TODAY in St Columba’s Kirk, at the top of the Royal Mile from 3-4pm, I’m introducing a session on Tragedy & Translation. For my money, this will be the most important theatrical event of any Edinburgh Festival – EVER! Quite a claim. Well, let’s see.
I’ll be introducing the greatest tragedy ever written, Aeschylus’s Agamemnon in a new translation into Scots by Wiliam Imray, with a dramatic reading of extracts from the play. Then there will be a discussion focusing on the Scots language and ancient Greek tragedy, ranging far and wide – from Aeschylus to Shakespeare’s Hamlet – and further!
Why is Aeschylus a dramatist everyone should know about? Charles Freeman, in his book The Greek Achievement (1999), says succinctly: “The playwright Aeschylus, whose first production was in 499 BC, is credited with introducing a second character [into plays] and allowing interaction between the two, even though the characters still refer back to the chorus.”
And by the time of his play Agamemnon (first performed in 458 BC), there are more than two characters. In other words, he invents drama which embodies different characters confronting each other on stage. We take it for granted that this is what “plays” are. It was not always so.
It’s difficult to overstate the significance of this innovation. It’s the foundation of what we now know as drama – characters interacting with each other. We live in a culture which demonises “others”. What plays do is ENACT confrontations between “others”. Plays do not present one voice ranting but various voices coming out of different experiences of the world, on one stage. We forget the value of this at our greatest peril.
Plays produce contexts for exchange, thought, critical debate. As the great African playwright Wole Soyinka puts it: “The greatest threat to freedom is the absence of criticism.” Nothing like that ever happens on iPhones. That’s not what they’re designed for.
Plays, like all the arts, generate new visions, the possibility of change, and even progress. And that’s why governments – all governments – want to cut back and close down the arts. They do not want criticism, knowledge or intelligence to spread.
RB Cunninghame Graham, in his book José Antonio Páez (London: Heinemann, 1929), says this: “The policy of Spain was to exclude all strangers from her South American possessions. Not so much on account of trade or contraband, but to keep out ideas. No government since the world began, however stupid, and some surely have been stupid enough to satisfy the most orthodox, but has felt instinctively, that once their people were to begin to think their power would soon be at an end.”
He goes on: “Monarchs and presidents, liberals, conservatives and socialists and communists alike, are all agreed to stifle thought when once they are in power.”
Aeschylus’s life spanned Athens’s greatest years. To quote Freeman again: “Six, and possibly seven, of his plays survive from an output which may have totalled 90 in all.” He was: “Sensitive to living in an age of rapid change. In his plays he contrasts the world when human beings lived in savagery with a more recent one where the laws of the polis have brought civilisation and order.
“In the earliest times, as portrayed in Agamemnon, Aeschylus suggests that there is an underlying harmony upheld by the gods but one sustained by brutal punishment. Primitive, vengeful gods such as the Furies harass and destroy those who have offended. The gods punish not only those who infringe their rules but their anger is passed on to their descendants as well.”
In the play, Agamemnon the warrior leader returns from Troy, which he and his Greek cohorts have sacked. He has a prisoner with him, Cassandra, a prophetess, a seer, who will be his slave and concubine. He returns to his ancestral home where his wife, Clytemnestra, is waiting for him.
Before he’d sailed off, he had killed their daughter Iphigenia in a brutal sacrifice to the gods. Clytemnestra wants revenge, lures him into his bath to wash off the dirt of war, and then she kills him.
She’s already taken a new lover, Aegisthus, so he comes in and adds to her vengeance with some of his own, since Agamemnon was from the family responsible for further atrocities to Aegisthus’s people, further back. The old folk standing around, the Chorus, who didn’t get to go to the war, comment on the action as things happen.
That’s about it. Sounds like not much. But the language is intense, and the action is as terrifying as anything you’ve ever experienced. And this play, like no other, takes you into the depths of human potential at its very worst. The destructions of war, the destructions of family, jealousies, violence, rage running riot – these are all familiar things in our own day.
THE six o’clock news gives us stories every day that Agamemnon shows us happening centuries ago. But Aeschylus gives us something no TV programme ever does. It makes us think from different angles and at challenging depths. It helps us understand. And more – it helps us imagine progress, how things might be different.
Ultimately, the trilogy, of which this is the first part, pinpoints the moment where democracy becomes the ruling principle and supersedes the doctrine of the gods. In other words, rule by self-interested authorities gives way to justice: witnesses are called.
Arguments are made. Human decisions are taken by human beings, who must care for each other, and not by the gods, the ruling authorities, only interested in profit for themselves. That should sound familiar. And it sounds stunning in the new Scots language translation by Imray. Come and hear it enacted!
Herbert J Muller, in his book The Spirit of Tragedy (1965), wrote: “I am assuming that what makes literature important is not only what distinguishes it from other major interests but what links it with these interests in the service of the communal life.”
With Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, we’re going back to origins, so it’s as well to start with purpose. Things that are usually unsaid, or often assumed to be unnecessary to say, are often the most easily overlooked, and in the early 21st century, so much is assumed that’s simply wrong: we inherit a world of lies and falsehoods and we learn as best we can.
Art is there to help people to live. That’s always been its only purpose. It is one of the few reliable ways to negotiate our understandings through the webs and nets of entrapment towards human realities and perennial truths.
People – plural – is what Muller is talking about in that quotation: “communal life”. Not the delectation of the wealthy solo purchaser, the consumer, the collector, nor the possession of church or crown or state, to be selectively dispensed, but a way of understanding and of acting in the company of and for others, for the good of each other as well as one’s singular self.
And this is why theatre is central, why plays are essential. The performance is something we watch carefully. We are not to be silenced by spectacle, nor to be whipped up to cheer at atrocities, banalities, inanities, human potential’s nightmares at their worst, but rather to have a space opened up between our thoughts and what we’re witnessing.
This is a space that gives us time for contemplation, in silent dialogues with what we see and hear, and then in conversation with each other. It’s a talking art.
Literature, every one of the arts, and the education that helps us get to grips with them, are “in the service of the communal life”. And of them all, plays are the primary medium which necessarily engages us with others, both in their contemplation through reading and in their presence, in our attendance at them, or if we take part as actors in them, or in any capacity in a theatre production. Other human bodies are involved. We are proximate in our actual physicality. All plays start with this premise
This is in many cases not a commercial proposition. For most of our political masters, it’s a bad advert. That’s good. Consumerism does not want participation. But participation, either in silent thought or verbal argument, physical presence in a theatre or what we might learn and discover in a library, is what we want, and what all art endorses.
Understanding cannot be a possession, secured and owned, fixed and stilled. Intrinsically, it’s experienced in movement and interaction. Some experiences are best appreciated in retrospect, of course.
But the learning, the understanding, the knowledge, and finally the wisdom, only comes through movement, which is to say, participation, which is to say, the caring that comes through an interaction with others, and that brings us right back to the Muller proposition: we’re looking at the health of the communal life. And this sets us in opposition to the ethos of communal death, the slaughter of war.
Imray’s Scots Agamemnon has its own specific gravity, grounded, or rather, earthed, in the rhythms and weights and movement of Aeschylus’s original Greek. It is packed with complex bitterness and anguish, anger and compassion.
The language contains, suppresses, then releases the feelings of we human beings intensely and precisely, as though through a formal mask. It conceals any personal psychological characterisation at the same time as it universalises the emotional significance of the human waste of war.
It also shows us the everlasting appeal of war to commercial priorities. There were surely arms-manufacturers in Ancient Greece, and then as now, they are the first disciples of the God of War.
But what is most deeply embodied in the Scots language of the poetry here is the material intimacy and vulnerability of the physical bodies of men and the dust they will come to, the earth they will be part of.
The Gòd o Wàr bàrters mèn’s bànes lik gòwd.
Thère, whar mèn wèild the spèar he sèts his wèchts.
Frae òot the fànd-fìres o Tròy
he sènns their kìn wèchty dùst,
dùst that’s àa they hàe for mèn,
àa they’re gùid for, stòur tae stàp
wàalie jàirs wi! I’ gàrs ye grèet!
Then on Thursday from, 1.30-2.30pm, again in St Columba’s Kirk, I’ll be joined by novelist, playwright and travel writer Chris Dolan and the historian, literary critic and Emeritus Professor of Latin American Studies in the Hispanics Department of Glasgow University, to talk about Minority Languages, Great Literature & The Politics of Cultural Survival.
I’ll start with my own translations of the greatest Gaelic poems of the 18th century, by Duncan Ban MacIntyre, Alasdair mac Mhaighstir Alasdair – ecological ideals embodied in a great mountain, and a sea voyage from Scotland to Ireland. Then with Chris and Mike we’ll open the discussion from Gaelic and Scots to Catalan, Basque and Galician, the priority of democratic republicanism, and the cultural conditions of the new Europe.
The whole question of festival culture comes under scrutiny the following Thursday, August 15, from noon-1pm, also at St Columba’s Kirk, with Scottish Culture & The Festivals. For Edinburgh Festival and Fringe legend Richard Demarco, the true history of Scotland begins in the words of the great medieval poets Robert Henryson and William Dunbar, the composer Robert Carver and the Scotichronicon, the first important history of Scotland written by Walter Bower.
The Scotichronicon is a 15th-century chronicle of 16 books by the Scottish historian Walter Bower, picking up from where the historian-priest John of Fordun left off in his earlier work Chronica Gentis Scotorum. In this account, the Celtic and Gaelic foundations of Ireland and Scotland underlie all forms of later modernity. Composed 1440-47, it ends with the death of James I of Scotland in 1437. It depicts Robin Hood in his actual historical context, one of the rebels. Richard Demarco too has always been one of the rebels.
This discussion centres on Demarco’s Edinburgh Arts programme, Sandy Moffat’s work as an artist in portraiture and my own work in Scottish literature. We each of us follow in the footsteps of these great predecessors, so the discussion will be an acknowledgement of that and an enquiry into how far the state of the Edinburgh festivals and Scotland as a whole is being responsible to the history they embody.
We live in a world where free speech is so often silenced or murdered; with “others” made monstrous, through caricatured configurations of race, religion, nationality, gender, various forms of “othering”.
When governments court populism and clickbait media devalue humanity, when politicians streamline lying for votes, what happens? Malevolent incompetence rules.
We’re in trouble. Freedom of expression is Scottish literature’s antidote. Only the arts give us trustworthy truths.
Tickets are available at tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/scotlandsfest-bringing-scotland-s-literature-to-life-alan-riach
