Being There

by David Malouf

  our great man, say? Oh tell me, Shelley – quickly!

  I can’t bear it, my head will burst. Will he take me with him?

  Will he have me in his household? – Ah, he won’t!

  SHELLEY:

  Claire, listen.

  CLAIRE:

  I shall drown myself.

  SHELLEY:

  Claire, listen. He is good, just and generous.

  CLAIRE:

  You say that? Will you abandon me too?

  SHELLEY:

  He accepts the child as his – you see, I said he was just.

  You will go back to England. The child will be born in secret.

  He will support it – you see, I said he was generous.

  CLAIRE:

  And good? Is he good?

  SHELLEY:

  You are to give the child over to his keeping.

  CLAIRE:

  My child?

  SHELLEY:

  Claire, you have no choice.

  CLAIRE:

  And is he good?

  Oh my God, Shelley, and you agreed to this?

  What is to become of me?

  Claire – Claire Clairmont – I knew her once –

  SHELLEY:

  Claire, nothing is changed. Nothing.

  CLAIRE:

  I have changed, Shelley. I have changed.

  SHELLEY:

  You will go on living

  as you always have done,

  with me, with Mary.

  CLAIRE:

  I feel old, already, Eighteen,

  but old. Hold me, Shelley,

  hold me. By the law of nature this child

  is mine – I hold it, I carry it

  here, under my heart. I thought we lived,

  Shelley, by the laws

  of nature.

  SHELLEY:

  No, Claire, don’t.

  CLAIRE:

  But when it comes to it, you too

  live by the laws of men.

  SHELLEY:

  Some day, Claire –

  CLAIRE:

  But this is now! Oh my God, my God.

  What can Ophelia do

  but love and be silent? I wanted

  to be free. What power

  did I have? What power

  does any of us have? Sleepwalkers –

  that’s what you want, you men!

  Shelley, am I to have

  no life of my own, ever, ever? Will it always be

  someone else’s story? No, no,

  it’s time now to wake up. I thought that I

  was one of beauty’s daughters. Well, I know

  now, I am just a woman.

  No charmed barque, my dear –

  all that leads to

  is a watery grave, and I am not for drowning.

  No forests, no regions dim. I want to live

  in the light!

  (During the last part of this, BYRON and POLIDORI enter, as in Act I, Scene I, the lights come up, MARY enters, the scene slowly changes till we are back in the open space of the Prologue dream sequence)

  POLIDORI:

  The fact is: stories come to an end. Real lives go on.

  BYRON/SHELLEY/CLAIRE/MARY/POLIDORI:

  The same story told again and again,

  And over and over, in joy or in pain;

  The same story finding new lives, new voices,

  The one thread winding again and again

  Through many lives,

  One story for ever unending.

  CHORUS:

  (offstage) Ah! Ah!

  SHELLEY:

  How does it end, Mary? End it, Mary!

  MARY:

  No, there is no end,

  there never could be.

  Out there on the edge of reality, on the sea of ice,

  they pursue one another for ever. For ever.

  CLAIRE:

  CLAIRE:

  For ever. For ever.

  SHELLEY:

  No. Mary. No!

  CHILDREN’S CHORUS:

  (offstage) Under the arch, over the grass,

  Under the arch, over the grass

  MARY:

  There is no other way

  Out here, out here,

  For ever.

  (BYRON and POLIDORI fall back into the shadows)

  CHILDREN’S CHORUS:

  Under the over the under the over the

  CHORUS:

  Ah. Ah.

  SHELLEY:

  Mary? Are you there, Mary?

  MARY:

  I am here, Shelley. Where else should I be?

  SHELLEY:

  Claire? Claire Clairmont. Are you there?

  CLAIRE:

  I am here. Where else would I be?

  (SHELLEY and MARY fall back into the shadows)

  I am here, still living, still hanging on to breath.

  Byron, where is my child?

  Shelley, where is she?

  CHILDREN’S CHORUS:

  Under the over the under the

  Under the over the …

  III

  INTRODUCTION

  EXTRAORDINARY THAT A PLAY that was first performed at the Dionysian Festival in Athens, in 428 BC, should still have the power to engage, disturb, move us as the Hippolytus does, and so directly. There is a quality of ‘lateness’ in Euripides, of domestic or low-life settings, of rare and extreme psychological states, that marks his work off from that of Aeschylus or Sophocles, though Sophocles in fact outlived him.

  He still draws his subjects, as entrance to the Dionysia demanded, from myths or the lives of semi-mythological heroes, but he questions and sometimes mocks the way they have traditionally been interpreted, to the point where he sees the gods as no more than a way of our coming to terms either with the natural forces that govern our lives or the warring elements of our own nature. In Aphrodite’s case, raw sexual desire, and in its role as a means to procreation the life force itself; in Poseidon’s the sea in all its moods, including that of the tsunami, as we would call it, that rises up as out of nowhere to destroy the hero of the play.

  Euripides’ tragedies, for all their classic situations and the richness of their poetry, are sceptical in tone and can sometimes, as in the Orestes for example, tip over into burlesque or farce. They mix the modes between tragedy and comedy and raise questions, rather as Shakespeare does in what we call the ‘problem plays’, that are left hanging rather than resolved, which makes them problematical in their structure as well as what they set out to say. Perhaps it was for this reason that Euripides, in his own time, was regarded as controversial – he took first prize at the Dionysia on only five occasions, once posthumously, as opposed to Aeschylus’ thirteen and Sophocles’ twenty or twenty-four. It may also, on the other hand, explain why later generations held him in such high regard. His lateness pointed for them to the future.

  Of the thirty-five Greek tragedies that have survived, out of several hundreds from various hands, more than half are by Euripides. Seven each from Aeschylus and Sophocles, but ten of Euripides, were preserved in a late-classical, 200 AD school reader, and nine others of his plays by other means. Add to this the many quotations from lost plays of Euripides that appear in the works of other writers. He has a ‘modern’ quality – in the sense that we still call Ibsen and Strindberg modern – that even Sophocles lacks.

  The Hippolytus, which was his second attempt at the subject, belongs to Euripides’ middle period. It is not outrageous, as the Orestes is, but its characters are conceived in a ‘domestic’, unheroic manner, and its situations develop in ways that call into question all the usual ties of family and social status. The assumption is that most men, and more significantly in this case most women, are driven by emotions that are irrational; that even those whom we expect to be mature and responsible (the Nurse, for example) may in fact be self-serving or dangerously amoral, and that the gods are too self-absorbed, or uncaring, to be in any way trusted.

  Phaedra is the victim of a sexual passion she cann
ot resist but which she knows is forbidden, a betrayal of her husband but also ‘against nature’. She sees herself as a victim, not entirely helpless, of a goddess who, out of hatred for her whole family, is determined to destroy her. She wants to act nobly but does not.

  Hippolytus too is noble, and devoted to sexual purity, but has no measure; he is fanatical in his resistance to natural desire, to the point where Aphrodite sees him as the enemy of all she stands for – not simply of the sexual life but of life itself. The play begins with her announcement that what we will witness in what follows is this young man’s punishment and death.

  Both characters here, but in a complex way, command our sympathy: both are misguided; both are destroyed. The Chorus of women that stands helplessly apart and suffers with them, and mourns their loss in lyrics of extraordinary richness and power, speaks at every point for us, the spectators and witnesses of what it is to be human and full of life’s complex potential and lost.

  This version of the play was commissioned by John Bell for the Bell Shakespeare Company and was first performed as part of the Sydney Festival in January 2002, with William Zappa as Theseus, Linda Cropper as Phaedra, Leon Ford as Hippolytus, Anna Volska as the Nurse, Paula Arundel as Aphrodite, Penny Cook as Artemis, and John Turnbull as the Old Servant and the Messenger. John Bell directed and the music was by Brad Taylor-Newling.

  HIPPOLYTUS

  a free version, after Euripides

  CHARACTERS

  THE GODDESS APHRODITE

  THE GODDESS ARTEMIS

  PHAEDRA, wife to Theseus, stepmother of Hippolytus NURSE

  THESEUS, Prince of Athens

  HIPPOLYTUS, his son by the Queen of the Amazons

  OLD SERVANT

  GROOM

  CHORUS OF PALACE WOMEN AT TROEZEN

  CHORUS OF HUNTSMEN

  COMPANIONS to Hippolytus

  MESSENGER

  THESEUS’ palace at Troezen. On either side of a door on the wall behind, statues of APHRODITE and ARTEMIS. Enter APHRODITE.

  APHRODITE:

  You all know me. Look in your hearts. I am Aphrodite. East

  or west, there is no creature under the sun, from the groundworm

  to the high aspiring eagle, that does not feel

  the promptings of my will. Those who pay tribute to me

  I love. Those who do not, I trample in the dust.

  Hippolytus, the son of Theseus and the Amazonian Queen,

  alone among all the inhabitants of Troezen, calls me

  fearsome, dangerous – which I am – and refuses

  the common bed of love. Turns his back on marriage; gives all

  his honours to my rival, the virgin Artemis. All day with her

  at his side, rides with his hounds through field and forest.

  A mortal and a goddess! Well, I do not grudge them

  their sport. Who am I, the Queen of Dalliance,

  to grudge a man sport! But Hippolytus

  has shown me mortal insult, he must suffer for it. My plans were laid

  long ago and have been working to their end, which now comes on.

  Two years ago, the boy Hippolytus set out

  from his tutor’s house at Athens to be initiated

  in the sacred mysteries. And there at his father’s side, Phaedra, his father’s

  new wife, among trophies, the excitement of cymbal and flute music,

  torchlight, the leaping of dancers, spilling of wine, and the throats

  of young men shouting in unison, first

  saw, first laid eyes upon him, Hippolytus, her husband’s

  son, his thick curls drenched with oil, his shoulders

  gleaming. At the golden shock of him her senses reeled, new life

  thrilled through her. (Yes, I too was there and played my part, I too

  was watching.) Ah his eyelids, his naked foot!

  Ah the warm breath of his body changing the air between his lips!

  Hippolytus, all youth and careless innocence, came home, a man at last to Troezen.

  And Phaedra?

  Safe in Athens she raised a temple

  of silence to her love, and looking seaward toward Troezen where her heart

  now lay, she burned and trembled. But safely, secretly, the one

  she longed for was far off.

  But fate takes curious turns, or so we manage it, we watchers.

  Theseus, to purge an old crime, accepted

  exile, a whole year long, and at Troezen. He brought

  his wife, he brought his young wife Phaedra here – poor woman!

  And now, in a delirium of passion, a sensual dream, wild-eyed and famished

  with hunger for his presence, she prowls the royal rooms and searches

  the still air for the scent of his body’s passing –

  swift-limbed, smooth-browed, the glow of clean sweat lighting

  his skin. And no one knows, no one guesses why she sickens, shuts herself up

  in a darkened room and on cool sheets writhes

  and sickens. Well today she will reveal it, I’ll see to that.

  As for the boy Hippolytus, so proud, so pure, so scornful, he will die

  today at his father’s hand – that too my doing.

  Once, a long age past, Poseidon, Lord of the Sea, gave Theseus

  three wishes. Today he’ll recall that gift, and one of his three wishes

  he’ll get.

  And Phaedra?

  Poor woman, she will keep

  her honour, but her life must pay for it – No, I’m not swayed

  by the sufferings of those who break my law. My enemies pay –

  the law of life demands it. And here he comes! This

  is Hippolytus. Home from a long day’s hunt, and with him, his pack

  in full cry at his heels, all howling hymns to Artemis!

  He does not know – how could he? – that the gates that open to him

  here are the gates of death. That today’s light is the last his eyes will greet.

  (Enter CHORUS OF HUNTSMEN. Their chant is heard over the last of APHRODITE’s speech. Enter HIPPOLYTUS. At the gate to the house, OLD SERVANT)

  CHORUS OF HUNTSMEN:

  (sung in parts)

  Follow

  follow

  follow

  Honour her

  honour the bright huntress

  honour

  our goddess our queen

  Child of Zeus and Leto

  the maiden Artemis

  Greetings joyful greetings

  you who step lightly

  through your father’s court

  you who tread lightly

  the sky’s burning pavements

  virgin and immortal

  we greet you, Artemis.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  (to the statue of Artemis) Lady, for you I bring

  this circlet of wildflowers, ox-eyed

  daisies, marigold, love-in-a-mist.

  I gathered them at dawn

  in the fresh dew of your meadow.

  No herdsman has ever grazed

  his flock there, no scythe

  swung whistling through its grass; only in springtime

  bees in their drunken dance quicken the air above its herbage.

  It is sacred, inviolate –

  only those who in simplicity seek holy ends, only

  they, they only may pluck garlands

  there. Dear mistress, accept

  this simple coronet. I offer it

  with a pure heart. I alone

  among mortals have been granted

  the gift of your sweet presence. I, your dear

  companion, who speak with you

  daily, hear your voice in the air about me – only

  your face I do not see, only your face you do not show me.

  May the end of my life be,

  as it was in the beginning, yours,

  my Lady Artemis, and yours only.

  OLD SERVANT:

  M
y lord – or rather, prince – only the gods should we address as lord. Would you accept a word of advice from an old man?

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  (impatiently, though he tries to restrain it) Of course. Only fools do not heed the voice of experience.

  OLD SERVANT:

  You know, sir, there is a rule laid down for men.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  There are several. Which rule is that?

  OLD SERVANT:

  The one that says, avoid arrogance, beware of being – overconfident.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  It’s a good rule. No one admires a man who thinks too highly of himself.

  OLD SERVANT:

  And there’s a kind of charm too, don’t you think, in being affable and friendly to all?

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  There is. It costs a man nothing to be friendly.

  OLD SERVANT:

  And this holds also for the way we treat the gods?

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  It does, yes. Our behaviour towards them should be a mirror of the grace they show us.

  OLD SERVANT:

  Why then, sir, are you so unfriendly to one among them?

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  (change) Careful, old fellow. Any more and you may go too far. Which god? Which god do you mean?

  OLD SERVANT:

  This one. She who stands here at your very door. Aphrodite, that dread lady.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  But I am not unfriendly to her. I hold myself apart from her – mysteries, that’s all.

  OLD SERVANT:

  And the power she wields? Do you have no fear of that?

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  None. None at all. I hunt in sunlight. I have no truck with gods who are worshipped in the dark.

  OLD SERVANT:

  (horrified) My son, dear Prince! To be whole we must not neglect any one of the gods. As you say, they are the mirrors of what we are. Each one we should honour. They deserve our honour, each one.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  And these gods, don’t they choose who they will favour? Surely we may do the same. I choose.

  OLD SERVANT:

  The gods grant you good fortune, my young master. And make you wise.

  HIPPOLYTUS:

  Come, men, we’ll go in. It’s time to eat. Good food is welcome after hard exercise. (to his GROOM) See my horses are rubbed down. When I’ve eaten I’ll take them out with the chariot. (to the SERVANT) Your Aphrodite – she is great, I know, and you are right to approach her with awe. But I worship elsewhere.