You can encounter a certain homogeneity of tone, voice and, to an even larger degree, subject matter. I haven’t gone to the front line, but I got as close as you can without going there.
As to the ‘widely held’ idea, I’d be interested to know just how widely held it is.
I interviewed those people when they were absolutely still living the issues of the plays – their woundings were very, very recent – and they were fantastically generous with their responses because they wanted their stories told. OS: How plays live is by amateur groups picking them off the shelf and doing them, isn’t it? PM: Regarding Welsh historical narratives, as you said earlier the Battle of Mametz wasn’t solely a Welsh disaster, but it is one that resonates with all the other disasters in our history. But it’s not a convincing political argument, it’s an overwhelming emotional argument. To a certain extent my BBC 4 series, Writer in Residence for the Welsh Rugby Union, resulting in, OS: Statistically football is the national sport of Wales. There’s a poem by Llywelyn ap y Moel titled To the Greyrock Woods – which is included in my anthology A Poet’s Guide to Britain – in which the poet says that, ‘To Owain’s men [the wood] is London’. Terms and Conditions. It’s a war memoir that is not widely known but it’s a beautiful, quietly moving and yet clinical account [of the Battle for Mametz Wood] by a staff officer.
Well Chris convinced me and another filmmaker, Matthew Springford, to go to Mametz to make a short film about these two writers. PM: How would you describe the difference between writing poetry and writing for the theatre? I think if you’re writing a poem properly – obviously when you edit you have to consider how someone else might receive it – you’re writing it for the sake of the poem itself, if that makes sense. There’s this awful phrase ‘war is politics by other means’ – and all of the contemporary soldiers I interviewed for Charlie F used to say that. I hope that it means in the play we have a range of accents that doesn’t make it feel too parochial, because the people being blown up were also from Tottenham and the East End. I took a lot of questions into this play, some of them have been answered and a lot of them won’t be answered until it happens – some will never be answered. PM: There’s a line where the remains of the soldiers are described as like a ‘foreign body’ that has worked its way to the surface. Following, OS: I try to live by my writing, as opposed to having a permanent teaching position or other job, so yes, there is always something new. It was very important in Charlie F. to create a play which responded to what the soldiers in the cast thought, felt and experienced. Anyone who’s attended a Poetry Live event when thousands of school students spend a day listening to poets can’t help but have hope in the future of poetry in the UK.
National Theatre Wales stake their claim as specialists in site specific theatre and have done so brilliantly. What do they see? So yes, there is a part of me as a writer that would want to be exposed to things that I could never imagine, that I could then write about. To a certain extent it was this episodic format and the prospect of writing for a medium in which the spoken voice has greater weight, which led me to tell the stories of Arthur, Hads and Taff through poetry. CG: Tell us about some of the charities/projects you are involved with. Owen: It is yes, partly because I’ve read so much about the people who were there.
Match. The only ‘shoulds’ in poetry are that it shouldn’t be prose, and it should be good. Privacy Policy. PM: I agree, as those plays are revived they’re reinterpreted, reassessed and reimagined and that’s what keeps them alive. OS: Its funny, when the publicity material went out [for the play] it said this was a play inspired by my poem. I get the sense from you that Mametz Wood is a very meaningful place for you.
CG: Are you working on anything new at the moment? So I think whenever [someone says] it was a necessary war, you can’t help but feel that there were alternatives.
OS: I try to live by my writing, as opposed to having a permanent teaching position or other job, so yes, there is always something new. All Rights Reserved. I worked on this other project – a libretto with the Welsh composer Marc Bowden – creating a contemporary response to Haydn’s Creation Oratorio.
In this article on Mametz they blame the Welsh, saying our Celtic brothers in their fashion, in their character were over enthusiastic and overran the bombardment, and were unfortunately… it’s all bullshit.
Writer Owen Sheers and director Pip Broughton discuss the making of To Provide All People, a poem marking 70 years of the NHS. OS: I’m quite an instinctive writer…and with Willem de Sitter, I have a character who is performing a very useful function.
For details and booking go to http://nationaltheatrewales.org/mametz.
No one knew what they were sending those boys into. They each saw their particular war in a very private personal way.
So while this terrible war was happening this huge idea was going from Germany to Holland to Britain, and because of Arthur Eddington to the wider world. Owen Sheers is one of the leading contemporary writers, in Britain, today, a Professor in Creativity at Swansea University, and my immediate go-to subject of conversation when I don’t want to do any work in English lessons.