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The Guardian
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
John Fox obituary
In 1968, when John Fox and Sue Gill named their newly founded street theatre company the Welfare State, it was because they felt that free art was as important as free spectacles and free dentures. Their mission was to create 'art as an entertainment, an alternative, and a way of life', eschewing theatres and art venues in favour of streets and parks. They wanted eyes on stalks, not bums on seats. For Fox, who has died aged 86, there was never any need for a separation between life and art. In the early days of the Welfare State company, in Burnley, Lancashire, its members lived and worked together in a convoy of caravans. There were couples, single people and a number of small children – including John and Sue's son, Dan, and daughter, Hannah. Their first show was The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, a tribute to William Blake that included stilt-walkers, fire-eaters, performing bears, Punch and Judy and trade union banners. By the 1970s the shows had shifted up a scale, often involving elaborate sculptural builds. Parliament in Flames was performed at numerous sites between 1973 and 1981, featuring a replica of the Houses of Parliament and a 60ft-high Big Ben. A huge sculptural puppet of Guy Fawkes with a skull head confronted a gigantic dragonfly Margaret Thatcher, to the tune of the Sex Pistols' Anarchy in the UK. And yes, it all went up in flames, a blaze of pyrotechnic brilliance. By then the company had changed its name to Welfare State International (WSI), reflecting its worldwide success, with site-specific commissions from Toronto to Tokyo. For Raising the Titanic, staged at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1983, an enormous team of artists and makers took up residence in the abandoned Limehouse dockyards. A 100ft metal construction resembling a ship was created, the stern hung from a mobile crane. The structure, animated by pyrotechnics, was surrounded by floating puppets, variety-style sideshows and bands. That same year the company moved to Ulverston in Cumbria, after which the focus shifted into more community-related work, including the creation of harvest and yuletide festivals in Lancashire villages. Following a trip to Japan, where John and Sue had witnessed a Shinto-Buddhist lantern festival, they decided to create their own version, with the lanterns made from willow sticks (withies) and tissue paper, lit by candles. Their modest first lantern walk grew into a much bigger annual event, the All Lit Up for Glasgow City of Culture lantern festival, launched in 1990 and the biggest in Europe. In the 90s the company opened the Lanternhouse in Ulverston, an arts centre with residential accommodation, as well a number of prop-making, rehearsal and performance spaces that ran until 2006, when WSI was wound up. WSI's last event was a celebratory promenade show called Longline: The Carnival, the culmination of a three-year programme of works connecting the communities of Ulverston and Morecambe Bay. Born in Hull in East Yorkshire, John was the only child of a sea captain, Horatio, and a schoolteacher, Lucy Hasnip. As a schoolboy at Hymers college he was an ink-on-the-fingers maker, creating homespun puppet shows. Sue, also from Hull, was his childhood sweetheart, and they would remain partners in life and work until his death. While studying philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford University, Fox also went to the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art and took part in local experimental theatre projects. In 1967 he went on to work as a tutor-librarian at Bradford School of Art, two years later becoming a lecturer in fine art at Leeds Polytechnic (now Leeds Beckett University). Many of the artists involved in early Welfare State performances were his students, and he remained as a lecturer for several years while pursuing his theatrical interests. Once WSI had been laid to rest, John and Sue continued to work together under the name Dead Good Guides, cultivating an artistic practice weaved more fully into the fabric of their lives. They set up courses, wrote books (including John's autobiography, Eyes on Stalks, 2002), mounted exhibitions, created ecological sculpture trails and set up the Wildernest project, based around a sanctuary garden on the Cumbrian coastal path and incorporating weathervanes and whirlygigs, poster poems and an observation pod. The release from WSI duties also gave John the space to pursue his work as a poet, songwriter and print-maker, and to play saxophone and accordion in numerous bands, including BLAST Furness and the Fox-Gill family ceilidh band. In 2012 he was made MBE for his 'unstinting contribution as an inventor of forms of creative participation and celebration'. Many now-familiar modes of artistic practice – immersive theatre, site-specific performance and community-engaged celebratory arts – were trailblazed by him and his company. Once he was diagnosed with cancer in early 2024, Fox decided to create a booklet of five new poems and an essay on death, called Rehearsing a Future, which he sent to 100 artist friends. He is survived by Sue, Dan and Hannah, and by five grandchildren, Rowan, Bel, Luca, Reuben and Rosa. John Fox, experimental theatre director, born 19 December 1938; died 11 March 2025
Telegraph
04-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
This love letter to William Blake couldn't be more eccentric
Philip Hoare's new book, William Blake and the Sea Monsters of Love, is ostensibly about the life and work of the visionary poet and his influence on a whole host of writers, artists and filmmakers. But it's far from a conventional study. If you've never read Hoare before, prepare to be confused, dazzled and amazed: it's a poetic fever dream of a book, which often reads like a kaleidoscopic convergence of the themes he's explored in his earlier books, Leviathan or, The Whale (2008) and Albert and the Whale: Albrecht Dürer and How Art Imagines Our World (2021), all of which tend to defy easy classification (except, perhaps, the remit of 'sea monsters'). Besides Blake, this is also a memoir and a meditation on all kinds of things, including swimming, whales and a celebration of the queer, the uncanny and the other writers and artists who happen, over the years, to have drifted into Hoare's vast orbit. Blake, in Hoare's telling, is not merely a poet or a painter but a kind of spectral force. Take the visionary works of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, in which Blake sets out his radical ideas on good and evil, illustrated with his own engravings, and where humans are transformed into mythic beings. 'Blake remade us in imaginary form,' Hoare writes. 'He did it to embody his fantastical ideas. He gave voice to spirits waiting to be released from a tree or a cave. Fertile, sensual, tactile, tortured exalted bodies, unabashed by their disinclination to wear anything other than their own skin.' As a writer, Hoare seems perfectly happy in his own skin, drifting unabashed through the cultural landscape, diving into whatever niche and crevice takes his fancy. There's no real argument here, no thesis, nothing you probably couldn't find out anywhere else. Thus, we move, in no particular order, from Blake to reflections and remarks on the life of and work Paul Nash and Derek Jarman, and then from Oscar Wilde to David Bowie, from Moby-Dick to Paradise Lost, through the lives of Gerard Manley Hopkins and Nancy Cunard and Iris Murdoch, and on and on. These figures aren't necessarily explicitly connected to Blake, but more by the subtlest of currents that ripple endlessly outwards from him, like the aftershocks of a wave. As a result, at times, the book reads a bit like a student art house film from the 1970s, with sequences of random jump cuts and juxtapositions. At one moment it's Paul Nash standing in a field, then suddenly it's Derek Jarman: 'Forty years later, in the summer of 1973, Jarman stood in the same field, filming through a yellow filter as if he were visiting another planet. You can almost hear him breathe. The heat peels away a veneer.' As a creator of hybrid beings and shimmering visions, Blake's art can be rather overwhelming. Hoare understands this: 'Blake takes a lot of looking at. He makes your eyes ache. He takes a lot out of you. His demands. It's all those pictures and that mirror-writing. Each one a window into his head. I'm not sure I can take any more. Everything's a bit jittery. I don't feel I have the right to be here.' Then again, for Hoare, you also 'get more for your money with Blake. He's the Willy Wonka of art, your golden ticket to other worlds. […] Deeply theatrical, Blakeworld™ is a terrifying Christmas pantomime, a furious ghost-train ride.' These sorts of asides are reminders of Hoare's unique and idiosyncratic voice: part scholar, part mystic, part Quentin Crisp-ish raconteur. Hoare himself – whose real name is Patrick Moore – drifts continually in and out of the frame. He visits Ireland, for example, a place of ancestral significance: 'With my name, Patrick Kevin Moore, you'd think I would have worked out all this belonging long before.' But belonging, in Hoare's world, is never a given; identity is as fluid as the sea. He pops up, for example, at Blake's grave in Bunhill Fields, and along the Sussex coast where both Blake and Hoare have sought inspiration. But otherwise, his presence in the book remains spectral, a figure glimpsed between the waves. In Hoare's estimation, Blake 'could hardly keep up with himself'. The same could be said of this book, which often seems on the verge of overflowing, unable to remain confined within the boundaries of a single subject. It's not just a book about Blake: it's a Blakean book.
