Abstract
Over the course of the last two decades Tony Harrison, the well-known British poet and classicist, has brought his poetry to full power on stage. His metrical arguments, which have always addressed social issues and audiences rather than isolated readers, find their perfect venue there, despite the fact that, as Derek Walcott recently put it, the very idea of metred verse drama has come to summon for most people ‘the beat of footfalls down a vacant corridor, a museum, a ruined colonnade’.1 Reversing those footsteps, Harrison’s much-hailed successes in translating and contemporising classical verse drama have led him to invent what critics are now struggling to describe as his own unprecedented sort of politically radical, popular, postmodern poet’s theatre.2
To understand this, it becomes necessary to level the artistic structure of the Apollonian culture, as it were, stone by stone, till the foundations on which it rests become visible.
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy
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Notes
Derek Walcott, ‘The Poet in the Theatre’, Ronald Duncan Lecture No. 1, 29 September 1990, South Bank Centre (London: Poetry Book Society, 1991) n.p.
For a complete list of Harrison’s theatre works to 1991, see Tony Harrison, ed. Neil Astley (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1991) pp. 507–9. Further references to this volume will appear as TH.
John Haffenden, ‘Interview with Tony Harrison’ in TH, p. 245.
See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967) pp. 46, 40 et passim.
Ibid., p. 47; Haffenden, op. cit., pp. 242–3.
Harrison has said that ‘the trouble with Eliot and Fry is that they brought the lyric into drama’ instead of vice versa (Richard Hoggart,‘In Conversation with Tony Harrison’, TH 45).
See ‘Them & [uz]’ in Harrison’s Selected Poems (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987) p. 122.
Harrison writes: ‘It’s not the percussiveness of consonants but their sensuality, their sexuality if you like. Vowels are spirit, consonants body, people say. Then I’m for bodies ...’(‘The Oresteia in the Making: Letters to Peter Hall’, TH 279).
Richard Hoggart, op. cit., p. 43.
See, for example, Randy Martin’s Performance As Political Act: The Embodied Self (New York Bergin and Garvey Publishers, 1990), and Fred McGlynn’s ‘Postmodernism and Theater’ (in Post modernism: Philosophy and the Arts, ed. Hugh J. Silverman [New York/London: Routledge, 1990]).
TH [book jacket].
Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 91.
Derek Walcott, ‘What the Twilight Says: An Overture’ to Dream on Monkey Mountain and Other Plays (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970) p. 17.
M.M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hélène Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984) p. 28n.
Ibid., pp. 255–6.
Tony Harrison and James Simmons, Aikin Mata (Ibadan: Oxford University Press, 1966) p. 5. All quotations are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976) p. 155. Soyinka adapts Nietzsche’s ideas to discuss the birth of Yoruban tragedy in this chapter.
Haffenden, op. cit., p. 240.
Tony Harrison, Phaedra Britannica (London: Rex Collings Ltd., 1975) p. xx; cf. Racine’s absolutism as described in Haffenden, above. All quotations from Phaedra Britannica are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
Haffenden, op. cit., p. 240.
Carol Rutter, ‘Men, Women, and Tony Harrison’s Sex-war Oresteia’, in TH 296.
Tony Harrison, The Oresteia (in Theatre Works: 1973–1985 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) p. 195. All quotations are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
The Oresteia, p. 282. Harrison remarks upon the fact that in Greek art the Furies are ‘always depicted as beautiful, but they’re described horrendously’; the discrepancy in views betrays a complex inner conflict (Haffenden, op. cit., p. 245).
Haffenden, op. cit., p. 245.
Ibid., p. 241.
Hoggart, op. cit., p. 44.
Tony Harrison, The Mysteries (London: Faber & Faber, 1985) p. 117. All quotations are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
David Bevington, Medieval Drama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975) pp. 239–40.
Bakhtin, op. cit., p. 15. Bakhtin writes: ‘Laughter penetrated the mystery plays; the diableries . . . have an obvious carnivalesque character. . . . ’
Harrison’s description of The Mysteries as being created by a ‘democratic’ pmcess of collective adaptation is quoted from the introduction to Channel Four’s television production of the plays, 22 and 29 December 1985, 5 January 1986.
Tony Harrison, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, the National Theatre Text (London: Faber & Faber, 1990) p. xiv. All quotations are from this edition; hereafter, page numbers will be given in the text.
Oliver Taplin, Harrison’s friend and fellow classicist, makes this diagnosis in ‘Satyrs on the Borderline: Trackers in the Development of Tony Harrison’s Theatre Work’ (TH 463).
Nietzsche, op. cit., p. 61.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1969) p. 256.
Nietzsche, op. cit., pp. 35–6.
Letter to the author, 19 June 1991.
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Huk, R. (1993). Postmodern Classics: the Verse Drama of Tony Harrison. In: Acheson, J. (eds) British and Irish Drama since 1960. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-22762-4_15
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