My deep-dive into Alan Plater has so far given me numerous surprises. A few examples: a musical about the Tolpuddle Martyrs written in collaboration with Vince ‘Edelweiss’ Hill; a documentary about the history of the Sadlers Wells theatre featuring an early TV appearance by Bob Hoskins singing a ditty in the character of Joseph Grimaldi; a campus rock opera starring Chris ‘Handbags and Gladrags’ Farlowe. With any luck, I’ll get round to at least two of these eventually on this blog.
However, Plater’s creation of a stage play in memory of Philip Larkin was most definitely not a surprise. For a start, there’s the Hull association, and in the introduction to the published script of Sweet Sorrow, Plater recalls their various meetings, their shared appreciation of jazz, but their variance over Charlie Parker.
The play, first shown at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1990, describes a social gathering of four people whose lives have been profoundly altered in some way through an encounter with Larkin’s poetry. We gather that they met when sharing a pew at the service of thanksgiving for Larkin at Westminster Abbey in 1986, subsequently meeting up at yearly anniversaries – this time around in Hull.
I’ve seen Plater refer to the structure of Sweet Sorrow as being jazz-like, in the way it spotlights four solos that are riffed upon, but you might equally describe it as symphonic, with four intersecting but tonally different movements. Either way, the flow of party conversation gives of the four ‘soloists’ opportunity to describe in turn how Larkin changed their life course, resulting in a kind of semi-dramatised presentation of his greatest hits. For the down-to-earth Hull native Tom, it was the poem ‘Here’ in particular that illuminated his relationship to his home town. For the thirty-something Barbara, a random exposure to Larkin’s poetry at a night-school class, especially 'The Whitsun Weddings', opens up new worlds of possibility, whilst the former teacher Christina’s controversial use of the sweary ‘This Be the Verse’ in a school lesson led to a sudden and necessary change of professional direction. Lastly, there’s Charles, a vicar whose faith is tested by ‘Church Going’.
The fifth guest at the party is the late Larkin himself, who comments sardonically on the proceedings, and communicates some of the biographical detail that is mostly side-lined in the play in favour of literary appreciation.
Sweet Sorrow was first staged in the period of relative calm between Larkin’s death in 1985 and the game-changing publication of his Selected Letters in 1992, and Andrew Motion’s biography the year after. Plater’s introduction to the text makes a passing reference to the upcoming publication of the latter, and it’s hard not to interpret Sweet Sorrow as a pre-emptive strike against those set upon denouncing the poet as a reactionary fogey…. or worse.
In his introduction to Reference Back: Philip Larkin’s Uncollected Jazz Writings, 1940-1984, published by Hull University Press in 1999, Plater argued that the poet’s evident appreciation of Black and/or female performers:
[...] goes a long way towards reclaiming Phillip from the demonologists (Chandler used to call them ‘primping second-guessers’) who fell on the Selected Letters and the biography with evangelical zeal and pronounced him unfit for human consumption on the basis of racism, sexism and various other disorders lumped together under any other business on that day’s agenda. (p.ix)
Similarly, in a 2002 piece to commemorate the opening of Tom Courtenay’s solo Larkin tribute Pretending to Me, Plater noted how:
Larkin was capable of extreme tenderness and compassion. Read the letters he wrote to Douglas Dunn, following the death of his wife, or to Andrew Motion, after the break-up of his first marriage. Then cast the first stone.
Ouch. The then-Poet Laureate Motion shot back the following year:
In his Guardian piece Plater approvingly quoted one Larkin society member who asked him how "anyone can be a womaniser and a misogynist?" Easily, indeed invariably, as Love Again [a BBC dramatization of the poet’s life shown in 2003] reminds us.
I’d need to defer to a Larkin expert about how the pendulum of appreciation has swung back and forth over the last twenty years, but he seems as prominent in the popular imagination as ever, as far as I can tell. There’s an argument to be made that, far from being naively fannish and in thrall to its subject, Sweet Sorrow anticipates and addresses the debates about problematic artists that are prominent today.
As a play about appreciation rather than artistry, Sweet Sorrow is also very much of a piece with Plater’s ever-present celebration of fandom – which usually in his writing takes the form of middle-aged men quoting and swapping trivia and profundities relating to jazz music, football, and old-time comedians and movies. It’s hard for me to judge, based on the published script alone, the tone of the play in performance, and whether the stiff gags on the page earn hearty rather than polite, indulgent laughter. But this is certainly the most spectral of Plater’s work that I’ve yet come across: the party-goers are literally and figuratively haunted by the poet, whilst the Larkin of the play is disconcerted and troubled by his readers and their relationship to him.
I’m curious to know how one particular gag – the one that explains the play’s title – went down with a flesh-and-blood audience, as it made me groan inwardly. Why ‘Sweet Sorrow’? It’s a mangled Shakespearean reference, as in: ‘parting is such sweet sorrow’, except with the first word replaced by the poet’s name. It’s the worst joke I’ve come across yet in Plater, and I’m almost growing to like it.
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