Kate Mosse - Blog

Monday, 16 January 2012

Happy Birthday CFT

Regular visitors to the website will know that, as a Cicestrian born and bred, I'm writing the book to celebrate the fiftieth birthday of Chichester Festival Theatre. Since CFT first opened its doors, in July 1962, with Laurence Olivier as the first Artistic Director, almost every great actor and actress, director and designer has come to Sussex to work in the dazzling Powell and Moya amphitheatre set in parkland in the north of the cathedral city of Chichester.

There have been glory days and dog days: times when nothing went right and the theatre came closing to shutting its doors for good; and times when everything has fallen perfectly into place. These are good times! Going into 2012, the anniversary year, the theatre has been named by The Stage as Regional Theatre of the Year 2011 and the current directors, Artistic Director Jonathan Church and Executive Director Alan Finch, named as some of the most influential people in British theatre. Three CFT productions -Bingo with Patrick Stewart, Singin' in the Rain with Adam Cooper and Sweeney Todd with Michael Ball and Imelda Staunton – are about to transfer into London.

One of the joys of researching and writing the book has been to be given a glimpse behind the scenes as to how theatre works. How reputations are so quickly made, and even more quickly lost, how the sure-fire productions sometimes turn out to be anything but, and how the least likely hits often come out of nowhere. It's been an exciting – if salutatory – reminder that in theatre, as in books, it is often that slippery thing called luck – in timing, in casting, in context, in fashion – that makes the difference between a modest success and a triumph.

But for me, in the end, the joy of theatre – both on the stage and on the page – is that it is always a relationship between the audience and the actors, the text and the times. The fact that it is real people, delivering real lines on a stage, eight show a week, that makes every performance is unique.

Chichester Festival Theatre at Fifty (published 1 May) is available to preorder onwww.unbound.co.uk

Monday, 9 January 2012

A l'avenir

Welcome back, to us all - to our desks, offices, computers, places of work, wherever they might be. A working Christmas and New Year, saw me slipping away for a little sun to warm my bones while I finished the draft of CITADEL. In my hotel room in Taba Heights, on the Sinai Peniusula, I immediately rearranged the furniture to turn the bedroom into a home-from-home office. A view, above my computer screen, of hibiscus, palm trees alive with sparrows and white ring bulbuls and pied wagtails. Beyond, sand and the Red Sea and the rocky outline of Saudi Arabia opposite. It was an inspiring place to work and to decide which sections of the novel were properly finished, and which needed a little more work. This is partly because of the sheer volume of words (180,000 on average) and partly because it's often only when you know your characters really well, you know your plot really well, that the little extra twists and turns that transform a scene become clear.

A View of the Red Sea from my Desk (© Jack Penny 2012)

I did however find time to visit St Catherine's Monastery, the oldest monastical institution in the world. A centre of Greek Orthodoxy, the monastery has been in continuous use since the sixth century CE. Built in the era of Justininan (527 - 565 CE), in the heart of the Sinai Desert, its survival is due in part to the fact that men of power - from the Prophet Mohammed in the 7th century CE to Napoleon in the early 19th century - took the monastery under their protection. Within the walls, there is a Mosque as well as the Basilica and the murals are testament to the Moslem, Christian and Ottoman protectors of the site.

It is said to be the site of the Burning Bush and the Golden Calf, mysterious marks on the rock wall of the desert to the east of the monastery. Now, only the Church itself, the gardens and a small exhibition are open to the public. The famous charnel house - which holds the skulls of the brother monks who lived out their lives within the monastery walls for generations, centuries - is closed, as are the Bell Tower, the old Refectory and the ancient library. A religious treasure trove, it is second in significance only to the library of the Vatican. It holds some 3000 ancient texts in Greek, Arabic, Syriac, Georgian, Armenian, Coptic, Ethiopian, Slavonic and Latin. The most important volume is the Codex Syriacus, dating from the 5th century CE, which is the the oldest translation of the Gospels, discovered in 1892. There are also some 5000 books, many of them produced in the first decades after the invention of printing.

But for me, the highlight of the visit, was the Icon Gallery. There, in the peace and quiet away from the crowds, I saw painted screens, triptychs, artefacts dating back as far as the early Byzantine Period. Most wonderful of all, though, was looking at a fourth century Codex, the papyrus thin beneath the glass. When you read CITADEL, you will understand why seeing this beautiful and ancient object - on 31st December 2011 - meant so much.

Monday, 19 December 2011

Bonnes Fêtes

For writers, the times when you are actually working – i.e. researching and writing, rather than promoting or publishing – can be rather isolating. Asked all the time 'if you've finished yet' or 'do you have something in the pipeline', there is a little visible evidence of how productive (or not!) you might have been. Without a book out there, it's easy to feel vanished, as if you have done nothing much.

For me, 2011 has been one of those years. Nothing went much to plan. Unable to work on Citadel for a few months, for reasons beyond my control, it meant that I didn't have a book published this year and the publication date (revised now to September 2012) felt an odd, rather hollow sort of a day. But, of course, plenty of other projects did come to fruition. I wrote Endpapers and saw it performed at the Bush Theatre and Westminster Abbey in October. I produced a first draft of a larger play commission, Dodger, which I'll be working on in the spring. I contributed several short stories to anthologies and magazines, including a piece about the Yew Trees of Kingley Vale in Why Willows Weep, published in aid of the Woodland Trust, and 'The Lending Library', a ghost story to be published in The Library Book, a commissioned book from Profile in aid of National Libraries Day on 4th February 2012. Also, work got underway on the anniversary book I'm publishing with Unbound for for Chichester Festival Theatre. And the Orange Prize and the libraries campaigning and the filming of Labyrinth and ...

And yet ...

In the end, a year without a novel published – when I had expected, hoped it to be done – feels a rather half hearted sort of a year, regardless of anything else that did or didn't happen. And it's a good reminder of why any of us who write for a living, actually do so. Because however much fun (or not) the publicity tours can be, the signings in bookshops, the visits to literary festivals or book salons, it always comes back to the novelist, working quietly, alone, in her room. The satisfaction in being a writer is, simply, that. In the writing itself. There is a real pleasure in the solitude, the living almost entirely in one's head (though obviously emerging periodically to be with family, friends, going to the supermarket or walking the dog). It is a luxury to be able to give ones' attention totally, and absolutely, to one single project.

So although it's now Christmas and publishing shuts down for a few weeks, I shall be spending the festive season at my desk, working on the last few chapters of Citadel. Getting it ready to deliver to my publishers in the New Year. And that, really will be a wonderful Christmas ....

Best Wishes for Christmas and a Happy New Year. See you all again in 2012 ....

Kate