martin Wimbush writes that he “always thought of poetry in terms of performance, not just reciting a poem, but performing a poem . . .”
His method, involving some astute editing, proved immensely successful in showing us how the minds of Betjeman and Larkin did meet: in their Englishness, in their craftsmanship, in their fundamentally tragic view of life and in their accessibility, this despite the writers’ poems being placed in separate halves of the performance. Mr Wimbush’s skill in his editing and his wonderfully convincing acting of the poems, aided by atmospheric lighting by Del Smith, revealed not only the aspects of the poems which, knowing many of them well, I had expected but also revealed previously unnoticed features that enhanced my understanding. I was also introduced to a poem, “Five O’Clock Shadow” by Betjeman, which I had somehow overlooked: bleak but brilliant, uniting Betjeman and Larkin in another of their similarities: fear of dying.
This was a most inspiring event because, despite the deep pessimism of much of the poetry and the poets’ fear of extinction, through Martin Wimbush, Betjeman and Larkin live on and speak to us in language we can all understand. It is fitting too that this event was in aid of Rye Memorial Hospital.
Photo: Rye Camera Club