Thanks very much, David, that sounds like an event I wish I had seen.
It's a very good description of what real acting can do with spoken
language.

Best

A

>Here is an account of a felicitous match between poet (Goran Simic) and
>actor (Alan Rickman); it is authored by one Michelle - no further details
>available - and comes from her attendance on 12th December 2001 at the
>Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London:
>
>"As part of The Word Festival held in London recently, Alan Rickman was
>asked to read a selection of Goran Simic's poems during an evening dedicated
>to war poetry. Goran Simic is a Bosnian writer currently living in Canada
>who has written harrowing and bitter poetry about his experiences in
>Sarajevo. Not having copies, I can't now remember all the poems' horrors
>(though the title of one, Sprinting from the Graveyard, makes me shiver),
>but they were stories of burying friends, dogs running wild and canny in the
>streets, the terror of opening your eyes in case you saw anything, and the
>utterly numbing yet howlingly painful sense of despair caused by war and the
>direct experience of war.
>Mr Rickman was the first actor to read and, after being introduced by the
>Festival's Director Peter Florence, he strode across the stage to the
>microphone and our applause, all dressed in black, a solemn, almost sultry
>expression on his face. Well, he was about to give us some pretty serious
>stuff. He announced the title of the first poem and then started to read.
>And totally disappeared.
>
>It's the only way I can describe it. As soon as he began to read, I was no
>longer aware of Alan Rickman standing on stage, reading, acting, performing.
>All I was aware of was the power of words that seemed not to have been
>crafted to perfection years previously, but that were being spoken freshly
>here for the first time. There was nothing else to be aware of. If I had
>been seated alone in a tiny room with the person who had experienced these
>terrible things, listening to him as he felt his way into an expression of
>his raw-meat memories, the impact could not have been greater. The voice was
>so full of passion, yet so empty and flat, so angry and violent and yet so
>despairing and hopeless, that after just some 7 minutes, we were emotionally
>limp and drained and wrung out.
>
>And then, after three poems, Mr Rickman smiled (very briefly), said "thank
>you" very quietly, and came back to us just in time to leave the stage to
>absolute and stunned applause. It was a most bizarre experience, yet a very
>profound one, and its power resulted not only from the actual force of the
>words themselves, but from this actor's ability to be so entirely 'there'
>when performing that he is not 'there' at all. He became, as it were, a
>transparency for what the poet wanted to say, rather than a performer of it.
>He let his mouth be shaped by the words, rather than shaping them himself.
>
>Only the very finest actors could dare to do such a thing: to surrender
>themselves completely and still retain command of the situation (which, of
>course, he did at all times). He allowed us to lose our sense of him, but at
>no time did he lose his sense of himself. I've heard a lot of poetry read
>over the years, but never like that."
>
>As a congenitally shy writer who dislikes public readings I envy Goran Simic
>the services of Alan Rickman.
>
>David Howard

--



Alison Croggon
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