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About KU’s Trollope Prize.
1. Last Kind Words, an anthology of poems after Geeshie Wiley’s song, edited by Peter Riley
2. ‘Ghost’ and eight more poems, by Veroniki Dalakoura, translated by John Taylor
3. The Metaphoric Graveyard, a short essay by Alan Wall
…and much more, below in this column.
Audio archive: Hayden Carruth reads Contra Mortem and Journey to a Known Place | James Laughlin reads Easter in Pittsburgh and five more | Peter Robinson reads Manifestos for a lost cause and Dreamt Affections| Daragh Breen’s Aural Triptych
More below. Scroll down.
4. New to The Fortnightly Review? Our online series is more than ten years old! YOU MAY NEVER CATCH UP, BUT YOU CAN START HERE: Peter Riley: Poetry Notes: Winter reading |Alan Morrison: June Haunting | Kallic Distance, explained by Michial Farmer | Thesis: Stravinsky. Part four of Tronn Overend’s comments on Adorno and music | Two uncollected personal poems by Roy Fisher, with comments by Peter Robinson | Anthony Rudolf reviews The Hölderliniae by Nathaniel Tarn (with an excerpt) | The reascent of Spengler’s Decline by James Gallant | Three new poems by Simon Smith | Tom Lowenstein’s poem To the Muses | Michael Hampton reviews Turner’s Loom | Le meutre: the death of Camus, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Peter Larkin: Extract from Trees the Seed |Anthony Howell on Julian Stannard’s Freeing Up | Wanton and two more poems, by Michael Egan | Alan Wall on Melancholy’s black sun | Paul Cohen parses Words and Lies | Bruce Kinzer on Leslie Stephen and the Metaphysicals | Richard Johnson: The Present Dystopian Paranoia | Nights In and two more new poems by Anthony Howell Dreamt Affections, a sequence by Peter Robinson | Freedom and justice at the Warburg by Peter McCarey | A Brexit Fudge by Alan Macfarlane | The poem’s not in the word by C. F. Keary | Peter Riley’s Poetry Notes: An Anthology for the Apocalypse | Diderot: The Curious Materialist, by Caroline Warman | Cambridge and two more poems by Ralph Hawkins | Gerard Manley Hopkins: No Worst There Is None, by Alan Wall | Hoyt Rogers: Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento | Dragon Rock, and two more short fictions, by Umiyuri Katsuyama, translated by Toshiya Kamei | Adorno and the Philosophy of Modern Music: Part three of the essay by Tronn Overend | Michael Buckingham Gray: Back to the drawing board, an extremely short story | Customer. Relationship. Management. A downloadable polemic by Sascha Akhtar | Strictly Scrum: Michelene Wandor on the life and work of James Haskell, flanker | Michial Farmer On Elegance | Telling it for ourselves: Simon Collings on the latest cinema news from Africa | Stephen Wade on the Good Soldier and his creator: The Good Writer Hašek | Six prose poems by Scott Thurston | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy, and ‘Seeing with Words: Yves Bonnefoy and the Seicento,’ by Hoyt Rogers | Jonathan Gorvett, In Djibouti with The Angel of Hulme | An Aural Triptych by Daragh Breen | Immanuel Kant and the origin of the dialectic, the second part of Tronn Overend’s essay on Adorno and music | Three bilinguacultural poems by Changming Yuan | The Optician, short fiction by Cecilia Eudave | (a bean) — fiction by Marzia D’Amico | Stories from The Jazz Age by Aidan Semmens | ‘The London Cage’ and three more poems, by Judith Willson | Manifestos for a lost cause: A sequence of poems by Peter Robinson | Seven new poems by Barry Schwabsky | The poetry of social commitment: Poetry Notes by Peter Riley | The poet as essayist, by Alan Wall | On Gathering and Togethering in Medellin by Richard Berengarten | Two songs by Tristram Fane Saunders | What Heroism Feels Like: Fiction by Benjamin Wolfe | Two poems: ‘Inbound’ and one untitled about Ziggy by Nigel Wheale | Iconoclasm and portraiture in recent fiction by Paul Cohen | The Weimar Republic and critical theory: Adorno on modern music. First in a series by Tronn Overend | From the archive: Art, constantly aspiring: The School of Giorgione by Walter Pater | Seven very, very short fictions by Tom Jenks | The Seicento and the Cult of Images by Yves Bonnefoy | Three poems after reading Heine by Tom Lowenstein | Six new poems by Johanna Higgins | Macanese Concrete by Peter McCarey | ‘Leave-taking’, the end of a left-bank affair. By Ian Seed | Peter Riley probes Laura Riding’s many modes and offers his 2020 list of summer reviews |Bibliographic Archæology in Cairo by Raphael Rubinstein | Steve Xerri: Ezra Pound’s life in verse — with two more new poems, one featuring Keats | New Poems by Carrie Etter and Anna Forbes | ‘So, Dreams’ and three more poems, by Luke Emmett | Simon Collings wanders Buñuel’s labyrinth of artifice | Matt Hanson on the Romaniotes in America | For Once, a short fiction by Susana Martín Gijón | Four prose poems by Jane Monson | Jesse Glass and the poetry of ‘ouch’, explained: Pain… | Three poems, one very prose-like, by Claire Crowther | Two new poems by Sandra Kolankiewicz | Michelene Wandor reviews a metro-anthology from London’s twin cities | Simon Collings interviews Jeremy Noel-Tod, anthologist of prose poetry | Alan Wall: How we see now. A Note on Inscape, Descriptionism and Logical Form | Simon Perril: Poems from ‘the Slip’ | Michael Blackburn reviews Byatt’s Odd Angel | Christopher Landrum looks through Chris Arnade’s candid camera at America | Nigel Wheale reviews Ian Crockatt’s translations of the Skaldic verse of Orkney | Osip Mandelstam’s Tristia, in a new translation by Peter McCarey | Anna de Noailles: Thirteen poems in versions by Anthony Howell | Meandering through the Belle-Époque with Anthony Howell | Peter Riley‘s Poetry Notes for Summer 2020 | Three collections of prose poetry: 1.Nine haibun by Sheila E. Murphy | 2.Hurt Detail and two more prose poems by Lydia Unsworth | 3.Ten prose poems, five about men. By Mark Russell | The Latest Event in the History of the Novel by Paul Cohen | Life after life: Viduities, an essay by Alan Wall | As Grass Will Amend (Intend) Its Surfaces, by landscape poet Peter Larkin | More delicate, if minor, interconnections. Poetry by Tom Lowenstein | What Peter Knobler discovered out Walking While White in New York City | Alan Wall reviews Ian Sansom’s autopsy of Auden’s September 1, 1939 | A few very short fictions by Georgia Wetherall | A Play — for 26 Voices by Alice Notley | Four new poems from Credo, Stephen Wiest‘s new collection | Nigel Wheale on the significance and frailty of Raymond Crump | Ottomania! Matt Hanson reports on three new Turkish titles | Cinema: Simon Collings looks into Andrew Kötting’s Whalebone Box | Gowersby. A new puzzle-fiction by Shukburgh Ashby | The Jinn of Failaka: Reportage byMartin Rosenstock | Five Hung Particles by Iain Britton | Three poems from ‘Sovetica’ by Caroline Clark | It’s about time—Boustrophedon time: Anthony Howell is Against Pound | When words fail: Alan Wall diagnoses Shakespeare’s Dysnarrativia | Olive Custance, Lord Alfred Douglas’s much, much better half. By Ferdi McDermott | Three gardens and a dead man by Khaled Hakim | Poems from The Messenger House by Janet Sutherland | Two new poems by British-Canadian poet Pete Smith | Mob Think: Michael Blackburn reviews Kevin D. Williamson’s Smallest Minority: Independent Thinking in the Age of Mobs | Natalia Ginzburg’s On Women. The first translation in English, by Nicoletta Asciuto | Alan Wall: Considering I, alone, An interrogation of the isolated first person | Anthony Howell reviews Christopher Reid’s ‘Love, Loss and Chianti’ | Jeremy Hilton: An excerpt from Fulmar’s Wing | Peter Riley: Hakim and Byrne and a spring storm of ‘Poetry Notes’ | Simon Collings with news of African films, including a review of Mati Diop’s Atlantics |Alan Price reviews Anthony Howell’s mind-body reflections | Franca Mancinelli: Pages from the Croatian Notebook, in a translation by John Taylor |Anne Stevenson: A tribute to Eugene Dubnov | David Hay: Two poems, one in prose | Four poems from ‘Lectio Volant’ by Steve Ely | Seven very short stories by Ian Seed | Advice from all over: Peter Riley on How to Write Poetry | Geoffrey Hill and the Perturbation of Baruch by Anthony O’Hear | Bird of four tongues by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Deirdre Mikolajcik: Abstract Wealth and Community in The Way We Live Now (Trollope Prize) | Nyssa Ruth Fahy on A Less-Beaten Path: Trollope’s West Indian fiction (Trollope Prize) | Blame it on the rain: flash fiction on two wheels, by Michael Buckingham Gray | True love—at 103: Breakfast with Mrs Greystone by S.D. Brown | The last Mantegna: fiction by Michelene Wandor | My first thirty years: A serial by Alan Macfarlane | Quotidian verse: She went to the hospital for an infection. By T. Smith-Daly | Tradition, by Enzo Kohara Franca. ‘My mother’s parents didn’t make it easy for her. In 1938 they immigrated from Sendai, where all men are Japanese, to São Paulo, where all men are Brazilian.’ | Peter Riley: Autumn reviews of new poetry | George Maciunas and Fluxus, reviewed by Simon Collings | The Political Agent in Kuwait, by Piers Michael Smith | Mother child: fiction by Conor Robin Madigan | The marital subtext of The State of the Union, reviewed by Michelene Wandor | Swincum-le-Beau, a puzzle-fiction in the spirit of Pevsner. By Shukburgh Ashby | Gibraltar Point and three more poems by Iain Twiddy | Six quite brief fictions by Simon Collings | James Gallant: Puttering with E.M. Cioran | Blind man’s fog and other poems by Patrick Williamson | None of us: a poem by Luke Emmett | Rankine’s uncomfortable citizenship by Michelene Wandor | Languages: A Ghazal by Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee | Seven more poems by Tom Lowenstein | Five poems from ‘Mattered by Tangents’ by Tim Allen | Anthony Howell: Freewheeling through some post-summer reading | ‘Noise’ and three more new poems by Maria de Araújo | A shelf of new poetry books for summer reviewed by Peter Riley in ‘Poetry Notes’ | Film: Simon Collings on Peter Strickland’s In Fabric | Michelene Wandor reviews Helen Dunmore’s Counting Backwards | Mauritius in three voices, by Emma Park | The hidden virtues of T-units and n-grams, by Davina Allison | Peter McCarey reviews W.D. Jackson’s latest Opus | Seven new poems by poet-ethnographer Tom Lowenstein | Anthony Howell: Empyrean Suite, an afterlife collaboration with Fawzi Karim | Christine Gallant reviews Herb Childress’s book on the life of the Adjunct Prof | The talk of The Dolphin, King’s Cross, as reported by Michael Mahony | Franca Mancinelli: Eight poems from Mala Kruna, in translations by John Taylor | A short question: Who will read short stories? David McVey answers | Eavesdropping on Olmecs: New poems by Jesse Glass | Two new poems by Laura Potts | Simon Collings on existence and its discontents in Capernaum | Peter Riley: Reviews yet more new prose-poetry | Anthony Rudolf remembers Turkish poet, novelist and essayist Moris Farhi | James Gallant sheds new light on the Duchess of Richmond’s ball in Brussels | Theatre: Third Person Theatre Co., and ‘The Noises’ reviewed by Anthony Howell | A fourth gulp of prose poems from ‘The Dice Cup’ by Max Jacob in a new translation by Ian Seed | Lots more short fiction: A new item by Michael Buckingham Gray and a full half-dozen by Simon Collings | Apollo 17 and the Cartoon Moon: Lunar poetry by James Bullion | Juvenal may be missing his moment: Satire for the millennium by Anthony Howell | Pickle-fingered truffle-snouter: fiction by Robert Fern | April Is the Cruellest Month: London fiction by Georgie Carroll | The Beginning and the End of Art…in Tasmania. By Tronn Overend | Kathy Stevens’s plate of fresh fiction: Everything in This Room is Edible | Boy, a new poem tall and lean by Tim Dooley | Beckett, Joyce, words, pictures — all reviewed by Peter O’Brien | Even more new translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s Dice Cup | Poetry written in Britain’s ‘long moment’: A dialogue and portfolio of work by Peter Robinson and Tim Dooley | ‘Remembering Ovid’, a new poem by Alan Wall | Four new poems by Luke Emmett | Hugo Gibson on Discount entrepreneurship and the start-up accelerator | ‘Half a Black Moon’ and three more new poems by Seth Canner | Martin Stannard’s life-lessons: What I did and how I did it | Anthony Howell on three indelible images left after a season of exhibitions | You good? Anthony O’Hear reviews Christian Miller’s The Character Gap. | Peter Riley on Olson, Prynne, Paterson and ‘extremist’ poetry of the last century. | Three prose poems by Linda Black,with a concluding note on the form | Simon Collings watches Shoplifters, critically | Tim McGrath: In Keen and Quivering Ratio — Isaac Newton and Emily Dickinson together at last | Daragh Breen: A Boat-Shape of Birds: A sequence of poems | Peter Riley reviews First-Person ‘Identity’ Poems: New collections by Zaffar Kunial and Ishion Hutchinson | Marko Jobst’s A Ficto-Historical Theory of the London Underground reviewed by Michael Hampton | José-Flores Tappy: A Poetic Sequence from ‘Trás-os-Montes’ | Nick O’Hear: Brexit and the backstop and The tragedy of Brexit | Ian Seed: back in the building with Elvis | Nigel Wheale’s remembrance of ‘11.11.11.18’| Franca Mancinelli: Maria, towards Cartoceto, a memoir | Tamler Sommers’s Gospel of Honour, a review by Christopher Landrum | Typesetters delight: Simon Collings reviews Jane Monson’s British Prose Poetry | In Memoriam: Nigel Foxell by Anthony Rudolf | David Hackbridge Johnson rambles through Tooting | Auld acquaintances: Peter Riley on Barry MacSweeney and John James | ‘Listening to Country Music’ and more new poems by Kelvin Corcoran | Latest translations by Ian Seed from Max Jacob’s The Dice Cup | Claire Crowther: four poems from her forthcoming ‘Solar Cruise’| Anthony Howell on the lofty guardians of the new palace | War and the memory of war, a reflection by Jerry Palmer | The ‘true surrealist attentiveness’ of Ian Seed’s prose poems, reviewed by Jeremy Over | Antony Rowland: Three place-poems, a response to Elizabeth Gaskell’s Life of Brontë | New fiction by Gabi Reigh | Simon Collings reviews ‘Faces Places’ by Agnès Varda and JR | Ian Seed’s life-long love of short prose-poems | Michael Buckingham Gray’s extremely short story: ‘A woman’s best friend.’ | Simon Collings’s new fiction: Four short prose pieces | Anthony Costello: ‘Coleridge’s Eyes’ were his shaping spirits | Anthony Rudolf remembers poet and broadcaster Keith Bosley | Michael Hampton on Jeremy David Stock’s ‘Posthuman and categorically nebulous art writing’ | Peter O’Brien meets Paulette, Martin Sorrell’s ‘extravagent mystery’ of a mother | Anthony Howell reviews Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory | :: For much more, please consult our partial archive, below on this page.
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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.
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Publication: Wednesday, 17 April 2019, at 18:35.
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