The unfair treatment of women in professional theatre, as in society, is something of which he is well aware. His account of Aikin Mata ends with the wry observation that ‘the most enthusiastic reception of the play came from the small, embattled group of female students’. I have always thought of Harrison when I read the magnificent line in Sophocles’ Antigone about Haemon, who is supporting Antigone and her insistence on burying her dead kin in the face of his father Creon’s fury: ‘ὅδ᾽, ὡς ἔοικε, τῇ γυναικὶ συμμαχεῖ’ (‘It seems that this man fights as an ally of the woman’) (740). Harrison planned to conclude the all-male Oresteia with a satyr play, as Aeschylus’ trilogy was originally followed by a satyric Proteus (which sadly did not survive the centuries). He wanted women to ‘play the half-men/half-goats and wear the phalluses as a mode of comment and redress’. This was made impossible by industrial disputes at the National Theatre, but Harrison’s determination to have women play male roles eventually found fruition in Square Rounds (1992), which he had started planning as early as 1975, and in which women took almost all the roles. Using female voices to explore the invention of TNT and chlorine gas had the obvious advantage of exposing the intimate relationship between militarism and the masculine identity endorsed by patriarchal society, a synergy which Harrison also exposed in his second adaptation of Lysistrata, combined with Euripides’ Hecuba and entitled The Common Chorus. This was set at the women’s peace camp outside the US missile base at Greenham Common, Berkshire. It has never been performed in full, although Glenda Jackson delivered some of the speeches in a programme, ‘The Memory of Troy’, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 28 August 1988. Square Rounds was staged at the National Theatre, and some critics slammed it for its affinities with vaudeville and cabaret. But the twenty-one women and two men performing in Square Rounds were a huge success at the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, where non-realist theatre has historically been rather better understood and appreciated.
Harrison’s profound originality can also be seen in his idea of creating a new play out of the fragments of an ancient drama in his The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, which was voted one of the best hundred plays of the twentieth century in the National Theatre Millennium Poll. His essay in this volume explains his lifelong attraction to the almost lost genre of satyr drama, in which august heroes and gods were forced to revel in subversive musical-comedy versions of mythology with a chorus of satyrs – half men and half goats – wearing huge, semi-erect, artificial phalluses. But in piecing together, translating and augmenting the fragments of a satyr play, The Trackers, by Sophocles, Harrison was, once again, way ahead of his time. Constructing a powerful modern drama out of the fragments of ancient Greek plays subsequently became a familiar practice. Trackers, which premiered in Delphi in 1988, was swiftly followed by Timberlake Wertenbaker’s Love of the Nightingale (1989, based on Sophocles’ Tereus) and Silviu Purcărete’s Les Danaïdes (Avignon, 1996), which supplemented the surviving parts of Aeschylus’ Danaids trilogy.
The essays here, presented in the chronological order in which they were written, provide unparalleled insights into Harrison’s development. ‘Fellowship’ and ‘Shango the Shaky Fairy’ show him experimenting with the prose essay as an art form. But they also reveal his urge to dramatise – to write direct speech bringing the conversation with people he had encountered to life, breaking through his first-person narrative, especially where the subject matter is painful. The speech he writes in ‘Shango’ for the Cuban revolutionary exploring his hopelessly reactionary views on homosexuality is a fascinating case in point. Reading these essays also illuminates his working methods – the endless drafts and the voluminous scrapbooks, now housed in the Brotherton Library in Leeds, into which he pastes quotations, newspaper cuttings, photographs and ideas as he writes. Harrison’s prose reveals a candid, sometimes frustrated and disappointed creative artist. He has often not received the funding he needed for important projects, especially film poems. He has frequently suffered attacks by critics who have meretriciously disguised political disagreement as aesthetic judgement.
These prose works also enrich our knowledge of Harrison’s personal biography. Although many of his important memories and relationships feature in his poetry, in his prose we catch different glimpses of his early life with his uncles and neighbours in Leeds, of travel with a young family in Cuba and Nigeria, and of innumerable thought processes and conversations with collaborators over delicious bottles of wine. His insights into his friendships with giants of twentieth-century culture are required reading: Hollywood titan George Cukor, stage designer Jocelyn Herbert, writer Harold Pinter, as well as directors and actors including Richard Eyre, Diana Rigg, Peter Hall, Glenda Jackson and his own long-term partner in private life, Sian Thomas. But his accounts of encounters that shaped him with individuals enjoying no such fame are equally significant: with Terezinha, a homeless little girl living under the exit ramp of the National Theatre of Brazil; with the elderly Yorkshire woman who gave him a bust of the poet John Nicholson after seeing Poetry or Bust, saying, with mordant Yorkshire wit, that it was as much use to her ‘as a chocolate fireguard’.
In a touching paragraph, he tells us that he learned a great deal about the use of cameras in film from his son Max, before Max was afflicted in early adulthood with a cruel psychiatric illness. The least familiar works of Harrison are those using a camera: his film poems. All the scripts have been published, but most of the films themselves, for complex copyright reasons, have not been made widely available and have therefore not been properly understood and valued. This makes his precious essay ‘Flicks and this Fleeting Life’, as well as the others which talk extensively about film, even more valuable. Although he was an ardent movie-goer as a child and saw every classic of world cinema that was shown when he was studying at Leeds University, his first experience of editing came with the montage of martial clips from documentaries and newsreels with which his Nigerian Lysistrata, Aikin Mata, had opened in 1964 – once again proving his prescience and appetite for innovation. Although it is now ubiquitous, the incorporation of video within live theatre, while not altogether unprecedented in eastern European performances, was unheard of in Britain in 1964. In that production, Harrison tells us, his Lysistrata put a sudden stop to the filmed combatants by throwing a water pot at the screen on the back wall, thus exploiting the power of the ‘hard cut’. Years of experimentation with mutually reinforcing both word and image through careful editing of clip against metre, producing what he calls ‘the scansions of edited sequences’, came to a climax in his powerful 1998 feature film Prometheus. This confronts the viewer with ‘a procession of arresting images leading from northern England to eastern Europe and Greece, via the bombing of Dresden, the collapse of socialism and the Holocaust. This procession advances – its sequential logic dictated by poetic values rather than strict chronology – with a measured pace enhanced by Alastair Cameron’s meticulous camera work and by precision editing.’
Alongside his creation of the moving images of film, flickering through time at twenty-four frames per second, these essays reveal the extent of Harrison’s engagement with ‘static’ works of visual art. The reader of almost any of his poetry will have noticed his fascination with statues and sculpture and their political uses and abuses. In the film poem The Gaze of the Gorgon, he adopts a statue of Heine as narrator, exploring the tragic history of European warfare in Heine’s own verse form, the couplet. He knew that the statue of the poet, who was Jewish, was removed from the Bavarian royal family’s summer palace on Corfu on the orders of Kaiser Wilhelm II. Harrison’s play Poetry or Bust, performed at Salts Mill in Bradford in 1993, uses the bust of the ‘wool-sorter poet’ John Nicholson as a symbol of a poet who ‘sells out’ his political principles in return ‘for the praise of genteel admirers, money or fame’. But the essays here reveal the extent to which Harrison’s imagination has been aroused by contemplating artworks from all over the world. They include carved wooden images of Shango
(the hermaphroditic thunder spirit in the Yoruba religion) and the depictions of the poets Arion and Orpheus painted in the fifteenth century by Andrea Mantegna on the ceiling of the bridal chamber of the Ducal Palace in Mantua. Harrison’s poetry has been informed equally by a fresco in the National Archaeological Museum in Naples depicting a verdant Mount Vesuvius before the eruption which destroyed Pompeii; by Rembrandt’s Descent from the Cross; and, in Phaedra Britannica, his translation of Racine’s tragedy to India under the British Raj, by erotic eighteenth-century art from Rajasthan in north-western India.
Harrison has adapted works by all four great classical Athenian dramatists: Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Aristophanes. Yet he has not translated any tragedy by Sophocles, held by Aristotle and the Victorians to be the most ‘perfect’ of the tragic poets. He relished, rather, working on Sophocles’ theatrical style as exemplified in the more boisterous, rowdy, comical key of satyr drama, as he explains here in ‘The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus’. Yet there is much that is Sophoclean about Harrison’s own theatre: a pleasure in the ‘plain words’ for which Sophocles was admired in antiquity, in letting poetry work its own effect without overelaborate visual effects, in unflinching acknowledgement of the absolute unfairness of human life and the undeserved extremes of human suffering. The famous view of Matthew Arnold – that Sophocles ‘saw life steadily, and saw it whole’ (in the sonnet ‘To a Friend’, 1849) – often comes into my mind when I read Harrison’s writing. This may seem incongruous. The anger and demotic verve of Harrison’s poetry may seem a world away from Arnoldian elegiac wistfulness and urbanity. But his poetry reveals that he has stared at the best and worst that human existence affords, if not with absolute steadiness, then with unflinching steadfastness. He has seen it steadfastly and he has certainly seen it ‘whole’.
For everything he has ever done, said and written is underpinned by an unerringly consistent and coherent intellectual structure. He looks at the material world from a perspective that is fundamentally informed by Marxist analysis, which is in turn grounded in the ancient atomism of Epicurus and Lucretius. Harrison’s cosmos is in constant flux; plants, humans and other organic bodies are in a perpetual process of coming to be and passing away, the matter that constitutes them dispersing, as they die, back into the environment. He is intrigued by horticulture, compost, cooking, alimentary processes and decomposing rubbish heaps. While his work is located in real, specific places, and gains much of its power from its physical particularity, his geopolitical perspective as a human being is never less than global. He is fascinated by cartography, physical geography, geology and the history of science, the latter being most clear in his fascination with the way chemistry, physics and technology have been used in the development of weapons – machine guns, explosives, chlorine gas and nuclear bombs. He has no religion and believes in no afterlife; there is no providential god for Harrison, and all his work laments that life is short and too often brutal, that human history has consistently disappointed utopian dreamers, and that apparent ‘progress’ takes us backwards away from the light. For these reasons, like the ancient Greeks who have so consistently inspired him, he believes in savouring happiness and sensory pleasure from landscape and sunshine, food and wine, love, sex, friendship and literature.
Harrison’s passion for the products of human artistic creativity is inexhaustible. To say ‘passion for the Arts’ would be a ludicrous distortion, since ‘the Arts’ are not normally taken to include all the countless forms taken by words and images, across the social and cultural spectrum, that he has enjoyed and that have enriched his imagination. As Richard Eyre has put it, ‘Tony wants the whole body of society, not just its head, to be involved in art.’ These essays complement his poetry by detailing the sheer diversity of his cultural experiences and how they have informed his own creative output. The most canonical high operas by Monteverdi, Verdi, Smetana and Orff jostle here with working-class entertainers George Formby and Vesta Tilley. Films seen only in art-house cinemas, by Eisenstein, Torre Nilsson and Tarkovsky, appear alongside James Cagney in White Heat and Disney’s Bambi. Almost forgotten translators like Edward Powys Mathers and minor novelists like Nancy Bogen rub shoulders with Dryden and Dostoyevsky. The work in which he offered his most eloquent exploration of the way the Arts have been used to create and maintain social divisions was The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus, where the human–animal hybridity of the satyr, and what Adrian Poole has aptly called the ‘ribald generic indeterminacy’ of satyr drama, allowed Harrison to meditate on the chasm in his own previous theatre between the supposedly ‘high’ culture of the Oresteia and the folk culture of Bow Down (1977) and The Mysteries. But Joe Kelleher points out that Harrison had previously chosen, for the cover of his translations from Martial, a photograph of a carved stone satyr, serving as a kind of mask for Harrison’s persona as a translator. This persona is neither neutral nor self-effacing, but has ‘a diabolically gleeful grin’, suggesting that the transformation of poetry from the ancient language to modern vernacular is the work of a personality with ‘an inscrutable agenda’ of his own. The same applies to the satyrs in Trackers. His clog-dancing satyrs perform his own manifesto not only on the gulf that separates elite art from popular culture, but on the system of social stratification that has always silenced the poor, the hungry, the oppressed and the persecuted (represented in the flayed body of Marsyas, above all) and excluded them from the rights and privileges enjoyed higher up the class system.
It is no accident that Harrison has found in classical antiquity his most fruitful medium for discussing the class politics of art. The boys at Leeds Grammar School studied Latin and Greek to make them feel superior to other children, but it did not work on the Loiner Poet. Harrison has faced up to the quandary of working in a medium whose consumers are not of the same class as that into which he was born – and to which he remains loyal – through his own brand of classicism. His radical treatment of classics has underpinned his quest for a public role for a poet who never forgets the way the upper and middle classes’ prosperity has been built on the working class’s deprivation. Harrison uses classical myth in the attempt to forge an inclusive public poetry rather than an exclusive curriculum. He uses a classical tradition of public poetry in a way that is consistently class-conscious and oppositional: it is, in Patrick Deane’s acute formulation, ‘the deft and opportunistic annexation of classical authority by a poet not born to it’. These essays, especially those on the Oresteia, Phaedra Britannica and Prometheus, show Harrison dipping his pen into his inkwell to use ancient Greek and Roman culture in ways that help us confront the darkest, most tragic elements of human experience.
Yet, in the final analysis, it is the exuberance of his classicism for which he may be best remembered. I have always felt that much of his work shares an attitude with the final scene of Jacques Offenbach’s uproarious Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), where the Olympian gods hold a party in Hades. Bored by Zeus’s old-fashioned taste in sedate dances, they invent the riotous ‘infernal gallop’, better known as the cancan. Critics were appalled by the irreverence Offenbach had shown towards ancient Greek culture, his ‘profanation of holy and glorious antiquity’. But another way of looking at it is that Offenbach was using the Greeks to take society and entertainment into the future, or, as Harrison puts it in ‘Facing Up to the Muses’, to take the human race ‘forward with the Greeks’. To use his own inimitable phrase from another essay, ‘The Misanthrope: Jane Eyre’s Sister’, the whole life’s work of this vates from Leeds has truly been ‘a Jack and the Beanstalk act’. He has braved ‘the somnolent ogre of a British classical education to grab the golden harp’.
December 2016
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London. She regularly broadcasts on the BBC and has been a consultant for professional theatre companies, including the RSC, the National Theatre, Shakespeare’s Globe and the ENO. She has published more than twenty books on Greek and Roman culture and their reception. Her mo
st recent books are Adventures with Iphigenia in Tauris (OUP, 2013) and Introducing the Ancient Greeks (Random House, 2014). She is the recipient of the Erasmus Prize of the European Academy and an Honorary Doctorate from the University of Athens.
Introduction: Inkless and Digital
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I am sitting in the same room in Delphi that has been my creative base for the poems I keep writing here, like ‘Wasted Ink’, begun in August 2008 and published in the London Review of Books in October that year, and ‘Polygons’, worked on here obsessively through 2013 and 2014, until finally published in the London Review of Books in February 2015, to coincide with my being awarded the David Cohen Prize for Literature. It was also the Cohen Foundation that helped to fund The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus here in Delphi. This is a room where I’ve never found it difficult to think that everything I do is poetry – for the page, the stage or the screen – because it still reverberates with the poetry and the strong rhythms of the plays I have written and directed for spaces in Delphi:
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 2