Tom Roper's Weblog

The Persians: Kings College London Greek Play 2010

Νῦν ὑπὲρ πάντων ἀγών: now you fight for everything. These words, from the messenger's description of the battle of Salamis, spoken by the Greeks as their ships are about to engage the Persians are, according to Simon Goldhill's pre-play lecture at the KIngs College London Greek Play, the motive and reason for the Greek victory.

I attended the play, and the lectures beforehand by Professor Goldhill, who holds the chair in Greek Languages and Culture at Cambridge, and Dr Lindsay Allen, Lecturer in Greek and Near Eastern History at Kings College London. Professor Goldhill said the play was the foundation text of western attitudes to the east and discussed it from a Greek perspective, while Dr Allen took the Persian point of view, illustrating her talk with images of Persian antiquities, including Darius's tomb at Persepolis, not Susa where Aeschylus set the action of the Persians.

Not much happens on stage in the play: the Persians, represented by the Queen Mother Atossa and a chorus of regents, and referring to themselves as barbarians, learn of the catastrophic defeats of Xerxes' armies in Greece from a messenger. Atossa invokes the ghost of her dead husband and father of Xerxes, the dead king Darius who appears to bemoan the defeats and prophesy further ones. At the end, the ragged Xerxes himself returns, amid much crying of 'οἱοιοῖ’, woe. It was, as Professor Goldhill pointed out, brave of Aeschylus to show this, for it turns the audience's pride in a Greek triumph to ‘pity and fear’. For 1500 years, he said, the play was not shown. Yet in the past five years, there have been at least twenty productions, including that of Peter Sellars.

The theatre was full, and not only with sixth-formers studying the play for A level. The production leaned towards the traditional but was effective and we applauded the cast generously at the end. Darius in particular, had considerable stage presence and, if I read the biographies in the programme, not all the cast are reading Greek itself, so their sensitive and accurate recitation of the lines was a considerable achievement. The Greenwood Theatre is not the most well-appointed in London, but I found a seat next to a broken one, which gave me plenty of leg room.

Χορός

ἰὼ ἰώ, Περσὶς αἶα δύσβατος.

Ξέρξης

ἰὴ ἰὴ τρισκάλμοισιν,

ἰὴ ἰή, βάρισιν ὀλόμενοι.

Χορός

πέμψω τοί σε δυσθρόοις γόοις.

Deep-girdl'd dames

'The Loeb Library, with its Greek or Latin on one side of the page and its English on the other, came as a gift of freedom...The existence of the amateur was recognised by the publication of this Library, and to a great extent made respectable...The difficulty of Greek is not sufficiently dwelt upon, chiefly perhaps because the sirens who lure us to these perilous waters are generally scholars [who] have forgotten...what those difficulties are. But for the ordinary amateur they are very real and very great; and we shall do well to recognise the fact and to make up our minds that we shall never be independent of our Loeb.”

Virginia Woolf in the Times Literary Supplement, quoted on the Loeb Library home page, though without a precise citation, which I shall look up tomorrow, when I have access to the TLS Archive.

I feel less guilty, now I have Woolfian authority, about reading the Loeb translation of Aeschylus' The Persians, by Herbert Weir Smyth, to support my faltering Greek in preparation for next week’s visit to the Kings College London Greek play. Annoyingly, I learnt that in Cambridge, at the end of the month, Emmanuel are staging an abbreviated production of Oedipus at Colonus in the original, with a discussion. If I were free, and still had a house in Cambridge, I’d be up there like a shot. The dates of this autumn's Cambridge Greek play still aren’t announced: I scoured the Arts Theatre website.

In using the Loeb, I find myself wondering at some of the archaisms Smyth use. Some examples:

'Trusty of the Trusties', 'venerable partner of my bed', 'nay, methinks thou shalt learn anon the whole account in very truth'.

Why should Smyth use this language,which must have sounded old-fashioned in the extreme in 1928 when he prepared this translation?

I quickly rejected one theory, that he might choose antiquated vocabulary to fit the metre, for the translation is rarely in verse, expect for some of the choruses.  Neither could it be that the choice of words is made to make a suitable translation for dramatic performance. These translations are designed to help the reader, not for performance on the stage, and in some cases, even to the ears of an audience eighty years ago, the translation would have been near-unintelligible. Is it that he wanted the translation to mirror the Greek word order? This would be helpful to readers like me, yet it is clearly not always the way Smyth translated. Sometimes the archaisms do preserve some of the effects in the Greek, such as assonance and alliteration, but not all the time.

I fall back on the theory that he felt that, as this is one of the oldest plays we have, it should be made to sound old. Unfortunately, even to my ear, and as my family often complain, I am not free from guilt of deliberate archaism and circumlocution, they grate.

An old library book

I'm going to see Aeschylus' The Persians, the Kings College London Greek Play, part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama next month. I thought I'd better bone up on the text and, while I have the very fine Scriptorum Classicorum Bibliotheca Oxoniensis edition, by Denys Page, my faltering Greek needs a parallel text, so I ordered the Loeb edition from East Sussex. The copy is kept in store and, their inter-library transport being delayed by the snow, it took a little while to reach Seaford, but I have it now.

The binding is damaged, and the spine has fallen off, but it will serve very well. It is an old copy and I was fascinated by the date label, which tells me it was first borrowed in 1939, and by the book plate. How many libraries, of any type, use book plates these days?

And here is the Browne issue card

It's a good year for Aeschylus. Agamemnon is to be the Cambridge Greek Play.

A drink-sodden, sex-addled wreck

Not a description of me after Christmas, but an example of the hours of fun to be had in the titles of academic papers. This year's Classical Association Conference boasts two sessions that are particularly fruitful.

Doctor Who and the Classical world: Time -travelling beyond Pompeii

Panel Convenor: Tony Keen (Open University)

Melissa Beattie (Cardiff) Stoicism in Gallifreyan society (or how I learned to stop worrying and not interfere)

Penelope Goodman (Leeds) ‘That’s not right!’: Doctor Who and historiography

Amanda Potter (OU) Turning to Stone in Greece and Rome: Petrification and the Classical Past in Doctor Who and The Sarah Jane Adventures

Graham Sleight ‘It is in the nature of poets to misuse their sources.’

And

The Transition to Empire in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

Panel Convenor: Antony Augoustakis (Illinois)

Antony Augoustakis (Illinois) Cheap Bodies, Vile Politics: Effacing the Female in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

Monica Cyrino (New Mexico) ‘The Price of Fame’: Atia’s Triumph in Rome Season Two

Rachael Kelly (Ulster) ‘A drink-sodden, sex-addled wreck’: Performances of Deficient Masculinity in Rome’s Mark Antony

Arthur Pomeroy (Wellington) Gangsterism in HBO-BBC’s ROME, Season Two

I'm not sure why they have to qualify this dire soap opera with the names of the broadcasting stations involved. Is it a bizarre intellectal property requirement? As for deficient masculinity, it sounds like the sort of thing that spam e-mails claim to cure.

Google censors Bryn Mawr Classical Review

A disturbing example of the misuse of Google's power, one hopes through incompetence rather than malevolence, is demonstrated by the case of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review's blog.

The Bryn Mawr Classical Review is an online journal of impeccable academic credentials, the second oldest online scholarly journal in the humanities.  Since August 2008 articles have also been posted to a blog, hosted on Blogger, owned by Google.

This note now appears on the main BMCR website:  'Please note that Google has removed all access to our blog after incorrectly flagging it as a spam blog. We had requested a review which did not happen, and on September 28 Google removed all access to the blog, which we are attempting to appeal.'

I hope this will be resolved quickly. It makes one furiously to think, is the world's  knowledge really safe in such capricious hands?

The library of Alexandria

The latest In Our Time has Simon Goldhill, Matthew Nicholls and Serafina Cuomo discussing the Library of Alexandria.

The listen again version is available until Thursday: http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/inourtime/inourtime.shtml

I shall listen to the podcast on tomorrow morning's train.

Citation in Classical Studies and FRBR

There's a special issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly on the theme Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure in memory of Ross Scaife, the founder of the Stoa Consortium for Electronic Publication in the Humanities, with lots of fascinating stuff, but the article that caught my eye is by Neel Smith on citation in the classics. I must admit that all my work and thinking about citation was during my medical librarian days.

Smith draws on the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) as a way of understanding the hierarchy of texts, and has developed the Canonical Text Services, a system for identifying and retrieving texts by canonical reference.

Smith, Neel
Citation in classical studeies
Digital Humanties Quarterly
Transforming Classical Studies Through Cyberinfrastructure
Winter 2009
Volume 3 Number 1 http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/003/1/000028.html

More on plays performed in Greek

I held forth on performances of classical Greek drama in the original language a few days ago. I now have more information, for which I'm very grateful to Amanda Wrigley at the Archives of Performance of Greek and Roman Drama, based at Oxford, and to Mr D Jones, archivist at the Perse School.

Mr Jones supplied me with the programme and the review from the Pelican, the school magazine, for an English language production of Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus which took place in 1970, and in which I played a minor, singing part. My contemporary, Bill Buffery, who played Oedipus, continues his interest in Greek drama. His company in Devon, Multi Story Theatre, have a play in their repertoire based on Medea, and I saw his Backward Glance, based on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, at the 2008 Brighton Festival.

I had incorrectly ascribed the music to Graham Sudbury, the Director of Music at the school. In fact I see it was by Robin Orr, for piano, cymbals, timpani and male voices. With me among the singers were David Tang who later made a considerable name for himself, and Roger Blayney, with whom I'm still in touch, played the timpani.

This was a performance in translation, but the best I could offer from the Perse to the Archives' database. Amanda Wrigley, the researcher at the archive, kindly supplied me with a print-out from their database of 160 productions since 1950 in Britain in Greek. There follows some rudimentary analysis.

The most popular plays overall were Sophocles Antigone and Oedipus Tyrannus, with fourteen performances each, followed by Euripides the Bacchae with twelve. The most performed comedies, by Aristophanes, were the Birds and the Frogs, with five performances each.

As for numbers of performances universities with traditions of performance of Greek plays dominate the list, with Kings College London in the lead with 55 shows, with Oxford and Cambridge following, with 18 and 21 respectively. The occasional alfresco production crops up among these, usually in the agreeable surroundings of a college's fellows' garden

I was particularly interested to see if a tradition of regular performances in Greek could be maintained in English schools. The Bradfield College does best, their most recent in the database being in 2006. In Newcastle too, joint productions between the Royal Grammar and Central Newcastle have been a regular fixture. Honourable mentions go to the Perse School for Girls, Bryanston School in Dorset and Whitgift School in Croydon who managed one-off productions.

I do not offer any scholarly commentary. Having missed this year's Kings production of Lysistrata, and last year's Oxford staging of Agamemnon, I am now determined not to let a production pass without seeing it.

Greek plays

I'm annoyed. I can't go to the Kings College Greek play next week, They're performing Lysistrata, as part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama, the only production of the festival to be performed in Greek.

I have been to the triennial Cambridge Greek play, Medea in 2007; I missed the Oxford one last year, Agamemnon. As far as I can tell these are the only regular productions in the country. The excellent database of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama (APGRD) at Oxford doesn't support searching by language of performance at the moment, though I'm pleased to learn that it's an enhancement they might consider.

I imagine that only a university would have the resources to put on such a production these days. While my school might have managed it in W H D Rouse's day, bringing together Caldwell-Cook's Mummery tradition and the school and Rouse's early pioneering of the direct method in language teaching, by the time I was in the sixth form in 1971-3 there were only three boys in the Classical Sixth, so I doubt if finding enough boys to speak lines correctly in classical Greek would have been feasible, even for the small casts required by Greek drama. The school play was usually Elizabethan or Jacobean, usually Shakespeare but with Dekker and Marlowe added for variety. One year we performed Oedipus at Colonus, but in translation; I lurked in the back row of the chorus, singing the lines to music specially composed by Graham Sudbury, the music master.

Postscript: I see, through the ARLT website, that Oxford's Classics Outreach Programme have published a guide to Greek plays currently in production at http://www.classics.ox.ac.uk/outreach/theatre/index.asp.

LRB: Patrick Hamilton's drinking and Athenian democracy

The paper version has yet to arrive, but the London Review of Books Newsletter alerts me to two articles I must read in the new issue:
Christopher Tayler on Patrick Hamilton's Drinking
David Runciman on Athenian Democracy and Google

The e-versions are for subscribers only, but readers who want to follow this up could either buy a copy of this issue, or even subscribe.