A little poetry...

There is always a tendency in my writing to give agency to those who seemingly have none. My play Dance The Colour Blue is about loss: of companionship, of love, of identity. What does it mean to be so absorbed by another that you can become as easily subsumed as the air that they breathe? You become a void: a repository into which any hint of a notion or scintilla of an idea can be tossed. All of it equally able to stick. Not a single joule of resistive energy anywhere to be found. Literature is littered with such examples - and they are overwhelmingly women. Take Shakespeare’s Cordelia in King Lear, or Ophelia in Hamlet, or so many supporting females in contemporary dramas able be replaced by a ‘sexy lamp’ without impacting the narrative. Or Penelope in Homer’s The Odyssey. Often seen as enigmatic, Penelope is the centre of the mythological strand of Dance The Colour Blue, in an attempt to lend her some agency (helped in no small part by reading Emily Wilson’s interpretation of the epic story). Hope may not always spring eternal but according to Homer it can wait 20 years: precisely Penelope’s penance for loving a man who is so easily distracted.

Manifesting an enigma is a perilous task for a playwright. What evidence, when there is little source material, have you based it on? Are you meant to read between the lines? What if the lines are so far apart that you fall into an expanse of pure white space…which only you as a playwright can fill? At some point during the editing process, it became apparent that the best way of remaining faithful to the spirit of the enigma was to write in the medium of the world in which she lived, thereby providing a framework wherein my interpretation would likely contain a scintilla of truth. That medium was poetry…in dactylic hexameter.

The poem contains three stanzas. The first laments Penelope’s loneliness. The second reveals the sleight of hand she uses to deceive The Suitors (the custom of the day, for any estate missing a master, was to initiate a Darwinian process featuring a cast of Suitors and find a suitable replacement). The third stanza lays bare the peril Penelope is in when she wittingly or otherwise allows a beggar (Odysseus in disguise checking on Penelope’s fidelity, of course) to use a treasured bow which only Odysseus can string. I read this poem for the first time at a Spoken Word Night event at Hillhead Bookclub (Glasgow) earlier this week.

Penelope

Once on a overcast morning, I asked the messenger Hermes
Has Kronos flown the Elysium, and rides post haste on your wings?
Slowly though quelling, time turned, and punctured my heart revealing
Denizens, five score men, claiming a tenure of nature that’s yours
Me; eyes fill and set forth sail, a confluence of tears down my face
Swiftly days pass, Odysseus, for the dark chases them away
Three years last you laid by my side, must yet I prepare for three more?

So, they have seen a shroud woven! An experience, that among others
Yes, I suppose they have, although they can hardly be certain
And in this unwove state, could they ever declare they had seen it?
But a shroud was woven, they do say, in a place where they saw
Something; a shroud was woven, they do say, yet they see nothing

Tell me my love, how you sleep when tomorrow starts without me?
Do you see the rings of sorrow on the rosy fingers of dawn?
How sits the guilt of finding pleasure pleasing inferior women?
Could not what you do more quickly be done for the saving of Ithaka?
Each day, unknowingly, I bring to mind a version of you who’s
No longer here, a little less clear, as I roam from room to room
My hand holding firm a key that turns fear into fragile hope
The Kingdom that rests on a kiss is a breath away, and I feel no guilt.

These three stanzas occur at different points throughout the play. Each interweaving with the story of regulars at a local Glasgow pub.

Dance The Colour Blue is scheduled for production in 2023.