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Do We Need More Verse Drama?

by Rob Mackenzie

I was having another read through Magma 52 the other day and came to Glyn Maxwell’s fascinating article on poetry and theatre. He finishes off with a plea to young poets to create verse theatre. Here’s the quote (I’ve left out the exhortation to ‘young poets’ in particular, as I see no reason why this couldn’t apply to anyone of any age):

“…go and find a space and some actors. Test your verse on the lungs and throats and tongues and lips of creatures trained to know utterance from nonsense, trained in the best English written, trained a hundred times harder than you. You’re not afraid of poverty or critics or you wouldn’t be a writer. Make some poets’ theatre, someone, before I go cheerfully mad alone in this field.” (Glyn Maxwell, from ‘Character and Verse Theatre’, Magma 52)

That’s the kind of challenge I feel I’d like to respond to, partly because I enjoy both poetry and theatre, partly because it feels like such an uncommercial move and I am unaccountably attracted to uncommercial moves (I do occasionally wish that wasn’t the case, especially in a recession). Whether I have the time and a half-decent idea is another matter. There’s only one way to discover whether I have the talent… I guess the best way would be to start small, to write something short and easily/cheaply staged, and take it from there.

But how about readers of this blog? Would you go to see a contemporary verse play? Would you like to see more being written and performed? If you’re also a writer, would you consider writing one and trying it out with a group of actors?

Comments (15)

  2. Your suggestion that young poets write verse plays—
    a concept in no manner new to me___
    William Shakespeare did it with aplomb.
    Pentametyer iambic told the tale
    in dialogue of rhythm and high style.
    What say you, poets, will you join the dance?
    Angels,will you find enough finance?

  3. Your suggestion that young poets write verse plays—
    A concept in no manner new to me—
    William Shakespeare did it with aplomb.
    Pentameter iambic told the tale
    in dialogue of rhythm and high style.
    What say you, poets, will you join the dance?
    And you, the angels, will you find finance?

  4. I don’t think Glyn’s premise is that simple: “…creatures trained to know utterance from nonsense, trained in the best English written, trained a hundred times harder than you.” Yes, but actors are trained to act, and acting often doesn’t do poetry any favours. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that acting can be the death of it. Far from enhancing a poem, it often reduces it to the meaning the actor is determined to convey. It can fill up all the space within a poem in ways that leave no room for further exploration. And very often, it’s that space that distinguishes poetry from prose (and what makes me interested in it). I won’t name names, but there is one particular highly respected actor, whose stage and screen work I much admire, but whose poetry readings send me running for cover. This isn’t to speak against verse theatre, so much as to suggest that anyone writing verse theatre needs to think carefully about what distinguishes it both from other kinds of theatre and, maybe more importantly, from other kinds of verse.

  5. Worked for Christopher Fry. And when I was at school I went to see Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in Chester Cathedral, although that’s all I can remember really.

    I’d love to do it. But I’d also want to be IN it! And I think there should be more poems for two voices, given the interest these days in poetry as performance. I have one or two…

  6. defo. But the issue is not does it get written, it’s whether it can get made and/ or toured. I don’t think Maxwell should make it sound as though the theatre is crying out for new verse dramatsists, cos it’s not! Maxwell’s own play from a couple of years ago didn’t get up to the Salford’s Lowry cos it was cancelled, alas.
    The ‘lack’ issue also depends on what level we’re talking about: pantomimes and musical theare are forms of popular verse drama and there’s plenty of those. And I’ll bet a good few nativity plays and their like get written down in rhyming couplets to aid the kiddie-twinkies memorisation skills!
    Most people think of verse drama and possibly think of Eliot or Fry, but then there’s the – shall we call it the harrison/ maxwell/ logue verse drama? – the kind that tends to use its story credits to pull a hi-brow audience in (Greek drama being nice and bloody)… Then there’s the more free verse verse drama, like Oswald’s moon drama on the Severn (maybe relying on local history interest groups?)… But possibly the groovy way ahead is Armitage’s Sir Gawain. t was about staging as well as language and you REALLY need a fab acting/ directing team to create that. New Perspective’s Sir Gawain had a silly knight who fell off his bicycle, a silly-sexy woman, and a scary green monster who roamed about without his head on for most of the play. It was a family verse drama (arguably of a higher quality than the usual panto) and kids did indeed love it. And so did I.

  7. Pat Stephens’ comment IV really nails a lot of the issues for me, spelling out things I’ve thought in a more lucid and connected way than I’ve ever managed.

    Particularly in the Patrocleia Logue does something that inhabits an interesting ground between the lyric and the theatre dramatic – his writing is full of space, full of cross-currents and complexities of suggestion, but reading some of the passages aloud can also make someone like me, who isn’t an actor and has never been one, feel what it would be like to be an actor more than almost anything else outside Shakespeare does. I’m not thinking so much of passages of direct speech, good though they often are, as of some of the passages where the speaker of the poem addresses the characters, especially the one beginning “Kill them, my sweet Patroclus”.

    I suppose I think the ability to create such moments of simple intense passion without compromising the complexity and space around them is one of the marks of greatness in a writer.

    I also think you get something of it in the best acting. One of the things I really liked about Derek Jacobi’s Lear (or, going back a generation, about his Pericles) was how much space he seemed to leave in his interpretations, how much he suggested rather than projected. But of course plays and even individual speeches have to be interpreted much more narrowly in performance than when read on the page – performance brings things to life but the life is always a particular one.

  8. It’s a very welcome suggestion. In the last century T.S.Eliot reintroduced the flavor of verse to English language theater, but in this generation of crass material hustle and bustle verse-discipline is hard to acquire and hence it is no more valid in the present scenario of creativity. I’m experiencing it in my own language theater. I’ve been writing and publishing verse plays in Hindi, my native language for long. Theater in Hindi is more occupied with prose experience and expression and its experiment is limited to the absurd representation of reality. I’ve translated some of my plays in English, but the Indian English theater is presently in a state of limbo.

  9. Ive written a half hour radio play in verse. Anyone want to read it? I wrote it for my degree dissertation it got a distinction but can’t find any competition to enter it into or any where to send it.

  11. I love verse drama, and have written a close cousin, performance poetry using several characters, which has been performed to audiences and was well received. I do aspire to verse drama proper, so to speak, but it’s a massive challenge. Partly because there’s an inherent contradiction: theatre is physical, and verse often emulates physical passion and emotion, so there’s an element of physical expression and movement canceling out the verse, and vice versa. Not a problem in radio drama: viz. Under Milk Wood for one of the pinnacles of achievement in that vein.

    Even in Shakespeare there are many periods in the dramas where the compelling effect of the verse provides a hiatus in the physical performance, or competes with it. At its best, the physical and the verse work together and the sum is greater than the parts, of course.

    As Coleridge said, verse is “might half-slumbering on its own right arm”, which drama isn’t.

  12. I realise this discussion has passed me by, but I spent 18 months and too many hours writing a 3,200 word narrative verse (how many “lines” is that?) after the style of the rhythmic, alliterative viking epics of 1500 years ago. I can perform it myself in 5 voices, bardic fashion (or five people could perform it) but having “finished” it (when is an oral history finished?) I’m finding there’s no competitions I can enter it for, and other than self-publishing there doesnt really seem to be a (paying) audience. I know I’m very new to the genre, but any guidance would be appreciated.

  13. t is a wild thought — but perhaps a publisher in Iceland, Greenland or Norway might find this of interest, and where English is widely understood and read.

    cheers,

    Norbert

  14. We probably need wild thoughts to get poetry seen and heard, Norbert! As for a ‘paying audience’, chaz, it’s pretty limited for all poetry but it does exist.

  15. Maxwell is right, as right was Eliot, and right again are all of us who are daring to dream of verse drama in any language anywhere in the world. It’s an invisible thread, the thread of a common dream that binds a community of dreamers. Who fails here or there individually doesn’t matter ultimately if others dream on. Out of these dreamers, some will reach the stage and find an audience. That’s something to celebrate. Many fail but a few succeed, and they succeed because many dream on. This brings me to Kumar Ravindra who writes verse drama in Hindi. Kumar, if you happen to read this, could you drop me a line at this address: achintya00@gmail.com. I’m interested in your plays.

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