Harrison - Tony Harrison: plays two

This version of Le Misanthrope commissioned by the National Theatre for production in 1973, the tercentenary of Molires death, sets the play in 1966, exactly three hundred years after its first performance. One of the focuses for mediating the transition was the famous series of articles that Andr Ribaud contributed to the French satirical paper, Le Canard Enchan, under the title of La Cour, with Moisans brilliant drawings, interpreting the rgime of General de Gaulle as if he were Louis XIV. The articles were continued under M. Pompidou as La Rgence. There are some obvious advantages to such a transposition: characters can still on occasions refer to the Court, but it is intended in the sense of M. Ribaud: the subversive pamphlet, foisted on Alceste in the same way as one was foisted on Molire by enemies angered by Tartuffe, can be readily accepted in a period during which, from 1959 to 1966, no fewer than three hundred convictions were made under a dusty old law which made it a crime to insult the Head of State; above all it has the advantage of anchoring in a more accessible society some of the more far-reaching and complex implications of Alcestes dilemma, personal, social, ethical, political.

Once the transition had been made other adjustments had to follow. The sonnet I first wrote for Oronte has now been replaced by something closer to my own experience of todays poetaster. To adapt what John Dryden, one of my masters and mentors in the art of the couplet, said of his great translation of Virgils Aeneid, I hope the additions will seem not stuck into Molire, but growing out of him: no more intrusive, that is, than the sackbut, psaltery, and dulcimer the Jacobean translators of the Bible introduced into the court of Nebuchadnezzar, or the Perigord pies and Tokay that the anonymous translator of 1819 introduces into his version of Le Misanthrope. That same version seems to base its Clitandre on Lord Byron. I have used contemporary, but less talented models. The version itself is my form of exegesis.

I was educated to produce jog-trot versions of the classics. Apart from a weekly chunk of Johnson, Pitt the Younger and Lord Macaulay to be done into Ciceronian Latin, we had to turn once living authors into a form of English never spoken by men or women, as if to compensate our poor tongue for the misfortune of not being a dead language. I remember once making a policeman in a Plautus play say something like Move along there, only to have it scored through and Vacate the thoroughfare put in its place. This tradition lingers in the verse versions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This is a typical piece of ripe Virgilian translation: Penthesilea furent, the bands leading Of lune-shield Amazons, mid thousands burns, Beneath exserted mamma golden zone Girds warrior, and, a maid dares cope with men. That would have earned some marginal VGs from my mentors.

With the help of Gavin Douglas, John Dryden, Ezra Pound, and Edward Powys Mathers I managed to escape from all this into what I hope is a more creative relationship with foreign tongues. So my translation, when I do it now, is a Jack and the Beanstalk act, braving the somnolent ogre of a British classical education to grab the golden harp. The problems of the academic coming to grips with a classic of foreign literature, in this case some three centuries old, puts me in mind of Francis Galton, the cousin of Charles Darwin, on his travels in Damaraland, southern Africa in 1851, who wishing to measure the phenomenon of steatopygia in what he called a Venus of Hottentots, but restrained by Victorian pudeur, took a series of observations with his sextant, and having obtained the base and angles, proceeded to work out the ladys intriguing endowments by trigonometry and logarithms. The poet, and the man of the theatre, have to be bolder and more intimate. The salient feature of Molires verse is its vigour and energy, rather than any metaphorical density or exuberant invention, and it is this which gives his verse plays their characteristic dramatic pace. In Le Misanthrope the effect of the rhyming couplet is like that of a time-bomb ticking away behind the desperation of Alceste, and Climnes fear of loneliness.

The relentless rhythm helps to create the tensions and panics of high comedy, and that rire dans lme that Donneau de Vis experienced on the first night of the play in 1666. The explosion never comes. But the silence, when the ticking stops, is almost as deafening. There is an almost Chekhovian tension between farce and anguish. To create this vertiginous effect verse (and rhymed verse) is indispensable. Neither blank verse nor prose will do.

I have made use of a couplet similar to the one I used in The Loiners, running the lines over, breaking up sentences, sometimes using the odd half-rhyme to subdue the chime, playing off the generally colloquial tone and syntax against the formal structure, letting the occasional couplet leap out as an epigram in moments of devastation or wit. My floating s is a way of linking the couplet at the joint and speeding up the pace by making the speaker deliver it as almost one line not two. And so on. I have made use of the occasional Drydenian triplet, and, once in Act Three, of something I call a switchback rhyme, a device I derive from the works of George Formby, e.g. in Mr Wu: Once he sat down those hot irons he didnt spot em. He gave a yell and cried Oh my Ive gone and scorched my singlet! or Oh, Mister Wu at sea he wobbles like a jelly, but hes got lots of pluck although hes got a yellow jumper! I have also tried both before and during rehearsals to orchestrate certain coughs, kisses, sighs and hesitation mechanisms into the iambic line.

These are sometimes indicated by (/) in the text. An American scholar (forgetting Sarah Bernhardt) said of rhymed translation that it was like a woman undertaking to act Hamlet. A similar, though much more appropriate summary of the kinship between my version and the original was given by my six-year-old son, Max. I know that Molire, he said, with true Yorkshire chauvinism, though he was born in Africa, shes Jane Eyres sister.

Even the Pictorial Record of the National Theatre 196371 on sale at the Old Vic bookstall was discouraging. Molire, it says curtly of the Nationals production of Tartuffe in 1968, rarely works in English and the National failed to find the key.

I began to feel that I had involved myself in a masochistic enterprise. What the key to Molire in English was I had no clear idea but I had vague notions of what it wasnt. The trouble with many versions of verse plays done by poets is that publication tends to be primary and performance secondary. It has obvious effects on the resulting text. Despite the growth of public poetry readings in the last ten years and the obvious feedback of oral performance into some of the poetry now being written in Britain or the USA, the poet is still very much bound to the private pleasure of the solitary literate. This doesnt help much when it comes to writing for the theatre.

I had to re-examine a great many rhetorical presuppositions. Above all, it seemed to me that, if Molire was to work in English, the verse, while retaining his sort of formality, should be as speakable as the most colloquial prose. The negative idea of rhyme as an obstacle one tried to surmount as best one could, I discarded and tried to think of it in positive terms as a way of continuously throwing the action forward, accelerating the pace of the play when necessary, and controlling the flow in a way that prose could never do. The playing time of a verse version tends to be shorter than an equivalent version in prose, and this is a considerable advantage. From the very earliest drafts of my