Letters to Dead Writers

This blog has moved house

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Wed, 23 May 2007 14:23:00 +0000

This blog has moved house.

It is now incorporated in Pessimism of the Intellect, Optimism of the Will.

Letters to Dead Writers will occur just as irregularly, but there'll be other stuff happening there to fill in the gaps.

Dear George Orwell

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Wed, 14 Feb 2007 14:19:00 +0000

Full disclosure to start. I'm not a great fan of your fiction. In both 1984 and Animal Farm the broad, bold strokes of your ecriture degree zero don't seem to me to be supplemented by sufficiently complex inner life on the part of the characters to avoid cartoonishness. This is perhaps more forgiveable in the case of Animal Farm but there the allegory is so blunt as to constitute assault. Who really likes allegory anyway? More on this later, perhaps.

Your non-fiction is much more satisfying because you've no need to strain for the plausible or the well-rounded; you can allow the stupidity of the real to stand untrammelled. You need neither to exaggerate nor contextualise the flaws or the crazes of the people you observe: and you have the freedom to sometimes not know. Given the trends in fiction when you were writing, the authority of yours is striking and just a little untrustworthy.

No such problem with the non-fiction: I just read Homage to Catalonia for the first time. And like so many people, aside from spurious musings about the two sides of Orwell, I can't help but wonder how you'd react to the world of today.

God, but that's a tedious and well-worn thought! And yet: who have we got today reporting like you did? Polly Toynbee's Hard Work goes some way toward being the Road to Wigan Pier of its way, except it's not as good: a bit too prim, a bit too much awkwardness and cant. Robert Fisk has the passion but none of the balance; likewise John Pilger. Christopher Hitchens doesn't know whether he most wants to be you or Tom Paine, but there are plenty of reasons he can't touch either. Noam Chomsky I like, but he doesn't get out enough. I could go on, but it's all a bit too depressing: and these are the radicals. I hate to come over all Medialens on you, but there really is an appallingly small range of opinion in the mainstream press.

But wait! You said just that in 1937: and not only about the mainstream press. Yet where you were feted, Medialens are broadly considered ridiculous. Despite their having as firm an evidentiary basis as you ever had, and as patient a style of argument, there's no question of their being the 21st Orwell. Perhaps this is because, like Chomsky, they don't get out and about actually reporting much; perhaps it's because they're a bit sententious. It's also because there doesn't seem to be any space for the rational left these days: the only remotely radical leftie voices that get heard in the papers are the hysterics:they may be right, but they give nobody a good name and persuade no-one who wasn't already persuaded. Medialens are a bit of a relic of days when the left were taken seriously. They need to be taken seriously. But most of all we need someone like you to calmly shock us into seeing why. If you can't help, I'll try Tom Paine later.

Dear William Shakespeare (5)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 23 Jan 2007 17:15:00 +0000

So, the project I mentioned in my last letter has got underway: four weeks of workshops on Romeo & Juliet and Much Ado About Nothing. As feared, it really is too much, in two hours, to expect a Damascene revelation, a realisation on the part of the slouchingly assembled crew of 15-year-olds that, actually, you're great. No-one else has ever written for the stage this fluently, with this richness and this craft. Wow.

The students seem (for the most part) to enjoy themselves; they seem (for the most part) to leave feeling they've gained something. Perhaps a thing no greater than help with the exams, but something, nonetheless, to take home. Maybe this little bit of help will mean that, one day, they have that Damascene revelation. This is easy. After all that struggle, resistance, face-pinching, it's suddenly luminous, magnificent, clear. Wow.

I hope so. But I work in the theatre. I want to see the moment of revelation for myself - or at least have it reported back to me quickfast pace Chekhov or the Greeks. Otherwise, despite the absurd feedback forms showing that teachers tick consistently under "excellent", how do I know I'm doing any good?

Dear Sophocles

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 10:10:00 +0000

I don't enjoy reading your plays. Or those of Euripides or Aeschylus, for that matter. It's probably in large part a language thing: not many people read Ancient Greek these days, and I count myself among their unhappy number. The very structures of language have changed since your day, to the extent that a literal translation is no longer even a plausible pretence, as it just about is from French or German. Still, most of your translators are academics attempting just that, and coming up with playtexts that smell like 2,000 years of dust.

Added to that, I've never seen a classical Greek play in production that I've enjoyed. Highly competent productions in obviously highly competent translations have moved me to nothing even resembling catharsis. Perhaps this is due to the extraordinary alien-ness of the world. I simply cannot empathise with characters whose worldview is predicated on their being controlled by the fates and the whims of capricious gods. Even before I read Marx, even before I abandoned christianity at aged 13, I couldn't share that view.

But good theatre, like good novels, ought to be able to take me to this alien world and help me share an experience of it. I may not be able philosophically to get along with your work, but if I were only capable of enjoying plays about people like me I'd be a startling egotist. No, the problem is not that I haven't succeeded in identifying with these people, this worldview. The problem is that the productions haven't. They've understood it on an intellectual, rather than an intuitive level and shown what it means, rather than how it feels. To feel I understand is far more powerful than to think I do.

There are three partial exceptions. The first is Katie Mitchell's production of Iphigenia at Aulis, shown at the National a couple of years ago. Theatrically this was astonishingly bold. It was studiedly undramatic: moments were missed, lines were mumbled. A fourth wall was partially built out of suitcases and any emoting that was done was done while facing upstage. At one point about seventy suitcases were brought in and counted. Someone lost count so they were counted again, all of which took about fifteen minutes. During this time no drama was obvious. Imagine Euripides' play performed by Forced Entertainment. The sheer insolence of this approach made it all quite gripping, and when the big moments came - and they were big moments - they had more power than if a great deal of effort had been expended on setting up high stakes. Whether I felt I understood this alien world is another matter.

The second is Kneehigh's production of the Bacchae, again about two years ago (that's also Euripides, isn't it? You'll wonder why I'm writing to you and not him. It'll become clear). When I remember this show I do so fondly, as it was the usual Kneehigh fun and games. Interestingly in this context, one of the first things that happened was a mini-lecture on the Greek metaphysical order, a cheeky bit of exposition made acceptable by its not pretending to be anything else. This succeeded principally in rendering the Greek metaphysical order a subject for fun, but at least it didn't just assume we knew what it was. When I remember the show I do so fondly, but when I think about it in this context I remember its faults. The transition from Bacchic joy to its horrible consequences was more of a lurch than a development - in part because the audience were never permitted to share the Bacchic joy, instead laughing at it hard. And when that transition was made, it came at the expense of any audience contact; the show retreated from us. So this one was tremendously enjoyable, but not a success on the terms under discussion.

Then last night I saw a production of your Ajax, directed by my friend George Rodosthenous. It was reminiscent of Kneehigh in that it was a complete re-rendering of the text, but aside from that it was completely its own thing. Scrupulously modernised, it became about a modern day (Gulf?) war. And it erased all reference to the Greek social order. Athena became the Defence Minister and all other references to the gods became references to God. It was the first time I've seen a Greek tragedy and felt that it was truly tragic. Why?

I don't think it's because of the re-vision of the metaphysical order. I think the same effects would, if anything, have been stronger for the "workings of fate" business. No, it worked so well because it created atmospheres rather than ideas. Any scenes that were led by two or three people having a conversation were pretty below par, exhibitions of intensity to no particular purpose, unleavened by sensitivity or gentleness. But when the full machinery of the production got going - led by George's magnificent music - it really whipped up a storm. Ajax's death came after a party sequence featuring frenetic Greek dancing, and the juxtapotion was astonishing. All of the set-pieces were just as strong. When Ajax's daughter sang a lament over his dead body - the first song in the show - it was breathtakingly powerful despite the fact that she wasn't much of a singer.

So my thinking is now that the way to make plays like yours work is through massive ensemble commitment and radical revision of the text. And for the first time ever, I've a desire to give one a go. Devising a version of the text is the only way to go. Perhaps a future Strange Bedfellows project? I'll let you know. But first of all, I'll need to read some of them...

Dear Samuel Pepys (2)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:37:00 +0000

Necessity is the mother of invention. She's also the mother of motivation, invention's less glamorous sibling.

Seriously, I don't believe anyone ever did anything they didn't have to. The difference in industry from one person to another derives simply from what each considers "necessary". For example, for whatever reason, you found necessary an impeccably meticulous work ethic in the office, plus extra-curricular reading (general and scientific), an hour a day of music, and regular philandering - not to mention unfailing daily diary entries for the decade before your sight failed. Because if you hadn't, people might have looked at you funny in the street: "old Sam's not been pulling his weight lately. He's really let his viola da gamba slip and looked a real fish when asked about Newton's latest paper."

When I last wrote to you a year or so ago I was suffering a real slump of motivation and couldn't understand how I got so little done, you so much. And still, whenever my thoughts turn to you it tends to be in self-reproach. But in general I'm riding a wave of productivity at the moment. Why? Because it's necessary.

I turned fully freelance a couple of months ago. Until then, I had the support of a bursary to pad out times thin for work. No matter how slow I got, I never neglected the essentials of keeping Silver Tongue afloat, because for whatever reason it seemed necessary. Now, I rely on keeping Silver Tongue afloat for my future rent and food, so its necessity is even more keenly felt. Although I've had days in the last couple of weeks less productive than the ideal, none have been totally wasted.

If you need something doing, ask a busy person. I'm now getting on top of a lot of Silver Tongue's administrative machinery, which I really ought to have dealt with when I had leisure to do so. The website is being redesigned, the financial governance sorted out with considerable outside help I could easily have engaged more than a year ago if I'd looked in the right place, and the legal constitution put in place. All of this will be done within a few months. (Added to all of which, I'm keeping up these correspondences with much more regularity.)

Inspiration comes from the strangest of places. As you may have noticed from recent published letters to other correspondents, of all my work in the pipeline I've been most enthused for a while about the clown show. Shiver didn't get the reception we'd hoped in Edinburgh and, though we're reworking it, selling the tour has been a tough gig. And I just haven't thought in enough detail about Man Across the Way to get excited about it. But wandering around the internet looking for good models for theatre company website design, I found myself poking about the Complicite website. I couldn't say what it was in particular, but I found myself thrilling with excitement at the possibilities of that show. So because of one necessary task, I found myself inspired with new and welcome enthusiasm for another.

It's not right to say I haven't been looking forward to the Man work. It's just not as new as the clown work, and so it's easy to become blase about it. But what I realised while reading about Simon McBurney were all of those things that are new. I found my first words of the development process, which starts in a fortnight. I found myself talking about how different this process will be from previous Silver Tongue development projects. I found myself seeing the things about the show that are different, that are new. This is all very exciting. It's not as though we're totally changing everything, leaving behind all that has made us what we are. But we're forging ahead anew.

Is this how you maintained your enthusiasm for all your projects? If in stasis, change things? If it ain't broke, fix it? It's a pretty good principle, especially in the arts. It's impossible to create to a model; in order to be genuinely creative, you need first to create the model. It's zero budgeting, it's the clean slate. Change is vital, it is the engine of creativity. But sometimes it doesn't appear necessary, and necessity is, of course, the mother of invention.

Dear Leo Tolstoy

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 08:14:00 +0000

Last week, for the third time, I saw NIE's Past Half Remembered. It's one of their twentieth-century lives trilogy, the life in question being that of Maria Mikhailovna Gurevich, a Russian whose life spanned most of the twentieth century. Unlike the character, the real Maria Mikhailovna never quite made it to 100, but that's a small piece of license in what is an extraordinarily faithful recreation of her story.

You see, until doodling round the internet just now, it hadn't really occurred to me that NIE's might be a true story. Its sweep, from WWI, through the Russian Civil War, to the siege of Stalingrad, with Mikhailovna always in the wrong place at the wrong time, seemed just too conveniently large. And it fits the requirements of Russian clown/storytelling way too neatly, a real feast of theatrical ingenuity and madcap idiocy. Still, it's a great piece of work, powerfully imagined whether true or not, extremely funny, terrifically sad, and beautiful.

I want to discuss with you Russia as an aesthetic idea. NIE's show, though brilliant, conspicuously stops its storytelling around the end of WWII. And I saw one genuine Russian show (NIE are international, the nearest nationality to Russian being Czech) in Edinburgh this year, The Family Semianyki, by clown troupe Licedi, which is likewise aesthetically stuck in about 1916: battered suitcases, and costumes Popov would have thought old-fashioned. For sure, it's hardly surprising that our Western idea of Russia is held in pre-war stasis. Remarkable, though, that the same seems to be true of Russia's.

It's worth noting that this thesis rests largely on clown-based work. I haven't seen the Maly Theatre of St Petersburg, currently showing in London, and perhaps they'll prove these ideas do not apply to text-based theatre. But I'm not so sure. Although they're widely professed to be brilliant, it seems aesthetically they're developing strictly along the path indicated by Stanislavski. This doesn't mean they're not brilliant, and I may be totally wrong. (Imagine, if you wish, this whole paragraph in parenthesis.) But they're certainly not strikingly contemporary. The photos prove that.

Could it be that Communism, breathing down artistic necks, held back any serious progress? That it seemed safer to stick with what was known than to innovate? I think this is plausible, and it would explain how the Russians got so good at what they do. Afraid to move forward with leaps, the finest artistic minds turned to refining what already exists and they refined it almost to perfection. (The long rehearsal periods help, too, I guess.)

There is one obvious counterexample here. Derevo are clearly producing work of a contemporary stamp. I tend to dislike their exercises in pure aesthetics, but it's worth noting that when they were founded, two years before the wall came down, they quickly became known as "the first underground theatre in Russia". They were the product of something in the wind, one of many signs things were about to change. And they were able to thrive in a post-Soviet world hungry for new forms that had hitherto seemed risky.

When it comes to clown, this all seems hardly surprising. When was there last a clown of any nationality that seemed aesthetically current? There are examples, but the overwhelming majority have an odd timelessness at best and, failing that, a retreat into the safely-trodden past. And a remarkable number from whatever country hark back to a semi-rural Russia that seems little advanced from the world of Natasha's dance. What's that all about?

It seems attractive to say that you fixed Russian-ness so firmly in the popular imagination that no-one has yet succeeded in imagining it better. Attractive but wrong. In the west we have a cliched idea of Russian-ness that your clowns serve to confirm almost as much as do ours. And clown relies on shorthand, on the recognisable situation ripe for disruption, so appealing to the cliche is an obvious strategy.

The whole of life is in War and Peace, you laid Russia bare. Along with Chekhov (whom you considered "an even worse playwright than Shakespeare") and one or two others, you created such a strong sense of your country that it's recognisable even today: to the extent that it's become cliche.

Dear William Shakespeare (4)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Wed, 11 Oct 2006 07:38:00 +0000

I saw your Cymbeline last night, in Kneehigh's (incredibly) free adaptation, and have just spent some time looking through the reviews. They fall, broadly, into two camps. Most are enthusiastic, excited by the verve and theatrical imagination with which they've tackled this tricky play. Unsurprisingly, only the bluff Telegraph deigns to use the epithet most fitting: fun. But several are sniffy, Michael Billington in particular exhibiting upturned nose on the grounds that this production "taught me nothing new about Cymbeline". What a complete arse.

He also cavils at the "relentless jokiness". Has he read any of your comedies? Some of your fools are so effortful those cast as them often look in danger of burst veins or worse. And this from a man who earlier this summer described farce as "the essence of theatre". What a complete arse.

Likewise Sam Marlowe in the Times complains about a "daft pun" at a key moment: misreading Posthumous' letter to Pisanio, Hayley Carmichael's Imogen reads "she has played the trumpet in my bed". Marlowe declares we get this "instead of Imogen's agony". Well firstly and for starters, that's not a pun. A pun is where the intended meaning of a word is mistaken for another, unintented meaning, not where one word is mistaken for another word entirely. Secondly, it got the biggest laugh of the night. Thirdly, I don't believe the agony is ever in doubt, but if it is then Carmichael's collapse from outraged disbelief (hilarious) to stricken gropes toward understanding (heartrending) removes it. The audience moves from utter bellylaughing hysteria to chokingly complete silence in an instant. I don't remember the RSC ever moving me to either of those states, let alone with such alacrity and skill.

These people, like those numerous who left during Stratford intervals (no such pomposity in Leeds), obviously nurse obscure feelings that Kneehigh director/adaptor Emma Rice is somehow cheapening your play. This may partly be derived from the fact that she uses very little of your text and they weren't told. Nothing more disconcerting than having to make your mind up on the spot. Marks off for not telling us in advance what we were going to see. There's an ill-concealed and sometimes even gropingly expressed feeling that without your language, it is impossible to match your grandeur. Bollocks. Kneehigh do with images what you do with words and I'm sorry if it upsets you, but this is the first production of Cymbeline I've seen and I know it's the best I'll ever see, text intact or no.

Still, I have a sneaking suspicion you'd like this show. Yours wasn't a theatre of reverence. Your crowds were rowdy and you had to keep them on side. So you gave them what they wanted to see - from wordmuddling fools to severed heads - in order to show them what you wanted them to see - the truth of loss, the joy of re-union. And if Kneehigh play to the crowds, they at no point pander to them. Barely a moment of this magnificent show is ill-judged, but a fair few of the responses are.

Dear WG Sebald

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 10 Oct 2006 15:27:00 +0000

Sarah and I got into a conversation yesterday about how language affects national character. The English have lots of words to fudge with, so we are drawn to politesse and euphemism and make good civil servants. The Dutch have fewer words and no word for "please" (at least, none comparable in usage) so they are direct, even appearing blunt. The Germans have a ferociously complicated set of rules regarding sentence construction, so their philosophers are as analytical and technocratic as their sense of humour is broad. In The Liar Stephen Fry postulates that the Germans have produced so many musical geniuses for the same reason: relatively little can be expressed in their language, so more must be squeezed into the music. Us Brits having a pretty much infinitely flexible lexicon, our compositional excellence is stunted by our ability to think about it too much. Yet in the modernist twentieth century, as music became an intellectual exercise as much as a means of expression, we suddenly started to punch above our weight.

I'm not sure how much of this I buy. But reading your Austerlitz, I'd love to talk with you about it. Given such a proportion of your work is concerned with the effects of suppressed national trauma on personal identity, I doubt you'd have much truck with a theory silly enough to rest on assumptions that definable national characters even exist. You'd be quite right to demur. A couple of years ago I went through a period of obsession with the notions of "Englishness" or "Britishness", both of which exist only at the level of cliche. What connects the football hooligan and the mandarin beyond mere coincidence of birth? And though both might understand the another, aren't there as many differences as similarities in the language they use?

Perhaps what we're really talking about is the character of the intellectual elite. But the intellectual elite across national boundaries have more in common with one another, I suspect, than they each have with the football louts of their respective nations. More importantly, as communications render the world affectively smaller (what many mean when they say the earth is becoming "flat"), national differences are eroding.

Bernard Henri-Levy, on yesterday's Start the Week, expostulated in his spectacular fashion on models of integration: the English and French models, resting to varying degrees on the firm-jawed retention of national identities, he said, have failed; while the American model, resting on the concept of the "melting pot", has succeeded. And if an article on last week's Channel Four news showing American muslims to be very much in love with their adoptive homeland is anything to go by, he's right. National differences are eroding.

All of this has relatively little to do with you, except that I thought you'd be interested. Maybe I'm conflating you with Austerlitz, who I'm sure would be. Either way, I wanted to leave you with this: this article links to a radio programme about language and music. It points out that speakers of tonal languages such as mandarin are, by a staggering proportion, far more likely to possess perfect pitch. But this gift has its downside in the west: their music and their language being much more similar, we understand neither.

Dear Bertolt Brecht

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Fri, 06 Oct 2006 08:59:00 +0000

It seems strange that this is my first letter to you. I've spent more than three years preparing a thesis on your work and haven't thought to drop you a line once. Sorry about that.

On reflection, it seems likely that spending my time wrangling with your work is itself my reason for not writing sooner. Or, more precisely, having wrangled with your journals, and the opinions of your biographers. Pretty well everyone who met you was won over, but in the absence of your personality you're difficult to like. And three years in, your work starts to pall a bit, too. Why write to someone you see every day?

But I'm writing now because I thought of you while writing about greatness in art to James Joyce yesterday, a letter which was written, like this one, in place of 1000 words on you. Your opinion of Joyce is, as far as I know, unrecorded, but the shrewd guess is that you'd go along with mine so far as his formal importance is concerned. Perhaps you'd even consider him to be using verfremdungseffekt, except: where I consider him to fall short of greatness because I don't think formal importance is sufficient, I expect you'd consider him totally defunct for just that reason. You probably won't even allow me to describe the multiple stylistic lenses through which Joyce viewed the world as verfremdungseffekte, because they don't focus attention on social realities. Which, for the orthodox Marxist, are pretty much the only realities admissible.

But I'm not an orthodox Marxist, and now you've been dead for fifty years and a month, you can stop pretending you are, too. You're not an orthodox anything, partly through contrarianism, but also - to be honest - because you never really understood Marx (or Hegel, or, for that matter, Chaplin). Still, by using them for your own ends, ends which happen to be more than purely formal, you become a greater writer than Joyce.

Yes. Though it pains me to say so to one with an ego so monstrous as your own, by the criteria I set out to Joyce yesterday, you're a great writer. Your use of popular forms to greater effect than plain populism seals it. But like Joyce, in some ways you become truly great almost by mistake. "Emotion floods through that celebrated dam the alienation effect at every turn. More and more one sees Brecht as a man whose feelings were so violent he needed a theory to curb them." (Kenneth Tynan) The harder you work to refuse the audience what they want, the harder they are forced to work to find it. But because everything else is so impeccably achieved, they are prepared to work. Nowadays your work is unfashionable because often nothing is achieved apart from the refusal, lending your work an appearance of petulance which your personal qualities as they appear in the journals and the biographies only serve to confirm.

But when done right, your work has everything. Fun, entertainment, emotional and intellectual seriousness, and ideas which resonate outward long after the half-height curtain has come down.

My thesis situates you in the tradition of clown from Karl Valentin, whom you knew, through Chaplin and Dario Fo, finishing by looking at how the contemporary, fiercely apolitical view of clown can be brought to bear on your work. Jacques Lecoq and John Wright insist clown cannot have political force because the clown, as an inveterate debunker, cannot hold any opinion for longer than about two seconds. It's a sound premise but a false conclusion: put an idiot in the right context and it's easy to illustrate the thesis that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. You don't need the clown himself to support the thesis any more than you need Richard III to support the thesis that tyranny is bad. Slightly harder than to illustrate a thesis is to explore a question undogmatically, but the principle is the same.

This combination of popular form with serious enquiry is at the core of your work (although don't worry, I'm not accusing you of being undogmatic). It's also what I'm trying to do with my clown show this winter. I love the work of Peepolykus, Ridiculusmus, Cal McCrystal and so on, but their work is, like candyfloss, ultimately unsatisfying. There's nothing left to savour once the madness is finished, no flavours left to deepen on the palate. I love Kneehigh above all because they manage to explore beauty, humanity, frailty through this kind of work. Why not create something of this stamp that is also intellectually exciting? The aim of the forthcoming clown show is to touch on serious geopolitical questions, but never stop being clown, never flip from funny to serious for cheap effect. The serious questions are there, but they are left to mature in the audiences' minds. It might not be great, but I hope it will be quite good.

But the other reason I wanted to write is the thesis itself. It's all over bar the writing up. That's the difficult bit. Reading the books was easy. I now know what I think. Fine.

I object to having to set it out in dead prose for the reading displeasure of six people I'll never meet again. The only thing motivating me to finish the damn thing now is politeness: I've been funded to the tune of about £25k to research the thing, so it seems rude not to give them something for their money. But that doesn't get a chap out of bed in the morning. I'm a freelance theatre-maker with a living to earn and both the work and the living are of considerably greater importance than completing a thesis to no purpose. These letters are a welcome opportunity for reflection. If I have to reflect much further on your work, I shall set fire to it.

I'm off to dash off 2000 words while I'm not feeling too negative about you.

Dear James Joyce

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Thu, 05 Oct 2006 16:50:00 +0000

Bafflingly, reviews of John Carey's What Good are the Arts are cropping up everywhere, some three or four months after it came out in paperback. I thought of you.

An article on Crooked Timber examines the Ribena theory: I prefer Ribena to Chateau Lafite and no-one can tell me otherwise; who am I to insist on the superiority of James Joyce over Barbara Cartland? Good question. The Crooked Timber post answers it by arguing that Chateau Lafite requires great dedication and skill to produce, and great experience to appreciate, whereas Ribena is mass-produced to appeal to the broadest possible palate. Cf. Ulysees and Her Throbbing Passion (not a real novel as far as I'm aware, but near enough in a Richard Hoggart-esque sort of way).

This argument is all very well. I'm quite attracted to it as filling a need for an answer to Carey I haven't managed to come up with for myself. But it does end up as something of a Pseud's charter. I'm fond of Ulysees, but by the measure advanced it comes out far inferior to Finnegans Wake, which took you longer to write and has been very thinly read. "If you don't understand The Waste Land", TS Eliot apparently said, "go away, read more, then come back and read it again." Personally, I prefer Prufrock.

The purpose of any theory of art being to justify the aesthetic prejudices of the theorist, I'm keen to find one allowing me to prefer Ulysees to both Her Throbbing Passion and Finnegans Wake; Prufrock to both The Waste Land and Tea With Kingsley Amis. The best I can do is to suggest that while cultivating one's palate is a rewarding activity, any work of either literature or viniculture that requires more of disparate knowledge than cultivated experience is pushing its luck a bit. In requiring us to learn about forty three languages to get the full experience of Finnegans Wake, you're taking the piss, I'm afraid. Whereas the majestic final section of Ulysees can be appreciated with or without having read Homer, but not without having spent some time developing one's literary palate.

And here's an unfashionable notion: that final section surpasses the rest of the book by such a distance in part because it's not entirely deaf to the requirements of Her Throbbing Passion's readership. Sure, their tastes are for the more immediate, for the quick release. But in this section of your book we have a human being in need of love, something so simple and immediately accessible as to be almost entirely unique in your ouvre. "Ulysess as romantic novel" (with a small r on romantic) would be an intriguing seminar paper and would begin to home in on my emergent theory of art.

Great art has to acknowledge the popular, but it has to broaden it. It has to engage with what the masses want, flirt with them, but not necessarily give it to them. The good popular artist knows what the audience want and gives it to them. The great artist understands what the audience want and, without frustrating them, is able to give them something else, something they didn't expect. Shakespeare, Dickens, Brecht: this is what they did. By engaging with popular forms they were able to broaden popular understandings of both art and society.

You engaged with forms popular among the literati and broadened their understandings of art. This makes you important, but it doesn't make you great. When you were great, you were great by mistake, you were great because your humanity crept in despite ferocious efforts to keep it at bay, because what made you important suddenly for a spell and by coincidence also made your work true. You were great for the last 60 pages out of 930.

Dear William Shakespeare (3)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Wed, 04 Oct 2006 15:20:00 +0000

Another day spent trying to make teenagers like you. They don't.

They enjoy themselves because it's a day out of school. The boys enjoy playing at fighting and the girls enjoy playing at being in love. They don't enjoy doing it through this - to them - near-dead language.

To me the language is more alive than anything I'll ever say. And it's not just language. The words are spurs to action that, if you listen to them, can't be refused. "Why, does not every earthly thing cry shame upon her?" says Leonato, and the words "every earthly thing" make him cast madly around, looking for support, for succour, for answers. That's what we see. All he has to do is what the words make him, and we see Leonato in full.

It's easy for me to say. I've directed two and performed four of your plays, studied ten and read thirty. I've had practice. But the ones I've least enjoyed have been those I studied at school; I'm still getting over my education. I read Hamlet when I was twelve and enjoyed it, read Romeo and Juliet at fourteen and didn't understand it. That's the wrong way around. And that lack of understanding puts kids off learning about it and teachers off teaching it. Why are we forcing them to study what they might enjoy if left to find it themselves, but don't when forced? The best way of getting a kid to learn piano is to tell him he can't learn piano. Why not build up, through the eighteenth century, to your work, rather than trying to clear a four-hundred year comprehension gap in one leap? By year ten, they might get to Keats; why not save you until A-Level?

Or: if the teaching of languages weren't so lamentable in this country, and we taught French and German to primary children when they're fitted to learn them rather than at secondary level when their brains have started shrinking, perhaps the language wouldn't be so much of a barrier.

Or: I'm not teaching it right. I'm doing a five-week project running workshops on your work in January and February for the West Yorkshire Playhouse. I'll get them to like you yet.

Dear William Shakespeare (2)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 03 Oct 2006 17:45:00 +0000

I spent today running a workshop on Much Ado About Nothing. It would make you turn in your grave.

The afternoon was spent running exercises designed to show how performing in the Elizabethan playhouse affects one's reading of the text. Perhaps a bit ambitious for a year nine group, but I try not to patronise. No danger of that with this group. "This is fine", I say to one group. "But where are your audience? You need to be aware of your audience." "Here and here" says the self-appointed spokesperson, indicating pews. "You're not in a church", I say, brandishing a picture of the Rose, "you're on this stage." "We're not", she says. "That's the whole point of the exercise", I say. Then she brandishes her trump: "I've seen the film. They're in rows."

This has all given rise to much quoting of C.S. Lewis's Professor Kirk. What do they teach them in these schools? If only there were a way of showing people, in a blinding flash of light, your genius. I always took it for granted, until I learned to see it for myself (appreciation that hasn't come with every "great" writer). The thing about Shakespeare, as Mark Twain said of you, is that he really is very good, despite all the people who say he's very good. But with every passing year we move further from you and further from our youth understanding you with anything near ease. The language is changing every day, changing faster every day, changing away from your language. Soon you'll be as distant as Chaucer, then as Petrarch. You are not for all time, but for an age.

At the end of the workshop we had a Q+A. After some really perceptive questions that allowed me to think perhaps I'd got through, one girl said: "who wrote the play?"

Dear Terence Rattigan

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 25 Jul 2006 07:54:00 +0000

I assume you're dead. But since Chrisopher Fry only died last year, I may be wrong. If so I apologise. This must be galling.

I saw your play [i]The Deep Blue Sea[/i] on Friday without any real hope I'd enjoy it. This is despite the excellent company at Theatre by the Lake in Keswick, who are doing plenty of other things well in their currrent season. Still, I expected period propriety through sepia-tinted filters. Yet it had remarkable clarity. What felt like a faithful recreation of period theatrical practices was in fact a faithful recreation of the period, detail by detail.

Your characters have an undemonstrative torment that may have something to do with your own enforced public concealment of your homosexuality throughout your adult life. They are tight-lipped, but not cold-blooded. So much more interesting, isn't it, to watch characters trying to conceal turmoil than to watch writers and actors trying to reveal it?

It's a problem we're struggling with at Silver Tongue at the moment in rehearsals for Shiver. The two characters share a secret in the past and are, in their own ways, haunted by it. But they haven't seen each other for seventeen years and it would be ludicrous to imagine they're still having nightmares regularly on the stroke of midnight. They'd have topped themselves. For seventeen years they have been tight-lipped and they have almost become cold-blooded. Then they meet again. And each knows what the other is trying to conceal, is ambivalent about bringing it into the open.

Yours is a well-made play. Ours is structurally rather unusual, featuring some flashes and jump-cuts that would have outraged your audiences. It's a stickier wicket, as it doesn't progress (smoothly) forwards but jerks. I happen to think this is more realistic than a three-act character development and I hope that's how it looks despite the edges of surrealism. Perhaps what we're trying to do is square the circle between you and, I don't know, Maeterlinck. Maybe I'll get in touch with him, too.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Dear Gerrard Winstanley (2)

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 22:15:00 +0000

I'm not done with you yet.

As happens every so often, yesterday I tried to align myself with one of our political parties. First I went to www.politicalcompass.org, as a crude measure of whether my views have changed in the year or so since I was last there. I find I've got a bit further to the left, leaving very little room to go travel any further, and ever so slightly less liberal, though there's very little in it. This is a little alarming given I tried to err on the side of moderation.

The only British political party even in the same quartile as me seems to be the Greens. I suppose the Socialist Workers or some similar bunch might be, although my instinct is to assume they're socially much less liberal. Maybe this is unfair. It seems likely that in actual fact I'm put off by either their extremism, their gang mentality, or (most likely) their spelling. Bizarre really that extremism should be a problem given that economically I'm slightly to the left of Stalin. But there's something tremendously unattractive about the rabble-rousing qualities of extreme left or right. Why can't "extreme" positions be couched in rational language. As far as I'm concerned my position is a perfectly rational one. I don't feel the need to rant or thump tubs.

So I'm instinctively more attracted to the Greens, who are both economically left wing, socially liberal and ecologically responsible. They are right to say that the saving of our planet is probably the most pressing challenge the next couple of generations will face. But again, I find their rhetoric unattractive. Their statement of core beliefs opens them right up to the hoary old charges of tree-hugging and they can do better than that. Instead of getting at why environmental issues are so pressing for everyone, they disappear into hippy mode using the environment as a metaphor for every issue. It's tub-thumping by other means. To be taken seriously they need to diversify, otherwise they'll be seen as an interest group as narrow as UKIP.

Essentially I'm in agreement with them on almost all issues except Europe. They also have an over-optimistic view of local government, aiming to create more without any ideas about how to dynamise it. Maybe they think giving more power to local authorities will improve the quality of those represented there, but the best people are still going to want to go to Westminster where more gets done. Maybe promising young things should be forced to do a stint in local government before being allowed up the greasy pole.

The argument runs that only by joining the party can you effect change within it. So I still consider signing up with the Greens. But transforming them into a party where environmental issues are only the most important plank in a broad policy ship rather than its whole hull seems an remote contingency given their name and origins.

So frustrated with all of this (and the fact that West Leeds seems to have no Green Party despite the fact that I voted for them in the General Election), I speculatively entered into google "find me something to believe in". This was probably rash as by far the most likely result was a Christian website. Instead I got a blogging site called 43things, where correspondents list the 43 things they want to achieve and blog about their success. Several people have "blog more regularly" without any posts on the subject, an attitude I sympathise with. But a few had "find something to believe in." Those who had done so successfully recommended the quest, which is heartening, although I couldn't quite work out what it was they had found. God, presumably. One girl had instead put "define my philosophical beliefs", which is nearer to what I ought to have googled except that I know what I believe. What I'm looking for is someone who shares my beliefs, in order to vote for them.

Why am I telling you all of this, Gerrard? Because you got off your arse and acted on what you believed in. You didn't need a party. You just got on with it. I admire that. Sadly, as an academic and theatre practitioner, forming a political party in the modern world is outside my skill set. So I suppose I ought to join the Greens.

Dear Gerrard Winstanley

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Sat, 28 Jan 2006 03:09:00 +0000

As you'll have noticed from the intermission since my letter to your contemporary, Samuel Pepys, I haven't got any more industrious in the matter of posting regularly. The later months of last year I continued to spend watching the West Wing and playing scrabble. I'm onto series seven on download and the presidential race is getting exciting even though we all know the Democrat Santos will win. But thankfully for my productivity's sake, I can't get scrabble on this new computer.

Some bloggers write every day regardless of whether they have anything to say. Others (fewer in number) write only when they have something important to get off their chests. Me, I"m in neither camp. I write only when I'm feeling guilty about having spent the day or week not doing more important things.

But since it's you, there's something I'd like to share. I've put you in a play once and I didn't pull it off, and now I'm having another go. After seven drafts the fire play was nowhere close to being done, although my wife was kind enough to say there were some beautiful things in there. Just because we're married? She's never yet admitted to liking a whole piece and after I finished my radio play her comment was: "wow. A whole play", which isn't even praise enough to be damned by it. So she's pretty honest, and also the only reason I continue writing. But I don't think you'd have liked it.

The new one is set at the point of your greatest fame, on St George's Hill. The idea is to show you at your best, not past your best. I still can't see it being a hopeful play - your experiment failed - but the process of disillusion might be more interesting than the result. You must have been a fairly inspiring figure - your idea was a crazy one - and entirely by accident I've written a young character with whom you have a bond rather than a rift. Whether that will survive, we'll have to see. Maybe at the end of the play your relationship with this young guy will be the same as your relationship with the disillusioned disciple Billy in the fire play. It depends whether your ideals survive. I do hope so.

I keep being drawn to you. You were on the lunatic fringe of seventeenth century politics, essentially a luddite and by no means a modern man, with your dreams of re-establishing some sort of agrarian communitarianism long past even then. Yet something in you was forward-looking. The idea that every man should have the vote (and every woman? Perhaps even you didn't go that far) was crazy at a time when moral worth was measured by the acre. And your proposition that ownership of the land was an intolerable imposition on individual liberty was barely proposed seriously for another two hundred years, certainly never in prose as good as yours. You've been described as a Communist before Marx, but this doesn't quite fit it. You were communitarian, sure, and you wanted to do away with the money economy in good time. But you had no ideas about the proletariat the bourgeouisie. These groups were only coming into being, not to speak of the terminology. Industrial society was a long way off; what you proposed was more like a universal kibbutz. You were both two hundred years behind the times and two hundred years ahead of it. On average, you were the most radically modern man of your time, irresistible extremism that could only have been produced and sustained by a civil war.

But you weren't sustained, not for long enough. Cromwell's thugs beat your followers, killed them like as not, and ground your experiment out of possibility. It's not really clear why. We have to assume he, or his subordinates, felt threatened by your fervour and sense of righteousness. And if it had worked, he'd have been out of a job. Whether or not Cromwell himself cared or even knew about what you were up to, he's going to make it into the play, I feel pretty sure, about two thirds of the way through the first half and possibly again towards the end. And he won't be entirely unsympathetic.

That was your moment. You had a little slice of utopia and you wanted it to grow and be shared. It might have worked, at least for a time, perhaps a longish time. Population growth and technologisation make it entirely impossible now.

I feel wistful about this, as I write to you on my .mac listening to guitar music on my stereo waiting for my friend Alan to call about a card game. Life may or may not have been simpler, but it seems that way at least. I'm sure I'm pretty happy as I am - things are going well right now - but in moments of excessive hurry I think of two things. One is Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow, a eulogy to the savouring of pleasures. The other is you, and what might have been.

Dear Samuel Pepys

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Sun, 09 Oct 2005 05:05:00 +0000

Principally, I am impressed by your industry. To have turned out a dozen volumes (in the Penguin edition) of diaries while holding down a full-time job at the top of the naval administration, conducting several energetic love affairs, reading all the most current scientific and philosophical literature, and occasionally getting together with your family for the seventeenth-century equivalent of a jam session, is pretty damn remarkable. I am impressed. It's hardly surprising your sight started to suffer.

I mind little you're not much of a writer. Your energy is a virtue, but, untempered by any writerly discipline, makes for torturous, labyrinthine prose. Your work was of great help to me when I was writing my play set during the Great Fire, but to be honest you're hell to wade through. So far as I can see, you're of literary value only as a window on your times, a mirror held up to 1660s nature.

And what a vigorous nature! Your industry is your legacy. It is a lesson to us all. I've spent two days this week watching series three of the West Wing and quite an improper amount of the rest of it playing scrabble against anonymous opponents on the internet. At university I was famed for my staggering productivity. To a certain extent I still am. But it has always been a battle. In my first year I had a note stuck to the ceiling above my bed, designed to be the first thing I saw in the morning, which read: "I must become more efficient". It became my mantra and to it I attribute my industry in the first and second year. I've never quite had the same will-power since, and I've never matched yours. Although I've been busy at times, my work is done when I'm in the mood or when deadlines press hard, it's never sheer graft. It's easy to attribute this to the extraordinary number of distractions available in the modern world, but that's not really good enough.

How did you do it? Did you have a sign above your bed?

Dear Oscar Wilde

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 22:54:00 +0000

It's astonishing how resilient is your Importance of Being Earnest. Of the two productions I have seen, neither has been a straight rendition of the text, but some sort of wacky take thereon - yet you escape such brutalising attentions unscathed. Four years ago in Edinburgh I saw a cross-cast version by Illyria theatre company, with Lady Bracknell as pure Pantomime Dame and the chaps as Principal Boys. It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen in a theatre. Then last night I saw Ridiculusmus's production of the play, with John and David playing all eight parts between them. That was pretty funny, too, although much less to do with anything you wrote.

How do you feel about all this jiggery-pokery with your masterpiece? It's not even as if the bonkers versions end with the two I've seen: KAOS did a production of the play a few years ago in their trademark heightened physical whatnot. It culminated in a violent food fight between Gwendolen and Cecily. I've never yet seen anyone do the play in a way related to how I presume you intended it. Why is this?

On its own terms, it's pretty much a perfect play. The plot whooshes along like a torpedo, there's a guaranteed laugh every eight lines and the characters manage the extraordinary trick of being totally loveable and utterly contemptuous at the same time. It's almost impossible to fuck up. And perhaps that's why people try. The play is so resilient that it will withstand any amount of nonsense and still produce a damn good piece of theatre.

I can't think of another play that would stand up to the treatment Ridiculusmus gave Importance last night. The concept - two guys play all the roles - gives plenty of scope for clownesque lunacy, and up to a point they exploit this. But the logic of it surely has to be that the changes get more and more manic and ragged; having established the gag surely you have to up the stakes? But it accelerates only from funeral march (very funny: lots of opportunity for putting one another in the shit) to brisk walk. It's never a manic dash, there's never any real sense of danger they might fuck up. So the animating question becomes "how are they going to do this bit?" (a question of method) rather than "how the fuck are they going to do this bit?" (a question of possibility). Obviously, the latter is much more exciting. Although neither has anything whatever to do with you.

Of course, this sense of danger would be fraudulent. That is entirely beside the point. When I did Mr Puntila and His Man, Matti earlier this year, the whole process was an exploration of ways to make it look like we'd got it wrong. The audience laughed like drains. Last night's Importance had none of that sense of danger, the real animating force of much comedy. All of the really big laughs came because of your magnificent script. I think I'd like to see someone do the play straight.

Dear William Shakespeare

danielbye@ymail.com (danbye) — Tue, 27 Sep 2005 18:43:00 +0000

I've seen two of your comedies in the last week and been struck by the widespread tendency among your directors to emphasise the bits that aren't funny. Surely this is bizarre. Yet it seems that to dwell upon the dark corners somehow gives more weight to your work. Work intended purely to entertain is frivolous almost to the point of pornography; one can only justify the production of your comedies if one can extract the moral message or the cruelty lying at its heart. It never seems to occur to these people that the surest route to success in the production of a comedy is to extract the jokes.

I expect that in the months to come I shall be writing to you more than any other of my correspondents, so I won't labour the point. But I think you'd have gained far more satisfaction from the Sheffield Crucible production of Much Ado About Nothing than the West Yorkshire Playhouse production of Twelfth Night. The latter is a play particularly susceptible to the vogue for writing large the dark corners of a text, its subject being romantic melancholy. And Ian Brown's production writes this mood exquisitely large, in a beautiful, thoughtful and sober production. As a reading of the text, it's impossible to fault: these people sure are melancholy. But as a performance it's unsatisfying: this is a comedy, after all, and has anyone ever considered that these moods of melancholic mooning are actually pretty ridiculous?

Consider Orsino. Surely you didn't mean us to take "If music be the food of love" as a serious example of the lover's art? If so, why make him thus ludicrously capricious? "Play on", he says, extolling the exquisite virtues of music as a spur to the lover's appetite. This lasts a whole four lines before he snaps "Enough! No more! 'Tis not so sweet now as it was before." Are we to suppose that his musician has deteriorated in skill in the intervening forty-five seconds? I somehow suspect the contrary, that you intended us to infer from this that Orsino is a ridiculous specimen among ridiculous specimens: a thesis you expound upon beautifully by demonstrating how love makes monkeys of us all. It's difficult to know whether it is through the demands of your chosen form or through sentimentality that you concede to the obligatory happy ending, but I like to imagine you're arguing that despite the ridiculous contortions love demands of us, it is nevertheless an exquisite thing, to be treasured. I can't quite square this with Sebastian's absurdly mercenary coupling with Olivia, but you can't have everything.

Brown's production gets all of the melancholy but little of the nonsense - or rather, it follows the conventional segregation of "serious" characters from "comic"characters. Thus Sir Andrew (wonderfully played by John Lightbody) is the only character who draws belly laughs, as, for the others, laughter is sacfificed on the altar of psychological truth. Why can't psychological truth be amusing?

Take Feste, for example. He's usually played as just another melancholic - and I think, rightly so. The trouble is, the motivation and focus for his melancholy are rarely located with any precision. If he's in love, he keeps it pretty quiet. So what is he so down about? Well, it's actually pretty clear. He was "much beloved" of Olivia's father, but under the new regime his position is by no means guaranteed. He's fooling for his livelihood in a way he hasn't had to since he was young and energetic. His unease is economic. And his jokes go over badly. The joke comes from the failure of the jokes: a position only possible when the audience is acknowledged as it was in your day, but is only capriciously so (i.e. solely during soliloquies) these days. Feste is a clown; a clown needs an audience. If he's simply a bit down he does nothing more than sap the energy of the audience; if he is allowed to acknowledge us he can draw both our laughter and our sympathy much more effectively than by mooning around.

Much Ado is a simpler proposition because the leads are acknowledged wits, and therefore allowed to be played for laughs. So the Crucible show was pretty enjoyable. But there's a period in the middle of this play where it completely stops being funny. And I can't help feeling like that's your fault. You come on a bit strong with the condemnation of Hero's infidelity, both from Claudio and Leonato. Did you have a jealous streak? These aren't the only of your characters (Leontes, Othello) to condemn infidelity in the strongest possible terms, only to learn to their shame that they have been mistaken. Such is the case here, but the condemnation is considerably stronger than the withdrawal, leaving for an oddly imbalanced piece of work.

The problem with this production was that it exaggerated this imbalance rather than dealing with it. The key moment comes when Claudio is convinced of his error and Leonato tells him that his punishment is to marry "his sister's daughter". Why does he allow a man who has so egregiously wronged his daughter, to marry his daughter? The only way I can see of answering this is to allow a moment where Leonato is inclined to serious punishment, before he acknowledges that Claudio's contrition is genuine and that Claudio's belief that his mistake has led to Hero's death is punishment enough. A skilled actor - such as Nicholas Jones, who played Leonato with wit and wisdom here - could easily show with subtlety and conviction the experience of this momentary dilemma. But in this production, we see all and understand none: Leonato's grief and rage is movingly exposed, but it is too easy to share. Having done this, we need significantly more convincing than we get here when it is replaced by a softer emotion.

Having said all that, it's pretty clear that this part isn't in the least funny. I wonder whether it was in your day.