Program Note

by Glyn Maxwell

This is a play in which no one knows what happened, and if you think I do you're sort of missing the point.
 
Several generations have passed since anyone I know believed in a recoverable pure truth. One learns to accept that people around you just see the damn thing differently. You can live with that until you realise the people who see the damn thing differently think theirs is the only way it can be seen at all. But that's enough about America.
 
The genius of Akira Kurosawa probably established the word 'rashomon' as referring to a certain kind of narrative structure - one incident seen in various contradictory ways - but his film is actually a conflation of two short stories by Akutegawa: 'Rashomon', which means 'gate' (you remember the film starts and ends with a gate in the pouring rain) and 'In a Grove', concerning the apparent murder of a nobleman by a bandit, and it's the latter tale which actually has the 'rashomon' plot. 'Broken Journey' is a contemporary mutation of this story. The one element in it that might seem to belong to a more exotic, superstitious past - the hysterical medium who channels the voice of the murdered nobleman - is of course as contemporary as can be: both English and American police forces routinely use so-called psychics to assist in criminal cases.
 
This is 'Broken Journey''s American premiere, but it was written ten or so years ago and was my first attempt to make pentametrical (five-stress) verse lines out of contemporary speech. As far as I knew, and still think, no one had done this before. My first plays were set in historical or fantastical environments, exploited strong forms for comical or high-lyrical purposes, and had quite traditional five-act structures. In this sense they followed the example of T.S.Eliot or Christopher Fry, drawing on poetic forms of the past to keep verse alive on stage in the present. But reading the poetry of Robert Frost and of the English poet Edward Thomas (killed in the First World War) suggested to me vast resources and fresh possibilities for the old pentameter, which 20th century poetry had spent decades trying to make obsolete.
 
I felt that Modernism, in its enthusiasm to throw out what had indeed become stale or frozen in poetry, had also obscured how essentially true to the body the pentameter is, in terms of its length on the breath, its miraculous flexibility, its supernatural capacity to stay with you. Live theatre, not written poetry, was where I wanted to conduct these experiments. I suppose that my writing life since then has been an effort to follow these ideas wherever they lead.
 
Glyn Maxwell    

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