ya gotta love a man who hates shakespeare.

judy
 
> From: Roger Day <[log in to unmask]>
> Date: 2005/12/12 Mon AM 03:43:26 EST
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Poem/Play (was Re: Pinter on Blair et al.)
> 
> I didn't mean to impugn your work - how could I, I've never seen or. I
> apologise if that seems the case. It's just me trying to work through
> what was being said, what was in my mind. Along the way overstatements
> get made, false steps taken. I get carried away.
> 
> When I woke this morning, things were clearer. The notion that you can
> put any text in that magic circle, stir it with action and it becomes
> theatre, is certainly a novel realisation to me. I'm still not
> convinced that poetry "profoundly illumines the theatre". Does this
> mean that because you're a poet you write better plays? I guess
> there's a reason that playwrights stopped using poetic meter as a way
> of delivering dialogue, I don't know enough to go there. Then again, I
> don't like Shakespeare.
> 
> As I now realiase, how successful that text works in the circle
> depends on it's adapttion to the demands of the circle. W00t!
> 
> Roger
> 
> On 12/11/05, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > Hi Roger, all
> >
> > Thanks for the fascinating posts. My contention wasn't that poetry and plays
> > are the same (although of course, anciently speaking, they grew from the
> > same root, drama evolving from the rhapsodists who performed the Homeric
> > hymns).  More that each can be profoundly illuminated by the other,
> > although, materially speaking, and the material is crucial in art, they are
> > different artforms.
> >
> > Artaud was not refusing language in demanding an attention to carnality:
> > what he wanted was, in fact, a _poetic_ theatre, by which he meant embodied
> > language. And Bernstein, for my money, doesn't seem to understand much at
> > all about theatre; certainly his comments on his opera with Ferneyhough in
> > an interview I read somewhere struck me as hopelessly naïve. (And what I
> > heard of the opera libretto, when I attended a very disappointing reading in
> > Cork, was ghastly doggerel). Bernstein's mistake is precisely an inability
> > to imagine carnality into language, in all its many dimensions; what Brecht
> > calls the gestic quality. (Brecht, it must be remembered, was a poet
> > _first_, of no mean abilities.)
> >
> > > The notion that plays should be good literature sounds European to me.
> > > Are film-scripts good literature? In Artaud's world, the script is just
> > > a set of directions on which the actors and directors play around.
> > > When I've read drama reviews, I usually mark the ones which insist on
> > > the text being paramount as hatchet jobs. You can treat drama as
> > > literatures, but it seems to me to drawing yourself into the same
> > > minimalist trap as poetry. As poets we tend to treat the text as
> > > paramount - it's our vocation after all - our calling - words are
> > > first, last and second to us. That's why we're poets. Artaud chafes
> > > against this notion. All because drama involves mere words, does not
> > > make it readily amenable to us, and even the best poet can make the
> > > mistake of thinking themselves a dramatist. Eliots plays are rubbish
> > > as plays, hence their continual revival. I wonder if anyone has sat
> > > down to write a poem but ended up with a play? I bet Alison has...
> >
> > Um. Roger, I find these comments a little strange. I don't understand what
> > you mean.  If you've read Bergman's scripts, you will know that film scripts
> > can indeed be good literature.  And Artaud's theatre strikes me as not quite
> > the improvisational thing you describe - what inspired him was, for example,
> > the extremely disciplined dance theatre of South East Asia - and didn't he
> > say the perfect theatre was a theatre without actors? (he liked puppets
> > better, perhaps because they would do what he said).  Of course drama is
> > literature, the best of it great literature: one might as well say that the
> > fact that most poems aren't very good means that poetry is not literature.
> > Martin's already pointed out the performability of Seneca (if he was not
> > performed it was, in any case, for political rather than artistic reasons);
> > I have seen a brilliant production of Peer Gynt myself, and can vouch for
> > the fact that it can work on stage; and I was lucky enough to catch Peter
> > Stein's Faust on television - how I wish I could have seen it in the
> > theatre! Heiner Muller stuck most of his plays in a drawer; a lot of
> > Bulgakov's works were not performed in his lifetime, and so on. They are no
> > less plays, or literature, for that. If language is the passion of poets,
> > why not of playwrights? Why else would they write? If they're serious about
> > writing, I mean...
> >
> > I don't get what you mean by "minimalist trap" - language, and literature,
> > is after all literally what we make it.
> >
> > My dear, you seem to be suggesting, ever so gently, that my plays are
> > rubbish, but I'll pass over that...it may indeed be the case, but I do know
> > that, if they are the plays of a poet, they are not poems masquerading as
> > plays. No, I've never written a play by mistake, thinking that it was a
> > poem; the writing of these things seem to me to be a different process
> > altogether, with very different demands. Partly perhaps because I have
> > almost always written texts for theatre when I've been asked to, and so am
> > imagining into a specific context of performance; on only one occasion have
> > I written a play as I would a poem, ie, being seized by the idea and rhythm
> > of it.
> >
> > George, absolutely: that is very much how I think about these things (and
> > you do say them clearly). But it's true that my ideas have been absolutely
> > inflected by my involvement in theatre; indeed, I first started thinking
> > about art in a critical way through watching plays, when I was a theatre
> > critic in the early 90s.
> >
> > All the best
> >
> > A
> >
> >
> >
> > Alison Croggon
> >
> > Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
> > Editor, Masthead:  http://masthead.net.au
> > Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
> >
> 
> 
> --
> http://www.badstep.net/
> http://www.cb1poetry.org.uk/
>