'Jacob knew no more Greek than served him to
stumble through a play'.
Woolf, Virgina Jacob's Room London: Hogarth Press, 1945
It is a considerable achievement to mount a production of a classical Greek tragedy in the original language, and to sell every seat in the house; even more so if the cast, all amateurs, are not exclusively classicists; and, if some of the key roles are given to non-classicists, and if those non-classicists combine understanding of the words and the drama as did Medea, a neuro-scientist, Jason a medical student, and the messenger, an astrophysicist, in the Cambridge Greek Play, Euripides' Medea, which I saw at its Friday matinée performance, then it is something rare.
This was the fortieth Greek play, in a tradition that goes back to the 1880s, but only the second time Medea has been performed. In a long and distinguished history, all sorts of people have been involved: Ralph Vaughan Williams wrote the music for the Wasps, Humphrey Jennings, an old boy of my school, designed the set, as once did Gwen Raverat, who, by one of those coincidences that fascinate me, I mentioned to my companion as I showed her round Cambridge before the play and we walked past the house where Period Piece was set.
Annie Casteldine, the director, set the play in 1912. Five years before that, in 1907, Gilbert Murray's translation, produced by Harley Granville-Barker at the Savoy Theatre in London, came just at the time that the struggle for women's suffrage was gathering momentum after the general election of the previous year. For the background, see Emily Hall's article below. So the chorus dress as suffragettes, and smoke cigarettes, Jason, Creon and Aegeus are dressed as naval officers, Creon in a bath-chair evokes Clifford Chatterley, and the nurse and paedagogue as a Edwardian nurse and governess; Medea's and the messenger's costumes are more classical.
Medea was splendid. She is on stage, or heard offstage, throughout the play. The chorus were fantastic, with impeccable diction. The language sounded beautiful, its musicality to my ear so much more emotional than the formal Latin of public oratory, the only time most of use hear either of the languages of the classical era spoken. I am no judge, but an international cast all spoke Greek that sounded far finer than my faltering Anglicized effort. Both my companion and I have been learning Greek for several years, though sporadically, and we would have been sunk without the sur-titles. We could follow well enough to know when the sur-titles compressed the text or when, at one point, they fell behind the actors progress through the lines.
The music, played by an on-stage trio of oboe, harp and percussion, sounded for the most part Greek, but occasionally music from the period of the production intruded, the chorus singing Parry's Jerusalem at one point, and at another something that I think must have been Dame Ethel Smyth's March of the Women. This incongruity caused a few giggles among the young audience.
I last saw a performance at the Arts in the early 1970s. I was disappointed the that the golden masks of tragedy and comedy which used to hang above the stage, and diverted the infant me during the dull passages of many a pantomime, were no longer there but there was no need for distractions, though the performance lasted nearly two hours without an interval.
I left resolved to see as much Greek drama in the original as I can, either in person, or in recordings,.
In the forty performances so far, Aeschylus scores six plays, Aristophanes and Euripides both have had eleven, but the winer with twelve is Sophocles. Clever statisticians among you can adjust these figures to allow for the variations in surviving plays by these dramatists. Top play, with five performances, is Aristophanes' The Birds, with Oedipus Tyrannus in second place and Sophocles' Electra and Euripides' The Bacchae in joint third place.
Hall, Edith Medea and British Legislation before the First World War Greece & Rome, Vol. 46, No. 1. (April 1999), pp. 42-77 (institutional subscription required for electronic version)
Image, a frontispiece from CESAR, the Calendrier électronique des spectacles sous l’ancien régime et sous la révolution to an edition of Medée, the opera by Marc-Antoine Charpentier, with libretto by Thomas Corneille, younger brother of the more famous Pierre.
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