In the republic of poetry (3). Borders and trespass

After my previous post, querying labels and form, poetry and playwriting, I received a wonderful email from writer Martin Pursey:

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“Perhaps as a winner of a poetry prize you should not think of yourself as a trespasser at all; I would offer you as comfort the image of a colonial map of territories. A demarcation-line drawn through desert, plain and forest is cheerfully ignored by the tribespeople who live across and all round it; so there you are, taking your goods to market, and you don’t even know you’ve crossed a border, it simply doesn’t matter for your purpose, and you are just as authentic a maker on either side or both!”

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As to my comments on the comfort of poetry, in troubling or bereaved times, Martin continues, in parenthesis:

——–

“(Long ago, when I played soldiers a little, I was greeted by the colour-sergeant, after a slow and disbelieving look up-&-down, with “So you are the Queen’s latest bad bargain, come to burden this Regiment and trouble my declining years?” – poetic, I thought at the time. He later astonished us, at a slightly dangerous time, by interspersing his commands and activities with ammunition and so on, with a wistful and heartfelt recital from ‘Fern Hill’:  “As I was young and easy Under the apple boughs about the lilting house And happy as the grass was green…”  -and he was a Regular!)”

——–

As I was delighting in this interaction with Martin Pursey, I got an email from Chris Kinsey  in response to my musings  about characters and narratives, poetry and playwriting. She has allowed me to reproduce several poems from her new collection, Swarf .

——-

“What about this one about words and inspiration?” She asks:

VACANT PLOTS

Rain animates the world beyond the glass.

Bare twigs sprout a crop of the fattest drops

water can hold, silvery as spoons

lining up on the draining-board.

Bullfinches ripen the empty apple trees.

Boundary yews shrug in seclusion,

shrubs huddle all borders. My thoughts too,

are screened, trained to a tenant’s need.

At home my gazing’s different.

The garden’s a runway to buzzard spirals,

vapour-trail ciphers. At doves’ ovations

I wait for word-specks to form.

——–

Or this one which is a poem monologue rather than a dramatic one she writes:

LOOKING FOR BILLY

It came on suddenly

this blindness thing

like walking into the barn

on a Summer day –

split shafts, shadows,

shapes.

Thought he was mucking about

Hide ‘n’ seeking me.

Thought it was my eyes playing tricks

when I found him,

but it wasn’t a feedbag

rocking from the rafters.

His father went to the War

brought back a darkness.

Billy caught it.

Now the dark’s in me.

Bits of me come back sometimes –

I’m going to look for Billy.

——-

All poems (c) Chris Kinsey, from Swarf, published by Smokestack books.

In the republic of poetry (2)

As I am now a poet according to The Poetry Society, Jeanette Winterson and the laureates of England and Wales (and in this company, who am I to disagree?), it is time perhaps for me to go public and brace myself for that first poetry reading.

The opportunity has come from my friend Chris Kinsey, who in so many ways is responsible for repatriating me back into the republic of poetry. Her latest collection, Swarf, will be launched at Oriel Davies in Newtown, where she is poet in residence, on Thursday 15th September 2011, at 7.30pm, and she has invited me to duet with her.

The idea is thrilling but also perplexing. I don’t write poetry per se, so am not quite sure what I’ll be expected to read at this ‘poetry reading’. Ever supportive, Chris gives me some suggestions of speeches from my plays which she feels have resonance with some of her poems in Swarf. This helpfulness merely perplexes me even more. What she has chosen are dialogue from play scripts, speeches written down as prose in the same format as this paragraph you, dear reader, are looking at now. They were not written as poems, but words to suggest a character, create pace, dynamic and rhythm, to push a story along. They aren’t set out in any shape or manner that resembles what I’ve seen published in poetry books – Chris Kinsey’s included.

This relationship between language and form – poetic or otherwise – has puzzled me for many years.

When I was younger, I used to read poetry widely, but somewhere  along the way became nervous and suspicious – not of the poems, but my own capacity to understand them. There were always some poets I still read and engaged with, but I wonder where this self-denigration came from? I’m not the only one feeling this way, or asking this question. In this quarterly’s edition of Mslexia magazine, D J Taylor queries why generations are growing up with a phobia, if not fear, of poetry.

Although I don’t actually write poetry, my version of Persians won the Ted Hughes Award for new works in Poetry earlier this year. As Aeschylus’s original, which I followed closely, was a verse drama, it fits the label. I was honoured to win the award and to have my name linked with two astonishing Poet laureates – Ted Hughes and Carol Ann Duffy, who initiated the award.  So why this trepidation in labelling, this fear of the poetic word? Will I be an imposter, masquerading as something I’m not at Chris’s book launch?

I look up the other readers who will perform that evening, to see if some clues lie there. R V Bailey has published three solo poetry collections, and From you to me – Love Poems, with her partner U A Fanthorpe. Andy Croft is the publisher of Smokestack Books, a widely published poet in his own right, and (a detail which delights me),  the writer of a regular poetry column in The Morning Star. The final reader will be Jane Dards, who has poems published in publications as diverse as Envoi, The Spectator, and The Oldie. Alongside them and the cause for this gathering is the wonderful Madam Kinsey, BBC Wildlife poet of the year, celebrating her third collection….

They are all poets. They all write poetry.

I wonder if I’m being overly literal. I’m not a fan of this segregational attitude I seem to have taken on. ‘Descriptive, not prescriptive’ I often say at workshops – and here I am, probably being blinkered in view and definition, quibbling about form.

But form is so essential. It is the life marrow in the bones that hold my work up.

I go back to the words.

What I seem to write are performance texts or prose which are viewed as poetry by poets, deemed highly lyrical by critics and cultural commentators. Told by the Wind, which I co-created with Jo Shapland and Phillip Zarrilli for The Llanarth group last year ‘..has the astringent purity of a haiku poem..’ Elizabeth Mahoney reviewed in The Guardian.

‘The pleasure in O’Reilly’s play … is in  the easy, generous flow of the writing, with its mixtures of wit and singing lyricism ..’ Lynn Gardner wrote in the same paper of an earlier play, Belonging, for Birmingham Rep’.

At the Saville Club in Mayfair when I was given the Ted Hughes award, I likened it to discovering and being welcomed into a section of the family I never knew existed. I could see the family resemblances, sense the shared DNA – but was also aware of those rogue genes which brought unfamiliar features and essential differences.

Poets… Playwrights….I wonder if I’m being too narrow in my definitions.

When I think about it, many poems I read (not least the Poet Laureate’s The World’s Wife) use words ‘to suggest a character, create pace, dynamic and rhythm, to push a story along’, to quote myself from earlier in this post.

But more importantly, are there others who doubt their own capacities to read and comprehend poetry? If so, where does that come from? What has distanced us from where we began, and what we loved so much as children – and what we turn to in bereaved or troubled times?

Any comments?

———————–

For details of the poetry reading and book launch of Swarf by Chris Kinsey at Oriel Davies, Newtown, Wales, click on:                   http://www.orieldavies.org/en/events/book-launch-poetry-night

Andy Croft’s most recent column in The Morning Star: http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/content/view/full/108528

For details of the book and the publisher:

http://www.inpressbooks.co.uk/swarf_chris_kinsey_i022646.aspx

http://www.smokestack-books.co.uk

continuous energy leanerfasterstronger

I get an email from Andrew Loretto, creative producer of Sheffield Theatres. It is short, focused, almost telegraphed, as is the nature of missives from scarily busy individuals.

How about if the title is presented as a continuous energy as follows: LeanerFasterStronger  

he asks enigmatically, except I know what he is referring to, and it’s a great suggestion.

Andrew will direct one of my commissions next year, a co-production between Chol Theatre in Huddersfield and Sheffield Crucible, and it is the title of our collaboration we are mulling over. The project is part of Extraordinary Moves, a major strand of the imove programme, which celebrates and challenges the relationship between people and their moving bodies through a series of innovative arts projects across Yorkshire.

‘imove explores how we feel in our moving bodies’ the website states ’whether that is in our daily lives going to work, to the shops, to school, achieving our personal best over 26 miles and 385 yards, or making slow painful progress from one side of the room to the other.

We all move, maybe in different ways and at different speeds and for different reasons, but we all move all the time. Even when we are still, we are moving inside. Movement can mean picking up everything we own and ending up in another place, so imove also explores the movement from one part of the world to another.‘

Extraordinary Moves looks to challenge perceptions of disability through an exploration of human movement. My commission for a new performance is one of the activities Chol are spearheading for 2012.

I assume one of the reasons I was commissioned is because I identify as disabled and as a disability artist. I’m a veteran both of the UK Disability Rights Movement and its burgeoning culture since first working with Graeae Theatre Company in 1986.  I’m one of the surfers of that first wave, once chased down the street by the police for taking direct action against inaccessible public transport (lying down in the street before the wheels of a Cardiff bus), now invited to be Patron of  disability arts organisations, or to write and edit disability culture publications.

Disability politics, the experience of living with impairment, and what I call crip culture inform me daily. They are both foundation and subtext, running like rock strata under everything I do.

LeanerStrongerFaster (if indeed we decide to call it so) will look at the underbelly of professional sport, informed by bioethics, sports science and the future of enhancement: Posthumanism, for want of a word.

I have already become widely read on the philosophical and ethical concerns of transhumanism, for want of a second word. It would be my specialised subject on Mastermind were I the competitive sort to enter such an arena. But I’m not, and that’s another reason for accepting a commission about highly competitive professional sport. I don’t understand it. What’s more, I dislike it. I only show interest in Wales vs Ireland international rugby matches as there no-one really minds who loses (as Ken, my former Caaaardiff neighbour used to tell me, the Welsh are the Irish who couldn’t swim). My favourite team sport was watching One Man and his Dog with my Father when he was alive, his own Welsh border collie racing in confused circles in the yard outside, obeying the whistled instructions off the telly.

And so it seems a particularly perverse action for someone who is at best indifferent towards sport to take on a commission with that as its subject. I always advise writers to work from their passion, their fascination, but this can also be acquired. As I anticipated, the research for the project has been fascinating. Apart from my long reading list, I’ve interviewed former world class athletes and several Paralympians, who have all had one thing in common: astonishing, jaw-dropping drive.  The level of sacrifice young sportspeople and their families make for the chance of getting up on a podium and having a ribbon put round their neck has both humbled and terrified me.

Sport, the competitive spirit, and this form of commitment is something I will never fully understand. But until the production opens in May 2012, I will spend the next months trying to.

For the website of imove, Yorkshire’s cultural activity for 2012:  http://www.imoveand.com/

http://www.choltheatre.co.uk

To read a review of FACE ON: Disability Arts In Ireland and Beyond, go to  http://www.kaiteoreilly.com/download/new_welsh_review.pdf

Inspiration exists, but it has to find you working….(1)

All photographs of The Endurance caught in the ice: Frank Hurley

Back in 2000, I wrote a radio play for BBC Radio 3′s then experimental strand, The Wire. Lives Out of Step was set in Antarctica and used actual wild track recorded on the continent from the BBC sound archives. The play juxtaposed excerpts from the letters and diaries of the early Polar explorers with a fictional narrative highlighting the contemporary exploration (and exploitation) of this frozen desert for oil.

During my research, I became consumed not just with Ernest Shackleton’s  South, his extraordinary account of making his way back safely – with all his men – from a glorious but disastrous attempt to get to the South Pole, but also Frank Hurley’s haunting photographs of The Endurance, the expedition’s ship, caught fast in the Weddell Sea, eighty five miles from their destination.

Long after the play was broadcast and the project was filed away and all but forgotten, the images lingered on in my mind. I made copies of Hurley’s iconic images and blu-tacked them above my desk, not quite sure why. As someone who makes their living through being creative, I have learnt to trust my often illogical-seeming impulses, knowing the process is sometimes instinctive and the reasoning will come through, eventually. It was only many weeks later when going into my study with a friend that I saw this overly-familar place afresh, with all its  superstitious objects and clutter and mountains of capsizing books – and on the wall above my desk a potent visual metaphor of the process of writing. And enduring. And, despite all the odds, surviving.

At risk of inviting hubris, I have to state I do not believe in writer’s block. Like Russian-American director/actor Michael Chekov, I believe that the potential of the imagination is infinite and as such, can be endlessly resourceful. But that doesn’t mean it is easy. It needs to be developed and harnessed, fed and nurtured, alternatively shaped and let grow wild.

In my interactions with writers experiencing this ‘block’, it has inevitably been caused by several possibilities, some of which I list, below:

Tiredness. We need to rest and feed our imaginations just as we have to rest and feed our physical bodies. After a period of intense activity, our energy and stores are depleted, so we need to input as well as output. But before I start trying to stoke the fire of my imagination with further fuel, I rest it by having a day looking…. at a horizon, whether seascape, landscape, or cityscape; at art (my personal favourite is to sit in the cool, dimly-lit environment of Rothko’s gallery at the Tate); at a huge cinema screen; at some other vista which seems to satisfy my hunger for seeing and absorbing. Find your own panacea, but be truthful in how long you need to rest. It is possible to rest for all of your creative life.

Research. Or lack of. The one common criticism I’ve heard from directors working with new writing is they feel playwrights don’t research their characters or the world of their play enough. I’ve also found when mentoring writers who are writing naturalistically, if they have come to an apparently insurmountable block and have begun to doubt themselves, the solution invariably lies in the work, as that is where the problem is, not in the writer. A few choice questions about the rules of the world, or the needs, motivations, or backstories of the characters often illicit a loosening of the obstacle, a thawing of the ice, with fresh material to pursue.

But this research needs to be carefully handled. Chekov warns: “Dry reasoning kills your imagination. The more you probe with your analytical mind, the more silent become your feelings, the weaker your will and the poorer your chances for inspiration.”

Chekov’s advice is to actors and embodied imagination, and so needs to be adapted for use by writers, but the overall sentiment holds true.

I think we need to keep juice in our work, especially during the dehydrating process of revising and rewriting. We mustn’t cook it so dry our work becomes unappetising or inedible. It’s wise to leave the work alone for a while when the material becomes too familiar, as we all know familiarity breeds contempt.

But most of all, my advice to writers is never give up.

Shackleton and his men were assumed dead, lost at sea or in the Antarctic wilderness…

Take inspiration, and above all, endure.

For Frank Hurley’s photographs and Ernest Shackleton’s memoir, see links below:

http://www.kodak.com/US/en/corp/features/endurance/

South with "Endurance": Antarctic Photographs

South: The Endurance Expedition

Two letters and a statement from Ariel Dorfman: Political Freedom of the National Theatre of Kosovo

Several days ago I received this email from Jeton Neziraj, playwright, director of the National Theatre of Kosovo, and fellow member of The Fence, an international network of playwrights and their allies, to whom this email was addressed:

Dear theatre friends,

The National Theatre of Kosovo is being seriously threatened by politics. Even before, this theatre had been the target of manipulations and political control; nonetheless, the latest developments are disturbing and make this theatre’s perspective dim.  The National Theatre of Kosovo is an independent public institution, financed by public funds through The Ministry of Culture.

Recently, the newly appointed Minister of Culture has committed a series of violations of law and power abuses, intimidating the independence of this theatre by making some politically arbitrary decisions. He has dismissed The Board of The National Theatre of Kosovo, even though that board has a legitimate mandate. This decision was made after the board had positively evaluated my three years’ work as the Artistic Director in this Theatre. The Minister has also manipulated with the new board that he himself appointed. As a result, a totally unprofessional person – until recently, he was working in The Kosovo Prime Minister’s Office – has been appointed for the position of Artistic Director of The National Theatre of Kosovo.

This political interference weights down my efforts and those of the previous Board to aesthetically and conceptually reform this theatre, to open paths for cooperation with artists and international theatre companies, to liberate this theatre from schematic national plays, to alleviate it from primitive nationalistic mentality which continues to use the theatre as a medium for promotion of racism and induction of nationalism. Our concept, during the past three years, has brought more audience, about 150% more in comparison to previous years.

I would like to take the opportunity to invite You to react in order to exert pressure on those scandalous political actions, which have arrogated the creative and functional independence of The National Theatre of Kosovo.

I would kindly ask You to send Your reactions to those e-mails:

memli.Krasniqi@ks-gov.net / Minister of Culture

enver.hoxhaj@ks-gov.net / Minister of Foreign Affairs

hajredin.kuqi@ks-gov.net / Deputy Prime Minister of Kosovo

info_pmo@ks-gov.net / The Kosovo Prime Minister’s Office

grakur@gmail.com / Koha Ditore Newspaper

gjergj.filipaj@zeri.info / Zeri Newspaper

faton.raci@gazetaexpress.com  / Newspaper Express

jetonneziraj@gmail.com / Jeton Neziraj

Thank You,

Sincerely,

Jeton Neziraj

——–

Jonathan Meth, founder and director of the Fence, asked Peter Arnott, a fellow founder-member, to draft a response on behalf of the individuals in our organisation. We received a draft last night (19th August 2011). Here follows what The Fence have sent out to the ministers, Prime minister and press of Kosovo:

To whom it may concern

The Fence is an International Network of Playwrights and Theatre Makers dedicated both to respect for cultural identity and for communication and collaboration across borders of all kinds.  Our membership of 130 comes from more than 40 countries, and includes leading practitioners who are themselves of international reputation as well as within their own theatre cultures.

What damages or restricts the free movement of artists and ideas in one country or between countries damages and impoverishes us all. What enhances the value we put on each other as human beings of every ethnicity, religion and background enhances us all. But what diminishes any one of us diminishes everybody.

We therefore note with concern and some alarm recent developments at the National Theatre of Kosovo.  For European Theatre Culture, the National Theatre of Kosovo, among others, represents hope for a more open and inclusive future, where, especially in newly emerging or re-emerging national cultures, mutual respect and imaginative engagement can enhance our common European home.

While decisions as to the governance and management of theatres are of course the province of their key stakeholders, including funders and relevant political overseers, the Culture Ministry of Kosovo should be aware that their decisions do not go unnoticed or uncommented on in the wider theatre and cultural sphere. Irregularities and arbitrary decisions are political in this cultural context, and will provoke a political as well as cultural response.

The reputation of every nation can be enhanced by its cultural production.

It can also be damaged.

And if it is felt that the theatre culture of a given country is being utilised for retrograde policies and attitudes, that damage can be lasting and severe. We respect both individual talent and cultural openness. We expect no less of our valued neighbours.

We urge the cultural authorities in Kosovo to consider the respect that should be afforded to all new and old nations and peoples, and further, urge them not to risk their own.

For and on behalf of The Fence Network

Peter Arnott

Jonathan Meth

www.the-fence.net/members.aspx

———-

Since posting this, I have received an update. Ariel Dorfman has made this public statement:

“For many artists and citizens around the world, the tragedy and cause of Kosovo was of great concern and, for my part, I welcomed the possibility of the people of that land to express themselves and their identity freely. Now I hear of intimidation and bullying and the promotion of racial and narrow ethnic and nationalistic policies at the National Theatre of Kosovo through the intervention of recently appointed Minister of Culture. This threat to the independence of such an important theatrical institution should not be taken lightly. For a country like Kosovo, the theatre is undoubtedly one of the arts that most needs to be able to tell stories – just like the people of Kosovo – without fear – also like the people of Kosovo. Indeed, the freedom that should be represented on the stage of the National Theatre is symbolic of the freedom that all those who live and create in Kosovo deserve. I beg the authorities to allow this freedom to flourish without applying petty politics. As someone who has had his work staged in Kosovo, I feel that I am part of your culture as well, and hope that this crisis can be resolved with generosity and without damaging the good name of Kosovo.”

Ariel Dorfman 

In the studio (2)

My friend writes to me.

‘So.. you’re working on a new show. What are you actually doing? Have you written a play, or some scenes, which the actors are trying out? Or are you scribing what the actors devise in order to shape into a script, later?’

The truth of the matter is, neither and both.

The Echo Chamber will be a collaboration, an equal co-creation between Ian Morgan, Phillip Zarrilli, Peader Kirk, and myself. We will each bring material and ideas and perspectives to the work. We may  come from different disciplines and have established our own distinct aesthetics and diverse trajectories, but we share common ground.

Some distinct roles exist – for example, I am a writer/dramaturg – but these roles are not rigid nor are they all-defining; rather, there is mutability and flow between us and the functions we may serve, so the director may think of text, the writer come up with movement, the performer suggest design.There is no pre-existing script, or prepared concept, or hidden agenda. Without hierarchy or pigeonholing, we will imagine the textures and surface and content, and work it into being.

I know from mentoring and teaching new and emerging playwrights, this notion of co-creation can be intimidating, bizarre, alarming, even. So much of our time is spent alone, dreaming the world of our play, peopling our imagination with these characters existing in printed words on a screen or on the page. It is easy to forget that performance is a collaborative act.

Like an architect, we are preparing a blueprint for others to realise, collaborators who will bring the force of their imagination and skills and expertise to the bones of the script and inject it with spirit, clothe it in flesh.

I know that many writers have not had the good fortune to be often, if ever, in a studio space with actors, directors, fellow writers, dramaturgs. I am frequently asked about rehearsal etiquette, or the process(es) a writer can or should use when in a rehearsal space with performers. My answer is always a disappointing ‘it depends’ – for it does, it depends on the context, on the company, on the aesthetic, on the project, on what purpose the being in a rehearsal space with actors is due to serve. I am hoping that over the next year some of these contexts and possibilities may be touched on as I progress through my productions diverse in style, content and context, in 2012.

My own work as a playwright began at the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs when a graduate in the mid 1980’s, as one of the winners of their Young Writers Festival.  But I was also working early in my career as a devising actor and physical theatre performer – which is, I think, where things start getting interesting.

There is often a schism – an artificial one, I believe – between performance texts or performance work per se and playwriting – and practitioners usually do stay in one camp, seldom crossing.

I remember many years ago being at a CPR event (The Centre for Performance Research http://www.thecpr.org.uk/) when Arnold Wesker unleashed what later became his essay On the Nature of interpretation, Act One, onto an unsuspecting community of pedagogues, performance makers, theatre practitioners and directors. As the audience remonstrated and howled, I marvelled at his bravery and what seemed an equal stupidity, this oppositional, segregating attitude amongst allies and collaborators. Whilst control and power and hierarchy and ownership are issues that need to be addressed and challenged in our industry – I’m not quite so naively optimistic as to believe they are not relevant and present in the majority of contexts – I also find Wesker’s comments stoke the old fires and may well be counter-productive rather than progressive.

Arnold Wesker writes:

            “- a madness is sweeping through world theatre, a madness that elevated the role and importance of the director above the role and importance of the playwright.  The stage has become shrill with the sounds of the director’s vanity; it has been cluttered with his or her tricks and visual effects.  No play is safe from their, often hysterical, manipulations.  The productions we are seeing claim attention to themselves rather than to the play. The playwright’s vision of the human condition has become  secondary to the director’s bombastic striving for personal impact; the playwright’s text, the playwright’s visual concepts, his rhythmic arrangement of scenes, her emotional tensions, his unfolding of narrative action, her perceptions of human behaviour, are distorted, re-arranged, cut, or ignored by the director and sometimes the actors….”

http://exeuntmagazine.com/features/arnold-wesker-essay-wut-up-esse/

Such attitudes breed fear and suspicion of our collaborators; it polarises what is broad and multi-faceted into a binary of director’s theatre and playwright’s theatre. Whilst there is of course a larger truth in some of what Wesker writes, and I acknowledge there are indeed terrible stories of lack of agency and say in ‘collaborations’ -playwrights in effect stripped of artistic ownership of their own work – in my experience, at least, there has been no such wilful, destructive vanity. There can be moments of discord and disagreement, but that is part of the collaboration, the negotiation towards production. It all rests on the context and company. Which is why I say ‘it depends’, when I’m asked about rehearsal etiquette and processes – for shocking as it is, apparently there are still cases when playwrights are banned from the rehearsal room – but then there are also examples when they run the whole show, or collectively participate, as I do.

In the republic of poetry – The Ted Hughes Award

In the republic of poetry

Alan Ward speaks to Kaite O’Reilly, winner of the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

This interview first appeared in the summer 2011 issue of Poetry News, which is mailed quarterly to members of the Poetry Society  (www.poetrysociety.org.uk).

Carol Ann Duffy presented playwright Kaite O’Reilly with the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry and a £5,000 cheque at the Savile Club, London, on 24 March 2011. Judges Gillian Clarke, Stephen Raw and Jeanette Winterson selected O’Reilly’s masterly retelling of Aeschylus’s 2,500-year-old play The Persians from a shortlist compiled from recommendations made by Poetry Society and PBS members. “Here’s the truth of language colliding with the clichés of politics and the advertisement of war,” the judges said. “This verse play is entertainment, challenge and a lie detector.”

Photo by Hayley Madden

Winning such a prestigious poetry award has, O’Reilly says, made her reflect on her practice and how she labels herself. “From the beginning of my career, critics have always called my plays ‘poetic’, or ‘lyrical’. Although I have never viewed myself as a ‘poet’, my poet friends do…”

So had she taken particular inspiration from the reworkings of Classical texts by poets such as Heaney, Hughes and Harrison when writing The Persians? “No, I was following a different trajectory,” O’Reilly says, though she had been keen to observe Aeschylus’s “very precise” poetic schema. “When Aeschylus used the heroic hexameter, I tried to echo this, sparingly, so as not to jar the ear of a modern audience. In the sections where he used prose, I did too.”

Poetry is an important part of her personal hinterland: “I’m Irish and, without trying to romanticise my culture, I do believe there is a form of poetics in the way Irish people handle the English language – or there was, certainly, in the living mouths of my parents and the way I was reared. There’s a love of language, an intoxication with what it can do – its lyricisms, its brutality – and this came to me through the language around me as I grew up.” John Donne remains a particular favourite. “He’s the poet I loved first and return to most. He and the Metaphysical poets wrote – to my ear, at least – the human voice in movement, full of humour and poignancy.”

O’Reilly’s adventurousness as a writer continues. She has been developing a series of work for disabled and Deaf performers for several years. In Water I’m Weightless: The ‘d’ Monologues will be produced by National Theatre Wales in 2012, as an Unlimited Commission and part of the Cultural Olympiad. The monologues vary in style and form, and include Sign Poetry. “I have been involved in disability arts and culture for over twenty years, and with Sign Performance for almost as long,” O’Reilly says.

So will the Ted Hughes Award finally allay her anxieties about claims to poetry? “I have always been rather terrified of ‘poetry’ – whatever that may mean,” she admits. “As a child, I gobbled it up and learned, as is so usual in Irish culture, huge swathes of it by heart. Then, somewhere in my twenties I became fearful – I wasn’t clever enough to understand poetry, it was something ‘beyond’ me – although I continued to read widely, especially in translation from German, Japanese, Welsh and Thai. My friend the nature poet Chris Kinsey started my repatriation into the republic of poetry, chasing away my fears, sharing her work and that of others. Now to be formally addressed as a fellow citizen, and by such luminaries – who I am to disagree?”

Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry

The award was founded by Carol Ann Duffy when she became Poet Laureate in 2009. The £5,000 prize money is funded from the stipend that the laureate traditionally receives from HM The Queen. The Ted Hughes Award 2011 will begin accepting recommendations from Poetry Society and Poetry Book Society members from September. Visit http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/tedhughes/ to find out more, to see examples of the type of work that may be eligible, and to make the Society aware of any exciting work you feel your fellow members might like to know about.

Further information about the Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry can be found here: http://www.poetrysociety.org.uk/content/competitions/tedhughes/

Beating about The Bush – the reluctant escapologist?

Mike Bradwell’s book The Reluctant Escapologist has just arrived through the post. I was delighted to see it was the (surprise? obvious?) winner of  the Theatre Book Prize 2011, given by STR, Society of Theatre Research.

Filthy and uproarious, it is a vivid journey through the history of the fringe by a marvelling, enthusiastic and subversive protagonist. Whether setting up Hull Truck, relishing the group onstage orgasms of The Living Theatre, fire-eating with Bob Hoskins, or running The Bush Theatre, this sometimes mocking, but passionate account is a call to arms for alternative theatre.

I worked with Mike with my first London production, YARD, back in 1998, when he was still artistic director. Many bottles of red wine were consumed in the pub below the theatre and it was probably during one of those evenings the idea for the show’s poster design materialised through the billowy clouds of silk cut.

I started to write YARD when my friend Christina Katic and I volunteered for Suncokret Humanitarian Relief Agency during the war in former Yugoslavia, a relationship and commitment which lasted for many years. At that time, in the mid-90′s, I wanted to write a play about the impact of civil war, but without setting it in the Balkans, against that particular backdrop, as I felt this could – and does – happen everywhere. The play is bloody and brutal, reflecting the horror I had seen within the shattered communities of frontline towns and what Michael Ignatieff called ‘fault line’ families, yet I didn’t want to make it biographical, or  put it at a distance and therefore safe, with nothing to do with us.

I eventually set YARD in the butcher shop and slaughterhouse of a warring Irish family living in Birmingham.  My father was a slaughter-man; I knew the jargon of the cutting room and the etiquette of the front of shop. Blood and the matter of life and death was not, then, something outside my daily experience and so it seemed an obvious and informed space in which to set the play.  

Memory is a fickle thing, but I like to think that when we were discussing an image for the production over many glasses and even more fags, it was Mike who said ‘the heart’s been torn out. We need to have a heart.’ 

And so I found myself In Spittalfields, obtaining an ox heart like some dubious alchemist, then making my way to a studio to cup the mighty organ in my hands, moulding it to appear even more ‘heart like’ than it did in actuality as a vegan photographer nervously took portraits of my hands. As a butcher’s daughter, there isn’t a squeamish bone in my body and it is now with pride I look at my nail bitten hands nestling that heart.

In the studio (1)

The fall of rain is so heavy, it wakes me in the night. I lie for hours in the dark, mind circling like the buzzard I’d seen the day before, shadowing the fields.

In the morning we congregate, armed with smart phones, mp3 player, video camera, still camera and several macs. It seems a lot of technology for a former milking parlour, still with lime wash walls and earth floor.

When we met in Berlin, we agreed a broad range of themes and aesthetics which were of individual and collective interest, and so this time we’ve come prepared with stimuli and research material: everything from Ethel Merman to Sean nos, old style Irish singing, and texts from Asimov to Paolo Zellini’s A Short History of Infinity.

The possibilities feel infinite and could intimidate, but we are agreed to keep our minds and options open, at least through these first days.

We have to begin somewhere.

So we do with several points of entry: Ian and Phillip leading physical improvisations with a simple exercise frame, centre/stick work, working with the space between them.

Peader offers some text-generating exercises and I follow up with some found text and new scripted dialogue. We are finding our way, testing boundaries, finding complicity. We are sending Seneca’s guard at the gates of the mind home early to barracks. There will be time for criticism and editing, but that’s not now.

We have a title and we have a company and we have to begin somewhere.

We’ve started. 

The Llanarth Group

Surrounded by the verdant greenness of the damp west Wales landscape, Friesian cows in the next field, and a thin slither of the Irish Sea, like the paring of a fingernail, just visible on the horizon. I am at The Llanarth Group’s Studio, beginning work on a new collaborative piece, The Echo Chamber, which will open in January 2012 at Chapter Arts centre in Cardiff.

The Llanarth Group is an association of international theatre/performance artists, founded in Wales in 2000 by Artistic Director, Phillip Zarrilli. Each production brings together a specific group of collaborators relevant to the aesthetic of a specific project, and this one brings together Ian Morgan, Peader Kirk, Phillip Zarrilli and myself.

It’s not our first time gathering to begin work on the project. Earlier in the year, we had two days in a studio in Berlin, but even prior to that, each of us has collaborated with at least one of the other, in some complex, convoluted dance of connections and companies and coincidences, but always conscious decisions.

Welsh theatre practitioner Ian Morgan has been a member of Polish theatre company Song of the Goat for six years. Peader Kirk, a director/artist, works collaboratively with Mkultra and recently made a piece called A Day Trip, commissioned by Athens Festival. An online portion of the project is available at http://mkultra-adaytrip-audio.posterous.com/59709281  Phillip Zarrilli is a long-term collaborator; we have worked extensively together since Theater Asou’s site-specific Speaking Stones in 2002, made inside an Austrian mountain quarried since Roman times and used as a work camp by the Nazis, making machine parts for aeroplanes during the 1942 Allied bombings.

It’s going to be interesting…