Biographical note: John Kinsella is the author of over twenty books, including The Silo (FACP, 1995), The Undertow: New & Selected Poems (Arc, 1996), The Hunt (Bloodaxe, 1998), Visitants (Bloodaxe, 1999), and Wheatlands (with Dorothy Hewett, FACP, 2000), The Hierarchy of Sheep (Bloodaxe/FACP, 2000/2001), and Auto (Salt, 2000). He is editor of the international literary journal Salt, a consultant editor of Westerly (CSAL, University of Western Australia), Cambridge correspondent for Overland (Melbourne, Australia), and international editor of the American journal The Kenyon Review. He is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge University, Adjunct Professor to Edith Cowan University, Western Australia, and Professor of English at Kenyon College. Peripheral Light: Selected and New Poems is due out with W. W. Norton in 2003.
Biographical note: Steve Chinna teaches theatre and performance studies in the Department of English, University of Western Australia. He works with scripted plays, and devises, writes, and directs new works, often in collaboration with students. These new works have included: From Dreams of Reason, 1992; Love and Addiction: The Diary of a Cure, 1994; The She-Wolf's Bloody Necklace, 1995; Missionary Positions, 1996; Encounters with the Alien (Dark Hearts), 1998; and Kinsella/Ryan/Chinna, Smith Street (Between Heaven and Hell), 2001.
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EAN13: 9781876857660 ISBN-10: 1876857668 ISBN-13: 9781876857660 Author: John Kinsella Title: Divinations Series: Salt Modern Drama Product class: BC Language: eng Audience: General/trade BIC subject category: CTGH Publisher: Salt Publishing Pub date: 15-Dec-02 Extent: 256pp Height: 216 mm Width: 140 mm Thickness: 15 mm Weight: 384 gms Supplier:Gardners Books Supplier:Ingram Book Group Supplier:Inbooks (James Bennett) Availability: IP Price: GBP 14.99 Price: USD 21.95 Rights: World
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description/annotation:Divinations – four modern morality plays by poet John Kinsella, each quite different but with threads that connect them – an anarchic sensibility, a poet’s voice, and an adventurous hybridity of performance styles and genres.
Main description: Divinations – four modern morality plays by poet John Kinsella, each quite different but with threads that connect them – an anarchic sensibility, a poet’s voice, and an adventurous hybridity of performance styles and genres. Crop Circles opens the set – where reckless mendacity and the chthonic forces of the salt-blighted landscape lock horns in rural Western Australia. In Smith Street, written with Tracy Ryan, and with additional material by Steve Chinna, the hypocrisies of suburban morality and corrupt officialdom encounter the pragmatic amorality of inner-city street life. The Wasps, where the title alone sets up resonances, has the seeming banality of everyday life in conflict with the “demons within” – where new-agers, diplomats and exterminators dance above the swirling waters of the Thames. Closing the set is Paydirt – a claustrophobic but elegiac exploration of addictions and desires amongst the “lowlife” of an urban bar. This is the earliest written of the four, and prefigures the stylistic heterogeneity of the preceding plays in this collection. Enjoy reading these plays as challenging “rough guides” but remember, it is in performance that these “Divinations” will be realised.
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Table of contents: Preface Foreword Introduction Crop Circles Smith street The Wasps Paydirt Notes Bibliography
In 1998 Cambridge University Marlowe Dramatic Society was privileged to give John Kinsella’s play, Crop Circles, its premiere.
That conjuncture calls for comment. Why on earth should a British student drama society be chosen as vehicle for a play so profoundly rooted not just in Australia but in South Western Australia and in the Wheat Belt at that? The experiences it drew on and referred to, its fauna and flora, its idioms were way outside the ken of most of the company we assembled to tackle the project. I’ve given an account of the solutions we came up with in “Mind the Gap”, a contribution to Fairly Obsessive: Essays on the Works of John Kinsella. Reading the four plays that together make up the present volume suggests some further reasons for this odd-couple marriage.
They derive partly from the character of one of the partners, the Marlowe (as it is known). It was founded in 1907 in reaction against the actor manager grand style in acting and overblown realist style in staging then dominant and specifically to tackle plays in verse by Shakespeare’s contemporaries, at that time almost completely forgotten by the British stage. It was thus an experimental society which had to find out how to tackle the project it had set itself by what is, as Steve Chinna emphasises, ultimately the only way in theatre: simply by doing it – and finding out how to do poetry was a major part of doing it. That phase of the Society ran from 1907 to 1928 and the presiding spirit was Rupert Brooke’s, although his dream of building a small experimental theatre in which the Marlowe could explore the contemporary German drama of Wedekind and others was never realised. From 1929 Dadie Rylands took over for a generation of productions until 1960. He redirected the Society’s efforts towards Shakespeare and these culminated in the recording of the complete works, the first ever, for Argo Records between 1957 to 1964. This was the school that nurtured the talents of John Barton, Peter Hall, who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Trevor Nunn in directing, Ian McKellen and Derek Jacobi in acting. The emphasis on Shakespeare continued after Dadie’s retirement until Sam Mendes’s production of Cyrano in 1988, which inaugurated a return to the Society’s founding principles, now extended to verse drama such as that of the Spanish Golden Age in addition to the Elizabethans. Since John Maynard Keynes had built the Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1936 all the Marlowe’s main productions had taken place there, that is, they were student productions but in a fully professional theatre. Alas, the return to experimental productions proved unviable at the box office and was abandoned in 1999, since which year the Society has returned to Shakespeare, working extensively with schools.
This is where John Kinsella comes in again. In 1998 he had founded an annual prize for students and followed this in 1999 with The Other Prize, to be awarded for a new play written by a student, and adjudicated by the Literary Manager of the RSC. (John is currently founding yet a third prize, The Komus, for musical composition setting text for theatre.) Part of the prize was to be a production of the winning text by the Marlowe in a small student theatre. Thus the Society is now committed to two productions a year, a main house production of Shakespeare at the Arts Theatre, and a small house production of new writing, and in the latter returns to its origins in finding out how to tackle the untried and the unknown. John’s own play, Crop Circles, can be seen as inaugurating this new departure.
At the time the Marlowe was working on Crop Circles, Paydirt had been lost, forgotten, and was only discovered by John’s mum in an outbuilding while we were in production. Furthermore, drafts of earlier plays are held in library collections as pointed out in the Notes to the Preface.
Reading it now in series with the plays that followed is illuminating. John’s “Preface” mentions the influence of Baal, which is plain to see. Brecht’s own introductory prologue to the 1918 version says that “The subject of this play is a very ordinary story of a man who sings a hymn to summer in a grog-shop without selecting his audience”. To jump to a much later Brecht – of The Caucasian Chalk Circle – Samuel in Paydirt is also an Azdak, a working-class and dissident intellectual in a downtrodden sector of Perth. The scenography is that of the cabaret, the poetics that of social epiphanies. But unlike Baal the play never moves into Nature; its space is confined to the bar and the alleyway just outside. That is what changes so strikingly in Crop Circles, where the spaces expand and natural forces, working through the varying resistances of the characters, become the main agents of the play. Hence the return to the urban in Smith Street is on terms different from Paydirt. Not only space but form is opened out by the brilliant device of incorporating a Medieval Morality scenography with the stereotypes of nineteenth-century melodrama. Relieved of the ambivalence and atmospherics that haunt Paydirt, the verse is released into wit and the tone lifts into comedy – indeed, at the beginning of Act 3 Angel anticipates the modality of The Wasps and begins to dance. With The Wasps we enter Pinterland (though further down river) where the banalities of urban living are invested with a dimension of fear and violence that cannot be identified but wells up in the pauses. When Dadie Rylands saw his first play by Pinter he recognised him as a poet of the theatre. John has taken that subtext and precipitated it into the music and dances that periodically take over and possess the characters. Act 3 may move into the de-historicised warehouse conversions and penthouses of Thatcher’s Docklands, but the Thames, Conrad’s river of darkness, still flows outside and early in the scene the lights reflected onto the ceiling from its waters begin to swirl. It is a comedic danse macabre.
This is the play that the Marlowe will explore, under the guidance of Steve Chinna, in some workshops early in 2003. With Crop Circles we could see the difficulty of exploring what seemed an alien landscape; The Wasps seems closer to home: beware!
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