The word’s the thing
Modern dramatic interpreters shouldn’t be making a choice between prose and poetry—a play should be a marriage of the two
Prose and poetry should be complementary, says Michael Billington
ASTUDENT asked recently what I seek in a good play. I made all the obvious points about conflict, tension and the collision of public and private worlds, but added that heightened, colourful language was a vital ingredient. One reason I enjoy the theatre is to escape the flat, flavourless dialogue I hear in much TV drama: I used BBC1’S Troy as an example, in which Homeric figures speak like characters in a soap opera.
For several centuries, poetry held sway. Then came Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw to make prose respectable; Chekhov even proved that prose, by means of what it implied rather than stated, could achieve the effect of poetry. Modern writers such as Harold Pinter have done something similar by finding artful patterns in the rhythms of everyday speech. However, three recent experiences make me wonder if one always had to make a choice.
The first wake-up call was a revival of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936) at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre. It is, to be honest, an odd play that mixes serious politics with cabaret and revue-style sketches.
An idealistic villager, Alan Norman, travels through Europe, accompanied by his dog, in search of a missing heir. Driven by the anti-fascist spirit of the 1930s, the play shows a continent succumbing to despotism and suggests we have to prevent Britain following the same path.
It opens with a powerful chorus that, as in a movie, starts with a wide-angled vision of Europe and zooms in to focus on a decaying English countryside: ‘I see barns falling, fences broken,/ Pasture not ploughland, weeds not wheat ...’ It’s a vision of a 1930s England in which time seems to have stopped and the only movement comes from the invasion of the country by urban visitors.
The vitality of Auden’s poetry is matched by Isherwood’s prose, which reaches its climax in a sermon delivered by the vicar of the fictive village, Pressan Ambo, warning against Communism: ‘Truth and Beauty would be proscribed as dangerously obstructive. To be beautiful would be treason against the State. Thought a sabotage deadly to the thinker. No books, no art, no music... even the grass would cease to grow, flowers would not risk appearance, heifers would not dare to calve.’
Auden and Isherwood get themselves into something of a bind. In the first half, they attack European Fascism; in the second, they send up apocalyptic warnings against Communism. They fail to see the dictatorial tendencies of both ‘-isms’, but the play, in Jimmy Walters’s sparky revival, with Pete Ashmore as the questing hero, loyally dogged by Cressida Bonas, works through its mix of politics and pantomime and its acceptance that poetry and prose are complementary forms rather than sworn enemies.
The play clearly takes its title from a famous poem by T.S. Eliot, in which he said of the Jacobean dramatist John Webster that ‘he was much possessed by death/and saw the skull beneath the skin’.
Watching a blood-soaked revival of Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi at the Swan in Stratfordupon-avon, I was struck by the
way he, too, switched easily between verse and prose.
Much of the play is written in that terse, tangy, bitter poetry that is Webster’s peculiar contribution to British drama. The convention seems to be that high-born characters like the Duchess and her vindictive siblings speak poetry. And lowerstatus characters, such as her steward-husband, Antonio, and the ex-galley slave, Bosola, resort to prose, but Webster has the wit and flexibility to switch registers when needed. In one haunting scene, Bosola comes to murder the Duchess. It works well at Stratford because Nicolas Tennant has the right brusque authority as the killer and Joan Iyiola is all heroic defiance as his victim, but it’s Bosola’s ability to shift between a heightened prose and mournful poetry that makes the scene so mesmerising.
He tells the Duchess: ‘Thou art a box of worm-seed, at best but a salvatory of green mummy. What’s this flesh? A little crudded milk, fantastical puffpaste.’ Having diagnosed the weakness of the body in prose, Bosola offers a poetic dirge about the futility of humanity at large: ‘Their life a general mist of error/their death a hideous storm of terror.’ Webster offers vivid proof that the binary opposition of poetry and prose is false and that each can take on the qualities of the other.
The ultimate example, of course, is Shakespeare, who switches instinctively between the two forms. One of my many arguments against Rufus Norris’s current revival of Macbeth at the Olivier is that it seems indifferent to language in general (Theatre,
February 21). It sets the action in some dystopian future: the Macbeths inhabit a concrete bunker, armour is held together by gaffer tape and the decor is black bin-liners. The principals, Rory Kinnear and Anne-marie Duff, don’t stand much of a chance. The saddest feature is the way Shakespeare’s most expressive poetry—‘light thickens and the crow makes wing to the rooky wood’—is barked or brayed and even his prose, as in the scene with the drunken Porter, loses much of its point.
I would love to see, in modern drama, a recognition that each has its value. The first requisite is that each has to be spoken with clarity and purpose, as they mostly are in The Dog Beneath
the Skin and The Duchess of Malfi. I’d like to go even further and champion the primacy of language at a time when it’s sometimes treated as if it were an adjunct to scenery and soundeffects. After all, in the beginning was the Word.
‘The vitality of Auden’s poetry is matched by Isherwood’s prose’