Tony Calderbank blogs about South Sudan Theatre Company’s recent performance of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline in Juba Arabic at the Globe Theatre, how the world’s newest nation took the London stage by storm and shows that it is the poets and musicians who create the soul of a country.

The South Sudan Theatre Company performed Cymbeline at the Globe Theatre last week. Their Juba Arabic version, capturing the work of the great bard in feisty African idiom, delighted the audiences who attended the two performances.

The first, a matinee, drew over 400, mostly groundlings at five pounds a shot, gathered around the stage, chins resting on arms folded over the boards, looking up in awe at imposing Posthumus and delightful, tragic Innogen. The crowd took to them instantly, much to the relief of the South Sudanese Minister of Culture and his delegation, who had made the trip to support the troupe. The performance was wonderfully interactive with hisses and boos and laughter and cheers and handshakes and high fives. Raucous applause followed each scene.

The second was an evening show with over a thousand people in attendance; more formal an audience, the chair of the British Council among them, with perhaps a sharper critic’s eye. Nevertheless the spectators thrilled to see the vibrant performance, these beautiful black people, their energy, their charm, their wicked sense of humour, cleverly combining some solemn, formal classicism and adherence with touches of slapstick and irreverence; the warm glow of Africa on the South Bank amid the pigeons and the drizzle and the crisp London air.

Among the audience were members of the South Sudanese diaspora, the privileged few who could actually follow the play in its Juban mantle. ‘Oooooh’ and ‘eeeeeeh’ and ‘aaaaaah’ went the group of South Sudanese ladies come down from Birmingham, as they watched the tender exchange of love tokens, or Iachomo sneaking a damning peek up Innogen’s nightdress in the bedroom scene.

The story of Cymbeline, has relevance for the people of South Sudan: Rome, a powerful neighbour demanding tribute from Britain and threatening war when it is withheld, the young lovers whose feelings for one another are stronger than their loyalty to clan and country, the machinations of court politics and the ambition of the wicked Queen. Only when the poison stops can reconciliation take place.

Linguistically the play represents a landmark moment in the development of Juba Arabic. Hitherto forth regarded as a pigeon, a creole, an inferior variety of the great Semitic mother tongue, Joseph Abuk’s translation of the play is a literary achievement of enormous significance. Arabi Juba has proven itself capable of hosting a classic of English literature. Arabi Juba has come of age.

The adaptation included Bari funeral songs, the ceremonial ostrich feather headdress of the Lotuku kings atop Cymbeline’s head, Cornelius the physician transformed into kujur, the wise eccentric tribal shaman, and the scintillating Acholi dancing that followed the final scene to end the performance. But above all, everyone was wondering, where did poor ravaged South Sudan find actresses and actors of such calibre?

Despite all the development needs and the many millions of dollars pouring into health and food security, roads and dams and latrines, it is poets and musicians who create the soul of a country. These performances at the Globe have shown that a band of thespians from different linguistic and tribal backgrounds, with will and determination, can forge a nation’s identity.

All the world’s a stage, of course, and over the next few months the Globe stage will host players from around the world. How wonderful then that South Sudan, the world’s newest nation, should take her place so forcefully, and so enchant the theatre goers of London.

Mary Moore talks openly about growing up as the daughter of the celebrated artist and sculptor Henry Moore in an interview with the British Council‘s Director Visual Arts Andrea Rose.

Andrea Rose: We’re talking on the eve of a major exhibition of your father’s work opening at the Kremlin Museums, Moscow. You have particular connections to Russia, as your mother was Russian. Can you tell me something about her, and whether you think her background had any influence on the development of your father’s work?

Irina Radetzky, Mary Moore's mother, aged 4

Mary Moore: Well, my mother was an intensely private person. I was born when she was nearly 40, and it was only when I was about eight that I began to ask her any questions about her upbringing, her ‘Russian-ness’. Given the fact that she didn’t talk much about her background – in the same way that my father didn’t talk much about his experiences in the First World War – I think few of us knew much about her and still don’t. The bare facts are that her name was Irina Anatolia Radetzky, and that she was born in Kiev in March 1907. Her father was probably Russian, but from an Austrian, or Austro-Hungarian background; and her mother was largely Russian, with some Polish ancestors.

Soon after my mother was born, the family moved from Kiev to Moscow or St Petersburg, spending their summers in Yalta, and other resorts of the well-to-do. I do know that her mother – my maternal grandmother – had none of the usual maternal instincts at all. During the upheavals of the 1917 revolution, when my grandfather disappeared, my grandmother parked my mother with her own mother in Kiev. That grandmother died shortly afterwards, when Irina was about 11. She remembers burying her grandmother in a hole in the ground, wrapped in a sheet. You have to remember, it was a time of tremendous deprivation for everyone, but Irina was left without family – an extraordinary trauma. She ended up in a home for deaf and dumb children, where she was befriended by a teacher, but she would talk about having to scavenge for food, and living on the streets of Kiev with other children who similarly had lost everything. I suspect that when they were young lovers, and then newly married, my father learned a great deal about Irina and her family, but it wasn’t the habit of that generation to talk in public about one’s personal life, like many people coming out of the war.

AR: How did your mother get to England?

MM: Her mother, Barbara, was an extremely beautiful, vain woman, who went on to marry at least six – or possibly more – husbands. In 1919, she met a British officer, Captain Norman Bult-Francis, who was serving at the time with the French military mission in Southern Russia. Along with other White Russians, she was evacuated to Paris, and it was there, through the Polish Embassy, that the two of them managed to track Irina down. She didn’t have any papers to identify her, so they smuggled her out on a Polish passport. When she arrived in Paris, she had the distended belly of a starving child. I remember, when I was a child, my mother would often gorge on tins of Nestle’s condensed milk. I think it was the food they gave to starving children. I remember thinking she had a sort of need for it; and I sort of understood what was going on.

I would say [my mother] was essentially solitary and introverted, whereas my father was the opposite – an extrovert, he just loved people.’

AR: Did they end up living in Paris?

MM: My mother may have spent about two or three years in Paris, living with her mother and Norman Bult-Francis, who may or may not have married, before my mother was shipped off to live with his parents in England in about 1921 (Norman Bult-Francis absconded to America in 1923 and never returned. My grandmother ended up in the United States). The Bult-Francis family though provided a sort of haven for Irina. They had built up a hugely successful pharmaceutical business, which was eventually bought out by Glaxo, and Norman’s father, George Bult-Francis, became a sort of guardian to Irina from then on. He was a chemist, and had invented a patent ammonia, which became the basis of their huge fortune. When Irina arrived from Paris, they lived in Edwardian splendour in a large house outside Marlow. My mother would read Russian and French novels – she had a special liking for Guy de Maupassant – and had an enormous feeling for stories about the suffering of animals. There’s a famous Maupassant story about an old horse that’s retired after a lifetime’s hard work. The farmer, thinking he’s being kind, tethers the horse so that it can easily crop at the grass around it, but forgets to remove the tether. The horse dies of starvation after eating its own saddle. She had a huge natural feeling for animals and plants. And she was tremendously good with them, reviving birds that flew into our windows, and looking after cats, which we always had around the house. I would say she was essentially solitary and introverted, whereas my father was the opposite – an extrovert, he just loved people. And just to return to the story of my grandmother, she finally ended up in Paris after going through six husbands in America. My parents did support her, but I think my mother dreaded ever seeing her again – and didn’t because of the emotional cruelty she associated with her.

AR: So the Russian connection isn’t a positive thing for you?

MM: No, I think the Russianness is actually very positive for me, because I don’t think I connected my grandmother with Russianness at all. I’d say I got my Russianness from my mother and, you know, I studied Russian from the age of 12, I went to a school which taught Russian, and I went on to do Russian A-Levels and Russian university entrance. I was reading books that my mother knew well.

Henry and Irina on their wedding day, 1929

AR: Did you talk to your mother in Russian?

MM: I did talk to her in Russian, but it’s rather like being taught to drive by your parents, you think you know it all, and they think they know it all, and somehow you don’t learn all the bits you need to. But I was incredibly aware of her Russianness, and she would talk about Russian food, and we spoke about Russian dancing. I think she’d been to a dancing school in Russia before war broke out, and I’m sure I wouldn’t have studied Russian had it not been for my mother. It was through my mother that I was introduced to Chekhov and Lermontov, Tolstoy and Gogol, as well as the great Russian composers, and Diaghalev and the Russian Ballet. But you know, in the end, it was her particular personality that affected me – and our family – the most. She was very down-to-earth and straightforward and gave my father the most wonderful advice. She was like the moon and he was like the sun. They were the perfect pair – the perfect couple – who balanced each other out entirely. She had immense reserves of common sense, and was able to reign him in or give him a kind of reality that he needed. He always asked her opinion about art and everything else. She had trained at the Royal College of Art – which is where they met – and he really valued her opinion. She was known to her friends at Nitchka, and my father called her Ninotchka.

AR: You mentioned earlier your father’s service in the First World War and said that he didn’t talk about it much. But he was gassed at the age of 19, when he was on the Front Line in Northern France. You’ve said that you think that many of your father’s drawings of the Second World War, now considered some of the pre-eminent images of life under bombardment in London during that war, bear an imprint of his experience of the First World War. Can you say something more about that?

Moore with his platoon, the Civil Service Rifles, 1917

MM: I think both my parents, at formative periods of their own lives, lived through some of the crucial experiences that shaped the 20th century. My father in the trenches, my mother caught up in the chaos of revolution, both of them survivors. They probably shared an understanding of where the bottom line really was. I think my father’s shelter drawings of World War II – and actually, even when I look at family groups, plug into his seeing people dead and dying in the trenches, with their faces held in a rigor mortis, their mouths open. He fought at the battle of Cambrai. Of the 400 men in his regiment who went in, only 52 survived. Though he only spent two years in the army (he was invalided out with mustard-gas poisoning in 1919), it’s hard not to think that what he saw in the trenches had a profound effect on his later work.

Row of Sleepers, 1941

AR: And the shelter drawings?

MM: I think the shelter drawings are like a repetition of a deeply embedded memory. When you think about memorials to the war dead – both here and in Russia – they are such an enormously important part of our national consciousness, a public expression of it. Yet I think the shelter drawings are also memorials in their way, completely different from the very public memorials we’re familiar with, but perhaps prescient about death, rather than death-after-the-fact. What you see are people lying down together and sleeping in large groups – almost like a sleep of death – yet it’s such an intimate activity. What is remarkable about those drawings is that they make something intrinsically private and personal into something public, without sacrificing the sense of witnessing something precious and intimate. I feel the same is true about the family groups. I think that they have often been misunderstood. I think that people think that they are about looking to a brave new future, and that it’s about a family group and you know, ‘Hooray, we’ve left the war behind’. But I think, in a way, families are again an intimate grouping that only those within it really know and understand, and yet here they are again being made public, but with all their small gestures intact, so that they preserve their intimacy – and individuality. When you look at the little terracottas – the faces, every single gesture such as the way their hands are – they are actually very realistic, and they express pain, or resignation, or perseverance rather than expressionism.

Family Group, 1944

AR: When you were growing up, did you model for your father – for instance, as the child in his mother-and-child sculptures?

MM: Yes, I did. I think my mother modelled for my father, and I modelled, but not consciously.

AR: Are there particular works where you could say, these are my hands?

MM: Yes. There are particular works which are of me in the bath, or me doing my homework, or me sitting and reading, or in a dress or whatever, and there are other works where, clearly, the family group is the subject matter.

AR: I suppose, after the Second World War in particular, many artists felt that they couldn’t really depict intimacy or tenderness in any way – that humanity itself was a difficult thing to contemplate. Yet Henry Moore was able to give a sense of possibility to the family. Family values, as we say.

Girl doing Homework, 1973

MM: Well, he had a enormous interest in the formal properties of art, and how they could be drawn on to express things which might be difficult to say. In a way, I think he probably found it much more accessible than we do now. When you look at the little terracottas, or when he’s working towards the Madonna and Child from Northampton for example, or another Madonna and Child in a religious setting, he was always looking back at Bellini. When we went to Italy – which we did fairly frequently – we would always go and look at Bellini: what he particularly loved about Bellini’s Mother and Child was the relationship of the large head to the small head, and the hands, the small hands and the large hands and the relationships of those four things together, and I think he’s thinking about that a lot in the family groups in a formal way as well as a realistic way. And I think I am in those groupings. He did lots of drawings of me as a baby with my mother, on a mat, and in my mother’s arms, and there are many, many drawings of me as a tiny baby and he did those kind of drawings again when my son Gus was born. He suddenly started to do again these very intimate, personal works.

Madonna and Child 1943-44

AR: Moore’s work isn’t often thought of as autobiographical. He was famously called ‘the ideal representative of the human race on Mars’ (*1). Were you conscious when you were growing up of his being a very successful artist?

MM: Oh yes, yes. Our house was open to the public all the time. I was tremendously aware, as was my mother, that we were a kind of machine.

AR: Were you on view?

MM: We were on view as well, though not overtly. For instance, from the moment that we all had breakfast together and he went off to the studio, we were a family on display. There are some well-known pictures taken for Picture Post (*2) when I was about three or two, with my father in his studio.

Henry and Mary Moore in the Top Studio at Perry Green, 1945

AR: And how did your father, who famously never accepted honours – never became Sir Henry Moore, or Lord Henry Moore – but always stood for integrity, and retained a down-to-earth plainness throughout his life – deal with this huge public acclaim?

MM: I think my mother was enormously important to him in that, and he would often acknowledge how essential she was to him in keeping him focused. But I think you’ll agree that there’s a certain type of Yorkshire character which is by nature modest, and down-to-earth. He didn’t change the way he lived despite his increasing fame. He didn’t go out and buy expensive cars or expensive things, although he used to say to my mother, ‘Darling, go to Fortnum & Mason and buy anything you want’ (*3). He loved the idea that he could get her anything, but in fact they lived incredibly modestly.

He didn’t change the way he lived despite his increasing fame.’

AR: They did have some beautiful works of art though. You mentioned Bellini earlier, but I remember seeing a painting by Courbet in the house. What other art did he admire?

MM: Well, you asked before whether I knew that he was famous or not, and I sort of knew it, and knew that we kept an open house and it didn’t matter whether it was students who were coming and knocking on the door at four o’clock on a Sunday afternoon or someone else coming to ask if they could look around the house, because my father would always say yes, and quite often took them round himself. Antony Gormley (*4) remembers arriving unannounced and being shown around, as does Anthony Caro (*5). When I was very small, the house was largely furnished with his own textiles. We didn’t have a great deal of other art around then, apart from some African pieces, and a few of his own works. When I was about twelve, we had a new wing built onto the house, which had one large sitting room, so he could see visitors with all the things he loved around him. He was able then to buy the kind of works of art he’d always loved. He had this game of listing his top ten artists, and many of those eventually made their way into his collection. Courbet was on the list, and Rodin, and Cézanne. He had a great love of Seurat’s drawings, and studied and copied them quite intently. He would also buy the work of artists associated with the work of artists he especially loved, Gustave Dore, for example – for the way they used light and shade to make solid form.

AR: What about his interests in Mexican and Mayan art? Did you travel with him to Mexico?

Henry Moore in his studio at 11a Parkhill Road, London, 1930

MM: I wish I had. I remember when he went to Mexico, it was 1953. I was very young and my mother and I both stayed at home. I remember his coming back – he’d been to Brazil too, where he’d represented Britain at the 2nd São Paulo Bienal – and was full of enthusiasm for the extraordinary racial diversity of Brazil. He said that’s how the whole world would eventually be. He’d met Oscar Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro, who was then building fantastic futuristic buildings, and who tried to get my father to stay out there and work with him. Mexico was a country he’d longed to visit. Three years earlier, he’d written to an architect friend there, Mathias Goeritz, saying ‘Mexico is the one country in the world which I have wanted to visit most… Pre-Colombian Mexican sculpture has been the most important single influence in my own sculpture – I should love to see it in its own environment.’

[My mother] had a stillness about her which probably did influence my father’s development of the female figure.’

Whenever we went to Paris or London, we always visited either the Musée de l’homme, where we’d end up in the African section, or the British Museum, where we’d end up in the Mexican or Mayan section, and looked at the things that most interested him. My mother had a fabulous eye too. When they used to live in Hampstead (*6), she used to pick up pieces in the local markets – pieces of African art, or early English pottery in particular. They both used to pick up things like that from before I was born, and we know from his carvings of the reclining woman how greatly he was interested in the Chac-mool sculptures of Pre-Colombian America (*7), specially the way in which the reclining figure is open rather than closed.

AR: Do you think that the female figures could also have been influenced by your mother too? They have a sort of distilled calmness to them. Or was that entirely the result of the formal investigations he was making?

Woman in armchair, 1930

MM: I think she might have been like that, because when I knew her she was rather like a cat – very quiet, rather solitary, and sometimes rather withdrawn. When you see photos of her at openings such as the great show in Florence, at the Forte di Belvedere in 1972, you can see my father sitting there amongst the dignitaries and rows of press, with lots of other people sitting near him, and my mother is sitting behind, very still and apart and quiet. When she was young, and he used her as his model, she was a woman of wonderfully-rounded proportions. He did used to say that he’d married her for her shoulders! But then she’d been starved as a child, and imbibed so much Nestle’s milk afterwards – it’s true, she used to say this – that she seemed to swell up. She was quite petite, but also quite monumental. If you look at photos of her, she’s quite a big girl – she could have knocked my father out with a single whack from her fist – but basically she had a stillness about her which probably did influence my father’s development of the female figure.

Henry and Irina Moore with Giovanni Carandente during the Moore exhibition, Forte di Belvedere, Florence, Italy, 1972

AR: Do you remember her talking to your father about his work?

MM: Yes she talked to him a lot about his work. Before I was born, when they were living in London, they would occasionally get out all his drawings and go through them, with my mother making him tear up any she didn’t think good enough. Sometimes, he’d look back and say ‘My God, I wish we hadn’t torn that up.’ I think it’s something they did regularly, and he fundamentally trusted her understanding of form, and of art, and of himself. I’m sure he didn’t actually tear up things he valued, but he often asked her advice and opinion. I’m sure they discussed things much more when they were younger and before I was born – you know, a young couple working together, because she was his back-up team. Tony Caro refers to her as his enormous support. She looked after the house, she looked after everything else, and he was able to do what he was doing and establish a routine.

Henry and Irina in their studio at 11a Parkhill Road, London, 1930

I think there were many people for whom my father was actually a father-figure’

AR: And do you remember the younger sculptors, such as Tony Caro, who were his assistants, and pupils?

MM: Yes, yes. I remember them very well and I often see Tony, and Tony remembers my father with such warmth, as does Sheila (*8). Tony calls my father his father-in-sculpture, and I think the film-maker John Read (*9) sort of adopted my father as his father. I think there were many people for whom my father was actually a father-figure, and actually he was a father and mother to me; my mother really didn’t know very much about how to be a mother because she’d never had a mother of her own.

AR: You grew up in Much Hadham, didn’t you, in the Hertfordshire countryside?

MM: Yes.

Hoglands, Perry Green, 1960

AR: It was an idyllic landscape, wasn’t it, with gentle slopes, rather like your father’s female figures?

MM: Actually, it’s quite flat and boring. He said he wanted flat and boring because he didn’t want anything that imposed itself on, or distracted him from, his inner vision.

AR: I thought he’d chosen a particular landscape to live in because it had a fertility, a gentleness, that rather reflected the nature of his sculpture?

Henry Moore cycling through the gardens at Perry Green, 1960

MM: No, no, no, he chose it because he had friends such as the poet Walter de la Mare (*10), who lived in the village, and other people he knew who lived nearby. It was fairly close to London, and when a house came up for sale, he liked it precisely because it was so unimposing, so undramatic. The whole point was that, when he went into his little studio, or his drawing studio, or his maquette studio, there was no-one to disturb him in there, and no-one came in except me and my mother. I used to be in those studios for hours as a child.

AR: Doing what?

MM: Just making little animals beside him, or making a little angel, you know: making something on a little table.

AR: Have they survived?

MM: I have got some of them still, wonderfully painted kind of religious pieces, you know, very good. I don’t know where they are, but you know he’d stop and I’d ask him to make me a pigeon, or some other sort of animal. I think that the studio was really like going inside his head. What he had in front of him was a vocabulary of forms that he drew on from inside his head.

AR: So, did he develop that vocabulary before he started to live in Much Hadham? The studio is still full of bones, flints, and stones, and things that come out of the earth, and give a sense of his drawing material out from the earth beneath him.

MM: Yes. I didn’t see his previous studios at any of the other cottages that he had, or the studio in London, but we have photos of the studios in London – the carving studios. It was when he started to make maquettes, even when he started to do the little family groups, that he started to build up this vocabulary. You can see this vocabulary being explored in his drawings, sketch book and writings. It’s an intellectually driven process.

Henry Moore in his maquette studio, Perry Green, circa 1969

AR: Where did it come from, this sense of the forms from the earth? From Yorkshire, where he grew up and his father was a miner?

MM: It was a vocabulary that he invented. When we talk about him drawing a natural form, actually he’d take a stone in there, but it wasn’t the stone itself, it was that the stone reflected something in his head that he would add onto in some way, I think.

He says it in a letter quite clearly, that “the eye sees something that is in the mind already.”‘

AR: So, you don’t think the objects he collected in his studios are objects he observed in order to create something new?

MM: No. No. I don’t think that at all. He was building up a vocabulary of form, and if we were going for a walk and saw a stone, he’d be interested in it because it mirrored something already in his mind. He says it in a letter quite clearly, that ‘the eye sees something that is in the mind already’. It isn’t the object that gives rise to the idea, but the other way round. I mean, I’m not saying that there weren’t surprises, but it was a vocabulary that he’d developed and created and it was there, you could just look around. We were talking about the shelter drawings earlier, and I think it’s similar – he had this immense ability, which I think all great artists have, of being able to tap into a subliminal meaning that already exists within himself. It’s almost a dream meaning, a part of themselves which isn’t overtly conscious, but you’re connecting with something that connects to something larger. He seemed able to connect with the submerged part of himself. I think all great artists have this, or great composers; people who really change our cultural vocabulary.

AR: When you were growing up, were you conscious that your father had actually invented a new language for physical form; as the Greeks did in their time, so your father found a new way of expressing the human figure for the 20th century?

MM: I think I must have subconsciously, because I decided that I couldn’t be an artist unless I could be one of those artists who really changed everything. But I think the ideas about the vocabulary and the way that he accessed it have come now that I’m older. I don’t think I would have understood, or at least been able to articulate it, when I was 20 or even 30.

Reclining Figure in the garden of Moore's home at Burcroft, Kent, 1939

AR: Did you ever think about becoming an artist?

MM: Well, it’s the one thing I probably should have been. I was really good at drawing, and I’m very good at seeing, I have a very strongly developed visual intelligence.

AR: Did you see your father’s work critically at all?

MM: Yes I did and I do, absolutely, and I can tell you why some things are better than others.

AR: So, how do you feel about the way that the recent exhibition at Tate Britain (*11) claims to see your father’s work in a new light with the emphasis very much on the carvings rather than the later work?

MM: I think that the emphasis on the carvings was great and a revelation for me. It was a revelation because when I was growing up, my father wasn’t making stone carvings except in Italy and he was making very large stone carvings there. He was making the elmwood carvings in the studio. I remember he made those two enormous wonderful elmwood carvings, and I knew that he could carve, I knew him as a carver, but I knew him as a carver on a monumental scale. What I found utterly thrilling in the Tate show was seeing the very early carvings, which by necessity are made the size of the block of stone that he could afford to buy or that he wished to use because it said something to him, and I saw many carvings that I had never seen before. They revealed an immense understanding of scale, so that it didn’t matter if the work was the size of a maquette, or the size that fitted the little turntable that I used to work on. He understood the size it needed to be, and I think in some of those carvings they have an energy, and a dynamic that means that even a small work can hold an enormous space.

AR: Have you any idea how you expect an exhibition in Russia to look? And to Russians who’ve not seen his work before?

MM: Well, if it’s able to show something of his anti-heroic feeling for people, and for the individuality of things, that will be fascinating.

AR: Could his early work even be linked somehow to the great experiments in Russian modernism, since your father was part of the modernist movement, albeit in a very different vein?

MM: Yes, absolutely. You know that a studio my father had was also used by Mondrian too, whom he knew and admired.

AR: What was your father’s attitude to abstraction?

MM: I didn’t ask him that.

AR: What would you think?

MM: Okay, let me tell you. He loved Rothko. He thought that Rothko had the most immense sculpturality and monumentality. He loved Rothko, and he’s written about Rothko. And I can remember when Rothko, and Motherwell and Barnett Newman all came to tea, and it was utterly thrilling and I went off and painted an enormous Jackson Pollock in the pigsty. He did love abstraction but we never had a conversation about it, he did love it.

AR: Because he pulled away from it, didn’t he, in his later work?

MM: I think some of the later work is very abstract and that it’s not popular today for that reason. But I think what you say about the connections with Russia is exciting, and I’m enormously looking forward to seeing [the exhibition at Kremlin Museums], and seeing the response to it.

AR: It almost comes full circle, Mary, with your Russian grandmother whom we last heard of in Paris. Did you ever meet her?

MM: Oh yes, I did. But I just wanted to preface it with a comment about the very many Russian visitors we used to have in the 1960s and 1970s. The house was always open to them, and musicians such as Rostropovich, and poets such as Yevtushenko and Vosnesensky were frequent visitors when they were in England. They tended to take over the sitting room and sit and declaim. I do indeed feel that there was a strong Russian thread that ran through my childhood, and of course coloured my father’s attitude to things.

AR: And your grandmother?

MM: It’s a classic story of the uprooted émigré. She was living in a hotel in Paris. I’ve no idea how old she was as she’d scratched out the date of her birth in her passport and written in the age she wanted to be. She wanted to move to Spain, and the only way of getting her there was if one of my father’s assistants – those big, strong, sculptural assistants – took her. My mother refused to meet her, so I went to Paris with Michel Muller (*12), and found an eccentric old woman with a penchant for tortoises. She had one in her handbag, covered up with a cushion, (and I had one as a child which lived in my mother’s flower beds). It was curiously reminiscent of a sculpture my father once made called ‘Slow Tortoise’. I never saw her again, but it was a reckoning of sorts. Two ends of a very disparate story that resulted in an extraordinarily successful, settled existence which, in part through my mother, resulted in some of the most moving sculptures to have been produced in the 20th century.

Slow form: Tortoise, 1962

Footnotes

1. Kenneth Clark 1903-1983. The most eminent British art historian of the post-war period. Appointed Director of the National Gallery at the age of 30, and author and presenter of the hugely successful book and subsequent TV series entitled ‘Civilisation’, first broadcast by the BBC in 1969, and a model of how high culture could be made accessible to large audiences.

2. Picture Post: Prominent photojournalist magazine published in the UK between 1938- 1957

3. Fortnum & Mason: One of the oldest and most prestigious department stores in London, established in l707 and a byword for luxury and high cost.

4. Antony Gormley: British sculptor born 1950. Well-known for his figures cast from lead, and especially for ‘Angel of the North’, a monumental figure with outspread wings at the entrance to Newcastle-Gateshead that has become the emblem of the North East of England.

5.Anthony Caro: Distinguised British sculptor born in 1924, and one of the key figures in the development of contemporary sculpture for over half a century. His abstract works from the 1960s in steel are recognised as some of the most adventurous and experimental works of the post-war period.

6. Hampstead: a North London district, associated during the 1930s in particular with the avant-garde movement in the UK. In 1933, a group called Unit 1 was founded, and included Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Paul Nash, Edward Wadsworth, Ben Nicholson, and the influential art critic Herbert Read. During the inter-war period, and based in Hampstead, this group prosecuted an interest in abstraction and the new movements coming out of Europe.

7. Chac-mool: a pre-Columbian, meso-American form of stone sculpture, usually of a reclining figure with its base along the ground. Henry Moore first encountered sculpture of this type in the collections of the British Museum.

8. Sheila Girling: painter and wife of Anthony Caro (see 5)

9. John Read 1923-2011: documentary film-maker, and son of Herbert Read (see 7). In 1960, Read initiated an important series of films for the BBC entitled ‘The Artist Speaks’, and went on to direct a number of important films on Henry Moore, which capture the sculptor speaking and at work with unsurpassed naturalness.

10. Walter de la Mare 1873-1956: Much-loved English poet and short-story writer, whose fame largely rests on his poems for children and young people, especially ‘The Listeners’.

11. Tate Britain: Henry Moore exhibition, February – August 2010, curated by Chris Stephens.

12. Michel Muller: sculpture assistant to Henry Moore.

Text copyright: Mary Moore and Andrea Rose

All images reproduced by permission of The Henry Moore Foundation

The exhibition ‘Henry Moore and the Classic Canon of Modern Sculpture’ is open at the Kremlin Museums, Moscow, between 21 February 2012 and 10 May 2012. Art works are loaned by the Henry Moore Foundation, the British Council, Tate and UK private collections.

Find out more about our work in Russia

Read our country director’s blog about the exhibition: Henry Moore at Kremlin Museums: The reciprocity of art and international relations

In the second and final blog from his week with the Active Citizens programme in Kenya, Tim Hartley explains how community football schemes in Wales are helping to inspire young volunteers in Kenya, to start similar cross-community teams and tournaments and how the aim of ‘football for all’ is being achieved.

The British Council has been working with so called ‘Active Citizens’ in Kenya to help them build social cohesion. The idea is that by promoting football, environmental and social projects, anything in fact which can improve people’s lives, we can improve relations between communities and even bring in some much needed money.

A group of Kenyans came to Britain in 2009 to visit social and community projects. They were impressed with the way football is used to build confidence and improve the prospects of young people.

They saw Cardiff City’s Football in the Community team developing young players and coaches at schools and through the club itself. Many of these boys and girls had been written off by the system, but by using something they are all interested in, football, they are growing educationally and are now taking an active part in their communities.

Following that visit, the Cardiff team was invited back to Kenya to continue the development of the young volunteers. There were visits to the ministries of Justice and Sport as well as the Kenyan Football Federation so that everyone from the top down understood what we were trying to do. 25 Active Citizens from all over Kenya made their way to Nairobi to be put through their paces both on and off the pitch.

Upper Hill High School sits about half a mile up the potholed road from the British High Commission overlooking downtown Nairobi. It’s a ramshackle collection of single story buildings, all painted a dull yellow.

It prides itself on its academic and footballing excellence and the walls of the cramped library, where the British Council project took place, were crammed with well thumbed textbooks. African short stories backed onto the English and Maths books with a smaller section for Kiswahili. ‘Ants Observed’ lay back to back rather bizarrely with ‘The story of the Rhodesia and Nyasaland.’

The Active Citizens at Upper Hill were given a week of practical coaching sessions and were shown how to organise clubs and arrange tournaments. Football is an international language and together we discussed how we can use it to bridge religious and ethnic divisions in our society. Every one there had a story to tell.

‘Call me Scaar. Yes, that’s my nickname. Scaar,’ says Oscar Omondi Onyango, ‘it’s what they call me back home in the Nyanza Province.’ Softly spoken, with thin rimmed glasses and sporting a smart pink shirt he looks every inch a rising academic or IT consultant.

But Scaar is a community mobiliser who has witnessed for years how the families of Nyakach District in Nyanza have suffered from cattle rustling. Young men from the Kalenjin tribe cross the river Miriu and make off with the cattle of the Luo people. Tit for tat raids have left many dead and the homes of suspects have been torched. It had to stop.

So Scaar helped organise a cross community football festival to ‘sensitise’ young men as he puts it to the consequences of their actions. ‘Of course the politicians care,’ he says with a smile. ‘They sponsor football trophies and competitions and even buy kits for the winning team. But it is their name on the trophy and it’s all organised by their families. The day after polling, they are gone and are hardly heard of again. It’s the same all over Kenya.’

Scaar is looking for a longer lasting fix and he listened attentively to Mizan Rahman from the Welsh Football Trust talk about the multicultural league he had set up. Religious observance, driving taxis or working late nights in restaurants means most young men from ethnic backgrounds simply cannot play football on Fridays or Saturday afternoons. So Miz arranged for Pakistani, Somali and other teams to play in a league not bound by traditional kick-off times.

It has proved a big success and rather than ghettoising these players, Cardiff’s Hamadryad FC team, which is made up of Yemenis, and the Swansea All Stars, which comes from the Bangladeshi community, both now play in the regular Sunday League.

The violence in Kenya escalates at election time and farmers on both sides of the river Miriu are dreading the elections. But Scaar is convinced he can emulate the success of the South Wales multicultural league. ‘If we can get the village elders to support this and speak to the young men during the tournament,’ he says, ‘we can try to get a real dialogue going between these two tribes.’

The day’s training over, we flew south to Mombasa and drove for forty five minutes to Diani. This is where most tourists visiting Kenya hit the beach in 5 star luxury. The brilliant white Indian Ocean beaches are studded with tasteful holiday complexes, complete with landscaped coconut tree groves and water features – all are gated communities of course.

We went to Coast where we sat in the spartan Diani community centre set back a little from the dusty main road. We met with Mary, Jean and Bakari, all Active Citizens who had visited Wales in 2009 and who were now putting into practise what they had learnt to try to strengthen their communities.

Mary was encouraging Muslim women who had never worked to seek some form of employment. Part-time work making jewellery at home from beads and polished coconut shells to sell to tourists was particularly popular. It brought in much needed cash and posed no threat to their husbands’ standing.

Jane was recruiting young men to collect leaves in paper bags, store them for a year and then sell the compost locally. These micro businesses are both environmentally friendly and offer some hope to the young men of Diani.

Bakari meanwhile had organised a cross community football tournament ahead of last year’s referendum on Kenya’s new constitution. The Digo tribe is in the majority here, but being a cosmopolitan area there are many conflicting traditions and communities, each vying for influence and power.

Bakari had managed to get twenty teams from different areas along the coastal strip to play on the threadbare local ground. Speeches between the games were made by local elders and politicians urging youths not to fight. It may have been coincidence, but the referendum passed without any serious incident.

The commitment of the young Kenyans was demonstrated by Daniel from Rongo in western Kenya. He has been coaching football for many years but disaster struck in a junior game. His neighbour’s son broke his leg in a heavy tackle. It was bad break and required the bones to be reset. Daniel took the boy to hospital and looked after him but his mother then demanded 750,000 Kenyan shillings (about £5,000) to pay the hospital bills. With no insurance things were looking bleak and Daniel had to sell part of his family’s land in order to pay the bill. ‘I thought of giving up the football, really I did, but what else would I do?’ he says.

Back in Nairobi, the Active Citizens were busy drawing up their individual action plans. Daniel had frowned a little at Caroline refereeing of our friendly international match. But he thought about it for a day or two and realised he had neglected the girls’ side of things. His plan was going to include setting up a women’s team in Rongo when he got home. Other participants were gearing up to work regionally, across tribal boundaries rather than solely in their own communities. They also appointed a national co-ordinator to support the programme across the whole of Kenya.

There are a number of forthcoming elections in Kenya – parliamentary as well as the big one: the presidential election. There will be little to choose between the candidates and the election is not fought on ideological grounds. But individual politicians can wield influence in different regions with promises of new roads and bridges or targeted investment. And that has the potential to set one area against another as allegations of favouritism to one community or tribe are thrown around.

The arguments have started already with the government itself demanding the election be put back until the end of the year. This time voters will have to produce biometric identity cards before casting their votes, in an attempt to ensure a free and fair election.

Will the Kenyan Active Citizens and their belief in the power of ‘Football for All’ be able to influence anything on the ground and ensure some semblance of normality, whatever the final result? Who knows? But if the election were fought on the basis of commitment and goodwill, then Stabua, Scaar, Daniel or indeed any one of the team of Active Citizens would get my vote.

Find out more about the Active Citizens programme

Tim Hartley is Chair of the Cardiff City Supporters Trust and led the British Council ‘Football for All’ project in Kenya.

In the first of two blogs, Tim Hartley writes about his week working with football coaches and community leaders from across Kenya and how the Active Citizens programme is helping to rebuild lives damaged by the inter-community and political violence of the past few years.

Never mind the sectarian rivalry of Celtic versus Rangers or the sporting enmity across the Pennines between Manchester and Leeds, at election time in Kenya, supporting the wrong football team can cost you your life.

Stabua Khatija Yusuf lives in Nairobi’s slum district. The Kibera slum is home to some 200,000 men, women and children. No one is quite sure how many. From the distance it forms a patchwork of reddish-brown shacks, all topped with rusting corrugated iron roofs. They say that if you’re not from Kibera then don’t go in there without a local by your side, as you will never find your way out of the maze of connecting streets.

Stabua combines her university studies with coaching Anyany Sisters women’s football team. Many of the girls who play for Anyany are victims of rape and domestic sexual abuse. Some of the rapes, according to Stabua, were politically motivated and carried out during the inter-community violence that claimed hundreds of lives following Kenya’s disputed presidential election in 2007.

Stabua doesn’t actually like football, but she started the girls’ team during the school holidays to try to help the rape victims, some of whom are as young as 12, regain some self respect. ‘Of course the facilities are poor,’ she says, ‘we don’t even have a full kit half the time, but the girls love playing and it really has made a difference to them.’

Unlike the other people I talked to in Kenya she needed some encouragement to speak to me. She said very little about herself. Stabua is 21. I didn’t press her.

Stabua’s was just one of many stories I heard during a week working with football coaches and community leaders from across Kenya. Our goal was to help build social cohesion and try to prevent inter-community and political violence, in the run up to next year’s presidential election. Like everyone else in Kenya, Stabua and the Anyany Sisters are the victims of their own country’s recent history.

In December 2007 President Mwai Kibaki was declared the winner of the presidential election. Kibaki’s opponent, Raila Odinga, cried foul, saying that the election was rigged.

Opposition supporters went on the rampage across the country, most notably in Odinga’s homeland of Nyanza Province, and the slums of Nairobi. Police shot a number of demonstrators and targeted ethnic violence escalated. It peaked with the killing of 30 unarmed civilians in a church on New Year’s Day.

With the country on the verge of civil war the two candidates formed a coalition government and vowed to do everything in their power to maintain peace.

Tim Hartley is Chair of the Cardiff City Supporters Trust and led the British Council ‘Football for All’ project in Kenya.

Find out more about the Active Citizens programme

Active Citizens: Football for peace part 2 will be published shortly

With China emerging as the fastest growing economy in the world, and with a high level people-to-people agreement just decided between the UK and China, mutual language skills are all the more important. The winning students from the HSBC Mandarin Speaking Competition 2012 blog about their experiences of visiting China and how their language learning has opened a world of new possibilities.

The British Council is working in China on developing the quality of English teaching and in reaching millions of English learners direct through digital platforms. But we also encourage Mandarin learning in the UK.

There are over 70 native Mandarin speakers currently working in UK schools thanks to our joint arrangement with the Hanban, China’s language learning authority. And we work in partnership with HSBC to reward excellence in Mandarin learning through the HSBC Mandarin speaking competition, which rewards nine hard working learners for their prowess in speaking, by giving them a chance to practice for real in Beijing.

Thursday 5 April
In early 2012 I was part of a group of nine students from around the UK, who won a trip to Beijing in the British Council HSBC Mandarin Speaking Competition. For me and one other student in the group, this was our first time abroad.

Adam

Friday 6 April
After getting off the plane, we got our first look of Beijing on the bus to BeiDa FuZhong. What surprised me the most was how organised everything was. Groups of identical buildings with (seemingly) millions of apartments crammed into them, sheltered the people of the country with the world’s biggest population.

It was quite overwhelming at the start and the school was no exception. With ‘only’ 2500 students and 300 teachers, BeiDa FuZhong was about four times the size of my school in England!

After settling down into our rooms, we were taken to the canteen to have our lunch, followed by a meeting about the events taking place during our trip. We then travelled to the Silk Market- which one might expect to be a dainty, quirky series of shops – to be met by some of the world’s most hardcore sellers.

The ridiculously high starting prices (which for a lot of the time had a minimum of four digits) were expertly bargained down to a more reasonable price; although rewarding, it was a truly exhausting task!

By the end of the day, we were all glad to return to our rooms and the next 12 hours were spent sleeping on beds that were a more comfortable distance above the ground than where had slept on our journey to China.

Krupa

Saturday 7 April 2012
To me, the whole idea of a trip to China evolved around meeting and speaking with Chinese people, to improve my skills of the language. When I found out we would be spending a day with students at the school we were staying at, needless to say I was delighted.

The students were simply wonderful! We were paired up with students from BeiDa FuZhong – this was great, as it allowed us to interact with people from a different culture, and as we were visiting the Beijing Capital Museum, they provided excellent tour guides!

My partner was lovely. She knew so much about virtually everything I was interested in. We also both enjoyed the language barrier – she was desperate to improve her English (which was already at a magnificent standard) and I was dying to improve my Mandarin. Together I think we made an excellent team!

One of my most memorable moments was when at lunchtime some of the BDFZ students began to teach us tai chi. We really surprised some of the other diners in the Museum canteen I think, but by the end of lunch we had (nearly) perfected a full-blown karate routine!

Some of the other activities we did included mask-painting, and a visit to the spectacular National Theatre, and partaking in a traditional Chinese meal. In Chinese culture, it is polite to fill your neighbour’s plate for them, and in the centre of the table is a massive glass circle that you can turn to get the dish you want. Our third day in China was definitely a massive success!

Ellie

Sunday 8 April 2012
We were all extremely excited to go and see the world famous Olympic birds nest stadium, and we weren’t disappointed. As usual as throughout the week the weather was dry and sunny, and, accompanied by our tour guide we walked around and through the huge stadium, which was being prepared for the concert of a Taiwanese singer. It was amazing! I have seen it on television and it was amazing to have been in the same place as the world class athletes.

Secondly we went to the Water Cube, which has been half converted into a water park which looked so fun that I wish I brought my swimming trunks.

After the Olympic site we went to the drum tower and experienced the wonderful views from the top, and also watched an awesome drum performance. We then got a chance to view traditional Chinese houses, and for the first time I felt like I was seeing the real China. The one you never got to see on the Olympic Games.

After an eventful rickshaw ride around the local area and making new friends with some Americans I met in the adjacent rickshaw we settled down for a performance of full on traditional Beijing Opera. It actually wasn’t that bad! The actors were very acrobatic and we were never low on Green Tea thanks to the attentive waitresses. Overall I thought today was fantastic.

Josh

Wednesday 11 April
Today, we visited the Great Wall. As Mao Ze Dong famously said, ‘If you haven’t been to the Great Wall, you are not a real man’. We can all say we are real men now.

We got up early, for the hour-and-a-half long drive to the Wall, and passing the time mostly by singing songs and rapping terribly (some better than others). We were also told a little about the history of the Great Wall, which had initially been built around 2000 years ago to discourage Mongol invasions.

I had never visited this famous area, which apparently boasted the highest altitude and best views. Although I was personally all for walking up, unfortunately this would have restricted our time on the Wall itself, so we took a handy cable-car up. The views were even better than described, aided by the good weather, and the sheer scale of the Wall itself was majestic.

When we were back at the school, we performed our 10 minute scene from the Chinese Classic ‘Journey to the West’, which was the piece we won the competition with. I don’t think any of us had realised how large the audience would be, so we were quite nervous, especially as we were performing last. However, apparently we were very good, many students laughed (with us, I think); and the improvised fight scene went down well, I didn’t break my back jumping over someone else, which is always a bonus.

I also found it interesting listening to the other students’ performances. I feel after the competition my level of Chinese has improved to the extent I can understand most of what the students said in the performances (apart from the comedy one, in which they spoke quite fast). I managed to practice speaking a lot with my friend, David, who I will definitely stay in contact with, we got on very well, and I definitely feel that I am more easily understood than I was earlier in the week when I speak in Mandarin to the students.

Jeroen

Find out more about the HSBC Mandarin Speaking Competition and register your interest for 2012/13