EMILY DICKINSON & I

FORWARD TO THE BOOK
by Margaret Drabble

I first saw Edie Campbell’s portrayal of Emily Dickinson in an intimate theatre in Guildford, and vividly remember the excitement of that evening. The performance was brave, true and touching, and the unfolding story was easy to follow and gripping to watch. It is a story of obsession, identification, admiration and respect. The background information about Dickinson’s life and work is conveyed so subtly and effortlessly that one realises only later how much has been packed into this short and personal evocation of one of America’s greatest but most enigmatic poets. The playwright has managed to dramatise, without betrayal or exaggeration, the life of a recluse. whose outward life was remarkable for its lack of events, but whose inner life was of a fierce, at times melodramatic, intensity. Using only the simplest of props, she manages to evoke the physical presence of the poet, and to suggest the small Amherst community in which she lived. Like Dickinson herself, she has pared down her message to its essentials. Technically, this is a remarkable achievement.

Edie Campbell discloses, within the play itself, both the nature of her obsession, and her long struggle to find an appropriate approach to her subject matter – an approach which took nearly twenty years to discover, and which involved many false starts and periods of despondency. Campbell’s own presence on stage and in the text is not intrusive or indulgent, for it appears as a necessary embodiment of her search. Recent biographers, such as Richard Holmes in his pioneering work Footsteps, have created a precedent for using the difficulties, even the failures of research, as part of the plot of their work: this play carries the process one step further, by including the person of the seeker as a physical image of the one who is sought. The quest for Dickinson is interwoven with Campbell’s questioning of the artistic role, and the contradictions of the artistic temperament – a temperament that paradoxically combines an urge to display and an urge to withdraw and conceal.

The decision to restrict the use of the poet’s voice to the words of her own poems and letters must be correct. Inventing dialogue or commentary for such an eccentric and powerful writer would have been an impossible task, for her use of language is unique, and any imitation could only emerge as parody. The poems incorporated in the play are carefully chosen from the wealth of Dickinson’s oeuvre, and will encourage the reader or spectator to seek for more. The poems are brilliant, elliptical, condensed: each one requiring further reflection. They shine out like jewels from the text, which provides a fine setting for them. Edie Campbell has managed to pay a very personal tribute to the writer whose work has haunted her for so long, while at the same time allowing her to speak for herself, in her own words. It is a very ingenious solution to an unusual dramatic and biographical problem. The solution was found with the support and help of friends and colleagues, whose suggestions are incorporated into the fabric and narrative of the play, but at the end, the final impression is of the poet herself, speaking out loud and clear, across time, to each new audience. And this is what the playwright would wish.

Margaret Drabble
January, 2005

Back to productions