Athenian Greenroom
The Dramatic Festivals of Athens. By Sir A. W. Pickard-Cambridge. (0.U.P. 50s.)
Tins posthumous work of the late Sir A. W. Pickard-Cambridge needs no praises from a reviewer. The author had long been recog- nised as the chief authority in England on the externals of the ancient drama, and this, his last book, concludes the task he set himself many years ago, and to which his Theatre of Dionysus (1946) was the first instalment. It has been seen through the press by Professor T. B. L. Webster. It is extremely factual. It gives, with the very minimum of conjectural theory, a very complete account, illustrated by over 200 photographs, of the recorded facts about the festivals, both Athenian and provincial, the actors, chorus, costume, audience, and, in a striking close, the later organisations and guilds, showing sometimes an idolisation of the fashionable favourites like that of film-stars at the present day.
On the whole the effect is comforting. The worst exaggerations of ancient theatrical convention are shown to be " late " or even Roman. We know from Lucian and Philostratus what a startling effect the big masks, the stilt-like boots below, the masses of piled hair above, and the padding in the middle, produced on unsophisticated spectators, and are told how once, when the terrible figure on the stage• began to roar its lines, a rustic Spanish audience fled in panic from the theatre. We can at least be sure that the plays of Aeschylus did not look like that, and that when he is said to have introduced " the tragic costume " that does not mean that he introduced it as it was some hundreds of years later.
Yet convention has always an immense effect, and nowhere more than in the theatre. You expect what you expect, and everything different repels you as grotesque or unnatural. The ancient drama was, after all, extremely different from ours. The chorus itself often seems to a modern critic to be a regrettable extra which can with skill be made as little offensive as possible ; it is hard for us to see it as the real essence of the matter, to which certain rather dangerous additions are made to make the story more vivid. The word for " actor," hypocrites, means " answerer," and seems to take one back to the time when the poet performing in solo with his chorus made the bold innovation of having someone to reply to him. And the speech : What does it mean that the performers of tragedy and comedy are called tra,g5doi, comodoi—not " speakers," but " singers " ? Did they really sing, or was it that poetry to the Greeks had a language of its own, not quite like mortal speech ? One remembers that when Homer has a story to tell he asks a goddess to sing it.
Most of all, the masks worry us. We like to watch the change in the actors face. The Greeks had a wonderful art of gesture, more effective in a large theatre than changes of facial expression. They also apparently wished to emphasise the transformation of the actor into the part he represented. The masks are thought to be derived from religious ceremonies where performers impersonated the god of the. dead hero. " Mask " became a hard-worked word ; it became " character," " office," " feature," " person," and caused some theological trouble to those who did not know that " three personae " or proscipa only meant three masks."
A religious or magical atmosphere seems to hang about the drama in unexpected places. The dress is said to be derived from that of priests. The centre seat of the front row belonged of right to the priest of Dionysus ; and to judge by the inscriptions in the theatre, the building must in Hadrian's time have simply swarmed with priests. Even the New Comedy clung to myths, rituals, and tradi- tional plots designed to bring divine blessings and good harvests.
It is perhaps fortunate that no one can now recreate accurately the production of an ancient Athenian tragedy. We should certainly need a good deal of imaginative training before we could enjoy the masks and stage conventions, and not find them making a strange discord with poetry which even we, at our two thousand years of distance, can recognise as among the most splendid ever written. It would be good training if we could begin by seeing Hamlet as produced by Shakespeare, or even by Garrick ; there would be some queer things to swallow, but we could manage them. Then perhaps, making sure first that we had a due sense of the beauty of Chinese poetry, we might face a Chinese classical drama and see if we were duly moved by the hero's" peacock whirls at moments of triumph over his enemies or his habit of singing while inferior persons only speak. Great is convention, and—in the theatre at any rate—it will prevail.
GILBERT MURRAY
Previous page
