Radio | Theatre | When Seneca and H.G.Wells invented golf (inside their shared time machine)

it was on the 2nd floor on Coronado Street

I used to get drunk

and throw the radio through the window

while it was playing, and, of course,

it would break the glass in the window

and the radio would sit there on the roof

still playing

and I'd tell my woman,

"Ah, what a marvelous radio!"
A Radio with Guts, Charles Bukowski

I can’t believe that the theme I have to contend with on my first week of writing takes everything I know and understand about performance and shoves it into a little box; albeit a fascinating box, and a clever box; but a box nonetheless. And then to add insult to injury, a fellow worm has infiltrated my draft article, and used pretty much the same opening gambit. Oh no wait, I can believe it. Perhaps we should re-name this ‘Casual References to H.G.Wells Week’.

To counteract my only-when-doing-the-ironing approach to listening to radio plays, I’ve spent my morning listening to one of the great phenomena of radio “performance”, H.G.Wells The War of the Worlds, read and performed by Orson Welles (who, incidentally, is the voice of the apocalypse, if there was ever to be one: a voice, not an apocalypse. Anyone watching Prof. Brian Cox will know that The Apocalypse is a dead cert; although an increasingly attractive dead cert when delivered in the I-can-woo-you-with-stars-science-and-a-piano dead-pan of a man who once told us that things can only get better, and now informs us that they’re going to get much, much worse.) That overly large parenthesis has a point: the information you are giving has a reception based, if not entirely, then largely on the manner in which that information is given; and for the purposes of this article on radio and “theatre”, on the way it is performed.

It’s probably fair to think of radio as synecdoche performance, just as theatre, film, music, and writing are. But it’s also, to my mind, pre-performance, offering up a non-space in which only language and inference play a part. As Orson doing Herbert discovered, it is possible to trick an entire nation into belief, a belief that would not have happened had The War of the Worlds been put into a theatre. The intellectual problem with radio is that it will always be a siphon for different types of information; news (fact: ha); debate; music; performance; soaps; comedy; social and economic affairs etc etc. Obviously the Radio Times, and the regimented system of News Bulletins, and PM (that’s 5pm, everyday, except the weekends) mean that you could, should you want to, find out exactly what is on the radio. But unlike the television, the radio occupies this odd little realm of its own: that of the often brilliantly imparted, and often unintentionally received realm of information. 

Thinking back to 9/11, and turning on the t.v to see those planes hit the sides of those buildings, I remember knowing it was true and disbelieving it entirely. Turning on the radio in 1938 to hear Welles reading Wells’s words - “ We know now that in the early years of the Twentieth Century this world was being watched by intelligences greater than man’s, yet as mortal as his own. We know now that as human beings busied themselves about their various concerns, they were scrutinised and studied. Perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.”- I think I would have felt the exact opposite: knowing it isn’t true, and yet somehow believing every word. That is the extraordinary potency of performance, and the extreme danger of theatricality. At its best theatre is exhilarating, terrifying, orgasmic, and heart-shattering and always too good to be true; at its worst, it is a warm glass of white wine on a muggy day when the tubes are stopping in every tunnel; far too close to the reality of your mundane life. The War of the Worlds was everything radio-theatre should be, someone just forgot to tell the audience it WASN’T REAL (actually they didn’t, the audience just tuned in too late).

After Wells came a whole host of playwrights working specifically in radio: Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood is subtitled A Play for Voices, and indeed when put on-stage is a confusing visual cacophony, made confusing simply by its physical realisation. Caryl Churchill and Tom Stoppard both started by writing for the radio; both formulating a style of narrative intercutting and a dependence on the alacrity of language and specificity of delivery which reflects in their stage work – Top Girls, a stage play?!!  Stoppard, moving into film writing, took much of that groundwork with him (I’m thinking here of some of the dialogues in Shakespeare in Love, where the fabric of the speeches, and they are speeches, is made up of three or four linguistic styles, borrowing and then subtly inserting the oft-quoted lines of Shakespeare and Marlowe). This could only be done because Stoppard, brilliant playwright, was recognising a collage-ing system built by other brilliant playwrights who came before him; and one that is closely entwined with elements of radio-writing. However, Shakespeare and Marlowe weren’t radio playwrights. What a preposterous idea, the radio hadn’t been invented, duh! Is it possible to be a product designer for a process not yet invented? To write a novel, a play, a song, for an audience or for a technology that cannot even be imagined? The answer is yes, else my article would be in very short thrift.

To borrow from some esteemed cultural historians: What have the Romans ever done for us? Apart, obvs, from all the stuff like schools, and running water, democracy, sanitation, the roads, medicine, and……….wine? I’ll tell you one thing they didn’t do for us, and that’s invent the pigging radio. Except.…….oddly enough they had some pretty nifty writers who wrote for radio. Enter Seneca (that’s The Younger to you and me), and his impressive array of radio plays from Trojan Women, to Oedipus, to Medea. He also wrote a whole heap of “Dialogues”, which were essentially holding forth on philosophical ideas, him being a Roman Philosophical Stoic and all. So why are these radio plays? Well partly to do with Seneca’s insistence on being a ‘stoic’ – not quite as reprehensible two thousand years ago, but still fairly dull. Far from the delights of Euripides, Seneca’s ‘plays’ were observations, and sonic landscapes, and refusniks to the theatre-cause. There was nothing to physically perform in Seneca’s writing, except for the writing of course. In the Latin, his plays are giant poems, lyrical bouncy-castles that seem to desire no visual elucidation. The other reason they’re radio plays is, (and here I get smug), ‘cos he bloodywell said they were, insisting that they were only ever performed by readers as sound plays, and not by actors as stage plays.

If you google various combinations of the words ‘stage, play, radio, performance’, you get everything from ‘how to write a radio play” to lyrics for R.E.M’s “Radio Song” in the results.  You might even trawl around for long enough to discover that Radio Four co-produced a radio-feature film in collaboration with The Arts Council and Film London, for the Imax in 2007 (incidentally, you’ll also discover that back in 2007 the IMAX was still subtitled as “London’s 3-D cinema”). What you won’t find however is anything obvious linking Seneca and H.G.Wells; tried it, failed, soz. However with a little digging I found out that Seneca had opinions about the radio such as “[I forsee that the radio will be] a punishment to some, to some a gift, and to many a favour”, espousing that when he was writing his radio plays it was “a happy age, before the days of architects, before the days of builders, before the days of technicians and the annoying HMV dog”.  And you will no doubt come across Herb coming back on Lucius: “adapt or perish [old man]”, and my particular favourite between the two esteemed writers  “[listen Seneca, I beat you fair and square and I told you] the uglier a man's legs are, the better he plays golf - it's almost a law [so take your effete Roman legs and go back to your radio plays]”. See, there are things that even Monty Python didn’t teach you, The Romans invented Golf, and Wells’s Time Machine was a collaboration between him and Seneca, they came up with it round about the ninth hole.

Look the point is that all radio is performance, especially the least expected bits, like the news and stuff. It is a kind of theatre, except we, the audience, are always in control; we can turn it on and off whenever we like. We just need to be careful that when we choose to turn on, something truly terrifying and magnificent isn’t happening, else we might just believe it. All.

For me the radio is the beginning of all things, and the end of all things: my day; my association with the world; my understanding of words and language; my enjoyment of music; my pleasure in the simplicity of a story. The radio is a daily performance, the world-theatre in a small, black box.


Promise me not to go silent all of a sudden.
Radio Poem, B. Brecht


Rowan Rutter
newbie | theatre editor

Destruction | Poetry | One Art

“For a chap with a face like a butternut squash, the voice of a clinically depressed I-Speak-Your-Weight machine, the joie de vivre of a Southend clam and the swashbuckling sex appeal of Lord Irvine of Lairg, the late Philip Larkin still manages to generate excitement.”

            -John Walsh

“the art of losing’s not too hard to master

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.”

            -Elizabeth Bishop

Those final two lines from Bishop’s ‘One Art’ stick in my mind with greater adhesive force than perhaps any other couplet in existence. This is partly of course, because it rhymes and is therefore fast-tracked to the memory banks. More importantly however, I have always seen ‘One Art’ as a fascinating and cynical insight to the creative process.

The poem can indeed be interpreted as being about ‘dealing with loss’ and getting over the upset of bereavement (the first draft appears around 8 years after the suicide of her partner of 15 years, Lota de Macedo Soares). However, I have always read the poem as being a more sardonic piece of advice for how to be a Writer™ – Bishop is not telling us how to deal with loss, but rather how to cultivate ‘loss’ as a key ingredient of our lives so that our biographers have something to write about; ‘Lose something every day. Accept the fluster / of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.’

This clearly wasn’t Bishop’s actual take on how to be a good writer, which can probably better be summed up in her letter to Miss Pierson (written the same year as the first draft of ‘One Art’):

“Read a lot of poetry – all the time – and not 20^th-century poetry. Read Campion, Herbert, Pope, Tennyson, Coleridge – anything at all almost that’s any good, from the past – until you find out what you really like, by yourself.”

What I think Bishop does hit upon in ‘One Art’ however, is a mantra which will lead you to the lifestyle that we want from our poets and artists in posterity. We want our poets to be ‘nowhere man, living in his nowhere land’, ‘losing farther, losing faster; places, and names, and where it was you meant to travel.’ We want our poets destructive, promiscuous, libertine and obnoxious as they burn out young and hit an untimely death, leaving behind a world that never really understood them.

Consider some of the films that have been made about poets and the slant which they put on their lives:

The Libertine (2004 – dir. Laurence Dunmore)

Johnny Depp is the 2^nd Earl of Rochester, John Wilmot. He uses his mixture of charisma and poetic ability to go round having it right off with every woman who will stand still long enough to hear a few of his couplets. He is obnoxious, treats his friends awfully, has copious amounts of sex with everyone but his wife and keeps getting banished and given second chances by King Charles. He uses his potent artistic acumen to rear the actress/prostitute Lizzy Barry as a star of the stage whilst having a goodly amount of sex with her. It is also suggested that at some point, he has had sexual dealings with his mother. He dies of syphilis.

Shakespeare in Love (1998 – John Madden)

A young Shakespeare moves to London and has corporeal relationships with more prostitutes than you can shake a quill at. As the film opens however, Shakespeare is wracked with impotence, which should in no way be attributed to feelings of guilt over his wife back in Stratford. Luckily, a sort of Elizabethan psychotherapist helps him get his erection back and as a happy coincidence he ends up writing the greatest love story of all time.

The Edge of Love (2008 – dir. John Maybury)

Dylan Thomas is an obnoxious drunk who goes round poncing money off his mates and having it off with everyone. WWI veteran, William Killick finally has enough of Thomas trying to get his wife Under his Milky Wood and takes a gun to the guy’s house for a good old fashioned game of ‘shooting up the house of the guy that keeps trying to have sex with my missus.’ Rather than leave it there, Thomas tries to get the guy done for attempted murder, unsuccessfully. The film ends with a petulant, defeated Thomas sat in his car, presumably thinking about how to fit in a quick pint and an extra-marital fumble before dinner without his wife noticing.

Sylvia (2003 – dir. Christine Jeffs)

Young American poet, Sylvia Plath becomes increasingly frumpy and nobody really takes her seriously as a poet. Her husband on the other hand – well there’s another story. Everyone loves Ted Hughes and, being a poet, he goes around having it off with everyone. Plath has a bash at living la vida poetica and tries to initiate a bit of sex with Alvarez. Big Al is having none of this however, kicks Plath to the curb and proceeds directly to tell Hughes about what just went down.

Il Postino (1994 – dir. Michael Radford)

Postman, Mario, wants desperately to sweep a beautiful lady from his Italian village off her feet but he just doesn’t have the moves. Luckily for him however, Pablo Neruda shows up and teaches him the ancient art of conning women into finding funny-looking men attractive – poetry. As if to prove this point, we see a few shots of Neruda (who is depicted as a bit like a Hispanic Hitchcock) dancing with his super-hot wife. A few poems later and Mario is well and truly in there with the ladies and manages to land the girl of his dreams.

Gothic (1986 – dir. Ken Russell)

What happens when you get a handful of the most important poets of the Romantic Era together in Lord Byron’s castle? They all take drugs and have sex with each other, obviously.

***

The problem I have about the weird sub-genre of film – ‘Poet Biopics’ is that cinema and poetry are fiercely at odds with one another in many fundamental ways (although, as Cecil Day Lewis once wrote, cinema and the art of editing has trained generations of readers how to become more skilled at making the leap from one image to the next).

Films are money-spinners; there is no money in poetry. Cinema requires some form of spectacle; reading and writing poetry is just about the quietest, most introspective meditational act imaginable. Films require an audience; poetry’s audience is, relatively speaking, a specialist interest niche. Films require characters; poets often take great pains to remove all traces of their own personality from their work.

With these tensions in mind, no wonder that biography and cinema seems to propagate this image of the male poet as a strange anarchic creature comprised of nothing but an erection and a middle finger, barking abusive comments at everyone he comes across whilst spilling his tortured autistic genius onto the page. I’m thinking here of that bastion of historical accuracy, The Tudors (late noughties BBC costume-porn about Henry VIII and his roving ways). Did anyone else see the bit where Henry and Anne Boleyn are celebrating their much-postponed marriage at court when we are briefly shown a cutaway to Thomas Wyatt sat looking moody at the banquet and muttering to his friend “for the record – I did fuck her!”

With this in mind, I have prepared a brief synopsis of the biopic for the life of Philip Larkin which will hopefully gain more attention to the (impossible to get hold of) BBC piece, Love Again (2003) which made the schoolboy error of going down the ‘honest, understated’ route. Here is where I would go with the project:

Larkin ‘til the Break of Dawn (2012, dir. Phil Brown)

Young, obnoxious and promiscuous poet, Phil Larkin, meets an enchanting exotic dancer in a gentleman’s club called ‘Skunk Hour’. As it transpires, this woman is a lesbian (her name is Lizzy Bishop) but Larkin is able to scribe metaphors so potent and seductive that Lizzy gives up her job as a lesbian stripper and becomes an award-winning poet (under Larkin’s tutelage). Disaster strikes when Larkin is enlisted to fight in the Vietnam war and Bishop’s affections turn to the draft-dodging Robert Lowell. Whilst fighting overseas however, Larkin forms a close friendship with Private Berryman. The two spend their evenings getting stoned and writing poems and learning more about each-other and themselves. Larkin soon falls in love with the Vietnamese prostitute, Emily Dickinson and is distraught when he realises that he is responsible for the destruction of her village in a napalm strike. Returning to New Hull at the end of the conflict, wracked with guilt, Larkin wins critical acclaim by writing The Wasteland.

***

To avoid the efforts taken in having to do such a dramatic recasting of a life story, could I ask any poets reading this to please do the honourable thing and make sure that your life has involved at least one love-triangle, a traumatic experience and a high-profile world-event at some point. I promise you it isn’t hard to master, even though it may look like disaster.


Phil Brown
Poetry Editor