The Chimes - my Charles Dickens 12in12

The Chimes (1844), Charles Dickens

You've probably heard of A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens; it's among his most famous works, and one of the most adapted. So even if you haven't read it, you probably know what happens. Just in case you don't, here's the basic story...in poor cartoon form.



This isn't a chance for me to write about A Christmas Carol – instead I'm going to write about Dickens' second Christmas story: the lesser-known The Chimes. Dickens wrote five short stories for the festive period, between 1843 and 1848, with A Christmas Carol being only the first. The Chimes is the second (1844), and although they aren't connected, it has some features in common with A Christmas Carol.

There are no ghosts, such a significant part of A Christmas Carol – and haven't ghosts always been an important part of Christmas? But even though it isn't the dead returning to life, The Chimes does involve some supernatural interference in the lives of mortals, and if that's not Christmas-y, I don't know what is. Rather like the earlier book, Dickens uses supernatural intervention to alter the attitudes of humans who've got the wrong idea about something. You can call it a cheap trick if you like, a failure to find sufficient psychological reason for his characters' actions, I'm saying nothing.

Our central character in The Chimes, Trotty Veck, unlike Carol's Scrooge, is poor and fairly sympathetic. He's a porter, who hangs around outside a church waiting for work carrying things – anything, really, but mostly boxes and messages. His two comforts while waiting and being bashed about by the wind are the friendly chimes of the bells and the thought that his daughter will be bringing his lunch later.

Already – nothing much has happened yet – Dickens has made his sympathies pretty clear. Here's a working-class, widower father struggling to claw together enough money for himself and his daughter, in contrast with the money-hoarding, bachelor Scrooge of Carol. What follows is hardly a hymn to the working classes, nor an outright attack on those wealthier than them, but instead something rather more subtle. More subtle and, of course, more supernatural.

The first two chapters (or Quarters, as Dickens names them) read as a satire of an upper-middle class that believes it knows both the working class and what is good for that class. The paternalistic (and, by modern standards, patronising) MP declares himself a 'Friend and Father of the Poor', while agreeing a harsh jail sentence for a poor man caught stealing bread for his infant daughter. The Alderman lists the things he is in favour of 'putting down', including the 'cant in vogue about Starvation'. He doesn't want to 'put down' starvation, of course, but the nonsense that the poor are anywhere near starving. These are powerful men, keen to show that they understand the sort of people they are dealing with, and have the power/ability to solve the problems of their lives. Alderman Cute is even at pains to appear to speak to the poor in their own language, or at least in a vernacular to which he has special access among the privileged classes. The MP (a baronet) criticises Trotty for owing a small sum at his local shop – it being bad form to owe debts into the New Year – while he goes about paying off his own rather larger debts. Both men make themselves increasingly ridiculous with their self-importance (accompanied by a failure to make a beneficial difference to any poor person's life).

In fact, 'the poor' take a bit of a battering in The Chimes, with Trotty left bewildered and confused by fast-talking rich men, and persuaded (by them) of his and his class' inferiority. He spends most of the book being told off by somebody, poor bloke. Here's something that I suspect is going to crop up fairly often in this 12in12 project; Dickens' support for the working classes and social reform, using his writing as his most powerful weapon.

Dickens' final two chapters/Quarters begin with that Christmas supernatural intervention, when the spirits of the church bells appear to Trotty and also tell him off. Trotty's failing is that he's lost faith in humanity and questioned Nature (by wondering what the point was in life, if people were so hopeless as he has been led to believe).

The lesson he has learnt – a little different to Scrooge's 'I should enjoy Christmas' – is:

'I know that our inheritance is held in store for us by Time. I know there is a sea of Time to rise one day, before which all who wrong us or oppress us will be swept away like leaves. I see it, on the flow! I know we must trust and hope, and neither doubt ourselves, nor doubt the good in one another.'

I can't help finding this message problematic. As he says this, Trotty is seeing his daughter standing by the Thames, ready to throw herself and/or her infant child into the murky waters and end their suffering. Trotty has been forced to watch this by the Spirits of the Chimes, to teach him a lesson for questioning Nature. But the lesson he's learnt seems to be much the same as the message handed down by Alderman Cute and his set: listen to us, don't question us and do as we instruct you. The Chimes are giving Trotty an injunction to keep quiet and accept the difficulties life throws at him, to acquiesce in his own oppression. That they have forced him, an old man, to his knees, weeping, to say this while seeing the suffering of his daughter and granddaughter is far more brutal than anything Alderman Cute says or does.

It's the poor taking a battering again; Trotty is as guilty of these wrongs as Alderman Cute and his set – in fact, he only fell into them because of Alderman Cute in the first place. And it's no wonder Trotty is so easily swayed, when he comes up against Baronets telling him that they will do the thinking for him. By rights, the Spirits of the Chimes should be going after the Aldermen and MPs with their warnings to stop harkening back to a supposed Golden Age.

Perhaps this serves to show us the wickedness of human actions in the story – they aren't as bad as the spirits' actions, but they could still be modified. That's what the MPs, Baronets, judges and Aldermen should be taking from Dickens' writing: modify your actions, and be more forgiving of the poor among us.

But Dickens' world was a world favouring the wealthy, the influential, over the hard-pressed, ill-educated and underfed. Can we really say that the world two hundred years later is much better?

12in12 - My Charles Dickens Birthday Project

Charles Dickens' books have been adapted so often we don't need to read them any more. Discuss.

Next month, February 2012, is a big birthday for Charles Dickens. How big? Two hundred. Two centuries since the birth of Charles Dickens. He won't be around for it, of course; he's been dead for most of those two hundred years. So we'll have celebrate the day without him (again). It's February 7th, since you ask.



Dickens has spent nearly two hundred years as one of Britain's foremost writers, Well, one of the English-speaking world's foremost writers, certainly of those last two hundred years. That's quite an achievement, and he's left a wide-ranging legacy, second only really to Shakespeare in the English language. What makes it more impressive is that Dickens wrote in so many genres, not just the novels he's famous for: short stories, travel writing, journalism, plays, poetry and general non-fiction.

His work has been adapted and reworked over and over again, working its way into the collective consciousness of the English-speaking world, again rather like Shakespeare. Dickens' Christmas stories have come to define the Victorian Christmas for those of us too young to remember the reality, made the festive season the popular holiday it now is, and still strongly influences our modern perception of Christmas. Adaptations of A Christmas Carol abound toward the end of every year, and Scrooge has come to be a widely-recognised term for someone like Dickens' infamous character.

Even before the BBC started rummaging through the Dickensian back catalogue for their current season of work devoted to Charles (or Boz, as he sometimes preferred), he was frequently the subject of adaptations. Not only have Dickens' books been adapted, but he himself often appears for public readings (as the man himself did while still alive) – the most famous perhaps being Simon Callow's portrayal alongside Christopher Eccleston in the new Doctor Who.

In fact, Dickens seems to have been adapted so often that it seems we don't really need to read his books any more. I've certainly seen A Christmas Carol on stage enough times that I know the story and characters as well as if I'd read it. And that's the curse of the writer of 'classics', of members of the canon of 'great' writers; people don't actually read their books any more. As Mark Twain quoted a Professor Winchester: a classic is something everybody wants to have read, but nobody wants to read. Mind you, I'm always wary of Mark Twain quotes; they're prone to being greatly exaggerated.

I thought I'd celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of Dickens' birth by actually reading some of these books that made his name and legacy. My birthday present to him will be to read twelve of Dickens' books in a year (I'm aiming for one in each month, of course). That's roughly eleven more Dickens books than I've managed to read in my life to date (1988-2011). For someone with an English Literature degree, I consider that a pretty poor effort.



To kick off my Dickensian effort (see what I mean? Dickens is sufficiently well-established that we have an adjective for him and his work which immediately conjours up a certain type of character and location, usually something Victorian and in London), I'll be starting with a Christmas short story: The Chimes.

So, welcome to my Dickensian sort-of extravaganza (can an extravaganza take place over twelve months? is that over doing it?). I call it 12in12, and I hope you stick around until the (bitter?) end.

So far I've covered:
January - The Chimes
February - Hard Times: For These Hard Times
March - Bleak House
April - The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club
May - American Notes for General Circulation(coming soon...)

Thanks to Will Clayton for the birthday cake image.

The other images depict Dickens at a reading of his own, and Fringe Festival stalwart Pip Utton playing Dickens.

Then we've got the cover of the Complete Dickens Kindle edition, 99p from Amazon.

Protesting the Proms: Israel's Philharmonic Orchestra and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign

London's Royal Albert Hall, home of the BBC Proms, scene of the protest

Last night, for the first time in its 117-year history, BBC Radio 3 stopped its Royal Albert Hall broadcast of a Proms concert because of a politically-motivated protest. Just like that. Mid-performance (Bruch's Violin Concerto, since you ask), taken off the air.

The broadcast started at 7:30pm, which is nothing unusual. Outside the Royal Albert Hall, pro-Palestinian protesters had been vying with pro-Israeli protesters in a shouting match for some hours. Meanwhile, inside, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Zubin Mehta, was about to begin their performance. But every time their Indian-born conductor stood ready for a new movement of Bruch's work, the IPO found they couldn't start – protesters inside the hall were making too much noise. The BBC broadcast was taken off-air twice, and radio listeners didn't get to the end of the concert.

The BBC Proms are hardly the place you'd expect to get heckling and disruption so serious it causes an early end to radio broadcasting. This is supposed to be a civilised event, attended by civilised, cultured people. That makes the reasons behind this protest all the more worthy of examination.

A few years ago I was in Birmingham when the REP Theatre staged Behzti (Dishonour), a play featuring rape in a Sikh temple. Local Sikhs found this distressing, understandably, and a couple of hundred of them protested outside the theatre, eventually resulting in the play's run being cut short. But that – and several other disrupted performances that come to mind – had some pretty controversial subject matter, which is what protesters were complaining about. Bruch's Violin Concerto contains nothing especially objectionable; the issue this time was the orchestra itself.

The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra is proud of its status as one of the leading cultural ambassadors of the state of Israel, as well as happily recruiting non-Jews to its ranks. Before the 1967 Six-Day War (the one where Israel grabbed a whole load of land while fighting a range of Arab nations), that was fine; Israel was the under-dog surrounded by powerful adversaries, still a young nation defending its right to existence.

But since 1967 and the increasing Israeli expansion into its newly-occupied territories (the West Bank, Gaza), with Israel's reluctance to give up control of the contested Golan Heights, it's rather harder to sympathise with Israel. These days, they're the ones risking international condemnation through their treatment of different ethnic groups, as Palestinian Arabs did in the decades before Israel's declaration of independence in 1948. Since occupying regions such as the West Bank, Israel has been expanding its settlements (of, at best, dubious legal standing) and getting involved in conflicts that do nothing for stability in a troubled region (conflicts that aren't really about Israeli self-defence any more).

In a statement on their website, the Palestine Solidarity Campaign – responsible for the protests outside last night's Proms – argue that the IPO has 'lent itself to the official Israeli propaganda campaign titled Brand Israel, which aims to divert attention from Israel's violations of international law and Palestinian rights to its artistic and scientific achievements'. I'm all for promoting the scientific and artistic achievements of Israel (or any other group of people, for that matter), but the IPO's alignment with the Israeli Defence Force is a worrying example of artists getting (perhaps too?) closely involved in politics. I grant you, art and politics can't and shouldn't be entirely separated, but artists lose their ability (maybe even their right) to comment on politics when they get too closely involved. The IPO is quite right to promote Israel's artistic achievements internationally, but performing morale-boosting concerts for the troops (as the IPO has been doing since 1942) implies a condoning of the actions of those troops. Much as I'd like to keep this performance of Bruch's Violin Concerto separate from Israel's encroachment of the West Bank, the IPO itself has made that difficult with their IDF concerts. The Palestinian protest last night has at least been successful in bringing the connection between the two to light.

When I say the Proms is an event for cultured, civilised people, it's worth pointing out that those protesting against the performance aren't themselves uncultured. Far from it; their in-hall protest included what one audience member described as 'singing to the tune of Beethoven's Ode to Joy' – Beethoven's Ninth Symphony features the words of Schiller's poem, To Joy, in its fourth movement. While I can't help thinking that disrupting a classical music concert inside the hall itself runs the risk of making your protest look churlish (dare I say philistine?), using Beethoven's Ninth – with its overarching theme of brotherly love and the constant struggle to improve the human condition – redeems that cause immeasurably.

Thanks to Boeke, for the image of the Royal Albert Hall on Flickr.

Some advice for journalists in the post-News of the World world

Some advice to journalists in the post-News of the World world; To Hack or not to Hack

Dear Journalists,

so, phone-hacking, eh? News of the World, huh? Well, that all blew up in their faces a bit. Or someone's faces anyway, I gather the actual culprits had already left (of course they had, of course). But, look, there are lessons to be learned here – just listen to Ed Miliband bang on about the lessons for everyone to learn when he was on Newsnight on Friday. And if Miliband Jnr's spotted them...

Where journalists went wrong here was in their choice of target (aside from the phone-hacking thing being illegal at the best of times). I mean, we hardly cared about an actor or Deputy Prime Minister getting hacked, but you go for a missing schoolgirl's phone and the nation's up in arms. It may be a cliché, but we do seem to love an underdog in this country. Target the powerful and we'll let you off. Target the vulnerable and we'll bite your hand off...or at least write strongly worded letters to rival newspapers.

Thing is, there are three types of people whose stories sell newspapers (and yep, because newspapers – especially tabloids – are driven by what we'll pay to read, it's kind of the public's fault too, a bit). I turn to our old friend William Shakespeare to explain them.

“Some are born to publicity. Some achieve publicity, and some have publicity thrust upon them.”

To take that one at a time...

“Some are born to publicity”
For example, the Royal Family. It's not their fault (honest) and they can't help it (really); if your mum is the head of state, your every move will be of interest to someone. These people have no choice about the public spotlight, and we can only hope that through a lifetime's exposure to it, they'll learn to handle it (there's still time for Prince Philip, fingers crossed).
These people probably have stories worth telling, so go ahead and get them (legally), but tread carefully; they are influential and know powerful people...not for nothing has that family been 'in charge' for centuries.

“Some achieve publicity”
For example, actors or politicians. It is very much their fault that they're in the limelight; they've sought it. They're either performers (of some kind or another) who've actively pursued public interest for the sake of their careers, or they're politicians who've gone out of their way to get noticed and elected to public office. Once in public office or on stage/screen/radio/print, they are of course interesting to the public.
Reporting stories about those in public may well serve the public good, and those should be encouraged. If you've a story about a celebrity, great, go for it, they'll probably help you out because they think any publicity is good publicity (unless they try to gag you, in which case you know you're into something).

“Some have publicity thrust upon them”
For example, people caught up in national tragedies, disasters or victims of crime. These are people like the families bereaved after the July 7th terror attacks. They've got a story, certainly, but if they don't want to tell it you, tough. They haven't gone looking for publicity, it's come to find them (along with something horrible in their lives), and the last thing they need is some journalist poking around their inboxes.
Stories about these people are fair enough, but don't be insensitive about them.

Thing is, the British public – as journalists can't have failed to notice over the last few years – always need a hate figure, some group of people to target all our latent anger and aggression at. Maybe it's because we're so reserved and/or apathetic most of the time and we need to vent a bit. Not so long ago, it was bankers for screwing up the economy. Before that it was MPs for...well, various things – cash for honours, fiddling their expenses, generally getting things wrong etc etc.

This week, it's your turn. Take it on the chin. Have a look at Shakespeare's contribution above, then go and dig some dirt on people worth doing it over. Or find another hate figure...we'll lap up a good hate figure.

Tour de France 2011 Stage Eight

2011 Tour De France Stage Seven

Incendies [film review]

There are two stories running through Denis Villeneuve's award-winning French-Canadian film, Incendies. But, as is pointed out in a slightly strained mathematical analogy, one plus one sometimes equals one.

Based on a earlier play, Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies takes its central characters, twins Jeanne and Simon Marwan (Mélissa Désormaeux-Poulin and Maxim Gaudette), from Canada to Lebanon, following a quest set by their mother's Will in 2009. She, Nawal Marwan (Lubna Azabal - also seen in the BBC's Occupation) has insisted her grave remains unmarked until they find the father and brother whose existence they've only just discovered.

Meanwhile – as it were – the young Nawal, in 1970s Lebanon, is living through the upheaval and religious warfare rampant in the Middle East. Her brother kills her lover, before her newborn son is taken away for adoption. Azabal gives us a spirited heroine, contrasting with the shellshocked woman we've already seen her become in contemporary Canada at the shattering moment when those two stories collide. It's a powerful and moving story of ugly actions across a divided nation. Seriously, this is a period of history well worth reading up on in light of Incendies.

The twins uncover more and more of their mother's story, and inevitably discover more about their own origins than they're comfortable with. There's a human drive for knowledge, a curiosity in the face of a conundrum which keeps pushing the twins inexorably onwards. They don't know it, but it's a quest for self-knowledge as much as it is a quest for their father and brother. The tight plotting and human thirst for knowledge in Incendies wouldn't be out of place in a Greek tragedy, and here it lends Incendies a throbbing ache in its heart; humans can be so curious they'll find things they don't want to know.

In fact, there's definitely something Oedipal about that missing brother, taken as he is just after having his ankle tattooed. The tattoo is one marker allowing us to follow his life in snapshots through the same war that his mother survives. It's a war that hardens him, and Incendies doesn't shy away from the acts of brutality committed, though always leaving just enough unseen and unsaid for the blanks to be filled in. That said, the order of events is masterfully handled in a way to make Greek tragedians spin in their graves, but to deliver a full-on shock to the modern audience.

A film that starts as powerfully as Incendies could build to something angry, something bereft of hope. The first five minutes leave the viewer fixed firmly in the gaze of a young boy (with a tattooed ankle) whose hair is being shaved by soldiers conscripting an orphanage. His eyes appeal for outside help even while defiance shines from them – how like his mother, later imprisoned and raped by the militia.


But what finally comes out of Incendies is forgiveness and the unbreakable love of family. Incendies teaches us that humanity can somehow overcome the ugliness it creates. Or at least that a family may do so.

BBC Question Time and Victoria Wood with Chris Evans

BBC Question Time from Huddersfield on BBC One (23rd June 2011)

As always, David Dimbley's high-brow panel show depends upon its guests and audience questions. This week the panel included Tory backbencher John Redwood, economist-turned-Labour MP Rachel Reeves, Lib Dem Transport Minister Norman Baker, David Mitchell and – increasingly inexplicably – Fern Britton. Oh, and Dimbleby's lurid green tie, always something to watch for in itself. Redwood got off to a shaky start, but once into his stride became a remarkably calm and patient panellist in an increasingly heated debate (Thatcher got some praise, which in the north was never going to get a positive response). Reeves had a habit of addressing her answers directly to one person – her gaze unwavering and unblinking, terrifyingly like an automaton. But the three politicians kept up a lively and interesting debate through the hour, but Mitchell and Britton...well, someone must have thought it was going to be a good idea for them to appear on BBC Question Time. Comedians on this show usually just throw out digs at politicians and do a bit of low-level rabble-rousing, but Mitchell – who could be expected to make sensible points – was lost without a script and toed a disappointingly careful line. Britton, meanwhile, worried that she sounded 'wishy-washy'. She was right to worry.

Victoria Wood and Chris Evans on Radio 2 (24th June 2011)

This should have been great. Chris Evans interviewing Victoria Wood (CBE) on his Radio 2 Breakfast Show really should have been great. Wood's funny, and Evans is experienced as an interviewer usually able to get on well with guests. But today, he sounded out of his depth, despite his usual boyish enthusiasm for life and his guest. Wood sounded like she didn't want to be there, and was talking to someone who just didn't get her. “Why would you start writing a play?” Evans yapped, joyously. “Well, first of all, because someone asks you to. I don't think you would otherwise” Wood replied (woodenly – sorry for the pun). He asked if she had been the first to write funny songs, leading Wood to patiently explain about a few people who'd been doing the same thing earlier (like the wonderful Jake Thackray). They ended awkwardly with a discussion about how she treated interviewers, but the worst moment was when Evans asked if she'd ever work with Richard Stilgoe. She told him that he'd not understood her at all if he thought she'd enjoy doing that...

I leave you with Victoria Wood and Jake Thackray: The Ballad of Barry and Freda and Pass Milord the Rooster Juice.

Artistic Director's Note to Merge 2011

They say that a band's second album is always the hardest, the 'difficult second album', so I like to think of Merge 2011 as the 'difficult second Festival'. Once we've got through that, we should be ready to take over the world and be as all-conquering as [insert your favourite band's name here].

Last year's Festival involved just over one hundred students as participants, and this year we've been even more ambitious. The Festival is split across several host venues and now happens over four days. It's all been designed to allow any audience member to see just about everything on offer. You could also look at our lovely little website, www.mergearts.org.uk.

There's a lot of stuff, so have a look around. We've got theatre, jazz, classical music, poetry, dance, performance art, workshops, burlesque, visual art...and it's all about showing off Hull's artistic scene.

Like any good band leader, I should thank the band. The Festival needs several people working hard on it through the year, and those people are listed below. I'm grateful to all of them. Once again, the University's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences has funded the Festival, and we're again grateful for their generosity in doing so.

The Merge band has also relied on our host venues for somewhere to put our second album; this year they are the Albemarle Music Centre, Fruit and the Ringside. We'd like to thank staff at each for their hard work and patience over the last year.

For Merge 2011 we experimented with some run-up events called EarlyMerge, which were hosted by the Haworth Arms, Pave, Hull's History Centre and the Ringside, while workshops have been hosted by Hull College – so we extend our thanks to them too.

Finally, can I thank you for coming along? I hope you find at least one performance or artwork that really makes you think and shows that Hull has artistic talent to be proud of. That would be a good legacy for this year's Festival.

Once again, thank you for coming – have a look around, see some shows, and I hope to see you for next year's Festival.

Richard T. Watson, Artistic Director

PS. Enjoy the album!

The Merge Arts Festival is:

Artistic Director: Richard T. Watson

Finance Director/Co-Producer: Alison Best

Technical Directors: Jon Cole & Adam Foley

Publicity Director: Rachael Abbey

Education Director: Zoe Hughes

Designer: Will Langdale

With special thanks to:

Professor Valerie Sanders and the University of Hull's Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Sarah-Jane Dickenson and staff at the University's Department of Music and Drama

Chris Maynard and staff at the Albemarle Music Centre

Dean Shakespeare and staff at Fruit

Darren Bunting, Anna Fox and staff at the Ringside

Arike Oke and staff at the Hull History Centre

Staff at the Haworth Arms and Pave bar

Jamie McGarry

Lucy Thurlow, Hayley Nikolay and staff at Hull College

Simon Bedford and Hoipolloi Theatre

Keira Walker

Janet Pearce and Marianne Lewsley-Stier

Jonno Witts

Elizabeth Coombs

The Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Mapping The City in Hull (starting at Hull Truck)

I'm walking down a street, holding a book. The book's about the paradoxes of logic, and the street is one I've walked along several times, but it's never looked like this before. It's never sparked these particular thoughts before.

That's the beauty of SlungLow's Mapping The City project for the city of Hull. It takes spaces within the city and transforms them, largely in the minds of the spectators, into wholly different spaces. Twenty minutes later, those same people are in the same space, and it means something new again. Mapping The City presents its audience with three connected stories, dotted around Hull, and the first lays the groundwork well by introducing the idea of memories ambushing a man in the street. Think of all those times that something seen in the street has triggered an old memory, one with no relevance to the rest of your day. SlungLow's Mapping The City is full of moments like these, moments when the place you're in, the 'here', influences thought and when thought influences and changes your 'here'.

A small audience troops around Hull's streets, marked out by the earphones clamped on their heads and relaying the speech of the actors they follow. Occasionally, down side streets they catch glimpses of someone carrying an oil lantern, or of a suited man watching, waiting, biding his time. In the company of a guiding figure, the intrepid audience is mapping the city of Hull in their own minds. We criss-cross over the same few streets, in Hull's old fruit market area, each time investing what we see with our special meaning. As one guide tells us, the tools we apply to people-watching ('trainspotting for the soul') are from our own experiences.

Those people with the lanterns should serve as a reminder that our journey around Hull's streets, mapping that city, are part of something much larger, something difficult to understand from our own limited perspective. The second of the three scripts that make up Mapping The City stresses this point when its professorial guide tells his audience about the human habit of thinking of ourselves as being at the centre of a universe that is infinitely complex – it's helpful in small things, like walking, but much less helpful for understanding how the universe actually works.

The same is true of SlungLow's sprawling production. Though it rarely strays from roughly the same geographical area (Hull's old fruit market and marina) it's a huge logistical challenge, and one that's impossible to fully grasp from an audience perspective. SlungLow make it all look so fiendishly easy. Little moments happen that seem almost accidental – a girl passes a bus at just the right moment – but have been planned well in advance, the whole coincidence stage-managed. There is much more going on than meets the eye. Smoothly, ushers display signs advising us to remove our headphones and 'enter the vehicle', which turns out to be a line of taxis, parked silently waiting and perfectly subtle in their transportation of the audience to the soup caravan. (Yes, there's a soup caravan – isn't that brilliant?)

Whether travelling on foot, by bus or in a fleet of taxis, the audience's attention is almost entirely centred on the performers whose words come direct to their ears. Sometimes that's to the detriment of things like balance and walking on cobblestones becomes especially tricky, because you aren't really looking where you're going. Instead, audiences almost blindly follow the voices, sometimes down the same street as the last performer, but a street this time endowed with an entirely different set of meanings.

Bemused local Hullians watch, taking photos and videos, as a united group walks past, headphones on, focus intently on the couple arguing ahead of them. The audience becomes as worthy of spectator interest as the actors, and sometimes we get more attention. Mapping The City really is theatre for the city, and Hull doesn't know how lucky it is to have this going on.

SlungLow have also been disarmingly open about the process of setting up Mapping The City, and their conversion of some of Hull's warehouse space. See their blog, photos and tweets on @SlungLow.