I write a moderately unorthodox pantomime-style entertainment every year in
rhymed iambic tetrameter - a metre that zips along faster than pentameters
(heroic couplets on the stage sound plodding to modern ears, or at least to
mine).
The advantages of rhyme:
It's a great help to amateur actors. If the verse is written properly with
the rhymes on the key words (such as the punch-word of a joke), this helps
the actor to phrase, and makes sure the key words don't get lost.
It provides a ludic level to the play which audiences enjoy. Unexpected or
ingenious rhymes can get their laugh or applause. The artificiality of rhyme
is a pleasing reminder to audiences that they're watching a construct,
something consciously made and crafted for their pleasure.
Would rhyme work for a serious modern play? I don't know, but I want to find
out. The big successful modern play of recent times that has used rhyme is
Carol Churchill's Serious Money, which used jagged couplets to show the
rapacious energy of the stock exchange. Definitely a play where prose would
have been inadequate.
As for unrhymed verse drama, whether it works depends on the skill of the
writer. I've seen a few modern examples over the past couple of years. Two
are by Ted Hughes - his translation of Alcestis, and an adaptation of his
Tales from Ovid. Both worked superbly. Hughes is such a great phraser of
sinewy sentences that it seems the actors just have to say his words and
follow the phrasing cues given by his line-breaks for the whole thing to
work superbly. No, it's probably not as easy as that, but watching Alcestis
especially (What a marvellous play!) I had the sense of actors lifted above
their normal talent by the strength of the language.
On the other hand, I recently saw John Barton's Tantalus, a collection of
verse plays about the Trojan War. The abridged version I saw lasted nine
hours. It was visually magnificent, very well acted and dramatically
gripping most of the time, but its dramatic power was constantly sapped by
the language. Set out on the page as verse, it sagged and plodded. Sentences
ran out of energy long before their full stops. Phrasing was often on a
soap-opera level, and actors couldn't do much with them except be jokey.
It's an incredible tribute to the production that it rose above this
weakness.
I think the point is that language for the theatre must do a theatrical
job - express the characters, provide energy, entertain. Verse and rhyme are
means of providing these things, but not the only ones. And it's no use
having pretty verse if the play doesn't work dramatically.
George
It provides
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George Simmers
Snakeskin Poetry Webzine is at
http://www.snakeskin.org.uk
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