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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