Emily Dickinson & I, the journey of a portrayal is featured in the chapter ‘Dickinson in England and Ireland’ in The International Reception of Emily Dickinson Eds. Domhnall Mitchell and Maria Stuart, Continuum Books, 2009.

[The excerpt follows a discussion of the fictional representation of Emily Dickinson in the novel Possession by A. S. Byatt:]

“A.S. Byatt’s fictional dialogue with Emily Dickinson has an indirect link with another artistic response to the poet: the one-woman play Emily Dickinson and I, written by Edie Campbell and Jack Lynch and first performed at the Mill Studio, Guilford, Surrey, in December 1999. The foreword to the published play (Campbell and Lynch 2005) is provided by Byatt’s sister and fellow novelist, Margaret Drabble and describes her response to that first production. Drabble is particularly attuned to the links between Campbell’s strategy for resolving her problems with staging Dickinson (her decision to place herself, wrestling with the material of Dickinson’s life, at the very centre of the play) and recent developments within the genre of biography in which the biographer ‘uses the difficulties, even the failures of research, as part of the plot of their work’(Drabble, Foreward). Subtitled ‘The Journey of a Portrayal’, Campbell and Lynch’s production charts the long, fourteen-year process during which Campbell attempted to find an adequate dramatic form through which to give voice to Dickinson (moving from a nine-hour version of the play, utilizing numerous poems and letters) towards the pared down, minimalist intensity of the final play. According to Campbell’s co-writer and partner Jack Lynch, a breakthrough came with the realization that the core of the work was ‘a play about a play that never happened, a meditation on writing, acting, and getting into Emily Dickinson’s dress’ (Lynch, 17). Thus, the play opens with Campbell walking onto a bare stage, carrying a large pile of papers:

SHE TURNS CS; FACES AUDIENCE; DROPS PAPERS ONTO THE FLOOR; SLIGHT PAUSE

There she is.

PAUSE

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson.

Poet.

The papers represent the copious research of many years, the (ultimately) unspoken lines and unperformed gestures that Campbell has carried with her during that time. They occupy a central place in the play as a physical embodiment of the ‘play that never happened,’ present on stage, and yet necessarily absent from the drama that follows. The initial gesture of throwing them down registers as both an act of release (allowing Campbell, finally, to move forward) and as a poignant example (resonant for any writer, academic or creative) of the particular challenge of representing this poet’s life and work. What follows is a play in which the difficulty of the material, the resistance of Dickinson’s life and work to narrative shaping, becomes, in itself, the organizing principle of the piece. The stage becomes the very space in which Campbell dramatizes her difficulty and declares her own personal and professional investment in the work. Unlike William Luce’s infamous The Belle of Amherst (a shadow over any subsequent attempt to dramatize Dickinson and one that Campbell addresses within the play) Emily Dickinson and I strives to open out, rather than close down the interpretative possibilities of the work and the life. Like the poetry itself, it achieves this by foregoing coherence and expansion in favour of a condensed style, one in which the narrative is fragmented by the incursions into Dickinson’s ‘story’ of Campbell’s own family narrative. Like a dramatic embodiment of the Dickinson dash, the play jumps between time and place, juxtaposing Campbell’s personal history and Dickinson’s life and work, in subtle, suggestive ways. At one point, the death of Campbell’s own father (a charismatic figure, but one often absent from her childhood) is juxtaposed with one of Dickinson’s letters on her father’s death (L414), in a way that allows both deaths (and both relationships) to inform each other. The play ends where it started, with Campbell asking Lynch for help with shaping her various drafts into a realisable play:

Sunday morning.

Eleven o’clock.

I gather all my versions of Emily in my arms,

walk into the centre of the living room,

and throw them on the floor in

frustration.

‘There she is,’

I say.

‘And that,’

says Jack,

‘is your opening line!’

Possession and Emily Dickinson and I, represent two of the most significant creative responses to Dickinson within England in recent years.”

_________________

Maria Stuart, ‘Dickinson in England and Ireland’ in The International Reception of Emily Dickinson, Continuum, 2009, pp 217-218

By kind permission of the Continuum International Publishing Group