I often suffered from self-doubt over the difficulties of this piece. The theatricality it demanded from the performers was mostly alien to their narrow naturalistic fixations, and although Jocelyn often disagreed with me over details to which she was vigorously opposed, she was never once unsupportive and I have never known her to be negative. If I had nothing else to be grateful to her for, and I have much more than I could ever give words to, then I will never forget her loyalty, both artistic and personal, during this very ambitious enterprise, when many people around us were losing faith. What was remarkable, I remember thinking once, though after all I have known of her I shouldn’t have been surprised, was that the oldest member of the company was the most adventurous spirit in the room.
VII
There was a memorial for Jocelyn Herbert at the Royal Court Theatre on 12 October 2003, at which I recalled the last weekend of my dear friend and collaborator in, more or less, the following words:
‘Your spirit lifts with the wonder of being there,’ Jocelyn once wrote about Delphi. She had a glorious capacity for wonder. There were many times I saw her spirit lift like that, and one was on the Sunday, the day before she died. We were out at Andrew’s Farm, the cottage that Jocelyn had bought with George Devine. On the Saturday night we had a belated celebration of my birthday, which had been the week before. Jocelyn surrounded a chocolate cake with camellias. It had candles and I blew them out. We were all laughing. Trish [Montemuro] cooked a delicious roast lamb. Jocelyn had put cowslips on the table and Sian [Thomas] had brought some bluebells back from her walk to add to them. Yellow and blue, the great affirmative colours. Sun and sky. Matisse and Hockney. Sian described the wood, which had bluebells as far as the eye could see. I suggested we should all go on Sunday. As she became a little frailer, Jocelyn would normally let us go for even such a short walk by ourselves, but this time she decided she wanted to see the wood full of bluebells, and we all walked gently there at Jocelyn’s pace. When she saw the bluebells she was so happy. She made us put our heads from side to side so that we would see the flowers like a delicate mist change from mauve to blue to purple. As we all did this we noticed that in front of us two young deer were watching. Then they flew over the blue clouds and away. Jocelyn’s face was lit with happiness. I saw that her ‘spirit lifted with the wonder of being there’. These words of Jocelyn’s I’ve used are from an account she wrote of working with me in Delphi where we first did The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus in 1988 and another piece called The Labourers of Herakles in 1995:
When you find yourself in Delphi, drinking from the Kastalian spring before walking up the Sacred Way to the Temple of Apollo, up again to the ancient theatre and further still till you come to the vast stadium and you look up and see high above you the eagles wheeling majestically round the mountain peaks as they did centuries ago, then the isolation, fragmentation and the sense of the futility of much of our modern way of life falls away and you feel in touch and linked to those ghosts of far-off times and your spirit lifts with the wonder of being there.
I must have done that walk at least thirty times with Jocelyn. There was never once when she didn’t find it thrilling. We did it for the last time in 1998 and she felt triumphant that she’d still been able to make the climb. I did it again myself three weeks ago and missed Jocelyn every inch of the Sacred Way.
On Monday, the day Jocelyn died, we talked a lot about Delphi, as we often did. Jocelyn insisted that she would cook lunch and she made her delicious scrambled eggs and smoked salmon and we drank retsina outside at the table under the May tree. The retsina always made us talk about Greece. And we talked for hours. About Delphi. About the first time I’d taken her there twenty years ago.
It was somewhere she had discovered with George [Devine], and I always felt she included his spirit in the work we did there. We talked about recces to Delphi, our favourite part of the work process, with some free time to swim and explore and to talk at a table outside into the night about the work. The recces to Delphi with Trish and Vicki [Hallam]. The recce with Sian for Prometheus.
We must have been about ten times to Delphi together, our spirits full of the wonder of being there. The last time was in 1998, and Jocelyn, Sian and I all went down every day for a swim in Galaxidi. And after to the same wonderful fish taverna, Tassos. There was no one else there swimming. There were pine trees to give shade. We were all treading water together in the sea and we looked up and above us was Delphi on the mountainside, where we did our work together, and above it Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses. We floated, gazing, full of ‘the wonder of being there’.
We remembered all these things about Greece in our sunny conversation on Monday under Jocelyn’s May tree. In fact, we covered all the work we’d done together, our ‘adventures’, as she called them, with undiminished enthusiasm. The things we’d done in Delphi and at the National, and many projects we’d worked months, even years, on that were abandoned: an opera on Medea at the New York Met; a trilogy set at Greenham Common; a fragmentary piece of Euripides where we’d worked out how to fly a singing hang-gliding chorus from the Phaedriades into the Delphi stadium.
And we talked a lot about what was probably our greatest ‘adventure’, in Carnuntum, on the Danube between Vienna and Bratislava, about the lions and tigers we had beneath the audience’s seats in the Roman amphitheatre, about the bears that got loose, and about the speech I’d written for Sian, which Jocelyn loved as much for the way it came about as for its quality or content.
I’d been rehearsing a very incomplete text and we were about to leave for Austria. Sian said, ‘I wish I could come and see it.’ I said, ‘You can if you are in the play.’ ‘As what?’ she said. I said, ‘As the Empress Faustina, the wife of Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher of tranquillity, and the mother of Commodus, one of the most violent of all Roman emperors.’
I went home to Newcastle, wrote a speech for Faustina, faxed it to Sian. She went with the fax to Jocelyn in Princedale Road. They read the speech together and they went off to the Portobello Market. Jocelyn found a long red drape in an Indian shop. On the way out they noticed a dummy in the window with grey velvet and jewellery. Jocelyn said, ‘That’s her,’ and bought the velvet, the necklace and bangles. And the very next day we all flew to Vienna, drove to Carnuntum and started rehearsing.
And we talked about our epic journey for our film Prometheus, when at the age of eighty-one she rode on a truck with me through Germany, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and back to the Greece we loved. And on the day she died she reminded me how I filled my straw hat with mulberries I’d picked from a tree while setting up a shot in Bulgaria and brought them for her. There are not many people who would inspire a man to fill his straw hat with mulberries. But Jocelyn was the sort of Muse you made those kinds of offerings to. They were received with her unique joy.
As well as all our many adventures we also talked about death, as we often did, under the May tree, sitting in the sun. She said how she wanted to be – ‘sprinkled’ was the word she used – she wanted to be sprinkled at Andrew’s Farm to be with George. I said how most people in my family had been doing something one minute and the next were dead: my mother, my father, my grandfather, who got a pint of beer from the bar, sat down, took a sip, put his glass on the table and died. ‘How wonderful!’ she said. Then she said, ‘Do you remember in Delphi how you used to read those beautiful poems you wrote about your mother and father’s deaths, as we sat on the balcony overlooking the sea of olives and our swimming place in Galaxidi?’ I did remember. I was sitting on that same balcony three weeks ago missing Jocelyn and remembering her final day. It was on our last trip to Delphi in 1998. Sian said, ‘He’s just written a new one that was published the other week in the London Review of Books.’ Jocelyn said, ‘Oh, read it to us, darling.’ We were still sitting under the May tree and I read the poem. It’s about a large clock over a jeweller’s called Dyson’s in Leeds, under which my mother and father used to meet whe
n they were courting. But it is also about Time, that brings us all together in the end.
‘Under the Clock’
Under Dyson’s clock in Lower Briggate
was where my courting parents used to meet.
It had a Father Time and Tempus Fugit
sticking out sideways into the street
above barred windows full of wedding bands,
‘eternities’ to be inscribed with names,
like that I felt on Dad’s when we held hands,
or on Mam’s crumbling finger in cremation’s flames.
Today back on Briggate I stopped and saw
the red hands on the Roman XII and V
those lovers won’t meet under any more,
glad stooping Father Time and I survive.
I see the scythe, the hourglass, the wings,
the Latin you’d proudly ask me to construe
and think of the padded boxes with your rings,
under the clock to keep our rendezvous.
‘Oh, that’s beautiful,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Beautiful.’
‘“Under the Clock”,’ she repeated the title. ‘And here we are,’ she said. ‘Under the May.’ Then she said, ‘The May is all the more beautiful when you’re also aware of Father Time.’ It was as if she were saying that the wonder of being there or anywhere was enhanced by the awareness that one day you wouldn’t be.
‘We’re here under the May and we’re blessed,’ said Sian.
‘Yes, we are,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Blessed that we know one another, blessed that we are here together in the sun on this beautiful day.’ And we all sat quietly absorbing that feeling of being blessed by the place, the day and the bond of our deep friendship and our work. Then Jocelyn went to have a sleep and we washed up.
And if we’d reminisced in the sun about our glorious adventures of the past, in the evening over supper we had a wonderful conversation about the new play of mine she was going to design. She was very focused and kept challenging me to make what I was after clearer and clearer. And she helped me over a real block. I said I was sorry that on the recce for this we wouldn’t be able to swim or drink retsina in Delphi, but may need to go to the Arctic Circle to view the Aurora Borealis.
‘But that would be wonderful,’ she said. ‘I can’t wait!’ A few minutes later she went upstairs, sat on the bed, and died.
Her bedroom window was open to the night, the moon and the scent of the May tree we’d sat under talking and drinking half the day.
Recces were our favourite part of work, though we loved the work too.
Over our sunny lunch we’d talked about our work and recces to Delphi, to Carnuntum, to Elefsina, to Japan, and only last year to Los Angeles.
I think of her now on a recce I can’t join her on just yet.
I think again of her climbing the stairs after we had had our wonderful conversation and think now again of how she wrote about Delphi:
When you find yourself in Delphi, drinking from the Kastalian spring before walking up the Sacred Way to the Temple of Apollo, up again to the ancient theatre and further still till you come to the vast stadium and you look up and see high above you the eagles wheeling majestically round the mountain peaks as they did centuries ago, then the isolation, fragmentation and the sense of the futility of much of our modern way of life falls away and your spirit lifts with the wonder of being there.
She had a beautiful capacity for wonder.
This time she climbed further still, and three weeks ago I swam as I swam with her in Galaxidi as recently as 1998, and I looked up and saw Delphi, and above Delphi, Mount Parnassus, the home of the Muses, where I know she has joined them and will be inspiring me and all of us for the rest of our days.
All our spirits have been lifted by the wonder of Jocelyn being here.
[Newcastle-upon-Tyne]
Weeping for Hecuba
* * *
2005
What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba,
That he should weep for her?
Hamlet, Act II, scene ii
Though no doubt the original Athenian audiences wept for Hecuba in the two plays of Euripides in which she is the principal figure – Hecuba of about 423 BC and The Trojan Women of 415 BC – the first named person we know who wept for Hecuba was a notoriously cruel tyrant, Alexander of Pherae, in the fourth century BC, and he was ashamed of it. Plutarch tells his story in two versions, and in one it seems that the monster shed tears at a performance of The Trojan Women, and in the other at a performance of Hecuba. The tyrant was so moved to pity by the spectacle of the Queen of Troy, without husband, sons or city, reduced to slavery, that he jumped up and ran from the theatre as fast as he could. He said it would be terrible if when he was killing so many of his own subjects he should be seen to be shedding tears over the sufferings of Hecuba and Andromache. Alexander the tyrant almost had the actor who played Hecuba severely punished for having softened his heart ‘like iron in the furnace’.
What the man of iron had been surprised by was that bond of empathy and compassion that can cross centuries, and which, along with the imagination that needs to be primed to experience both, was dangerously undermining for the tyranny and oppression that upheld Alexander’s power. Oppression and empathy can’t co-exist.
In these two plays of Euripides, set in the immediate aftermath of the Trojan War, the poet creates one of the great archetypes of suffering. For an actress it is a role of the tragic grandeur of Lear, except that for the Queen of Troy the play begins by cutting straight to Shakespeare’s Act III, the storm and the heath – and the sense of total deprivation. Hecuba enters deprived of everything she had – husband, sons, city, wealth, status – reduced to ending her days as a Greek slave scrubbing Agamemnon’s latrines.
This reversal of fortune was the theme that appealed to the earliest appreciators of Hecuba in the sixteenth century, when it was translated from Greek into the more accessible Latin by Erasmus and Philip Melanchthon, who put on his version acted by students of his university at Wittenberg, where Hamlet was said to have studied.
The other theme was revenge, though it is a strange play about revenge that begins with the ghost of a murdered Trojan boy asking simply for burial and a last embrace from his mother, Hecuba. But he also tells us of another, angrier, unresigned ghost: that of Achilles, who can’t rest without the shedding of more innocent blood. We are encouraged to cheer Hecuba on to her revenge against Polymestor, who has murdered her son Polydorus for gold, though we are chilled by the action when it happens. Euripides never makes it easy for us, tears or no tears.
It took the twentieth century’s horrors and the rediscovery of The Trojan Women to turn the moralist of fate and the vicissitudes of fortune into an almost modern political playwright. Once discovered, it revealed that Hecuba was about the corruption of both power and powerlessness. The range of compromised violence it covers, even from a distance of twenty-five centuries, is from computerised aerial bombardment to the suicide bomber.
Three months after Franz Werfel, the Austrian poet and dramatist, translated The Trojan Women in 1914, the Serbian nationalist Princip assassinated Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Werfel had written prophetically in his preface to his version of Euripides: ‘Tragedy and hapless Hecuba may now return; their time has come.’ In fact, Hecuba’s time had already come at the beginning of the century, since when her glaring spotlight has never been dimmed. Gilbert Murray, the great humanist, early idealist of the League of Nations and (despite the later rejection of his Swinburnian poetic ear) the great populariser of Greek drama, did a version of the same Trojan Women, which Harley Granville Barker, who was responsible for groundbreaking productions of Greek tragedy, directed at the Royal Court Theatre in 1905.
The production was seen as ‘pro-Boer’. Murray was outspoken in his opposition to the Boer War. He saw inevitable parallels between the suffering of Hecuba and the women of Troy and the Boer women and children whose homesteads were burnt to the ground and who were in
terned by Lord Kitchener in concentration camps – a phrase coined then to describe this British invention. The Edwardians were made to squirm uncomfortably with guilt at the obvious similarities between Greek and British imperialism. Euripides no doubt deliberately made his own audience squirm when, in an almost blasphemous parody of a democratic process, he shows the assembled coalition army debating whether to sacrifice Polyxena, the daughter of Hecuba. The principal proposers of the motion are the two sons of Theseus, Athenians. He also allows Odysseus, the ‘molasses-mouth’ master of spin, to win over the coalition vote for sacrificing an innocent girl.
The girl, Polyxena, is to be sacrificed to the ghost of Achilles by Achilles’ son, the notoriously psychotic, Arkan-like Neoptolemus. Neoptolemus’ notoriety is given graphic detail on some extant vases. On a red-figure vase in the Archaeological Museum of Naples, Neoptolemus is shown savagely hacking at the old King Priam, the husband of Hecuba, who has their grandson on his knees, also hacked to death. There are numerous slashes and gashes on the body of the child and on the old man’s head, to show the fury of the assault. On a cup in the Louvre, Neoptolemus is shown braining Priam with the hacked body of his dead grandson. He is also shown, nearer home in the British Museum, sticking his sword into the gullet of Polyxena, who is held over the sacrificial tomb by three soldiers. It is one of the most brutal of amphorae. It makes us think of Nietzsche’s description of the Greeks as ‘civilised savages’.
The Inky Digit of Defiance: Selected Prose 1966–2016 Page 32