Stay home and read the books instead?

Last night Francis and I went to the theatre — the Riverside studios in Hammersmith, to be precise. It’s a rare treat when we successfully organise ourselves an outing of this sort and there were moments yesterday, when we were afraid it might be snatched from us. Yesterday (March 11th) was the day Italy went into corona-virus-enforced lock-down and there were many people urging the UK to do the same, at once. ‘Perhaps I should ring the theatre and check it’s still on,’ Francis worried. Then, trying to keep cheerful he added ‘Maybe it won’t matter too much. I’ve seen a couple of rather lukewarm reviews, suggesting one might just as well stay home and read the books. ’

Afterwards I concluded that those reviewers must already have been ‘self-isolating’ and had never made it to the theatre in the first place. Because both of Christopher Reid’s poems, but especially The Scattering, were transformed by being staged.

The Song of Lunch is more straightforward — wry, knowing, funny, a bit sad — it reads well and transfers quite easily, particularly, I would guess, with a ‘people-like-us’ audience who recognise immediately the type of retro Italian restaurant where one might still be tempted to fetishise chianti in a plump raffia fiasco and sneer at a proliferation of pizzas. And, while the timbre of an actual female voice was especially welcome when the ex-lover got her chance to scream at the failed poet, the demolition had worked almost as well on the page: ‘the Eurydice that you’re trying to rescue / with your brave little song must be yourself: your inner self, your soul. But you’ve not been in touch / with that in your entire life.’

I’d love to know more about the relationship of these two poems when they were being written. The Scattering is a collection of lyrics to make an elegy; The Song of Lunch is a dramatic monologue. Both were published in the same year (2009). The second poem contains some narky lines that could almost be jeering at the first — was the dead wife an actual Euridice or is the poetry ‘in the self-pity’ as the bereaved husband flounders about trying to rescue his own soul?

When I read The Scattering to myself at home there were moments when I felt out of sympathy with the ‘vague, off-centre presence’ of the narrator-husband. I found myself thinking — well he’s a career poet, his wife has died, of course he’s got to eulogise her and write about his experience of loss. (I know this was unkind and wrong.) Last night when I heard the poems on stage (very cleverly rearranged from the published sequence, by whom, I wondered?) giving Rebecca Johnson’s live voice to the dead wife, I had no more repressed grouchinesses. The enactment of the poems created something new: a sense of relationship She had taught him the language of plants, for instance. So it was the female voice chipping in at those moments and, as he was remembering it, he was remembering her. It sparked the additional quality of relationship, when two entities fuse into something new. The sequence of illness, death, mourning and memory became dynamic. I felt caught up in it. I cared.