Poetry Becomes Theater: “The Last Days of Troy” by Simon Armitage

Britain’s poet laureate Simon Armitage has long been interested in myth and legend. He’s published retellings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Death of King Arthur, The Odyssey, and The Iliad, and he’s reached into the mists of medieval England to translate two famous poems, The Owl and the Nightingale and Pearl. What all of these works have in common is that they were originally created in poetry, the common language of myth.  

A few years ago, before he became poet laureate, his work with The Iliad led to the creation of a play, The Last Days of Troy. It was first performed at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Manchester before moving to Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London. Other productions have followed.

 

It’s a gripping piece of theater. It’s a griping piece of writing in general. Armitage doesn’t “improve upon” Homer; it’s more that he illuminates the great Greek story for a contemporary audience. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Another Day – poem by Jerry Barrett at Gerald the Writer.

 

Poetry Prompt: I’m in Charge of Celebrations – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

 

A forgotten writer of Pere Lachaise – Anthony Daniels at New Criterion on Enrique Gomez Carillo. 

 

“March,” poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Reading the 1913 Edition of “Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare”

It was an intriguing invitation. Read all the works of William Shakespeare in a year?  

Poet Dave Malone posed the challenge. Writer Callie Feyen accepted. I wavered, trying to balance time commitments, and then I leaped. But before I told Malone yes, I checked to make sure my memory was correct, and I indeed had a one-volume edition of all of Shakespeare’s plays. I did. I also had several copies of several individual plays, small, hardbound editions published between 1890 and 1930.

 

Also pushing my decision was having read The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 by James Shapiro, the movies Shakespeare in Love and Much Ado About Nothing, which I truly enjoyed, and having seen Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones playing the leads in Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic Theatre in London in 2013. 

 

My copy of the 1913 edition of Cassell’s Illustrated Shakespeare has been occupying space on my bookshelves for more than 30 years. Judging by the bookplate, I purchased the book sometime in the late 1980s from Dappled Gray Antiques, a shop in my St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood that had been across the street from the Kirkwood train station. The antiques are long gone, the owner having retired and moved away. The train station is still there, an Amtrak station operating in a building built in 1893.

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: The actor Robert Mantell in the stage production of Richard III, from Cassell's Illustrated Shakespeare.

“Smart People,” a Play by Lydia Diamond

Smart People, a 2016 play by Lydia Diamond, has been staged by several companies around the country. It’s set in 2008, shortly before the presidential election. Four people (and they are the only characters in the play) are connected to Harvard University. One is a surgeon, one is a psychologist, one is an actress, and one is a teaching neuropsychiatrist. All are, to one degree or another, interested in how the brain works. And all four are, to one degree or another, looking for love and affirmation. 

But then there’s politics. And politics saturates the characters’ thinking. Only a small part of that politics concerns the presidential election; it almost serves as an unspoken theme off-stage. But there’s academic politics (and what happens when cancel culture rears its head). And there’s what happen when the politics of relationships inserts itself into what might have been love stories. For all of their understanding of how the brain works, for all of their expertise, and for all of their intelligence, the characters of Smart People seem unable to overcome the politics they supposedly know so much about. 

 

Lydia Diamond

Yet these characters are all recognizable. In their own ways, they are all compelling. That isn’t to say a reader of the play finds them sympathetic. Each is disagreeable, the neuropsychiatrist in particular. He’s an academic close to tenure, something of a rainmaker for bringing all kinds of grants and recognitions to his department. He’s looking for what in the brain makes people racist. He himself is “evolved,” as he describes it, and has transcended his own racist leanings. Except he suddenly faces cancel culture for something he says in the classroom. 

 

One doesn’t today expect such a probing treatment of the academic and cultural left, but that’s exactly what Smart People does.

 

Diamond’s plays include Stick Fly, Harriet Jacobs, Voyeurs de Venus, The Gift Horse, Inside, and The Bluest Eye (a stage adaptation of the Toni Morrison novel). A graduate of Northwestern University, she has taught at DePaul University, Columbia University, and Boston University. She is currently a clinical associate professor of Theatre at the University of Illinois – Chicago. 

Forgotten Classics: “Shakespeare of London” by Marchette Chute

You’re reading an article on literary criticism, and you spot an almost easy-to-overlook aside: “For example, no one has really explained William Shakespeare like Marchette Chute did in 1947.” The reference is to a book she wrote, Shakespeare of London, and it was published in 1950, not 1947. But it was high praise indeed.

You ask yourself, “How is that possible? How is a biography of Shakespeare published 70 years ago better than anything more recent? We have so much more research, so many more historical and literary studies, so much more information. And we have the internet. How could someone make a statement like that?”

They were able to make the statement because it’s true. Shakespeare of London has been long out-of-print, but it is still a classic, and you can still find used copies via sources like Amazon and Alibris.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Mayfly” by Joe White

The story begins with a young man, Harry, rescuing an older man, Ben, from drowning in a river. And yet it looks less like an accident and more like an attempted suicide. The young man works at a local pub that’s closing, likely to become an art gallery or antique shop. He meets an older woman named Cat (for Catherine) at the pub, and her flirting has more than edge to it; it seems almost self-destructive. And he meets a young woman, known only as Loops, dressed in camouflage, who tells him she’s a soldier.

The young man will learn that the man, the woman, and the girl are nothing like what they first seem like – a would-be suicide, a woman on the make, and a soldier who talks military but doesn’t seem military. In fact, they are a family, struggling to understand themselves, what their lives have become and to be reborn. 

Only gradually do we see that their struggle has to do with the death of the family’s son, who killed himself. The story of that struggle is Mayfly, a debut play by young British playwright Joe White,which debuted earlier this at the Orange Street Theatre in off-West-End London (analagous to off-Broadway in New York). 

The story is set in Shropshire, in central England. It might be easy to overlook since it doesn’t have an overtly critical role in the story; in a sense, the play could be set anywhere. But White has placed it Shropshire, often considered the heart of England Shropshire is the setting for A.E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, that long narrative poem that was so popular among soldiers in World War I. It was what the soldiers considered home as they sat in the mud and the lice of the trenches, watching their mates die of disease, mustard gas, and artillery shells. 

Joe White

In Mayfly, Shropshire is England’s heart, but the family in that heart is broken and trying to reconstitute itself. The characters are not trying to tear each other apart so much as tearing themselves apart, desperate to find a meaning from the personal tragedy.

White has been associated with the Orange Tree Writers Collective and a “playwright on attachment” at Pentabus Theatre Company. He’s also been a member of the Old Vic 12, a group of young theater writers and producers selected by the Old Vic Theatre to nurture the next generation of theatre creatives.

Mayfly is unsettling and often disturbing, exactly what you’d expect a family to be when it finds itself unmoored and adrift.

Related: The trailer for Orange Street Theatre production of Mayfly.

Top photograph: A scene from the production of Mayfly in April 2018.

“Apologia” by Alexi Kaye Campbell

Last fall, while visiting London, it was a rare day when we weren’t traveling by double-decker bus from Victoria Street, around Parliament Square, and up Whitehall to Trafalgar Square. We’d pass the old Scotland Yard, Westminster Abbey, Parliament, the government buildings on Whitehall, the Horse Guards Palace, and a rather small building named Trafalgar Studios Theatre. Playing at the time was Apologia. We considered trying to get tickets, but they were few and far between. Certainly, a draw (for us American tourists, at least) were two of the stars – American actress Stockard Channing and Laura Carmichael, aka Lady Edith of Downtown Abbey fame.

So, I bought a copy of the play script.

Apologia by playwright Alexi Kaye Campbell is actually written in two versions, an English one and an American one. It was the American version playing at the Trafalgar, likely to accommodate Ms. Channing. The plays are essentially the same; the difference is the lead character, Kristin Miller, who can be played as an American or a Brit. I read the American version.

Miller is something of a famous art historian, who started out her professional life as a protester. The cause didn’t particularly matter; if she thought it could enough, she was there. She’s now living not far from London, in a charming cottage-like home. It is her birthday, and her two sons are coming to visit for the party, along with their girlfriends. Neither son is particularly happy with their mother’s newly published memoir, which doesn’t even acknowledge their existence. She tries to explain this by saying it was a professional memoir, but that excuse doesn’t survive for long.

As the characters interact, the sons Peter and Simon, the girlfriends Trudi and Claire, and Kristin’s old friend and fellow protester Hugh, it becomes clear that this family is about both what it says and what it doesn’t say. Kristin discovers that Peter met Trudi (an American) at a prayer meeting, and she nearly freaks out at the idea that her son may have found faith. Simon, largely unsuccessful at about anything he tries, is breaking up with the successful soap-opera-star Claire. It’s clear that Kristin likes neither of the women and almost seems to deliberately provoke them. Claire gets incensed and responds; Trudi rather blissfully ignores the sarcasm.

Alexi Kaye Campbell

This is a family seething with anger and resentment, and it takes some time to see why.

Campbell was an actor for 20 years, working for such companies as the Royal Shakespeare Company and Hampstead Theatre, before turning to playwriting. His plays include Death in Whitbridge (2008), The Pride (2010), The Faith Machine (2012), Bracken Moor (2013), and Sunset at the Villa Thalia (2016). Five of his plays have been collected and published as Plays One (2017). The Pride won several theater awards when It was written and produced. Campbell was also the scriptwriter for the movies Possession (2002) starring Gwyneth Paltrow and Woman in Gold (2015), starring Helen Mirren.

Apologia slowly builds tension; one begins to suspect that Kristin Miller is almost on the verge of cracking and will do (and say) anything to avoid that. She has to believe she’s in control; she doesn’t seem to understand that her family has become the protestors and she the central authority being protested.

Top photograph: an advertisement for the play at Trafalgar Studios.

"Dancers in Mourning" by Margery Allingham

As William Farraday writes his memoirs, he realizes that much of his life has been something less than exciting. So, he embellishes a bit. Even more than a bit. When the book is published under the title “Memoirs of an Old Duffer,” it becomes a hit. And then it becomes a successful musical in London’s West End, starring one of the top performers in the business, Jimmy Sutane.

For one performance, Farraday brings his friend Albert Campion. The purpose is for Campion to meet Jimmy Sutane after the show. Someone has been playing pranks on Sutane, and the pranks are becoming increasingly vicious.

Campion visits the Sutane home, 20 miles outside London, and discovers tensions simmering just below the polite surface. He also finds Sutane’s wife, Linda, and Campion finds himself complicating what he’s supposed to be doing by falling in love. The other guests are all connected to the theater and “those theatrical people” are always overly dramatic.

And then a dancer is killed in what appears to be an accident. More deaths follow. Because of Linda, Campion tries to avoid getting entangled. But his entanglement is inevitable.

Dancers in Mourning was first published by Mystery Golden Age writer Margery Allingham (1904-1966) in 1937. The mark of an Allingham novel is a good mystery combined with a touch of romance, but it’s surprising that the romance in this story involves Campion and the wife of one of the suspects.

Margery Allingham

Allingham began publishing in 1923 when she was only 19. But it was The Crime at Black Dudley in 1929 that established her as one of the best mystery writers of the era. That story introduced Campion, a private detective who has assumed his name because he’s actually a title in one of Britain’s leading aristocratic families. His “man” or butler Magersfontein Lugg, a convicted felon who has seen the inside of prison, also contributed to Allingham’s success, and in this story Campion loans him to Linda when her butler quits.

Dancers in Mourning is an excellent mystery, one that jeeps the reader guessing (and Campion himself guessing) all the way to the end.

Related:

The White Cottage Mystery by Margery Allingham.

Two by Allingham: an almost Gothic and a Campion.

More Work for the Undertaker by Margery Allingham.

The Mind Readers by Margery Allingham.
The China Governess by Margery Allingham.

The Beckoning Lady by Margery Allingham.

The Allingham Casebook by Margery Allingham.

Margery Allingham’s The Case of the Late Pig.

Margery Allingham’s Flowers for the Judge.

Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost.

Margery Allingham’s Black Plumes.

Margery Allingham’s Look to the Lady.

Margery Allingham’s Police at the Funeral.

The Essential Margery Allingham Collection.

Margery Allingham Box Set #2.

Margery Allingham’s The Fashion in Shrouds.

The Margery Allingham Society.

Top photograph: the Palace Theatre in London’s West End, which first opened in 1891.