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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