Seize the Fire: A Version of Prometheus Bound

by Tom Paulin (Adaptor), Aeschylus

After the success of The Riot Act, his version of Sophocles's Antigone, Tom Paulin turned his formidable powers of transformation on Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound. Commissioned by the Open University, Paulin produced a reworking of the myth, deploying a fluent and sinewy diction laced with the vernacular. As drama it is a brilliant object lesson in what is inessential. Plot and character, even action, are secondary to a gripping, inventive and quasi-futuristic treatment of burning contemporary issues - feminism, the corruption of power and authoritarian politics.

52 pages, Kindle Edition

About the author

Tom (Thomas Neilson) Paulin is a poet, critic and playwright. He was raised in Belfast in Northern Ireland where his father was the headmaster of a grammar school, and his mother was a doctor. He was educated at Hull University and Lincoln College, Oxford.

He lectured in English at the University of Nottingham from 1972 until 1989, and was Reader in Poetry from 1989 until 1994. He was a director of Field Day Theatre Company in Derry, Northern Ireland. He has also taught at the University of Virginia and was Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Reading. He is now G. M. Young Lecturer in English at Hertford College, Oxford. He is a well-known broadcaster and a regular member of the panel for the BBC Television arts programme 'Newsnight Review'.

Much of his early poetry reflects the political situation in Northern Ireland and the sectarian violence which has beset the province since the late 1960s. His collections include A State of Justice (1977), winner of a Somerset Maugham Award; The Strange Museum (1980), which won the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize; Liberty Tree (1983) and the acclaimed Fivemiletown (1987), which explores Northern Irish Protestant culture and identities. Later collections include Walking a Line (1994) and The Wind Dog (1999), which was shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. The Invasion Handbook (2002) is the first instalment of an epic poem about the Second World War. His latest collection is The Road to Inver: Translations, Versions and Imitations 1975-2003 (2004), which brings together work from four decades.

His non-fiction includes Ireland and the English Crisis (1984), Minotaur: Poetry and the Nation State (1992), The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998), a critical study of the nineteenth-century essayist and radical, and (with Amit Chaudhuri), D. H. Lawrence and "Difference": The Poetry of the Present (2003), a study exploring Lawrence's position as a 'foreigner' in the English canon.

Tom Paulin is editor of The Faber Book of Political Verse (1986) and The Faber Book of Vernacular Poetry (1990). His plays include The Riot Act: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone, which toured Ireland in 1984, and All the Way to the Empire Room which was broadcast by the BBC in 1994. His latest book is The Secret Life of Poems (2007).

Tom Paulin lives in Oxford with his wife and two sons.

Reviews

[Phillip · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is specifically a review of Tom Paulin's Seize the Fire (which, for some reason, GoodReads wants to conflate with the Aeschylus Prometheus Bound, even though Paulin's version is a distinctly different play). Seize the Fire is a very condensed version, much more compact and efficient than the Aeschylus play. The edition I read was 65 pages, but only the right hand pages had any print on them, so it was closer the 33. While Paulin goes through everything the Aeschylus plot does, he does it more quickly and efficiently. For instance, the interaction between Prometheus and Hermes only takes a few pages, whereas in Aeschylus it is roughly the last quarter of the play.

The other thing Paulin does is modernizes many of the references. He describes Zeus' kingdom as a modern surveillance state with censorship and political spectacle, and Prometheus prophesies a military coup with tanks rolling onto Zeus' lawn.
https://youtu.be/cZ4Y6353LIA