Why Verse?
Verse theatre after all, reached its artistic peak 400 years ago in the crucible fire of the Elizabethan & Jacobean mind. A combination of linguistic experimentation and religious and cultural war forged a hybrid child of immense power. But why now? As a sole starting point, with no context, the idea of Verse Theatre feels far removed from the visual-led mainstream.
The answer to these doubts is another question:
What kind of stories do we want to tell?
Truly successful theatre mainlines straight into an audience's heart and soul. It rouses emotional and physical reactions. Positive or negative, one cannot sit above it looking in, but instead is swept into the maelstrom. A physical change is acted upon players and audience alike by the experience.
Yes, ideas are there, but at its heart must be an archetypical universal struggle that we can all identify with in our bones because we all know love, hate, anger and jealousy in our bones and we all have mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters and lovers who we hold in our bodies.
But what is the connection between verse writing and creating muscular engaging plays?
Verse requires you to use language with deep care and precision. It gives you a living form. Through alliteration, balance and rhythm, specific words are given weight. Uniquely strong contrasts and multiple antitheses are set up. In the music of these antitheses wider mythological undercurrents play out, so the detail of the language starts to illuminate the whole story.
The rhythm of the line forces an audience to engage physically and emotionally with the play. The words which are spoken are mainlined into the body and bypass the brain because they ride on a heartbeat. Above all else, what we want to encourage is writers to take back ownership of the RHYTHM of a play. Line by line. Speech by Speech. Act by Act. We need a ‘BEAT’ theatre; a ‘RHYTHM and RHYME’ theatre.
Isn't writing in verse a straight-jacket?
Form is not our enemy; form is a channel through which one can draw vitality and life. Paradoxically the form of the verse allows a writer to start with the physical sensation of language and not worry about coming up with a 'new' idea. When you chance upon a word that fits the form the direction your line is taken upon is not one decided by a pre-planned prosaic idea, but an intuitive leap. And your only judge is if it 'feels' right. You are thrown back onto your intuition and feelings as a writer.
The theatrical rhythm can be marked with a metre structure like the iambic, paced in the footfalls of your actors or driven by the 4/4 beat of a hip hop record. It can be accentuated and picked up on with rhyme, alliteration and line structure. But at its heart is....
the BEAT, and in the beat, true FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION.