BLOODY POETRY
Byron–in literature and in the popular mythology of his day the “doer” to Shelley’s “seer,” charming rogue and heroic revolutionary–comes off as a cynical, burnt-out libertine, diseased by alcoholism, syphilis, and sexist arrogance. The women we meet are Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, Shelley’s lover, and her half-sister Claire Clairemont, mother of Byron’s child (though she’s also sleeping with Shelley, and though the bisexual Byron seems to have his eye on both Mary and Shelley himself). Both women are abused, embittered, and all too dependent victims of love-=potential case studies from a pre-Victorian Smart Women, Foolish Choices.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In a play that purports to illustrate how the aspirations of its characters are undone by flaws in their personalities, the soulful and the sordid elements need to be equally credible. That is where Bloody Poetry–both Brenton’s script and Blind Parrot’s U.S. premiere production–falls short: its account of the characters’ personal failings is strong, but their poetry, their great achievement, sags. None of the actors, though they’ve done good work on other occasions, have the vocal size for the language; Larry Neumann Jr., as Byron, comes closest to matching the text, but he’s such a dried-up, bitter old bitch from the start that we can’t understand how anyone could take him seriously anyplace but on the printed page. Director Norma E. Saldivar’s plodding pacing exacerbates the script’s tendency to grow tedious, as the procession of sorrows–the suicide of Shelley’s wife, Byron’s betrayal of Claire, the deaths of both Claire’s and Mary’s children–continues down a woeful, finally purposeless, path. “They learn in suffering what they teach in song,” Shelley wrote in Julian and Maddalo. Bloody Poetry lacks the song, and so the teaching.
