Person: Chris Argles

Chris Argles decided to look at the cycle of life with an ambitious collage of music, readings and dance aided by a series of projected images, from the first screams of birth through schooldays, work, first love, marriage, parenthood and the inevitable effects of aging through to the last breath and the long silence of death.

Commencing with Louis MacNiece’s ‘Prayer Before Birth’ is a far from happy or even optimistic start. Written in 1944, while the Second World War still raged, the author lays out all the pitfalls and horrors that may await this newborn, who in the poem calls out to some higher power to protect them, or else kill them.

‘The Font’, from Clive Sansom’s ‘The Cathedral’ verse sequence is used here to represent the child’s Christening, while Barry Tebb’s poem ‘School Smell’ from 1942 invokes a remembrance of schooldays past, but not a fond one, recounting memories of unlovely shell-shocked teachers and bullying. ‘Not To Sleep’ by Robert Graves is used here, seemingly, to help demonstrate the delights of first love when it is really a far more whimsical piece about the wonders of sleep and the anticipation of waking up. The musical counterpoint that followed, the Moody Blues’ ‘Nights in White Satin’, may be a little ponderous, but is imbued with more romance.

Richard Kell’s ‘The Pay Is Good’ is similarly paired with Cat Stevens’ paean to the endless and soul-less grind of the 9 to 5 office existence, ‘Matthew and Son’, where ‘…the work’s never done, there’s always something new. The files in your head, you take them to bed, you’re never ever through’. The first act is finished with a wedding, or rather an extract from beat poet Gregory Corso’s 1960 poem ‘Marriage’, whose full-length 111-line ramble over the advantages and disadvantages of the wedded state was wisely abbreviated, and as a result was much the funnier for it, leaving the audience going into the interval on welcome upbeat note.

Betjeman’s ‘The Cockney Amorist’ starts the second half’s readings, following on from Holst’s ‘Jupiter’, telling us of the old London haunts of he and his partner, forever changed now that she has left him. Clearly the marriage didn’t last long. Elton John’s instrumental piece, the heavily synthesizer-driven ‘Funeral For A Friend’ from his album ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’, then leads us to ‘Old Man Asleep’ by Elizabeth Jennings, a portrait of a man who despite his loneliness, rejects an offer of companionship out of pride and subsequently waits only for a death that cannot come soon enough. John Denver’s bittersweet ‘My Sweet Lady’ follows, before the final reading of the evening, taken from the song ‘The Weaver’s Answer’, written by Roger Chapman and Charles Whitney and originally performed by their band, Family. The lyrics recount the tale of an old blind man asking the ‘weaver of life’ to show him his own story from childhood. As the tale comes closer to the present day, the man’s eyesight returns, just in time to for him to realise his death is imminent. And on that cheery note, Richard Strauss’ ‘Also sprach Zarathustra’ rings out, and the show is brought to an end.

The production is unique in that it saw the involvement of a scholarship student from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, who had been working on a temporary basis with Chris Argles at Hertz cars. Chris enticed the then 23 year old Art Malik to assist with the choreography and other aspects of ‘Circles’, and quickly endeared himself to the cast as well as significantly improving the show. The programme shows ‘Grateful Acknowledgements to our Super Art from the Guildhall.’