Issue No. 593
Culture
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4 - 10 July 2002 Issue No. 593 Culture |
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Plain Talk
I have always enjoyed poetic drama, both in English and in Arabic. During my long stay in London I had the opportunity to see TS Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral, Family Reunion and The Cocktail Party. The plays were staged at the Mercury Theatre in Notting Hill Gate, a church turned theatre. The smallness of the theatre and of the audiences proves Eliot's point -- expressed in his article "Poetry and Drama" -- that poetic drama is "for a rather special kind of audience -- an audience of those serious people who go to festivals and expect to have to put up with poetry." In fact the first time I saw Murder in the Cathedral was at the very first Edinburgh Festival in 1946, where I met Eliot. In Egypt I always enjoyed watching and reading Ahmed Shawqi and Aziz Abaza.
What has brought these memories back is a review in the International Herald Tribune of The Lady is Not for Burning, a verse play by Christopher Fry, an English dramatist who is now past his 90's year. Again I had the good fortune of watching the play in the late 1940s, directed by John Gielgud, who also played the leading role opposite Pamela Brown. The play was a great success and made stars of Richard Burton and Claire Bloom who played supporting roles.
"It has been generally held," Eliot wrote, that verse dramas "should either take their subject matter from some mythology or else should be about some remote historical period far enough away from the present for the characters not to need to be recognisable as human beings, and therefore for them to be licensed to talk in verse." Eliot adds that picturesque period costume renders verse much more acceptable.
This applies to Murder in the Cathedral as well as to Fry's The Lady is Not For Burning, a mediaeval comedy about a woman accused of being a witch.
As a small diversion I would like to discuss Eliot's opinions about verse drama. "Now," he wrote, "I am going to venture to make some observations based on my own experience which will lead me to comment on my intentions, failures, and partial success, in my own plays."
The first thing he discovered was that a writer who has worked for years, and achieved some success in writing other kinds of verse, has to approach the writing of a verse play in a very different way. In writing other verse, claims Eliot, "I think that one is writing, so to speak, in terms of one's own voice: the way it sounds when you read it to yourself is the test. For it is yourself speaking. The question of communication, of what the reader will get from it, is not paramount, if the poem is right to you you can only hope that the readers will eventually come to accept it... But in the theatre, the problem of communication presents itself immediately. You are deliberately writing verse for other voices, not for your own, and you do not know whose voices they will be."
The dramatist is aiming to write lines that will have an immediate effect upon an unknown and unprepared audience, to be interpreted to that audience by unknown actors, rehearsed by an unknown producer. And the unknown audience cannot be expected to show any indulgence towards the poet. Eliot goes on to say "the poet cannot afford to write his play merely for his admirers, those who know his non-dramatic work and are prepared to receive favourably anything he puts his name to." His conclusion is that the author must write "with an audience in view which knows nothing and cares nothing about any previous success he may have had before he ventured into the theatre". Eliot is a hard task master.
Anyway, the success of verse drama in the late 1940s and early 1950s was short lived. Since that time there have been no performance s of such plays, until this sudden revival of Fry's play.
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