To conclude, I would like to read a short scene from The Common Chorus, Part I, the Lysistrata. The Greenham woman playing Lysistrata (which I hope will be Glenda Jackson) faces the magistrate, or in this case a Police Inspector who has come to find out why, as actually happened, the women have put huge padlocks on the main gate to the missile base, that ‘Acropolis’ whose very existence and cost undermine our national education as much as anything:
INSPECTOR
We let laxness in the home and when we’re on the beat
they’re giving someone else our little midnight treat.
We’re out and about enforcing British law
and they first learn whoredom and then denounce war.
If this is what happens when you treat her
like an equal, don’t give her a millimetre
or she’ll take six inches and it won’t be yours.
Then they try to castrate us by stopping wars.
Domestic leniency, believe you me
first it’s sensuality then it’s CND!
First it’s going out alone with made-up faces
then, the next thing that you know, surrounding missile bases.
One day it’s taking classes, ancient bloody Greek!
Then it’s aerobics and building a physique.
What’s next, you wonder. Well, one thing that’s next
is getting our missile systems hexed
with their witchcraft, wailing, all this, all this,
because in domestic matters men have been remiss.
You know we’ve given them far too free a hand
and the upshot of it is, they’ll destroy the land.
In my opinion they’ll undermine the state
and as for Great Britain, you can forget the Great.
It’s my belief we’re on the slippery slope
because we’ve given women far too much rope.
Now they’ve gone too far. They’ve cooked their goose.
Their necks are going to feel the tightening of the noose.
HE’s on our side. He’s a bloke is ZEUS!
Well, ladies, I think you should be knowing
that this is as far as Liberation’s going.
Sorry to spoil your little fun, but from today
the only way you’re going is Holloway.
I’m rather afraid that we’re going to get tough.
The gentlemen of Britain have had e-bloody-nough!
(to LYSISTRATA)
You’ve locked these gates, madam. May we enquire why?
LYSISTRATA
Because the weapons in there bleed the country dry.
INSPECTOR
Locking the gates, though. It doesn’t make any sense.
LYSISTRATA
It’s a protest against the money wasted on Defence.
INSPECTOR
O so we’re a paid-up economist are we, miss? I see.
The FT index is all Greek to me.
Tell me then, if you’re an economist, miss,
about the money that gets wasted policing all this.
Ever thought about the cost to the nation
of policing your protest and your little demonstration?
LYSISTRATA
You won’t need to do it once they withdraw
the missiles, and we’ve put an end to war.
The money stockpiled in that Acropolis …
INSPECTOR
Acro … Acro … is that some foreign lingo, miss?
English is all I ever need to speak.
LYSISTRATA
OK, then, no more references to anything Greek!
The money represented by this wire fence
could be used on education if men had any sense.
The millions of pounds in your barbed-wire barricade
could go on education here, or Third World aid.
The billions committed to your missile base
could go towards helping the human race.
These destructive systems waste enormous wealth
better spent on Housing, Education, Health.
The billions behind that guarded silo door
would feed more than five thousand if we got rid of War.
Those millions in missiles and US personnel
could be spent on health, on making people well.
Those millions on missiles that you pour
along with human blood down the open drain of War.
Those millions, those billions stored in that concrete
could let the world’s hungry learn to eat.
We protest against those billions that are poured
into payloads the nation can’t afford,
cash that’s needed to house, feed, clothe, heal, teach.
INSPECTOR
Just open the bloody gate. Forget the Budget Speech!
LYSISTRATA
Inside blast-hardened bunkers housing Cruise
are millions the nation’s being forced to misuse.
These palatial missile bunkers almost halve
the nation’s resources and people starve.
Even if you never use your boyish little toys
by taking from the needy deterrence destroys.
With Cruise-missile money you could create jobs
for kids your kind will end up calling ‘yobs’.
Their lives of unemployment don’t make any sense,
and the money needed is squandered on ‘Defence’.
And by jobs I mean some profession other
than killing the sons of a Spartan mother.
INSPECTOR
Now you’ve lost me. Where the hell is Sparta?
LYSISTRATA
Where your payloads are pointing. The Peloponnese.
INSPECTOR
Didn’t catch the last bit.
LYSISTRATA
Forget it, it’s in Greece.
And if you want to know my name it’s Lysistrata.
INSPECTOR
Well, miss, is it? Lysistrata, or do we say Ms?
LYSISTRATA
When I’ve finished with your armies it’ll be DisMs!
INSPECTOR
Your geography’s confused me, Ms. I do hope
your little ladies’ commune’s not into dope.
POLICEMAN
Shall we search them, Inspector? They look the type
that have their peace pow-wows with the hashish pipe.
OLDER WOMAN
I’ll kick his knackers for him, the cocky little devil!
LYSISTRATA (restraining her)
No! That would be descending to their male level.
(to INSPECTOR again)
There’s no confusion. My mind’s completely clear
and there’s no difference between there and here.
Since Hiroshima what we’ve done,
paradoxically,’s to make the whole earth one.
We all look down the barrel of the same cocked gun,
one target, in one united fate
nuked together in some new hyperstate.
So Greece is Greenham, Greenham Greece,
Poseidon is … Poseidon, and not just for this piece.
Not just all places, all human ages too
are dependent on the likes of us and you.
In the Third World War we’ll destroy
not only modern cities but the memory of Troy,
stories which shaped the spirit of our race
are held in the balance in this missile base.
Remember, if you can, that with man goes the mind
that might have made sense of the history of Mankind.
It’s a simple thing to grasp, when we’re all dead
there’ll be no further pages to be read,
not even leaflets, and no peace plays like these,
no post-holocaust Aristophanes.
So if occasionally some names are new
just think of the ground that’s under you.
If we’re destroyed, then we
&nb
sp; take with us Athens 411 BC.
The world till now up to the last minute
and every creature who was ever in it
go when we go, everything men did or thought,
never to be remembered, absolutely nought.
No war memorials with the names of dead on
because memory won’t survive your Armageddon.
So Lysistrata, Glenda Jackson, it’s one name.
Since 1945 past and present are the same.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s ‘real’ or a play.
Imagination and reality will go the same way.
So don’t say it’s just a bunch of ancient Greeks.
It’s their tears that will be flowing down your cheeks.
In Lady Falkender’s memoirs of the Harold Wilson years she has this to say about the election of 1964:
Before the Election I had been leafing through the Radio Times to check which television programmes might interfere with public response to our campaigning. To my horror, I discovered that on polling day itself Steptoe and Son was due on an hour before the polls closed. This is the time during which, traditionally, the largest number of Labour voters come out and Steptoe was very popular at the time. I told Harold Wilson, and he explained to the then Director General of the BBC, Sir Hugh Greene, that the programme might reduce the number of people who voted, Conservatives as well as our own supporters. Sir Hugh Greene accepted the general point that the BBC should not put temptation in the way of voters of any political loyalty, and wryly asked Sir Harold what programme he thought would be suitable. The reply was: ‘Greek drama, preferably in the original.’
I have a dream that we might devise a drama, not Greek drama in the original, but deeply inspired by it and drawing some energy from that inexhaustible source, that might push Mrs Thatcher, and her spokesman on defence, and education, not to mention the members for Cannock and Burntwood, and Bury South, way down the ratings, so that on my way back from Delphi this July with my thiasos of British satyrs I might be able to go to Askri again, and Hesiod’s valley, and face up to the Muses, look the Muses in the face, and say, ‘See you again next year. I’m going back to a little bit of civilisation.’ And maybe hear the quavering voice of the ailing Mrs Muse, recuperating on Helicon, say, ‘Kalo taxidi!’
The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus
* * *
1989
INTRODUCTION TO THE DELPHI TEXT
I
Something prepared me for Greek drama long before I knew a word of ancient Greek or had ever heard the names of Hecuba or Oedipus. It began with the creation of what I call my ‘orchestra’, in the sense I later learned for that Greek word meaning ‘circular dancing place’. This ‘orchestra’ became my first brooding ground and, I think, the first intimation of what for me is the basic struggle of art. I was eight. We were celebrating what was called VJ (Victory over Japan) night with a large bonfire in the back street outside our house. The atmosphere was more celebratory than I can ever remember before or since, with normally taciturn people laughing, singing, dancing at the end of a terrible war. Furniture was brought out of houses to keep the blaze going. The fire became so high the telephone wires were burned down. The paint on our back gate blistered and peeled off. It went on all night, and in the morning I helped to douse the fire and shovel the ashes into tea chests to be taken away. When the space was cleared, the celebratory bonfire had left a black circle of scorched cobbles with thick scars of tar.
Forty-five years later, the circle is still there. Looking into that circle I once thought of it as the night-sky globe totally devoid of stars, an annihilated universe. It was something like Byron’s vision in ‘Darkness’:
I had a dream, which was not all a dream.
The bright sun was extinguished, and the stars
Did wander darkling in the eternal space …
It looked like this when my imagination couldn’t cope with the twentieth century. It was in this starless shape, even before I became a poet, that I learned to relate our celebratory fire, with the white-hot coils from domestic sofas, to that terrible form of fire that brought about the ‘VJ’ when unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. One element for celebration and terror. One space for the celebrant and the sufferer.
I began to learn to people that scorched orchestra only after an immersion in the drama of the ancient Greeks. Things just as ‘dark’ occurred in this orchestra of Dionysus, but it was lit by the sun and was surrounded by a community as bonded in their watching as we had been by our celebratory blaze. It was a drama open-eyed about suffering but with a heart still open to celebration and physical affirmation. In the late twentieth century, what clues to existential survival could be found in an ancient drama which managed to face up to the worst things it could imagine and yet not banish the celebratory? What style permitted the sufferer and the celebrant to share the same space? What were the ways and means?
Though the texts of ancient drama are constantly annotated and re-annotated, some of the factors I have found essential to the drama’s affirmation are often overlooked.
The first thing to observe about Greek drama is that it was staged in the common light of day. A shared space and a shared light. Our word ‘theatre’ is derived from the Greek word ‘theatron’, ‘a place of seeing’. Not only did the audience (hoi theatai, ‘those who see’ in Greek) see the action of tragedy, not only did the audience see the actors and chorus, but the actors and chorus saw the audience. They were all equally illuminated by the light of the sun. The lighting grid was the great globe itself. In Athens of the fifth century BC that ‘obvious reciprocity’ that Harbage found between actors and audience in Shakespeare’s theatre was created from the beginning of the experience by the shared space and shared light. When Bertolt Brecht writes in one of his theatre poems, ‘The Lighting’,
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