I am absolutely bewitched by Luton Henge.
My first ever day on set was in Luton, at Luton Hoo. Somehow I ended up in the thick of it, thanks to Wendy and Stephen. I was in a neighbouring Winnebago to one of my heroes, Richard E Grant, who had enough grace to spend the day with me and keep me company. I met Sir John Mills that day as well. “Your first movie? It’s my hundredth!” “I hope one day to be able to tell someone the same thing.” Ha.
That was, as you can imagine, a magical day, perhaps made more magical by my latterday understanding : it wouldn’t just become an everyday thing for me. Back then I assumed this was the new normal.
I’ve rarely been to Luton since. I was there today and I’ll be there on Sunday. But… the henge is a very different affair to the hoo.
The Hoo is a stately home for hire. The Henge is a new thing, a piece of magic on the land. Built from passion and need. A stone circle thoughtfully constructed in ancient ways by modern minds. Parks and dirt bike tracks intersecting. Public land but inhabited. Room for play, room for ritual. A border space, that old word liminal, the shore where one world brushes against another. This is where we need to make art, where we have to make art. The border spaces are the only fertile spaces left once everything at the extremes has become toxic.
I don’t know who spearheaded this henge but I see what it is. Volunteers with a building and a site that they can use to teach workshops to the local kids. One of them wants to teach kids plumbing. “There hasn’t been much sign up for that,” I’m told when I ask, because for me I know what a free workshop about plumbing could have saved me over the years, let alone what it could have earned me on top of that. It’s a skill that pays more than law these days. But the kids of Luton are yet to catch on to that.
It is a powerful initiative, beautifully executed in a strong site. We are helping make it flow by embodying Cheryl’s script there for just one night on Sunday.
It’s gorgeous. Arid at the moment as this summer of drought has been proving. But the thistles are flowering. The long grass is straw now, and at least there’s been no fire. We will do a show on Sunday about connection with the natural world and ourselves. We will keep making art while the world burns around us. We all need to try. It’s the only way we can justify ourselves as a species, making beauty. Otherwise we really are just barbarians.
