The Word's The Thing

Modern dramatic interpreters shouldn’t be making a choice between prose and poetry—a play should be a marriage of the two

- Michael Billington

A STUDENT asked recently what I seek in a good play. I made all the obvious points about conflict, tension and the collision of public and private worlds, but added that heightened, colourful language was a vital ingredient. One reason I enjoy the theatre is to escape the flat, flavourless dialogue I hear in much TV drama: I used BBC1’s Troy as an example, in which Homeric figures speak like characters in a soap opera.

For several centuries, poetry held sway. Then came Ibsen, Chekhov and Shaw to make prose respectable; Chekhov even proved that prose, by means of what it implied rather than stated, could achieve the effect of poetry. Modern writers such as Harold Pinter have done something similar by finding artful patterns in the rhythms of everyday speech. However, three recent experiences make me wonder if one always had to make a choice.

The first wake-up call was a revival of W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936) at London’s Jermyn Street Theatre. It is, to be honest, an odd play that mixes serious politics with cabaret and revue-style sketches.

An idealistic villager, Alan Norman, travels through Europe, accompanied by his dog, in search of a missing heir. Driven by the anti-Fascist spirit of the 1930s, the play shows a continent succumbing to despotism and suggests we have to prevent Britain following the same path.