It is to find the meaning of suffering in such a context that Greek tragedy exists. And out of the same source comes the laughter of comedy and the celebration of the satyr play. Closer to our own precarious days the theme of transience was taken up by one who certainly helped us to become more fearfully aware of it. The ‘father’ of the atom bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, was thinking perhaps of a vista longer than the one his own invention shortened when he wrote:
Transience is the backdrop for the play of human progress, for the improvement of man, the growth of his knowledge, the increase of his power, his corruption and partial redemption. Our civilizations perish; the carved stone, the written word, the heroic act fade into a memory of memory and in the end are gone; this house, this earth in which we live will one day be unfit for human habitation as the sun ages and alters.
Certainly Oppenheimer’s invention, unleashed upon the world in 1945, made a great many people feel that we did not have to wait for the ageing of the sun for the earth to become unfit for human habitation. The American psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, who studied the survivors of Hiroshima, showed that when our sense of ‘symbolic immortality’ is undermined and threatened, as it was in the cold war after 1945, then our ‘confidence in the overall continuity of life gives way to widespread death imagery’.
It was into this new context of the old idea of transience experienced in the worst times of the cold war nuclear confrontation that I chose to put the Lysistrata of Aristophanes and The Trojan Women of Euripides together as The Common Chorus. I imagined them played and performed by the women of the peace camp at Greenham Common for the benefit of the guards behind the wire who were defending the silos where the weapons of our ultimate extinction were stored. Nuclear weapons gave mankind what Hannah Arendt called a ‘negative solidarity, based on the fear of global destruction’. Their presence also made us stare into the face of oblivion in a way unlikely to be redeemed in the memory of those whom Hecuba addresses as ‘later mortals’, and into whose hearts and songs she commits the suffering of her women at the end of The Trojan Women. As my Lysistrata is made to say, in the text published here:
In the Third World War we’ll destroy
not only modern cities but the memory of Troy,
stories that 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 Hist’ry 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.
And no post-holocaust Euripides either! No Hecuba entrusting her story to the future. That moment in The Trojan Women was central to my understanding of how the tragedy and comedy produced within four years of each other might be played together. When everything has been taken away from the women of Troy, with their city in flames, the death of all their menfolk, the execution of the child Astyanax, it is left to the one who could be said to have lost most to seek for one last redeeming idea. Hecuba says (1242–5):
εἰ δὲ μὴ θεὸς
ἔστρεψε τἄνω περιβαλὼν κάτω χθονός,
ἀφανεῖς ἂν ὄντες οὐκ ἂν ὑμνήθημεν ἂν
μούσαις ἀοιδὰς δόντες ὑστέρων βροτῶν.
But if God had not surrounded us and hurled
us headlong beneath the earth, we would have
disappeared and never been hymned by Muses,
providing themes for the songs of later mortals.
If we hadn’t suffered, we wouldn’t be songs for ‘later mortals’. The song for later mortals is the tragedy being performed. Hecuba addresses the Athenian audience of 415 BC across time from an already mythical and long-ruined Troy. They are the very ‘later mortals’ whose songs are Hecuba’s redemption. Every time the play is played through history in all its versions the ‘mortals’ become ‘later’. And we are the latest mortals now. We are in that long line of ‘later mortals’ first addressed in 415 BC as if from the present suffering of the Trojan Women of centuries before. We are the latest mortals who guarantee that the suffering was not in vain, and that the chain of commemorative empathy is unbroken. The Trojan women exit into the imagination and memory of each audience whenever the play is played. Hecuba leads her women into theatricality and into the only redemptive meaning known to the pre-Christian world and, I might add, to our post-Christian world. The pathos of her address to us in our lateness in mortal history is all the more precariously and transiently poised when it is made outside the base where a destructive force is housed that will undermine history and human memorialisation permanently. It becomes an appeal for the past not to be betrayed along with the present and the future. As Lysistrata says:
Since 1945 past and present are the same.
And it doesn’t matter if it’s ‘real’ or a play –
imagination and reality both 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 order to place the tragedy in this context I had to use the contemporaneity of comedy to first establish the parallels and allow the play to pass from Greenham to Greece and back in a fluid way.
If I am a serious witness of mutability and the ruins of time, I have to confess that I believe that versions of ancient plays have to be redone for each new production. There exists the basic culturally deciduous network of stems and branches of the original, which itself changes shape through growth and atrophy, and there is also the foliage for each new season’s versions. I live on yet another border of the Roman Empire, and often walk on the wall built by the Emperor Hadrian to divide the Romans from the barbarians. It has survived, or not, in various ways, ways that affect all monuments whether physical or spiritual. There are portions that have survived pretty well and can give a reasonable idea of the scale of the original enterprise. Then there are the bits of it – stones, milestones, altars, columns – from the wall and adjoining camps that have been recycled to become barns, farmhouses, pig troughs, gateposts, even church fonts and church pillars as at Chollerton. And there are sections – like the marble hewn from Mount Pentelicus to make the stadium seats in Delphi – which have gone into the lime kilns, some of which you can still see, to become mortar for building new structures in a modern style, or fertiliser for depleted fields. Representing an ancient play uses all these processes. Sections can be revealed intact. Some are cannibalised as elements of modern structures, some transformed into bonding or fertilising matter, generating new growth here and now.
Twenty years before I embarked on The Common Chorus, I had done another version of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes for a group of student actors and village musicians in northern Nigeria in collaboration with the Irish poet James Simmons (see p. 85). The text is unperformable outside Nigeria and was responsive to the tensions that later erupted into a devastating civil war. Contemporaneity is essential to the serious comedy of Aristophanes. The political situation has to be mortally serious. His play was written in the twenty-first year of the Peloponnesian War that eventually destroyed Athens. And neither his play nor that of Euripides prevented it happening.
A women’s peace magazine produced from Brighton in the 1980s called itself Lysistrata, and there was in its pages a reaching backwards to the suffering of the past, meeting, if you like, the hands held out by Hecuba to the ‘later mortals’ from the ruined city of Troy. There was a sense expressed by these women and the women of Greenham that ‘we are all interdependent, we are all responsible for each other, how delicate the strands, how strong the web’. Their historical empathy with the suffering of the past and their concern for the very existence of mortals later than themselves gave me the essential spirit to allow the pl
ay to move between Greenham and Athens in 411 BC. If the tragedy I had wanted to perform with the comedy declared that remembrance was the one human redemption, then the comedy, in the spirit of the peace women’s banners at the Cenotaph, declared that remembrance is not enough, and all their effort in the play is to prevent that dark, soul-rending effort of remembrance from becoming necessary once again in human history – if remembrance itself could survive the ruins of time in any Third World War. In that spectacular photograph of Greenham women dancing hand in hand in a circle on top of a missile silo I like to imagine both Lysistrata and Hecuba.
As Jeffrey Henderson tells us in his study of Aristophanic sexual imagery, ‘of several words used to indicate the cunt whose basic notion is that of an opening or passageway, θύρα [= gate] is the most popular’. And it is outside the gate into the missile base that the Greenham women pitched their bender tents. On one notorious occasion the women padlocked the main gate. The hilarious sequence of soldiers and police trying to reopen the gate can be seen in the film Carry Greenham Home. I use the action to represent the occupation of the Acropolis in the ancient original and symbolically to represent the women closing the entrances to their bodies. As Henderson also points out, the most notable use of θύρα is in the Lysistrata, where it is used to mean the gate of the Acropolis and the gates of love.
Leaflets inviting women to come and demonstrate at Greenham by linking arms and forming a chain around the perimeter fence declared that ‘we will turn our backs on it. Turn our backs on all the violence and destructive power it represents …’. In theatrical terms, by turning their backs on the base the women turn themselves towards the audience. Thus they are continually ‘presented’, as they would have been in the masks worn in the original ancient production. Also, the Greenham women faced forwards in order to scrutinise those who passed by the base on foot or in cars for signs of support. In this way I could find a ready motivation for the actors to face outwards and play out to the audience. The cruise-missile bunkers had three metal shuttered openings, like the back of the Olivier stage. I had intended these to be raised at the end of the second play, The Trojan Women, to let out the headlights of the convoy bearing the missiles, blinding the audience before the final blackout.
I imagine the first play, the comedy, the Lysistrata, played with all its robust Aristophanic language as a direct response to the sexually abusive language that was continually directed at the women, especially when trying to sleep, by the guards at the wire. I spoke to Greenham women about this, and it is recorded by Caroline Blackwood in her book on Greenham, On the Perimeter (1984):
‘I am so tired,’ Pat said. ‘We had such an awful night with the soldiers. They abused us all night. They just wouldn’t stop. It was sexual, of course. It’s always sexual.’
Apparently, many of the soldiers were under the impression that all the peace women were only camping round the base because they wanted to sleep with them. This was such a vain and deluded assumption it was comic. Never had any group of men seemed less sexually desirable than the defenders of the cruise missile when seen from the peace camps.
What is the matter with these soldiers, I wondered when I later heard them bellowing their horrible obscenities. Presumably they didn’t carry on like dirty-minded schoolboys at home. Yet the peace women brought out everything that was sadistic and infantile in these men. The sex war that was raging on the perimeter was a very ugly and cruel one.
And, of course, behind these British guards, in the heart of the base, were the USAF personnel, recreating the comforts of the USA and singing the kind of songs that appeared for sale in a publication from the USAF 77th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Upper Heyford. The following are typical fare:
I fucked a dead whore by the roadside
I knew right away she was dead
The skin was all gone from her tummy
The hair was all gone from her head.
And as I lay down there beside her,
I knew right away I had sinned.
So I pressed my lips to her pussy
And sucked out the wad I’d shot in.
Sucked out, sucked out.
I sucked out the wad I’d shot in, shot in,
Sucked out, sucked out,
I sucked out the wad I’d shot in.
Or:
I love my wife, yes I do, yes I do, I love her truly.
I love the hole she pisses through,
I love her ruby lips and her lily white tits,
And the hair around her asshole.
I’d eat her shit gobble, gobble, chomp, chomp,
With a rusty spoon, with a rusty spoon.
Not all the songs are of masculine sexuality. There are battle cries also:
Phantom flyers in the sky
Persian pukes prepare to die,
Rolling in with snake and nape.
Allah creates but we cremate.
North of Tehran, we did go
When FAC said from below,
‘Hit my smoke and you will find
The Arabs there are in a bind.’
I rolled in at a thousand feet,
I saw those bastards, beating feet,
No more they’ll pillage, kill and rape
’Cause we fried them with our nape.
I imagined such songs spluttering through the walkie-talkies of the British guards at the wire, songs with a Budweiser slur, coming from close to the silos where all the mod cons of Milwaukee were available, so that the Americans didn’t have to feel they were actually abroad. We shall be glad to be rid of such songsters and the weapons they brought with them.
Unfortunately, the Quick Reaction Alert – which involved at least one flight of nuclear-armed missiles being permanently in readiness – is not a common category in the world of theatre, as opposed to the theatre of war. There is no QRA at the RNT! By the time various managements had lingered over this text, the tension of a topical present and a tragic past had leached away into oblivion. Thankfully, the cold war has ended and my play has been marooned in its moment. The ‘text’, as Tarkovsky said of the film script, gets ‘smelted’ into performance. This text never went through that essential smelting process. If I wanted to do Lysistrata now, I might have to begin again with a third and totally different version. To recognise that a performance text has to be done again and again is to acknowledge the transience, the flow, the ephemerality of all theatrical realisation. And it is in that spirit that I have to acknowledge also that the time for this particular version of the Lysistrata of Aristophanes has passed, with the thankful ending of the fearful cold war that produced it. However, in July I received from friends in Dubrovnik An Appeal for Peace in Croatia. It was written on the opening night of a play: ‘In these times of deafness in which the word that cries for peace and understanding has become inaudible, our company is playing Hekuba by Marin Džić – the tragedy of a mother at the end of an absurd war.’ Hecuba is once more committing herself to later mortals, aware of their imminent mortality. And where Hecuba is, then Lysistrata isn’t far behind.
Honorary Doctorate, Athens: Acceptance Speech
* * *
1998
I started learning ancient Greek exactly fifty years ago almost to the day, at the age of eleven, three years after the end of the Second World War.
And I am celebrating that half a century of involvement with the drama of Greece in two ways: by the opening of my new film for the cinema, Prometheus, on 9 November at the London Film Festival; and four days later, here in this hall receiving the honour you so generously bestow on me today. It is the first such honour I have accepted, although many have been proposed to me. It may seem strange to you that I have never accepted an honorary degree before. I will try to tell you why. When I began learning ancient Greek I came from a family who had no knowledge of literature and culture, and in fact considered themselves uneducated and inarticulate. It was this awareness of that background that gave me a hunger for articulation, for all forms of eloquence
, and gave me a passionate taste for the supreme poetry of ancient Greek, and also with the same passion made me into a poet. It is a famous and much-anthologised poem of mine, which is almost considered my signature tune, that expresses this:
‘Heredity’
‘How you became a poet’s a mystery.
Wherever did you get your talent from?’
I say: ‘I had two uncles, Joe and Harry,
one was a stammerer, the other dumb!’
My awareness of the wound of inarticulacy, of dumbness and stammering made me grasp at Greek and grasp at the growing identity of poet, so that an awareness of inarticulacy and ancient Greek eloquence were the double helix of my inspiration. In retrospect, I see that I was hoping to express things my parents and uncles had never been able to express, and I was taking as my model the greatest body of literature and drama known to Europe. For the great hunger there was the greatest food.
One of the ways I taught myself to be a poet, at this very early stage, was through translation, and I translated a great deal of ancient Greek as a way of finding a style of my own, never for mere philological or archaeological purposes.
I worked hard at both, and my parents, whose lives had always been insecure, wanted me to become something like a teacher and were thrilled when I began to do research for a doctorate. On the point of submitting my thesis I decided to burn my boats, abandon any aspiration towards academic life, and though I knew it was bitterly disappointing to my mother, I ventured everything on becoming a poet first and foremost, and that is what I have always been. I had conceived of a deeply serious role for the poet from my reading of ancient Greek, and it had to be my whole life, and as much of a job as my father’s, who worked long hours in a bakery. My mother later learned to have pride in my work for the National Theatre, but she always regretted that she would never be able to call me ‘doctor’. It was the same instinct for freedom that made me decline honorary doctorates from a number of British universities. I worried about being weighed down with honours as I grew older, when it was the time when I hoped to be freest in my art.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 19