Inaugural Durham Prize in Classical Reception 2024

 

The results are in! Dr Caroline Barron, Director of the Durham Centre in Classical Reception, has made them public. The panel of judges, Durham scholars who work on Classical Reception, met on September 4th, after independently drawing up their lists of chosen candidates. The task of reading them had been a joy: the quality and number of submissions, diversity of their subject-matter, critical approaches, languages and classical traditions left us deeply optimistic about the future of this sub-discipline internationally.

All except one of us had selected as winner Nebojša (‘Nebo’) Todorović’s Tragedies of Disintegration: Balkanizing Greco-Roman Antiquity. This outstanding Yale Classics dissertation explores receptions of ancient Athenian tragedy ‘in contemporary Italian, Greek, and Yugoslav adaptations that thematize the violent disruption of former Yugoslavia’.

It has everything: meticulous archival research into substantial subject-matter covering cinematic as well as theatrical artworks and a clear, original over-arching argument. It bravely exposes how historiographical accounts of Yugoslavia’s breakup tend to undermine how certain fascist sentiments were never fully quelled after the Second World War; Nebo’s great-grandfather and great-uncles died fighting for the resistance. It is elegantly written and above all exudes a sense of political commitment and personal passion for acknowledging the inherent links between Classical Reception and historic trauma that sweep the reader along with it. Nebo’s parents were forced to leave their beloved, war-torn Sarajevo when he was just four months old.

But three runners-up for the prize have been Highly Commended. We were taken, entranced, to visit Arcadia by Topomythopoiesis: The Expression and Reception of Classical Mythology in Gardens from Antiquity to 1800 by Johan Prinsloo, from the Department of Architecture in the University of Pretoria. This thesis was distinguished by Johan’s firm control of his ancient sources, especially Greek sanctuaries and Roman private gardens, combined with a persuasive methodological framework and detailed study of neglected sources on landscape gardening until the 19th century, such as emblem books, design treatises and poetry.

We also highly commended Cassandre Martigny’s  Sorbonne dissertation Devenir Jocaste. Naissances et renaissances du personnage de l’Antiquité à nos jours.  The sheer bibliographical scope of this thesis is breathtaking. But Cassandre wears her erudition lightly, and deftly steers us through two and a half millennia of Jocastas by elegantly distinguishing the uses to which she has been put by each era, from democratic Athens and imperial Rome to French absolute monarchy, Freudian and post-Freudian psychoanalysis to contemporary feminist recuperation. Beautifully done.

Peter Makhlouf (Classics, Princeton) revealed fascinating but neglected images of Roman imperial continuity and downfall in fin-de-siècle German poets and intellectuals in his Declinations: German Decadence and the Fall of Rome and received the High Commendation, too. This thesis was remarkable for its synthesis of academic traditions with more public-facing culture at a crucial historical turning-point.

But it was a close-run race. There were several other dissertations that stood out, mentioned here in no particular order. Also from Princeton, but from the Department of Art and Architecture, Aleksander Musiał’s highly original and often amusing thesis took us into a world of bathing culture inflected with classical ideals in  his Classical Reception and Eastern European Transformations of Hygiene Architecture, ca. 1600-1830.

Anne Morvan’s Nantes thesis Écouter Cassandre? Étude d’une figure scénique paradoxale dans la tragédie grecque (Ve s. av. J.-C.) et ses traductions et réécritures à la Renaissance (XVIe s.) skilfully disinterred numerous reimaginings of Cassandra that have long been forgotten. Elena Stramaglia of Bologna and Giessen persuasively reminded us that the great East German poet, playwright and theatre director Heiner Müller was just as interested in ancient Rome as Greece in Gestaltwandlungen des Imperiums: Heiner Müller und Rom.

Wrocław candidate Antoine Haaker has produced a stupendous critical edition of Philibert de La Mare’s 17th-century biography of Claude Saumaise, an outstanding French classical scholar. Since none of the judges reads Polish, we were relieved—and mightily impressed—that Antoine’s thesis was in Latin, the ancient lingua franca of the Humanist intelligentsia! We were taken to Italy by Fulvio Vallana of Turin’s subtle and loving study of Arcadian poetry in Latin and Italian, L’Arcadia delle idee Poesia e pensiero nello spazio delle Bucoliche:  Calpurnio Siculo, Teodulo, Battista Spagnoli Mantovano, Giacomo Leopardi.

Alice Ahearn of Wadham College, Oxford, revived our love for Ovid’s playfulness with her sophisticated Heroines: Contemporary Anglophone Versions of Ovid’s Heroides. Sebastian Marshall of Christ’s College, Cambridge, provided us with a nostalgic feast for the eyes with his Beyond the Classical Landscape: Representing Greece and Anatolia in British Illustrated Books, 1832-1882. 16th-century homoerotically inflected poetry was given a nuanced treatment by UCL’s  Massimiliano Riviera in ‘Orpheus Came and Began to Sing’: Richard Barnfield’s Allusive Subversion.

 From St. Hilda’s and the Oxford Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama came Marcus Bell’s resonant Choreographing Tragedy into the Twenty-First Century, which does a brilliant job of enriching Classical Reception methods with Queer and Trans* studies, Performance studies and dance theory to put the body firmly back into the Tragic and revise traditional Idealist notions of that genre. From Sydney, we were treated to the changing faces of matriarchal warrior women in Connie Skibinski’s The Amazon Queen Penthesilea from Antiquity to Modernity: A Classical Reception Study.

Poets, playwrights, screenwriters, biographers, historiographers, landscape gardeners, architects, bathers, travellers, painters, etchers, dancers and mythical figures, discussed in five languages across four continents—the new Durham competition has revealed the depth, breadth and vigour of Classical Reception Studies in the hands of the rising generation of scholars. Congratulations to all entrants on their doctorates!

We will be hosting Nebo’s prize lecture in Durham on December 11th 2024; watch this space and and Twitter/X @Durham_DCCR for zoom links. And the competition will open again after Christmas to candidates who are awarded their doctorates between June 2024 and June 2025. Thanks to everyone for support.

Euripides on the 50th Anniversary of the Turkish Invasion of Cyprus

 

On July 10 I was in Nicosia and privileged to witness the first public performance of a production of Euripides’ Phoenician Women directed by a great classicist and former PhD student of mine. The review has been published in Greek. Here is the English-language original. 

Gaping Wounds in the Cypriot Body Politic

The opening night of the THOK Phoenissae in Magdalena Zira’s magnificent production was unbearably hot and airless. The actors must have struggled to keep up the amazing energy of the performance. But somehow the sense of strain enhanced the evocation of incurable tensions within the city-state of Thebes.  

The play premiered in 409 BCE, when Athens had just undergone four years of desperate trauma:  a catastrophic military defeat, thousands of fatalities, an oligarchic coup, the restoration of the democracy and vicious reprisals in the lawcourts leading to summary executions. The city was split into hostile factions.

Magdalena chose Phoenissae this year because only a Civil War play is appropriate to the 50th anniversary of the Turkish occupation of Cyprus, which tore so many longstanding communities apart. It led to much suffering, death, and the displacement and exile faced by Oedipus and Antigone at the end of the action.

Zira is a highly trained classical scholar who always remains true to the text and spirit of the ancient play, while using visual and aural means to make it speak resonantly to our modern context. The set suggested both the painted timber of military walls on ancient vases and the half-finished houses, their metal frames jutting out of concrete blocks, so familiar on Greek and Cypriot horizons; the soldiers wore costumes evoking 20th- or 21st-century militiamen.  The shouting and violence just beyond the encircling walls of the city was represented by a brilliant soundscape.

When I first discussed the play with Magdalena, I advised her that the most difficult aspect of this long, stately piece of epic theatre, at least  to make intelligible in modern performance, is the chorus. This play is rarely performed in northern Europe, where nobody knows much about the ancient Phoenicians. But she smiled.

Her own PhD was on the chorus in Greek tragedy and how to perform it today. Moreover, she reminded me that Cypriot people are descendants of Phoenicians as well as Greek-speakers, and—even more relevantly—the sight of refugee women from the Levant and Syria is an everyday fact of Cypriot life. We understood exactly what these lonely travellers were doing in Thebes and why the events they were witnessing so stirred their emotions. They are also specialists in myth and ritual, as hierodules on their way to Delphi.

The amazing chorale about Ares, whose primordial rage at the execution of his serpent-son is now massacring the present generation of Thebans, was perhaps the most exciting piece of musical theatre I have ever witnessed in a Greek tragic performance.

The Thebans belonged to one of two families, Oedipus’, directly descended from the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus, and Creon’s, sprung from the serpent’s teeth. The figure who unites and divides them simultaneously is Creon’s sister Jocasta, whose contested body symbolizes the Theban Body Politic. When she greeted Polynices, the physicality of their embraces represented in searing terms the deep love as well as hate integral to this household, and the dangerous possibility of incestuous desires. The altercation between the two brothers was executed with such commitment, passion and oratorical precision that the audience was physically trembling by the time Polynices stormed off to the battlefield.

The ending is perhaps the bleakest in the ancient stage repertoire. It is not just that three young men and a longsuffering mother lie dead and bloodied before our eyes. As Creon terrifyingly assumes the mask of power, his tyrannical disposition fully exposed by the action, we know that there is to be no healing or redemption in this community. Truly a tale—and a production—for our own dark and divided times.

Classics, Speaking Skills & the Dawn of Hope

 

One of Keir Starmer’s first statements as PM has been that he wants to reduce the number of people going to prison through renewed efforts to cut reoffending. He has appointed the admirable James Timpson, whose ubiquitous shoe repair chain has a policy of recruiting ex-offenders, to help achieve this goal. This is music to my ears: tomorrow the Durham-based campaign Advocating Classics Education (ACE) that I lead with Professor Arlene Holmes-Henderson MBE embarks on its new initiative to explore life skills through classical materials in His Majesty’s Prisons.

Along with appreciating beauty, art, architecture, and encouraging our participants to enact ancient plays about suffering, revenge and violence, we’ll be using Aristotle: his Ethics to ask how being a good person and taking decisions carefully will make you happier, and his Rhetoric to hone communication skills both in writing and orally. Especially but not exclusively in the case of young offenders, we are convinced that the ancient world can help stop people reoffending.

This election mattered for me personally and professionally as never before. My brilliant and witty young Durham colleague Dr Peter Swallow, who has been active on the ACE project, overturned a massive Tory majority in his home constituency of Bracknell to become its first ever Labour MP. His job until Friday was as Research Fellow on my Leverhulme-funded project Aristotle beyond the Academy, and he will be sorely missed. Previously, before teaching in schools, he had done his PhD under my supervision on—guess what—the world’s first political satirist and comic dramatist, Aristophanes! The thesis is now an excellent book.

Peter took holiday leave to run his campaign, which meant that he had to pull out of a philosophy conference in Coimbra the week before last. I had intended to lead a six-strong panel, including also the wonderful colleagues on my other research project The Writing Styles of Aristotle,* talking about how Aristotle’s Rhetoric was written in and for a democracy where ‘ordinary’ people needed strong rhetorical skills for civic debate and in lawcourts, and why these are still important today. Peter’s absence meant that the six-strong panel turned into five, but we found a fresco and statue of Aristotle in slight compensation.

I am filled with cautious optimism by the election, partly as a lifelong advocate of prison reform, a socialist and ardent fan of the NHS, which recently saved my life. But it is also as an advocate of the teaching of speaking skills, to which Starmer is committed, to lower the class ceiling. I am also a proud member of the British Committee for the Reunification of the Parthenon Marbles; Starmer is on record as saying that he is ‘open’ to returning these magnificent sculptures to their rightful home alongside the rest of the total artwork that is the Athenians’ temple of their Maiden Goddess.

An expert on Aristophanes in parliament and a PM whose enlightened views on prisons, rhetoric and the Parthenon align with mine (not to mention the brilliance of Jude Bellingham and Bukayo Saka, whose Yoruba first name means ‘Adds to Happiness’, which of course pleases this Aristotelian)! Things feel better than for years. I’m off to the first prison tomorrow, then to Cyprus for a theatre production directed by another former PhD student, Dr Magdalena Zira, to mark the 50th anniversary of the Turkish invasion. Expect another blog next week.

*Total team: Prof. Phil Horky, Drs. Alessandro Vatri & Rosie Wyles, Profs. Holmes-Henderson and Hall

Daisy Dunn interviews me in The Daily Telegraph

 

‘Face ghosts or they will have their way’

How the ancient Furies escaped from the pages of Edith Hall’s library to cast a shadow across her life

• The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
• 27 Apr 2024
• By Daisy DUNN Facing Down the Furies by Edith Hall (Yale, £18.99) is out on May 14
• It is often said that Edith Hall is to Greece what Mary Beard is to Rome. Over a long career, each has made extraordinary contributions to classical scholarship: Hall in theatre, philosophy, ethnicity and education; Beard in the history and religion of the Roman Republic and early Empire. Both have raised the profile of a once beleaguered subject; neither shows the slightest sign of slowing down.
• 
  
• Hall, 65, is talking to me from the home in Cambridgeshire she shares with her husband, a journalist, and two daughters when they’re home from university. Next month will see the publication of her new book, Facing Down the Furies, in which she confronts the horror of suicide. Her maternal grandmother, great-grandfather and cousin all took their own lives, and there have been times when Hall has contemplated doing the same.
• 
  She was just a toddler when her grandmother Edith jumped to her death at the age of 72. Growing up, Hall found her mother reluctant to discuss her own mother, telling her only that she was named after her and was “just like her”. Silence, as Hall says, “makes the ghost or the Fury far more palpable… If you don’t face the ghosts, and talk to and about them, they will have their way.”
• 
  
• The Furies, also known as Erinyes, were the Greek goddesses of vengeance. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, they hover over the house of Atreus until they’re appeased by the deaths of three family members. The concept of a family curse resonates with Hall’s understanding of the inheritance of suicidal tendencies down her own bloodline. My early impression that she is not only an expert in Greek drama, but almost an unwilling participant in it, deepens as our conversation develops.
• 
  
• Hall wrote her memoir quickly, “as if I was being taken over by a muse”, completing much of it in a month. No sooner had she finished, than she was diagnosed with a virulent type of breast cancer. Fortunately, it was caught early, and treated with radiotherapy. The experience has made her “more pleasure-grabbing”, though she remains “an obsessive worker”.
• 
  Hall is currently Professor of Classics at Durham, where she has been running research projects since 2022. Earlier in her career, she taught at Oxford, but the schedule proved unaccommodating: “I wasn’t going to ruin my relationship with my two little babies because of Oxford protocols.” Hall’s maternal instinct comes across strongly.
• 
  It was as a student at Oxford in the 1980s that Hall first encountered suicide outside her own family. She recalls vividly the day one of the tutors, Colin MacLeod, took his life on a railway line. The shock, when she was already battling depression in the run-up to her final exams, nearly tipped her over the edge.
• 
  Eerily, she had discovered that MacLeod’s tutor, Eduard Fraenkel, had also died by suicide. The idea of it as a kind of contagion shook her, and Hall collapsed in the street after realising she was about to step in front of a bus. “Fraenkel’s suicide probably played a big part in Colin MacLeod’s,” she says. “And MacLeod’s suicide nearly killed me.”
• 
  This autumn, she will publish a commentary and text of Agamemnon, the first play in the Oresteia, in which the Furies are on the warpath. The experience – and a determination, perhaps, to break the cycle and appease the Furies – has strengthened Hall’s resolve to live.
• 
  She still battles “very well-controlled” manic depression, to which she attributes her literary productivity, as well as “suicidal ideation”. “An image of a blade sinking into my forearms appears almost every time I reach for a knife to chop the evening’s vegetables,” reads an alarming line in her book. But picturing suicide and actually doing it, Hall has come to realise, are different things.
• 
  She hopes that her book will encourage us to talk about suicide and help those who have suffered a bereavement or contemplated the act themselves. Throughout, she turns to Greek tragedy for guidance. Playwrights, Hall explains, saw it as their duty to educate their audiences in morality. Suicide was not illegal in ancient Greece, but it was heavily frowned upon, so much so that victims’ bodies were often buried separately from the hand with which they had killed.
• 
  Of all the surviving plays, she believes Euripides’s Hercules Furens may offer the best advice on how to treat a suicidal crisis. In it, the eponymous hero recovers from a psychotic episode only to realise that he has killed his family. Other relatives, Theseus and Amphitryon, listen to him in his despair and ensure he’s not left unattended.
• 
  Hall has long been determined to bring ancient wisdom into the modern world. She is currently preparing to pilot an initiative for educating young offenders in classics, and often visits state schools to encourage the introduction of classical subjects as part of Advocating Classics Education (ACE). The campaign “is working slowly but surely”, though the northeast lags behind. 
• 
  
• Not everyone approves of the mission to introduce Classical Civilisation and Ancient History to schools in place of Latin and Greek. Hall herself admits that she wouldn’t take on a PhD student who wasn’t prepared to learn the language if they didn’t know it already. But this isn’t about creating academics. Class Civ can be taught by teachers of other subjects, so doesn’t require the employment of extra staff. “Knowing a little about democratic Athens and the Roman Empire, being able to spot the top 10 statues, having a few bits of rhetoric… this should be compulsory,” Hall says. “It is in Denmark.”
• 
  She sympathises with efforts in the US to make classics “less white”. However, she feels that poor handling of the debate has perpetuated the myth in schools here that the subject is horribly elitist: “I hate the word ‘class’ [as in ‘Classics’],” she says, “but the answer is not for white people with tenured jobs at Ivy League universities to go virtue-signalling all over the place.”
• 
  Better, she says, to “excavate the thrilling progressive past of the subject and show it hasn’t always been elitist”. Hall did just that in her recent book, A People’s History of Classics, co-authored with Henry Stead, which charted the historical efforts of gardeners, cabin boys, fishermen, bakers and others to study the ancient world.
• 
  Hall’s first book, Inventing the Barbarian, examined xenophobia, particularly on the stage. Published in 1989, it propelled her into the media just as apartheid was crumbling in South Africa. Although Hall “never set out to be a public anything”, her fluency in discussing febrile terrain earned her many radio engagements, to the annoyance of some of her academic colleagues.
• 
  “I got so slagged off until at least 2000 as [broadcasting] was seen as a vulgarisation and absolutely deleterious to your career,” she tells me. “Mary [Beard] has done wonders. You have to hand it to that woman. She has made it respectable to be a public classicist and has managed to be regarded as probably the greatest expert on the Roman Empire alive as well as a great communicator.”
• 
  Yet Hall observes that while Beard was welcomed to TV as “this delicious, slightly batty-looking” expert, she was typecast in early meetings as a babe with brains. “With me, it was quite clear I was the girl with the big tits and long hair.” She recalls one producer referring to her as “the Greek professor who looks like a barmaid”.
• 
  “I don’t mind if I look like a barmaid,” she says now. “I like bright colours. I feel like Kat on EastEnders. But I was not going to do it.”
• 
  The dangers of this kind of public exposure, when so many women in the media are “fetishised and worse”, were brought home to Hall in 2004. Following an appearance on Radio 4’s In Our Time, her husband and the then wife of the programme’s host Melvyn Bragg were targeted with obscene letters.
• 
  “Some said that Melvyn and I were having this torrid affair, [that] the affair consisted… of him raping me very sadistically,” she recalls. “I had to go to the police.” The topic of the radio programme had been Homer’s Odyssey. If theatre feels like safer ground, it is perhaps because it is so familiar to Hall, whose own life often seems reflected in it. For all the tragedy she has endured, however, she speaks of having lived “a fantastic life”, though she remains conscious of human frailty.
• 
  “I’m 65, I’ve had cancer… I’ve only got three or four big books left in me,” she says. “I’m going to pick very carefully.” Her next will be an ecological reading of the Iliad. “I can’t tie myself to railings”, she says, “So this is my bit for my daughters’ generation.”

Revenge: Sargent’s Orestes Pursued by the Furies (1922); below, Edith Hall

Greeks but Few Romans in the Granite City

 

Four years, an epidemic and a job change after a conference I co-convened with Dr Tom Mackenzie (and blogged about), on the Scottish leader Calgacus, who stood up to the Roman invaders, I have finally returned to Aberdeenshire. The Battle of Mons Graupius  of 83 or 84 CE supposedly took place at Bennachie.

According to Tacitus, Calgacus gave a rousing speech about not surrendering to imperialists before dying in battle fighting Tacitus' father-in-law, the governor of Britannia, Gnaeus Julius Agricola. One famous phrase, ‘they make a desert and call it peace’ (ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant, Tacitus, Agricola 30.6) has entered modern languages as a proverb.

Fans of the TV drama series Succession may have noticed that in the episode ‘Dundee’ (series 2 episode 8), when the Logan family comes to Scotland, Ewan cites Tacitus. He says of Logan, the mogul brother he loathes, ‘Tacitus comes to mind… He’s made a wasteland, and calls it an empire’; Ewan’s grandson Greg facetiously responds, ‘God, Tacitus … all killer, no filler with him’.

On my own visit, I hoped for a theme park, life-size mannequins dressed in proto-kilts or Roman military gear, or better still, local people reenacting the battle as Caledonian tribesmen routed by members of the Legio IX Hispana. Apparently there was once some such tourist facility, but it made no money and was shut down.

So instead we visited the site of a nearby Roman marching camp at Oyne, in driving sleet. It too had closed down. But my intrepid family climbed in and took a photo of the sole remaining evidence that the dilapidated Roman ‘archeopark’ had ever existed. At least I got to see a photo of some locals pretending to be Roman soldiers.

Frustrated, I visited Aberdeen’s beautiful Museum and Art Gallery, which has an intense history of engagement with both classical knowledge and social class in Britain. It was founded on money made by a former crofter named Alexander MacDonald, who was inspired by Ptolemaic sculptures to invent steam-powered polishing machines to lend a gloss to the local granite. His business subsequently helped fund such great Victorian/Edwardian acquisitions as John Price Waterhouse’s ‘Penelope and the Suitors’.

And, as we left, I heard the news of the appointment of Nicholas Cullinan, the new Director of the British Museum. Aberdeen’s fine plaster replica of the entire Parthenon frieze is cleverly displayed at an appropriate height, around an entire rectangular hall and to be experienced as a narrative whole, not unlike the Acropolis Museum in Athens.  

It attracts many appreciative admirers and schoolchildren and is a local pride and joy. It might give Cullinan some useful ideas when he next enters the musty, disastrously lit, aesthetic abomination that is the BM’s Duveen Gallery. We live in hope of reunification!

Day of Drama in Dublin

 

Green was everywhere. The elation was palpable. Half the people on the flight from Stansted were dressed as leprechauns and the other half in Ireland rugby merch. But I wasn’t going for St Patrick’s Day or the Six Nations showdown. In a once-in-a-lifetime coincidence and treat, two friends of mine of decades-long standing had their plays in performance at the historic Abbey Theatre.

One was Marina Carr’s brand new and brilliant Audrey or Sorrow, directed with pitch-perfect sensitivity and vision by Catriona McLaughlin; the other was Conor Hanratty’s direction of the oldest surviving play in the world, Aeschylus’ Persians. The two plays, written two and a half millennia apart, are linked by ghosts, bereavement, and delusion.

The ghost in Persians is the great King Darius, raised in a thrilling necromantic ritual to explain to his wife and councillors why they have suffered such appalling fatalities in their doomed invasion of Greece. His deluded son Xerxes believed he was entitled to invade and conquer Hellas. It was impossible not to be reminded that, just five minutes away, a large and peaceful Free Palestine demonstration was in full vocal form along the banks of the River Liffey.  As Marina said to me, ‘As a once-colonised, starving nation, the Irish have to speak out’.

I got to know Marina’s exquisite work because, like so many great Irish writers, she has found inspiration in the ancient Greeks—Medea in By the Bog of Cats, the Oresteia in Ariel, and Hippolytus in Phaedra Backwards, just for starters. But Audrey is a modern Irish tragedy with a Beckettian absurdist edge and a noirish psychological detective plot about the ineradicable domestic presence of children who die. Yet it is often hilarious: Marina has a perfect ear for the casual cruelty that members of nuclear families inflict on one another and the lies they tell themselves. I was left speechless by the denouement, even though I half saw it coming.

Marina's Beckettian ghosts

Conor’s production is scintillating for several reasons. One is that the first ever production of Persians at the Abbey has been a long time coming. Edwardian Professor of Greek Gilbert Murray was well aware that the play, in the right context, was political dynamite, for in a letter to Yeats in 1905 he suggested a production in the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, ‘with a seditious innuendo’.  In Yeats ‘The Statues’, Easter 1916 became a victory of civilisation over barbarism as the Irish rebels won a spiritual victory over the English. It was men, ‘not the banks of oars/that swam upon the many-headed foam at Salamis’ who ‘put down/All Asiatic vague immensities’,

It is therefore even more appropriate that Conor has realised his long-held conviction that this ancient text would be well served by performance in the ancient tongue of Ireland (I was so proud that my own 1996 translation was used for the surtitles, which I didn't realise until halfway through). And the acoustic effect is a revelation. As the mist swirls over Darius’ tomb and his spectre comes into view, it feels like a metaphor for the entire history of theatre, where we raise the ghosts of the past to speak to us once again in our ancestral languages.

The final quarter of Persians features Xerxes, in despair, singing a long antiphonal lament with his bereaved compatriots. He is the only character in all Greek tragedy who never speaks, but only sings. In a master stroke, Conor cast a young sean nós singer from the Gaeltacht region of South-West Donegal, Naoise Mac Cathmhaoil. The sweet, heartrending, melodic phrasing of this ancient dirge idiom was hypnotically beautiful. You know when a performance has spellbound its audience when there is a long silence before they break into applause. At the end of the Irish Persians, the silence was profound.

With Naoise and Conor

 

I first went to Ireland in the early 1990s. It was so different. My car was searched by surly armed soldiers at the border checkpoint driving from Belfast south. In the Republic, divorce was prohibited, women had to travel secretly out of their own nation to obtain an abortion, and I was assured last night by someone who has inside information that the national broadcaster RTÉ refused to allow Father Ted to air. But the sheer energy and merriment palpable in the streets of Dublin this weekend seem down to far more than a victory in the rugby. In a world of so much darkness, watching such an ancient culture grow into its liberal, lively, fun-loving, irreverent, woman-friendly maturity is an absolute joy.