A Celebration of Sussex Poetry at Shoreham WordFest

Rhyme and Reason offers A Celebration of Sussex Poetry for this year’s Shoreham WordFest, courtesy of Half-Time Orange Theatre company

Transcript

00:00Good afternoon. My name is Phil Hewitt, Group Arts Editor at Sussex Newspapers. Always lovely

00:06to speak to Ethan Taylor. Ethan, you always come up with interesting projects. The latest

00:10is Rhyme and Reason, a celebration of Sussex poetry, which you're bringing to Shoreham

00:15Wordfest, the Marlapins Museum, the 3rd to the 5th of October. Now, this was commissioned

00:21in effect. Now, how did you set about it? I mean, there's so much that you could encompass

00:26in this. What have you pared it down to for this celebration of Sussex poetry?

00:31And that was the tricky bit. It was whittling it down. So, yes, we were very fortunate that

00:36Shoreham Wordfest, they reached out to us. They said they would like, you know, being a literary

00:40organisation that programmes certain aspects of theatre. They were like, we would like

00:45a show that incorporates poetry to mark this year's National Poetry Day, which falls on the

00:52Thursday, just before we open on the Friday. And so, being a theatre company that delves

00:56into local history, I thought let's delve into Sussex poets, and goodness knows there's

01:01enough of them. There was a real ream of just fantastic anthologies. But yes, we managed to

01:07pare it down to Hilaire Belloc, Edmund Blunden, Charlotte Smith, and Mary Collier, who I think

01:13will make for a fantastic roster of characters to sort of celebrate Sussex's connection to poetry

01:20It sounds great. Now, what's the significance that they are Sussex poets? What is the fact

01:25of there being Sussex poets out to the evening? Is there something very, very Sussex about what

01:29they write? Could there have been anywhere, do you think?

01:31I would say so, actually. I think a lot of them, I mean, the natural landscape of Sussex

01:37definitely plays its role. There's definitely a lot of elements of escapism. Hilaire Belloc often

01:43references the nature of verse rolling off the South Downs and into the sea, and often the word

01:49coming off the sea and back across the landscape. So I definitely think Sussex, its political

01:55motivations, as we explore to a certain extent, and also given when some of our, given the timeline

02:04of some of our poets' lives that we're featuring, the encroachment of industrialisation definitely

02:10plays a lot across the rural landscape. The social upheaval that that brings with definitely

02:15influences a lot of the poets we are featuring. That sounds great. And just a word on how it's

02:20presented. What's the sort of setup for the actual show? Yes, so we've got four characters.

02:26It will be upstairs in the Marlapins Museum, which is a fantastic, intimate space. We'll have audiences

02:30at 30, so they'll be really lovely and intimate. And we will have the poets bring to life the context of

02:37their lives, a little bit about their life histories, and what inspires the poetry that they composed.

02:43They'll recite some of their poems, but we're keeping it very upbeat. It's going to be very funny,

02:49very dynamic, and it should hopefully prove for some very lovely evenings.

02:53Absolutely, and dispelling a few prejudices about poetry to boot. You were saying that it's

02:58absolutely not stuffy, stayed, it's good fun, and, as you say, upbeat.

03:02Exactly. Yes, I think there is a bit of, I don't know if it's snootiness, I just think poetry is a

03:09bit of a reputation, especially poetry of yesteryear, has a bit of a reputation of being stayed. We often

03:15only encounter it in school textbooks. It's not lifted from the page, it's something we read

03:22in our heads. Whereas if you bring the performative nature to it and sort of imbue it with the context

03:27that it was composed within, I think people get to see these texts in a whole new light.

03:33Well, it sounds brilliant. Congratulations on bringing it to fruition. It's Rhyme and Reason,

03:38a Celebration of Sussex Poetry, Shore and Word Fest, October the 3rd to the 5th.

03:43Ethan, as always, lovely to speak to you. Thank you.