Chatterton

"Chatterton" is a play adapted from the Ackroyd  book about Thomas Chatterton, a young writer revered by many and said to have been the stimulus and heart of the Romantic movement. He was  born posthumously in Bristol on Nov. 20, 1752. His education was attained at a charity-school but was profound. At the age of fifteen he began writing poetry--said to be stimulated by scraps of old manuscripts his mother found in the church--and he eventually developed an alter ego,  a 15th-century poet, Thomas Rowley--and mastered enough of the style and history of the time  to present these writings as Rowley's. (This fiction was not unusual for the time and was used by Horace Walpole, among many. Chatterton seemed to use this disguise with more intent, selling these writings as historical as well as literary documents.) He eventually moved from Bristol to London where his career foundered and he eventually committed suicide by swallowing arsenic on Aug. 24, 1770.

He was, at his death, astonishingly young for his learning and accomplishments, only eighteen.
While alive, no collection of his poetry had been published.

Keats wrote a sonnet to Chatterton - ''Dear child of sorrow - son of misery'' -and in ''Sleep and Poetry'' alluded clearly enough to Chatterton as one of those
''lone spirits who could proudly sing
Their youth away, and die.''

Keats also inscribed Endymion "to the memory of Thomas Chatterton."

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In ''Resolution and Independence'' Wordsworth invoked the lives of Chatterton and Robert Burns to prove that
"We Poets in our youth begin in gladness;
But thereof come in the end despondency and madness."

Coleridge wrote a poem to his memory.
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Chatterton's genius and his death are commemorated by Percy Bysshe Shelley in Adonais (though its main emphasis is the commemoration of Keats),

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Oscar Wilde's last lecture, in March 1888, was on Chatterton: ''He had the artist's yearning to represent, and if perfect representation seemed to him to demand forgery, he needs must forge: still, this forgery came from the desire of artistic self-effacement.''

But here Chatterton is not a symbol of artistic creation and pain, he is a means to an end. Ackroyd's book--and the play--involve identity, single and multiple, true and false. And reality, single and multiple, true and false. Further complicating the matter, there are four separate threads in the storyline that follow four separate but intersecting versions of the same theme: There is Chatterton himself with an alternative death explanation, an elderly failing plagiarist novelist, a dying unsuccessful poet who may have discovered evidence of a gigantic fraud involving a second alternative Chatterton story, and a question of a series of forged paintings. Any play including these complexities would be ambitious; this play presented by the innovative Quantum Theater in Pittsburgh further complicates the circumstances by dividing the audience into thirds and showing only one third of the play to each, with the separate groups and story lines brought together by occasionally intermixing. And it presents the play in the Trinity Cathedral, with scenes throughout the building which requires the audience to travel in and out, up and down as if the peripatetic had its own value and infused its practitioner with philosophy. (It certainly encouraged admiration; these multiple and mobile sets for three separate audiences was a logistical and timing nightmare that was managed remarkably well.)

And there is a lot of philosophy involved. Ackroyd is interested in the nature of truth and whether it is an absolute--or if it is even attainable. But he is also interested in quality. Why is the excellent forgery of lesser value? If Chatterton had actually written some of Blake's poems, would that detract from them? And, as might be a more current question, is the Western Canon a brand, a creation of time and circumstance--and nothing more?

So not only might our creations be arbitrary but the very standards by which we measure them might be so as well.

It is a difficult debate and the play manages it adequately with capable actors--including the always good Helena Ruoti--and sometimes lovely lines for Chatterton, played well by Jonathan Visser. Indeed the entire cast was very good; Gayle Pazerski in the roles of two young women was especially winning. But the play suffers with the fractional presentations which, while interesting, veils the multiple storylines, particularly for those who are new to it.
The Chatterton section, which I was in, was mostly poetic. The other segments when we intermixed were more plot development. While I did not see the other two segments except when there was a confluence, I do not really know how they were presented or what qualities they contained. While this might be a clever reflection of the play's themes, it was not comfortable. More, it seemed the structure of the play carried additional risks of trapping someone in a subset of the story when he might have been happier or more interested in another. 

The moving of the audience is perhaps best for a younger crowd--which this crowd was not. The Cathedral is lovely but roaming it was work. And, as is true for many churches, the acoustics are atrocious and vary widely depending upon where the speaker and the listener stand.

The dinner was well done, a nice meal by Black Radish Kitchen, and it was fun to talk about the play half way through.

An enjoyable and provocative, if challenging, evening about interesting and important topics, but not made easy by the presentation.