The Owl and the Nightingale may have been written 800 years ago, but its anonymous author shows that human nature nearly never changes: two rivals’ joust in the tree tops using words as lances to try to wound the other.
However, proving the exception to the rule, two men from the West Yorkshire village of Marsden – poet laureate Simon Armitage and his lifelong friend, the theatre director John Tiffany – are collaborating on a performance of the medieval poem that Armitage translated last year.
Armitage’s translation from the Middle English original was the fourth of the medieval poems he has rewritten for modern audiences and he suspects it will be the last. Part of the reason is that there simply isn’t anything else as much fun.
The Owl and the Nightingale could hardly be a greater contrast to Tiffany’s day job directing seven productions of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in seven cities. He co-authored the play with JK Rowling and the playwright Jack Thorne and is soon to leave for Tokyo to supervise a Japanese language production.
In contrast, the Owl and the Nightingale will be performed on a bare stage at the Royal Court theatre in London and the only props will be copies of the script.
Armitage will narrate and the parts of the Owl and the Nightingale will be read by Meera Syal and Maxine Peake. A day has been set aside for the rehearsal. In a testament to the skill of his actors, Tiffany was happy to temporarily leave seven Harry Potters and hundreds of cast members in the hands of others so he could work on a show with just three performers.
The cantankerous Owl and the disputatious Nightingale are each convinced they are right and are impervious to persuasion. Their discussion is so reminiscent of confrontations on social media the publisher was happy to bill Armitage’s translation as a “Twitter spat”.
In the world of entertainment, Armitage is a the sombre Owl and Tiffany the lighter-than-champagne-bubbles Nightingale. Tiffany is a few years younger than 58-year-old Armitage and doesn’t let him forget it.
Their fathers, who died recently within six months of each other, were best friends their entire lives as well as being members of the same amateur dramatic society and brass band. Their grandmothers played whist in the village hall, bragging about the achievements of their precocious grandsons between hands.
Tiffany said: “They were much more competitive than the two of us. Simon’s career took off way before mine did. There’d be newspaper articles saying he’s being considered for poet laureate and I’d be assistant director on a play in Edinburgh and I always used to say: ‘Please Grandma, I’m incredibly moved and flattered but I don’t think we are going to win this particular battle,’ but they continued which me and Simon loved.
“With him being poet laureate, I was ‘look at you being all posh’. I always like to point out that we weren’t actually friends as children because I’m much younger than him. I’m not actually that much younger but I do like to point it out.”
Tiffany sees the avian rivals as two divas, think Hilda Ogden and Rita Fairclough from Coronation Street. Armitage did not have to labour the parallels. He said: “I don’t think it’s a didactic piece, I haven’t translated it because it’s got a moral lesson for our age, but I definitely see reflections and echoes of our times and I don’t think they need to be amplified too far to be clear. These are two birds having a barney over 900 rhyming couplets.”
He added: “The most obvious parallel or comparison is that we live in a very divided, very antagonistic time. What’s interesting to me about these two birds is that both of them absolutely believe they are right. It fully attunes to the times we are living in, in terms of people having access to ways to broadcast their opinions so readily and so feistily.
“The birds have their positions and they are unshakable. The way that they go about announcing their positions is not just to talk through the strength of their argument, it’s also to undermine and attack the arguments of the other. They do that in both in rational and logical ways and in scurrilous and vulgar ways as well.”
Armitage says: “Being in a room with John, watching him work with actors, having him to tell me what to do, is just a lot of fun. We are the Marsden Boys and we are the hottest ticket in town.”
