Edited with an Introduction by Ian Heames & with
an Afterword by J.H. Prynne (Face Press, Cambridge 2014)
After reading these fascinating pieces of dramatic realisation one comes across Jeremy Prynne’s concluding comments:
‘This suite of recently composed performance scripts is instructively hard to categorise’.
Hooray, I thought, no box to simply pack these into then! And the opening sentence of that Afterword took me back to re-read Ian Heames’s Introduction which in a way set the scene in a very appropriate manner:
‘A book of plays in which characters can stand on-stage not really playing their parts casts the familiar role of a general introduction in an awkward light. In the context of the work that follows, the usual range of opening manoeuvres would be a dress-rehearsal for the wrong occasion.’
Of course Samuel Beckett’s ghost haunts the wings of this display and the merging of lyrical intensity with a breath-taking awareness of what constitutes loss is a hallmark of much of the writing here:
‘The past. What is it? What is the past? The past, what is it? What is the past? The past is a present. It is a no-longer-useable present. Gone and forgotten. Gone and not forgotten.’
Prynne’s comments are instructive as they direct us to another haunting presence:
‘The emotional carapace overall that encloses precarious life is assembled from off-the-peg elysian fancies that are profoundly tested e.g. against the lyrical reticence of Thomas Hardy, poet: in the more distant background lurk parody dinosaurs dressed up as a light blend of Harold Beckett and Samuel Pinter; not to mention Lucian and Ovid in deeper shade.’
A fascinating volume…get it…
http://face-press.org/nine-plays.html
Ian Brinton 9th June 2014
Tears in the Fence 