It also led me to conceive an ill-fated trilogy, The Common Chorus, for a large cast of women. I also planned it for the Olivier. It was to be the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and the Trojan Women of Euripides, as performed by the women’s peace camp at the Greenham Common US missile base for the education of the guards behind the wire. The third play was to be a new piece by me about the origins of the machine gun, and the inventors, Hiram and Hudson Maxim. For various reasons the trilogy never happened, and history rather marooned the play once the missile base had gone from Greenham.
The Common Chorus, Part One had an energetic performance at Leeds University, but Part Two has never been performed and therefore lacks all the kinds of detail and radical revision I always do in rehearsals. All my pieces for the theatre are fundamentally altered and defined in rehearsals and previews. However, the third play became Square Rounds (1992), which I wrote and directed for the Olivier, for a group of women who played all the male parts, except for two. Only now in retrospect can I see the unity in my theatrical ventures. With its magic, transformations, song and women munitionettes transformed into top-hat-wearing males like Vesta Tilley, Square Rounds drew on the same early experiences of theatre that had led me to my dream of unlocking the energy of ‘high’ art with the more obviously demonstrable energy of ‘low’, which launched me into the Oresteia.
Square Rounds
* * *
2004
I
The date on the first of twelve notebooks devoted to the research notes, doodles, drawings and drafts of Square Rounds is 14 September 1975, and the play didn’t see the light of day until 1 October 1992. Seventeen years of brooding! It started brewing as an idea that came from other work I’d been doing at the National Theatre: the Oresteia, which I’d begun working on in 1973, and The Mysteries, which involved years of work and months of practical workshop experiment, followed by long rehearsals. In each case, what frustrated me was that having got together a group of actors to explore a theatrical style that was not the usual inert naturalism, they were then disbanded. As these large-scale events were happening, I had hoped to evolve with the companies created a modern piece that I would write making use of the verse and acting techniques discovered during the extended rehearsals.
This never happened, although my urge to evolve a satyr play performed by women wearing the phalluses as an epilogue to the Oresteia led to my play about the discovery in the Egyptian desert in 1907 of fragments of a lost satyr play by Sophocles, the Ichneutae. This became The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, though it was not played by women. I’d partly come up with that idea in the sometimes fierce arguments I’d had with actresses at the National about men playing great roles for women in the Oresteia. I had promised them and myself that I would reverse that cross-gender casting in a play one day. In my earliest experiences of theatre, men played women and women played men, and I’d always searched for ways of using these verse pantomime conventions in serious pieces of theatre. The play that started in 1975 became what was intended as the third in a trilogy about war for the Olivier, in which I would also use two contemporaneous ancient Greek plays, a comedy and a tragedy. The comedy was the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and the tragedy The Trojan Women of Euripides. The trilogy was to be called The Common Chorus, as it was to be the group of women encamped at Greenham Common outside the US missile base performing the ancient plays for the benefit of the guards on the other side of the wire.
The third play was to be about the invention of the machine gun, and about weapons developing as far as the nuclear. Part Three, on Notebook 1’s first page, has a title which reads: Maxims (or Tongues of Fire) or The American Contribution to Civilisation. I have the names of three Maxim brothers next to the title: Hiram Maxim (1840–1916), the inventor of the machine gun; his brother Hudson Maxim (1853–1927), who developed a smokeless explosive powder called Maximite; and the final brother Leander, who died in the American Civil War at the Battle of Spottsylvania Court House in 1864. His ghost had a number of speeches, but he never emerged from the notebooks. The Common Chorus never reached the Olivier, and the end of the cold war rather marooned the idea of the Greenham Common setting. The versions of the ancient Greek plays are only now being given performances, and Part One, the Lysistrata, became the basis of a demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament against the war in Iraq in 2003. The third play, Maxims, eventually became Square Rounds. When conceiving the original trilogy it was obvious that Aristophanes and Euripides were verse plays and that my version would honour that fact, as indeed it had been through translation of dramas whose poetic qualities could not be avoided that I first cleared a space for my own poetic plays. But, defensive as even I am about ‘verse drama’, I had to find a reason for the verse of the third play.
The first justification came from my early research on the Maxim brothers with which the early notebooks are filled. I discovered that Hudson Maxim, the explosives inventor, had not only written a book called Defenseless America (1915), in which he describes his brother’s invention, the machine gun, as ‘the greatest life-saving instrument ever invented’ and claims that it is ‘a matter of solemn certainty that the quick-firing gun is the most beneficent implement of mercy that has ever been invented’, but also a book called The Science of Poetry (1910), which he tells us that he spent ten years writing, in between bouts of invention and the development of explosives. The book ‘scientifically’ reveals the engineering of poetic form and offers many examples, all invented by himself, embedded in his appendix between Shakespeare, Milton, Keats, Shelley and other poets, in the expectation that by not attributing the quotations, his readers would mistake his work for theirs. There is a braggadocio arrogance about the whole book. He seems to place poets, whom he despises for their lack of science, in the same category that he places the pacifist or ‘peace-sophist’ in Defenseless America (1915): ‘Their delicatessen natures shrink from contact with the stern, man-making realities of life. They are disciples of soft stuff. The mush and moonshine of maudlin sentimentalism are their element.’ In The Science of Poetry he writes: ‘Modern verse has degenerated largely into twaddle … The present-day bard goes daffodillying in the flower garden. A great part of modern verse is based on sentimental mooning and spooning, while ruby lips, limpid eyes and sunsets and moonlight are the bricks and mortar of the poet’s building.’
He had written poems himself from the age of fifteen, as we learn from Hudson Maxim: Reminiscences and Comments (1924). He seems to believe that his smokeless powder, Maximite, and poetry have some kind of affinity, and reminds us that ‘poetry and gunpowder were born about the same time – some fifteen hundred years before Christ’. Often he uses the power of the explosive to debunk the poetic. In Hudson Maxim’s collection of stories about dynamite accidents, there is no more relished explosive fate than that of the poor unfortunate poet:
It is perfectly safe for the poets to live and move and have their being in error, but it does not do even for a poet, when working with explosive materials, to eliminate scientific procedure, for in that case he is likely to get an uplift that will sprinkle the feet of the angels with his filamented fragments. This very thing actually once happened in the Pennsylvania oil region when the poet laureate of his community was blessed by the discovery of petroleum on his otherwise worthless farm. One well sunk by the oil company gushed a large quantity of both oil and natural gas. The royalty received by the poet was immense. One day he conceived the idea of climbing to the top of the oil-derrick and writing a poem to vent his pent-up fervour. He had engaged the services of a photographer to catch his beatitudinations … The poet loosed his divine afflatus and set his fine frenzy to doing things. The following science-confounding doggerel is what he effused:
Poetry is a divine art
And I am a poet to the heart,
And am writing these lovely lines
Right where the setting sun shines,
Just at the close of a beautiful day,
Under the milk-like M
ilky Way,
But which cannot be seen just yet though
Because of the sunset’s brighter glow.
Yet I know it is there, and poesy may
Raise me nearer the Milky Way.
And it did, for at this point the poet struck a match to light a cigarette, and the explosive mixture of natural gas and air about him fired first. When last seen the poet was headed for the Milky Way.
The flavour of the endorsements Hudson proudly appends to the book also enjoy playing with the idea of the explosives expert taking poetry apart:
Your daring as a chemist in high explosives, your originality in contributing to the destructability of war as the shortest way to international peace … have all been outdone by your book on The Science of Poetry. Poetry has never been sciented before. You analyse and classify the whole mysterious compound, you label its constituents and even give receipts for remixing them to produce any kind of poetry desired as a cook would make a cake.
Rev. Dr James Clarence Jones, poet and preacher
It will give many long haired poets a shock.
Newton Harrison (no relation!), noted electrical expert
You have probably won more undying fame by your epoch-making book, reducing poetry to science, than you have achieved by making that dread Maximite.
J. H. P. Kenyon, writer
Your big, breezy book blew in upon us like a ’splosion of Maximite.
Dr David Todd, Professor of Astronomy
There are two illustrations in The Science of Poetry, by William Oberhardt, of Hudson Maxim riding Pegasus like a bronco-buster, with Maxim’s cloak flying and Pegasus trying to buck him off, the creator of Helicon’s wings in frantic motion. It is titled ‘Breaking Pegasus’, and its sequel shows a relaxed Maxim, one hand on his hip, mounted on the docile mythical stallion, its wings trailing on the ground. This is called ‘Pegasus Broken’. Mounted on the now broken-in Pegasus, Hudson has the temerity to ‘improve’ Milton’s Paradise Lost and Hamlet’s ‘To be or not to be’ soliloquy by his superior paraphrase.
They don’t come much brasher than Hudson Maxim. Hudson’s contemptuous hostility to and undoubted facility in the art of verse were seminal in the early doodles that became Square Rounds. The discovery of Hudson Maxim’s debunking Science of Poetry gave me the licence to conceive the whole enterprise in verse. His bragging insensitivity combined with a certain poetical facility seemed to lift into the kind of theatrical bluff I needed to command the Olivier space. Inventive genius in chemistry or mechanics could manifest itself just as well in verbal creativity. Hudson has no doubts about his own exuberant talent in science and poetry. It is also interesting to note that the Swedish dynamite tycoon Alfred Nobel has gone down to posterity as an inventor and philanthropist, but it is not fully realised that the famous chemist and explosives expert was at heart a poet, and there was some doubt which path he would choose, that of invention or poetry. In March 1896, when he was, in fact, dying, Nobel wrote to Bertha von Suttnert: ‘Not having been able to engage in more serious work during my recent illness, I have written a tragedy.’ It was a tragedy about Beatrice Cenci called Nemesis.
The brothers Hiram and Hudson were very competitive and both claimed the invention of the smokeless powder Hudson had patented. Hiram Maxim claimed that he was ‘the only American that was found to have done anything whatsoever in the early invention of smokeless powder’. But Hudson contradicts his brother and says: ‘In truth, not a single feature of the powder originated with him, and he himself was never able to invent or produce a powder of sufficient merit to compel its use.’ With this contention fuelling their lifelong rivalry, it was easy to imagine Hiram not wanting to be outdone in versifying invention by his younger brother. What discoveries I made I put into verse, without much thought for the final context of the lines, and I have an early draft of the beginning of the poetic rivalry between the brother inventors:
HUDSON
Just to show you that versified speech
is within every competent man’s reach
I shall address the audience, impromptu,
in poetry the entire night through.
HIRAM
Well, if brother Hudson can spout in verse
I don’t want anyone thinking I’m worse.
If Hudson can do it then so can I.
The rest of the evening’s in poetry.
HUDSON
You’ll have to do better than that, brothe
That last couplet’s awful. Try another.
HIRAM
I was the greater inventor of the two
and so will write a better poetry than you.
And as with Hudson’s explosive, there seems to have been some kind of ambiguous attraction between rhythm and Hiram’s invention, the machine gun, as was clear in the next discovery in my research: James Puckle (1667–1724), the Englishman who patented a gun with a revolving chamber in 1718 and advertised his invention in rhyming verse. I also found out that the Russian Mikhail Kalashnikov, who invented the Kalashnikov automatic rifle, the AK-47 and its successor the AK-74, wrote many lyrical poems about his invention. Metre, rhythm and ballistics seemed ineluctably bonded. And the great Italian tenor Luciano Pavarotti told the New York Post of 18 March 1981 that he owed his sense of rhythm to listening as a kid to the sound of gunfire between local fascists and the Germans, claiming, ‘If I have a good sense of rhythm it’s from having that beat of the automatic weapons drilled into my head as a child.’ The headline to the interview said, ‘First Taste of Rhythm: The Rat-a-Tat-Tat of the Guns’.
All these discoveries were further encouragement towards the central rhythmical energy I was searching for, but the invention of the Englishman James Puckle became even more important by the time the production reached the Olivier in 1992, during the Gulf War, because the singular peculiarity of Puckle’s ammunition chamber was that it contained two forms of bullets: round ones to kill fellow Christians and square ones to kill Muslims. Hence finally my paradoxical title Square Rounds. Had it been the more recent Gulf War and not the first, prompted by Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait, I could have extended the irony of my chosen title up to the minute. The cluster bombs which were used illegally by the so-called coalition in bombing Baghdad and elsewhere once contained bomblets full of round metal ball bearings. These were then ‘improved’ by substituting cubical for spherical rounds to make them, as with Puckle’s square rounds, more painful. The ingenious inventor then made these cubes plastic so as not to be detectable by X-ray.
The passion for rhyming in two of my scientific protagonists in their recorded lives was sufficient to get me started on the play. At the time I was scanning the poetic credentials of my weapon inventors to give an authentic base to their bragging self-approval and advertisement for self, explosive or innovative ballistics, I was unaware that Fritz Haber, the pioneer first of nitrogen fixation, for which he later won the Nobel Prize, then of chlorine gas as the invention to break the deadlock of the First World War created by the Maxim gun, was accustomed to penning verses and also even ordering apparatus in his lab in rhyming couplets, provoking his colleagues to respond in kind. Discovering this made me sure that the verse forms I had chosen were on the right lines and launched me into early drafts.
II
Serendipity and omens are important to me in the early stages of searching for the shape of a theatrical piece. On page 9 of Notebook 1, I have copied from Hudson’s book what he writes on Hiram: ‘… and at the end of his days suffering from bronchitis he invented an inhaler, hailed by Harley Street, and inhaled by grateful asthmatics everywhere. It eased the pain of those whose lungs had been destroyed by gases invented by the equally ingenious. Remembering the Indians of his boyhood in Maine, he called his invention, his inhaler, the Pipe of Peace.’ This led on the same page to my doodling the following verse quatrain:
He invented an inhaler hailed (pun! pun!) though never quite as much as was his gun, by Harley Street, and inhaled by those who’d been gassed
at Ypres by lung-ravishing chlorine.
– and scribbled after the glued-in typescript is ‘by that inventor, Haber’. Not long after, I found an intact ‘Pipe of Peace’ in a Newcastle junk shop, which I took as a favourable omen. It had the delicate glass inhaler, the chemicals and the instructions. In my imagination the two inventions of Sir Hiram Maxim were related, and the cough that racked him in his final years became the sound of his machine gun, complete with eerie ricochet. This bronchial onomatopoeia was extended also to the Chorus of Munitionettes, as the women who worked in the munitions factories filling shells with trinitrotoluene (TNT) were racked with coughing. According to an article, ‘Observations on the Effects of Tri-Nitro-Toluene on Women Workers’, in The Lancet 2 (12 August 1916), by two women doctors who itemise the coughing, another effect on the Munitionettes was that their skin turned yellow. They were called ‘canaries’. This fact I stored away, and it helped to bring about my finale transformation into China.
I spent time researching the consequences of gas attack other than Hiram Maxim’s invention of an inhaler which soothed the lungs of those exposed to gas on the French front, or trinitrotoluene on the home front. I played a good deal with an account of one gas victim at the front, whose experience had global consequences:
The piercing pain in my eye sockets was diminishing; slowly I succeeded in distinguishing the broad outlines of the things about me. I was given grounds for hoping that I should recover my eyesight, at least well enough to pursue some profession later. To be sure I could no longer hope that I would ever be able to draw again … I decided to go into politics.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 30