Drama
I Wonder, 1968
A play by Adrian Henri and Michael Kustow, first performed at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, on November 11, 1968 as part of the ICA’s centenary celebration of Apollinaire.
Directed by Michael Kustow
Designed by Derek Boshier
Music by The Liverpool Scene
I Want, written with Nell Dunn, published by Jonathon Cape, 1972
I want is the story of a love affair lasting more than fifty years. Meeting as adolescents in a Liverpool bookshop – he a brilliant scholarship boy, she a convent schoolgirl – Albert Hodgkin and Dolly Argyle begin a secret summer courtship. As the cultural difference between them is an erotic stimulant, so it is also a barrier, infusing their relationship with intense excitement yet always preventing its fulfilment.
A good redbrick degree fails to secure Albert an academic job, and he settles for factory employment and unemployment, marriage, holidays in Blackpool and Milford Haven. Dolly spends a year in France, embarks on the London season, sleeps with the rich and famous, travels to Fez and Moscow. Letters, postcards and infrequent meetings sustain a long and constant attachment which outlasts war and social change – yet never matures into commitment.
I Want is a dialogue between two characters – and two writers. As to be expected from this exhilarating partnership of poet and novelist, the book is both lyrical and compelling to read. Its unusual structure – fragments of correspondence and conversation, different social perspectives in the narrative – heightens its pathos and its poetry.
Nell Dunn was born in London in 1936 and educated in a convent. Her first book, Up the Junction, sold over half a million copies and was filmed for both television and cinema. Her subsequent books include Talking to Women (a series of interviews with women) and Poor Cow (a bestseller that became a major film).
Yesterday’s Girl, Granada Television, 1973
The TV play was recorded in front of a studio audience and opens with Adrian Henri singing the title song Yesterday’s Girl. The play develops the theme of the song in a series of dramatised flashbacks, linked by Henri himself, who narrates this true love story.
Three actors play Henri over a six-year period. While still an art teacher, Henri has an affair with one of his students, but eventually she marries someone else. Three years later they meet again and become lovers, but once more drift apart. Another three years pass and Henri, now a roving minstrel and poet with a pop group, meets Liz again…
The music was written by Adrian Henri and performed by members of the Liverpool group Sticky George.
The play was directed by Peter Walker and produced by Dennis Woolf.
‘It’s a love poem, an experiment in auto-biography, a mixture of theatre and rock music. Six years of my life in half an hour.’
Adrian Henri, quoted in a 1973 press release for Yesterday’s Girl.
The Big Feller, 1979
“I suppose like most people of my generation, I really found out about Ubu through an issue of a magazine called The Evergreen Review, I think it was Evergreen 13. It was called What is Pataphysics? (…)
Alfred Jarry did some woodcuts of this grotesque figure that he’d invented who was based on his particularly gross and sadistic physics master at school. There were a number of rather sensitive, poetic kind of boys that he used to pick on very regularly and they used to amuse themselves at night by making up adventures in which this person – who was called Père Hebe – became King of Poland by murdering all his friends.
Ubu, I think, was meant to personify all the bourgeois vices. He usually has an umbrella and a bowler hat and a moustache and he also has this kind of infinity symbol which is painted on his stomach. One thing I like about him, I think, is that despite the fact he is a monster in a way, he is also somehow a survivor. In every one of the plays terrible things happen to him and somehow he bounces back and he is always coming back at the end saying “Where shall we go now?
There was a performance of Ubu Roi at the University, and I played Ubu in it. I can’t remember the date – early 1960s though. I had a costume made for it. I was very large then, and even then I was padded. And of course it was quite a vigorous production and there were battle scenes and everybody had wooden swords. I was belaboured with these wooden swords and jumped off the stage and ran around. I should have lost a little weight but I didn’t.”
Adrian Henri interviewed in Adrian Henri, Paintings 1953-1998, Walker Art Gallery (2000), p. 54.
Click here to read an extract from The Big Feller
The Husband,
the Wife and the Stranger, 1973
BBC Television, directed by Gerry Mill,
music by Joji Hirota and Andy Roberts
Extract from the first page of the original script:
Black and white. Pan across debris of a picnic behind titles. Among the litter, find some crushed carnations. Only the flowers are in colour. End pan on the body and finally the face of the dead husband. The breadknife that has killed him lies on the ground nearby. Mix from this face, to colour C.U. of the wife, in neutral space. (i.e. not in the setting).
Caption:
The Wife
Wife:
Believe me, I was so happy with him. Our first holiday together, our first few days away for over a year, since our honeymoon. He’s made everything perfect for me. Such a happy afternoon…
The Wakefield Mysteries
Staged at Pontefract Castle, 1988
Published by Methuen Theatre Classic, 1991
Adrian Henri was commissioned to do a modern adaptation of the medieval Mystery Plays for Wakefield’s 1988 centenary celebrations. Sixteen hours of thirty-two rhymed playlets, written in the fifteenth century by an unknown author, were compressed into twin two-hour dramas of powerful lyricism. All the simplicity of emotion expressed through the natural vernacular speech is retained in these renderings. What emerges is the epic impact of a cycle that spans the dramatic spectrum from Creation to Last Judgement.
Together with music by Andy Roberts, this is an ideal play for performance by schools, professionals and amateur groups alike.
‘Henri has gone for the heart and gut of the original bawdy, satirical Middle English… , dismantling it to create a new, popular poetry, catching natural speech rhythms, dialect, song and rhyme to tell a truth that’s both earthy and celebratory, and sings clear as a bell… its text should be grabbed by all enlightened drama teachers.’
Norma Cohen, Times Educational Supplement
Originally produced as a site specific promenade, with the plays performed on alternate weekday evenings, and end-to-end at weekends. The plays are, however, performable in any large space, indoor or out, separate or together, and the stage directions adapted accordingly, though the principle of certain areas having particular associations – Eden/The Baptism, the ‘Baddies’ (Pharaoh, Herod, Pilate) – should be kept as much as possible. Similarly, though I wrote the play for a very large cast, the numbers could be varied considerably.
‘We live in a secular society in which religion no longer plays the all-embracing role it did in the Middle Ages ; I hope, nevertheless, that the power, the drama and the humour of these familiar stories will be as relevant to present-day audiences. What the plays are about, for me, is above all man and woman’s struggle to choose between dark and light, envy and humility, pride and compassion.’
Adrian Henri, introduction to The Wakefield Mysteries, Methuen Theatre Classic, 1991.