It was something of a Greek spring, too, with an extensive exhibition from Nicosia at the British Museum and nine Greek tragedies playingtosold-out houses at the Aldwych.
The Cypriot show at the British Museum, Cyprus B.C., could no more draw the crowds away from the Viking Exhibition upstairs than the Aegean show at the Metropolitan in New York earlier in the year could divert the public from the Hapsburg costumes downstairs. More to the point, as far as New York was concerned, a rival prehistory exhibition at the Museum of Natural History devoted to Pre-Columbian art had lines waiting to get in while at the Aegean show a visitor had plenty of elbow room. All of which proves how Philistine the Anglo-Saxon public can be. Alas, the sad fact of the matter (still quite unappreciated in this country), is that as far as art is concerned, the classical ideal fell off its pediment and broke up a good while ago, and being prehistoric Greek nowadays is neither better nor worse than being prehistoric anything else. And, as every civilization has had a prehistory (if little else) and there is wide interest in it, the field, of course, is highly competitive. Nevertheless, without the fanfare of the Aegean show, the Cyprus exhibition came over just as well. Over-familiarity is one of the problems of Greek exhibitions. For all its borrowings from neighbouring cultures — Egyptian, Minoan, Anatolian, Mycenean, Syrian, Phoenician — Cypriot art has a quirky charm· . and a strong primitive imagination of its own. Its art is rarely beautiful by any definable aesthetic criterion, but it has liveliness, humour, freshness, humanity, individuality of form and an essential, immediately conveyed mysteriousness which is one of the chief attractions of all prehistoric art.
If, in the London art world, the Greeks were not exactly packing them in, at the theatre it was a different story. A nine-hour drama called simply The Greeks was the success of the season. The Royal Shakespeare Company’s six-week run was sold out at the Aldwych, and an extended run was being considered. It seems that when John Barton, who pieced The War of the Roses together out of Shakespeare’s historical plays, proposed doing a similar tailoring job on nine Greek tragedies, he was thought to be out of his mind. Following the lead taken by Atreus, who started the accursed tragic cycle rolling by chopping up his nephews and serving them up to their father, Barton has carved up Aeschylus, Sophocles, some goodly chunks of Euripides, laced them with several handfuls of Homer, and served them up to a London public which has proved to be enthusiastically carnivorous. The price (VAT and all) paid for this haute cuisine dish is, of course, sizeable. The poetry is gone, the rhythm is lost, the Iliad is reduced to a 40-minute Shakespearean sauce. The National Theatre of Greece’s Mario Fortuny style is notably absent, and there are ‘campy’ bits devoted to Helen and Thetis which would strike any purist dumb with outrage. There are, however, substantial rewards. Dramatically the whole cycle is rivetting. From the sacrifice of Iphigenia, through the Trojan War, the returns, the series of murders and the final expiation, the chronicles of the House of Atreus proved to be what so many classicists have claimed and so few others have believed — namely, it is one of the most titanic, savage and splendid stories ever conceived by the human imagination. Another sterling virtue of the cycle is its clarity. For once, the whole story gets told, and it moves so swiftly and inevitably as to carry the sense of fatality in the course of its action without having to stop incessantly and talk about it. The attitude taken towards the subject is overwhelmingly Euripidean, simplified but sensible. The questions asked are his questions: How does Aphrodite try to enslave women? How does Artemis try to free them? Does justice exist, and if so what is it? If men know good, why do they do evil? Do the gods exist? If not, what is order? These flat, obvious questions, spoken out clearly and simply, have a great power to move in the theatre, particularly in the context of a flamboyantly barbaric world in which man is seen desperately trying not to fall back into the abyss of chaos, out of which civilization has only recently sprung. The ancient Greek chorus may be a commercial producer’s nightmare, but in Barton’s use of it, with its simplicity, its innocence, its questionings, its puzzlement, it becomes, as it should, the very soul of the drama.
In Euripides, the women’s roles are the plums, and in the Barton version they are, too. Besides the chorus of women, Judy Buxton’s Iphigenia, Billie Whitelaw’s Andromache, Celia Gregory’s Cassandra and Lynn Dearth’s Electra were all excellent. The men fared less well, the text from Homer being too compressed for Mike Gwilym, Peter Woodward and Oliver Ford Davies to do much with, respectively: Achilles, Patroclus and Priam. John Shrapnel as Agamemnon would have fared better had he not been consistently outshone by the extraordinary Janet Suzman as Clytemnestra. From her laughing entrance with Iphigenia at the opening until her death-chant after she has been axed down by her son, Suzman dominated the first two parts; and as Helen she continued her sovereignty into the third and last part. The production was not without flaws. The eccentric mixture of tragedy with ”camp” farce left a sense of ambiguity about the whole. On the other hand, the satyr plays, about which we know so little, that followed the tragic trilogies in ancient times, were, we are told, full of travesties and indecencies. Nick Bicat’s jingling Syrtaki score was, at best, bizarre.
Greece has inspired oddity in the English for over two hundred years but never so richly as in the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Byron has always been the most famous exponent of Grecian romanticism, an unstable movement (in England at least) which split formally into Greek Revival and Gothic in the 1820s. Other figures of this period, however, are surging back into popularity. The painter Henry Fuseli, the sculptor John Flaxman and the architect Sir John Soane, although they never got, like Byron, to Greece proper, did include southern Italy and Sicily in their Grand Tours, saw Greek architecture firsthand and never got over the experience. In the newly rearranged rooms at the Tate Gallery, Fuseli now has a room to himself where his astonishing Grecian romantic nightmares, as idiosyncratic as Blake’s, are hung to their best advantage. Over at the Victoria and Albert, a vast hall is now exhibiting the sculptures of this period, over half of which are the works of Flaxman, the first native sculptor who really seems to have understood what ancient Greek plastic art was all about. Finally, Sir John Soane’s house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which for a hundred and fifty years has been one of the most neglected museums in London, has become such an “in” place today that one has to queue up to get in on Sundays. Containing the original paintings of Hogarth’s The Rake’s Progress, the museum has always attracted some visitors, but it is the house itself, crammed with antiquarian bits and pieces, which draws the crowds today. The facade is a double deception. At first sight it looks like a 1920s art-deco structure spoiling a Georgian row. Two replicas of the Caryatids on the second storey are the first clue to the startling fact that one is a whole century off and that it was built in the 1820s. Even so, this pre-Greek Revival frontage gives no hint of the dark doings inside. In the space of an ordinary townhouse are crammed crypts, catacombs, court yards, sepulchral chambers, colonnades, loggias, trompe Poeil mirrored rooms, a monk’s yard and a dome — the whole place looking as if the House of Usher had been thrown together with Byron’s Newstead Abbey and reduced to the dimensions of a doll’s house. Every centimetre of wall space was utilized by this designer of the Bank of England who was an indiscriminate collector of ancient architectural fragments. These include, on closer investigation, such things as a beautiful figure from the Erechtheum frieze, models of Greek temples made of cork, a figurine of the many-breasted Artemis of Ephesus set on a Roman table leg and a whole collection of children’s sarcophagi of the Hellenistic period. One detects here a sinister ancient, if dim, connection with the House of Atreus. It would take as long to examine each display of this Grecian-Romantic hodgepodge as it does to sit through The Greeks. But after this experience one can only say that the “camping up” of Euripides & Co. at the Aldwych is only a modern instance in a long tradition of Anglo-Hellenic eccentricity. To continue it, The Greeks should really come back to Greece, hopefully not, like Byron and Agamemnon, to expire or be done in.
Zito Gerontocracy!
THAT youth should hold the elders of a community in high respect was a basic moral precept of ancient Greek civilization which has not only survived in modern Greece but is flourishing. While in the youth-oriented democracies of the West, retirement comes ever earlier and senior citizens are lucky to find a seat reserved for them on a streetcar, in Greece, where the wisdom of age is valued, the positions of power in government, in the military and in the civil service remain totally in the hands of the venerable. A survey recently published by To Vima sets out to prove that not only does hoary wisdom rule in Greece but statistically that this country has more old people in important government positions than any other country in Europe. With a President in his sprightly eighties, a Prime Minister in his vigorous seventies, and most Ministers, Deputy Ministers, and Chiefs of Civil Service positions in their chipper sixties — so chipper, indeed, that they moonlight in several jobs at the same time — Greece is an ever-spry gerontocracy.
While retirement is postponed at the top, the newspaper To Vima pointed out recently, the “dauphins” get older while behind them is a growing proletariat of government employees with no chance of advancement. They are all blocked at the entrance while the leaders inside are reshuffling the party packs and playing musical chairs. As a result ambition is stunted, enthusiasm wanes and the nation’s most able citizens move increasingly into the private sector. Meanwhile students studying abroad, seeing little chance of advancement at home, stay away and find employment in foreign countries. As To Vima pointedly demonstrates, while the average age of the Government’s Council of Ministers is sixty-two, the average age of the opposition PASOK party’s Central Committee is thirty-eight. The cry, therefore, for new blood is being heard from many quarters. As it is said (and it will be said again), Greece is not like other nations. Whereas in so many countries the problem of old age is a growing social dilemma, in Greece the problem is being young — and even middle-aged.
Refusing Refuse
THE news that the birds had returned to Athens in early March might have won the praise of environmentalists. The trouble was that the birds were scavengers, and their prey was garbage. The ten-day nationwide strike of garbage collectors began on March 3 and lasted eleven days though it was over two weeks before the mess was cleaned up. It not only attracted birds from above and a certain scuttling population from below, but it also brought out to full view the city’s vast number of cats. As one thousand tons of Athenian refuse mounted daily and it became increasingly difficult to walk around, the government-sponsored TV spot about “Keeping Athens Tidy” was continually shown to viewers at quite unnecessary public expense. After a week, army drivers were recruited to relieve the stress, although the disposal of the garbage itself remained strictly self-service. The government’s circular posted in apartment house lobbies requesting people to keep their garbage in their flats and on their balconies was largely ignored. The general attitude was summed up in a scribbled postscript added to the official notice in an entranceway in Pangrati: “If there is a strike of sewage disposal trucks in the future, are you going to request that we do not use the lavatory?”
