Performer Stanley Townsend on Bringing Paul Muldoon's Poetry to the Stage

At the Irish Times, Stanley Townsend tells Rosita Boland what it's like to learn Paul Muldoon's poem "Incantata" in preparation for performance on stage. Foregrounding their conversation, Boland explains that Muldoon wrote the long poem "in memory of his former partner. Mary Farl Powers, an artist and print-maker, [who] died in 1992." From there: 

Now this stirring elegy will be premiered at the Galway Arts Festival.

The lengthy text is dense with references and allusions that have me Googling from as early as the second line. “Colder and dumber than a fish by Francisco de Herrera,” reads that line. De Herrera was a 16th century Spanish painter who specialised in baroque still-life, including fish.

Irish-born Stanley Townsend, who has been living in London for some 20 years, will be performing Incantata next month. We’re sitting talking in a Dublin hotel. For the last six weeks, he has been spending at least two hours a day with the text, memorising it, and digging into it. “At the moment, it’s constantly in my head. If I don’t spend a couple of hours each day working on the Muldoon, I get very edgy,” he says.

At the time of interview, it’s just five weeks out from the premiere, but director Sam Yates and Townsend have yet to get into a room together and figure out the performance. What they have been doing over the last three months is spending single days here and there together in London with the text, “mining it and trying to sift through the content, the images. We need to know, or have a theory about, what they mean. It has given time for things to percolate,” Townsend explains.

He takes a while to answer the question of what the poem he will deliver as a monologue is, in his view, about.

“What it is about primarily for me, is an artist wrestling with his grief. It seems he is trying to make a piece of art to remember her, and he is conflicted about doing it. He remembers her then, and all the things they shared: moments, arguments, picnics, people, walks, drinks, travels, smells, tastes, places. If he finds anything through the poem, it is simply to remember her.”

Read on at the Irish Times.