Storm Cloud: Observations of the Sky

A review of the performance at the Tanya Moiseiwitsch Playhouse, Sheffield 19.06.2024

Photograph by Becky Payne

STORM WARNING

I am intrigued to think what sparked Tom Payne’s interest in Ruskin’s late lectures and the publication in 1884 of The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century.  Payne is a lecturer and course leader in Acting and Performance at Sheffield Hallam University… but obscure and prolix, if somehow prescient, Ruskin tracts can’t be on the students’ reading list.  His one-man show is on one level straightforward.  He gives us the text word for word of Ruskin’s lecture as published but now in a thought provoking multimedia, multilayered production combining contemporary performance, visuals and sound design. 

And appropriately Ruskin is woven into the cultural fabric of the city where Payne professes.

From the decade before giving his talk, and in intermittent visits, Ruskin must have stood around the upper Walkley suburb of Sheffield and gazed across to the east of the town and the pall rising from heavy industry.  Perhaps this called to mind dragon slaying and the meaning he imputed to the fearsome image of Jason from Turner’s Liber Studiorum - just one of the artefacts he could place in his idealistic St George’s Museum founded in a cottage in Walkley in 1875.  His aim was morally and artistically to stimulate the skilled metal workers of Sheffield and provide a riposte in his idiosyncratic and labyrinthine way to the de-humanisation resulting from heavy industry. 

Payne taking this seminal text and performing it first in Sheffield correlates it to a place where interaction of environment and city life is very much part of the City’s existential history.  From branches of beech strewn on molten metal in rolling mills to fig trees along the Don as workers chucked the stones from fruit after a shift break, to pioneering the Clean Air Act in the 1950s and more recently courting huge local controversy over proposed and partially implemented tree-felling in the city streets -  Sheffield nonetheless remains the greenest of big cities compared to a Manchester, a Birmingham or a Leeds.

But as “ur-Sheffield” as Payne’s production is, it is of course part of a bigger inquisition into the climate emergency and this is undoubtedly what triggered the idea of the performance.  The text is now placed in a bigger debate - a prompt to create a multivalent, multidisciplinary arts -led project and one set to  take as yet unpredictable forms, much like an evolving cumulus which is both intellectual and action orientated. ( Home | Storm-Cloud ) The original Storm Cloud pronouncement from Ruskin was both analytical and a call to arms of sorts.

The genius of Payne’s performance is that in no way is it historically revivalist. He is not playing at being Ruskin - blue cravat, frock coat etc. or even, by 1884 at 65, a figure prematurely aged and already looking more like how we might imagine a King Lear.  

Payne instead wears a silky cloud-scape patterned jacket which sees projected text and visuals meld him to a shifting diorama of images reinforcing perhaps the impression of the natural world playing out in the manufactured.  The delivery is as if it were a contemporary lecture, happening in the here and now and with immediacy but delivered with a natural cadence. He doesn’t baulk in any way at what might feel pompous on the page but is actually vivid and felt even in the moments of abstruse flights in Ruskin’s prose.  The text is in no way edited but the structure of what Ruskin is setting out to do is given clarity by the recovery of this as a performative piece with the cumulative sections of what he establishes and turns to next, along with asides, side swipes at other contemporary “authorities” (climate deniers? in modern parlance).  In the characteristic peripeteia which must have been a hallmark of Ruskin’s delivery, digression serves to bring us back with even greater force to what is being asserted, like a twisting vine of observations around a sturdy growing branch of argument.

Survivor of two mental collapses in the late 1870s and in 1881, Ruskin was coming out of his Brantwood retreat to address the London Institution and issue this broadside based on the observation of phenomena.  He talked of having “bottled skies” since his early days  in the same way as his father had bottled sherry. Could it be however that the coiner of the term “pathetic fallacy” (in his earlier writing in Modern Painters Vol III  from 1856, attributing human characteristics to manifestations in nature) had become himself susceptible to a  symptom of an unsettling phenomenon?

And what was Ruskin compelled to assert?  First of all something which, as a person who based his entire career on looking and seeing and thinking and trying to find expression for seen things and how they might be understood, in visual art, in architecture, in nature and in society, something that he has more than noticed and noted and now wants the London Institution as a place of scientific enquiry and dissemination, to register as a chemical or phenomenological observation. As such it is his contention it was an observation which was not available to a poet such as Byron or his generation, one that was not even recorded or intuited by such authorities as de Saussure… but in the late 1870s and 1880s had been logged by Ruskin as empirical evidence.

It is the demonstrable existence of “a plague wind”, “a storm cloud” - a set of  meteorological phenomena… potentially irreversible… and certainly nefariously man-made as opposed to God-given. 

This is delivered with urgency and conviction that Payne has discovered in the text itself.  Would Ruskin have been reading from a hand written manuscript or notes or purely extempore and subsequently worked up for publication?  Tom Payne uses an inner ear recording playing the text in his head in real time, which in a virtuoso performance has nonetheless the external effect for the audience of living, iterative thought. 

He also takes the prompt that Ruskin illustrated this and other lectures using projections or exhibits (some drawn on a large scale as for students of his Oxford Lectures.)  These projections of cloudscapes done by assistants such as Arthur Severn for Ruskin from his own drawings are used in the performance and further developed through the phenomenological dimensions of artist Penny McCarthy’s absorption in the make-up of clouds incorporated now into a changing backdrop projection put together by Jake Goodall with additional photography from Becky Payne and illustration from Billy Hughes. This visual backdrop is a counterpoint synched to the delivery of the lecturer seated  simply at a table downstage throughout. The effect is  further complemented by a shifting  bespoke score and discreet soundscape from David John Brady.

And as this unflagging and absorbing hour and a bit draws to a close, having not in any way lost its audience, quite the contrary, what are we to make of the concluding pages where the lecture turns evangelical … where Ruskin concludes the beauty of God’s creation has been desecrated and the moral accusation implied needs to be laid at industrial capitalism’s door as a result of a series of unremitting “blasphemies” over the last twenty years?  Think not 1860-1880 for his contemporaries but 1980-2000 or 2004-2024.  Maybe these concluding thoughts from Ruskin could segue as it did in my mind into the various  images of massed delegates at endless COPs, or the repeated notion that we don’t have to do anything because our contribution is only 1% to global warming (…when in Ruskin’s day it probably was 99%).  Or again the absence of climate consensus in many recent electoral debates or political systems in this country, in Russia, China or in India, or in  the place where most of the storm clouds are heading our way, in America, or perhaps more nebulously,  in the massing powers of AI held somewhere now in the 21st century Cloud.  Indeed as in the arresting passage and visual prompt embedded in Tom Payne’s engaging performance and its projection beyond the page, beyond the stage, beyond the audience: “What is Best to be Done?”

David Alston  

Storm-Cloud: Observations of the Sky was directed and performed by Dr Tom Payne, at the Crucible’s Sheffield Playhouse on June 19th 2024 with motion design by Jake Goodall, photography by Becky Payne, original composition by David John Brady, visuals and illustration by Billy Hughes and Penny McCarthy, dramaturgical focus by Terry O’Connor, digital media production by Anne Doncaster and Richard Mather and archival research by Ashley Gallant.

The next iteration of the project Storm Cloud: Thrown into Form will form part of the No Bounds Festival  at the G-Mill, SADACCA, Sheffield at 7pm  Saturday, 12 October 2024. Booking details will be posted HERE.

About the author. 

As Deputy Director of Arts for Sheffield City Council, David Alston led the City Art Galleries in the 1990s, before becoming the Keeper of Art in the National Museum of Wales.  He left Wales to become Galleries Director for the millennium project of The Lowry on Salford Quays, returning to Wales to be Arts Director for the Arts Council of Wales. He was awarded an MBE in 2020 for services to the Arts. His family base has been Sheffield since the 1980s when he arrived in the city to be the first Assistant Curator for the Ruskin Collection of the Guild of St George.