Our latest play is live, Battle of the Bards by the 3rd century BC Greek playwright Theocritus. A shepherd and a goatherd go to war over a stolen goatskin the way the Greeks new best: in song! But hang on! Little Wonder is mostly about spaceships, right? What are we doing in 300 BC? Click on “more” to find out what we learned from recording the Battle of the Bards.
Old Fashioned Translations are Probably Not Your Friends
This version of Battle of the Bards was translated by C. S. Calverley of London: Bell and Daldy in 1869. That’s a long time ago, and it shows. Styles and fashions have a huge impact of playwrighting. Victorian theatre was enjoying an explosion of creativity at the time Mr Calverly was writing has translation; comic opera and burlesque were competing with the ever-popular Shakespeare, and Gilbert and Sullivan had just hit the scene.
But there remained (are continued to remain for more than a hundred years after this), the idea that Greek translations should be staid, formal and dry, tied into strict rhyming couplets and, when staged, with as little movement as possible. You can still go an see Greek plays treated in this way today. It’s something of a tragedy.
The Mind-Numbing Pain of Endless Rhyming Couplets
The opportunity to listen to a play entirely in couple
ts allows us to see a phenomenon that all writers need to drill into their brain: excessive repetition, be it in form, word choice, or even emotional action, is BOOOOORRRRING. I like this play and I love what our actors did with it, but because the form of the sentences repeats, and repeats, and repeats, steadily it becomes more difficult to understand what they are they are saying or even to hear the words at all.
“But what about Shakespeare?!” I hear you cry.[i] Shakespeare is indeed famous for writing rhyming couplets in iambic pentameter. But he cheated. Constantly. He changed syllable emphases, even shifted into blank verse or just plain old prose if it served him. Variety is King.
Back and Forth gives you tennis neck strain
There’s another problem here that ever writer needs to learn. Two characters taking it in turn to talk to each other creates the same problem as the rhyming couplets. It gets repetitive, and as it gets repetitive it gets boring. While rhyming couplets down crop up to bane the audience quite so much days, THIS flaw happens all the time. If you just have dialogue that goes A, B, A, B your audience will quit the theatre about thirty seconds after they feel neck strain. Mix it up.
In it for the challenge
Roger and Joe are wonderful, charming actors. Sometimes a script that looks flawed reveals itself in the hands of talented performers. Sometimes a rubbish script will shine in the hands of talented actors! Give Battle of the Bards a try – at the very least until you get to the song. Roger and Joe do a great job and I still laugh when I listen. But when you do so, also try to listen out for the things that make the writing fail (After all, this is a writing blog as well as a radio podcast). Don’t write like a 19th century translator with a stick up his bum![ii]
If it’s too much Greek, then did I mention that we have spaceships this way —>
[i] Unless you were saying, “what about Spaceships”, in which case, fair point.
[ii] You know, unless you do it in private.
