On Harauld H – Chloë Clifton-Wright in NYRB:

‘The playwright Harauld Hughes, who was born in 1931 and died in 2006, remains little known and seldom read. His work, which includes Platform (1960), Table (1961), and Shunt (1965), is rarely staged in the US. His groundbreaking collaborations with the Norwegian director Ibssen Anderssen on films such as The Swinging Models (1966), The Especially Wayward Girl (1967), and The Deadly Gust (1973, and still the best film I’ve seen about an evil breeze) have bypassed even the most plugged-in genre aficionados. What’s more, Faber and Faber’s recent three-volume reissue of Hughes’s oeuvres complètes—The Models Trilogy, Four Films, and Plays, Prose, Pieces, Poetry—barely registered on the cultural cardiogram.
So why have people forgotten the recipient of the 1986 Euripides Prize for short-form drama (the only award that entitles the winner to six months’ complimentary mask hire)? Granted, Hughes’s last play, 1972’s Dependence, was roundly dismissed as “more pause than play” and “a new Mount Everest of inwardness” by The Times. Hughes also stopped writing for the cinema after O Bedlam! O Bedlam!—his state-of-the-nation address that sought to combine the supernatural with skiffle. The film, if reports are to be believed, collapsed during production, and we know that, within the cinematic arts, there is no sin greater than failing to make a profit.’

(…)

‘But I have, as Hughes’s first biographer, Augustus Pink, once put it, “the zeal of the convert.” I can’t let so much Hughesian treasure languish unseen in the rancid sod of disinterest. For my first true experience of theater—of what language can do—was the West End revival of Hughes’s Roost (1962).’

(…)

‘When I got back in the car, I told Angus I wouldn’t be buying him any more alcohol and that, in fact, what he was doing was wrong and it wasn’t the only wrong thing I knew he was doing. I would write and partially stage a rock operetta about power imbalance. I would set fire to the chemistry lab. I would leave school. I would sue the school. They would pay me off. I would start a literary magazine. I would give it a one-word title that people would begrudgingly admit was clever once they looked up what it meant. I decided to read everything, to see everything, to marinate myself in poetry and, when necessary, prose.’

(…)

‘Like Harauld Hughes once said, the logistics of marital betrayal takes nearly all the fun out of it.’

(…)

‘His hunting ground is our collective unconscious; he is not fooled by our camouflage; he will shear the wool from our startled peepers; he will pour his heart into our naked eyes. Harauld knows who I am. Harauld knows us all. How else could he write like that?’

Read the article here.

The collective unconsciousness is his hunting ground.

Indeed, how could we live without Harauld Hughes?

Marinate yourself in poetry, as long as it last.