An Odyssey without the Darkness

Happy World Theatre Day, celebrated on March 27, which this year coincides with Western Easter.  At this time of year, when the sailing season started, the ancient Athenians celebrated the BCE equivalent—the international festival of Dionysus, complete with bull and piglet sacrifices, on the south side of the Acropolis.

I marked it by cheering on my friend Sian Thomas, one of the funniest and most skilled actors around, in Welcome Home, Captain Fox, a hilarious new version of Jean Anouilh's 1937 Le Voyageur sans bagage / Traveller without Luggage at the Donmar Warehouse.

Anouilh was fascinated by Greek literature. Besides his world-famous Antigone, his plays include a Medea, an Oedipus and a Eurydice. Traveller without Luggage owes much to the Odyssey (even the key recognition token is a scar) and to the mistaken identity plot-type which Sophocles realised so darkly in Oedipus.

Odysseus' nurse recognises his scar

Anouilh’s play explores the Odyssean theme of the late-returning soldier whose identity is in question and whose own accounts of his past are unreliable. Homer gives Odysseus and his alternative persona as the Cretan beggar many different—and conflicting—memories. Can we really believe him when he says he has visited the Underworld?  Could he actually, as his beggar-self reports, have been kidnapped by pirates and enslaved?

The 'returning mariner’s tale' is primordial. It goes back many centuries before Homer to an Egyptian Middle Kingdom prose story called The Shipwrecked Sailor (c. 2050 BCE). But Anouilh was also inspired by the real-life tragedy of a traumatised and amnesiac French soldier sent back from German captivity and found wandering in Lyon in 1918. He thought his name was something like ‘Anthelme Mangin’: I first learned about him from Jean-Yves Le Naour's fine book The Living Unknown Soldier in 2005.

The Real 'Captain Fox': No Laughing Matter

'Mangin' suffered much, moving between asylums. He died in one, hungry and forgotten, in 1942. But the bereaved of France were suffering too: no fewer than 300,000 of their men had disappeared without trace from the trenches. When ‘Mangin’s' photograph was published, hundreds claimed to be his wife or mother, desperate to have ‘their’ beloved lost man returned to them.  

Sian Thomas glows as Captain Fox's Horrible Mother

Anouilh’s play has been updated by Anthony Weigh, who transplants it to the Long Island bourgeoisie in 1959 and makes it both more ‘feelgood’ and far less profound. Not that I have anything against high comedy, and the performances, especially Thomas’s ghastly Übersnob Mrs Fox, are outstanding. The stellar reviews are richly deserved. 

But both the Odyssey and Anouilh’s original poignantly convey the psychological agony as well as the absurd comedy involved in delayed postwar reunions and compromised memories. My quest for a London theatre with anything really serious to say goes on.

HOW MUCH OF TRUMP'S DNA IS NEANDERTHAL?

Reconstruction of Homo Neanderthalensis

Having over the years suffered three bad bouts of depression, the worst of which was postnatal, I was fascinated by an article in Scientist. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology have found a correlation between depression and DNA inherited from the Neanderthal males with whom female Homo Sapiens mated 50,000 years ago. [Perhaps surprisingly, it was  that way round:  no evidence of Neanderthal mitochondrial DNA has been found in modern humans].

Rhein Valley 

Reconstructions of Neanderthal Man’s appearance from a cluster of archaeological sites in the Rhineland bear an uncanny resemblance to Donald Trump (whose grandfather, purely coincidentally of course, happens to have come from Kallstadt in the Rhineland).

Since the DNA of all modern humans can contain between 0% (all sub-Saharan Africans) and an estimated 4% Neanderthal elements, could the potential US president lie at the upper end of the spectrum? After all, a New Scientist article states that Neanderthal behaviour would seen 'dogmatic and xenophobic' to most humans today. 

Here is my evidence so far:

The Neanderthal diet was mostly animal protein: Trump’s favourite foods are meatloaf and steak.

Neanderthals loved hunting: Trump goes hunting with his son.  

The Neanderthal language was primitive: a recent linguistic analysis shows Trump uses grammar at the level of the average American 8-year-old. 

 Neanderthals were more robust than humans in the upper body: Trump is an obsessive golfer. 

 Neanderthals mysteriously collected small spherical stones: could they have enjoyed pushing them into holes in the ground with sticks, in an early form of golf? 

Neanderthal men often lived in a cave with three females: Trump has had three wives.  

Donald Trump & (below) ancestor?

·    Neanderthals lived horrifyingly violent lives and even their infants’ skeletons show signs of shocking trauma: last Friday Trump lamented to a rally in St. Louis that ‘nobody wants to hurt each other any more’. In February he promised another mutinous crowd that he would protect them if they protected him: ‘If you see someone getting ready to throw a tomato, knock the crap out of them, would you? Seriously. Knock the hell out of them. I promise you I will pay for the legal fees. I promise.’

Some may object that I am being unfair to Neanderthals. The Neanderthal reputation for moronic barbarism was challenged by William Golding’s great novel The Inheritors (1955), where it is Homo Sapiens who is the bad guy, driving the muscular, nature-loving Noble Savage into extinction. I would ask such objectors simply to look at the most recent archaeological evidence for the average Neanderthal’s life-cycle. Nasty, brutish and short doesn’t even begin to describe it. And someone should tell Trump that dogmatism and xenophobia are demonstrably linked with species extinction.

Open Classics on Pots and Online

With Head of  Classics Prof  Hugh Bowden at King's "Oscars"

An exciting week for my project Classics and Class (nominated last term as the only Arts & Humanities research venture for the King’s College ‘project of the year’ prize). Co-author Henry Stead and I heard that the anonymous peer reviews Routledge received for our Big Book proposal, Classics and Class in Britain, were enthusiastic.

Victorian  vase made in Samuel Alcock's factory 

Even better, Routledge have accepted it under their Gold Open Access scheme. Once published (winter 2017/18), it will be available both in book form and completely free of charge, in its entirety, online—as is only appropriate for a study of the historic exclusion of most Britons from elite culture, and how they succeeded in getting access to the Greeks and Romans anyway.  

Alexia, Wedgwood Brand Director Leigh Taylor & Josiah Wedgwood

Then I went north-west with esteemed colleague Dr Alexia Petsalis-Diomidis to the capital of the British ceramic industry, Stoke-on-Trent. Many vases and figurines produced there from the late 18th century onwards copied or adapted Greek and Roman artworks. Although some skilled painters and modellers were middle-class, the design classes at Mechanics' Institutes and, later, local art schools created jobs for children, of any class, with a flair for drawing. One was the 13-year-old Eliza Smallwood, whose apprenticeship contract with Minton's factory (shown below) was drawn up in 1878. And the tens of thousands of workers employed in the 150+ factories operating in the 19th century must have been well informed about classical gods and heroes..

Eliza Smallwood's Apprenticeship Contract

In 1839 Charles Shaw, the seven-year-old son of a pottery painter, began working fourteen-hour days. His 1903 memoir When I was a Child, by ‘An Old Potter’ contains horrifying descriptions of the hunger, brutality, dangerous conditions and degradation suffered by the work force in the Potteries, as well as first-hand accounts of the Chartist riots.

But he picked up information about mythology, read Charles Rollin's Ancient History at Sunday school, learned Greek, and became a Methodist minister. The classical figures produced by the companies for whom he worked lingered in his imagination. He described a ruthless local magistrate as one who ‘ruled as the Jove of the pottery district.’ The first Jove (aka Zeus/Jupiter) on which Charles will ever have laid eyes was probably this angry, thunderbolt-wielding figurine, produced by his first employer, Enoch Wood & Sons.

A classical bust & vase drawn by kiln firer

My pulse raced when we were shown the Firing Records from the 1790s by Gaye Blake Roberts, Wedgwood Museum Curator. The labourers who put the ceramics in the ovens—hot, backbreaking and dangerous work—used to draw the pots and figures in miniature in the margins of their often mis-spelt inventories. I can’t wait to write the ‘Potters’ chapter in the Big Book now.

Enoch Wood's Factory in Burslem, Staffordshiore

Aristophanes in Illinois: Spike Lee's CHI-RAQ

Lee, Willmott  & John Cusack (who plays radical priest Father Mike)

What do South and West Chicago today and Athens in spring 411 BCE have in common? Film Director Spike Lee thinks there are vivid parallels. He’s made a film updating Aristophanes’ Lysistrata to CHI-RAQ, ‘Chi-[cago/I]raq’, the killing fields where teenage members of African American gangs run riot with firearms. I met Mr Lee this week, just after his non-appearance at the whiter-than-white Oscars, during a public screening and discussion masterminded by Professor Sara Monoson, Head of Political Science at Northwestern University north of Chicago.

Just about to kick off with Sara Monoson

Eighteen months before the first production of Lysistrata, the Athenians failed to conquer Sicily and suffered their worst ever fatalities there, losing many thousands. Athens was crammed with widows and grieving mothers; Aristophanes' comedy imagines the Athenian women organising a sex-strike alongside the women of the ‘enemy’ city, Sparta, and a takeover of the Acropolis, until the men on each side agree to lay down their arms and make peace.

• Teyonah Parris as Lysistrata (2nd from left) plus lieutenants

In the calendar year 2015, there were 5011 shooting victims in Chicago. There have already been over 500 in the first two months of 2016. Poor black neighbourhoods are crammed with widows and grieving mothers: Lee and his screenwriter Kevin Wilmott imagine the women of two gangs (Spartans and Trojans) denying their men sex and occupying the state armoury. CHI-RAQ ends with an armistice and promises of full employment and local investment. 

The new film is magnificently Aristophanic in that it is both a political satire and musical theatre (Lysistrata’s lover is a rapper). There are colourful dance sequences by the 60-strong female army, absurdist episodes featuring enormous cannons and sex toys, and punchy versified dialogue in sometimes (to me) near-incomprehensible but clearly bracing slang. It is rib-achingly funny and sexually uninhibited. The cast are very beautiful and visual puns or surprises pop up round every corner. But its message is deadly serious and has proved controversial ever since the Mayor of Chicago tried to get the title changed, so concerned was he about the frightening picture of Chicago street life a name including the four letters IRAQ paints.

But the eye-opener for me on Wednesday night was the passionate intensity of the questions put by the (largely student) audience to Lee, and the forcefulness of his responses. The film is undoubtedly courageous in facing up to the black-on-black nature of the violence, and the problematic hyper-masculinity endorsed by some street gangs.  But there were plenty of black feminists attacking Lee, with open disrespect, for his sexualisation of African American women; he had a stock of rude quips in response. One carping voice asked Lee to justify the praise he has received from some white people for the film; the convoluted point seemed to be that if he had succeeded in getting his message across to The Enemy, he must be some kind of race traitor.

Girls and Girls go out to Play

None of this debate was edifying: I had walked straight into the heart not of the politics of the deprived black gangland underclass but the racial, gender and identity politics, the maelstrom of the ideological wars being waged on privileged American campuses. But it was educative, and increased my admiration for Mr Lee’s work. He may be irritable and egotistical but he does put his head above the parapet and address an extreme contemporary emergency through his unprecedented re-energising of an ancient play. 

He is committed to doing something constructive about the plight of young, under-educated gang members, often from broken families and with criminal records by the age of 10. He brought two with him. They are now adult and campaigning for decent schools on the south side and reform of the gun laws. They both spoke with devastating conviction and palpable personal pain. I am sure that Aristophanes would have been proud of the entire project.  

Rehabilitating Rational ENVY

As the gap between rich and poor widens inexorably, I'm puzzled by the tolerance shown by poor humans towards the wealth possessed by the super-rich.

We need a word that means ‘rational aversion to other humans living a far more comfortable lifestyle than your own which you would like to enjoy yourself.’  Perhaps R.A.I.G. (Rational Aversion to Income Gaps). Currently our only option is the demeaning, pejorative term for a Deadly Sin, the Green-Eyed Monster, ‘Envy’.

Adam Smith,  Kirkcaldy-born Hero of Capitalist Theory

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (a superb open access resource which I’ve used much writing the lecture I’ve just given at Stanford Uni.) states that envy is ‘very commonly charged with being…unreasonable, irrational, imprudent, vicious, or wrong to feel’. Witness Adam Smith: ‘Envy is that passion which views with malignant dislike the superiority of those who are really entitled to all the superiority they possess’.   

Even social fairness advocate John Rawls thinks envy is horrid and undermines the self-respect of the poor, thus posing a threat to societal stability. But why so? It takes self-respect and a sensitivity to human dignity to recognise the absurdity of over-payment for doing nothing useful.

So I’m thrilled to discover that Aristotle is also puzzled. He notes the absence of a Greek word for people who fail to feel appropriate envy of the undeserving plutocrat. There wasn’t even a word in ancient Greek for that kind of incomprehension of economic reality.

In his ‘Golden Mean’ table in the Eudemian Ethics he lists twelve virtues. Each has two correlative vices caused by excess or deficiency. Courage in excess is recklessness, but in deficiency it is cowardice. Friendliness in excess becomes brown-nosing, but if deficient just means you're rude.

Nemesis--Not Happy in 2016

Aristotle says that excessive envy (phthonos) means revelling in the misery of the deservedly fortunate. The correlative virtue is Righteous Indignation (i.e. my proposed R.A.I.G.), which well-balanced people feel about the selfish rich and ill-gotten gains. But the one hole in his table of 36 terms (12 virtues and their correlative 24 vices) is the box where ‘stupid tolerance of unfairness’ should be.[*] 

Nemesis--Rational Aversion to Nasty Rich (with Good Luck)

So both the English language and ancient Greek have a real problem with even naming the inability of people who can’t heat their own homes to resent star footballers’ salaries.

But there is some good news: ancient Greek does have a solution to my R.A.I.G problem. In Aristotle’s table, the rational and appropriate level of envy, a commendable sensitivity to inequality and desire to erase it, my cacophonous proposed virtue of R.A.I.G., is strong, holds a hint that the world can be changed, and rolls off the tongue: it is NEMESIS. 

Giving Eitner Lecture on February 18

[*] I asked the Father of My Children what the English word was for 'failure to feel Rational Envy of Undeserving Super-Rich', it being missing from ancient Greek. He responded immediately 'False Consciousness'. Must have been reading Marx or somefink.

NIGHT OF THE HAIRY PROMETHEANS

Frederick Douglass Day

"My beard's bigger than yours"

I’ll be in the sky returning from lectures in California as the night of Saturday 20 February turns into morning, and memorial day for Maryland Abolitionist Frederick Douglass segues into the anniversary of the Communist Manifesto, published in East London on 21 February 1848.    

David Oyelowo as Prometheus

Douglass and Marx had much in common. They were both born in 1818. They were both large, hirsute, and charismatic. They both wrote prose of such potency that it changed minds the world over. And both titans of the Left were inspired by a real Titan, the Prometheus of the Aeschylean tragedy Prometheus Bound. He was the rebel god whom a vicious, autocratic Zeus had chained to the Caucasian mountains for bestowing on mere mortals the gods' exclusive prerogative--fire. 

Rock-shackled Prometheus was adopted as the mythical ancestor of all slaves during the Abolition debates immediately  after the Greek tragedy was first published in English in 1773. The chains that constrained Prometheus, painted, drawn, engraved and sung by Flaxman, Blake, Fuseli, Goethe and Shelley, became instant Romantic ‘code’ for the fetters of slavery. A collection of poems published in 1807 to mark the abolition of actual trading in slaves in British territories put a picture of Hercules liberating the shackled Titan on its cover.

The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1844 offers an unmistakable allusion to the myth through the black slave mother, prone on the ground but shielding her baby from the onslaught of the aggressive eagle.  Near the patriotic symbol of the Capitol building, the stars and stripes floating overhead, the American eagle is subversively co-opted as a vicious raptor.

In 1833, Douglass was rented to the vicious slave-breaker Covey to have his rebel spirit subdued once and for all. After a spate of severe floggings, Douglass fought back for two hours and won.  Little surprise that the story of Prometheus’ defiance against Zeus was one factor which shaped Douglass’ own account of that primal showdown in his epochal My Bondage and My Freedom (1855).

Soon Aeschylus’ Promethean fetters symbolised not just slavery but any form of oppression under capitalism. Marx represented the censorship of his newspaper Die rheinische Zeitung in 1843 as a scene from Aeschylus Bound: Marx is chained to his printing press, tortured by the eagle of Prussian censorship, and comforted by Ocean's daughters (the chorus in the tragedy) who have become fused with Rhine maidens.

You Have Nothing to Lose but Your Chains

Five years later, in London exile, Marx penned with Engels the rousing 23-page pamphlet destined, for better or worse, to change the world. But at least one of the manifesto's most famous sentences is a resounding allusion to that Greek tragedy: ‘The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.’ 

THE GOOD WIFE, Classical-Style

King's College Greek Play 2016

Cross London Bridge to the Greenwood Theatre and this week you could watch my students enact the most peculiar of ancient plays. Euripides was always avant-garde, but his Alcestis is borderline outrageous.

Northern Broadsides/Hughes Alcestis

King Admetus gets the unusual chance of avoiding death on his allotted day if he can produce someone to die in his place. Only his wife Alcestis offers. He accepts. She dies. All involved (including their lovely children) weep. Then Admetus’ old chum Heracles turns up, gets drunk, wrestles with Death, and brings Alcestis back from the dead. Everyone (except, conspicuously, Alcestis) cheers.

The sting in the tale is that, even before the play is over, Admetus breaks the single promise he made to Alcestis—that he would never marry again and inflict a step-parent on their children. He doesn’t realise that the attractive veiled lady Heracles offers him a blind date with is, in fact, Alcestis. He takes her in as a new bedmate anyway. So the play ends with a revenant wife who has a bit of a bone to pick with her morally invertebrate husband.

T.S.Eliot's Alcestis, Vivienne

My favourite adaptation is a Victorian musical-comedy burlesque (1850), performed next door to King’s College at the Strand Theatre. This Alcestis leapt at the opportunity to leave her self-important husband and bunk off with the handsome young Death to a fun new life in the Underworld. Its title was Alcestis! The Original Strong-Minded Woman!!!

But writers with absent wives have always taken the play more seriously. Robert Browning adapted it in Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) when trying to cope with the loss of Elizabeth Barrett. T.S. Eliot adapted it in The Cocktail Party, which he wrote in 1948, the year his estranged wife died in a mental hospital. Ted Hughes, who had buried two mothers of his children, left his version when he died, with the instructions that it should be performed by Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company.

But how can a supposedly gender-equal world restage a patriarchal story in which a woman’s greatest virtue is defined as embracing the idea that her life is worth much less than a man’s? Euripides admittedly does his best, not only by that sinister ending but by portraying Admetus as a weasel-worded slimebag who can’t stick by a principle for two minutes. 

The Ever-youthful Professor Silk

My enterprising students, brilliantly organised by producer David Bullen, also did their best by rewriting the ending and with Marcus Bell’s superb choreography; Pina Bausch-style movements accompanied the exquisite ancient Greek verses recited by my esteemed mellifluous colleague Professor Michael Silk, who knows more than anyone alive about the poetic rhythms of classical Greek. But the play still bothers me and always will.  Anybody out there have any ideas about how the plot could be made truly 21^st-century?