Ian McMillan is contemplating the greats who have gone before him. He is one of five poets tasked with translating Beowulf for a community music-theatre production in Huddersfield this week. It doesn’t pay to fret about those who have put words to this Anglo-Saxon epic over the past millennium.
“All the people that have tried it before are standing behind you in a big row,” says McMillan, the Barnsley-born presenter of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. “Seamus Heaney has done it – and Simon Armitage. They’re all stood there with their arms folded, shaking their heads and tutting. But also behind them are all the people who made it up on the spot. When you’re typing it at your laptop, you feel you’re surrounded by all these different Beowulfs. You try and put your own spin on it, but you’re aware you’re just a mouthpiece for some vast historical thing you’ve got no control over.”
Joining him to tell the story are fellow Yorkshire poets Franc Chamberlain, Joel Simmy and Michelle Scally Clarke, whose contributions have been jigsawed together by Chris O’Connor. Some of their words have been set to music by pianist and composer Leighton Jones, working alongside classical Indian Carnatic singer Supriya Nagarajan, for a show that begins with a Viking procession and ends with a music-theatre performance supported by a 60-strong community choir.
To hear the story of the Scandinavian warrior who battles the monstrous Grendel only to face Grendel’s equally ferocious mother and then a dragon, the audience gathers in the town’s Byram Arcade. Here, designer Lara Booth has suspended branches as if cascading from the Victorian glass ceiling (currently hidden by scaffolding). At the base, between the art supply shop and the photographers, is a funeral pyre, complete with mummified corpse.
Singers gather on the balcony in a droning lament for a dead king. The actors, all antlers, tunics and face paint, switch from Old English into something more familiar as they lead us out to the street.
Brandishing torches, we process to St Peter’s parish church, founded in the 11th century and now doubling as Heorot, the great mead hall of King Hrothgar (a sonorous Neil Balfour) who leads the mourning for his father, King Halfdane. The audience are cast as resting warriors, sitting on two sides of a raised platform, a community threatened by the fearsome monster outside. Like Hrothgar, we are not feeling so brave.
“The promenade from Byram Arcade to a church replicates the way it would have been performed before,” says McMillan, whose version of The Barber of Seville plays at Bradford’s St George’s Hall this month. “The idea of an audience sitting watching something is a fairly recent thing.”
The score shifts with the level of jeopardy. An upbeat opening number could have been one of the jauntier songs in Jesus Christ Superstar. Not so the skittering insect percussion, nervous and unsettling, that accompanies the arrival of Grendel. That’s before a kind of medieval hip-hop as a badass female Beowulf arrives. Played by Charlotte Barnes, she is resolute and ferocious, a counterbalance to Hrothgar’s timidity.
“None of us knew what the others were writing,” says Scally Clarke, the Leeds-born poet and playwright, who wrote the final dragonslaying section. “They wanted the mixture of voices.”
Streamlined and direct, the language plays with Old English forms even as it alludes to the Yorkshire Ridings and nods to environmental destruction. “There’s a Yorkshire pride and integrity,” says Scally Clarke. “It’s very blunt: nowt put in, nowt taken out.”
The origins of Beowulf are uncertain but it is likely to have emerged orally, passed from bard to bard before it was written down, anonymously, 1,000 years ago. The contribution of the five Yorkshire poets to James Beale’s production is in the same spirit of collaborative enterprise, written in a language designed to be heard not studied.
“It’s the same with Chaucer: you listen to the music, not the words,” says McMillan about the Old English original. “Even the words you can’t quite understand convey a kind of meaning, which is a deep meaning that is far down in your DNA and in your bones and you think, ‘Well, yes, I understand that.’”
Staged by Proper Job theatre company for Kirklees Year of Music, it is a visually inventive mix of masks, shadow puppetry and projections. A gnarled and twiggy Grendel, made by puppeteer Liz Walker, looks like a creature grown from the soil, a quality shared by the music at its most organic.
“What I like about Proper Job is they have astonishing theatrical ideas – and trickery,” says McMillan, who also wrote the script for the company’s Nosferatu in 2015. “It’s like being a magician’s assistant, because you’ll send the words off and then you’ll go and see the thing. You recognise your words but, somehow, you’ve sent them off in black and white and they’ve turned them into Technicolor.”
Beowulf runs until 11 November. Kirklees Year of Music runs until 31 December.
