1988: The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus in the stadium above for the one-performance world premiere. Among the people who saw it there was Piero Bordin, who invited me to bring it to his newly started venue in Austria, on the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava. I took the version I revised in 1990 for the NT’s Olivier and then did an original piece, The Kaisers of Carnuntum, in the ancient amphitheatre in the manically busy year of 1995.
It was this revised version of Trackers that I took to Salts Mill in Saltaire, where Jonathan Silver afterwards commissioned a new piece for the mill. This became Poetry or Bust, which I wrote and directed in 1993, about the Airedale poet John Nicholson, who drowned drunk in the Aire a few minutes away from the wool-sorting shed we used as our theatre.
1995: The Labourers of Herakles, to initiate the building site for a new ancient-style theatre to be built in the grounds of the Cultural Centre of Delphi. This piece, with its chorus of nine cement mixers and a vast Herakles cement silo out of which voices and music came, was based on some fragments of Phrynikos. I came on myself as the spirit of Phrynikos to remind the audience that drama has its responsibilities in the face of the savageries of war, like that just over the mountains in Bosnia. I went to Bosnia after the play and wrote poems from Donji Vakuf and Sarajevo.
2005: Hecuba of Euripides, as the inauguration of the newly completed theatre, to be called, appropriately enough after my piece of ten years before, the Theatre of Phrynikos.
It was also here in Delphi that I began to think of my film of Prometheus, partly because of the costumes and masks still displayed in the house of Angelos Sikelianos and his American wife Eva Palmer, who revived the use of the ancient theatre in 1927 with their Prometheus Bound of Aeschylus. One story of that performance always haunted me: that the cries of the chained and suffering Prometheus could be heard echoing from the Phaedriades all the way down to Galaxidi, which I’m looking at now from my room. Two years ago, at every sunset for four days, we shared the balcony and the view (and some local wine from Distomo) with Peter Symes, with whom I’ve had a long and hugely fruitful collaboration on my four film poems on graveyards, Loving Memory; one on Alzheimer’s, Black Daisies for the Bride, which won the Prix Italia in 1994; The Gaze of the Gorgon, shot in Corfu and Germany; and, finally, a collaboration with Peter and me and Oliver Taplin, with whom I have shared many earlier times in Delphi, on the journey of the severed head of Orpheus along the Hebrus through Bulgaria and into the sea and finally to Lesbos.
There are many loving memories in the pages that follow about my great and much-missed collaborator Jocelyn Herbert, with whom I first went to Greece for the two performances in Epidaurus of the NT’s Oresteia in 1981, and who went on to design almost all the plays I wrote and directed. I came with Jocelyn and with my partner Sian in 1996, and we all came together a second time in 1998, Jocelyn’s last visit before she died in 2003. I remember the three of us held hands and stood in the centre of the ancient theatre of Delphi. As we did so, Jocelyn raised her head towards the looming Phaedriades and saw an eagle. It was, of course, two eagles sent by Zeus meeting up above that defined Delphi as the omphalos – ‘the navel of the earth’. For the last twenty years Sian and I have come here together, and we always remember Jocelyn in the same way by commemorating the three of us standing on the ancient stage and holding hands. This year, 2016, Sian and I stood in the same theatre, and as we whispered the name of Jocelyn (Joc!) an eagle appeared high up above us in the same place as before. Jocelyn was eighty-one on her last visit. And next year I will reach my eightieth year, when I hope I will sit and brood and compose again in this same room, though various physical afflictions have made an inevitable question mark loom a little larger as the months go by.
This room is between two places where I have asked my loved ones to scatter my ashes when I can no longer make the journey to Delphi as a living being. The first is a steep climb up above, to the now unused stadium where I put on The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus for the first time in 1988. Thirty years ago, I used to run up and down from here to the stadium at least three times a day. Now it takes me almost half the day to go up once. The second place I’d like my ashes scattered in is a forty-minute drive down below, beyond the sea of olives in Amphissa and the port of Itea to the sea and the small town of Galaxidi, where we go to swim and from the sea look up to see Delphi far above, and over Delphi the peaks of Parnassus, the home of the Muses, with Melpomene, the Muse of Tragedy, the most supreme.
I wrote a poem half down in Galaxidi but finished in this room in 2006 called ‘Galaxidi’:
Those golden hairs I’m stroking on your thigh
I only get to glimpse in this Greek light,
and only here do claw-snags on my hand
(from grappling with our lunch of garavides,
the Greek word for the local langoustines),
the back of which has those dark freckle marks
my grampa called his ‘grave-spots’, catch
on your glittering Galaxidi-gilded hairs.
The only year for many I did not spend some time in this room was 2011, when I began a version of the Iphigenia in Tauris of Euripides, encouraged by funding organised by Edith Hall, who also accompanied me, Sian, my daughter Jane, an archaeologist, and David Braund, a classicist and Crimean specialist, to the Crimea to recce the most northerly ancient Greek theatre near Sebastopol, not far from the ruins of the temple of Artemis, where Iphigenia was priestess after being saved by the goddess from being sacrificed by her father Agamemnon at Aulis. This was one of what I call my ‘kamikaze’ projects. I wanted, as always, to imagine it in the specific space of the ruined theatre, made more than slightly awkward by the presence of the ruins of a small early Orthodox church considered by contemporary Crimeans as probably more important than the ancient Greek ruins, which were discovered in 1954 but were not very accessible until the end of the cold war, as the area was where the Soviets had their nuclear-submarine base.
In the Crimea we all bathed in the Black Sea and looked across at the lights on the shores of Russia. I had to buy a towel, and it had on it a colourful map of the Crimea showing Sebastopol, with the ancient site of Chersonesos near by, and Kerch and Yalta, where the house of Chekhov is, which we visited and was where we were given tea sweetened with a cherry jam made from Chekhov’s orchard. That swim in the Black Sea later gave me my poem ‘Black Sea Aphrodite’, which I also worked on in this very room when I again came to Delphi.
All the negotiations with the Crimeans finally came to nothing and Putin’s annexation of the Crimea made a performance of Iphigenia unlikely. I had a very welcome workshop at the National Theatre Studio, the place where I had started Trackers and The Labourers of Herakles, but no further interest from the present NT management in any of my work. I had finally chosen to set it in 1854, during the Crimean War, with the tragedy enacted by all-male soldiers playing Iphigenia and the female chorus. Happily, this intrigued Emma Harding at the BBC, and it will be performed on Radio 3 about the time this book comes out and I have finally made eighty, and hopefully before the scattering of ashes above in the stadium and below in the sea at Galaxidi.
A number of things I use for swimming in the sea at Galaxidi dry on the balcony railings of this room. After a swim down at Galaxidi, and maybe a meal, and the drive back up to Delphi, I spread my damp Crimean towel out to dry on the railings of my balcony and reflect on the Russian script derived from Greek: Херсонес – ‘Chersonesos’ – founded by the Greeks in the fifth century BC, where an ancient theatre exists near to the ruins of the temple of Artemis, where the play is set. Alongside the Crimean towel is a white T-shirt also with Cyrillic script, saying, Пловдивски античен театър – ‘Plovdiv Ancient Theatre’ – which I bought in Bulgaria while making the Orpheus film with Peter Symes and Oliver Taplin. Our film, titled Metamorpheus, followed the severed head of Orpheus down the Hebrus and over the sea to Lesbos. This is the one white T-shirt I possess, as all the others are black with the Gree
k text of Nikos Kazantzakis: Δεν ελπίζω τίποτα. Δεν φοβούμαι τίποτα. Είμαι λέφτερος – ‘I hope for nothing. I fear nothing. I am free.’ There are usually two of them drying on the balcony railing. And they found their way into my poem ‘Polygons’, all five of them.
There is also a battered baseball cap with a Florida gator on it in an orange T-shirt. Its peak is shredded. I use it when swimming to protect my bald head with the spreading ‘grave-spots’ from the sun. As it dries on the balcony I remembered with Peter two unrealised projects imagined for Florida. One was to be set in Gainesville, near to where I had lived in the late 1970s and early 1980s with my then wife Teresa Stratas. The film was to be called Fast Forward and was about the Florida Gators football team, and Halloween with its pumpkin lanterns, and the fact that a serial killer had been at large around the campus at the same time, and that my son Max, who had chosen to study in the university there, had a serious breakdown because of it all. The other unrealised project was set in Arcadia, Florida, where the first rattlesnake canning factory had been set up by George End in 1931. He claimed to have canned every part of the snake ‘except the hiss’! It was also the place where a prototype flying bomb had been devised. The film we never got to make was to have been called Et in Arcadia Ego.
There are other rooms and balconies where I’ve sat in Delphi, especially in the Cultural Centre, which I can see to the right if I stand up on this balcony. Seamus Heaney and I had adjoining rooms and balconies when we attended the performances and conference at the centre and spoke about our own work on Greek tragedy (and, in my case, the satyr play!). Now, his death haunts me here, though it was down in the village that I first knew of it. On 31 August 2013, Sian and I had gone down to eat under the plane tree where we often eat. Next to the taverna is a kiosk that used to sell foreign newspapers but now only sells Greek ones. Hanging up secured by a clothes peg was the Greek paper Ethnos, with a large picture of Seamus on the front. That could only mean one thing: that he had died. The kiosk was opposite a derelict building that was the first hotel in Delphi, the Vouzas, where Jocelyn Herbert told me she had stayed with George Devine in the 1950s. Sometimes dinner was arranged in the hotel for guests of the Delphi Festival, and I had eaten there with Seamus. My poem ‘Polygons’ grew from this moment into something else, though it wasn’t finished until 2014.
Exactly one year later, we were sitting here on this balcony when the room’s phone rang and Michael Kustow’s partner, Jane, told us he was dead. The following is what I said at his memorial:
MICHAEL KUSTOW (1939–2014)
I have labels attached by drawing pins to the shelves that carry the hundreds of notebooks of all my projects in poetry, theatre and film. And there is a large, ever-growing section labelled ‘Unrealised Projects’, which I was forced to add to last year with some bitterness after being given a two-year runaround by some nameless (for now!) BBC commissioning editor. I slammed the notebook for work on the new but never to be realised film poem onto the shelf with a curse and went off to Delphi in Greece, where over the last thirty years I’d done a number of theatre projects, and where I could recuperate from my disappointment. Soon I found myself thinking of Michael Kustow, who, though he’d had no direct involvement in these Delphi projects, nonetheless took the trouble to come to Greece to see them and be supportive. And I began to think of the notebooks next to the ‘Unrealised Projects’ labelled ‘The Mysteries’ or ‘The Oresteia at the National Theatre’, both of which Michael had been instrumental in bringing to Channel 4. And there was the opera Yan Tan Tethera, about shepherds and sheep-counting, for which I’d written the libretto and Harrison Birtwistle the music. It was an opera the BBC had commissioned and then chickened out of, which Michael snapped up. In his book One in Four: A Year in the Life of a Channel Four Commissioning Editor [London: Chatto & Windus, 1987], Michael remembers that Harry Birtwistle had rung him to say that we had both decided that we’d like the opera dedicated to him. ‘I can hardly say how pleased and proud I am [he writes] … It’s a true reward when artists … acknowledge that you have some special gift as an encourager, a sustainer, an eliciter, a fellow spirit.’ Michael was all those – ‘an encourager, a sustainer, an eliciter, a fellow spirit’. And he was all those things when he brought Richard Eyre’s film of my reading of my poem v. to Channel 4, which brought the front-page fury of the Daily Mail down on our heads. I found myself almost every day thinking of Michael in Delphi in August 2014, when we had a call on this room’s phone to say that he had died.
Every time I went to Delphi I sent him a postcard of the ancient stadium in Delphi where The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus had its world premiere in 1988. Michael had helped to try and find me backing to take it there and to have it filmed, though even his enthusiastic eloquence didn’t manage that one. Unlike others, he saw nothing strange in my being a poet in film or in the theatre and directing my own, what I called ‘kamikaze’ performances. Michael the ‘encourager’ encouraged me, and what is more, unlike anyone from the NT, actually came to them all, whether in Salts Mill, Yorkshire, the ancient Roman stadium in Carnuntum in Austria on the Danube for The Kaisers of Carnuntum, or in Delphi again for The Labourers of Herakles on a building site. Not only was he one of the few who came from Britain to see the productions, he later wrote an enthusiastic Introduction to Volume 3 in the Faber collection of my plays, in which these ‘kamikaze’ productions were eventually printed.
It was during and after this project in 1995 that Michael began to perform his ‘eliciter’ and ‘encourager’ roles again by urging me, after a number of film poems I’d made for the BBC and Channel 4, to write and direct a film for the cinema. And eventually, for Film Four, in 1998, I did and made Prometheus, with Michael as executive producer, which translates in Michael’s case into ‘encourager, sustainer, eliciter, fellow spirit’.
Another notebook in the ‘Unrealised Projects’ is for a film which I regret not making but which was in nobody’s power to retrieve. But for me it shows how Michael could respond enthusiastically to the briefest, even craziest of suggestions, on one page faxed from the Amazon. I’d gone to Colombia to do a reading in Medellín, and then went south to Leticia on the Amazon and got a boatman to take me up the river between Colombia and Brazil. In that year, 1994, the two neighbouring countries were expecting to play each other in the football World Cup final. I went past a wooden house tied by lianas and ropes to trees to stop it drifting away. A boy and a girl, both wearing the blond afro wig of ‘El Pibe’ Valderrama, were kicking a football and balancing on floating logs, until the river carried the ball away. On the veranda snuffled a chiguero, a giant kind of rat the size of a wild boar. Inside, two men in hammocks were watching the football on TV. Also watching were six macaws, which are, of course, red, blue and yellow – the colours of the Colombian team. Whenever Colombia scored, the macaws squawked, ‘Gol! Gol! Gol!’ As soon as I got off the river, I sent a fax from the small hotel on its banks with only these details to Michael, saying it would make a great film if the final were between Brazil and Colombia, knowing that there was no one else who would respond. He didn’t attribute my sketched suggestions to the influences of Colombian powders. He was on the case immediately, encouraging and sustaining, but sadly Colombia didn’t make the final and we never made the film, but I can’t imagine anyone else taking up that brief hint of a project with such encouraging alacrity. I now feel there are more people helping to unrealise projects than helping to realise them, and it makes me miss Michael even more. He sent me his One in Four book, inscribed: ‘For Tony, comrade and chum’. And that was how I felt about him. He asked me for my view of his book, and I remember I wrote to say he should stop writing apologetically about being carried away by his own ‘enthusiasm’ or ‘earnestness’, as I was always amazed how undiminished his enthusiasm could be. He was a rare and utterly warm enabler.
He helped me to realise some of my most cherished projects. I’ll always be grateful to him, ‘encourager,
sustainer, eliciter, fellow spirit’.
On this Delphi balcony death is part of all my sunset thoughts, of those I have mentioned and all the actors and collaborators, recalled in the various introductions that are gathered in this book, who are no longer here. I remember seeing on an English balcony off a hospital room the actor Walter Sparrow, who played the chain-smoking ex-miner who was my Prometheus, with his fennel stalk/constantly lit fag. I went to the hospital with Alistair Cameron, who’d been the cameraman on my film. Walter was dying from lung cancer caused by a lifetime’s heavy smoking. He struggled out of bed, and we helped him to his chair on the balcony. He sat down and lit up a fag, and with it held in his nicotine-stained digits of defiance he did the whole of the smoking speech at the end of Prometheus from memory:
You just get t’first drag down your throat ’n
some bugger’s barking it’s verboten.
Dictators, deities, they’re all t’same
forbidding men fags, fruit or flame.
First Zeus wi’ t’fire then t’God of t’chapel’s
obsession wi’ forbidding apples.
One crunch into that contraband
gave men t’knowledge God had banned.
We’ve got t’knowledge, we’ve got t’fire,
we’ve raised ussens up out of t’mire.
Diso-bloody-bedience got us over
t’barbed-wire fences of Jehovah.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 3