Thanks for these comments, Alison. (I don't seem to have received Dan's
poems, only the interview.) I agree about Eliot's verse dramas - I've always
thought _Murder in the Cathedral_ was the best of them, because its
pageant-like nature is better suited to the verse than the attempted
naturalism of the later plays. I quite enjoyed Christopher Fry's plays when
I was at school, but I haven't read them since and should think they've
dated badly. _Under Milk Wood_ I've only heard, never read and the same with
the Louis MacNiece radio play (_Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came_?) So I
am really very ignorant of the subject.
Best wishes
Matthew
-----Original Message-----
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: 23 March 2001 02:29
Subject: Re: Verse Drama
>Matthew wrote:
>
>>I have often wanted to write a verse play - perhaps one for radio,
>>which seems to work well in this context. Does anyone have any thoughts
>>about what verse forms are appropriate? If you write free verse, is it
>>likely to become indistinguishable from prose? Is blank verse still a
viable
>>option? Can rhyme be made to work? Or would a mixture of forms be
>>dramatically effective? I haven't got beyond turning these questions over
in
>>my mind yet, and I'd be interested in your opinions.
>
>Thanks Matthew, (and btw, I'm certain Dan would be grateful for yours or
>anyone else's comments on his poems.)
>
>I've written a few plays, and believe dramatic language is inherently
>poetic. My first adventure - a short commission from a small theatre
>company in the early 90s - was an illuminating experience. I wanted to
>write a dialogue between a dying woman and her confessor, fairly
>straightforward, one would think, and I was thinking alot about what
>Peter Brook calls the utterance of words in space, and how that might be
>different from other kinds of writing. But to my dismay, what I was
>writing was complete rubbish - I knew that much - dead and stilted and
>just awful. I wrote draft after draft in increasing despair. Then a
>friend told me to rewrite the lines as blank verse, and once they were
>working, turn them back into prose. It worked like magic, a total
>transformation of the dynamic of the play. I think maybe it forces you
>to understand that theatre is already a metaphor. Anyway, it worked for
>me. Not that the theatre company liked the result: but I did.
>
>Playwrights like Heiner Muller write a free-verse poetry; you might like
>to look at Caryl Churchill's _Thyestes_ for an example of a formal poetic
>construction which works I think very well. And I found Howard Barker's
>language eye opening (he's not a bad poet, either) and sometimes that
>segues into poetic form. Eliot's verse dramas haven't, for me, worn very
>well, but Brecht's has. I think rhymes are very hard to make work, but
>that doesn't mean they can't be tried - I hesitate to rule anything out
>myself. I suppose what distinguishes theatrical language from poetry is
>what Brecht called gestus, the thrust in the language itself towards
>physical action, a certain necessary muscularity. And of course the form
>in any case depends what the play _is_.
>
>Best
>
>Alison
>
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