ὦ μητρὸς ἐμῆς σέβας, ὦ πάντων
αἰθὴρ κοινὸν φάος εἱλίσσων,
ἐσορᾷς μ᾽ ὡς ἔκδικα πάσχω. (1091–3)
O you heavens who roll around the light that is common to everything,
you witness the injustices I suffer.
– confident that the full light of day not only illuminates his suffering and the collective audience, but also the landscape and life beyond the imagined realities of the stage. Not only by this light that was ‘common to all’ were the tragic events, the actors, the sea, the valley, Lake Copais, Euboea illuminated; the actors could also see the audience. This shared space and shared light makes an enormous difference to the sense of theatrical communication. It creates ‘obvious reciprocity’. It is harder to slide into some of the self-indulgences of obscurity and some of the audience-dodging evasions of much modernism. And remember, and we should always remember this, though I am not suggesting that their use is essential in modern productions of Greek drama, all these plays were performed in masks. Masks have the curious ability to look many people in the eye at the same time. They had the effect of that famous Lord Kitchener recruiting poster, where it seemed impossible for the unenlisted to avoid the pointing finger and the staring eye. A chorus of twelve or fifteen could patrol (if that’s the right word) the concentration and attention of those spectators on the curved cavea because they were wearing masks. If you think you are being looked at, if you think you are being addressed personally and directly, you listen. And masks make an audience feel exactly that. You can bet your life that when the Furies in the Oresteia talk about individual guilt, no one in the audience felt let off the hook of moral scrutiny. There is a British TV documentary about the great Greek actress Katina Paxinou, who is appearing currently, I am happy to see, on Greek postage stamps. She talks about playing in the theatre of Epidaurus with 18,000 people. She was distracted by a man at the back scribbling in a pad, obviously a critic (or the correspondent of The Times!). She said: ‘I looked at him, and I spoke my next lines to him, and he stopped scribbling.’ And if an unmasked human face can effect that renewal of attention, how much more so the mask that seems to look at many people at the same time, in the same shared light and the same shared space.
I’d like us to think about masks for a while because I have the sense that when you scholars consider masks, if and when you do consider them, it only occurs to you as a rather embarrassing afterthought, and it’s been my contention that masks are central to the understanding of the style and language of ancient drama. Although, as I have said, I am not of the opinion that masks are obligatory gear in modern productions, I have to maintain that we cannot understand the action or verbal style of Greek theatre without continually reminding ourselves that it was a theatre of masks. Perhaps you leave masks out of your dramatic considerations because you have never had the opportunity, as I have, of experimenting with masks and actors. Some of you may recall Jocelyn Herbert’s beautiful masks for the NT Oresteia. They were the result of much experiment and workshops with actors, which were to find out, as much as anything, what kind of language would be spoken by masks in this theatrical situation of ‘obvious reciprocity’ in a shared space and a shared light. I don’t think you need me to tell you that it wasn’t the language of Noël Coward. Agamemnon and Clytemnestra didn’t have a ‘little chat in front of the palace’, though I have heard it actually described like that by a distinguished classicist. And, once and for all, we should dismiss a fallacy which must still be current because I saw in Brussels only two months ago in a museum section where they had depictions of Greek theatrical masks the explanatory caption that a mask performed the office de porte-voix, the ‘function of a megaphone’. I’m actually quite attached to this little delusion. When I was a schoolboy studying Greek and the class was about to be subjected to a harrowing test on the conjugation of histēmi, one of the unfailing ways of distracting Dr Wilson from his horrible purpose was for one of us to point to the picture of the Theatre of Dionysus on the wall and ask innocently, ‘Please, sir, how could people hear at the back?’ The teacher would go off into a long, complicated explanation, the gist of which was that the masks were a sort of megaphone. Since I no longer have to undergo the ordeal of tests on the conjugations of histēmi, I am glad to jettison the megaphone theory of the Greek theatrical mask. There’s another kind of red herring too when we have to consider the language that masks use. In the last six months, I have sat and brooded in a number of ancient theatres, in Athens and Epidaurus, Delphi, and Priene, and Bergama and Ephesus and the beautiful ‘chamber’ theatre at the top of a mountain on the site of ancient Thera in Santorini. In all of them there was always a crowd of people with or without a guide dropping drachmas, or yen or deutschmark or pence or dimes, or crying loudly, ‘Yoohoo!’ to one of their number strategically placed on the very back row, to ‘test the acoustics’. And although I believe with W. B. Yeats that ‘first of all there must be visibility and audibility and if these are absent nothing can be right’, it’s even more important than testing the fine acoustics to remember that the texts that were spoken there by masks had a built-in ‘performability’. This performability had a rhythmical energy that was designed to fill such spaces, to communicate in such conditions of full daylight. We will discover more about the texts by thinking of them first in this way than through years of drachma-dropping. It’s probably fortunate that Oedipus wasn’t required to drop the brooch he blinded himself with or it would have been taken as irrefutable evidence that you could hear a pin drop. You have only to compare the amount of artificial and external rant that has to inflate a prose translation of a Greek tragedy with a real metrical pulse to begin to address the problem. The reason that Peter Hall and Jocelyn Herbert and I had to spend so much time in workshops on masks for our Oresteia was that there really is nowhere to turn for help. Even when some practical work has been done there exists a generalising stylistic confusion between Noh drama and commedia dell’arte and the full Greek tragic mask. There is no help either in what little writing there is on masks. When Susan Harris Smith, in her recent book Masks in Modern Drama (University of California Press, 1986), writes about masks, even though she has the NT Furies on the cover of her book, she gets it almost 100 per cent wrong when she writes:
The mask challenges the primacy of language that is undisputed in realistic and naturalistic drama.
This is absolutely the wrong way round, as the mask actually reinforces the primacy of language, at least in the theatre of ancient Greece. The mask reinforces that primacy by continuing to speak in situations that ‘normally’ or in realistic or naturalistic drama would render a person speechless. It is exactly the primacy of language that allows us to gaze into terror and not be turned to stone. Adrian Poole, in another recent book, Tragedy: Shakespeare and the Greek Example, gets it wrong in a related way when he writes that ‘tragedy represents the critical moment at which words fail’. Words might fail you or me at such critical moments when we see the city burned to the ground, our children slaughtered, devastation and horror in all their worst forms, but words do not fail the mask. It is designed with an open mouth. To go on speaking even at ‘critical moments’.
Let’s juxtapose the naked human face that you and I have with a tragic mask and ask three questions to get a feel of the difference between life and theatre.
1. What does a human face do, what do we tend to do, when we’re presented with real or very realistically filmed versions of blood, death, violence and terror? We tend to close our eyes in psychic self-preservation. The psychiatrist Anthony Clare wrote in The Listener not long ago that ‘the portrayal of Ulster violence has only numbed viewers into anaesthetised silent voyeurs’. They’ve looked into terror and been turned to stone. The Medusa-like countenance of the Fifth Age has petrified them. Silent voyeurs!
2. What does the human face do, what do we do, when we gaze on such terrors? We become silent. We are s
peechless with anguish or grief. We have no words to describe them. ‘There can be no poetry after Auschwitz,’ the familiar and utterly dispiriting adage of Adorno. Das Wort ist tot. ‘The word is dead.’ For my new piece for the Delphi stadium in July 1988 I have been reading papyri and studying their fragments, and I found one the other day which is an appeal to a Roman general to come and save the inhabitants of Egyptian Thebes from a barbarian tribe thought to be the Blemyes, of whom the pleader writes:
οὐ μία τις βιότοιο γὰ[ρ ἔμ]φασις, οὐ χορὸς αὐτοῖς,
οὐχ Ἑλικών, οὐ Μοῦσα·
For such people life has no emphasis, no significance. They have no dance, no Helicon, no Muse.
The mask, facing up to the Muses, refuses to surrender emphasis.
3. What does the head do when it suffers or witnesses suffering? It tends to bow down.
And now we should imagine the Greek mask in the same three situations. If a mask gazes on the same horrors, the same terrors, it goes on gazing. It is created with open eyes. It has to keep on looking. It faces up to the Muses. What does a mask do when it suffers or witnesses suffering through these continually open eyes? Words never fail it. It goes on speaking. It’s created with an open mouth. To go on speaking. It has faith in the word. The chorus in Agamemnon might say:
τὰ δ᾽ ἔνθεν οὔτ᾽ εἶδον οὔτ᾽ ἐννέπω (248)
What happened next I did not see and will not tell.
but what they have seen they will tell you about, and in such spellbinding language that you have to listen. The open eyes and open mouth of the mask come together very powerfully in the figure of Cassandra, in the same play of Aeschylus. For almost three hundred lines of the Agamemnon she stands gazing silently into the terrors she has already witnessed in the destruction of Troy and gazing into the terror she sees in the future, her own bloody death and Agamemnon’s. Her silence establishes the seeing, and the seeing prepares the way for her bursting into speech. The open-eyed silence is full of seeing. The mask creates that expectancy. If the human head bows down when it suffers, the mask keeps its head upright. It is created to stay upright. It’s created to present itself. In this theatre of ‘obvious reciprocity’ the mask is created to see, to speak and to present itself so it can be seen. Even Oedipus has to present his bloody sockets to be seen. When he enters blinded, the messenger introduces him as a theama, something to be seen in the theatron. ‘Theama’ is also the word Prometheus uses of himself to direct the theatēs to the injustice of his Zeus-imposed suffering. When Oedipus, this theama, enters, Sophocles has the chorus draw attention to what we must see by saying how terrible it is to regard:
ὦ δεινὸν ἰδεῖν πάθος ἀνθρώποις,
ὦ δεινότατον πάντων ὅσ᾽ ἐγὼ
προσέκυρσ᾽ ἤδη. τίς σ᾽, ὦ τλῆμον,
προσέβη μανία; τίς ὁ πηδήσας
μείζονα δαίμων τῶν μακίστων
πρὸς σῇ δυσδαίμονι μοίρᾳ;
φεῦ φεῦ, δύσταν᾽:
ἀλλ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἐσιδεῖν δύναμαί σε, θέλων
πόλλ᾽ ἀνερέσθαι, πολλὰ πυθέσθαι,
πολλὰ δ᾽ ἀθρῆσαι:
O dread fate for men to see, O most dreadful of all that I have set my eyes on! Unhappy one, what madness has come upon you? Who is the unearthly foe who, with a leap of more than mortal range, has made your ill-starred life his prey? Alas, alas, you hapless man! I cannot even look on you, though there is much I desire to ask, much I desire to learn, much that draws my wistful gaze.
(trans. R. C. Jebb)
I’m not enough of a Greek scholar to say, but it seems to me that the progression in that speech from one word for ‘seeing’ to the next, from idein to esidein to athrēsai, help to make the audience continue their gazing, and focus on the mask, with its now blood-glued eyes, when it starts to speak from its still open mouth. Words have not failed the mask of Oedipus. The head stays unbowed for us to see the terrible sockets and also to register the carriage of survival. One could almost say that the first words of Hecuba in the Trojan Women of Euripides, ana, dysdaimon, is a kind of motto for the tragic mask, an injunction to present itself suffering and all to the audience:
ἄνα, δύσδαιμον, πεδόθεν κεφαλή.
Lift your head, unlucky one, from the ground.
The mask of Hecuba presents itself to the audience, faces up to its suffering, speaks, and carries from this first act of presentation an existential meaning that survives in the last words of the Trojan Women. The very final scene of the play could be said to have been prepared by this ana, dysdaimon, that survives into the play’s ending and brings us back full circle to the act of raising the head and facing up to the life of the future, with all its horrors. Euripides deliberately brings Hecuba, and the chorus with her, back down to the earth we first see her prostrated on, just before the very end of the play:
Ἑκάβη
γεραιά γ᾽ ἐς πέδον τιθεῖσα μέλεα καὶ
χερσὶ γαῖαν κτυποῦσα δισσαῖς.
Χορός
διάδοχά σοι γόνυ τίθημι γαίᾳ
τοὺς ἐμοὺς καλοῦσα νέρθεν
ἀθλίους ἀκοίτας.
(Trojan Women, 1305–9)
HECUBA
I’m stooping my ageing limbs to the ground
and pound the earth with both my hands.
CHORUS
I kneel down too, calling my poor husband
from the world below.
My dramatic instincts tell me that Euripides brings his Trojan women low to the ground not only to take a last leave of their dead, but in order that they again had to raise their heads like Hecuba at the beginning of the play, and stand, in order to make an exit. And the bearing of that exit and the deportment of the mask are reasons why we are able to gaze on the terror and not turn to stone. What is Hecuba’s last word, if not the final word of the play?
ἴτ᾽ ἐπί, τάλανα,
δούλειον ἁμέραν βίου. (1329–30)
Come on, poor woman, slavery is now your life.
For all the future is slavery the mask’s last word and vision is of biou, ‘life’. And the chorus add to this:
ἰὼ τάλαινα πόλις: ὅμως δὲ
πρόφερε πόδα σὸν ἐπὶ πλάτας Ἀχαιῶν. (1331–2)
Oh my miserable city. But none the less start walking to the ships of the Achaeans.
In that little word homōs, in that ‘none the less’ so strategically placed at the beginning of a new sentence and at the end of a verse line, is a reinforcement of, a commitment to the last word of Hecuba, biou, ‘life’. These are small words but crucial, and spoken in masks, with their necessarily upright bearing, they resonate with existential survival that is at the heart of tragedy and make it impossible to agree with Jean-Paul Sartre that the play ends in ‘total nihilism’.
These are some of the simple questions that I put to myself standing with a fellow pilgrim in an ancient theatrical space on the slopes of Helicon in the Valley of the Muses. They are part of a search for the means to face up to the Fifth Age of mankind. One of my new projects for the National Theatre, which will hopefully be brought eis to phōs, though not, alas, to the full light of day, in 1989, bears all the marks of these recent broodings. I have combined two ancient plays written within a short time of each other as a response to the same political events in Athens, and I have placed them in a setting which makes all our spiritual struggles and cultural endeavours face up to the impasse of the Age of Iron. It is a place that mocks our inner adventures either in reimagining the past or shaping the future. One play is a comedy, the other a tragedy: the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and the Trojan Women of Euripides. I intend t
o play them both on the same evening. In my study at 9 The Grove, where I write my poems and plays and create my versions of Greek drama for the National Theatre, I have on the wall some inspiring pictures of the Muses. I have a copy of a vase painting of the Muse sitting on Helicon with a lyre. I have a reproduction of the Muses dancing on their mountain by Giulio Romano, from the Pitti Palace in Florence. And next to them I have what looks like a similar group of women holding hands and dancing in an ‘indissoluble chorus’. The mountain they are dancing on is in no way zatheon, ‘holy’, like the mountain of Hesiod we happened on last year. It is in no way sacred or holy, though it has blind worshippers. It is a hellish Helicon more appropriate, perhaps, to our Age of Iron. In front of this mountain is barbed wire and razor wire and police cars. This chorus of ‘Muses’ is a picture of women dancing on the top of a nuclear silo at the Greenham Common US missile base in January 1983. It is here that my two plays, which I have combined and call The Common Chorus, are set. The mountain that these Muses dance on is where our extinction is stored, an extinction that even Memory, the mother of the Muses, will not survive to make our sufferings a story like those of Hecuba and the women of Troy, an extinction that will mean no going ‘back to civilisation’, even for one learned in the classics. Life will have no emphasis, no significance. There will be no dance, no Helicon, no Muses. This ‘scenario’, as it is called by strategists speculating over the future of Europe, sometimes called the ‘theatre’ of war, is probably the worst thing that our imagination can and, I’m afraid, must conceive. And on the brink of the silo and the extinction it represents, this chorus of Muses of the late Age of Iron affirm life, and celebrate it by dancing in the face of the ultimate darkness on Helicon. Our way not back to civilisation but forward might begin by facing up to these Muses. My play The Common Chorus, combining the Lysistrata and the Trojan Women, is set outside one of the gates to the Greenham Common missile base. It begins with the guards behind the wire shouting sexual abuse at the women’s peace camp, with its ‘benders’, where they live their continually disturbed existence, made from bent branches and polythene. The women’s response to the guards’ abuse is to play, with very limited theatrical resources, first the comedy of Aristophanes and after it the tragedy of Euripides. The threat of extinction contained in the weapons the guards are protecting make the real and the imagined interdependent, as we of this Fifth Age bear in our memory all responsibility now for the struggles and aspirations of the past, of all ages, not only fifth-century Athens. This idea casts its shadow over the whole piece. When it became known that I was preparing this piece for the theatre, I was asked to send a draft of the Lysistrata to an American magazine, with a view to publishing it before the performance. Although my texts for the theatre are never finished until they are performed, I sent the draft. The magazine was a well-known, once ‘radical’ American journal. They hung on to the text for a long time, as is the way with these magazines, and to tell the truth I forgot about it. Then I had a letter saying that, after due consideration, etc. etc., while they found the version ‘wonderful’, they had come to the conclusion that it was ‘too pacifist, and too obscene’ to publish. God knows what the Daily Mail will make of it if the Partisan Review takes this attitude. God knows also what the member for Cannock and Burntwood and the member for Bury South will find to say in their outrage to the Daily Mail about a play over two thousand years old. I mention this now only to remind you, when you are debating the threatened future of your subject, that the book-burners are abroad again. There are grave threats to Greek studies besides the new National Curriculum. Some people are trying to create a climate of opinion in this country also where it might soon not be beyond the realms of fantasy to foresee such brilliant and human books as that by another former president of your association, the great Greek scholar Sir Kenneth Dover, on Greek homosexuality falling foul of the infamous Clause 28. When the Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford reviewed this book in the New Statesman ten years ago, he wrote that Sir Kenneth Dover gave ‘an excellent selection of illustrations, all the more welcome because museums are often unwilling to exhibit and scholars to reproduce the works of art most relevant to this purpose, some of which are not only interesting but delightful’. Can delightful pictures be said to promote homosexuality? There are certainly some very happy and unashamed couplings in the pages of Sir Kenneth Dover’s book. Are the vases, I wonder, even now being re-relegated to the dusty basements and cellars of our museums? The homosexuality of ancient Greece is as essential to its understanding as its tragic drama. I have had my problems with the book-burners of Cannock and Burntwood, and Bury South, and I know many of the ancient poets I admire would have similar problems if they were alive in Britain today, and I would be proud to be hounded in their company. I have said that I am in the process of reconstructing the fragmentary satyr play of Sophocles, the Ichneutae, and I have a feeling that I’d better hurry round the museums with my thiasos to seek inspiration from the satyrs depicted on vases before they too are sent ‘back to civilisation’ in some basement. I don’t quite know where satyrdom will stand under Clause 28, but I have witnessed them coupling not only with Maenads (which might well pass muster!), but also with each other, even with gratefully surprised donkeys, not to mention the Sphinx handle of the wine jar they are cavorting on. I’m not sure how buggering the Sphinx would fare either under this infamous clause.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 15