Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost

Derived from and inspired by the 14th-century Chinese play Circle of Chalk, Brecht changes the ending so that the child lives, not with his birth mother but with the mother who cares for him most. Echoes of the Judgement of Solomon here.

I was more than a little thrown by the perceived need for a new translation. The original translation into English was by by Brecht’s close friend and admirer, Eric Bentley, who also went on to direct the first professional production of the play. This new version has been translated by Alistair Beaton, and I suppose in a way it’s brought the Caucasian Chalk Circle up to date as far as language is concerned. But I thought it added little and detracted more than once from the historical perspective of the play.

Grusha, the servant-girl, played by Matti Houghton, is excellent; as is Azdak, the judge, played nonchalantly by James Clyde.

Nancy Meckler directs a tale of justice, corruption and morality, not entiely flawlessly. The first act seems too linear and is one-paced, and by the time of the interval I was looking for something to happen.

In the second act the linearity of the piece falls apart and out of the ruins of that something very special begins to happen. The audience is engaged in a way that seemed impossible during the first hour and, in spite of Brechts stated aim that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action, but should instead provoke self-reflection and a critical view, I was definitely moved here, and touched deeply by the experiences of these characters. Not least when the child, Michael, previously only seen as a bunch of swaddling, miraculously morphs into a toddling and wholly engaging puppet.

During the course of the play one is reminded, inevitably, of other theatrical experiences and references. In the case of this performance I was haunted by the spectres of Chaplin and Beckett, an actor and director who was perhaps a contemporary, and a playright who would follow and extend the work of the early modernists.

After Leeds the play tours to:
Richmond Theatre, Richmond 20-24 Oct 2009;
Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham 4-21 Nov 2009; and the Unicorn Theatre, London 24 – 29 Nov 2009

A touch of cold in the Autumn night -

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded;

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

TE Hulme (1912)

Hugo was lyric and theatrical; I was dramatic. Hugo required for his effects the introduction of organ music and chorus, of tables covered with flowers and black draped coffins. He needed elaborate scenery, costumes, stage effects, secret doors and stairs, rope ladders and traps. I needed only four walls, four boards, two actors and one passion . . .

Cather considered Dumas’ statement as one of the elementary principles that guided her own output as an artist, a version of minimalist modernism which is still being developed and refined in areas of contemporary theatre. Beckett’s Not I comes to mind.

Being reminded of all this, I find myself wondering if old Dumas didn’t overstate his method a little. Do we really need those four walls, for example, or isn’t the passion itself all that is required?

Willa Cather expanded her thesis a little when she said:

“Whatever is felt upon the page without being specifically named there—that, one might say, is created. It is the inexplicable presence of the thing not named, of the overtone divined by the ear but not heard by it, the verbal mood, the emotional aura of the fact or the thing or the deed, that gives high quality to the novel or the drama, as well as to poetry itself”

The Opera, Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten introduces us to a complex, on-the-edge outsider. The stormy music and sweeping orchestral beauty of the score underline the poverty and the incautious nature of a character who is at once a visionary, impetuous, ambitious and frustrated scapegoat trapped in a community still trying to lift itself out of a feudal world.

Opera North’s revived production of Peter Grimes with many of the original cast members, including Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as Grimes and Giselle Allen as Ellen Orford has won a string of awards. The modernist piece is regarded as a historical turning point in the history of opera – particularly British opera.

Conducter Richard Farnes and Director Phyllida Lloyd encourage a massive performance from Jeffrey Lloyd-Roberts as a haunted giant of a man who conceals an undeveloped child within. He has a wonderful tenor voice and doesn’t falter for a second, presenting a beautiful interpretation of mood and character.

The chorus, fishermen and their women and the local judge and priest and innkeeper of the village, often in counterpoint to the principle singers moves effortlessly from pious congregation to bloodthirsty rabble and back again.

This production offers a more symbolic, darker and atmospheric interpretation than usual, refusing to shy away from the sex, politics, and violence which form an undeniable subplot to the main narrative.

The congregation are depicted in key scenes with their back to the action of the principle players and they chant liturgical phrases, oblivious to the drama which is taking place within their community. And there are two wonderful scenes involving a net hanging through the centre of the stage. The net is manipulated by fishermen from the outside, as though casting or lifting shoals of fish, while inside the women mend holes and at some point the whole village seems as though it is caught there.

The music, the direction, the pathos, drama, and voices were compelling and mesmerizing.

After Leeds the tour continues in Nottingham, The Lowry at Salford Quays, The Grand Opera House in Belfast, Sadler’s Wells in London, and finally at Newcastle’s Theatre Royal.

Don’t miss it.

So you find my novel too postmodern, wrong again Gaston, you’ve arrived too late, we are already beyond postmodernism, it’s dead, dead and gone, don’t you know, it’s been buried, where have you been, and that’s precisely the problem for literature today, now that postmodernism is dead, writers don’t know how to replace it, the disappearance of postmodernism was devastating for the writers, but it was not surprising, it was expected to happen for some time, the last gasp happened the day Samuel Beckett changed tense and joined the angels, I can give you an exact date if you want to, postmodernism died because Godot never came…

The essay leaves one with much to think about.

I was on the terrace, wrestling with the moon.
Swarms of windows riddled one of the night’s thighs.
Placid sky-cattle drank from my eyes
and the breezes on long oars
struck the ashen store windows on Broadway.

- there is a translation, by Christopher Maurer, of a lecture which the poet gave in Madrid, and then repeated in other Spanish cities and in Argentina and Uruguay. The lecture opens like this:

Whenever I speak before a large group I always think I must have opened the wrong door. Some friendly hands have given me a shove, and here I am. Half of us wander around completely lost amid drop curtains, painted trees, and tin fountains, and just when we think we have found our room, or our circle of lukewarm sun, we meet an alligator who swallows us alive or . . . an audience, as I have. And today the only show I can offer you is some bitter, living poetry. Perhaps I can lash its eyes open for you.

Rimbaud provides the exemplary example of a writer who packs it all in. What is even more astonishing than this case of a writer who quits is how early, in his case, it happened. Before his twenty-first birthday he had changed the course of French literary history. As Arthur Symons put it in his pioneering monograph The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899):

He catches at verse, at prose, invents a sort of vers libre before anyone else, not quite knowing what to do with it, invents a quite new way of writing prose, which Laforgue will turn to account later on; and having suggested, with some impatience, half the things that his own and the next generation are to busy themselves with developing, he gives up writing, as an inadequate form, to which he is also inadequate.

In the words of Charles Nicholl, author of Somebody Else, a fictional account of Rimbaud’s life would come to an end at the moment when he crossed the remote salt lake of Assal, 500 feet below sea level:

if Rimbaud’s years in Africa seem like a flight from what he was – from Europe, from poetry, from himself – then it is surely here, on this desolate desert trek, that he reaches the furthest point of that arrow-flight, arriving at this utter privation, at this landscape of nothingness . . .