Welcome, everyone, to Big Tent. Live events. The Lockdown, a live online event series brought to you by Torch,
the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities as part of the humanities cultural programme itself.
One of the founding stones for the future, Stephen Schwarzman Centre for the Humanities here in Oxford.
My name is Wes Williams and I'm a professor of French literature.
A fellow isn't Edmund Hall and I'm also the knowledge exchange champion here at Torch, the Big Tent Live Event series.
It's our way of bringing together once a week researchers and students, performers and practitioners from across the different humanities disciplines.
We're bringing you this event programme online.
While we're all keeping our distance and we hope that you're all safe and well during these difficult times.
Our aim here, as regular viewers will know,
is to explore together important subjects and ask challenging questions about areas such as the environment,
medical, humanities, ethics and A.I., the public, the private and the common good.
And we will celebrate storytelling and music, performance and poetry, identity and community.
If you would like to put forward any questions to our speakers about the topic that we're discussing during the event tonight,
please pop them in the comments box in YouTube. We encourage you to submit these as early as possible.
And I can then ensure that they inform and enrich the Q&A part of our discussion.
In about half an hour or so. Now onto our excellent speakers tonight.
I can't tell you how excited and honoured I am to host and welcome.
Joining us for the final event of this phase of our online series.
Both Oliver, chaplain emeritus professor of Classics and fellow of Maudlin College in Oxford, and Fiona Shaw, CBE, actor and director extraordinaire.
Neither of us, because really needs any introduction, but I'll embarrass them both by saying just a tiny bit about just really a sentence or two
to clarify why we're bringing them together online this evening to address along with you.
This week's theme of tragedy and plague. Oliver first, Oliver Taplin has a central concern throughout his work with the performance of Greek poetry,
tragedy and comedy, both in ancient and in modern times some 25 years ago, together with Edith Hall.
Oliver set up the archive of performances for Greek and Roman drama here in Oxford and thereby revolutionised the study of this area.
And in the last few decades, he has worked both with the National Theatre on different productions.
They are Steier and with the RNC on the Thebans,
along with a whole range of other productions and inspiration to many generations of play makers and playgoers alike.
Oliver has, in his retirement, further explored the craft of translating.
Fiona Shaw is an actor and director working on film and TV.
In opera and in the theatre like Oliver, albeit in different ways, she's worked extensively with both the RNC and the National Theatre,
as well as performing and directing in a huge and exciting range of spaces and places, exploring both contemporary work and the classical tragedies.
We'll be talking about this evening from Elektra to massively and memorably Madame.
I trust you'll forgive me if I say that there are many watching here today
who will feel that Fiona has done more to making classical tragedy engaging,
urgent and powerfully present in contemporary culture than pretty much any other performer alive.
Welcome to both. Then Oliver and Fiona, thank you again for joining us.
Our big tent. And without further ado, I'd like to hand over to you, Oliver.
To start the real discussion going. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you. Well, I'm going to try and set the question rolling with a little mini professorial lecture and then throw the
ball to Fiona and when then we can then throw it to and fro and see whether we catch it or drop it.
The question I want to set rolling is this. What is tragedy good for?
Does a tragedy do people any good? Why should people who have quite enough suffering in their outside world go to
the theatre to witness and live through the terrible sufferings of others?
And that question's been sharpened for me about the pandemic that has struck us and the way that our theatres have had to close.
And it's made me ask a question which, as far as I can see, has hardly ever been asked before,
which was which is did the Athenians, the ancient Athenians in the 5th century B.C.
Did they call off their big annual theatre event when they were struck with their terrible plague?
And it was a much more terrible plague than ours.
It came and went across the years between 430 and 425 B.C. or B.C. It had the most terrible symptoms, seems to be white, like typhoid.
But I think the experts think it's probably a pathogen that no longer exists.
But it had a mortality rate of something like 25 percent.
And we know quite a lot about the horrible symptoms and its effects because the great historian Vicinities actually caught this plague himself.
He was there in Athens,
suffered from the plague himself and survived and observed that people who survived didn't catch it again or didn't get it again,
that they were, in effect, immune. And he also observed that doctors and care workers were particularly vulnerable to getting the plague.
But what doesn't seem to have arisen is, is the idea of contagion. So that's the plague.
In Athens, the theatre in Athens was not a matter of daily entertainment as as ours is or
as ours was until recently and as indeed as it was in Shakespeare's London.
Instead, it was this big event in the spring and the preparations for it started the previous summer.
And there were a lot of people involved in it and there was a big budget involved in it.
And rehearsals went on through the entire winter preparing for the spring festival of Diron ISIS, where thousands of people,
literally thousands of people gathered in the theatre to watch three days of tragedies,
three competing, tragedian each one putting on three tragedies and a Saturday.
Now, the quest, the answer to the question, did the theatre go on during those years of plague is.
Yes, it did. We know for sure that there were comedies put on during that those years.
And we know of at least one tragedy and maybe more, but one we actually know for sure.
We have good evidence was put on during those years, and that was the Hippolytus of Europeans, which was put on in for twenty eight.
Now, of course, it's not about this isn't a play about plague. It doesn't have plague in it any more than Shakespeare's plays and plagues in them.
Plays put on between 16, three and 16, 10 years when plague came and went.
In Shakespeare's London, it's a play about this.
Beautiful, clean living young man Hippolytus, who hates sex, and his passionate stepmother, Fiderer,
who simply cannot stop herself from becoming infatuated with him, cannot stop her desire for him.
And you have actually four main people in Europe. It is opposes all of them doing their best, isn't it?
They are no fools and there are no villains in this play that all of them doing their best to live as they can according to their own values,
according to what they think is right. And all four of them come crashing down in disaster.
And the play ends with death and waste. Now, why in 428?
Should people go on witnessing such suffering? Why in a time of such suffering?
In 2020, it seems to me that with much less suffering, we've met with mostly I speak myself anyway,
turned to Netflix and turned to a relatively lightweight television.
So why did the Athenians think it was good for them to go on going to tragedies?
And might the fact that they did have something to tell us about going to the theatre and something about tragedy?
That's that's the question I want to set right now.
I have got an idea that I'd like to try out later about how they thought that tragedy might be good for them.
But I think at this stage, I really ought to hand it to Fiona and please, Fiona, go wherever you want.
Though there is a there is a question I quite like to toss to start with,
which is when when you perform tragedy, do you have a sense of how your audience is receiving it?
And do you have a sense of what what it's doing for them? Or is that a not not really a real question?
I certainly don't perform tragedies for any medicinal reason,
but I think that all theatre now is an attempt to get back to what must have been the stunning novelty of what it was to watch debates about the
complexity of human life that the Greeks and I and I suppose they went to the
theatre because they wanted to learn the nuance of what it was to be human.
What shall I do if this happens? What shall I do if my stepmother falls in love?
What what what did I do if I fell in love with myself? These questions are the big questions, and they're both engaging and distracting.
But I think in my case, I've been stunned in my few experiences in Greek tragedy with the effect the Greek tragedy has on audiences,
particularly if you pull out the if you try not to be too ritualistic with them, but allow them to just be.
And but when you talk about Claig, the only time I ever performed anything in it is remotely like a time of plague,
was that when we first heard Electra at the Barbican and then subsequently we remounted,
we took it to Dery and in the north of Ireland in 1992, Annie,
in a week where there had been a terrible bomb in a local betting office and some people have been killed.
So this was completely by accident, as was your partisan in the inplay period.
And we were there. We performed in a sports centre and the audience came and we performed the play.
And as you know, electorate is a strange little play because it's not really a play in which the protagonist has any flaw,
particularly she may have flaws as a person, but they're not crucial to the action.
She's a she's a trapped observer of a terrible event. And therefore, once the the thing to be solved,
resolved by her brother killing her mother and John Lynch was from the north of Ireland who played arrestees.
And that was very powerful at the end of the play where he was able to stand and say to a guest,
this, you know, you killed my my father, I'm going to kill you.
The play finishes quite quickly after that. There's no great grandeur in the wordplay.
A columnist was dead. And and they they just sort of I guess this is all right.
I'm I'm done for them. And this is going to go on then and just leave the stage at the end of the play at that moment.
Normally, of course, we've been around the world by then. People applauded. There was complete silence in the auditorium, complete silence.
And I remember a sort of flame of panic going through me.
I sort of I thought we had offended or we hadn't been good.
We hadn't done it well, though it had been the same as every other night. And the audience stood up.
All of them stood up without communicating with each other in silence.
And they just stood there. And the standing was clearly a complement to return to the actors.
The silence was they couldn't clap because it was too near their recent experience.
So I suggested the audience that we would have watched, come out and talk to the actors, to the character, to the audience.
So we all came out just ten or twelve of us, and we all went round the auditorium.
We stood and I remember people berating us for putting on this play because they felt it encouraged vengeance, that the play was about vengeance.
John's accent was local quite by chance, and it seemed to have a kind of will for vengeance because we were halfway through the rest.
We were good, you know, it could have kept going. And it was the most astonishing evenings of my life was that week.
I'll never forget it. I realise that the plays were way beyond theatre.
They are. They are. I don't know if spiritual bombs is there.
So it's a very striking anecdote, though. I mean, I thought it was gonna go a different way.
I remember Peter Stein saying that when he took three sisters to Moscow at the end, there was a long, long silence.
This awful thing had been a flop. And then there was some terrific applause.
But but you had no applause. I'm fascinated with that because I've got a I've got a bit of a thing about curtain calls.
It always seemed to me that at the end of plays, but I'm thinking particularly of tragedy,
that the transition of the curtain call between the world of the play and the world outside the play has as a rather crucial place that
it came into play where there's been death and there've been the dead have been there in the presence of the audience or on stage,
and they've felt the presence of death. And then the dead person at the end stands up, smiles, takes the applause,
is actually rather reminds me of when Prospero at the at the end of The Tempest,
when it's probably romantic to think that in some way Shakespeare giving up his own.
He says that by his soap. Bye bye bye bye bye, my so potent art.
He's raised the dead from the from their graves. So I don't know whether I mean, but that's a really extraordinary story about a lack of cooking.
Cool. Yeah. That happened Tuesday.
It happened the following day as well.
By which time journalists began to turn up to write about this phenomenon because it seemed to have been quite uncle unselfconsciously but couldn't.
Polls are an interesting moment. And when we finished Medair, as you know, the children get killed.
And even though sort of technically it was Off-stage, you saw one of the children running away from its mother and being caught.
And of course, the bodies are brought out, which is a very important part to play.
And I used to have a huge effect between New York abuse to faint screams with lots of ambulances called.
In fact, on one occasion, we had to stop the plane with the dead children under the arms.
But at the inplay, we would come out the children dead midair back in some sort of circular nightmare with her husband, Jason.
And the audience would clap, clap and erupt and relieved that thing was over.
And when the children came on, they got the biggest capital. And so the audience had imagined them dead and then were so relieved.
And more than that were complicit with their death. That's it, I think.
But I mean, those children in video do actually speak and they actually sort of forget if they did and you know, they don't.
I think they they have a scene earlier with it, with her. And then it's up is.
There's a fellow, a teacher who looks after them. But no, they don't speak.
You kind of the murder. They don't do you didn't have them. So to say one switch.
The other saved me and my daughter. Oh, I don't think. I think.
I think we're all behind it. Just things that they just saw the child run and the mom gone.
You have the child. Yes, yes. Yes, that's right. That with me, the quote, the child trying to escape and, you know, so intent on revenge.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, at one point I just carried them. I was just call them the all the crew chorused knew that they were going to be killed.
And my dad just gathers the children and they come to her very happily and wander off with her.
And it's like, no, you know, they have been elusive with this with the logic of the play up to that point.
And I mean, I think when you're talking about tragedy in the time of plague,
I do think the story has to be pertinent to the plague that is happening in the world,
because, of course, we're all dealing with personal questions of ourselves.
I think the place fundamentally deal with the domestic and the personal. That has huge ramifications, maybe.
But I think that one of the biggest things I notice in plays and certainly, my dear it is, is that Medair herself is complicit with her past.
She married a fellow she shouldn't have married. She left her home.
She killed her brother. She ran off with this guy.
The notion that she could start again in a new country free of any ramifications must be part of the reason she's furious when he leaves her.
And in that way, it's almost the beginning of subtext, I think, that we didn't think really came in until the 20th century.
But the Greeks, I think they understood that you're only telling the the iconic bit of the story,
but all the layers of the story, as complex as we are. Sit underneath and you can find them.
Yeah. I mean, actually, Congress is trying to give them a little bit of classical scholarship on your on on this matter, because when we know.
Right back in the very early days of tragedy, and we're talking about the four nineties, right at the beginning of the fifth century.
There was a very important city in Asia. Minor caught my letus that was sacked by the Persians.
A horribly defeated by the Persians, and this city was very close to the Athenians, so they had a lot of ties and is closely Athenians hearts.
And a couple of years after that terrible event,
a contemporary of Aeschylus Circle Francaise put on a play in which he dramatised the sack of my letus.
It dramatised this terrible event that happened two years earlier.
And the audience was so the Athenians were so distressed by this that we know about this from her office.
So, you know, we have it from a source that is quite close to the thing.
Hackney is not just a later anecdote. He says the audience was so distressed at seeing their own troubles that they find him considerable
fine and said that the plane was never be put on again and never again did Athenian tragedy.
Direct, directly dramatised, what's going on just outside the theatre, the just outside the theatre,
in the in a way that's what happened in Derry that's just too close to us.
Yes. Yes. To is the reference. Yes, I think that's right.
That's very, very interesting. I think we still like that. It's why people write very delicately shaded and memoirs or other colden fiction.
I mean, I think people are killed in fiction because we can't bear it if if it's got the full glare of being actually ourselves.
I think that's fair enough. And I think also, you know, performers, you're always performing a character.
But, of course, a huge part of it is performing yourself. It doesn't mean that you have to be that to you.
But all of us are potentially the protagonists of any play. That's them.
That's the charm of it and the skill of it and the terror of it.
Can I ask you, because I know the Epidaurus, the wonderful theatrical Epidaurus,
which I think when Callas sang sang the day of their role in Ruthie's David Carabiners me.
I think they managed to squeeze in 18000 people. And you performed Happy Days.
What, about 10 years ago in that wonderful circle, that amazing performance space.
And there you were in the beckert entirely by yourself with an audience of thousands.
Was that over? Was that somehow different? A different kind of experience?
Yes. And just before I said that, you know, it's interesting, but I don't think the play electorate had been done very often in Derry before.
So in a funny way, it was a new play.
In fact, going into the play in Derry, two boys were overheard, one party saying this play was performed first 400 years of BBC.
It took a long time to get to Derry. Equally, when we went to Epidavros, which is a fantastic thing to be allowed to do,
we were one the first new plays to be done in that space because it's been kept pretty sacredly since it's finding,
hasn't it, as a as a as a Greek tragedy spot. And so we performed Beckett's Happy Days, which is, of course, a modern tragedy.
And in that this woman, you know, goes on believing that she's high as a kite everyday being another lovely day.
But in fact, she's disintegrating fast and time is sort of accelerating underneath her and therefore underneath the audience.
And it was thrilling. All our member is that I said, of course, you know, in happy days.
And the woman sits with her, first of all, up to her waist.
In the next second half, she's up to her neck in the. So she's the visual image is just a picture.
But what she says is at odds with the picture. And there the drama sits.
That's all it is. It's genius of Beckett. And then the audience sat and I had this vision as I looked out, I thought,
I just have to take all these people in T-shirts and jeans and put them in togas or or gorgeous robes.
And I'm there. I am descended from those wonderful players who must have been here doing that and a number of birds singing and my voice.
I didn't have any, of course, microphone and you don't need it there.
And just speaking and the silence and the mountain and the mountains beyond where the flames were lit to say that the Trojan War was over.
And it was a moment where I stood. I felt between heaven and earth, you know, between eternity.
And you're both in the present and in imagination and you're in the play.
And it took it was absolutely mind blowing.
But the audience there come from from Athens or from everywhere, some by boat, some by car and some whatever way they can get there,
which is very like how they came before that they would come together and visit so that the audience are
coming in a slightly different way than the way they come when they buy their ticket in the West End.
You're coming up a path. They have to arrive at the place and they have to yield to the circular swirl of the magic.
There's going to be offer to them. And I think that's roughly the same. Yes, indeed.
It was a pilgrimage. I mean, it. And and when I first went there very long time ago, there was no modern road that wasn't there much longer to get to.
And as you say, people come by boatmen from the harbour about ten miles away.
They get the bus up to the theatre.
But most of the people came in buses and they went back to discuss the play all week, presumably, or all year to the next play,
because they knew the play was about them, even if it wasn't directly about them, it was about them and how they were going to proceed.
And I wonder whether your question at the beginning is, you know,
do we should we be doing a trilogy of Greek tragedies on Netflix so that we're all dealing with those questions?
Or have the questions changed or have the, you know, who are who are heroes or are who are our demons, you know?
The government, when they make these terrible mistakes, killing us.
These are the questions that we may want to ask, but if we asked them to directly, we will be able to answer them in the glare of political choice.
Yes, but also, I mean, watching and monitoring on screen is so different from this sense of pilgrimage, the sense of coming to a special place.
I mean, I'd love I love it when the theatre is site specific and people have to come to it as a pilgrimage.
And actually, that's particularly relevant to Epidaurus because the town of Epidaurus was down on the coast.
And what you with the theatre is part of a healing.
A place of healing. Sacred to Asclepius, where people would come for for cures and healing.
And every year there was a big,
big festival and there used to be a procession coming up the up the hill from the towns on and on so people would gather there.
And when they watch the play in ancient times, they were in a place of healing.
And I think that's still there's something of a sense of a place of healing.
It's a wonderful Seamus Heaney poem called Out of the Bag, where he writes about Epidaurus as.
As a place of healing. And that brings us back to Haiti.
Of course, it's about healing. I do think they're about healing.
They they they lance a boil. Often they dare to face into something and allow the action to unfold in front of them.
But at their best, you see, I have this theory,
but it really comes in playing Shakespeare that because we tend to breeze with the actor if
we are engaged with the play or the actor is so enthusiastic that they're your heart race.
Your heart begins to race with the actor, then you're sort of at one with the actor.
So I began to think that the audience aren't just watching the play.
Like watching it. They are in it. They are part of it.
They also take out the sword at that moment.
They in their mind's eye, they identify with it because their blood is is sort of pumping at the same rate as the actors at good.
That's a good play that they receive. Are living. There's no chance they are complicit with it.
And they have. They have enacted it themselves. And ideally, they should be tied to at the end of watching watching a play.
But it does heal them because they have, you know, vicariously done that action or forgiven themselves,
that action or resolve that action or that family. Yeah.
I think this is the opportunity for me to say love the idea I had about about tragedy with a kind of medical metaphor,
because you said that they're tired at the end.
And that reminds me, though, of what people usually say about the effect of the tragedy on the audience,
which they've derived from our support, which is catharsis.
When asked when his politics contributed the word catharsis to the languages of the world, and it's a word that's used every day.
But catharsis has something to do with cleaning, purifying and.
Most people think they know, perhaps. We think we know what catharsis is because we're at the end, we feel somehow washed out.
We feel we feel we've been cleansed of something.
But I I'm not sure that is the right metaphor. There's another.
Semi medical metaphor, which I think might be better because I feel that at the end of the tragedy,
the audience doesn't leave something behind, but take something with them, takes with them kind of antibodies.
And so I was very excited when I came across the metaphor in Fiji.
Is the poet of the Ode to Joy, which is now the European hymn, who in I think it 1792 coined the phrase of tippler tragedy.
Wasn't inoculation an inoculation against the inevitable?
And he meant it didn't mean the inevitability. That is the inevitability of suffering, the inevitability of mortality.
Cause it doesn't stop people catching suffering and catching mortality.
And that that isn't, I think, what innoculation quite meant to two Chinna.
But he it protected them and made them a better able to cope, much better able to understand their suffering.
Is it just four years before Jenah discovered vaccination and one point the word vaccination.
So I'm. I'd like to try out is the idea that tragedy, instead of being catharsis,
instead of being a leaving behind you, take with you into your life afterwards and then not kill it.
And our ailment. What would you say? Our ailment, obviously. And the big word is this is this virus.
But our ailment is ignorance, isn't it? And and the plays can help you with ignorance,
with our ignorance about family or or bad action or the consequence of action illnesses that the Greeks are very good at dealing with it.
But they don't give you, as you say, and knowledge. So the inoculation doesn't mean that you will never participate.
You will never do nothing wrong. Nothing will ever go wrong. But you are mildly defended against it.
Yeah. You know, you have a way of coping with it, or at least you'd understand it.
And I'm obsessed with reading every day, you know, the amount of people who've died in this country or.
And of course, it's a completely useless number,
but it does make me feel I have a sense of how present the virus is if I know how many people have died of it.
And it also goes on reminding me of how serious it is. So none of this cures us of the virus.
But it it allows us to cope with it, doesn't it? It's tax on spending on not just to feel you've driven crazy by the by the complete meaninglessness.
Yes. Well, randomness randomness is a terrible thing.
And and I think that the Greeks don't shirk from that.
They say the gods are random. So they do feel comfortable that we'll call the gods are random.
So anything can happen. But the but also I think the other thing is that the artistry,
the art form and the author of the the art and craft of the performers as well, create a shape, a create a form.
They live in some in some way they contain it. And so that is instead of it just being a meaningless kind of splurge of of cacophony and randomness.
And the suffering is given is given that music is given, poetry is given to the voice.
And when you see a vaccine, you know, in a way,
each new generation of actors has to create a vaccine because playing the same all that words the same old way or borrowing
another style from another time doesn't have the effect on the audience that you're talking about the inoculation.
It has to be a new strain of half a vaccine.
So that's, I think, put the actors spend their time to try to find a new way of doing which replies usually,
usually to the moment that we're in both locally in terms of the psychology of the moment we're in and the way we are,
because otherwise the thing doesn't have its magic. I'm very taken with what you say about the physical experience of the audience,
that they may have a somatic response that is in in tune in tune with either the heart,
the heartbeat, the sweat, the fear that they think now the sign ups in the mind,
the sign ups as doing the similar thing both in the actor and in the audience.
If the audience are tuned in to the actor's job in a way is to work is you are not octave is to is to start the audience into joining the story.
Otherwise they're thinking, oh gosh, I must bake a cake tonight. I have to run right into the world.
Yes. People come into the world and the mental. Energy of the actor is, too will that to happen?
And the director and the lighting and the the event has to has to sort of charge them and
increase their energy to a much higher level than it was when they sat down in their fight.
Peter says, you know, the blackness of the theatre just before play starts.
That moment is the most important moment of silence because it is not the moment of the grave.
It is the moment of expectation. And that's when the whole thing will suddenly reveal.
I won't reveal in a moment,
but if you are drawn into a revelation and you will leave ideally the theatre just with that under your your pocket or in your mind or.
Yes, you've taken it in. That's the point.
That it's not there to cure you because you can't be cured of life and nobody gives you sort of gives you a kind of protection of understanding.
But then what you're saying, making films then must be very, very different.
Making films, I'm sure, the films, the film editor of the film director have a great fun making.
The effects on people, but to perform in a film is to perform in silence in a room.
It's a bit like this time of Kove. It is that you are performing with a group of people.
You make this thing happen, is put in a box, is taken away and you never see it again.
So when I watch myself on a piece of film or television, I don't relate to it at all.
It's all happening at that moment. It happened months ago. And then you have no curtain call.
And, you know, the dead stay dead. They don't stand up again.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Remember the end of Hedda Gabler, which we which we filmed for the BBC,
and at the very end we ran out of time or money rather of everything and had a gob. I had to die.
And so I went back and I lay down and a lady ran in, put some blood quickly on my brain,
and they just froze it and they cut and they were able to extend that dead, you know, that dead shot of the head on the ground.
But they had to extend it. They had to invent it. In fact, I was only on the ground for a second because I knew I'd love to.
I mean, I a passion about Chekhov. And, you know, I regard those as tragedies.
And you did. You didn't seek out. I didn't go Peter Stine to Denver Festival.
And he he he is very keen on Greek tragedy. And he particularly likes that it should only be on once.
He likes a thing happening on one night. He never watches it again. He only watches the first night.
He's not interested in previews and making it better.
He thinks the group come together, an audience come and it happens in that first first performance.
It's a very old fashioned, you know, but maybe very profound relationship to it.
But we did The Seagull, and he had he had two wonderful ideas.
One was that the silence that the that the group of people watching the play in Act one half,
when they look out of the Czech cliché Chekhovian situation of looking out of the Foreston and somebody finally says,
ha, you know, so we would let that pause is written in as a pause.
And the pause used to be about 10 seconds in English shows or maybe fifteen.
But with Peter it was two and a half minutes and we sat for two and a half minutes with sounds and feels like two and half hours.
And the audience began to first smile, then Titor, then go silence and then weep.
So that's the power of the emptiness of a non-event off of an event.
There was nothing in it. And and it just went silent.
And for two anatomies, at the end of the play, they all play a card game.
And I constantly commit suicide. Sorry, this is this is not my machine.
And at the end, they play and replay a card game so constant.
And he says, what's that? You hear a gunshot. They say nothing.
And they go back to play the card game and they use exactly the same numbers as we used in the previous game.
So it was as if time went forward. And then World War Back know it is utterly genius.
It felt like time had been killed inside Iraq. That's right.
I did do a wonderful outside and I didn't I didn't see it in Berlin, the original production.
I saw it in Russian in the theatre at Epidaurus. It finished at four o'clock in the morning and everybody said it.
But the Russian production in Russian wasn't really as good as the production had been back in Berlin in nineteen eighty eighty one.
But it was still white something. One of the great directors. Yes, I did fly to Epidaurus for one night.
The Madison. We did a few degrees for one night to watch Electra at Epidaurus that Peter signed it.
I did good one night. Oh yes. The Electra. Yes. Yes. That was a big bath with gold light coming out of it.
It was, yes, my love. They were kind of cattle troughs, weren't there. And when when after when.
Electra has since succeeded in luring her mother to her death,
she was wearing this terrible black rags and she would sit on the stage on and then
she plunged into one into one of these things and came out and was dressed in white.
It was very, very memorable. He always does magic for somebody who is silly me for the truth.
He he he finds it, too, that the spin of magic. Yeah.
But I remember you in black as his electorate in the Barbican.
Are you not somebody else. That's. And that's it. Yes, I.
My man. What did you throw a pomegranate on the ground. I did.
In fact, it was quite by chance. Deputy director brought in pomegranates one morning and they were being held just we were just using him.
And I threw these two pomegranates in the ground and they split open.
And the audience used to go mad as if they would because, of course,
we've been talking about dead heads and cutting heads open right up to that moment to make the
spit is still with the blood red axis is a is is electric first lines and one of the first lines.
And so they split open and everybody just got stunned as if these two heads split open.
It was it. It's a marvellous cake. It's a small play.
But in it all the pain of people and in the play is is explored and I think is one of the great,
great plays because it's very rarely done, because it doesn't seem much going for it, but it's because it's a sidelong place.
It's a play about a girl who is forgotten, but it's not really about her.
She is really about arrestees coming home. It's and it's full of dramatic irony.
The audience metre arrest is at the very beginning of the play and they see him there, a door.
He disappears, a girl comes and says, oh, my brother will never come home.
And the orders go home. He is it. It's just the way in which the Greeks understood those necessities of the theatre so early is breathtaking.
I would love to continue that. We could continue this obviously develop for the whole hour, but we are also really good, too.
I don't think Wes is there whether whether it's a good time for us to start inviting some questions.
I am indeed here. Yeah, I know. I could happily listen to more stories about pomegranates and what have you for a while yet,
but there are a whole bunch of questions that have come in. So I'll pass some of them to you and see see what you make of them in particular.
I guess we might start with the ones that are looking at where your discussion started.
In other words, theatre in a time of plague and the kind of correlation between then and now.
And there's a number of questions that are all sort of similar in a way.
And they're asking. So we knew. We know, thanks to various historians on Virginian's, what the plague was like for them.
Do you imagine that we ought to be somehow representing the plague?
For the future generations. In other words, what we're going through now.
Is it our job to sort of tell people thousands of years down the line what it's like for us?
I think there's something, as Fiona said, you don't. To make a thing effective, you don't put it straight on.
It has to be. It has to be. Made real through other people.
So I think if we're to do that, you know, it's not that dumb,
not a matter of describing and it's not a matter realistically portray the matter of somehow conveying how it's how it is or how it affects people.
What it does to people. I mean, and I think rightly, there's been quite a lot of emphasis on the mental health dimension of this lockdown,
which is and has been pretty terrible, I think, for many, many families.
It goes to the question of closeness and distance.
That sort of ran through some of your discussion, whether it's in relation to the very performance or in relation to your forgive me,
I hope all of I can't remember the name of the tradition who was banned from ever writing a play so close to the event again.
I mean, I'm somebody who worked on 16, 17th century French writing and tragedy as well, where, again,
there's sort of there's an agreement that you can't possibly write about the recent civil war in a tragedy directly,
whereas you might do it indirectly.
I'm just inviting you to think a bit more about this whole sort of question of indirection or closeness and distance.
Because there's a number of questions in that in that sort of area. Fiona, do we know the stories yet?
Do we I mean, you know, they say that domestic violence has shot up.
There'll be some extraordinary stories about people being locked in together and what that has done,
that something into the area, which is often the emergency area of Greek tragedy.
And I think there was a very edgy moment, which it would be too personal to ever write about in a play.
But the moment that the prime minister was in at death's door is a very interesting moment, given his policies being perceived as cavalier until then.
I mean, these are the moments that would produce drama. But, of course, you'd have to change the names and change.
But there was a moment when we were in a moment of potential change,
which is what tragedies do produce huge change and that might have gone the other way.
You know, and then there would have been an element of tragedy. It's a tragedy hovers like of disabilities.
Yes. And it has to be made particular and and almost all the tragedies.
I'm much, much concerned with the family. Is is it is at the core of this.
There's a wonderful story of a French sage who was told in Mao's China that the Chinese had done away with the family.
And he said that this is terrible. It's the end of tragedy.
And so so that if there's going to be a future way of bringing home what it's been like, please will be changed, won't they, by what's happened?
Because we are much more in touch with with things now, particularly, you know, people that they have to bury their families.
We already in fact, one of Antigoni everybody is who hasn't had relatives.
They're not being allowed to bury the. What is the effect on the on the family or on them on the people mourning to be allowed that be your dad?
I mean, that's something very profound.
And we'll have a terrible effect on us that we have one of the most terrible things that we know in Athens at the time of the plague,
that there weren't proper funerals and they've excavated some mass burials because there was no time to have proper.
And I thought I think I'm sure that's a very strong recurrent theme both.
And it will in a whole range of great plays about the right to grieve and the right to bury one's dead.
And again, there's been I'm sure that's a thing that we'll return to another sort of contemporary ancient question that's come up,
which actually speaks to your innoculation theory, Oliver, which is.
So the Greeks carried on through their plague. We've stopped.
Are we missing something important, therefore, by not having the inoculation of tragedy during the plague itself?
I mean, it seems to me the most obvious thing we're missing is the is the communal, the commonality of going to the theatre.
You go with all these other people and you gather close together in a way that we can't.
And experience what Fiona was talking about, the way that you enter into the world of the play.
You you become physically and psychologically part of that world for for the for the duration of the play.
Yeah. And we're certainly missing. We're missing. We're missing communality.
We. We're missing and even. And there was a livestream from Epidaurus just the other evening of Aeschylus persons, which we watch on the tiny little.
I've had it at home. And I didn't see I didn't see the audience gathering, I gather sort of watching the beginning.
Well, I gather that people saw the audience gathering and that they were all happy to be socially distant schools.
Did you did you see that film? I saw them all coming in and there were some groups of two or three together and then suddenly a big empty you.
It felt like a half empty theatre. Yes. And then at the end of Epidaurus, when you when you leave, you leave in this great sort of wave of humanity.
And at the end, they said, well, you've got to get we've got to go.
Row by row. And please observe the distance between each person as you leave.
Again, that speaks. If I may. That speaks to a number of questions where people are picked up on Phiona's use of the word bond.
You talked about a bond between the audience and the performers and so on.
And there's clearly a good few people worrying that somehow that bond is broken.
Kind of either. Well, it clearly temporarily broken, but there's people worrying as to whether it sort of irrevocably broken or whether
we can somehow get back to that even in a socially distant state of space.
Do we? Yeah, maybe.
Although we could talk about this in the Greek context because, you know, the theatre had to be invented, obviously, and it got it.
It obviously gets some it hit some point in commuter life that we thought this is a really good idea.
So they built these vast amphitheatre so cities can be together and.
And I think it is broken. Yeah. I don't think I certainly would want to be in a theatre and I wouldn't want to be in a half
filled theatre because my association is that you are shoulder to shoulder with someone.
It's something we didn't take much notice of until this coverage. We didn't notice how important the cramb getting in matters.
The cramm of sitting next to strangers matters. I don't think we realised it until now.
And it is. It's broken. It's going to be quite broken for a long time.
I don't know. Young people like might break through it and not mind.
But if it goes on being airborne and can be carried by asymptomatic young people, then none of us want that to happen.
Right. And in that sense, then an Epidaurus type outdoor auditorium or space is not gonna make any difference, really.
It's an honour. I think for better nothing. Well, yes.
But I think I agree with Fiona. We won't we won't be able to get back that sense of of the shared experience until we're all crammed together again,
until we got suspicious of each other. You know, now we've been turned to each other into potential enemies.
No one really. But unwitting enemies. And that's not what it is.
Yeah. Well, I do hope that eventually you will.
But once we can once again get big audiences together, you will do it.
Another tragedy for us. I can feel on coming on to another another question that's come through.
Is is in a sense. It's funny cause there are quite a few of the questions as somatic and to do with the bodily the bodily experience of being there.
And another one is is actually directed to you as a performer, Fiona, in terms of character.
So you talked about how, you know, a performer needs to find the character inside them and so on.
If somebody is asking a sort of reverse question, which is have you ever found it difficult to shrug off a character and has a character's misery,
feelings and so on, leaked into your own personal feeling, whether that's Madaya or Whinney or,
you know, it has gone on beyond the end of the show for you.
I I've always denied that they have any effect on me, but I, I think given that I haven't performed on stage for a bit,
I can see the effect they did have on me when I did Medair on Broadway doing eight shows a week.
And, you know, at its best, I was seeing this recently to all of that at its best.
When you're performing the pit, you're not doing the play at the audience. You're experiencing the thing as new.
And you were just a surprise for the messenger turns up as the audience is, oh, my goodness,
he's just because you are so on the track of the play, you're just following the track.
It's like watching a movie whilst being in it. It's it's, um, in that way.
Also, the actors are part of the the commonality of it.
So I'm sorry I've forgotten your question. Well, so does kicking it off.
No, I never published it know. But I did take about a year to get over my dead writer.
So something must've affected me. I think it made me depressed. I to wake up on a Monday, very depressed.
And I think it wasn't the sorrow of the story of the play, but the mental concentration on that sort of subject or which isn't good necessarily.
One might ask a similar question of a scholar. Oliver, has all this time spent with tragedies done you harm?
It may well have, but I've I've always thought that actually a scholar who's going to work on tragedy needs to be of have some equanimity.
I always reminded this wonder that this is a tangent, but you'll see where I'm coming from.
The book on Read many years ago by Alfred Harbage, in which he made up two episodes from Shakespeare's Life and The Letters and Shakespeare.
And one of them, Shakespeare, says, I'm absolutely, utterly depressed at the moment.
But I think he said the plague is absolutely terrible. Life is awful. And I'm composing Twelfth Night and then another one.
He says everything's going so well, it's been over the Mitu success.
The theatre is thriving and my family is happy. And I'm writing King Lear and I feel that.
In order to be a scholar of tragedy, you have to have you do have to have some some resilience and some ability to.
To make fun of it, almost, yes. And whether that's done me harm or good.
What do I tell an awful lot of tragedies in my life. An awful lot of that were done.
Well, some absolutely wonderful, memorable ones. We've we've we've touched on a few of those this evening.
And something terrible happens to you if you said yes to fun.
Well, I think Oliver, you know, when he's taught brilliantly about tragedy,
has made a whole generation of his students and generations, the students loved the humanity within the place.
And in the end, when he says fun, there's a huge amount of humour in in in mid-air.
And it's not already Greek humour. It's the humour of people just being together and their sense of betrayal about each other.
What women say about men, what men say about women remains as true now as it was then.
And all the same problems arrive in a marriage. And recognition of those problems makes people laugh a lot.
And that's that's a great, huge pleasure. And when I did an elector, I used to do the kind of fights with item kindness would want to hit you.
And she couldn't hit me. You you hit me.
You know, all of these things are very humorous, but they're part of what happens when you add flesh to these brilliantly spare words,
when there's a kind of bitterness and a sweetness.
It makes me think of Keats on King Lear when he says he must taste the bitter sweet of the Shakespearean fruit thinking in Emidio,
for example, when she says to Jason, go off, you know, go off and enjoy your new you new business bird.
And it's it's bitter, bitter and sweet as often happens on these events.
You're already answering some of the questions that are coming in. And in particular, I think in a way, you've already answered this question.
You might want to take it on the more straightforwardly, which is what do you think that Europe,
Idiz and the other tragedian from the Greek audience would have made of your version of Madaya?
Would they recognise whether you're talking about a kind of essential human or a set of human traits that or would you ever do this
kind of transplanting of of what would they make of what I'm doing in the same way as I'm making something of what they made?
It's very hard always as news talk about it. They probably would understand a thing you were doing, but they would be shocked.
This was the amount of violence that we now allow on the stage when they didn't need it.
They were more innocent and more and therefore more shockable.
And I think they were all the better for that. It doesn't mean they were unsophisticated, but they weren't.
We've become very jaded by watching too many movies. So I think we now are always trying to not be more violent.
But we have to somehow slip the violence in in a way that really arrest the audience.
I think they didn't need that. They needed to hear somebody was being murdered and they were probably covering their faces.
I think they were much more innocent. I hope I'm right. I hope I see you.
It is interesting that in your policies, actually policies brought on.
Having had this terrible of these charges smashed and he's been dragged along the ground and he's brought on dying,
mangled and dying and does die just before the end of the play, which is unusual for us.
Yes, there's a lot about that as we were dying live on stage inside the play as opposed to in a mess and just beat.
You're off. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Funny cause again, as somebody who went from on Russin, he's busy dying offstage.
And it's the big, long speech about how he's mangled and all the rest of it.
That that affects the audience most. Where precisely what you're saying about hearing about it is also kind of physically affecting.
And the speeches are always very good in in in Greek tragedies.
They do. I mean, if you need a very, very good actor to be the messenger,
to say this is what happened with the chariot race, which is it was a line in an electorate.
And then he hit the post and he came round again and he turned over.
It mangled and the audience knew it was well written and well formed.
You see the race much more clearly than if you were trying to make race happen in a in a flashback.
You know, it's, um, it's still the active imagination, but when it's fused with good writing, it's unmatchable.
You're talking about well written and well performed. A few question people have after both of you, actually.
What are some of your favourite versions or productions of tragedies in the last few years?
They're asking you to reminisce a bit, but to remember what what worked for you?
I adored IFIC eighty eight hours at and at,
and I am a huge conservative because I love seeing plays in other languages and I mean my French is as awkward as, you know as it can be.
But I, I can enjoy it. I just thought that was superb.
There's a section in it fair and the chorus for dancing.
And if Virginia has agreed to die and she's being taken by the chorus, which is, you know, the force,
you you don't have to know anything academic about the play to feel it there just with her pushing her towards her death.
And the mother was trying to stop the cause by holding onto their legs.
It was pitiful. And she was just.
And they kept dancing to show the force of fate was so much greater than a mother just trying to stop any random person by their legs.
We love all the greatest things that ever seen. I would agree.
I think I am Ruskin's laser 3D is one of the greatest performances I've seen it with.
Talking about Greek tragedy. I was I was personally involved in the Peter whole Tony Harrison or a star.
You know, that is that as a young kid, how old I am.
I went to rehearsals. I mean, I was just used to answer questions, but that that may have a huge effect on me and a very strong memory.
Electorate in the Barbican. The very strong another media, Nina Golla, Yukio Nino, Golla media, I thought was absolutely wonderful and memorable.
And Katie Mutuel, take Katie Mitchell. That is a great Trojan women.
Yes, it is a great if denied free. I thought, you know.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And Palestine again, you know, I wouldn't.
So I mean, we, we're naming the great directors of our day.
Really. Yeah we are. We should. Yeah we should. Have you all run a represented almost.
So sorry. Yeah we got it. I had dinner over Deborah Warner as well.
Bobby obviously left him. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
We've got time for a few more questions. And the next one has to do with sort of the it's a it's a variant on the bond that you talked about, Fiona.
You also talked about complicity on a one point, one point collusion.
Yeah. You have a lovely phrase. I said good. I wrote it down. But the audience are collusive in the logic of revenge in the plays.
And I just wondered if you might think, both of you,
a bit more about that side of the bond that performance creates between an audience and the performers.
So it's not just a bond of community.
And if you like feeling crumpled and closed next to each other, it's also somehow complicit in the terrible things that are happening in front of us.
Yes. Okay. I played a very small part in that movie. Plager was on the radio.
I was in Oedipus. But, you know, Oedipus hears his his wife says to him, you know, he says, what the what was what was your husband?
And she says and he looked very like, you know.
You know, there is such that was so daring like a matador. The writing comes right up to Oedipus and says,
Dare you not notice that she says that the man you killed looked a bit like you and you were running away from defeat.
That's it. You know, he's colluding at some level.
And I think that sort of writing is genius because we all know when we get a funny feeling about something,
we usually write because the information has been given. You just haven't wanted to take it.
I think that's full of that. And then that way, they're very sophisticated that they're not just arguments, arguments, arguments, arguments.
You know, I think I hate her mother. Why? Because she Oberly loves her father.
You know, that's a fault. I liked your idea also that the audience is drawn into collude with the characters.
Need you not only collude with the nice people you don't include with the sweet, innocent and pathetic.
Revenge is very, very important. Do you understand revenge?
Yeah. You know, you might you you may not like it, do you? It's horrifying.
It can lead to terrible vendettas and so on. But you understand it.
Thank you. I jotted down because.
Shylock speech, which should start, you know, had to have not a Jew hand, which ends and, you know, so shall we not have revenge?
And it includes in it when he talks about the the the humanity that that Jews share with the Christians in the in the play.
Are we not subject to the same diseases healed by the same means?
It seemed to me it had so striking that one of the things that's happened to humanity now is.
You know, we're told that the universalisation, as it is, is very dangerous and problematic idea, but would with this cold it shared by all humanity.
We are we are subject to the same diseases and healed the same needs.
And so that that's how to do a bit of a bit of a ramble.
But I have to tell Oliver. In fact, it precisely addresses another one of the questions which perhaps we blend with, which is so.
Looking back at the brink plays, there's the whole notion of hubris and other kind of tragic flaws and so on.
Might we think that covered and this plague has revealed a number of flaws which are endemic in our society.
One of them is precisely what you were talking about just now.
The degree to which universality is or isn't accepted and the degree of humanity of others isn't is or isn't accepted and is.
Yeah. Can we believe that there, too, will somehow remind us,
restore us and give us back something of that collective humanity, or is that too romantic of a.
And the messenger in midair says, call no man happy for no man is.
I was set as one of the great, great time. But we felt we were happy.
I mean, I don't I don't think the plays out either. But they're not Crime and Punishment plays.
No, none of the great tragedies, as I say, are simple crime,
punishment simply that people do wrong and then they get struck down for it's not as simple as that.
I mean, you're right that there are lessons on that. I mean, people are learning lessons about.
But particularly, I think the environmental lessons are coming out of this that, you know, we've maltreated with maltreated our world.
And it turns out that James Lovelock, who's now got 103 or something like that,
saying that this is a guy that, you know, we've maltreated the world and the world, the world will.
We'll get it. We'll maltreat humanity back if we don't look on.
I think we know that, isn't it? That's why there's a slight of embarrassment about this thing.
We can't really blame it despite maybe America trying to pay China for it.
But actually, we all know this. There's a sort of group responsibility for what's happened.
Every plastic bag, we jump into the sea, every, you know, we we're all part of that.
So, again, I think that that takes us back to Oliver's theory of inoculation in a way which is that the plays.
In some sense, tell us stuff we already know that we didn't want to acknowledge or that we didn't didn't feel.
Is that right? Whatever I am or am I my your theory?
No, I think either that that's actually developing. It's going beyond what I thought my life.
I liked it a lot and I. Yeah. You know, I hope I hope we can salvage something from this bad time.
This time when we we haven't been able to gather together in theatres. We haven't been able to to have close physical contact with people.
We will be. And I think you were saying you of you know, we distrust people.
We're in the queue the other day in the supermarket, and these people behind us kept on coming up to about a foot behind us.
You know, we got very angry about it. But this time it's I do hope that you're right.
But we'll learn something from it and and take something like an inoculation away from it.
Fiona, Jewish, to add to that, have the last word or two. Well, I think we didn't ask why.
But you do something about port pottery overseas. But it is about being humble.
Be humble now in relation to this and in relation to and it's how you get to discover
plays actually is to be humble in the knowledge as you try and discover what's in them.
Just be humble and maybe something. Fromson. Well, one thing that we have gained from these times is this kind of event.
And it's now time, I think, to draw this particular one to a close.
But not before thanking both of you enormously for for for standing up to the challenge of doing this weird thing online and so on and so forth.
But it's been an enormous pleasure, certainly for me and I think for others out there.
Judging from the questions that have come in, you might like to know that we've had people in the UK,
U.S., India, Brazil, Canada, Greece and more here.
So before I do, a little spiel about the end of the series, once again, enormous.
Thanks, Oliver. An enormous thanks to you. Also, Fiona McHugh.
Been great since. So that brings us sadly to the to an end this evening.
Of course, once again, thank you to our amazing speakers for this inspiring and enjoyable fashion.
Thank you also to all the viewers at home for watching and for your comments and questions.
Thank you to to the others who will join us another time, in other words, who aren't watching live, but will join later on YouTube.
And I also want to thank again everyone at Torch who's made this possible.
We have a torch been effectively blown away by the phenomenal support and encouragement that
we've received in this big tent live series as we've ventured into a new digital format.
I think it's worth saying that over the course of the series, we've been joined by over 20000 viewers from twenty three countries.
So the kinds of bonds that we've been talking about this evening or in the last hour
or so are clearly there and waiting to happen and indeed instantiated in this series,
amongst other things. Tonight's event was the last for this term.
But we do hope you'll join us again when we come back in September. We're all taking a break for August.
Come back in September for more. More big tent live events. If you would like to look back, all 17 events from the series are, as I say,
available to watch again on our website via the YouTube channel Torch Oxford.
And in fact, if you have any thoughts or comments about any of the events you viewed as part of this series, please do take a moment to let us know.
You'll find a link in the event description and the live chat below.
It will help us as we kind of craft the next series. If it looks like we might be in this mode for some time to come.
We wish you all and a relaxing and enjoyable August, wherever you may be, and look forward to welcome you back to our big tent again in September.
Thank you. Oliver and Fiona again. And thank you all and goodbye for now.