Richard Eyre, the former artistic director of the Royal National Theatre, has said of that his is the "one name that seems to me to justify the claim that there is an unbroken tradition in the British theatre going back to the fifteenth century" (Tony Harrison: Loiner, 1997). Harrison's particular strength as a dramatist is his resolute determination to return the poetic voice to the theater, but he returns it in ways that would have seemed quite bewildering to the previous generation who attempted it. Harrison declared in 1987: "Poetry is all I write, whether for books, or readings, or for the National Theatre, or for the opera house and concert hall, or even for TV. All these activities are part of the same quest for a public poetry, though in that word 'public' I would never want to exclude inwardness" (quoted in Bloodaxe Critical Anthologies 1: Tony Harrison, 1991). A wide-ranging...