Scottish Play

… a penny Poet whose first making was the miserable stolne story of Macdeol, or Macdobeth, or Mac-somewhat, for I am sure a Mac it was, though I never had the maw to see it …

William Kemp, Kemp's Nine Days’ Wonder, 1600

Others would rather stammer, and beg your pardon,

Than name that thunderbolt of opera seria

Conducted by the ‘gentle sorcerer’, Gluck,

Which struck the national alto, Kathleen Ferrier,

Although she tweaked the curtain, thrice, for luck

In 1953, at Covent Garden.

A ‘wooden actress’ – that would be our Kath,

Strumming the plyboard lyre; but when she sang,

So mixed of man and woman, love and death,

Sacred, heimlich, and operatic breath,

The house in high forgetfulness forgot

Whom it should mourn or pity, and for what.

And though the wings spared her the customary

Backslap and ‘Break a leg!’ for her own good,

Her ca-cancerous right hip snapped where she stood –

As she recalled in hospital, pillowed and propped

In eiderdown, I wanted a soft manhole

To open up immediately and devour me –

Still, still, she made them carry her back on stage

To sing his tortured air or aria,

The plum ‘Che farò senza Euridice’,

Which Gluck implored the original Orfeo,

A bull castrato, to perform ‘as if

You’re having two-thirds of your leg sawn off’.

MICK IMLAH