Tony Harrison
Wednesday 9 April 2008 21:45-22:30 (Radio 3)
Philip Dodd presents a special programme devoted entirely to an interview with one of Britain's foremost poets and dramatists, Tony Harrison.
Recently turned 70, Harrison has spend much of the past nine years researching and writing a new theatre piece, Fram, that tells the story of the great Norwegian explorer Fridtjof Nansen who made a bid for the North Pole in the 1890s with a suicidal companion.
He talks about this project and also about a life in writing - that has varied from descriptions of life during the miners' strike and voicing other political concerns to adaptations of the medieval Mystery plays and reworking of Greek drama.
Tony Harrison
Tony Harrison
Photograph by Nobby Clark.
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Tony Harrison - Britain's most important film and theatre poet - came to fame with a series of poems about his Leeds working class family, which used the language of the street in sonnet form. He has gone on to several collections of poems but he's also scripted acclaimed translations of Aeschylus's Oresteia and the Medieval Mystery Plays for the National Theatre, both in verse.
He once declared that "Poetry is all I write, whether for books, readings, for the Theatre or the opera house, or even for TV."
Born in 1937, Tony Harrison's early life was marked by the war - and it marks his poetry too. He's even been a poetic polemicist about the Iraq war.
He talks about poetry, about his background, about the classics and about his new play for the National Theatre, Fram.
Fram is about Fridtjof Nansen, a Norwegian explorer who went on to become one of the early pioneers of the League of Nations, and about a trip he made to the Artic with a suicidal companion in the 1890's.
FRAM, a new play by Tony Harrison, will open in the Olivier Theatre on 17 April (previews from 10th) www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
