From TS Eliot and Ted Hughes to Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage, numerous poets have written a few plays. However, Tony Harrison’s collected plays run to six volumes, comprising 19 full-length dramas. Many of them are translations from Greek (The Oresteia, from 1981, is the most actable version of the trilogy by Aeschylus) or French (he did an astonishing rhyming version of Molière’s The Misanthrope in 1973). But, as Harrison’s theatre career developed, he also wrote original plays, of which The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1990) and Square Rounds (1992) stand as the best new verse dramas written in English since Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral in 1935.
The English versions of foreign dramas were a dividend from the extraordinary education in classics and languages available to a working-class child at Leeds Grammar School in the 1950s, before he extended his knowledge of Latin and Greek at Leeds University.
