From TS Eliot and Ted Hughes to Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, numerous poets have written a few plays. However, Tony Harrison’s collected plays run to six volumes, comprising 19 full-length dramas. Many of them are translations from Greek (The Oresteia, from 1981, is the most actable version of the trilogy by Aeschylus) or French (he did an astonishing rhyming version of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 1973). But, as Harrison’s theatre career developed, he also wrote original plays, of which The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990) and Square Rounds (1992) stand as the best new verse dramas written in English since Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.
The English versions of foreign dramas were a dividend from the extraordinary education in classics and languages available to a working-class child at Leeds Grammar School in the 1950s, before he extended his knowledge of Latin and Greek at Leeds University.
The poet-critic Sean O’Brien has observed that Harrison’s printed verse “insists that it is speech rather than page-bound silence”, and this vivid verbal quality led logically to writing words for performance by others.
It was while teaching at Ahmadu Bello University in Nigeria from 1962-66 that Harrison wrote his first play, collaborating with a colleague on Akin Mata (1964), a vernacular version of Lysistrata, Aristophanes’ comedy about a pacifist sex-ban by Greek women. Harrison suppressed this text, although some have argued that the strongly visual and ritualistic nature of African theatre influenced his later stage work.
Back in England in the early 70s, Harrison was picked by the director John Dexter to solve the problem of why French classic dramas rarely succeeded in English. The technical difficulty was the favoured Parisian style of alexandrine rhyming couplets, which frequently rely on soft and half-rhymes that are more elusive in English, encouraging translators towards blank verse or prose. Dexter set Harrison to translate Molière’s Le Misanthrope and Racine’s Phèdre while fully respecting their rhymes and 12-syllable rhythm.
After much experimentation, delivering his drafts aloud while walking northern moors, Harrison perfected a compression technique, through lines such as “The loved one’s figure’s like Venus De Milo’s”, which had a speedy, speakable beat. By relocating the Racine to the period of English rule in India, Harrison also ingeniously widened the rhyme store: “Raj”/“sabotage”, “degrees”/“rupees”. Both starring Diana Rigg, Harrison’s The Misanthrope and Phaedra Britannica, staged by the National Theatre at the Old Vic in London from 1973-75, were hits that still make pleasurable reading.
One of Harrison’s signature stories about the English class system was of going to the gents on one of his first nights and returning to find his father beside the auditorium door, looking in bewilderment at his hand, filled like a tout’s outside a sports stadium. “People keep giving me their tickets,” said his dad, whose Sunday best had convinced the smart-casual middle classes he must be an usher.
When the National moved to the South Bank in the mid 70s, artistic director Peter Hall set Harrison another frequently-failed theatrical test – rendering Greek drama into lines suited to be said rather than read. His solution in The Oresteia involved, as with the French texts, compacted content, this time through frequent hyphenated neologisms such as “grudge-dogs” and “blood-ooze.” Insistent on the actors keeping the exact syllabic beat, Harrison described his role in the rehearsal room, with characteristic wit, as “the man who came to read the metre”.
Ever since being ticked off at school for his translations being too “demotic” (as described in his poem Classics Society), Harrison hankered after a literary rhetoric reflecting Yorkshire speech. He achieved this brilliantly in The Mysteries, first performed at the National Theatre in 1977. Harrison reshaped the medieval religious plays performed by workers’ guilds in Wakefield, York and elsewhere into three plays – The Nativity, The Passion and Doomsday – that take a whole day to perform in full. Apart from Yorkshire vocabulary and vowels, the linguistic signature in The Mysteries was aggressive alliteration. Creating the world, God fills the sea with “fish to flit with fin / Some with scale and some with shell”.
One reason that Harrison gravitated towards writing plays from scratch was frustration that even the most acclaimed translations are rarely revived, theatres tending to commission new versions. The dramatic move had also been influenced by immersion in television. In 1984, he had written The Big H for BBC Two with composer Dominic Muldowney, a music-drama for children based on the Herod story. He also worked with BBC producer Peter Symes on a series of film-poems with verse commentaries, including The Blasphemer’s Banquet (1989), about the death threat imposed on the writer Salman Rushdie.
Harrison’s first theatre original, The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, ingeniously entwined expanded fragments of a lost satyr play by Sophocles with the story of the archaeologists who found them. Its successor, Square Rounds, examined the morality of scientists through the stories of the inventors of the machine gun and chemical weapons. The inventive staging incorporated live magic tricks, but audiences stayed away, and the then NT artistic director, Richard Eyre, recorded it in his published diaries as “a kind of noble disaster” that he should have done more to improve.
Eyre himself staged The Prince’s Play (1996), a version of Victor Hugo’s Le Roi S’Amuse, which channelled the anti-monarchist views that would lead Harrison to exclude himself, in the poem Laureate’s Block, from consideration for the role of poet laureate. Fram (2008), about Arctic exploration, felt unready for the stage, and was his last collaboration with the National, although The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus and Square Rounds both looked impressive on revival at London’s Finborough theatre in 2017-18.
Despite lacking a thirst to sip the Queen’s sherry as national bard, Tony Harrison became, across four decades, the National Theatre poet.
