Page 56 - Studio International - May 1969

To achieve this rich and shifting diction, follows through into the text, where Logue work)
Christopher Logue, like the bards before him, mentions 'talking pictures' in reference to the Nipped down into the ditch to strip the dead
has ransacked every idiom, every formula, cinema, and compares the Greek warriors And cosh the wounded into hell.
every style, every literature available to him. with moonshots, writing 'as in dreams or at Nothing was left of Hector's raid except
Snatches of Yankee slang (Apollo in this pro- Cape Kennedy, they rise') ... Loose smoke-swaths drifting over the Aegean like
duction resembles LBJ), gestures of Brecht, The significance of Why Tears, Achilles? is dark hair,
Ezra Pound lucidity, titles of best-sellers, twofold. First, artistic. In all the arts today, we And the ditch stained perfect crimson where
imitations of Chinese poems, an Elizabethan encounter a certain modern authenticity which Some outraged god, five miles tall, had stamped on
grace reminiscent of Marlowe, are assembled is either a singleminded depth exploration of glass.
and welded together into a rich linguistic of an extremely delimited segment of expression,
cake. Which we savour fully, and swallow or a blithe sensory brushing over the debris of The Iliad in this reincarnation combines a
eagerly. our contemporary environment. (Minimal or passionate social cry against the apparently
Visually, the staging of Why Tears, Achilles? Pop; theatre of the absurd or broad popular necessary devastation of war, with an
gives us a comparable richness. Why stage theatre, e.g. Mame). Why tears Achilles?, a con- extremely sophisticated, and yet broadly
the thing at all ? For generations, Homer has temporary interpretation of an epic, reminds popular (battles and bare tits) formal con-
existed in the West as a printed book, in prose us that a focused concentration need not ex- struction.
or verse translation. But even the most ancient clude large areas of experience outside the Perhaps only narrative art-forms unfolding
archaeological discoveries taught our pre- chosen frame, nor need a desacralisation of the through time can reveal the social, structural
decessors that the epic was originally intended art-work lead to shallowness. Epic keeps the and economic dimensions of reality; perhaps
for oral performance. In the nineteenth connections : between men and gods, between iconic, visual or plastic arts can probe more
century, when the 'straight' theatre was in a men and animals, men and the elements, men deeply into the psychological, metaphysical,
state of degradation, there was no tradition of and technology, men and cosmos. religious and cosmic areas of experience. The
theatre performance which could re-interpret The second significance is social: the Iliad is epic reminds us—at a time when many
Homer anew in live terms; a book-centred about war and peace, and the psychic and `visual artists' are experimenting with images
high culture transmitted the epic on the page. social investments which make men make which extend in time—that we should not
Today—after Brecht, after Artaud, after war. Nothing in this analysis must make the accept the divorce between the two categories
happenings and mixed-media shows—we have reader forget that two-thirds of the Iliad is a unthinkingly.
the instrument to play the epic again, closer crystalline realistic description of men killing I am writing this article in a magazine
to what it may have been, should be now. each other: devoted to the visual arts, so I should like to
So we saw at The Royal College of Art scenes end with Homer's description of an ideal
with a Berliner Ensemble precision of outline, Patroclus split the rump. work of plastic art. In Book 18, Hephaestus,
stage conventions rooted in Japanese Noh Some (only a few) followed their horses up blacksmith of the gods, forges Achilles' shield.
theatre, vocal and physical techniques learned Onto the plain and ran for Troy. The rest In this description we can read a vision by
from Artaud, mixed-media sequences in- (More, but only a few) scurried along the ditch Homer—who was supposed by legend to have
volving film, slides, and strobes. The narrator And hid themselves in the fens beside Scamander. been blind—of an ideal created plastic object:
was like Dimbleby, but gifted with real Poor birds! He began by making a large and powerful
eloquence; the gods were knockabout panto- No sooner were you half a step from one death shield, adorned all over, finished with a bright
mime giants, but we were never allowed to Than another, worse death, trod on your necks. triple rim of gleaming metal, and fitted with a
forget their real power over the humans. In Cooks, farriers, camp-followers, some dogs, all silver baldric. The shield consisted of five
all, a truly Elizabethan mix—which means The plausible vermin heroic armies carry in their layers, and he decorated the face of it with a
something confidently impure, full of dis- seams number of designs, executed with consum-
junction and brave anachronism (which (Even a poet Diomede had brought for evening mate skill and representing, first of all, Earth,