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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Seven Short Poems by Lucian Staiano-Daniels.
2. Reflections on Anonymity 2 by W.D. Jackson.
3. On Learning a Poet I Admire Often Carries a Pocket Knife by David Greenspan.
4. Hautes Études and Mudra by Michael Londra.
5. Rhyme as Rhythm by Adam Piette.
6. Windows or Mirrors… by Charles Martin.
7. Three Texts by Rupert M. Loydell.
8. Two Poems by Moriana Delgado.
9. Mariangela by Ian Seed.
10. Six Prose Poems by Pietro De Marchi, translated by Peter Robinson.
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Two poems, with an audio track, from Heart Monologues by Jasmina Bolfek-Radovani | Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych | Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | Anthony Howell reads three new poems | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause, Dreamt Affections,Blind Summits and Oblique Lights
New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series, with more than 2,000 items in its archive, is more than ten years old! So, unless you’re reading this in the state pen, you may never catch up, but you can start here with ITEMS PUBLISHED DURING OUR 2023 HIATUS (July-August 2023):
Master Ru by Peter Knobler | Four Poems on Affairs of State by Peter Robinson | 5×7 by John Matthias | You Haven’t Understood and two more poems by Amy Glynn | Long Live the King and two more by Eliot Cardinaux, with drawings by Sean Ali Shostakovich, Eliot and Sunday Morning by E.J. Smith Jr. :: For much more, please consult our massive yet still partial archive.
2011: Golden-beak in eight parts. By George Basset (H. R. Haxton).
2012: The Invention of the Modern World in 18 parts. By Alan Macfarlane.
2013: Helen in three long parts. By Oswald Valentine Sickert.
2016: The Survival Manual by Alan Macfarlane. In eight parts.
2018: After the Snowbird, Comes the Whale, by Tom Lowenstein.
LONDON
Readings in The Room: 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 9AS – £5 entry plus donation for refreshments. All enquiries: 0208 801 8577
Poetry London: Current listings here.
Shearsman readings: 7:30pm at Swedenborg Hall, 20/21 Bloomsbury Way, London WC1. Further details here.NEW YORK
10 reliable poetry venues in NYC.
· The funeral of Isaac Albéniz
· Coleridge, poetry and the ‘rage for disorder’
· Otto Rank
· Patrons and toadying
· Rejection before slips
· Cut with a dull blade
· Into the woods, everybody.
· Thought Leaders and Ted Talks
· How Mary Oliver ‘found love in a breathing machine.’
By Roger Berkowitz, Juliet du Boulay, Denis Boyles, Stan Carey, H.R. Haxton, Allen M. Hornblum, Alan Macfarlane, Anthony O’Hear, Andrew Sinclair, Harry Stein, Eugène-Melchior de Vogüé, and many others. Free access.
· James Thomson [B.V.]
Occ. Notes…
A dilemma for educators:
Philosophy and the public impact.
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Michelene Wandor on Derek Walcott and the T.S. Eliot Prize.
.Nick Lowe: the true-blue Basher shows up for a friend.
Kate Hoyland: Inventing Asia, with Joseph Conrad and a Bible for tourists.
Who is Bruce Springsteen? by Peter Knobler.
Martin Sorrell on John Ashbery’s illumination of Arthur Rimbaud.
The beauty of Quantitative Easing.
DEPARTMENTS
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Two innovative plays in London.
By ANTHONY HOWELL.
Third Person Theatre Company
Directed by Mark Phoenix
with
Mark Gray, Lesley Ambler, Aliona Ladus, Samantha Wright and Afro Ghignoni
at
Bread and Roses
Sunday 7 April 2019
IT’S BEEN A good week for me, on the fringes of theatre-land. Last Sunday, I went to the Bread and Roses pub near Clapham Common to see the work of the Third Person Theatre Company, who perform on the pub’s small stage upstairs on the first Sunday of the month. Mark Phoenix, their director, describes what they do as “Theatre of the Moment”. Essentially, the company improvise a play for the audience. They prefer the term “Theatre of the Moment” now, as “word improvisation” (the term they’ve used before) has become synonymous with stand-up comedy.
Phoenix informed me that this work grew out of Meisner technique, which focuses on the relationships between actors rather than the cultivation of personality.
Phoenix informed me that this work grew out of Meisner technique, which focuses on the relationships between actors rather than the cultivation of personality which is popular today in drama schools grooming students for celebrity. The actor reacts instinctively to the environment, which includes other actors. An underlying emotion may be expressed in a variety of ways. Sanford Meisner’s approach develops out of Stanislavski, but is divergent from the ‘method’ acting that also grew out of Stanislavski’s preparations for dramatic interpretation. For me, it is still an ‘internalised’ approach, a mental readiness, whereas, with my own performance art I have been more interested in the actuality of one’s own being – “being, not acting” was a key-phrase in the Theatre of Mistakes which I founded in the seventies. Then, we focused on the physical reality of our actions. Could we reverse them? Repeat them? Copy them exactly?
But that was some fifty years ago, and I guess I have mellowed. Anyway, I am curious about ways of going about things that differ from my own habits of doing. In the second half, Third Person presented a play entitled ‘Three, Two, One’. All the actors knew about it was that there would be three actors in the first scene, two new actors in the second scene, and a solo actor, never previously on the stage, and this solo scene would conclude the drama. Very rapidly, the first actor to appear in the trio, a young person, set up a scene – underground, limestone pits, one’s clothes always damp and smelly, somewhere below a religious establishment. The second actor expanded on this notion, while the third, who had had a certain bossiness projected onto her, remained silent, traumatised, finally screaming in anguish. In the second scene, two actors, somewhere, it seemed, above ground, worried about the loss of a young person, and the loss of several persons who had vanished from their community.
I found the way the play was built utterly engrossing, because of course I was building it also, in my own mind. This seemed a new form of audience participation. Every member of the audience was a playwright, as was every member of the cast, and perhaps our versions of the narrative converged, perhaps they were widely divergent. We were still all engrossed in making a play unfold, and it was up to the last actor, the solo actor, to take us to some notion of a conclusion; but this proved a tricky business. I sensed that it would be all too easy simply to tie up as many of the loose ends as could be gathered together. Instead, the actor (Mark Phoenix, the director, in this case) chose to deepen into the character that he had gone for as he stepped onto the stage: a somewhat dubious, religious type, unctuous, possibly sinister.
The limitations, it occurred to me, were defined by the structure, since no actor appeared in more than one scene. Talking to me later, Phoenix explained that this was the structure the company had decided to explore that evening, and that they constantly sought for structures that could generate interesting results. I mentioned The Ancient Classical Drama: a Study in Literary Evolution, (Oxford 1890), by Richard G. Moulton which identifies four “Plots of Passion” and two “Plots of Action” which may take place within the strictures of the classical unities of time, space and action. Plots of Passion can be an “Opening Situation developed to a Climax”, a “Development of a Final Situation”, a “Development from one situation to another”, or an “Opening Situation developed to its reversal”. Plots of Action can involve “Complication and Resolution” and then there is “The Pendulum Plot, or Plot of Fortune Turns.”
How intrigued I have always been by the Pendulum Plot. Its ghost is always there in a trio: two may side together against one, but then one may always switch sides. It’s a plot that shapes the development of Iphigenia in Tauris, Hercules Mad and Philoctetes. In Philoctetes by Sophocles (the action concerns a man suffering from an evil-smelling foot!) the plot swings from complication to resolution and then back again to complication. With its interest in theatre of the moment, Third Person is well-equipped to work with such ideas, and I very much appreciate how they invite their audience into the creative process. You witness a play being made in front of your eyes.
♦
The Noises
by Jacqueline Saphra
Directed by Tamar Saphra,
featuring Amy McAllister as Luna
Old Red Lion Theatre
Angel, Islington — until 20 April 2019
ON WEDNESDAY NIGHT, I watched a dog, for the length of the evening; a dog shut up and abandoned in a bare space, possibly a basement, below a family home. The poet Jacqueline Saphra has written a monologue for this dog: it often gets interrupted by noises from above, which the poor bitch, for it’s a she, interprets as best she can. There is nothing in her space but a cushion and a blanket. She’d like to be taken out for some exercise but there’s some sort of family row going on. Doors slam. It sounds as if a youngster has stormed out of the house. The dog’s name is Luna. Her language is doggy. She is bored and lonely, and she needs to pee, and she is hungry. To relieve herself, at least of her anxiety, she tells her own story to the walls.
Poets seem to have a penchant for dogs. Last year I went to the Jermyn Theatre to see Cressida Bonas in W.H. Auden’s The Dog beneath the Skin. It was intriguing to watch this lovely, and extremely talented actress, performing for all but the last few minutes of the play in a gas-mask muzzle as a very believable dog, and doing this within a stone’s throw of the Palace. Thank goodness she broke up with her prince and has been saved for theatre-land.
Then F.T. Prince has a wonderful poem called “His Dog and Pilgrim”. It concerns the dog that licked the buboes of Saint Rocque, curing him of the plague. Here is the opening of part two:
♦
Luna provides us with a contrast to the differences that divide our sexes. She is played by Amy McAllister, a brilliant poet in her own right.
Jacqueline Saphra’s Luna is just as doggy as either of these precedents. She is certainly as loyal to her young mistress, Ellie, as Prince’s dog was to his saint. However, she is more down to earth. She gets into scraps. She comes on heat. She steals shoes. There is satirical intent here. A dog is a dog, after all. Hounds in a pack may be male or female. Beyond the specifically biological, there is no great division of roles. Luna provides us with a contrast to the differences that divide our sexes. She is played by Amy McAllister, a brilliant poet in her own right (I mention her in my article on satire). She has already triumphed in several “slam” competitions, and she possesses a phenomenal memory and holds the stage for a good eighty minutes or so: a bitch who has seen it all, had good and bad masters, can be loyal, can sink in the teeth when it’s called for. Luna wags her bum in a convincing way, hoping the door will open, and we can imagine her tail. The daughter having left the house, we hear from upstairs how the husband calms the wife of her apprehension about the girl’s departure – all done through very convincing placing of sound speakers above the ‘ceiling’. Since no one’s around, they make love, and Luna knows just what they’re doing. But then the play takes a dark turn. There are explosions. The wife’s fears resurface. Everyone has forgotten about poor Luna, locked away, desperate for a shit by now. The tumult grows louder and louder, enhanced, on the night I was there by the football crowd roaring its disgust and then its approval in the bar below the theatre! Perfect setting for a feminist drama!
As events take a turn for the worse, so Luna’s tale of her life and its vicissitudes grows more desolate. Amy McAllister holds our focus on how her isolated location crystallizes the surrounding situation. This is a technique pioneered by Tom Stoppard, whose plays often evolve through characters peripheral to some grander drama, or events at celebrations – observed through some room where the guests leave their coats. What makes The Noises riveting is undeniably the solo performance of McAllister. Well worth catching, if you can.
♦
Note: Altered subsequent to publication to repair an editing error.
Related
Publication: Wednesday, 17 April 2019, at 18:35.
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