Cautionary Tales - more performance poetry
Post Christmas lunch.. full to the brim with turkey and Chritmas spirit, what could be better than to amuse the family with a cautionary tale? These poems/monologues were a strange beastie, incredibly popular in the late nineteeth/early twenties century. The master is Hilaire Belloc whose Cautionary Tales are full of examples of people whose actions bring them to a (normally abrupt) end. Although the subject matter is macarbre, these poems make wonderful performance pieces. The lyrical language lends itself to reading outloud and you can use pauses to increase anticipation before revealing the climax. At Brandon Learning Centre, we have poetry reading shows twice a year and I have noticed that the audiences will lean forward as performers pause before the high point of their poems. My father, who is a born performer, used to read "Albert and the Lion" in which the combination of a small boy, a walking stick and a lion leads to a predictable result. The monologue was originall