Tom Paulin: Combative poet heads north with tale of rage and revenge

The story is by turns intensely emotional, shocking, gripping, appalling and cathartic. Anyone tackling a new version of the play must have the language of hatred, rage and nightmarish vengeance at their fingertips.

Alone and betrayed by Jason, her husband, Medea unleashes horrific acts of revenge on her enemies, and in the heat of her fury turns her children into both assassins and victims.

Yet this abused and wretched woman has to be portrayed sympathetically,

as worthy of love and loyalty.

Medea is one of the most powerful and arresting female roles ever created.

Tom Paulin – one of our most celebrated poets and critics – enjoys revisiting the classic plays of antiquity and bringing them to a contemporary audience. He set about writing his own version of Medea and had finished it before sending it to Halifax-based Northern Broadsides and its director Barrie Rutter.

In 1984 he did a version of Antigone for Field Day in Londonderry and was commissioned by the Open University to do a version of Prometheus Bound for their Arts and Classical Civilisation course. He didn't try any more classical adaptations until last year when he started on Medea, and has since done a version of Euripides's Electra.

"I've tried to do my versions in a simple, terse style – I love writing dialogue and speech rhythm, or what Robert Frost calls 'sentence sound'. It is essential for me when I write a poem."

There was no hesitation about who he would like to produce his Medea, says Paulin. "I have admired Northern Broadsides and their work for a long time. I saw their Othello with Lenny Henry and it was a revelation. Barrie's been great to work with, and I like the percussive music of the monosyllables in the company's performance of the spoken vernacular. There's a sense of intense, passionate love for the modern idiom."

A respected academic for 30 years, Paulin has produced eight volumes of poetry, edited many others, written acclaimed essays and works of criticism, plays and learned books on the art of poetry. He is also a regular on the sofa of BBC2's Friday night arts programme Newsnight Review.

Born in Leeds, but mostly brought up in Belfast, he attended Annadale Grammar school where his father was headmaster. Paulin laments the fact that poetry is sidelined in many schools. "For some reason it's seen as 'difficult'," he says.

That wasn't the case at his school, where he was one of a group of young men who discussed poetry and liked to invent new words. His early influences were Robert Frost and Edward Thomas.

Reading English Literature at Hull University, he didn't get far with his writing, and later burned all of his early unpublished work. During a two-year BLit at Oxford one contemporary described him as "very intense and a little scary."

Paulin's first solo poetry collection, A State of Justice, was published in 1977.

Many years teaching at Nottingham University and as a reader in poetry preceded an academic career back at Oxford.

The historical context of poems is important to him and Paulin was brought up in a home where there was healthy argument around the table. He says he can't imagine how he could have grown up in Northern Ireland and not become political.

He likes debate and his fervent, serious, combative style has made him a favourite on Newsnight Review. He was involved in a public row over Israeli policy towards Palestinians and has attacked the literary establishment's tolerance of TS Eliot's anti-semitism and Larkin's racism and freely airs his views about the negative effects of literary criticism on the teaching of literature.

Putting Paulin together with the punch, immediacy and vigour of the Northern Broadsides voice sounds like a marriage made in heaven.

Medea will be at The Georgian Theatre Royal, Richmond, North Yorkshire from Feb 16-20 (Tickets 01748 825252 or www. georgiantheatreroyal.co.uk); Viaduct Theatre, Halifax, March 3-6 (01422 255266 or www.deanclough.com); and Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough March 16-20 (01723 370541 or www. sjt.uk.com).

Tom Paulin

Born – 1949, in Leeds. Father an English headmaster and mother

a Northern Irish doctor. Moved to Belfast at the age of four.

Educated – Annadale Grammar School, Belfast, the University of Hull and Lincoln College, Oxford.

Married – Munjiet Kaur Khosa (two sons).

Career – Lecturer at the University of Nottingham 1972-89, and reader in poetry there 1989-94; GM Young lecturer in English Literature at Hertford College, Oxford 1994 and currently.

Publications – Eight volumes of poetry, including A State of Justice, (1977), and The Invasion Handbook (2002); collected essays and criticism, including The Secret Life of Poems (2007); drama, including The Riot Act (1985), Ireland and the English Crisis (1985), The Hillsborough Script (1987) and Seize The Fire – a Version of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound (1990); The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (1998).