Many words can be used to describe Glyn Maxwell, poet, novelist, writer. As it usually the case with eclectic artists, defining their career seems impossible. He studied English at Oxford, and poetry in Boston under the supervision of Nobel prize Derek Walcott. He has proved to be a most versatile and prolific writer, moving from poetry to radio plays to libretti. As his new creation After Troy is staged at the Oxford playhouse, we took a chance to ask him a few questions.
Glyn Maxwell has written a lot for theatre, usually in verse (pentameters). Why such a choice? ‘Theatre feels like the place I was always heading, being more interested in making up character and figuring out how he/she speaks, acts in the face of others than I am in figuring out who I am. And if you introduce a constant – say, people speak lines in pentameters, Shakespeare’s constant – you suddenly have this further resource. The lines go by like the world turning, at a steady pace, so you can make the sound of characters who can’t think fast enough for that, or some who love their own thoughts too much, or some who speak merely to shore up sound against the terror of silence– you introduce one constant and all these things become possible. I’m not saying there aren’t terrific prose plays around, but you need to be a real master of voices to make it work. And I’m aware that ‘verse drama’ barely exists now beyond myself and a couple of other eccentrics, and has a unique burden to bear – the weight of the great ones and the almost total failure of everyone since… All I can do is keep trying to show that verse on stage can make the sound we make now on the street, in the pub, in the bedroom, in Parliament. Ancient Greeks didn’t talk in hexameters but if you master the line you can make anyone talk like it’s today.’
There is an eclectic selection of themes ranging from classical to contemporary and different genres, how does he match theme to genre? ‘Switching between genres just seems to be the nature of the engine. It’s how it rejuvenates. I can’t go straight from writing a play to writing another play, but with a couple of days off I could be ready to do some libretto work. I suppose they are neighbouring chambers of the brain.’
Given that in the plays the verse has a core importance, I asked whether prose had no hope for authority.The reply was that prose can wield immense authority, but it can never fly free. ‘The great prose works survive at least partially because of the matter in hand, the sense of a great truth being passed down. What the best verse has over that is a relationship with time itself. The forms of the best verse, the one which survive whole ages – are mortal responses to time. That’s what all those pentameters are doing – I breathe, I walk, I think, in spite of time. The sonnet – I love, I hope, I sigh, in spite of time. That’s the power that free verse writers don’t think they have a use for. If you subject yourself to the pressures of form, you are incorporating the presence of an Other. Now that might be God for one, or an absent lover, what matters is there’s something to remind the self it isn’t free. Cells age, oxygen sucks in and out, day ends, love fades – not much is free about you, what on earth can be free about poetry? To wrestle with the language for a rhyme, this is to be in the presence of the language’s history. Any poet should be humbled almost to silence by that encounter.’
Talking about themes such as Troy, or Lily Jones’s Birthday (based on Aristophanes’ Lysistrata), the inspiration often begins with the classics. Is this always the case?
‘What I want to talk about in After Troy is the a very strong theme of parents and children, the difference between oral and written cultures, the strangeness of divine beliefs. These ideas may be implicit in the old story, but every writer discovers his or her own passions within it. I don’t read any ancient languages, and I use the translations only to learn the story. I love the story but I don’t see why I should tell it like a Greek from several millennia back: men in masks, choruses…To be blunt, we English had some fairly storming theatre since then, we learned how to interrupt each other and have four people on stage at once.’
We wonder if classical themes are still relevant nowadays? Maxwell replies that ‘any story that has reached us, whether it’s biblical, classical, folklore, dwarfs the age we live in, simply by the marvel of its longevity.’
A poet’s work is to tell ‘how ordinary people bury stories and move on, as if those stories won’t erupt out of the ground again – as poetry does, as Troy did, six times after the Greeks destroyed it’. We remain enchanted by the pure magic of poetry as the words still ring in our heads.
