Writer Mike Poulton has a knack of making ancient plays relevant to modern audiences - but he'd prefer to have been born in 1603, he tells Peter Crawley ahead of his new production in Dublin
A few weeks ago, at a casting call for one of his latest theatrical adaptations, the English playwright Mike Poulton realised once again that he was not made for these times. "Oh did you see him in Pillars of the Community?" Poulton asked his director, referring to the star of a recent Ibsen revival. The director shrugged. Had Poulton seen Elmina's Kitchen, the director
inquired, referring to Kwame-Kwei Armah's recent play at the Royal National Theatre. Poulton blinked back. A tall, smartly dressed man in his early 50s, Poulton is best known - if he is known at all - as an adaptor and translator of classic texts.
Unswervingly polite and slightly grave in manner, for a moment he seems uncomfortable at this memory of mutual incomprehension. "With one or two exceptions," he says, shifting in his seat, "all the plays I had seen were classical revivals. All the plays he had seen were contemporary plays.
"I don't feel at home in the world of modern theatre," he confesses. "My natural home is the [Royal Shakespeare Company]. I grew up with Shakespeare. I admire enormously any modern playwright that you could care to name. But I can't do that." What is it he can't do? Poulton thinks for a moment. "I can't live in the 20th century happily, I suppose."
For most people in the world today, that might count as a slight inconvenience - exacerbated by the recent advent of the 21st century - but not for Poulton.
Though it may explain why he has such difficulty working his mobile phone, being out of sync with the times has had enormous benefits for his career. When we meet, in a Dublin hotel, he has just discovered that his theatrical adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, for the RSC, will have its West End run extended until November. His adaptation of August Strindberg's The Father will open shortly at the Chichester Festival Theatre, followed next year by his version of Gulliver's Travels and then Morte D'Arthur, both for the RSC.
Today, however, Poulton is in Dublin for the first rehearsal of Myrmidons, which is to receive its world premiere in a production by Ouroboros Theatre Company.
"This company in Dublin thinks epically," says Poulton, impressed by artistic director Denis Conway's enthusiasm for large-scale, language-oriented productions. "I understand we have a tiny theatre of epic proportions."
The play is based on the few remaining fragments of Aeschylus's own lost adaptation of The Iliad, and advertised (more than a little bewilderingly) as "a brand new ancient Greek tragedy".
Poulton chuckles at the description, dismissing the notion that he has strayed far from the path of adaptation, or even that he has constructed something largely original. "Not really," he says, "in this case, because Aeschylus's source is The Iliad - what I've got in front of me is what Aeschylus had in front of him when he was setting out to write a play. I was sort of fascinated by the way Greek tragedy works, having been very successful with two Euripides productions. Funnily, Ion was an extraordinary success. The Independent summed it upwhen they said in their review, 'Amazing to see a little known Greek play filling a theatre in a hot night in July . . . '"
Poulton's conversation continues this way, like a university don combined with a publicity department. He elaborates on the remnants of Aeschylus's text for
Myrmidons - from the longest fragment to the shortest fragment - then digresses to consider how works were salvaged from the Library of Alexandria, or how one recognises a great playwright, before referring, tangentially, to the "very, very successful" production of The Canterbury Tales. If that sounds immodest, Poulton never seem to be boasting of his own success. Talking of Chaucer or Euripides or Schiller, he sounds considerably less like their representative on earth, and far more like a proud agent - at one point he talks about the desire to "put my arm around the shoulder of the play and introduce it to people".
At the University of Warwick in Coventry in the late 1960s, Poulton was introduced to European literature. "Certain things made an enormous impact on me," he says. "Schiller did. Chekhov did. And then, after university, you sort of move on and get on with life."
FOR A TIME, Poulton worked in the education division of Robert Maxwell's British Printing Corporation ("I always got on very well with him. He never showed me his nasty side."). He then spent 17 years as the managing editor of the education department of Oxford University Press. "But somehow you try to return," he says. "You know, you can sense greatness. Why is Schiller a great playwright? With all these things, especially Chekhov, it's an attempt not to translate the work, but to actually get the spirit of the play, to get to know the author. You get to know what he wanted to do, then identify the elements of greatness in that work. You set yourself up as speaking for the author to a modern audience."
Greatness, in Poulton's eyes, is timeless. But, on occasion, the bygone styles and unchecked prejudices of a previous age require his renegotiation. At the end of Don Carlos, for instance, an adaptation that earned Poulton a Tony
nomination, the hero disguises himself as a ghost to gain access to the queen. "Too absurd for a modern audience," he decided, and wrote in a go-between instead. With The Canterbury Tales, Poulton had a different problem - the nearrhapsodic anti-Semitism of one character. "What do you do?" asks Poulton. "Say, 'Ohwell, this is perfectly commonplace at the end of the 1300s? No, you don't do that; it's going to shock a modern audience. You present the Prioress as a bigoted anti-Semite,show her for what she is, and let the audience judge her."
Poulton may claim to be a man out of place, or out of time, in contemporary theatre, but such solutions speak of a clearer understanding of modern sensibilities. Myrmidons, however, with its elevated verse and ever-present Greek chorus, makes relatively few concessions to modernity.
Aeschylus, the founder of Greek tragedy, may have been the first dramatist to introduce a second actor to the stage, thereby creating dialogue, but Poulton admits that "the chorus is the main character".
One explanation for the demise of the chorus in theatre is that the device asks us to relate to a community, while, through the millennia, we have become fixated on the individual. Contemporary directors tend to fuss over the anachronism, rationing out the chorus lines to individual cast members, wary of depicting any group that thinks and speaks in unison. A brand new ancient Greek tragedy, however, might have broken with tradition - but Poulton makes no apologies for preserving the choric function.
"People say that gradually the chorus was worked out of the drama," he says. "I chime in with the original intention that the chorus is the main work. The chorus speaks to the audience as well as the actors on stage. The chorus is privileged, in that it can question the actors and interpret for the audience. The play is not called 'Achilles'; it's called Myrmidons. The play is a learning process - God, that sounds so cliched - for the chorus. The chorus are us."
POULTON HAS ALLOWED contemporary chimes into the language of the play, as when the Greek's champion Achilles - still sulking after all these millennia - announces, "Without me the world's unnewsworthy". "Well I hope they are chimes," says Poulton, a little anxiously. "I hope they don't unbalance it. If they unbalance it, then I fail. What I don't want to do is lay down a heavy message and say, 'look, I amdrawing very rigid parallels between then and now'." The playwright is well aware that there are rigid parallels we might discern in the tale of a country invaded by a devastating army, and the years of violent battle, guerrilla combat and fighting in the suburbs that ensue.
"Where have we heard that before?" he asks dryly. But if this seems particularly topical, it was ever thus. "This war will never end," Athene tells Achilles, "just shift its ground, grow and expand." There is an echo of Poulton in these words, resonating as they do with the belief that the present day teaches us nothing new, but history holds the answer. "The issues of today, I can't excite myself about," he says, "unless I can find a reference for them from the past. It's a reverse process. Then they become relevant for me - if I can see them in Coriolanus."
Interestingly, Poulton does have one wholly original work in development. "But it's about Shakespeare and hismistress and the Earl of Southampton," he quickly adds. "Yes, OK, it's a contemporary play, but its set in the 1560s . . . If I wander too far from the source, everything becomes rather barren and sterile."
A long pause follows, leaving room to chance an appropriate Shakespeare quote. Poulton pounces on it: "'How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable seem to me all the uses of this world.' Yes. I'm not very much at home in the contemporary world. I sort of inhabit the world of other people's imaginations, really. And sort of my own.
"Apollo talks about timelessness and the nature of time," he continues. "The gods have got this ability to choose whatever time they want."
What time would Poulton have chosen to live in? "Probably about 1603," he smiles. The year when the Elizabethan era wound down and the Jacobean era began? Now that's really showing your age.
• Myrmidons runs in the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Trinity College