Deborah Winter & Barney Griffiths plus others, Straeon Gwaun, Peppers, Fishguard – Wednesday 31st January 2024.
“No story lives unless someone wants to listen.” J.K. Rowling
Everyone in the capacity audience gathered at the lovely Peppers restaurant cum gallery in Fishguard for the storytelling evening hosted by Deborah Winter was most certainly listening. So much so that you could have heard a stitch drop.
And they were probably living every moment of the lives of the characters in the stories. Loving them, maybe disliking some of them, but always enjoying the colourful narratives as the tales unfolded.
Deborah Winter is a renowned story teller whose award winning show at the Beyond The Border Festival in 2023 received a thoroughly deserved standing ovation. She lives near Fishguard and has established well attended storytelling nights at Peppers. Deborah’s the most welcoming host, greeting all attendees with a broad smile and a big hug, making them feel at ease, introducing strangers to one another, and bribing journalists with mighty fine coffee.
The evening began with a glorious tune from Barney. A regular collaborator with Deborah, Barney is also a member of early music ensemble La Volta and acoustic folk/country band Shanty Le Hara.
The remainder of the first half of the show was taken up with three ‘floor’ tellers – Jesse, Christine, and Elliot – each of whom had an intriguing tale to tell, often with a twist. Jesse was the most animated, mixing a capella singing with captivating narrative. Christine told an unusual Inuit story that surprised me with a sudden audience participation segment. And Elliot enlivened his performance by playing his, what, his Tibetan steel drum? Barney accompanied him with her understated flourishes.
After the interval, part of which I spent in Peppers’ toilet admiring the art on the walls, none of it defaced, a testament to the sophistication of the venue’s clientele or the banalness of one or two of the paintings, Deborah took centre stage to deliver three stories accompanied by Barney, and the whole bountiful beatitudeness went up a notch.
Not the sort of notch you find on Ikea shelving which, when you move the plastic support up a slot or two, it collapses leaving you and grannies’ best china broken on the floor, no, it was the sort of notch that accepts sturdy mahogany shelf supports in Borges’ Library of Babel, loaded as it is with all the tomes, and indeed all the time, in the universe, a library where books on flower pressing linger randomly in the section labelled ‘shirts’.
Deborah is a confident, clever, passionate, soulful and humorous storyteller. Enthralling and moving tales drawn from the Irish and Syrian traditions were embellished with Deborah’s words, carefully crafted on one hand, wildly improvised on the other, and we were drawn into their magical worlds where humanity, tattered and battered as an old man’s coat or a fish out of water might be, was celebrated along with a love of nature, the essential bittersweet joy of being, with all its paradoxes and unintentional (sic) juxtapositions and just the wonderful strangeness of it all. Life, eh? It’s what you make it.
That’s the truth or had Deborah bagged an unexpected item and put it into my coffee? Sure the dregs in my espresso bongo looked a lot like Alan Turing scoring a bullseye but I’d need a cryptanalyst or a medium to sort that out. Harrumph, crystal balls to fortune tellers, Deborah Winter dispelled any discontent and put a spring in my step. Now my shoes ‘n’ socks are wet but my soul is uplifted.
“Poetry remembers that it was an oral art before it was a written art.” Jorge Luis Borges
bbskone 