PLAYS
“In 1961, Ted wrote: ‘I’m just finishing a play---a real play. No resemblance to that other at all. 8 people wake up on a desert island without memory---or with only floating fragments of memory'. Can you identify this play?".
This is a description of the play called The Calm which is set on a desert island and does have 8 amnesiac characters, plus a 'Helper'. Fragments of the typescript are in the British Library, and fragments of manuscript (used by Sylvia as scrap paper for drafts of some of her late poems) are at Smith College, Northampton, MA. There are also fragments at Emory University, Atlanta, USA.
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"In a letter to Richard Murphy (LTH 9 March 1965) , Ted wrote: 'And on writing radio plays. I’ve brought one long work out of it---a drama in about 7 scenes, highly poetical & theatrical, which has been amusing to compose & which may have hidden virtues. Most of its visible qualities are vices. It’s a sort of Alchemical Marriage, I now realise, though it began as a grand demolishing of in-laws’. Can you identify this play?".
This is probably Difficulties of a Bridegroom but it is hard to be sure. The BBC script which I have is only a short 30 minute play in just one act, although music breaks it into smaller 'scenes'. This was broadcast on BBC 3, 21 Jan 1963. Another broadcast on 17 Oct. 1965, is entitled Difficulties of a Bridegroom but consisted of poems ('Nightfall' and 'The Knight') extracted from a play which the announcer introduced as a stage play subtitled "A marriage in 17 murals".
Ted told Ekbert Faas (The Unaccommodated Universe, Black Sparrow Press, Santa Barbara, 1980. p.212) that Difficulties of a Bridegroom was "part of a long waddling verse drama...partly based on Andrea's The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz.", which included 'Ghost Crabs' (THCP 149; originally broadcast as 'Nightfall'), 'Waking' (?: Possibly Gog 1'), 'Gog' (THCP 161) and parts of Crow Wakes (1971).
Later in 1965, Ted told Ben Sonnenberg that his 'Alchemical Marriage' would take about and hour-and-a-half to perform. (LTH Summer 1965). And he told Daniel and Helga Huws that he had written "a 13 scene cave-drama" (LTH 26 Sept. 1965).
Cave Birds (1978) has the subtitle 'An Alchemical Cave Drama' but the first Cave Birds poems were not published until 1974 and the whole sequence was first broadcast only in 1975. It is unlikely that the cave-drama Ted referred to in 1965 was Cave Birds but I think it is quite likely that Plato's cave is the metaphor which Ted was using in all these alchemical works. The Chemical Wedding of Christian Rosencreutz, which Ted told Ekbert Faas he was immersed in all that time, was very much a NeoPlatonic alchemical text.
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"Does a manuscript for The House of Taurus exist?"
I have seen no manuscript or fragments of The House of Taurus. Sylvia Plath, in a letter to her mother on 7 Oct. 1959, wrote that the play was finished and that it was based on The Bacchae of Euripides "only set in a modern industrial setting". She noted in her journal that she had started to type it (1 Nov. 1959); and that Ted had finished about 84 pages (11 Nov. 1959). But on 9 July 1960 she wrote to her mother that Ted had "scrapped The House of Taurus which was really only a rough rather unpoetic draft, or redraft, of a theme from the Bacchae with an antiquated social message"* * * * * * * *