'A Turn Outside' - a play by Stevie Smith

and a musical adaptation by Simon Rowland-Jones
 

The original play
I'll start with an account of Stevie Smith’s radio play, which was first performed in 1959. It  is set in a recording studio, a place that she was familiar with from reading her poems on Radio 3 in the 1950’s, and consists of a dialogue between Stevie and a character who is simply called the interlocutor. 

He is apparently a stranger who is at the same time familiar, he calls her dear, and seems to know her poems. He suggests that many of the poems she is reading have tunes to go with them : ‘as if you had some idea of music when you wrote them’.

She agrees, and offers to read him a poem : ‘Voice from the Tomb’, which could go with two hymn tunes, either ‘Jerusalem the Golden’ or ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains.’  He chooses ‘Greenland’s Icy Mountains’ and she digresses on how a passage from Macaulay’s ‘Horatius’ or a vulgar rhyme about Uncle George and Aunty Mabel would also fit the same tune.  

 She goes on to read another poem  about death, which begins 'Silence and tears are convenient,' which she tells him was inspired by a advert is a clerical outfitters for a cloak ‘eminently suitable for conducting funeral services’. She and the familiar stranger seem to establish a rapport, he calls her his good girl, she asks for a sip from a bottle he carries, ‘ such a delicious colour', and they talk about the poems and their tunes, he recognises that the poem ‘Silence and Tears’ goes to the tune of 'Who killed Cock Robin'. More poems follow, including the ‘Repentance of Lady T’, which stems from the liturgy, and becomes a sort of recitative. All the while he tries to come closer to Stevie, but she telling him keep to keep away, she just wants to go on reading her poems.  The serious tone lapses as she discusses the question of copyright, whether it is possible that she might have taken a tune from someone else.

Stevie begins to recognise that she has met the interlocutor  before, in woods, by a river,  in a classical landscape, a place where Persephone had picked  flowers before she had been picked out by the King of the Underworld and taken to live in the dark kingdom of the dead. Stevie remembers riding with the stranger that she now recognises: he was in the poem, 'I rode with my Darling in the Dark Wood at Night'. He says 'I was your true darling... do you think I am attractive?'. Stevie admits she finds death attractive, but says 'and yet, I say ... would you mind not coming any closer.'  He asks her 'to take a turn outside' with him, 'bye and bye,' she says. He says she has no choice, and then he kisses her and she remembers her poem, 'Longing for Death because of Feebleness'. After this she reads a chilling description of a frozen winter scene 'by Breugel out of Hecate'. They discuss the morality of various views of death. Stevie would rather believe that death is 'nox est perpetua una dormienda'  (one eternal night for sleeping). She reads the poem' My heart goes out to my creator in love/ who gave me death as an end and remedy ...' The familiar stranger kisses her for the third time, she takes another sip from his bottle and all at once seems to feels the room is disgusting, she hates the blank walls and harsh lights can't wait to get outside, why has he been so slow, so lackadaisical  ...

This dialogue between Stevie and death shows how she finds him fascinating yet frightening, is enticed and repelled by him, how, when she chooses to remember, she knows she has met him everywhere, that he is always waiting to take her for 'a turn outside'. In this dramatic encounter with death she is witty and amusing yet disturbing and profound. Although her interest in death is out of the ordinary, I think her poems echo the conflicting feelings about death that lie, largely ignored and usually unspoken, in many other people's minds. 'For Stevie, death was a friend and she used to say that the notion of death coming when called cheered her up so much that she was able to face life.' (Me Again)

This brief description necessarily leaves very much out, but the full text can be found in 'Me Again, Uncollected Writings of Stevie Smith,' edited by Jack Barbera and William Mc Brien and published by Virago in 1981.Rahter oddly, the play includes passages  taken from her third novel The Holiday; for instance in the novel she rides with her cousin, in the play she remembers riding with the interlocutor, to a place on the edge of the sea where the light is classical, eternal, and he will not let her pick the flowers, 'Do you want to raise the devil? he says.'

The original performance

'A Turn Outside' was first broadcast on the BBC Third programme on 23rd May 1959. Janet Richer read the part of Stevie Smith and Hugh Burden the interlocutor. The play was produced by Douglas Cleverdon. Stevie would have liked to read and sing her role in the play, but the producer advised against it, saying that to come over well on radio you needed to have a trained voice.

Musical adaptations of Stevie's work

The composers Elizabeth Lutyens composed musical settings for some of Stevie's poems, and in 1949 there was a performance by the singer Hedli Anderson of these poems. The audience was enthusiastic, and Barbera and O'Brien in their biography wonder if this encouraged Stevie to incorporate more singing and chanting in the performance of her poems as time passed. In 1967 some of Elisabeth Lutyens settings  were included in a performance of poetry and music, however it seems doubtful whether Stevie actually liked the settings, she apparently had very demanding requirements and often disliked professional performances of her poems..

Musical adaptations by Simon Rowland-Jones

The composer Simon Rowland Jones  has always been interested in Stevie Smith's writing. When he was a child an aunt used to quote her poems.  He is a  friend of Hermione Lee, who was the editor of a selection of Stevie Smiths poems and prose ('Stevie Smith: A Selection', Faber and Faber, 1983). Simon Rowland Jones composed a setting for seven of Stevie’s poems:  The River Debden, Frog Prince, Not Waving but Drowning, Harold’s leap, River Humber, She Said …, and The River God.  He and Hermione Lee performed  this 'River God Sequence' in the late 80’s at various venues, including the Cheltenham Festival.

More recently, Simon Rowland Jones was given a copy of 'Me Again' and was fascinated by ‘A Turn Outside’. He liked the idea of working on a more substantial setting of Stevie’s work and adapted this play for Dame Josephine Barstow and it was first performed at the First North Norfolk Music Festival which was held in the Church at South Creake in 2005. The work had its London premiore at the Wigmore Hall  in October 2007.

He says, 'In my musical adaptation the role of the interlocutor is eliminated leaving Stevie Smith Centre Stage. The interlocutor's ominous presence, remains, however, partly revealed through the music and elsewhere implied by Stevie's responses to unspoken questions. Stevie Smith was often given to singing her poems to hymn tunes and familiar songs, even if the words didn't always quite fit. In my adaptation of the play, the poems are both read and sung, sometimes to original music and sometimes set to tunes (with variations) that Stevie herself was known to have used'.

 Performances at the North Norfolk Festival - July 2005 and the Wigmore  Hall - October 2007

 The performances of 'A Turn Outside' made me realize how much  music is an integral part of Stevie's poetry. This should make it very suitable  for musical accompaniment and interpretation, but, on the other hand, it must have been difficult for the composer to set these poems to the tunes she suggested which, she admitted, do not quite fit. It was enlightening to hear an  musician of the calibre of Simon Rowland-Jones, inspired by Stevie's work,  performing this adaptation of her work with other excellent musicians, and I really enjoyed both performances. 

If you would like to find out more about the  musicians who took part click here

Final reflections on Norfolk

 Stevie Smith loved Norfolk, and often stayed here with friends, where she enjoyed swimming and walking along the coast.  She wrote in a letter to a friend in June 1937 ‘ There are parts round the Norfolk coast, that look like nobody had ever been there before just dunes and sand and sea and nobody at all.’ (letter to Denis Johnston 28 June 1937 quoted from P 194 of ‘ Stevie Smith – A Critical Biography By Frances Spalding’ )

I had never been to Norfolk before coming to the North Norfolk Festival to hear ‘A Turn Outside, but I certainly intend to come again. To explain why, I'll show you a photograph I took at Brancaster Beach. It was a wonderful place to be in the interval before that familiar stranger comes who will take us all, eventually, for ‘a turn outside’. Maybe the thrill of being in these vast and almost blank landscapes is that it suggests the beauty of being taken out of ourselves before we are committed to the fearful and irrevocable step of taking  'a turn outside' for ever.

Anne Bryan

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