The theatre of life, Barry Smith's Performance Rites

As its title, Performance Rites (Waterloo Press, 2021), indicates from the off, Barry Smith’s first full collection is very much concerned with the roles we play and the characters we act out in our lives.

In many poems throughout his wide-ranging collection, Smith’s exploration of this theme remains in the background, filtered through a narrative or a scene, offering a latent invitation for the reader to wonder whether things and people are quite as they seem. However, in the book’s title poem, he meets it head-on, as he also does in ‘The Roles We Play’. The opening lines of the latter read as follows:

What drives us time and time again
to place ourselves onstage in the line of fire
in front of the adjudicating panel?

Is it our search for a new identity,
a different self with licence to act
in ways we would never dare or dream?

Or do we lack essential definition,
just a hazy blur of expressions
an empty vessel waiting to be filled...?

This poem’s scenario is an audition for a play. As such, its concerns might appear specific to theatre at first glance, but they expand. In other words, the two questions from the above extract echo and reverberate through the collection.

Nevertheless, as the poem progresses, it also takes on further ramifications, moving on from its initial, more generic doubts, homing in on a social context, as in its closing stanzas…

…you’re howling into the night…
OK, thank you very much,
we’ll let you know if you’re needed for the call back.

And so in a giggle and gaggle you withdraw to the café
sharing your experience over a latte or expresso
- it went really well, I think they liked me –

you’re ready to take on the world in King Lear
or Maria Marten and the Murder at the Red Barn,
inhabiting an unhinged king or scheming villain,

or maybe just back to the yoga and Pilates
waiting for the next audition to strut your stuff
seeking the ministrations of our transient art.

The ending gives us the bathos of exaggerated drama being undercut by everyday language, followed up by the counterpoint of cosy middle-class conversation about the audition (which feels like a pose in itself), all before the mention of pastimes that are implicitly both compared and contrasted with theatre. This leads to an intentionally over-the-top final line shot through with irony.

In summary, the poem works so well due to initially incongruous juxtapositions that apply gradual layers of nuance to the poet’s probing doubts. As a consequence, it provides us with a perfect calling card for the collection as a whole. Barry Smith’s Performance Rites leaves us pondering just who we are and why we act as we do. And in my book, that’s never a bad thing!