No one gets out awake
Poets are often more at home on the page than the podium. Christina Patterson discovers that drafting in actors to read their words doesn't necessarily make the readings any more tempting
08 June 2004 


For many people, a poetry reading is worse than a funeral. All that mumbling, unbroken by hymns or eulogies, without even the guarantee of a knees-up afterwards - just a paper cup of rough house red in the bar, which may well be closed anyway by the time the poets have finished. "When you meet the usual haunted-looking individuals who organise readings," said the poet Hugo Williams once in the TLS, "- men with eyes red from crying, women with garlands in their hair - they have either just taken over from someone who committed suicide, or are trying to pass the job on to someone whose sanity is still intact."

Any poetry aficionado will have had more than their fair share of evenings straining to catch the words, and drift, of the figure hunched over the lectern. During a reading by Auden at the South Bank in the 1960s, Patrick Kavanagh even fell asleep on stage. In my own years of presenting and promoting the stuff, I've developed a polite smile that friends tell me later can, at times, look rather fixed. There was the poet who spent the entire reading jangling the change in his pockets in a metallic symphony that drowned out all the words. And the one who, after too many vodkas, lurched up to the microphone and launched her reading with a loud burp. And the Aboriginal poet who, if I hadn't started clapping and leapt up to thank him, would clearly have gone on all night.

"It would be very odd," said James Fenton in a lecture on poetry a few years ago, "to go to a concert hall and discover that the pianist on offer wasn't any good at all, in the sense that he couldn't actually play the piano. But in poetry this is an experience we've learnt to take in our stride." No wonder there are pleas to hand the whole thing over to the professionals. If poets can't be trusted with their own work, the argument goes, then actors must take over.

It's an approach that's widely used in radio, and for the odd posh fundraiser, but one that's largely frowned on by the poetry world itself. So it's somewhat surprising that Bloodaxe Books, the bastion of cutting-edge poetry publishing, is pairing up with an arts centre, a literature promotion agency and a poetry performance company (yes, such things do exist) to organise a poetry tour with actors and music. Based on the bestselling (and wonderful) poetry anthology Staying Alive, the tour will, it's envisaged, bring poetry to the people in 17 towns around the country, starting off in Maidenhead and culminating in the capital. I catch it in Tunbridge Wells.

Tonight the atmosphere at the Trinity Arts Centre is, to put it kindly, low-key. In the draughty foyer that was once a nave, you can't get a cup of coffee, a bar snack or a glass of wine, but you can get a mini bottle of chardonnay for a fiver - half the price of the ticket. I settle for a half of Guinness in a plastic cup and join the scattering of (mostly white-haired) punters in an auditorium that is, this evening, an empty, echoing space.

The set is simple and clearly portable: a circle on the ground, with matching backdrop, covered with pale green swirls and the names of hundreds of poets. Suddenly, the lights dim and three black-clad figures step out. Two are barefoot and youthfully casual in black T-shirts and baggy linen pants. The third, a slightly older black woman, opts for a more tailored look and, sensibly in this draughty theatre, a pair of sturdy boots.

The young man starts playing the cello and, to a background of rippling strings, they all start declaiming the titles of poems. We're clearly in for some kind of cross- arts collage, the kind, I can't help thinking, that sets Arts Council eyes aglinting and funds aflowing. The performers are Matthew Sharp of Opera North, the performance poet and actress Sara-Jane Arbury and the actress and singer Pauline Black. I don't think their fees can be coming out of ticket sales.

"You do not have to be good/" they chant in unison, "You do not have to walk on your knees/ for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting." The poem is the beautiful "Wild Geese" by the American poet Mary Oliver, but this is for the performers to know and us to guess. They've already done a medley of titles and we're not going to be bothered with such prosaic trifles, or their authors, tonight. As they work their way through the rest of the poem, they look firmly, and unsmilingly, ahead. Perhaps it is, after all, a funeral.

But no, this is only one in a full repertoire of facial expressions. Next up comes a little tableau that has the two women staring out at a fixed point in space and the young man looking extremely startled. A Puckish figure with fine teeth and a sweet smile, his poetry default mode appears to be edging towards the manic. "The word goes round," he intones in an Oz accent, offering a clue, perhaps, that this one's by the Australian poet Les Murray. But the rules of this guessing game are not consistent. American poets, for example, appear in a variety of guises: New York, Southern belle, estuary English and good old RP. Smiles, frowns and hand gestures appear to be optional, and random. So does the creative use of chairs.

One by one, they massacre them, these poems I love. "Poem from a Three Year Old", a beautiful child's-eye view of the world that I'm used to hearing in Brendan Kennelly's own mellow, Irish tones, sounds like a spoilt rant from a particularly precious Home Counties child. "What Every Woman Should Carry", a wry and touching poem by my friend Maura Dooley, is played for laughs with the full panoply of smiles, frowns and dramatic pauses. I pray that she won't hear it.

Perhaps the nadir is an extraordinary rendering of Fenton's charming gay love poem, "In Paris with You". Tonight it's given a spectacularly literal-minded and heterosexual interpretation and, for some reason, a cockney accent. Sharp and Arbury writhe together on the floor, pausing for kisses, caresses and more. "I'm in Paris with your eyes, your mouth,/" intones Sharp, his face hovering dangerously over Arbury's crotch. "I'm in Paris with... all points south. / Am I embarrassing you?" Yes, Mark, Sara-Jane and Pauline, I'm afraid you are.

It's clearly not fair to dismiss an entire artform (or at least the performance of it) on the basis of one event. So, a month later, I find myself in the Queen Elizabeth Hall for a celebration, by poets and actors, of the life and work of Stephen Spender, who died in 1995. Tonight it's the big boys - Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison and Harold Pinter - and it's sold out. They're joined by Vanessa Redgrave and Jill Balcon, also friends of Spender who, according to the programme, "often enjoyed discussing and reading poems and translations together". The evening has been given a title, "The Word Bites Like a Fish" (the first line of a Spender poem), and a thematic structure ranging from "Youthful Aspirations and Hero Worship" through to "Immortality".

The celebrants all troop on stage together and take seats under a huge screen offering a photographic mini-tour of Spender's life and chums. Pinter kicks off, the solid man of letters in a yellow jacket. His mode tonight is actorly: resonant and rather solemn. It's a bit of a shock for anyone used to hearing Spender read his own work. White-haired and rumpled, he would stumble on to the stage with an air of extraordinary sweetness. You hardly noticed the poems, but you did feel you were in the presence of Living History. Without him, the poems sound anachronistic and a bit flat, in spite of the combined efforts tonight to tart them up with wavering intonations and dramatic pauses.

Heaney's up next, looking more than ever like a farmer in his Sunday suit. He reads beautifully, of course - could make love lyrics out of the proverbial telephone directory. So does Harrison, in lugubrious tones that speak of impending doom. It's the actors, I'm afraid, who let the side down: Balcon, who makes every poem sound like an elocution lesson, and Redgrave, who seems to be playing Ophelia. She looks wonderful, but sounds deranged as her voice soars and fades to a whisper.

At one point, I write a note to a friend: "I am so bored I could die." She nods and leaves at the interval. I can't. Respite only comes in the second half when Harrison and Heaney read a few of their own poems. I've made up my mind. Leave poetry reading to the poets. At its best, it's wonderful. But even the worst poet beats the best actor.