 Hello, my name is Helen Melody and I'm lead curator of contemporary literary and creative archives at the British Library. I'm glad you can join us for this special conversation about Ted Hughes and the theatre. Soon you'll be meeting our guest speakers, the directors Jonathan Kent, Tim Supple and David Facker as they speak to Melvin Bragg about their experiences of working with Ted Hughes on a number of different theatrical projects during the 1980s and 90s. Ted Hughes would have been 90 last year and to mark the occasion, the Library's Treasures Gallery is currently home to a small display on Hughes and Theatre which runs until late October. Ted Hughes was a writer, poet and poet laureate whose work covered a wide range of subjects. The natural world is a particular focus as in his first poetry collection Hawking the Rain and the Iron Man, one of his books for children. Hughes's archive was acquired by the library in 2008. It's a wonderful resource for anyone interested in his work and is especially strong on the poetry collection Birthday Letters. A range of items from the archive have been digitised and can be found along with contextual essays on the Discovering Literature 20th Century website. Although Hughes wrote for the theatre throughout his career the 1990s was a particularly productive period as he produced new versions of classical and European plays which gave his remarkable use of language yet another outlet. We're delighted to focus on this lesser known aspect of Hughes's work today following advice from Cowell Hughes. It goes without saying that the Library is very grateful to Cowell for her guidance and assistance with this event. Today I'm delighted to be joined by a group of acclaimed theatre directors who commissioned some of these plays and got to know Ted well. Jonathan Kent was joint artistic director of the Almeida Theatre from 1990 to 2002 during which time he commissioned and directed Ted Hughes's adaptation of Federer starring Diana Rigg which went on to appear on New York's Broadway. He's directed theatre and opera around the world from the Royal Opera House and Gleinborn to Santa Fe Opera working along the way with the likes of Ralph Fiennes, Juliette Binosh, Kate Blanchett and Liam Neeson. Tim Supple has directed and adapted work all over the world literally on every continent and has regularly worked on productions for the National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company. He was artistic director of the Young Vic from 1993 to 2000 where in 1995 he commissioned and directed Ted Hughes's adaptation of Spring Awakening. They went on to work together on an adaptation of Lorca's Blood Wedding and Supple directed a theatrical version of Hughes's Tales from Ovid in 1999. David Facker is an award-winning British theatre and television director. David has been artistic director of the Duke's Playhouse, director of the Young Vic, director in Residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company and artistic director of the Octagon Theatre Bolton. He also became the first professor of theatre at the University of Bolton. In 1993 he co-adapted The Iron Man into a musical with Pete Townsend before directing its successful run at the Young Vic. Today's conversation is hosted by broadcaster and author Melvin Bragg who will be well known to you from his many programs on television and radio from the South Bank show to In Our Time. He's the recipient of the BAFTA Academy Fellowship Award and the Royal Television Society's Lifetime Achievement Award and is a patron of the Ted Hughes Society. We're very grateful to all of our speakers for joining us for what promised us to be a fascinating and revealing event. I'll now hand over to Melvin to open up the conversation. Okay we're talking about a very great poet who particularly in the 1990s turned his attention to drama. He'd worked on drama before with Peter Brook but these 1990s his decade produced some extraordinary work and these three three three persons here know more about it than probably anybody else. We want to anchor this discussion in what he was writing at the beginning of the 90s which is his massive book took him two years on Shakespeare and the Goddess. Would you like to? Well only begin by saying that it probably would take us two years to be able to do it justice in discussing it because it's incredibly dense and beautiful and insightful and as I think could only be written by a truly great poet in much the way I think that Coleridge had an understanding of Shakespeare. But what drive does that book give to this discussion? Well his commitment to Shakespeare that any great poet who loves Shakespeare so much is bound to in some way want to at some point in their life explore the possibility of themselves as a dramatist. I guess I have to say I never spoke to Ted about that but I do know how enthusiastic he was about productions of Shakespeare and he's seen at least one that I directed and so I just know it was his passion for Shakespeare I would suggest that led him to this but yeah we know that when he went up to Cambridge he first thing in the morning he would read a Shakespeare play before doing anything else you I think he was surprised like that put me ahead or whatever he did what can you just talk about that Shakespeare thing as if we if we're using this as an anchor for this what what does that give us in our understanding of him? Well I think I think that his relationship Ted's relationship with Shakespeare absolutely anchored his sense of theatre and his sense of drama and everything else he did in terms of drama sort of relates to that central electric force. I just want to quote a fantastic sentence that he wrote about Ovid which I think illustrates this a more crucial connection maybe can be found in their common taste that Shakespeare and Ovid their common taste for a tortured subjectivity and catastrophic extremes of passion that border on the grotesque and then the second thing which he also said in relation to Ovid and Shakespeare which for me defined my what was illuminated for me in reading that that extraordinary book is he talks about the act of metamorphosis which at some point touches each of the tales that's the Ovid tales operates as the symbolic guarantee that the passion has become mythic has achieved the unendurable intensity that lifts the whole episode onto the supernatural or divine plane so in the book he has this idea of the different planes of reality in the supernatural and then the pit and it was that idea that defined my understanding of drama from the book and I think drove him into theatre. Do you have anything to add to that? Well I except the two things that I first of all asked him to do Medea and then he did further in the end and they both what you were saying about the extremes about the the the the numinous and the and the depths were things which he could encompass and which he understood and the and the the feral nature of of humanity that feral savage nature of humanity all of which I think he he he derived a lot from Shakespeare. So let's talk stick to the 90s and let's begin here with the iron man how did that come into the right? Well like many things totally by accident and I'm sure all of us have the same experience in our lives that a sad thing happens and then that leads to a happy thing and if you're lucky we hope so. I approached Pete Townsend as I was director of The Young Vic at the time and I approached Pete Townsend about the possibility of doing Tommy at the theatre. Now he had had though a great success or was having a great success with Tommy anyway and so quite naturally he declined that and but he said well what about the iron man because I've written these songs and I've always wanted to take that further so Pete was the driving force for it in the first instance and Pete had strung together a sort of loose narrative but primarily was looking at writing the songs if you like inspired by it. So my early contribution was to convince Pete that we should go right back to the iron man the story the short story the primary source material if you like and use that and develop that and not in a sense not divert too much from that now the great no the Ted's great gift was to allow us to do that and he was extremely generous to allow that process to take place. Now I think I should say and perhaps we could talk about this later if it's interesting or useful the iron man is unfinished business I would say and so I don't think we'll be talking about a completed piece of work for reasons I could describe but so in the first instance it was Pete and I collaborating on trying to make this work and my attempt was to see if I could get Pete to adjust the lyrics of the songs to some extent and to accept going back to the text which I have here the kind of script of the version that we did which those who know it begins exactly I guess if you've got the text of the story there and the first recitative is the iron man came to the top of the cliff where had he come from nobody knows how far had he walked nobody knows you know and and almost entirely we just used his text. So how do you think this introduced him to what's going to be a decade drama as well as all the other things he did I mean it's hard to get a handle on the amount of work he was doing but did you think the iron man was a key or do you think it was a ship that passed in the night but he said oh I might get on that well it could have put him off actually in in certain well I think as I said his generosity was to let us do it then he came to see it in the rehearsal room and Carol sorry as well came in the rehearsal room and he was extremely generous and supportive at that point and at that point he gave suggestions and and often line amendments or whatever things that he thought could improve it and develop it now because it was as Tim will know the young Vic doesn't have long rehearsal periods and this in one sense was a big ask for the young theatre should also say that Pete Townsend was extremely generous in putting money into it to enable the production to happen particularly the musical side of it. So as it got closer to the opening the main task which Ted was very supportive of was to try to make sure at least the narrative was coherent. Okay so he had that experience there with the Iron Man can we go quite quickly if you don't mind it's up to you really but to spring awake Nick. Yeah well there's a funny link here which might connect back to this question of how the Iron Man turned him on to theatre again was I bumped into Ted Hughes in the corridors of the young Vic when I was coming in to take over David's position there and he he was watching Iron Man. Now I had a feeling I wanted to do a production of Grim Tales it's very very briefly and swift the diversion the the great Grim Tales and I had a feeling that Ted's relationship to myth legend and words would suit those stories very well so having never met him before I felt he was in a good mood enjoying the theatre you know being in that cranky wonderful space and I asked him would he do this version of Grims I didn't hear anything from him absolute silence for months so I don't think he was too excited about theater at that point but what is interesting is I did get a card about two weeks before I started rehearsals saying did himself well I've been thinking I would like to do your Grim Tales if it's not too late by which time I'd already commissioned Carol Ann Duffy to do a version so I said unfortunately it is a bit late but come and see it if you like it I've got something else in mind and and that was Spring Awakening. Why did you have that in mind for him just a second why did you have that in mind for him what did you think would attract him by from Spring Awakening? From Spring Awakening. Spring Awakening is this fantastic German expressionist late 19th century piece which often is treated rather awkwardly in English translation best existing English translation was Edward Bonds which treats it as sort of pre-brecht what I felt because Spring Awakening is about the unstoppable irrepressible force of sexuality in children that's what it's about and it's about the German Victorian attempt to quash that with disastrous results suicide rape and so on and I thought that Ted would shine a completely unexpected light on that inner force that he wouldn't so much get hung up on the realistic impression nor would he get hung up on on an attempt to sort of create a version of German or pre-brecht expressionism he would go right to the heart which is exactly what he did of this inner experience what it feels like to be driven by that passion and the absurdity of trying to suppress it. Did you work up an aura did you work on an already existing translation? We got commissioned for him a kind of literal line-by-line translation his German was good but he needed he needed sort of assistance here and there so we got a sort of line-by-line commission and then he lined up the other existing translations to cross refer to it. Something I'll come to and I'll bring the two of you on this question after you've answered that these are called versions not translations now is this is there a distinction what does a version mean to you that is not a translation? I think there is a distinction I think it cuts both ways it's it's both an acknowledgement from the writer in this case Ted that he's not translating directly from the Germans so he's not trying to pretend that he's doing something he's not and what restraints what restraints does he put on himself I mean things that happen in the original have to happen in his version version or does he change those things in his version? It varies because of course with Racine when when he did Ferd he didn't try and replicate the Alexandrine he and it so it inevitably was a version as indeed the Racine was a version of of Euripides. So Senegal is saying it too. Yeah exactly so so but it's inevitably a version it's not a it's not a replication and although he's very literally he responds very literally to the narrative the form is obviously very different. But the Spring Awakening and the Lorca for example he's following it line by line line by line he's following it the sense of version as Jonathan says is is more in the line by line linguistic choices he doesn't change the structure of any lines he doesn't put one thing there and one thing there which some versions do so there's many different ways to cut the cloth of the version. Is there a sense in which he leans on particular parts of it more than you would expect from or more than had been done before? And parts of sorry part of the Spring Awakening well what I was going to wonder the tying up between it's so I'm so happy to know that you were in there with that audience because I don't know the experience you had but the audience was extremely diverse in terms of the age in particular and so Iron Man audience Iron Man audience like young children there with their parents and their grandparents and I know from certainly the people I know who went I have a photograph which I should really pick up and show you a Ted with my children in front of the Iron Man but anyway my point I was going to ask you Tim is the thing that there's something in common between Spring Awakening and the Iron Man which is the centrality of children, not just being for children but actually children being at the heart of the narrative. Now that's a key thing just to say in the answer to Melvin's question and what you just said David when Vader can wrote Spring Awakening he decided that children could not portray the parts of children and he decided that young women had to play the young boys and the girls because these are 14 year old characters going through extreme and explicit sexual experiences. Ted and I made the decision that kids should play these roles even though it was being done at the RSC so it was done at the on the highest stage that we should get kids 14 15 year old and what he did which I think is so brilliant in this version is that other translators including Edward Bond who's terrific as well tends to stand outside the children's experience tends to slightly objectify what's happening to them within as I said a sort of Brechtian distance. You might not even exactly mind that. I mean that the children's experience is portrayed with an sort of analytical frame which is which is nothing wrong with that that places it within a Marxist tradition but what Ted did is he got inside what it feels like to be a child but also did that with his fantastic sense of the mythic continuum so it's quite. What was the mythic continuum. The mythic continuum is the force of irrepressible sexual potency so it's not like a sort of a a television吗 realistic naturalistic study of the child's experience sexually. It's this idea of possession which is another fundamental idea of possession and transformation and he got right inside that language of that of that text. Yeah, can we talk about some of the characters to bring it a bit more? I mean what he got you're talking about he got inside and got absolutely with you. It's sort of essayistic. I mean he has these characters, these boys, the schoolteachers, and he gets hold of them and brings us to your generalizations that were through individuals in that way. And would you like to comment on that? Well yes, I mean he was a natural dramatist and so many... What does that mean? Well for exactly he allowed his characters to be subjective and it was the conflict of various subjectivities that made so much of his theater alive and it was the energy of his writing too. The narrative thrust and energy which I think made him a natural... It's always the energy isn't it? Yeah, I mean the energy of his poetry but then it found such full expression in the energy of theater. Do you belong in that? Yes I do and I had the privilege, and it was a privilege, of working with Ted as he recorded some of his poems and actually he and I engage with the question about how best to read them. He asked you to help him with the reading of his poetry? Yes, yes, and it was fantastic. I bet it was. And of course to begin with I was... I can't... how can I possibly tell you how to read or read? It's a ridiculous proposition. Now this came directly out of the Iron Man, the work on the Iron Man, the little we'd done together and so what I agreed was I said well I'd love to do that but my role will be just to tell you if they're clear to me or not and I won't know all of them. I intentionally didn't read the ones that that I didn't know and but what I think was most interesting for me was Ted engaging with his own voice and not being doing poetry reciting but actually allowing them to pass through him as if they were narratives, his own narratives. And there's a sense in which some one of you writes about him not being right, not sort of not cajoling, training the Royal Shakespearean idea. Now Royal Shakespeare has done some wonderful things but having his characters go at the work, go at the text in a different way. Is that right? Yeah I mean he has... What was that different way? Well it was... I remember being two rehearsals I remember him with the kids actors in Spring Awakening patiently going through every text with the young kids, the boys and the girls there and I remember in the Blood Wedding which we'll come to later but that since he had no time for an actor not connecting with the urgency and imperative of the text. And how was this different from the way that these things have been done before because I think it's you make a point in your long essay, the long essay of yours I read which is excellent, that he stood aside from the way that people say we keep using the Royal Shakespearean because it's such a handy example and so replete with examples, then it had happened there. Yeah it's a very good question and to put your finger on it I don't know whether you've got an insight on this Jonathan he had so he just had no time for the... He had no time for the fancy, he had no time for the disconnected, he had no time for the afloat. For people who aren't so versed in all our jargon of theatre, do you mean, because I think what I would mean is he wanted it to be real, he didn't want phony voices overlaying the text and actually there's a certain kind of acting of Shakespeare that is in my view entirely phony is that people reciting, reciting Shakespeare rather than embodying through the language, the synthesis of language, text and emotion and psychology. Now I can only say that for my little experience of him reading his poems because what he responded to in any feedback I gave him was essentially you mean make it less poetic, just let it be my voice. Jonathan also we're talking about this and the other, it's still a bit abstract doesn't it? It seemed to me that what he got a grip on was what these characters are like, these boys were like and when we come to the teachers which is a bit problematic in some ways but let's let's say what the boys and he went for their character, apprehensive, full of appetites, whatever it was and it was through them it was, that was the Shakespeare thing seemed to me, what do you think? Yeah, I mean he will say he confronted, I can only speak with any kind of authority on the racine. But coming to the racine. Yeah, but he confronted and I think this is true of all his dramatic writing, he confronted the extremes of it. He didn't sidestep anything and I mean that worked extremely well in Ferd, but I think also he confronted the sexual and psychological desires and difficulties of all these plays without sugarcoating or without sidestepping. And it was also, I mean he took on in Spring Awakening, the very strange ending which is you're suddenly thinking, whoop, why are we going now? It's like being in a sway boat and you're going up and your stomach's there and you're going up and you think what's going on here, but that works very well. It does work very well and he's brilliant at that and that was a second thing Melvin that drew, made me feel he'd be right for this text. He has to do it in Lorca as well. He can get to grips with the surreal, with the symbolic, with the abstract and he can make it alive and funny and concrete. It doesn't feel odd in his hands. How did he go down? It went down extremely well the Spring Awakening, as a text and as a andesite performance. So you've been pulling at the bit about blood wedding, shall we move on to that? Well, blood wedding is perhaps more totally natural, Ted Hughes. Can you just give people a bit of background about blood wedding? Well, blood wedding was one of the four main plays we have from the great Spanish poet, Lorca, who was killed by the fascists in the Civil War in the 30s. He's a standout figure for 20th century poets and I knew that Ted admired him greatly and particularly admired an essay of Lorca's On the Duende. The Duende is, again, it's back to this idea of the passion that takes you over. Lorca describes being in a bar in Andalusia and hearing a singer singing and being taken by the Duende, the devil, the force of the devil, which is the creative force of performance. And Lorca defined that as the essence of theatre and Ted looked to that poem as a good expression of what he was looking for in theatre. So I knew he had a thing about about Lorca. And indeed, although I think the Spring Awakening text is superb and coming back to it, I'm amazed by it. The Lorca text is on another level of... In what way on and on the level? Well, I was going to say because you've been trying to get me us away from generalisation and trying to sense what is the Husean nature of theatre writing? Well, it's there in blood wedding. It's where he strips everything aside. And with great forceful economy, he can express how a character is feeling, the desire, or the need, or the urgency, or the violence. And he cuts away in his version of blood wedding anything that gets in the way of that most essential thing. So I have to say we have to be careful because he's not a real writer. There are far more writers writing today in his wake who are much more real in terms of real meaning, in terms of talking like people talk. What Ted does is he manages to make sound natural, the innermost simple fact of necessity of a character. So it's very strange. It's not like speech, and yet it is like living through speech. When you start... Well, that's no different than what the issue is with Shakespeare, is it? When I said real early, I didn't mean naturalistic like it's Carnation Street or something. But what I meant was that the actor is able to embody it as if it is actually happening to them, that they're not outside of it. And I would suggest that I wish I'd seen the blood wedding from what you describe it, that that would be what would be... Well, you'll get it by reading it. It's there on the page. And what's extraordinary when you open it? Given the lushness and the density of his language in most of things, it's a spare as beckett. Yes. And you think, I don't want to make a few of these comparisons, but it is a spare as beckett and even more spare than pen. From the set off, it works because the relationship is so powerful. Yes. And that's why I keep coming back to the relationship about this young man is what the relationship is so powerful. And he makes that work. Is that in the text? Is that in the original? Or did he pare it down when he did his version? It's in the original, but he achieves it in English in a particular way to him, in a way that is particular to him. I mean, Lorca was a very great writer and had that. But I think you're absolutely right, Melbourne. Of course, it's his ability to engage with the present emotional experience of the characters that's going to make it work. But he does something else that is so important with theatre, which is to do with economy. He can have two people saying like with the mother and the bridegroom at the beginning of the first scene of blood wedding. He can have them talking about one thing while something else is the thing that's going on. And that fantastic economy to know that while you're talking about one thing, you're actually dealing with this other thing. What I think is more, and I agree with that, what I think is more impressive for me anyway, here we are, is he's got you. I mean, the tension is at the beginning. And it's just him talking, her talking to her son about whether he goes out or not. It's just, and I'm not being stupid about this. I know I'm not being stupid anyway. But the tension is there, you think something really important is going on here. And I'm hooked. Yes, absolutely. Because I went off with the other one. Yes, I went. You would have done the same. I was a woman on fire, inside and outside ablaze with agonies. Your son was a single drop of water that I hoped would give me children and health. The other was a dark, big ripper, carry toned up trees that brought me the sound of its wreath and its song. And I was going with your son, your little boy of cold water. But the other sent thousands of birds that stuck to me and dropped frost into the wounds of this poor shriveling woman, this girl possessed by flames. I didn't want to. Do you hear me? I didn't want to. My whole hope was your son. And I haven't deceived him. But the other's arm dragged me like a wave from the sea. And it would have always dragged me always, even if I had been an old woman and all your sons and sons had tried to hold me down by my hair. I think because Lorca is hugely elusive in English. And I think this is by far the greatest version of Lorca that I know. And I think the secret lies in his spareness, the taughtness and the tension of that spareness of writing. What do you make of the songs? Are you familiar with this? When we're talking, what do you make of the songs that keep the girls singing the songs and the verses that go through? Well, I think that what he's brilliant at in both Spring Awakening and this is right in the abstract and the surreal, like we said. So the moon, the moon speech, the beggar woman speech, the woodcutter speech, the one thing that works less well in his blood wedding is the song. As a song is the song. It works as poetry. It's fantastic. But when we set it to music, it wasn't the best song lyric. Maybe the music wasn't up to it. Well, I think to be to be fair on the musician and I say that in all respect to Ted, but I just think that he wrote slightly more, more verse than song there. And you mentioned the teachers in Spring Awakening. He does the teachers good, but it's not the area he most illuminates. Edward Bond had a better bash at the teachers because he wanted to bash them. The teachers in Spring Awakening are the authoritarians who believe that this boy who has done something quite straightforward as is the source of all evil, must be sent to a reformatory school, must accept as an example. And at the same time, the great thing about that scene is that one of them keep complaining that it's cold and could somebody close the window? Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic. Yeah, it's very, it's very funny. I think when Ted, Ted's sense of human absurdity is, is, is at its best when he can really understand the figure who has been made a fool of like Midas in Ovid, which I know we're not coming to yet. I think, I think the teachers just weren't deeply interesting to him. And Nor did Vedic and give Ted enough to really get behind his parents that he writes the parents very well, because he can understand what the parents are going through more. So what more would you want to say about Blood It begins to dawn on me what might happen, which will be a terrible thing. And then it dawns, and then it happens, and it is terrible. And he places it. He places it very well, doesn't it? Yeah, I mean, he because I mean, you don't know, you don't think, oh, I know it's good. I'm, you know, I'm away with him. But you don't get back for a long time. Yeah. He knows, he knows how to write. It's very hard to you're going to accuse me of generalization. He knows how to write a ritual. I'm glad you're getting it. He knows Ted, Ted, Ted knew that Lorca was trying to write a ritual, a ritualistic theater. And Ted knew that it was going to happen. We know it's going to happen. The mother's obsessed with it. The mother lives in the moment when her husband and her other son were killed. The mother, the mother knows that blood will come again. And when it comes, it comes like the turn of a wheel. It comes like the moon coming out every night. And Ted gets the theatrical shape of that ritual. Is it, is it Ted or you in your comedy would say that you saw it as something like a carnival? We talked about that. I'm not sure whether it was Ted or me or Lorca. I mean, it might well have been Lorca's idea. But that was one of the words that Ted and I certainly used in talking about it. But I just think the only other thing I'd say about about blood wedding is when it comes to Ted writing, and we'll have a reading of this by Archana Ramaswamy, when it comes to Ted writing, how it feels to do what you know is wrong, what you know is condemned, what you know will kill you. But to not do that thing is impossible for you. When it comes to him writing what he called in Ovid the subjectivity of passion, he does that so indescribably well. And I think in blood wedding, that's the very height of extraordinary writing is between the bride and Leonardo and the bride at the end. And I would only say that you're quite right to point out again and again, Melvin, that he brings the character somehow close to us, and yet he in no way diminishes the extraordinary uniqueness of that moment. But that's what we'd all say, wouldn't we? It always feels unique to us when we're in the extremes of passion. But he gets that. And also the dramatic suddenness of it, and the melodramatic even, but convincing ending. Something out of Gothic literature. Well, he was very near that, wasn't he? Yes. You mean the two of them killing each other in the woods in the moon? Absolutely. Could I pick up something that you were introducing earlier about the notion of the version? Now, the only comparable experience I have is a number of playwrights who have written translations slash versions of other great plays. Now, did you feel with Ted working on this that his primary impulse was to serve, as it were, Lorca, by finding a way of finding an English equivalent to what Lorca would have written had he written in English, seems to me the task of the translator, as it were. Or did you feel that he very clearly wanted to alter the play for his own purposes? Now, I don't mean that disrespectfully to Ted at all, but because Arthur Miller will be good comparison with the name of the people when he was quite clear that he wanted and did change fundamental things about the name of the people because he found them just tasteful in various ways to create a play which I don't think could possibly have been written by either playwright, Miller or Ibsen, but Miller was definitely and quite openly doing his version. I think that's very interesting and very clear and I think Ted did another thing, a third thing, which is that he he acted like a conduit, like an electrical force conduit between the writer and his own audience in his own time. He was like, you know, when you plunge the machinery into the ground and the oil bursts out. I think that's what Ted did. So he didn't alter anything. He didn't alter anything. I don't think he had that kind of way of seeing things that Arthur Miller did and I know you were much more closely with him than I but I think Ted felt that he didn't need to alter anything but he certainly didn't feel he was serving anybody or he just felt that he wouldn't do the project if he wasn't deeply committed to what that writer was doing and then he acts like a sort of transmitter into English and to do that he modernizes phrases he uses words like nuclear in orbit or he you know but in blood wedding less modernization but he'll use the words he like like like the economy is so flinty. He manages to get his language as if it's born in the earth and I don't think Lorca's got that. I think Lorca had that more naturally. I think Ted is inserted in an extra clarity of that to give the English ear and an English audience. Was he the ideal collaborator as it were? Like in a sense it sounds like to me no to what's Ted to were they meeting in heaven then would it be the great collaboration that was him finding a way of expressing for Lorca a play for an English audience that Lorca could not have expressed himself. Yeah but even then I don't think it was so much for Lorca it was more like a kind of with Lorca. He uses a brilliant phrase about Ovid that Ovid divined. He divined these myths. He kind of pulled them out of one place and put them in another place and I think that's that's Ted's great gift I mean when we you're about to come to the big classical stuff Melvin I know because we're going on to Federer, Ovid and then Oristaya. Ted was up to those writers because he didn't need to change them he didn't need to make modern equivalents he didn't need to adapt them he took them and I think that's what he did with Lorca I think he treated Lorca on that scale. Can we go to Federer now and can you tell people I'm going to give people a mini resume of it and then we'll talk about Federer. Well as you know it's Racine but it's Racine based on the Euripides and with some of Seneca and it is about uncontrollable passion and it's about the terrible effects of desire and love which is not able to be constrained and so but can we personify it a bit? Well it is about this woman who this woman Federer who falls in love with her stepson and thinking that her husband has been killed she declares her love her husband comes back she then accuses her her stepson of trying to rape her and and in the end the the the son Hippolytus runs away and is killed by a monster rising out of the sea. Because his father, Theisha, curses him and leapt to you. That's the curse. Yeah and and then Federer confesses and kills herself. So when you when that came to you, how did you sit about it and how did you did you intend to sit about it? Well I asked him to well I actually before that I'd asked him to do Medea and he hadn't been able to I don't know actually I think he hadn't been able to it wasn't that he particularly didn't want to do it but then three or four years later I wrote to him in 97 asking him to. Was that Diana Riggs Medea? Yeah. I saw that it was very good. But it wasn't in his version. No, it was just a little like a little tiny digression. But then I so I wrote to him again and heard nothing back and thought oh well he's clearly not interested or not Yeah, certainly not going to do it. And three or four months later a version I mean his version dropped through the letterbox. He'd completed it, set to work and completed it. And it was completely astonishing because although he did some variation it was pretty much the version that we did when we when we came to do it which we did in London and in New York. Who was Helen Mirren in your first, was Helen Mirren Federer? Is that right? No, no, no, no. She did it in his version later on at the National Theatre. No it was Diana Riggs. I did it. It was all a sort of continuation from having done Medea. And it was an astonishing version. It was a sort of it was inevitably as I said a version that it wasn't in an exondering but it was it was surprisingly faithful to to the Racine but it was it was a landslide of rock slide of language. It wasn't water, yes, rock slide and better than I was going to say a waterfall of languages. What do you do as a director when you're faced with these massively long speeches? I'd say a couple of pages and people know what we're talking about. And one person talking about generally something that happened in the past but could be excused, might not be excused. What do you do about it directing it? You just let them stand out. How do you what do you say to them? What do you say to Ted to help you on that? Well I mean such was the compelling nature of what he was writing, a compelling nature of his of his language of the writing that it it it's sort of hypnotic. It becomes and there is a great I mean the huge speech in it is the report by the by Hippolytus, the son's tutor of his death and this monster rising from the sea and that is some of I think some of Ted Hughes' greatest writing. It is completely you can hardly breathe listening to it and it had that effect astonishingly on an English West End audience. Is that in the in the original text? Yes. That there a monster comes out of the sea? Yes. And the head itself is a beast? Yes. It's astonishing how how faithful he was to to Racine. Why do you think he as it were conjoined with it so tightly? What do you think appealed about it to him to make him to enable him to write so powerfully? Well I think if you read his poetry he he understood and the savage nature the savage ways of nature and by extension the the savagery and terror of and shame of our human natures and and he was unafraid to to confront them. He didn't in any I mean that's where in a way it is wasn't it isn't Shakespearean it doesn't it directs these emotions head on and without without without metaphor just it's a it's a relentless gazing at at the appalling nature of these yes not only incest but the the passion for incest itself yes desire what desire and love does to us and then vengeance yeah his father on him because of what he thinks yes but yes I know we go yes yes but but I'm flinching gaze at it and you know you talked about the spareness of the Lorca but the spareness of the language in in in the Racine which is of course true to Racine because Racine I think used only 800 words in in fact I mean overall in his whole all his work I think he had used he was 4,000 words whereas Shakespeare uses 32,000 so and that that I think is one of the what what Hughes managed to do what he managed to is to distill and to and to almost with a laser like unflinching gaze at at the terrible effects of of our monstrous loves I've read a couple of times of two three two times properly over the last week or two how would you just how would you describe his achievement in making the line so powerful it's a very funny question but it's it's another good obvious question I think what's what what is he doing to make their line so they all have narrative thrust they all there's a I mean we said earlier one of his great qualities was his energy the energy of his writing and it's like being it's like getting aboard a train you can't stop it just it runs for them they last an hour 20 minutes and it's it's a headlong white knuckle rush and it's it's appalling in a good way we were hardly clear of the city gates and onto the beach road towards my senior Hippolytus was leading in his chariot his bodyguards close around him a somber troop the prince was taciturn his mood made the mood of every man we all shared one dark thought and was silent no sound but the click of hooves and the jingle of harness those horses of his was strange usually so bursting with spirits so headstrong so eager to be off they need the constant touch of his voice and the raids to hold them in today they were listless he left the pace to them letting the reins lie loose over their backs they hung their heads they seemed preoccupied as if they were helping him with their hanging heads to think what he was thinking I noticed it it seemed very strange as I was watching that a sudden skull splitting raw an indescribable terrible tearing voice like lightning flash and thunder clap together made us all duck and cower it came out of the sea as if the whole sea had bellowed and then like an echo to it another roaring groan subterranean as if something that groaned were trying to scream rolled through the earth under our feet the ground was bulging jumping between us we were petrified and bewildered the horses mains and tails flared on end and now I saw out at sea a mountain of water boiling up heaping higher erupting from under the horizon and racing towards us till it towered above us seeming to hang and there in slow motion it collapsed a solid fall of thunder quaking the bedrock and out of it the foam cascading from a colossal body came a beast up the sands with the fury of a supernatural existence its head was one huge monster all to itself like a bull's head with bull's horns but from the shoulders backwards the whole body was plaited humped and plaited the scales greeny yellow a nauseating color that's sick in the eye and beyond the humped bulk of the body came scaled and lashing coils half bull half dragon mouth hanging open like a cavern and bellowing like a heavy surf exploding in a cavern the earth trembled the air was thick with horror we breathed a mist of horror weapons or courage were out of the question everybody fled we all took cover in that small temple among the tombs and I looked back and saw Hippolytus he was lashing his horses and making a run straight at the monster at the last moment I saw him swerve tight past its jaws and bury a javenin all but for a span length of the shaft behind that thing's shoulder right where the heart is in creatures that have hearts I never saw anything so fearless but whether a javelin blade found a heart of the beast was convulsed with fury at his daring the whole mass of it rose and collapsed under Hippolytus like another mountain of ocean or a giant octopus of water I saw horses and chariot tossing among foam and tentacles that drag back down towards the sea but then like a miracle the horses were clambering free like a team scrambling across a avalanche and I saw Hippolytus braced in the chariot fists bunched and legs wide I thought he was getting clear but a god was watching in a surf of churning sand a last scything swipe of the monster's tail came round under their hooves top of the horses and smashed the wheels of the chariot then the horses went mad I heard Hippolytus shouting among the screams of the horses and the blast of that beast the wonderful strength of Hippolytus was helpless some of the other saw something I can hardly credit I did not see it they saw the glowing figure of a naked god astride the shoulders of the demented horses goading and urging them among the rocks of the foreshore with the chariot stripped of its wheels bounding like a bucket behind them Hippolytus had wound his arms in the rains he tore the horses mouths but they felt nothing and the voice they had grown up with became a scream that added to that terror as the chariot disintegrated beneath him then it was two mad horses dragging a man oh lord forgive me the sight of it it's like a great wound through my body it's never going to heal the horses galloped away with their weightless bundle that had fed them and that was your son did you ever think he's got the wrong word or did he ever say have I got the right word no he didn't he surprisingly little he he came to rehearsal and changed were a change occasional phrases and was been not nearly as much as many writers I worked with and they were usually to help what he detected was a difficulty that the actor had why do you think he's turning to the classics at this time because now we're going on to orbit about whom he's written that you started quotation from orbit shape changing the and the great orbit of 250 tails and and so on what attracted him to orbit and what's pulling him towards these classical texts I see you you you chapelling him towards it was the mythic though of course that's where he responded to the mythic he's all all his life he I think the nature of myth and these are and the nature of the gods you know in the racine this is the god is made manifest but the matter the gods are also internalized in that we can't resist them instead of them being outside us they are within us they are they become our stereotype so coming to orbit now who wants to leave with a bit Tim I think I'm sorry could I am I allowed to go back to a question no I just like to go back to a question earlier dying to ask you about spring awakening was Ted hoping or indeed we're intending that the audience would comprise a lot of young people of the age of these central contact players or was this an adult's event well not neither he quite rightly in my opinion didn't write for a particular audience he's very he was very humble Ted I mean we're talking about him as a titanic force which he was but working with him on spring awakening which wasn't his comfort zone compared to Lorca he was very humble about how can I do this he did I think by the sound of it much more than with Federer much more with Lorca we went through it word by word and he was saying shall I do this shall I do this Lorca he just took away and he did but but the spring awakening so I think that he he didn't really think about the audience he thought about the play and he knew it was for the RSC so he probably knew it would be mostly an adult audience I'd love to show it to kids but it was written for an adult audience of course if I can write it for an adult audience and I feel embarrassed that I'm talking so much but I was lucky enough to do three works with him in the 90s well let's talk about Ovid and if you want to share and jump in well he there's he there are a dozen of a dozen of the open stories in this in this collection that we've got about eight I think yeah like we did we did like four big ones and four smaller ones we kind of moved between epics so you had the epics of you had Narcissus you had Murrah who sleeps with her father you had Thoreus and Philomel that the terrible story of the man who rapes his wife's sister and then we have Minerva and Arachne and then we had smaller ones like Sound Maccos and Hermaphrodite's Salome and Tiresias how he lost his sight so these little ones and we wove them together into a kind of pattern or movement and a bigger narrative so what what how would you describe that in terms of drama I mean they're obviously stories people would say perhaps they're fables people would say they're fanciful but we're talking about them in terms of drama now can we take one or two just I mean everybody'll know about Narcissus and everybody will know about Minus maybe Arachne but let's talk about those two to get going yeah well back us as well the back I we could talk about yeah but let's talk about echo and Narcissus is obvious and Minus is obvious and that's their strength for this particular discussion okay well I tell you their problem for this particular discussion is those were two of the least dramatic of the tales that's not Ted that's Ovid because of course we have to remember as part of this discussion Ted never intended this material to be put on stage he did what Ovid did which is make them brilliantly speakable and if you want to hear Ovid Ted's Ovid you listen to Ted's recording which I'm sure is still available I mean it's as good as you're going to get what we did is we took his his his oral verse and made it into dramas now so each story was its own distinct drama it's like a play of short stories now actually Narcissus is I would say reading it again one of our less successful adaptations not Ted's because dramatically it's quite hard Narcissus it's a beautiful story but in the theatre it tells rather like a narrative echo falls in love with Narcissus Narcissus won't return his love her love echo fades away into the world which is why we have echo Narcissus falls in love with himself falls in the water dies and there's a Narcissus plant so what it lacks is dramatic tension as you were talking about say with blood wedding the stories that have dramatic tension are for example Bacchus which is the story of the king Pentheus who defies the god Bacchus tries to banish him and ends up being ripped apart by his mother and his aunt and so on the reason why that's got dramatic tension is it's got the scene where Pentheus says you will not worship this God whatever happens we will banish this God and people come to him and say you shouldn't banish the God and he insists that he will banish the God so it's got the kind of core dramatic scene where you see a character by their own folly or by their own stubbornness you see them fall into disaster so it's got action conflict consequence and another great example of that which people won't know but I have to mention it because it's a great story is murder who it's like Romeo and Juliet meets Edepus I mean it's such an extraordinary story the daughter who loves no other man but her father who must have her father who knows that she mustn't have her father but will have her father and it's got all the scenes of torment where she said I mustn't but I must I mustn't but I must she tries to kill herself there's a nurse character which is why it's like Romeo and Juliet who says what's wrong with you my dear and just like Edepus the girl keeps saying don't ask me what's wrong with me don't ask me and the nurse insists that she tell her so Mura tells her nurse that she wants to sleep with her father and then persuades the nurse to make it possible so in the cover of darkness Mura sleeps with her father until the light comes on until the light comes on he sees her face she runs away but again it's got the drama so I think that's a slightly different question than the rest of our discussion Melbourne because it's not so much a question of how Ted made drama it's a question of the inherent drama of his verse which I think is an interesting mirror reversal of our whole discussion actually and he I mean if you read you don't have to see our show which of course is 20 years long dead and wasn't recorded in those days if you hear him read Mura, Therese and Philomel which we're going to have a reading from read by Alison Reed you will hear drama as verse poetry so brilliantly. Tears can't help us only the sword or if it exists something more pitiless even than the sword oh my sister nothing now can soften the death Therese is going to die let me see this palace one flame and Therese a blazing insect in it making it brighter let me break his jaw hang him up by his tongue and saw it through with a broken knife then dig his eyes from their holes give me the strength you gods to twist his hips and shoulders from their sockets and butcher the limbs off his trunk till his very soul for terror scatter away through a thousand exits let me kill him oh however we kill him our revenge has to be something that will heaven and hell and stupefied the earth while Procney raved, Itis came in, mummy mummy her heart ice she saw what had to be done her fury seemed to be holding its breath for that moment as tears burned her eyes she felt her love for this child softening her ferocious will he tells me all his love but she has no tongue to utter a word of hers he can call me mother but she cannot call me sister this is the man you have married oh daughter of pandian you are your father's shame and his despair to love this monster to reyes or pity him you must be a monster it is monstrous did Ted know you were doing this and did he was he involved with the tales from the of it absolutely he knew we myself and Simon Reed who was the dramaturgical colleague that I worked with we asked Ted's permission asked him to be involved in in in the script we told him the way we wanted to do the script and rather like David said about Iron Man right at the beginning we didn't want any other text but Ted's text we just wanted to take Ted's text and make it into drama and Ted was fine with that approach so in this instance we created the adaptation not Ted and sent it to Ted for his approval by that stage he was unfortunately pretty ill and he gave it his full seal of approval as a project but he passed before we got near rehearsal yeah can we finish with the artist tire the trilogy iskolas which was not performed in his lifetime but is is sort of front up on the greatest because it was one of the greatest plays in many ways it's the first ever great play that we know about he sent me that text before he sent to the National just to say you know what do you think of this and he put a little note he said I thought you'd be interested in my version of this little folktale okay and I thought that's brilliant right that's a little bit so modest well you know the most the most titanic play come on it was having you on wasn't it no I think he I think in the end he saw both the brilliance of things but when things are really brilliant he saw them as as they are which is manageable and and not overblown you know and he saw that material as as refined earth matter and it was quite handleable and I think that's the only other thing I was going to say reading reading the work he the astonishing work he did on that I think he filtered it so it so it it comes through characters situations the text of it comes through with with such refined clarity that's just the simple thing it's not it's not explosive it's not it's not in any way or Nate it it is absolutely it's itself in very pure glass like clarity yeah it's pure epic isn't it it switches from one side to the other side there's another story comes in replaces that story and as it goes on more and more stories revealed to you get to the root of the matter you think you do really in the end and the fewer isn't it's a fantastic piece of well is there anything else in January like I say about Ted Sparms well I'd like to ask a question my college of pronunciation myself of course when you said could be do with God so good in in the Iron Man it's a very redemptive tale isn't it very much I would say a tale for our time it does that quality of redemption and need to try to deal with the terrible things that these plays address existing in the plays through Ted's eyes do you think or are we looking at bleakness but they're yeah but confronting terror that isn't necessarily bleak it's actually exhilarating and I don't think there is a just going back to the Racine there's a sort of the the thesis adopts our AC this girl this slave girl who that's a sort of token oh it's life goes on but but I don't think that I don't think his just either blood wedding or spring waiting or in certainly the Racine I don't think it's despairing it's a it's I think that's the nature of its of its cold-eyed hard-eyed confrontation of the world as it is the deeper world as it is it isn't actually if you look back on events of last fortnight you think I'm wrong isn't yeah yeah exactly and I think I think just just just my last comment and in connection to that for me the biggest homage I made to to Ted for all that that I learned from him about Shakespeare and about theatre and about poetry was a production I did of A Midsummer Night's Dream about six years after after he died and I did it in India and it and I did it through a complete understanding gained through Ted to Ovid about this work and it was like this word carnival that I don't think I don't think in the end he was that interested in either redemption or bleakness I think it is like this is how it is Midsummer Night's Dream is the big the big Ovid takeover exactly and in in the in the sort of in in the middle of Midsummer Night's Dream you have the fairy queen you have the spiritual high of our sense of beauty and you have bottom the the the character called bottom the very bottom of our earthly being and in the marriage between the two you have this fantastic carnival of human experience without judgment without moral judgment bottom might be the very bottom of my experience but I'll have you know I played that one I was 15 years old unfortunately they didn't record it and actually because of because I was called bottom it got more unnecessary laughs than anything else okay well thank you all very much thank you baby Tim Jonathan thank you and there we are thank you