oh oh oh that Shakespehearian rag

Speaking of Daljit Nagra, yesterday I got taken to see the new RSC Henry V in Stratford. It was glorious. Of course. Well: no of course about it, but it was lucky for me there was no sign of Kenneth Branagh about the place.*

My companion asked me, as we sat there, what had been the last play I went to see. To my chagrin - no, my horror - I cannot remember. It is lost in the mists of time. What was it?!? I used to go to the theatre all the time! What happened? It tells you something, I've spent a year - give or take - lying in this poxy flat whenever I wasn't at work or some book launch, not really doing anything much I didn't "have" to do.** And last Christmas I gave everybody masses of theatre tickets/tokens, and the only person who never got to a play at all was me. So the theatre yesterday was a sort of drenching experience. The set was great - the costumes, the lighting (especially) - all marvellous. Beautiful. And minimal. But the words, dear poets who read this blog! And the spoken words! After a year of no theatre and no (live, okay)*** Shakespeare, and lots of poetry readings, I felt embarrassed sitting there.****

Come on, guys!

It was a blessed relief to hear the English language being spoken as it ought, by people with really beautiful voices, who know how to treat it with respect. I know: a couple of actors did mangle their pentameters. I could name them, but I won't. Some jumbled and slurred. A few shouted when they didn't have to, and a few got too over-the-top actory about it for my tastes. Most, though, were like a deluge of something ineffable, something like drugs. It was almost too intense. And I started getting that thing again, where the words float across my mind, visible.

Not too long ago I quoted the film critic Antonia Quirke on this phenomenon. I think we can take her remarks with a pinch of salt in this instance, as we were in the theatre (though she seems to think that counts), but she says:

"Actors never seem to capture lawyers or teachers very well, possibly because they think they would make great lawyers or teachers. Great orators. But they're too musical, too fearful of monotony. That's why they can never read poetry. None of them. Why your toes are always curling throughout Radio 4's Poetry Week. No, there is one: the magnificent Stephen Dillane, whom I once saw play Hamlet as if he were a guy disappearing into the words, delivering the lines like he was reading a railway timetable, as Eliot recommends a poet should read poetry. The artlessness of Dillane's voice! You listen to Eliot or Auden or Larkin doing so little with their own stuff - or Bob Dylan singing, or even Tennyson captured on a wax cylinder in 1890 chanting The Charge of the Light Brigade - and you realise how the very purpose of the voice is to make the reciter disappear, to abolish everything but the ear. Actors are never quite happy being all words."

Interesting... well, in a play you really don't want them to be all words, do you.

But at a poetry reading you do want the words to be spoken with conviction, with clarity, and you want the reader - the author - to have confidence that those were the best, most beautiful, meaningful, delightful words possible. You do want their voice to be beautiful too, to act as a conduit for the words. You want to feel the poet is giving you a gift - something worth having. And why Daljit Nagra? He knows how to get his stuff out. He do the police in different voices, he projects his voice, he uses the space, he works with the audience.

There. Daljit, you owe me £5. But it's true. And even if actors are crap at reading poetry, at least in this case it was poetry worth listening to. I felt drunk on it.

(By the way, I apologise: almost everything that pops into my head lately is a quote from Eliot. Maybe it's because I reread The Waste Land the other week. I usually try not to do that, for this precise reason.)

* Don't even get me started.

** This goes to show how long it takes to get back up to speed. Aside from the USA trip in August, that was also my first day outside London since Easter.

*** It's all coming back to me now, last autumn when I had my bad eye patch and could barely read anything for weeks and weeks and weeks.

**** Recent most comparable experience: Ciaran Carson reading at the Poetry London launch in, was it June? Now, he is not histrionic, and he has a stutter, but he also has beautiful words that mean something, a commandingly quiet voice, and utter conviction. As with the actors, I won't name the ones I didn't like.