Stephen Sondheim at 80 - BBC Prom concert

Not much scope for the classicist, it would appear, at the BBC promenade concert on 31st July 2010 celebrating the 80th birthday of Stephen Sondheim. To most, Sondheim is a composer of Broadway musicals featuring numbers like “Send in the Clowns”, “Broadway Baby” and “Side by Side by Side”. This view does not take full account of his highly varied output which stretches well beyond the popular stage musical to the Bergman-inspired “A Little Night Music” to the operatic “Sweeney Todd”, the Seurat-based “Sunday in the Park with George” and (for the classicist) versions of Aristophanes and Plautus. Sondheim’s version of Aristophanes’ “The Frogs” is best known for being first performed in the Yale University swimming pool with Meryl Streep and Sigourney Weaver in the chorus. It is not often performed although a CD exists, but the opening fanfare and “Instructions to the Audience” began the evening at the Proms. Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans formed a double act calling on the gods to look down on the actors (in both senses), and in a really Aristophanic way combined religious solemnity with informal addresses to the audience, telling us what not to do (sing along, clap in the wrong place, and so on) and particularly to switch off our mobile phones (not something Aristophanes had to worry about). The breezy dialogue and the deceptively simple music gave an idea of what kind of atmosphere might have been created by an Aristophanes comedy where action, song, dance and dialogue would have combined to give the overall effect, much more than the concentration on the text which some Aristophanic study seems to consist of. I have always thought that Aristophanes’ metrical ingenuity and variations greatly influenced W S Gilbert’s verse in the Savoy operas, and these have always been recognised as influencing the lyrics of American musicals. Is there scope for a study of the “Influence of Greek Comedy on the Broadway Musical”?

Then there is the case of Sondheim and Plautus. “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum” is a conflation of several of Plautus’s usual plots involving a young man in love with a slave girl who turns out to be the free born daughter of the absent master who comes back to be told he cannot enter his own house because it is haunted (but really because the young man in inside with his girl-friend). The central figure is the clever slave who eventually sorts out all the misunderstandings and all ends happily. The featured number here was the patter song “Everybody ought to have a maid” delivered by Simon Russell Beale and Daniel Evans with Julian Ovenden and finally the great Welsh baritone Bryn Terfel, who was last seen on the same stage as Hans Sachs in Wagner’s Meistersinger. (The comedy always comes after a long dose of the serious stuff.)

Sondheim draws on many traditions in his work: fairy tale, film, art, horror story as well as the conventions of musical theatre. But these two examples show that he is fully aware of the origins of his craft which stretch back to the stages of Athens and Italy. I think Aristophanes could well have sat in the audience, tapping out the rhythms and enjoying the show, while thinking at the same time how he could write a piece that would send up Stephen Sondheim something rotten.

Welcome to Thebes

This new play by Moira Buffini is running at London’s National Theatre. It updates a number of Greek stories to modern West Africa, taking on big geopolitical issues with a mainly black cast. Thebes is an unspecified country where civil was has recently ended in the election of Eurydice (Creon’s surviving wife) as president. She is trying amid the ruins of her country to re-establish some kind of civilisation. To help her in this Theseus (Athens’ “first citizen”) is visiting to try to arrange some kind of international aid. The drama thus raises the questions of democracy v. tyranny, women in politics, race (Theseus has white aides), religion (the charismatic warlord Tydeus is possessed by Dionysus), the state v. the individual, child soldiers, and many others. It is perhaps too issue-driven for its own dramatic coherence and it contains enough material for a whole trilogy with a comedy to follow.

For the classicist the interest is in the use of mythological figures in the modern setting. All the characters have Greek names which fit their character role. One of Theseus’ (white) aides is called Talthybia after the tragic message-carrying figure; one of the child-soldiers is named after one of the Furies (Megaera) who she tells us she represents; some cabinet ministers are named after the Muses, while others are called Strife (Eris, chief of police) and Force (Bia). The main characters (Eurydice, Theseus, Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias) are recognisably derived from their equivalents in Athenian tragedy. The emphasis from the author and the production team seems to be on the recreation of ancient myth in a modern setting, but there is also a large input from Greek literature as well. Sophocles’ Antigone is the main narrative line and it follows the story closely: Polynices’ body is found and lies bloodily to the side of the stage throughout. Eurydice (standing in for her dead husband Creon) forbids its burial in an autocratic decree at odds with her democratic credentials. Antigone (the “mad one”) decides to bury the body, while Ismene (the “nice one”) agonises over whether to help her. After a very tense scene in which one the black child-soldiers is shot by a white security guard, Eurydice changes her mind and the two victims of the violence are buried together. Buffini chooses not to make this motivate the final section of the play where Theseus changes his mind and decides to help the tottering state of Thebes, but it becomes just one of a number of highly-charged scenes racing the action forward. This pushes things on at a furious pace but does not allow the dramatic conflicts to linger and come to a slow climax. Instead she turns to another tragedy, Euripides Hippolytus, for the event that makes Theseus see things differently. He has been in touch by mobile phone with things at home and the events familiar to National Theatre audiences from last year’s highly successful Phèdre have been taking place off-stage. With extra extended references to Euripides’ Bacchai as well as Aeschylus’s Eumenides this is a rich mix of tragic themes. Even Aristophanes gets a look in with reminiscences of his Lysistrata in the takeover of government by women.

For all its serious themes, it is a very funny play with some excellent lines, but perhaps sometimes it appears as if Aristophanes had contributed extra jokes to a Sophocles script. At one point a character says to Antigone and Ismene “… and as for your motherf…ing father!” The Athenian festival of Dionysus knew better to keep tragedy and comedy firmly separated.

With strong performances from all the large committed cast, pacy direction and an atmospheric set this production shows how the old Greek stories can be used creatively to speak to each generation afresh. The dialogue with the Greeks continues to be lively, with that competitive edge which shows how the moderns can attempt to go one better. As Theseus says in the play “Tragedy shows us how to live”.

Italian Renaissance Drawings

The British Museum has brought together a stunning collection of drawings by all the big names of Italian renaissance art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Raphael and many others. With informative displays and videos about the technique and materials of drawing including the manufacture of paper, this is an exemplary exhibition. This drawing of Raffaellino del Garbo (left) shows the risen Christ based on Roman copies of Greek originals of the god Bacchus (right).

The explanation label beside this drawing says that Italian renaissance artists did not slavishly copy Classical models, but used them to spark their creativity. They engaged with these Greek and Roman predecessors in a dialogue, often with a competitive edge. That comment, overturning years of prejudice about the dead hand of classicism on contemporary art, seems to me sum excellently what Classicists are seeking to do in making the Classical world in all its facets (languages, literatures, art, history and so on) available to each new generation. How refreshing to be thought of “engaging in a dialogue with a competitive edge” with our classical models rather than the usual dreary assumptions of dryness, pedantry and outmoded ideas. Top marks to the exhibition and the curator Hugo Chapman.

Semele/Salome

Semele/Salome

Which young female heroine asks a powerful male figure to grant her whatever she wishes? The granting of this favour then leads to her destruction. By a curious juxtaposition we had tickets for two operas on consecutive nights which provided two answers to this question. Handel’s Semele asks Jupiter to appear to her as a god, and Richard Strauss’s Salome asks Herod to give her whatever she wants in return for performing a dance before him. Semele as a mortal cannot withstand the sight of Jupiter and is burnt up, while Salome wants John the Baptist’s head on a silver charger, which Herod egged on by his wife Herodias, Salome’s mother, gives her. Herod is so repulsed by her favour that he orders her death. Handel is comic and amusing where Strauss is violent and shocking. (What would it be like to have Handel’s Salome and Strauss’s Semele? Could Handel be as striking and could Strauss be as light?) This was my second Semele of the year, with the same conductor and orchestra (Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques) but was a very different affair to the earlier Chinese production in Brussels (see earlier post in September 2009). The singing here was much stronger with Danielle De Niese and Vivica Genaux in the roles of Semele and Ino/Juno, but without the theatrical production by David McVicar from Paris in the concert version I saw at the Barbican in London. Here the comedy was more apparent with Ovid’s rather ditzy heroine causing her own downfall by her vanity (De Niese making the most of her mirror aria “If I persist in gazing”). David McVicar was also responsible for the production of Salome at the Royal Opera Covent Garden. Here the strength of his vision made the lack of it at the Barbican all the more apparent. Set in the grim kitchen area of a swanky restaurant the violence and raw emotion was always there just under the surface and even in the bloody final scene was never overdone or indulgent. The figure of the naked executioner emerging covered in blood from the cistern with John the Baptist’s head is one of the strongest stage images I have seen. With Angela Denoke’s soprano soaring over the orchestra this scene packs a shocking punch, with Salome cradling the severed head in her lap like Agave with Pentheus’s head in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is not often that a biblical story can rival the mythical power of a Greek myth, but Oscar Wilde in his original play saw the potential of this episode to produce a new kind of Greek tragedy. Both pieces are based on strong literary texts: Congreve’s Semele and Wilde’s Salome. The surtitles projected to clarify the sung texts carried their own richness unusual in the librettos of operas. The highly contrasting treatments of two broadly similar stories show how classical myth can supply the raw ingredients for art which can be served up in different ways according to taste.

Proses

When I was first learning Latin, prose composition was regarded by us students as completely old-fashioned and a waste of time. The way we were taught to compose into Latin from English was rigid and prescriptive and seemed to us young radicals as pointless. We wanted to get to grips with sexual ambiguities in Ovid and Propertius, and in the state propaganda underneath the text of the Aeneid. We didn’t want to have to churn out reams of Ciceronian prose, and Cicero was right out as well: a pompous old windbag, in our opinion. Just as with many opinions these have now run their course and can be seen as symptomatic of their time. Some of our attitudes have been developed and vindicated and have become mainstream thinking, and I find Cicero much less of a windbag these days and a much more interesting rounded character. Yet I begin to wonder if we were right about prose composition. Certainly the way we were taught seemed to make even more rigid the grammatical rules of certain books. Any attempt to break the sentence structures as laid down in Hillard and Botting (or was it North and Hillard?) was greeted with scorn and multiple underlinings in red ink, and any protest that Tacitus actually uses that construction on a number of occasions was regarded as a serious challenge to authority. But then that was the Zeitgeist: authority and challenge; but the rendering of prose as optional in final examinations and even in Oxford entry was taken as a kind of token victory. I am still not sure if my refusal to do the prose paper at Oxford entrance was serious folly or brave individualism. Anyway the examiners did not have much idea of what to do with the alternatives set instead: to have offered them was enough. I was able to take Greek Sculpture instead of prose composition at Oxford, which is surely justification enough.
And yet I am now not convinced that my principled opposition to proses was the right decision. Now I am quite pleased to be required to compose a letter or document in Latin that will allow a little individual expression and the opportunity to put down in a few elegant Latin phrases exactly what is required. In the European Schools this is sometimes a good solution to the otherwise laborious necessity of having to issue a document to Latin teachers of many linguistic origins in a language that a) they will understand and b) not be offended by. Never underestimate the susceptibility of certain nationalities to object to being addressed in one language rather than another.
So my position today is rather that composing in Latin is a creative act, a vehicle for the transmission of ideas in a pleasing form. There is a pleasure to be had from finding an exact equivalent and in using the clearest idiom or construction. Familiarity with the great prose authors is a necessity of course, but trying to imitate them is a form of literary criticism and one which teaches you a lot about the text you are trying to read. The art of parody may be much closer to prose composition than we think. Good parody plays with a well known text and even pokes fun at it. But a good parody will always contain a knowing appreciation of the author in question. Think of all the wonderful parodies of Shakespeare, by practising poets and writers. They are not written out of contempt or slavish imitation, but out of playful admiration and respect. As many other aspects of twentieth century Classics, the teaching of proses became rigid and paid too much attention to its own made-up rules. By emphasising the creative and aesthetic elements of composition could we possibly revive it? I recently came across a copy of Bradley’s Arnold Latin Prose Composition (a volume I cheerfully hurled across the room several times as a student) and found it immensely balanced, informative and encouraging. In looking for the mot juste it was very useful. Should we Classicists start to revive the practice: not as mechanical translations but as free composition or ironic parodies?

Final Demands - Frederic Raphael

This is the final part of a series of three books chronicling the lives of Cambridge graduates from the 1950s to the recent past. Adam Morris first appears in The Glittering Prizes as a young undergraduate who becomes a writer in literary London. Fame and Fortune continues the careers of the group of students through their working lives which culminate in this last series as they reach the beginnings of old age. Frederic Raphael was a brilliant classicist at Charterhouse (an English public school; the English public school?) and began Classics at Cambridge before switching (as you are allowed, even encouraged, to do at Cambridge) to Philosophy. Classics, however, continues to play an important role in his writing and he one of the few writers who include Latin and Greek literature seriously, without condescension, as a major part of European literature. He is one of the most European of writers in English, drawing for his inspiration on a wide range of authors of all languages into which he draws the Classical authors as a matter of course. For the classicist interested in how the subject is portrayed in a modern novel the figure of Adam Morris’s daughter Rachael is the most involving. She is a young classicist who surprisingly goes to California with Bill Bourne, also a classicist and one of Adam’s Cambridge contemporaries. Her work on Catullus is well received, although Adam takes a little of the credit for himself; but he should be ashamed of himself for the muddled line of poem 51 on page 185. It should read identidem te (not et) and the line ends after te. Can he really be quoting the text of a JRS article? Or is FR having an elaborate game with us here? Is Adam supposed to be so well-read that he can misquote Catullus? Not with the text in front of him, surely. Nevertheless it is a pleasure to have a young, female and pretty cool character given Latin literature as her subject in a modern novel.
The reviewers all recognise that Adam is a thinly veiled autobiographical version of Raphael himself: the polished wit, the long-windedness, the Jewishness, the prickliness. He is not always a likeable character, but I guess he is not meant to be. Hearing Tom Conti from the BBC television and radio versions say the words in your head, however, makes him a more real person than just the words off the page.
Reviewers are less forthcoming about the basis for the other characters. So who are they based on? Is Bill Bourne based on John Sullivan who worked on Martial and Petronius, as Bill did? Sullivan did, I think, die relatively young, but did he also run into trouble with the black faculty for alleged racism? Adam gets embroiled in a Black Athena-type argument at Bill’s memorial gathering in Los Angeles. As for the others: is Joyce Hadleigh drawn from Joan Bakewell? Is Alan Parks Clive James? Or could he be David Frost? Is Samuel Marcus Cohen George Steiner? Is there a website devoted to this kind of pointless but intriguing speculation?

What a Carve Up!

The theme for the set text for Latin at the European Baccalaureate in 2011 will be Virgil Aeneid 6 and the Descent to the Underworld. My colleagues and I have been looking for passages from European art and literature to accompany the Virgil and to give an idea of the use of this theme in later periods. We came up with the usual suspects: Dante, Milton, Sartre, but a French colleague said she had been reading a novel by an English writer whose title I didn’t recognise. The author, Jonathan Coe, I had read, but this particular work was a puzzle. In the end it turned out that the title is What a Carve Up! which defeated the French translator who had to make do with “Testament à l'anglaise”. The title refers to an old film starring Sid James and Kenneth Connor which is woven into the novel in original ways, that combine comic horror with social satire of Britain in the 1980s. The passage (page 94-5, Penguin edition) which relates to the underworld is a scene where the narrator goes down into the tunnels of the London Tube system for a dreadful journey. (A sort of Descent into the Underground.) There is embedded into the text a line of Latin: perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro (Ovid Metamorphoses 10. 14) which is unusual in a modern English novel, where writers often wish to conceal their learning for fear of putting off readers by a show of perceived elitism. Nothing much more is made of this at the time, but slowly through the book other allusions begin to appear to the myth of Orpheus. The narrator meets a young painter, Phoebe, whose work he unwittingly misunderstands and which she then destroys. These paintings are an interpretation of the Orpheus and Eurydice story and the theme of the search for the past by a descent into Hell becomes clearer step by step as the novel progresses. Though not slavishly following the outline of the mythical story, it becomes clear that Michael (the writer and narrator) bears some resemblance to an Orpheus figure and Phoebe has elements of Eurydice. She repeatedly urges him at the end of the book: “Don’t look back.” As a result the scene of the katabasis earlier on is not a casual classical reference but an integral part of the novel’s structure. A quick trawl through some of the reviews of this novel do not appear to have picked up on this Orpheus reference although one or two did make a connection to Cocteau’s film of the Orpheus tale. The author, Jonathan Coe, makes wide use of film in all his work and may have been thinking of Orpheus through Cocteau, but the inclusion of the line of Ovid seems to indicate a wish to go further back to the original myth. Or at least to Ovid’s version of it. So I was introduced to this accomplished postmodern piece of English literature by a French colleague to include in a collection of Latin texts. The European School is often full of surprises like this. At the same time I found I was introducing, by way of the same process, my German colleagues to the writing of Max Sebald, who wrote in German but is perhaps better known in England. He also has a key passage in Austerlitz featuring a descent into Hades by way of Liverpool Street railway station. There must be something about London train stations that makes writers think of Hell. I can’t imagine what it is.

An Education and Latin A Level

An Education

This film starring Carey Mulligan as the 16 year old schoolgirl who has an affair with an older man in the early 1960s has been receiving a lot of notice with awards, good reviews and Oscar nominations. It is always difficult when you know the period and background to a film through personal experience to avoid criticising the details but in this film there are too many mistakes and misjudgements to ignore, especially when you compare the original brief memoir by Lynn Barber on which it is based. (You can read it here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2009/jun/07/lynn-barber-virginity-relationships
It is easy to forgive the fact that the film places the concert to which the girl Jenny is taken in St John’s Smith Square. I remember that this church was converted to a concert hall only in 1969, well after the time in which the action takes place. Unimportant perhaps, but shouldn’t somebody have checked? When she finally receives her acceptance from Oxford (the chance of which she initially abandons to marry the unsuitable lover) it is addressed to her by the University of Oxford. Didn’t anyone involved on the script know that admission to Oxford is only through a college? The business with C S Lewis and the supposed visit to him in Oxford is set up to be unmasked as a falsehood, but it is highly unlikely that the girl would have read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe at her age. Though it was published it was never very popular with young readers in the early 1950s when she was growing up. The film is also very vague about the Oxford entrance exams which we had to sit after A levels. In fact Jenny gets her A levels and at first withdraws from the entrance examinations. Only on the intervention of her father is she allowed back to take them. What is really annoying though is the way Latin is set up to the representative symbol of the old fashioned nature of her school. This is not the case in the memoir, where Latin is mentioned only as her weakest subject (not surprising as then Latin A level was a difficult subject). In fact in the memoir Lynn Barber mentions the fact that (mirabile dictu, as she says) she got the top grade in it as well top grades as expected in English and French. Latin was required as entrance to English at Oxford at that time and indeed first year English undergraduates had to take a Latin paper. The fictional persona of Lynn Barber in the film is very unlikely to have scorned Latin at A level, and may well have enjoyed it. She may have found it challenging, we all did, but the memoir shows she is proud of her final result. This default denigration of Latin is all to prevalent in English culture where to succeed at something difficult is seen as being a mark of a lack of sophistication. English is fine, French with all that existentialism is a sign of being cool. Why is reading the classic texts of European literature regarded as being a bit odd by English writers and intellectuals? Can it be that it is a bit too much like hard work?
Complaints aside, An Education is a remarkable piece of work, beautifully acted and painstakingly set in its period (visually, at least, but perhaps others are screaming equally loudly that the model of car being driven went out of production before the film’s setting). It is very thought-provoking about the time, especially for anyone who was at school then. Carey Mulligan deserves her Oscar nomination. But why couldn’t they be more careful over the details?

Dulce et Decorum

The new British poet laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, has recently published a poem to commemorate the deaths of the last survivors of the First World War trenches:
Last Post Carol Ann Duffy
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud . . .
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home —
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce — No — Decorum — No — Pro patria mori.
You walk away.
You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too —
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert —
and light a cigarette.
There’s coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.
You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.
At its heart this poem quotes Wilfred Owen in turn quoting Horace from his poem Dulce et Decorum Est. Perhaps more about this later: is Duffy being fair to Horace by wrenching him so far out of context and so far away from what he may really have meant? But for the moment a question of pronunciation. How should the Latin in this poem be pronounced? There is an audio recording of the poet herself reading her poem in which she pronounces “dulce” as if it were Italian (doolchay). Where has this pronunciation come from? Is it because of Catholic Latin where schools and churches perhaps founded by Italian orders used this sound in their services? Almost certainly Owen himself would have said in the old English pronunciation of Latin dulce (dulcie), as in the girl’s name, with a soft “c” pronounced as “s”. He would probably not have used the pronuntiatio restituta as used in Latin teaching in most European countries today dulce with a hard “c” (dulke) unless he was taught Latin by a particularly radical young teacher. Rather he would have used the current English style which had been used for many years, until recent scholarship had established that this pronunciation was inauthentic. The battle over this change in sound lasted for many years until the last of those taught the old pronunciation had died out. The British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan was apparently one of the last survivors who persistently stuck to the old pronunciation until the end of his life in 1986. Owen’s Latin was apparently fairly minimal and he could not go beyond the basics when he was engaged as a private tutor to a family in France. In the end what sound should be adopted here in this new poem? An authentic or restored pronunciation would be understood by modern listeners with a basic knowledge of Latin; the traditional English pronunciation would be historically accurate, reflecting the usage of the poet who is being quoted (Owen, not Horace). But certainly not an Italian style which makes Wilfred Owen sound either like a Catholic priest trained in Rome or a waiter asking what you would like after your pasta.

Paul Delvaux and the Ancient World

Paul Delvaux was one of the Belgian surrealists best known for his Sleeping Venus pictures and his railway stations. He was for a long time resident in our part of Brussels (Watermael-Boitsfort) and you can sometimes see a background to his paintings as you go around the commune. He was particularly fond of Watermael station which turns up in several works. A small exhibition at the Musee Royale in Brussels is devoted to the influence on him from antiquity. He studied (as many young Belgians still do) Latin and Greek at school and he testifies to the impact the Iliad and the Odyssey made on him. He visited Italy and Greece in the late thirties and then in the fifties when travel to such exotic places was not easy. The open spaces of Pompeii and Herculaneum appear often as backgrounds to the moonlit settings of his female nudes, giving them dream-like quality. His female figures (often recalling the waxwork Sleeping Venus he saw exhibited in Brussels) are inspired by classical sculpture in their simple elegance but are unnervingly modern in their just not quite realistic depiction. Placing a porcelain-skinned female nude before a deserted Greek temple at night he achieves a disturbing nightmarish quality. He makes use of the figure of Venus as a signature to many paintings, but he also uses mythology in, for example, his Pygmalion which reverses the usual story. This use of the ancient world for visual inspiration from the material remains seems to anticipate one of our modern approaches to Classics: Delvaux discovered the power of the stories in school, and then he then went on trips to most rewarding sites to see for himself. In the exhibition there are sketches he did on site from Paestum, Pompeii and Herculaneum, and also from Olympia and Athens. He made sketches of the sculptures from the temple of Zeus at Olympia when they were scarcely known to a wider public. All these influences consequently find their way into his surrealist images transformed by his imagination into an entirely new vision of what are now familiar images. His view of the classical world is not the philological, text-based image often portrayed in critical comment by administrators wishing to show off their modernity by dismissing Classics: this is how the early introduction to the ancient world can work on the imagination of a creative artist who can absorb these ideas and aspects to change the way we look at ourselves.

Iphigénie en Aulide: Greek Tragedy in the French style

The Brussels opera house (La Monnaie) is presenting Gluck’s two Iphigénies in tandem. On some days you can see both of them in one go, an evening of Wagnerian length; the two operas performed without intervals and a long break between. Or you can see them separately and I opted for the first of the two. The inspiration is more Racine than Euripides with a lengthy treatment of the love between Iphigeneia and Achilles which allows for the themes of obedience, duty, guilt and love in different forms to be developed. Achilles loves Iphigeneia and is prepared to defy the orders of Agamemenon for her sacrifice, but his duty compels him to obey his commander; Clytemnestra is conflicted between her love for daughter and her duty towards her husband; Iphigeneia herself loves her father even though he gives the order to sacrifice her under threat from the gods. Gluck’s through-composed music is serious and always pushes the momentum forward. It suits the tragic atmosphere well and is a highly suitable style for Greek tragedy with its combination of recitative, short arias and choruses. It has few great moments and is ultimately unmemorable but for the expression of dramatic scenes it is highly successful, especially when shaped and made urgent by the conductor Christophe Rousset, whose musical triumphs continue at the Monnaie after Semele. A strong cast, headed by Véronique Gens in the title role, conveyed the tension and conflict within their tragic characters. After Katie Mitchell’s staging of Euripides’ Iphigeneia in Aulis at the National Theatre in London recently this seemed restrained and cool, but the Racinean pacing of the events in this treatment develops into real tragic tension. Only the rather soppy happy ending detracts from the full horror of what we are capable of when put into impossible situations.

The main problem of this production lies in the staging and the director’s lack of appreciation for the audience in the theatre. Obviously the producer did not climb up to the balcony where I found my seat to check the sight-lines. I could only see half of the action and only part of the surtitles. Pierre Audi brought the stage over the orchestra pit, put the orchestra on the stage and placed the chorus behind them as a sort of reflection of the audience. (We are all spectators in this postmodern world; there are no hidden actions; all is there in front of us, we get the point). What he forgot is that the Monnaie is a traditional house where you can’t do this sort of thing without depriving the audience of most of what you want to show them. The seats which have poor enough lines of sight for conventional productions are designed to look at the stage not the pit. So we had a good view of the orchestra who we wanted to hear, and half a glimpse of the singers who we wanted to see. The staging would go well in a school hall or a gym or other improvised venue, but not in a traditional opera house which did after all commission the piece. It had “touring production” written all over it and will no doubt be sold all round Europe. But it shows contempt for its original audience. In addition I think the health and safety authorities should be called in to look at the tilt of the stairs which his singers had to negotiate their way down. I feared for the sopranos in their long dresses each time.

Vitruvius on architecture

Does anyone read Vitruvius today? Do architecture students have some familiarity with the basic text on architecture from the ancient world. Judging from the splendid new Penguin Classics (http://www.penguin.co.uk/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9780141441689,00.html?strSrchSql=vitruvius*/On_Architecture_Vitruvius) translation of the ten books de architectura, perhaps they do. But does anyone read him in Latin? Our European Baccalaureate last year decided on Latin scientific writers as the set texts for the final examination, and so we have become familiar with this text, in fact for the first time. It is a much more entertaining read than may be imagined at first, and is far more than a dry technical analysis of building techniques. (Though in its own way that would still be pretty interesting.) He spends quite a long time telling stories about the origin of architectural features, and about the famous figures of science and technology. His is the story about Archimedes in his bath, and about Ctesibius and his mirror in his father’s barber shop (the origin of hydraulic pumps). He is also fascinating on the origin of the Caryatid figure on temple buildings, and on the origin of the Corinthian capital. A young girl died from disease and her nurse collected up her things and placed them by her tomb in a basket with a tile on top. By chance she put this basket over the root of an acanthus plant which sprouted in the spring shooting its foliage up around and through the basket. A passing artist, Callimachus, observed the pleasing shape of the different elements and decided it would look well as a new type of capital on top of a column.

Sometimes you have to read him with the illustrations to hand to see exactly what he means, but the modern editions are full of diagrams and sketches to make the text clear. Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Vitruvian man sketch seems just such an attempt: the meaning of the text becomes apparent when you see it rather than just read it.

The classic sections are those on the different orders of architecture, the styles of painting in houses and theatres and town planning. He is also good on astrology and how to defend a city from sieges. There is much more to him than just architecture: in fact architectus is not confined to the narrow sense of the word in modern languages. As a stylist, Vitruvius is not a Cicero or an Ovid, but he doesn’t pretend to be. He is trying to write clear plain Latin for other architects and engineers as well as a general readership to explain things that may have become lost if he hadn’t written them down. He does not deserve to be patronised in the way the translator of an online version of his work looks down on his Latin style. As an intermediate author he has a lot to offer students of Latin who are beginning on their exploration of authentic texts but who may still find the subtleties and complexities of the classic works a bit daunting.

Do you CLIL?

Second half of term began with a pedagogical day. This is Eurospeak for in-service training, And I found myself in a lecture about CLIL, that is Content and Language Integrated Learning. This turns out to be teaching a subject to pupils through one of their foreign languages, History in English to native French speakers, for example. In French this educational phenomenon is referred to as EMILE (L’enseignement d’une matière intégré à une langue étrangère) with a nice reference to Rousseau. After a bit of this lively lecture (given by a guest lecturer: details here: http://www.vub.ac.be/FOST/fost_in_english/leden_pvdc_eng.htm) I began to realise I had been here before and I recalled some articles I had actually written on this subject in an earlier incarnation. It wasn’t called CLIL then but some other acronym, but basically it was the same: teaching through a second language towards a subject. I had been more interested in the sociological effects of this on the pupils: what German speakers made of being taught the history of the Second World War in English, by a British teacher in a mixed class with French, Italian and Dutch fellow-pupils, for example. I had seen this as having a Europeanizing effect on the youngsters, breaking down old prejudices and nationalisms in the search for objectivity and a touch of reconciliation. But it turns out that CLIL is not the answer to Europe’s old political problems but it is a way of increasing schoolchildren’s performance. Those who learn Mathematics using a CLIL methodology do better on their tests. (I suspect this means Belgians doing Maths in English in practice, but that’s another question.) And all this in the lecture, with added neuroscience. It was illustrated by those brightly-coloured brain scan pictures you often see in newspaper articles, which it is claimed show different areas of brain activity. I had a vision of schoolchildren being fed into an MRI machine and then being made to do Maths problems while they were lying flat inside a metal tube with electrodes fitted to their heads, but I’m sure it’s not like that really. It was all down to concept forming apparently. When the pupils are tackling these problems through a second language they form the concept more precisely, because they are having to think about what they are doing in a more objective manner than they would if they could do it more automatically through the medium of their first language. Then I began to think: isn’t this exactly what teachers in the past used to claim for Latin? The act of learning abstract language skills (nouns, verbs, accidence, syntax and so on) through the medium of the first language but applied to another separate language made the concepts more easily understood and consequently retained. So all that time spent on Latin grammar was not such a waste of time after all. But what did the old teachers of past centuries know? They were using what the lecturer called pre-scientific thinking about education; they didn’t have those nice pictures of bright blobs in the brain. Classics teachers would be regarded as hopelessly old-fashioned to claim such benefits for studying Latin today: we have to justify Classical studies on cultural and European grounds instead. CLIL on the other hand gets results. A criticism often aimed at Latin is that it is only for the better performing pupils. But what if it is the other way round: that those who do Latin perform better because of it, as a result of the CLIL effect? Will Latin then be at the forefront of modern educational thinking? With added neuroscience?

Look at the screen

I have had a projector in my classroom for the first time since the beginning of term. I hesitate to call it by its familiar name - beamer – as when I said I had a beamer my grown up children thought I had bought a BMW (beamer in London speak). So a data projector or device that throws a large image onto a screen, or a blank wall in my case. I do not have a Smartboard which is an interactive screen you tough instead of pointing a mouse. You quickly learn not to emphasise a point by tapping the board smartly; if you do you risk losing the whole page and then have to rummage around getting it back. What difference does this make to my teaching? In fact quite a lot. We have the Cambridge Latin Course DVDs for Books 1 and 2 on the school network (yearly licence fee paid up, of course) so I am able to use the readings, dramatisations, and civilisation videos regularly. Much better to show a short 3 or 4 minute film, than to devote a whole lesson to catching up on the ones available once a week, as I was doing before. Perhaps the most irritating part of it all though is how quickly the pupils get used to this and accept it as normal, although I still think it is an amazing piece of new technology. In other classes it is also extremely useful. With an internet connection you can very quickly and easily find an image to illustrate a piece. I was going over an unseen translation from Cicero, one of the Catilines where he tells how all the senators deserted the benches when Catiline entered the senate-house. I had not thought of it before the lesson, but I remembered the painting of just this scene and within seconds was able to find it by Googling Cicero and Catiline and switching to images.

Mythological references and illustrations are now all within easy reach, and each teacher can quickly build up their own data base. Also available are resource banks, like the Oxbox for upper school Latin from Oxford University Press. This full of exercises, unseen translations, texts for practice, presentations and other activities including the latest thing: translation into Latin. (More about this later.) So no more chalk, no more squeaky markers on the white board and now nothing but PowerPoint. Perhaps, however, we should stop going on about this new technology and like the kids in the class just take it for granted and get on with the job of teaching using what kit is available to us. The lesson is still the same, the class have to pay attention to the material in the same way and they still have to work at it. New technology doesn’t make it easier, but it does broaden the range of possible material for any particular class. So it may be the case that we are not “dumbing down” but making more demands of our students after all. So everyone, pay attention to the screen.

Not taking a school trip

For the last eight years or so I have taken a school trip (or voyage scolaire) to the Bay of Naples and Pompeii. This has been for Latinists aged 14 or so (our 4th year) in their second year of Latin. They are familiar with Pompeii through the Cambridge Latin Course Book 1 and are pleased to see some of the locations in which the stories about Caecilius and Quintus take place. A trip to this area can also take in Mount Vesuvius, Herculaneum, the Archaeological Museum in Naples, the Campi Flegrei, the Villa Oplontis and Paestum. Over the years the visits have evolved, both improving and declining. Visits to Herculaneum have improved a lot with a new car park for the bus, and no longer a need to walk a perilous distance to the site entrance. New excavations are also tantalisingly close: the Villa dei Papiri almost within sight of the traditional excavations. Pompeii is often as frustrating as ever with the House of the Vettii still closed after many years of restoration. Every year for the last four I have asked at the entrance “Is the House of the Vetti open?” Always the reply is “sempre chiusa.” Last year I was told the restaurant was also closed because of a dispute over the franchise. I didn’t dare ask any further about that. Who has the concession over coffee in Pompeii? Vesuvius is always a good excursion, although the weather can make this a bit uncertain as it will be closed if it is cloudy. Even the usually dependable Solfatara had changed last year. This live volcano near Pozzuoli is a winner with school pupils especially if they were taken around by Bruno. He must have been in his seventies, a retired teacher by my estimation who spoke good French and always amused and informed my pupils, showing them the volcanic phenomena of the region with a twinkle of enthusiasm. But last year I was told he was no longer available and school visits had to make special arrangements.

So this year I have said no. The demands of taking 30 14 year olds away have finally proved too much. I very much enjoy teaching lessons on the spot: talking about gladiators in the amphitheatre itself; giving a lecture on Vitruvius’ analysis of the Doric order in front of one the temples at Paestum; speculating on who lived in the Villa Oplontis in one of the bedrooms; showing the extent of the eruption by the wall of volcanic material rising up in front of the site at Herculaneum. But when we get back to the hotel at 18.30 or so the day has not finished and will continue through dinner (Are they all eating enough? Are they behaving at table?) and the evening (How to occupy them until bedtime?) and the night (Who is making that noise at 03.00? Are they all in their rooms?). The responsibilities of keeping them all safe, well, fed, healthy, getting enough sleep) are just too much, when parents are now so demanding over the safety aspects, the cost and their need to be constantly informed about the welfare of their offspring. (Can we have your mobile number? You will make sure it is switched on at all times?) I have begun to wonder if it is safe to let them go off for half an hour in Naples. Probably not, but they do have to learn to cope with different places. So for my pupils I shall have to leave to someone else the responsibility of giving them the experience of seeing the Bay of Naples with its ancient past and controversial present.

Partial to Martial 1

Euroclassicist has been amusing himself by making versions of some of Martial’s epigrams. Here are a few samples:

1.1

Hic est quem legis ille, quem requiris,
toto notus in orbe Martialis
argutis epigrammaton libellis:
cui, lector studiose, quod dedisti
viventi decus atque sentienti,
rari post cineres habent poetae.

Dear Readers, here’s the one to whom you’re partial,
Your favourite poet: M. Valerius Martial.
A crowd of you each day the bookshop crams
To buy his witty books of epigrams.
The praise you give him, gentlemen and ladies,
Is mostly given to poets down in Hades.
But he’s not ready for the depths of Hell:
In fact he’s here now, still alive and well.


1.4

Contigeris nostros, Caesar, si forte libellos,
terrarum dominum pone supercilium.
consuevere iocos vestri quoque ferre triumphi,
materiam dictis nec pudet esse ducem.
qua Thymelen spectas derisoremque Latinum,
illa fronte precor carmina nostras legas.
innocuos censura potest permittere lusus:
lasciva est nobis pagina, vita proba.

If, o my lord, you condescend to look
At my small efforts in this little book,
Please do not let your brows in rage be furled
Although that fits the ruler of the world.
Triumphal jokes made in my lord’s procession
Are licensed by an emperor’s concession.
My jokes are like those of a cheeky comic;
Allow your frown, then, to be economic.
My poems must be rated as “18”,
But even if they’re filthy, I am clean.


1.10

Petit Gemellus nuptias Maronillae
et cupit et instat et precatur et donat.
adeone pulchra est? immo foedius nil est.
quid ergo in illa petitur et placet? tussit.

Jimmy wants to marry Jane.
He’s got gifts and flowers to give.
In fact she is a real pain,
But she’s got three weeks to live.


1.16

Sunt bona, sunt quaedam mediocria, sunt mala plura
quae legis hic: aliter non fit, Avite, liber.

Some poems here are pretty good,
Some scarcely worth a look.
But in the end, you need them all
To make up one whole book.

1. 23

Invitas nullum nisi cum quo, Cotta, lavaris
et dant convivam balnea sola tibi.
mirabar quare numquam me, Cotta, vocasses:
iam scio me nudum displicuisse tibi.

Cotta asks you to join him for food
In the baths with your kit off – how rude!
But he never asks me.
Why is this? Well, you see:
I don’t look too good in the nude.


1.28

Hesterno fetere mero qui credit Acerram,
fallitur: in lucem semper Acerra bibit.

All day he has the kind of stink,
Which must be due to last night’s drink.
He drinks so late his drunken haze
Is not last night’s, but still today’s.

Going to University

Part of Euroclassicist’s job is dealing with young people from all over Europe who want to go on to study at university in the United Kingdom. This has to be done through UCAS (www.ucas.com) which is the central admissions point for all UK universities. The main difference between entry to UK universities and those of many other European countries is that entry through UCAS is competitive: applicants receive conditional offers or rejections on the way admissions tutors assess their applications. Their achievements at school and their marks are part of this, but so is the reference or report written by the school on their progress, character, suitability for the course and their predicted marks in their final examination. Some courses require additional entry tests as well. In addition the applicant must write a personal statement expressing their motivation for the course and institutions they are applying to, as well as their background and interests. They must demonstrate in this personal statement their commitment to their subject and give clear reasons why the tutors should choose them instead of their rivals. A large part of my day is taken up in reading many of these personal statements, and then returning them to their authors explaining what could be improved or better expressed (and correcting plain errors) while endeavouring to make sure that it remains a personal statement and not one that has been completely rewritten. The remainder of the day at the moment is taken up with arranging for the writing of the references, writing them myself, and then editing those written by my colleagues for space and consistency of style. Then I try to squeeze in some Latin teaching as well.

What amazes me most about these applications is the number that come from young people of all European nationalities who want to go to study in English in the UK. Many have English as their first or second language and have achieved an excellent level of language skills. Some, however, take English as their third language and have studied it formally for only six years. Yet they are willing to commit themselves to a three year undergraduate course in what is neither their first language (or mother tongue) nor their second language as studied at school. The adaptability and ambition of these young people is admirable, and experience shows that they go on to make a success of their chosen courses. As a whole for all applicants, Geography is up this year and Economics, though still popular, is down a bit. Not many of them, although they are skilled and accomplished linguists, go on to study languages at university. Quite a few, however, go to study Law with a language or International Business or Management where they use their languages as an integral part of their course. We send a good number to do scientific and engineering courses each year. Imperial College London which is a specialist science and technology institution is very popular with my students. I even get an occasional student to apply for Classics, which flourishes at Oxford, Cambridge, London (University College and King’s College) and many others.
Many of these applicants wish to go to Oxford or Cambridge (or Oxbridge, as we call it/them). These world-class universities are very competitive and few in the end are chosen. The capacity to show that you are completely committed to your academic subject, to have all-round ability in every subject and to be a reasonably well-rounded human being as well is not granted to many and I always have some disappointed faces to deal with in January when the decisions have been made. For talented and ambitious young people, the first rejection in their lives is hard to take. But they bounce back after a bit and realise that Bristol, Warwick, Edinburgh and Imperial College are every bit as good, and are perhaps even better for them personally. These applications have to be completed by October 15th and the lucky ones will be interviewed in Oxford or Cambridge in the first week of December.

Chinese Semele

I told my Baccalaureate Latin class, as we were reading Ovid’s Diana and Actaeon, that the evening before I had been to see an opera in Brussels performed by Chinese and international singers, directed by a Chinese artist, conducted by a Frenchman, of an opera in English by a German composer based in England, based on a version in Latin by Ovid of a Greek myth. This extraordinary production has been taking place at La Monnaie/De Munt, the Brussels opera house throughout the month of September. The contemporary artist Zhang Huan has been the overall inspiration for the show, making his directorial debut in opera. He is best known as a performance and installation artist and has an exhibition on in London at the same time featuring a pig (don’t ask for more details). The root of this production of Handel’s Semele is a Buddhist temple taken down and reconstructed by Zhang Huan, first in his Shanghai studio, and then transported to Brussels for the performances (above middle). Behind this temple there is a long and tragic story, which is shown to the audience in a video during the overture, concerning the couple who were living in this abandoned temple for a time before Zhang Huan came to ask to remove it. It is a tale of love, jealousy, murder, arrest and violent death when the husband is convicted of killing one of his wife’s lovers and executed. Though not exact, the parallels to the story of Semele appear to be what attracted Zhang Huan to the project of directing his first opera. He fills the show with many elements of his art: the temple itself used as a set; sumptuous costumes (above middle) from both Chinese and European cultures; a group of musicians from Mongolia playing and singing traditional music; his trademark ash paintings (above top); and finally the wife of the temple couple herself bringing the drama to its conclusion. This whole creation was intrinsic to the performance and Zhang’s interventions in the opera (including cutting the last scene) cannot be separated from the whole experience. One of his sculptures has been placed outside the opera house (above bottom) and the audience have to walk through it, smelling the incense (which provides the ash for the paintings) as they enter. Then in the interval Aruhan and her Mongolian musicians perform their version of Semele outside under the legs of this sculpture. The opera critics in the newspapers I have seen seem to have been baffled by all this, and have concentrated on the things they feel comfortable with: the singing and the superb orchestral playing of Les Talens Lyriques under Christophe Rousset. However, what they have failed to indicate is that this is one of the most thought-provoking current opera productions, combining visual, musical, cinematic and dramatic effects in such way as to achieve a total artistic experience; and it does this without the predictable “shocking” tactics too often employed by European opera directors. At the very end, one of the ash paintings of a woman (Semele or the temple wife?) is shown on a screen in front of the stage. We see water trickle down over it, as slowly the image is washed away and Semele is dead and the show is over.

This is really a Classics blog and I haven’t gone into detail about Ovid yet, but the main thing to take away from this seems to be that Greek myth is so deeply ingrained in European culture that we take it for granted. Of course, a story about overwhelming passion that ends in violent death has to be Greek, and the sensational narratives of Ovid’s Metamorphoses are the means by which we have absorbed such tales into our archetypal consciousness. But how can this be the case for Chinese culture? When this production transfers to Shanghai will the cultural commentators there be asking: who is this writer Ovid? What does he have to offer us? Will there be translations of the Metamorphoses in bookshops in Beijing and Shanghai? How can European classicists respond to that? Zhang Huan has shown how such a cross-over between cultures can work and enrich both of them.

The Myth Painter

The Myth Painter 31st July 2009
J.W. Waterhouse The Royal Academy London


Classicists may well know John William (or Nino) Waterhouse (1849-1917) for his paintings of Greek Myths. The images are probably well-known as illustrations of texts of Ovid or Homer. Calendars using his paintings often sell well. Yet this is his first major exhibition in London for many years and shows the largest ever retrospective collection of his paintings. Many are in Tate Britain (though not always on display), others are in English provincial galleries, and some have come from as far as Australia for this show.

He has been out of fashion as a Victorian painter, often regarded as sentimental and conservative in style, and recently the young women who feature in nearly all of his works have been looked at with disapproval and a suspicion of an unhealthy fascination. His reputation ought to be enhanced by this exhibition for, whatever comparisons can be made with other more modern work being done at the same time, he is clearly a terrific painter.

Look at Circe Invidiosa, for example (above middle).

Reproductions cannot convey the quality of the green he has found to give this image its attractive yet troubling atmosphere. The story is from Ovid’s Metamorphoses 14 and shows Circe jealously poisoning the sea after Glaucus, who loves Scylla, has rejected her so that Scylla will be turned into a monster. Waterhouse’s women are almost always highly attractive yet slightly dangerous creatures. His paintings feature Circe, Ariadne, Proserpina, Penelope, Echo, the Sirens and the nymphs who tempt Hylas in perhaps his best known picture (above top).
Other paintings are based on figures from English literature: the Lady of Shalott and Miranda from the Tempest. While classics teachers may often use these images to illustrate the stories of Greek mythology and particularly the way they are told by Ovid, it is worth paying some attention to the context in which Waterhouse was working. The Pre-Raphaelite painters (Rossetti, Millais, Holman Hunt) were clearly a great influence, but Waterhouse was still painting in what appears to be a similar style long after the Victorian period and also long after Picasso’s Demoiselles d’Avignon. This exhibition enables us to look at Waterhouse not just as an illustrator of stories but as an individual stylist and original painter. Is it the use of Greek mythology which makes him appear old-fashioned? Or is his use of unusual and troubling stories from Ovid a precursor of the kind of criticism now current for Ovid, which sees him not as an amusing but slight poet but as a subversive and ironic writer reworking and recreating the old stories in a new way? Perhaps we should not be saying, “Look at this charming portrayal of the Echo and Narcissus story” but “How does Waterhouse create a disturbing image of the young woman in this story?” There are also hints in the notes to the exhibition of Waterhouse’s possible interest in the occult particularly in the figure of Proserpina who seems to appear in many of his pictures although she is not named as such. Claudian’s poem the Rape of Proserpina seems to have been important to him. Questions can also be raised over possible misogyny in his portrayal of women as femmes fatales, always tempting the men in the pictures to danger, and over his fascination with young women, girls even, in sexually ambiguous poses. It may be thought however that here we are retrospectively attributing the unease of our own period back onto the late nineteenth century when a portrayal of childhood may have had very different connotations. This show seems to have been popular with the public who have been brought face to face with a demanding series of images based on Latin and Greek authors. Without a basic knowledge of the foundation texts that classicists seek to keep before the gaze of young people in Europe, the subject mater of these paintings would be baffling to many viewers. Should we really just read them as examples of significant form, of just a collection of shapes and colours, or should we know or have to work out what story the painter is trying to tell?

Helen at Shakespeare’s Globe

Complementing Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida is a new production of Euripides’ Helen in a version by Frank McGuiness. This is the first time the theatre, which reproduces the building of Shakespeare’s time, has put on a Greek drama http://www.shakespeares-globe.org/theatre/annualtheatreseason/helen/. One of Euripides’ lightest tragedies, it was played largely for laughs but the rapid production managed to slip from the comedy to the more serious almost seamlessly. Penny Downie was a sexy, lively Helen reaching up to the top of galleries with her appeals to the gods to rescue her from her fate of being abandoned in Egypt among barbarians.
For this is of course the real Helen: the one who went to Troy was merely an idolon. Menelaus (a strong and sympathetic Paul McGann) is shipwrecked on her shore on his return from the war and is surprised to find his real wife already there. These two fill the stage and the whole theatrical space, and take us through their disbelief, wariness and ultimate joy in their mutual recognition. This plot device of course enables Euripides to play with the idea of the war being fought for nothing, for an illusion: a thought that is always relevant to whichever war is being fought. It also enables him to include some clever wordplay over misidentification and misunderstanding. We can see the origin of all those future comedies of separation and reunification, of loss and restoration in Menander and Plautus and then the whole of European comedy, here in a so-called tragedy of Euripides. McGuiness’s version is in what is called “muscular” free verse, that is a kind of heightened poetic prose which suits the style of Greek drama well. It is the same solution adopted by Ted Hughes in his version of Racine’s version of Euripides (see the post above on Phèdre). Deborah Bruce as director has solved the problem of what to do with the chorus in the current fashion: a collection of individuals half recite their lines, half sing them to simple tunes (though the professional singer brought in to strengthen the music should have been left in the box with the musicians or incorporated properly into the chorus, not dressed in a dinner jacket and allowed to wander over the stage). I know the deus ex machina is difficult to deal with too, but the knockabout act of Castor and Pollux was unfunny and spoiled the hard work of the two principals.

A curious incident before the play started. One of the great things about the Globe is that you can often go along at the last minute and get a standing ticket for five pounds (six Euros), as was possible for Shakespeare’s public. (They paid one penny.) However to our surprise we were greeted with House Full posters and asked to wait for returns. While we were waiting a well dressed and well spoken woman came to the head of the queue offering two standing tickets. Someone in front of us took one and as we wanted two we passed her back to the person behind us who took the second ticket for five pounds. We continued to wait while a couple came up having a huge public row about whether to go the show or not (something about the last train, but not wanting to waste 40 pounds). Then the man who had just bought the standing ticket came back out of the theatre, furious. He had been sold a ticket for last night’s Romeo and Juliet, but in the transaction had not looked closely at the ticket. I immediately began to have suspicions abut the piece of street theatre we had just witnessed. Was this a scam too? Then a member of the box office team came up with two standing tickets and we got in just in time. Who would have thought that a) a Greek Tragedy would be sold out and b) that a rogue would pull a stunt like that outside the Globe? It was full of pickpockets, rascals and coney-catchers in Shakespeare’s time too apparently.