Party!

Party! What could be a lighter, more fizzing title for a seasonal gathering together of Words and Music? Indeed, there is plenty of humour in this collection: the classic Christmas drinks ‘do’ hosted by the friends of the parents of one Bridget Jones, featuring her seminal, excruciating, epoch-making first meeting with future husband Mark Darcy; two comic poems by Ogden Nash – in one, the rhyme-ready Artie (the life of the party) is a womaniser on the loose (madam, please “curtain your spine”), while The Party Next-Door bemoans the experience of a party from the other side of the fence –not greener, just very, very annoying. 

There’s phantasmagoria in this collection too: the fabulous tableau of the Hatter, the March Hare and the Dormouse all speaking in riddles to Lewis Carroll’s Alice in the ‘mad’ tea-party in her adventures in Wonderland. It’s faintly disturbing.

In fact, scratch beneath the surface and the terrain soon darkens. Party! was never going to be all levity – the more I searched through the literature, the more the troubles of mankind came tumbling from the bookshelves: if Bridget Jones and the original Mr Darcy in the ball scene of Pride and Prejudice (both read by Naomi Bentley) bookend this edition of Words and Music, then its centre-piece is F Scott Fitzgerald’s description of the breathtakingly opulent parties of Jay Gatsby. Gatsby’s parties only highlight the vapidity of his guests: the crashers, the hangers-on who don’t know their host but who happily feed on his champagne and baked hams, who make introductions ‘forgotten on the spot’. The passage from The Great Gatsby is brilliantly evoked by the actor David Neilson. And David also reads the inspiring prose of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, a description of an aristocratic ball in fin de siècle Risorgimento Italy – the waltzing guests celebrate life but without realising it, they’re playing out the passing of the ancien regime and its centuries-old values, facing a future of great change and uncertainty. There is a poem each by Heinrich Heine and Thomas Hardy – both men speak of the unseen guests at the party: shadows of fragmented relationships, of lost loves, of the dead, haunting and stalking our memories as we try to embrace the party.

And what of the music? It was easy for The Leopard: Nino Rota’s score for Visconti’s extraordinary cinematic realisation of the novel. There’s a song composed by Hans Pfitzner to follow Naomi Bentley’s reading of Heinrich Heine’s poem Sie haben Heut’ Abend Gesellschaft that it sets; the space between the sparse notes of Debussy’s Voiles make ideal stepping stones for Alice as she continues her journey from the tea-party to the garden. Of course, dance is never very far away: as well as Nino Rota, there’s Weber’s own ballroom scene, two dancers join and part in his Invitation to the Dance. And, talking of dance, Fred Astaire makes two, very classy appearances.

Thanks and admiration to the readers: Naomi Bentley, a television actress who has graced Casualty, Miranda, Jonathan Creek and My Family among numerous others, and whose delivery of six words (including an expletive) in one of Ricky Gervaise’s Extras quite stole the show. And David Neilson, best known for his portrayal of Roy Cropper in ITV’s Coronation Street. He’s a brilliantly versatile and sensitive actor, as you’ll hear in today’s edition.

Paul Frankl (Producer)