Tony Harrison’s state-of-the-nation poem V is to be performed in the Leeds cemetery that directly inspired the Yorkshire writer, who died last week.
The seeds of V, first printed in the London Review of Books (LRB) in 1985, were sown when Harrison visited his parents’ graves at Holbeck cemetery in Beeston and found the graveyard to be vandalised and daubed with racist graffiti. In the poem Harrison used this location of “the family plot”, where he envisions his own epitaph, to represent a divided and dejected society, juxtaposing the inscriptions on tombstones with spray-painted expletives.
Harrison had encouraged the day of site-specific readings, which was originally planned to mark the 40th anniversary of V but, following his death aged 88, will now also serve as a tribute to the poet who had a long career in theatre himself. There will be two performances of V. A Homecoming at the cemetery on 12 October, with an indoor performance later that day at the Warehouse in Holbeck, run by Slung Low theatre company.
A cast of five including Barrie Rutter, who worked with Harrison, will perform the poem unabridged, directed by Kully Thiarai. “As a working-class teenager growing up in the 80s, much of what Harrison captures in V is a potent reminder of the world I had to navigate,” said Thiarai. “Yet it seems as I read the poem now it demands our attention even more powerfully today, in a world where there is so much division and fear. I feel very privileged to be able to work on this presentation as part of the 40th anniversary and bring the poem back to where it started, enabling us all to look at how we might come together for a more hopeful future.”
Audiences will listen to the reading of the poem on headphones. Promotional material states: “We invite you to experience V through headphones in the very place that inspired it, ‘on Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds’ – re-rooting it in both the seething past and anxious present, and rediscovering the beauty, strength and hope at its heart.”
Harrison’s epic poem, running at 3,763 words, was published as a book in 1985 by Bloodaxe. Two years later, a film of V – with Harrison walking among the graves – was directed by Richard Eyre and broadcast on Channel 4, to tabloid outrage thanks in part to what the poem itself calls “a repertoire of blunt four-letter curses” as Harrison surveyed the miners’ strike, unemployment, racist abuse and football clashes. In November, the LRB will release a vinyl recording of V read by Maxine Peake in Highgate Cemetery.