The Goran Simic reading took place on 12th December, 2001, at the Apollo Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, as part of the International Writers' Season of The Orange Word, a literary festival sponsored by Orange. Their website is at www.theorangeword.com. Mr. Rickman read the following poems:
Dogs and Bones
Beginning After Everything
Christmas
Sarajevo Spring.
The Orange Word has a very large sound file in their site. To hear it you need RealPlayer and high-speed internet connection.

Mr Rickman was the first actor to read and, after being introduced by the Festival's Director Peter Florence, he strode across the stage to the microphone and our applause, all dressed in black, a solemn, almost sultry expression on his face. Well, he was about to give us some pretty serious stuff. He announced the title of the first poem and then started to read. And totally disappeared.

It's the only way I can describe it. As soon as he began to read, I was no longer aware of Alan Rickman standing on stage, reading, acting, performing. All I was aware of was the power of words that seemed not to have been crafted to perfection years previously, but that were being spoken freshly here for the first time. There was nothing else to be aware of. If I had been seated alone in a tiny room with the person who had experienced these terrible things, listening to him as he felt his way into an expression of his raw-meat memories, the impact could not have been greater. The voice was so full of passion, yet so empty and flat, so angry and violent and yet so despairing and hopeless, that after just some 7 minutes, we were emotionally limp and drained and wrung out.

And then, after three poems, Mr Rickman smiled (very briefly), said "thank you" very quietly, and came back to us just in time to leave the stage to absolute and stunned applause. It was a most bizarre experience, yet a very profound one, and its power resulted not only from the actual force of the words themselves, but from this actor's ability to be so entirely 'there' when performing that he is not 'there' at all. He became, as it were, a transparency for what the poet wanted to say, rather than a performer of it. He let his mouth be shaped by the words, rather than shaping them himself.

Only the very finest actors could dare to do such a thing: to surrender themselves completely and still retain command of the situation (which, of course, he did at all times). He allowed us to lose our sense of him, but at no time did he lose his sense of himself. I've heard a lot of poetry read over the years, but never like that. If you ever get the chance to hear Alan Rickman read, grab it without hesitation, whether he's reading Dante's Inferno or yesterday's shopping list. You won't regret it.

Don't miss Michelle's review of Private Lives, and meeting Mr. Rickman backstage.