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Down Among the Dead Men
By HILARY SPURLING
OF all human plants,' said Proust, 'habit requires the least fostering, and is the first to appear on the seeming desolation of the most barren rock.' Hecuba, at the beginning of her tragedy, has lost husband, children, throne and country. Troy lies smoking, she is a slave, and worse is to come as she fears dimly from a dream. Yet no sooner is her dream fulfilled than the past seems to her a shady grove from which she has only now stepped forth on to the barren rock. Odysseus, coming jauntily to claim her daughter for the sacrifice, is appalled at the energy of her lamentation. Listening at first reluctantly im- pressed, then with growing uneasiness, Stelios Vocovits makes it plain that it hadn't occurred to him, when he volunteered to fetch the girl, that the mother would put up such a struggle; and he is frankly relieved when Polyxena decides to come quietly. Katina Paxinou rears up against him with the formidable grandeur of the Queen of Troy; what is surprising is the earthiness of her acting—her shameless cunning, her hands fluttering helplessly up to her mouth, the way she plumps down heavily on a bench like a tired old peasant. But this mixture of grandeur and earthiness, suffering set against the songs of the chorus and the comings and goings of lesser men, is the root of Greek tragedy. There is nothing mystical, intangible, or even impractical about the tragic hero: Polyxena would sooner die than sweep floors, which is how slavery presents itself to her, both mother and daughter see clearly that Hecuba's life will be the harder. Hecuba at this point seems to have touched the bottom of pain—lying alone at the back of the stage, a huddled inanimate bundle of old clothes.
But habit, says Beckett in his gloss on the pas- sage in Proust, performs a constant duty of re- adjustment between the inner sensibility and the world outside: 'Suffering is the omission of that duty, whether through negligence or inefficiency, boredom its adequate performance.' Hecuba has only a brierrespite. Receiving a message that the sacrifice is over, she gets up again, turns her attention to making the best of a decent burial, sends out for sea-water to bathe the corpse—and back comes her attendant from the sea-shore with a bier, the body not of her daughter but of her newly murdered son, Polydorous.
With Euripides when sorrows come, they come not single spies but in battalions. The play is like a Beethoven symphony, a series of crashing hammer blows, receding and returning until they reach a fearful explosion—Polymnestor howling and blinded with pins—after which tension slowly ebbs away. Like Beckett's own characters who cling on, imprisoned in urns and bins and burial chambers, denied distractions, denied the use of their limbs, lately even speech and movement, the tragic hero is inexorably stripped of all defences. Fate comes at him again and again, with a truncheon, and still be goes on living. The loss of Troy to Hecuba, Oedipus' first inkling that he may have killed Laius—these are only the first tentative steps in the direction of ultimate depriva- tion. Hecuba at least can blame Polymnestor for the murder of her son; in Oedipus Rex no one is at fault. But the point is not that Hecuba takes a wild beast's revenge—though this (oddly muffed in this production) may be the necessary dramatic climax and release—but that she learns to live on the barren rock itself. 'Stand off like a painter and look at me and my woes,' she says to Aga- memnon, coming with condolences—a splendid helmeted king from Vasilis Canakis, bronzed, erect and gravely attentive. But Agamemnon's concern drains away in protestations about what the Achaeans will say, he washes his hands of the whole affair, and Hecuba has her way with Polymnestor — Thanos Cotsopoulos, another magnificent figure, stumping in with that indefin- able air of a Greek among barbarians, an air of being just down from the hills if not the trees. At the end, a closing bout of prophecy reveals the coming bloodbath at Argos, the deaths of Hecuba and Agamemnon : Agamemnon is furious and can't believe it; Hecuba, long past hope and self- deception, is indifferent.
The Greek National Theatre in London labours under the crippling disadvantage of having to act indoors on a proscenium stage what, in Greece, -they would do out of doors in an amphitheatre carved out of the side of a hill and holding up to fourteen thousand people. What the audience sees, under normal conditions, is the vast, empty sky, the brim of the horizon, the sweep of the amphitheatre and, right at the bottom far below them, the tiny figures of the actors. In the Aldwych, the company seems cramped, the acting rough-hewn, even a trifle crude. 'It feels like acting in a coffin,' says Alexis Minotis, director of the company and of all three plays.
Nevertheless, though this may be one's first impression—and certainly the sets are a disaster at close quarters, angular, dated, a glum portent of the 1930s in Thrace or ancient Thebes—what is extraordinary is the individuality of every mem- ber of the company. The minor characters come and go like painted toys, each carved to represent a single quality—subdued jollity, a flavour of Silenus, for the fat shepherd in Oedipus Rex, vaulting ambition for Polynices, worldly greed for Creon. They may not act in masks like their antique predecessors but they manage somehow to convey the quality of masks—they have a kind of heroic presence on the stage. Stelios Vocovits plays Odysseus and the two messengers in Oedipus Rex and Oedipus at Colonus; Vasilis Canakis plays Agamemnon, the leader of the Chorus and Theseus; in each case one has not so much the feeling of recognising a fine actor giving three different performances, as of one man in- habiting three different heroes. Which presumably is something like what happened in fifth-century Athens, when an actor nipped behind the scene to switch masks and come back fixed in another role. Alexis Minotis, who as the hero bears the chief burden of the two Sophoclean tragedies, plays Oedipus with more of the subtle detail we are used to. And the chorus, no longer a distant flowing pattern on the orchaestra, here following the action with small attentive changes of face and gesture, still have the impersonal beauty of archaic statues. Even if we can't lift the roof off the theatre—which at the very least the-.e produc- tions require—the company brings with it tij authentic feeling, of man as a tiny dot pitted against the sky and hills.
The Bofors Gun at Hampstead has something of it too: seven soldiers in an army guard-room, beds without mattresses, swill for supper, fags running out at the Naafi. and that dreadful sen- sation. common knowledge in the army, that you can't win. However much you squirm and struggle. fate will get you in the end. And -it does. Faced with these unhappy characters, one has the same thankful reaction that seldom fails to occur to a Greek chorus: 'Your rotten luck. Jack!' John McGrath's excellent new play is directed by Ronald Eyre with an immaculate cast, and there are another eight days in which to see it.
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