“This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.

The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.

...

I simply cannot see where there is to get to.”

~ Sylvia Plath, The Moon and the Yew Tree

For close to three months during the first half of 2020, Launceston’s regal theatrical venue, the Princess Theatre, remained dark. A full annual program of performances and concerts, ranging the full gamut from children’s shows to opera, simply dissolved into empty space. The reason for this dramatic halt was easy to acknowledge as much as it impossible to comprehend: a global pandemic.

It is tradition in large theatres, during periods of “darkness” (ie, when no shows are scheduled) for a ghost light to be left on, softly illuminating the stage. Last year, the ghost light remained on at the Princess Theatre for 165 days – the longest period of inactivity in the theatre’s history.

Theatres are, even when empty, magic spaces – inherent with the ghost of possibility, of creative vigour and colour. Adding insult to injury, the Princess Theatre was plunged into darkness on the eve of its 100^th birthday – it first opened for performances in 1921. For several decades it served as a cinema, being remodelled as a venue for live performance in the early 1970s. With its art deco exterior, it is the ornate and beautiful centrepiece of Launceston’s thriving theatre scene. Within, eight different companies populate any given (pandemic-free) year free with an eclectic collection of performances.

For two years prior to the pandemic, actor Michael Edgar and I busied ourselves devising and performing “Grand Poetry Evenings”, so-called because they were held at the Hotel Grand Chancellor, a five-minute walk from the Princess Theatre. They began with a brief reading we organised to support Michael’s performance of his one-man show Before the Fetch, a celebration of the life and work of Dylan Thomas. Each Grand Evening has a theme or binding idea: so far, among others, we have celebrated Grumpy Poets, Comic Verse, Poets of Faith, Tasmanian Poetry and Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of Verse.

When the coronavirus pandemic arrived early in 2020, next on our schedule was an evening celebrating the life and work of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. It was initially scheduled for May but of course, with the advent of Tasmania’s statewide lockdown, it was delayed.

What this meant is that an evening that might have comprised simply selecting and reading our favourite poems by the two (interspersed with the occasional biographical nugget) now had the scope to develop into something rather more involved. This manifested itself, if nothing else, in the fact that we had more time to read about Plath and Hughes, and the more we read the more fascinated we became.

Specifically, I was drawn to the last eight months of Sylvia’s life –simultaneously the most intensely creative and deeply traumatic months she ever experienced. As we know, out of the trauma emerged some of her most complex and achingly beautiful poems – “Daddy”, “Burning the Letters”, “Letter in November”, “Sheep in Fog” – but there are dozens of them, all of which burn off the page, all scribbled furiously in those quiet pre-dawn hours when she preferred to write. In, perhaps, the embrace of her own ghost light.

The script for our performance of these and other works became something inherently shaped by the unexpected gift of time we’d been given to work on it. The usual running time for our Grand Evenings was an hour, give or take a few minutes; beavering away in isolation, reading poem after poem, cross-referencing poems with biographical moments, Michael and I developed roughly an hour of material each, almost independently of each other. In our research, we stumbled across two absolute gifts: “Last Letter”, a long unpublished poem by Ted Hughes which was found among his papers some 10 years after his death, and which sets out in beautiful pain his version of the last weekend of Sylvia’s life; and the brief memoir Giving Up: the Last Days of Sylvia Plath, by Jillian Becker. Both of these sources revealed things we had not previously known – that Ted and Sylvia met on the Friday before her death, a meeting he left with the impression that there was a chance they might reconcile to the point where he cancelled his appointments for a fortnight in hopes of sharing time with her away from London, “on holiday, to the coast, some place we had not been”. On the Saturday night before she died, Sylvia left the house where she was staying (with Jillian Becker and her family) to meet a man for a drink, identity unknown. In a strange way, we have the pandemic to thank for delivering these revelations to us.

I was deeply moved by the letter Hughes wrote to Sylvia’s mother Aurelia a month after Sylvia’s death. “I don’t want ever to be forgiven,” he wrote; “… if there is an eternity, I am damned in it.”* I am keenly aware of the debate that rages over his treatment of her and his role in shaping her posthumous legacy; Facebook posts about working on this project quickly attracted comments that condemned him. I strongly suspect that feminists are in the difficult position of having to demonstrate enmity towards him, and not without good reason; yet the key role he played in shaping her legacy, and ensuring that she would have her place as a major poet of the 20^th century, is undeniable. It is a role he maintained, and protected tirelessly, for the rest of his life.

Between many meetings and over many cups of coffee and fudge brownies, Michael and I shaped our script into something that honoured both poets and married their tumultuous lives to their brilliant work in approximately 75 minutes. This meant addressing the temtpation to include that poem or this poem simply because we thought it was brilliant, and so many excellent poems were left out.

Tentatively, live performances recommenced at the Princess Theatre at the end of of August, 2020; as one of a quartet of performers, I was fortunate enough to turn the ghost light off. In fact, we did it twice – demand for the performance was such that two shows were scheduled, for the afternoon and evening of Friday, August 28. The performance shifted from the Grand Chancellor to the Princess Theatre to be used as something of a canary in the coal mine, to test the theatre’s Covid safety protocols -– staggered arrival times, contact tracing requirements, strictly capped audience numbers (which, it must be said, helped drive demand for the two shows) and patrons asked to follow chequerboard-style seating patterns – maintaining two or three empty seats between them.

At the beginning of each show, the four of us – I was Narrator, Michael Edgar and Alex Wenn playing Older and Younger Ted, and Debbie Parish playing Sylvia –gathered in the shapeless glow of that ghost light. We burned with the energy of being back on stage, on the cusp of sharing some of the most incredible poetry and the moving lives of two extraodinarily gifted but deeply flawed artists.

However briefly, we replaced the pandemic with magnificent poetry, poetry that traced the soaring beauty and the unknowable depths of human experience: of love, of parenthood, of anger, of loss and grief. All across the empty page of possibility and provocation that is a theatre.

As one we clicked our fingers. Thanks to some theatre magic, the ghost light flicked off. After such a period of silence, ghosts made way for voices.

* All direct quotes are from the letter to Aurelia Plath, dated, 15 March 1963. In Letters of Ted Hughes, selected and edited by Christopher Reid, Faber and Faber, 2007.