BEFORE UGANDA - DISCOVERY AND PLANNING

after such a succulent tastery
of this mouth-watering past-ery
this lip-licking nibblery
this unashamed dribblery
very soon now (bold as brassery)
comes the inevitable sales-gassery…..

wander which way you willery
through rgg's potent distillery
so much to sip in this brewery
of one man's lifetime's reviewery
of spirits that make up his armoury
their range perception (and charmery!)
so now with delight or with mockery
let your mouse run up the clockery
dock first (if you like) before dickory
nuff said - get on with the clickery

4.

(walking through Southampton Common
on a full-bellied sunlit evening one late Summer):

well - no - before that

born face downwards with a bleeding crown
as a child scatter-brained cheeky
morose sulky moral
a stealer of sixpence and apples
a breaker of windows
a joker too serious
dreamer and sufferer of migraine
rheumatic fever my scourge
a secret romantic
a brain on a stick
early riser
knowing from the start
I had something important to do with my life
something something
(but with no great gift that I could guess at)
early stories
teenage detective novel
(bag of poison gas beneath the carpet)
running a private concert or two
with home-made sketches
more stories - a boy
wakes up with the world pink
his day of dying
and then some poems including
one in blank verse celebrating the charge of horses
at Agincourt in Olivier's film-version of Henry Vth
and another (in forty or so quatrains) praising the heroics
of the soldiers at Arnheim from the film Theirs is the Glory
and a translation from a Spanish poem into English
that so impressed my Spanish master he forewent
his siestas during afternoon lessons for the next month -

but then in the beginning (at last)

southampton seventeen

one teenage summer end of war
i walked from school down the straight town road
wrestling with problematic futures

westward the low sun melted on the grass
but i mind-locked in undergrowth and bracken
the uselessness of school
myself a hollow shell
(no music of a wind for outer ears to dream by)

but as i walked
the sun's good grace possessed me
shutters fell open
my shoulders rhymed
clarity consumed my tangled spaces

within that shallow moment
i knew the dream to graft my life upon
whatever else i did i would write plays

a seed in granite searched around for roots

i reached the town
my eyes on the level with the civic centre clock

and what then?

the army -
(attacked by rheumatic fever for the third time)
Education Corps - in Germany
wrote poems for The Goose Girl in Göttingen
and a long long short story about a voluptuous girl called Gretchen
though I ended up talking of marrying one called Sonia
a play for illiterate soldiers in Bielefeld

After demob more stories (getting weirder)
and poems
three accepted for publication the week I started at University)

6.

but no plays?

I did join an amateur company
and played Victor in Coward's Private Lives

not much for four years

no - but I was thinking about it a lot

and when I went to King's London to study the King's English
I did direct Chekov's The Proposal for a One-Act Play Festival, came first
and went on to direct the 1950 Commemoration Play,
(The Witch of Edmonton by Ford Rowley, Dekker etc)
and I business-managed and then edited the College Magazine
(helped change its name to Lucifer)

in a college biased towards theology?

we were thinking of Lucifer the Morning Star

University and poetry didn't mix for me
but I did rouse myself in my final year
to enter a competition
subject - a saint
I called mine Unholy Saint with Judas as its hero
(it was disqualified)

8.

I left London - returned to Southampton
got married and took a job as a Waterworks Labourer
and here began the long (aesthetic) revolt
from which I am still suffering fifty years on

THE BIG CONUNDRUM

How could I write plays for a theatre
I knew so little about

well I'd read a lot of Shakespeare
acted once in a Marlow extract
knew all about the Jacobeans
had read Shaw until he was coming out of my ears
had seen my fair share of plays and operas
in Southampton Germany and London
had a kind of yearning for a modern poetic drama
Eliot Auden-Isherwood Christopher Fry and others
couldn't requite

where there should have been keenness
there was an emptiness
if this was theatre I wanted something else
my upbringing (for all its ignorance)
was at odds with the theatre (for all its breeding)
its encasement of we have the secrets
you out there - in the dark - can't be allowed
to get your fingers on
your sole job is to admire
and clap in all the right places
I set up my own (amateur) theatre group
to find out why - to discover
what the acting world would be like
outside the proscenium arch

so from there to a total cock-up
to four years of doing it the hard way

10.

The fifties was a time of necrophiliac toryism
(Churchill in the state of Poe's M. Valdemar for much of the time)
but it set up the sixties in a daft sort of way
Eden's Suez campaign the invasion of Hungary
the growing nuclear fear
educational dissatisfactions
the breakthrough in theatre of the working-class voice
(radical content - reactionary form)
the heated fiascos of the cold war
all these - with their anxieties and paradoxes -
ruffled old feathers and sprouted new ones

I made a good labourer but couldn't work in the evenings
(Rostrum rehearsals)
not good
married with a child on the way - labourer's wage too little
not good
so became a temporary teacher - stayed for nineteen years
not good (or so I thought)

In the fifties (apart from Rostrum Theatre
and having three children)
I read and read and read
every book I could find on theatre staging
the history of theatre
the nature of acting and functions of playwriting
those trying to push the boat out from the well-worked shore

Out of which simple (symbolic) fact
the whole of the implications
of theatre (assembly) shape
can be deduced!

My life's work stands upon that base
Much of my polemical writing has worried away
at the consequences of those throw-off lines
for one such attempt to get infinity into a pint pot
click to scratchings from a deep round pit (1999)

12.

My plan not to stay long as a teacher
was scuppered in 1958
when I accepted a Head of English appointment
at a new school (a reorganised old one)
in an old building and a hall with no stage
and I was off -
I soon tired of the standard curriculum
devised one based on
writing reading doing (and saying) and listening
I was already into learning not teaching
into the overriding importance
of the creative essence in people
as the best basis for a genuine education
of the marrying of poetry and drama
(language and movement
word and action)
whatever else I had to do as an English teacher
these were the heart of me

POETRY

DRAMA

I took (to begin) a lot from Ron James, and from courses with others that he arranged. I loved the awkwardnesses and hesitations, the flows and delights of children improvising in groups; the inventiveness and wit that came out of spontaneously set-up situations. I developed my own ideas on dance drama - groups working with music, devising their own movements spontaneously, with brief periods for discussion before going back to the music again. Out of this came the building game - individuals working separately to begin, using music, or sounds, or actions, then linking with another, joining their initial pieces with some agreed bridging activity; then twos becoming fours, fours eights etc - but with the initial impulses to be kept throughout. Other games, the making and unmaking of statues, the use of objects as starting points for a quick play - all the time letting the group activity be felt as the sum of the contributions of all its members. Much emphasis on concentration and silence, of sensing the body as a busy world of its own where each muscle could be capable of independent and meaningful movement; but then the emerging out of self-consideration into an awareness of others and their equal contribution to the value of the moment Occasionally drama became theatre, when group improvisations were shown to each other - but the essence of drama was in the discovery that the shared ordinariness of each person contained such diverse qualities poetry is my search to be myself drama is my search to understand you they have become the same search poetry the still centre of drama the moving mass poetry the light within the seed drama the light watching the seed become flower poetry is what drama grows out of drama is what poetry is squeezed from poetry the microscope drama the telescope poetry reduces all substance to essence drama takes essence and makes it human poetry can become a stream drama must always be flesh the problem of drama is how to give flesh the crystal properties of water the problem of poetry is how to turn water into flesh

Outside the lesson (and my strict role of Head of English)
between 1958 and 1965
I was involved in:
Wyvern School Theatre Club
Wyvern Youth Theatre Club
Eastleigh Theatre-in-the-Round
Eastleigh Children's Theatre Group
Hampshire Experimental Drama Group
Eastleigh Children's Drama Association

Before this period
I had already written seven plays
(four of them performed - three not)
as I struggled to find a form I could happily write for
now - with the hall with no fixed stage -
I wrote
(for the school)
a verse accompaniment to Frederick and the Enchantress
(a dance-drama to Sibellius' Second Symphony
adapting a Grimms' story - The King of the Golden Mountain)

14.

This was a good time for playwriting
(these plays written between 1959 and 1964
all for performance in-the-round)

The Tragedy of the White King -
a dance-drama to words not music
with 32 chess-set characters
(used as main course material by Stephen Joseph
at Burton Manor on The Wirral - 1961)

The Monster
(episodic play set on a mountain)

The Woman
(a psychically-gifted old woman
causes trouble between desert tribes)

The Trial of Sarah Spring
(Spring is prosecuted for killing Winter)

Volcano
(Women and girls shipwrecked on a volcanic island)
(for the Youth Club)

Dreamer
(a play originally for 18 girls and one boy -
an adopted girl seeks to find her true parents)

(for the Children's Theatre Group)
A Play to Pay the Rent
(for Primary Schools - encompassing audience participation)

(for the Experimental Drama Group)
Death at the New Year
(a text containing dialogue commentary poems and choral passages
satirising the current attitude to the death penalty)
The production was not completed
but the play was given three performances
by Stephen Joseph's Studio Theatre Scarborough in 1962)

(for Eastleigh Theatre-in-the-Round)
Sex-Barrier
(Four characters in search for the right actor
an experimental text that has to be performed to be understood)

All these plays were written in verse
and each was concerned not simply with its plot
but also with a formalised sense of staging

I directed these and other plays for most of the groups
and took part as an actor in the adult productions

more clickery needed here
for EXTRACTS from some of these plays

16

(The Eastleigh Schools' Drama Association
set up an Open-Stage Exhibition
which gathered exhibits from many parts of the world
including material from major Soviet productions)

I had linked Stephen Joseph's symbolic sense
(of the Proscenium Stage as a Renaissance structure)
with Descartes' I think: therefore I am
and saw we were about to move into a post-Renaissance age
where the relationship between head and body had to change
The Victorian Age had been a mountain pinnacle
from which the twentieth century was a downward slide
we were on our way to becoming scree
(a necessary state
before the foothills of a new mountain
could begin to be glimpsed)

Modernism (said Bradbury)
was a condition that existed between 1870 and the 1930s
Post-modernism took some time to catch on
The Age of Anxiety (really a bit of an Age)
gave way to the Woodworm Age
(the old had to be nibbled away)
and now we are all scree
all seemingly equally valueless
in the large assessment of things
but we have to get to a state of nothing counts
before anyone can start counting again

The poetry I was writing
was coming up out of its dark self
there was a new energy for language
but a social dissatisfaction that was getting deeper
being a teacher not an actor was a boon
granting an offbeat freedom worth a mint
but society was still creaking with the old arse-aches
and an inch beneath the surface
not an inch could happily be moved

I was getting poems into a few magazines
a restive self was finding its kind of language

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