I have just
discovered that Louis MacNeice’s verse drama for the BBC is
available on the BBC’s website –
here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03kpwv9
The play is inspired by a few lines in Robert Browning’s
poem Childe
Roland to the Dark Tower Came.
Listening
to it brings back happy memories of my teenage years and the Arts
Centre I belonged to. It reminds me of Garibaldi biscuits and tea
drunk out of chipped mugs. It reminds me of sitting on sagging
armchairs in the EOS room arguing about poetry and life. But we
didn’t just talk and argue, we also performed. And we performed
this play – not as a theatrical production but as a play for
voices. It is hard to see how the subject matter could be performed
for anything else but the radio. The play is play of the imagination
and where better for Roland to journey to the Dark Tower than through
the dark shadows of our minds? The actors’ accents may sound a bit
dated, but this is an extraordinary poetic play.There certainly was a
golden age in postwar British radio, when the BBC embraced experiment
and welcomed poets, using composers like Benjamin Britten to provide
the music and world-class actors, such as Richard Burton, to do the
poets justice. What has become of that patronage? Maybe the internet
will come to the rescue. Maybe the future of ebooks will include
performance. Let us hope so.
As I have
said in a previous
post we
also performed at the Young Arts Centre verse plays by Dylan Thomas
(Under
Milk Wood),
Lorca (Blood
Wedding)
and Christopher Fry (Boy
with a Cartand The
Firstborn),
to say nothing of verse plays by Euripides and Shakespeare. What a
grounding! Is it any wonder that I have written two verse plays or
poems for voices?
