But men thesens bring back barbed wire
round t’Bramleys and round t’bakehouse fire.
There’s not one joy but what some berk’ll
want it ringed wi’ a red circle.
Gods or men or summat similar,
’ermes or some town hall ’immler,
those in power’d like red ring
round almost bloody everything.
He died a few days later.
Then there are this year’s deaths down below. Christophoros, who had a place for coffee just round the corner from the Castalian Spring and overlooking the gymnasium where the column lay that Byron had etched his name on in 1809, which is totally neglected and will soon disappear. I took Christophoros down to see it. He never had. I tried to get the Delphi mayor of the time to do something about the column for the 2009 bicentenary of Byron’s visit, but nothing happened and the neglect and fading away continues. Like the stadium above, no one is allowed in the gymnasium, as they once were, due to dangerous rockfalls. When we walked to the Castalian Spring to fill up our bottles, we always used to have a coffee with Christophoros. He died a few months ago. As did Panagiotis, who in the old days of the Delphi Festival ran the taverna Gargantuas, where all the performers went to eat and drink into the small hours after a show. I can never forget walking down the steps with Jocelyn and my actors after the Labourers of Herakles, and the gathered diners, led by Yuri Lyubimov, all rising to give us a standing ovation. Lyubimov later invited me to do something at his theatre, the Taganka, and so I went to Moscow a few times to prepare and direct a Russian version of Square Rounds, which finally redeemed the play for me. I’d done it in the NT’s Olivier in 1992, but most of the actors were stuck in television naturalism, which for me still ruins most of the theatre I see. One of the exceptions was Sian Thomas, now my partner. Panagiotis had to leave the old premises and cross the road, to have a few tables inside the small new space and four or five outside on the pavement. We stayed loyal to him and his wife, Panagiota, and his son, Stephanos, and eat down the hill on a lot of our nights. He died a few months ago. Each meal we take there keeps Panagiota’s grief still raw, though Panagiotis had been very ill for ten years. As she takes our orders, we talk about him. On the night he left the old taverna, we were his final and only customers. We’ll probably be at the new place tonight, on a shaky pavement table facing the mulberry trees from the old taverna, and opposite a kiosk that was run by Andreas, who had been my production manager on Hecuba and who would always come across and share some wine with us. Now, the kiosk is shuttered and a ‘For Rent’ notice painted on it, like many of my other favourite Delphi haunts, as one by one they close. Stephanos, the son of Panagiotis, always asks at the end of our meal if he can drive us back up the steep hill. I always say, ‘It is better for my heart if I go on foot.’ It becomes a ritual, especially after the times he had given us a lift before I had my dodgy damaged knees replaced at the brilliant Freeman Hospital in Newcastle, when I couldn’t get up the hill at all and it took me all day to shuffle with a stick down to the Castalian Spring, which I saw as essential to my recovery. I couldn’t even think of climbing to the stadium to remember my manic self of thirty years before, running up there sometimes three times a day.
My moods on the balcony are often now very elegiac. Which is probably appropriate also for the reason that this collection of introductions to my theatre and film projects seems to me to be almost like a set of obituaries, sometimes affectionate enough, sometimes defensive. The doing of it, that manic energy I used to have for these projects, I have often been asked or gently bullied into describing, works only in the transience of the performance itself.
I look down at Galaxidi, where I took Vanessa Redgrave and the whole Hecuba company for a swim and lunch at Tasos’s tavern. Tasos is now dead, but yesterday Sian and I ate at his psarotaverna, now run by his son Panagiotis and every bit as delicious, with its beetroot leaves, octopus and mussels, which come from a place I can see here from the room’s balcony. It is the setting for the poem written here I’ve mentioned above, ‘Wasted Ink’. And here I would be wasting even more ink if I were using, as I always did, my fountain pen and paper to draft poems or plays and be left with my digits typically inky. As the sun sets over the mountains I no longer climb but celebrate in front of me, I hope that my defiance isn’t diminishing, though this text is inkless and digital. As the sun sets, the cicadas fall suddenly silent. So do I.
Tony Harrison
224 Amalia Delphi
August 2016
Aikin Mata
* * *
1966
‘The Greeks’
They care for the outward show of this life,
but of the life to come they are heedless.
The Koran
THE LYSISTRATA OF ARISTOPHANES
Aristophanes (c.450–385? BC) is the only writer of Greek old comedy whose work survives in more than isolated fragments. Eleven of his plays are extant. Aristophanes wrote Lysistrata in 412 BC, at a time when Athens was on the brink of total disaster in the prolonged Peloponnesian War with Sparta and her allies, which Thucydides called ‘the greatest disturbance in Greek History’. The play was produced in 411 BC, at one of the great Athenian religious festivals. It is one of the most admirable things in Greek culture that, at the worst time of a bitter war, which would eventually mean the collapse of the Athenian Empire in 404 BC and the downfall of Athenian civilisation, this play, which mocks the whole concept of war and makes an ‘indecent’ but deeply pacifist plea for an immediate truce between Athens and Sparta and for peace in general, was performed at a public festival. ‘The Greeks’, said Werner Jaeger, ‘placed laughter on the same plane with thought and speech as an expression of intellectual freedom.’ A culture without such laughter, however progressive or religious, is an inadequate one, and it is a kind of measure of later European societies that the Lysistrata has often been considered too licentious to perform. The Lysistrata of Aristophanes is now well over 2,000 years old, but its laughter and its purpose are perennially meaningful.
More recently, Professor Erik H. Erikson, the Freudian psychologist and Professor of Human Development at Harvard University, looking for a solution to the desperate problems of war and general human aggression, came to a similar conclusion:
It may well be that war cannot be banned until women, for the sake of worthwhile survival, dare to recognise and to support the as yet undeveloped power of unarmed resistance.
It is a long time since Aristophanes said the same thing, but it would be difficult to say it better.
FOREWORD
Aikin Mata was written for a specific group of student actors at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, in northern Nigeria. The year before, the same group had won the first prize in the Students’ Drama Festival at Ibadan with a production of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel. This group and other local groups had, between them, performed most of the published plays by modern Nigerian dramatists, and they wished to do something different, and yet they were not prepared to tackle Shakespeare or any of the classics of English theatre. They liked the mixture of drama, mime, music and dance in The Lion and the Jewel. An adaptation of a Greek comedy seemed the best solution, and in particular the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, with its great basic comic plot, particularly relevant in a country where women have not yet reached political equality with men, and where the ‘sex war’ is a recurrent source of humour. It seemed to us too that an adaptation of the play into Nigerian terms would not only draw fully upon the various acting, dancing and musical talents we had available, and exploit relevant or potentially relevant comic themes, but also that, by restoring music and dance to an integral place in a production of a Greek comedy, the play itself could be performed in a manner nearer to the Greek than the kind of productions one has in European theatre and on radio, with effete angelic choral speaking and emasculated dancing. Masquerades like the Yoruba Egungun of Oshogbo, with their dual sacred and profane functions as
ancestor spirits and as comic entertainers, seem closer to Greek comedy than anything one has in modern Europe. The particular brand of satire of different ethnic groups in the Oshogbo Agbegijo, with its Gambari (Hausa man), Tapa (Nupe man) and Oimbo (Europeans), and in the popular Yoruba travelling theatres like the Afolayan Ogunsola Theatre, seemed particularly suited to the Lysistrata. For this reason we had Yoruba and Ibo actors playing Hausa and Fulani characters and a mixed group of Yoruba and Ibo men as the chorus of old Hausa women. The masks that were used were a studied compromise between Nigerian and Greek traditions. The music and dance was evolved from various traditional dances and an inter-tribal variety of instruments were used, just as Attic and Doric modes were mingled in Greek comedy.
A basic linguistic division exists in the original Greek play between Attic Greek and the Doric Greek spoken by the Spartans, which the Athenians never tired of mocking as a substandard form of their own ‘received pronunciation’. Existing translations of the Lysistrata have used either a Scots dialect or the accent of the American ‘Deep South’ to recreate this linguistic division. In Nigeria we had a readymade distinction between ‘standard’ English and pidgin English, and the northerners in the play speak ‘standard’ and the southerners speak pidgin. This helped to emphasise the spirit of inter-tribal parody as a basic ingredient of the comedy of the adaptation, and since we had no real wars to draw upon for a parallel to the Peloponnesian War, we had to make it imaginary, drawing upon latent or blatant tribal rivalries. The whole play is, of course, a plea for mutual goodwill, and all tribes in the play have their fair share of parody and lampoon.
While Aikin Mata was being auditioned and rehearsed, a number of European members of the university made objections to the performance of such a play, which has a notorious reputation in Europe, especially amongst those who have neither read it nor seen it produced, and has often been the source of prurient scandal and attempts at censorship. All kinds of fearful speculations about the effects of such a frankly bawdy play were aired, ranging from the farcical – that outbursts of self-indulgent sexuality would occur on the campus – to the traditional outcries levelled against the stage since the theatres were closed in England during the seventeenth century. The basis of the objection was that the plot of the play presumed in the audience a knowledge that husbands sleep with their wives and are likely to suffer if their wives refuse sexual intercourse over a prolonged period. In the society of Lysistrata woman’s only weapon was her sexual attraction, as Pope writes:
Power all their end and beauty all their means.
Finally, a deputation was made to the Vice-Chancellor, Sir Norman Alexander, who would not entertain any of the objections, and made it quite clear that censorship in any form was inimical to the whole idea of a university.
After the play was performed in March 1964, to capacity audiences from the university and the town, there were none of the expected dreadful consequences or deputations either Christian or Muslim. The would-be censors had suggested, among other things, that Muslims would seriously object to the spectacle of Muslim women taking an oath over a calabash of wine, since the consumption of alcohol is forbidden in Islam. In actual fact, the audience, which contained a great many devout Muslims, accepted the scene in the spirit of comedy as just one more outrageous way in which the women could demonstrate their defiance of a male-dominated society. In any case, jokes about Muslims drinking are frequent in Hausa and several neologisms among ‘initiates’, like jajaye hiyu and Krolar Kaduna, referring to the lacing of soft drinks with something more intoxicating, have found their way into the language.
Significantly enough, the most enthusiastic reception of the play came from the small, embattled group of female students.
Fellowship
* * *
1969
I had always been under the naïve impression that UNESCO was a surefire incantation for the raising of international goodwill. Driving from the airport in Havana at three in the morning past the VIETNAM VENCERÁ posters with the secretary of the Cuban National Commission for UNESCO, I said that I hoped to travel into the interior, as they called it, and maybe see the initiation of the zafra (sugar cane harvest), in which the Soviet fleet were to participate so nobly instead of whoring round Havana like the imperialist marine. ‘No,’ he said, ‘you look too much like a Yankee.’ No one else thought so. Whenever I walked along the Malecón (esplanade) I was followed by boys shouting, ‘Hey, Ruso,’ or ‘Hey, Tovarich, da me chicle.’ So much so that after almost two months of it I finally delivered a lecture to one persistent got-any-gum-chummer. Didn’t he realise that chewing gum was a North American confection and didn’t he know the insult he offered to a Soviet comrade by begging for imperialist chicle? He seemed chastened, then said, ‘Give me your belt then.’ If I wasn’t a Russian I was Czech. I was walking up and down in old Havana, waiting for the bank to open to draw my UNESCO pittance, when a workman beckoned me over to the welding yard and asked me if I’d like to see the shop. There was an oldish, deliberately distinguished-looking man standing guard over a former Coca-Cola fridge. Coca-Cola el refresco de la Amistad. He gave me a bottle of orange and clearly fancied himself as the ‘professor’ of the works. ‘Checo?’ ‘Sí,’ I lie. Then he explained to his workmates that Czechoslovakia was divided into three parts, ‘Slovakia, Moravia y … y …’ ‘Bohemia,’ I said. ‘Sí, Bohemia.’ When I had drained the refresco, they asked how much I wanted for my sunglasses. ‘I am afraid they are not for sale. Thank you for the welcome refreshments, comrades.’ Many Cubans rationalise the Soviet occupation of Czechoslovakia, and Fidel’s support, by saying things like, ‘The Czechs are taking advantage of the imperialist blockade to sell us shoddy goods at high prices,’ or ‘The Czechs feel your clothes … enviously.’ In Havana, they didn’t feel our clothes, but we were always being asked to sell them. In the end we had to. The money given by some kids’ pants, and a dress or two to pay off our bill. We could have left Cuba in barrels and braces if we had wanted.
In Brazil my stipend had been raised, and we managed a little better for a while. Things went reasonably, until in the north-east of Brazil I paid a visit to Dom Hélder Câmara, the Archbishop of Recife, who is ‘in quarantine’. He agreed to meet me later that day at the archbishop’s palace. Suddenly, I was summoned to the president of the EMPETUR (the state tourist bureau of Pernambuco) and told my programme was cancelled. ‘Such a person’, he said to a colleague, ‘must not be allowed to visit Dom Hélder. The man has worked a whole year in Czechoslovakia. He has been to the Soviet Union by invitation. He has come from Cuba. He has been to China.’ I hadn’t been to China. I had told a train-enthusiast employee of EMPETUR that once you could go all the way to Peking by train. UNESCO, I murmured. But it was no good. It was the day that the hostages for the kidnapped American ambassador had arrived in Havana and sworn to return to Brazil armed for the struggle. The army had been jumpy all day. ‘The war is against the people,’ explained a poet. Ambassador Elbrick had been kidnapped the day I flew from Rio to Bahía, and when I made my contact in the Afro-Oriental Institute, he said, ‘It’s the CIA. Brazilians could never plan anything like that.’ I began to see what he meant after two weeks, when my promised programme of Afro-Brazilian attractions had not materialised. I ran out of money, waiting. UNESCO, UNESCO, I murmured to EMPETUR. That made matters worse, I was later told by a monk when, being again penniless, I had sought refuge in a monastery. ‘In Latin America,’ he said, ‘UNESCO is highly suspect. The Americans think that there is too much European influence and so restrict its activity. I had two friends who did literary campaign work. They were paid and told to do nothing.’ I was glad to hear that they had been paid. I was having some difficulty. But as a UNESCO Fellow I did have one invitation to eat from a UNESCO expert, a Canadian, and his wife. When the wife heard that we had just been in Cuba, the flesh between her bikini shook and she said, ‘Everybody in the world knows that North America has the best food in the whole world.’ Then she said, ‘
When they start getting their filthy communist literature translated into French and putting it for sale in Canada …’ She tailed off and sighed, ‘How awful it must be not to feel free.’ And as an afterthought and a warning, I thought, to me she said, ‘In UNESCO we just do a job and never meddle in politics. We have no political opinions.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. Then, changing the distasteful subject, she went on to speak of what she felt she lacked in Brazil. ‘I lack bilberries. I lack gooseberries. I lack loganberries.’ ‘But fruit is plentiful.’ ‘Have you tasted the apples?’ she shouted back. We preferred to rely on monks and nuns. Habitless now, radical, they lead dangerous lives. Their hero is Dom Hélder, whom I was prevented from seeing, whose house has been often machine-gunned, and their martyr is the young Padre Henrique, who chose to work among the students of the north-east and was found with bullet holes in his head, the nails broken off his fingers, cord marks round his throat and wrists. His funeral all but provoked a violent confrontation between the military and the radical church. As I was seen off on my way to Brasilia, two nuns listed the terrible diseases prevalent in the north-east and concluded, ‘But the worst disease here is hunger.’
In Brasilia my first human contact was with Terezinha, a little girl of five whose family, six in all, were living under the fancy exit ramp of the National Theatre. It met the ground at an angle like a bushman’s windbreak. It had the advantage of being near the bus station, where they could get water, and being near the foyer, where Terezinha could hold her lice-ridden two-year-old sister up to the playgoers, coming out of The Devil Is a Woman, and beg for centavos. Culture. The ‘C’ of my incantation, UNESCO, was the half-open womb I had to huddle into. In UNESCO we do our job and don’t meddle in politics. My job was culture. I looked at the brave new architecture, the flat-topped pyramid of the National Theatre, with Terezinha’s family flopped at the bottom like broken-backed Aztec sacrifices. I looked at the architecture. The CHEs, seven storeys high, that they had in the Plaza de la Revolution in Havana would do even better in Brasilia.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 4