Mr Heracles. The original 'Heracles' is shocking and
strange. It begins in defeat and despair, soars into triumph,
waver's on a razor's edge of dramatic uncertainty, then plunges
into carnage and horror of the darkest kind.
What is the greatest atrocity a man can commit? What do
we mean by hero? Who can apportion blame to the workings of
the human mind, and who has the power to forgive? These are
questions thrown up by Euripedes' Heracles and tackled
by Armitage in language that brings the play's contemporaneity
sharply into focus, without diminishing its historical portent.
Mister Heracles was commissioned by the West
Yorkshire Playhouse. This volume includes an introduction
by the author including a discussion of the 'translation'
process and commentary on the thinking behind the project.
INTRODUCTION
What do we mean by hero? What is the greatest atrocity a
man can commit? Who can apportion blame to the workings of
the human mind, and who has the power to forgive? These are
the questions that face any reworking of the Heracles fable.
In the modern Western World we race toawrds the future.
Logical, economical, sophisticated, comfortable, virtual sometimes,
double-glazed, air-conditioned, centrally heated...the real
and the vital gets left behind, and the greater the distance
the bigger the calamity when collision occurs. It's like the
noise when lightening strikes, when the thunder we hear is
air rushing in to fill the burnt-out gash in the sky.
There are many reminders of ourselves: dreams, intuition,
appetite, lust, language, but violence is one of the most
potent, opening a direct channel between what we have become
and what we originally were. Heracles is a master of violence,
and also a slave to it.
Euripedes' Heracles or The Madness of Heracles,
is shocking and strange. It begins in defeat and despair,
soars into triumph, wavers on a razor's edge of dramatic uncertainty,
then plunges into carnage and horror of the darkest kind,
before playing out in bewilderment. At some midpoint in the
story, a line is crossed or a switch is thrown; some short-circuit
occurs in the mind of the conquering hero, and after an episode
of uncontrollable fury, Heracles finds himself amid the bodies
of his wife and children with their blood on his hands. Stupefied,
he shuffles away in the arms of his friend, still carrying
his weapons of murder. As the play comes to an end, the audience
is left in the same mood as Heracles himself, puzzling over
an extreme act of brutality against loved ones, the cause
and effect of which demand an explanation and resolution.
The play's structure is typically classical, but it's contemporary
relevance is not in doubt, its issues no less pressing than
they were four hundred years before the birth of Christ. Euripedes,
the last of the great Athenian playwrights, seemd to suspect
that the gods on Olympus were no more than metaphors for the
urges and impulses of a man's mind, and that Fate, if it existed,
was a minor deity compared with the supreme beings of Choice
and Chance. The messengers that break into the original plot
to plant the seed of madness might be portrayed as supernatural
henchmen acting out a vendetta or employed on a mission of
revenge. But crucial to the argument of the play are the implications
of heracles' heroic past, the extent of his guilt and blame,
and his human response to this most horrific predicament.
How can Heracles live with himself from this moment on?
There are several translations of Heracles, all of
them important and more or less faithful in a literary, textual
sense. I have written the play again with a view to production,
as a piece for the modern theatre, although I didn't simply
want to contemporise this ancient drama in the way that some
translations of the classics have made the golden fleece a
pair of Nike trainers or the Trojan horse a nuclear submarine.
What has been translated here is not so much the language
as the sentiment and the setting, and the main research tool
has been an encyclopaedia rather than a dictionary or thesaurus.
It is probably more useful to think that the play has not
only been interpreted from Ancient Greek into English, but
that it has been inferred, across time. In paying due respect
to the original, it is equally worth remembering that Heracles
never actually existed, and if that sounds like a sacrilegious
statement when put so bluntly, it has proved a useful notion
when deciding how much latitude might be taken without the
accusation of irreverence.
Although the original lineation has hardly been altered,
virtually all stage instructions have been omitted in this
version and there are no indications as to when a character
should enter or exit the stage; this seems to me to be a production
issue, and I didn't want to restrict the dramatic possibilities
or try to direct the play from behind the typewriter. The
one exception is the opening up of the house following the
slaying of Lycus and Heracles' family. The implication is
that the murders must not be seen, only described, and this
seems to me to be imperative to the value of the drama. That
isn't to say, though, that the killings couldn't be witnessed
or represented through some other device.
As with most plays, each characters idiolect is at least
as important to the strategy of the drama as the story-line
itself. In Mister Heracles, the old family are locked
into a rhetoric of blank verse and grand imagery, with Amphitryon
even quoting himself from a previous translation at one point.
Imposters, intruders and visitors seem able to express themselves
more freely, crudely even. And the chorus buzz around the
place using a variety of voices and means of expression, from
cheap one-liners to chants and songs. The role or function
of the chorus in the play is entirely a matter of discretion,
interpretation and, hopefully, possibility, but it is their
presence more than anything else which conveys the atmosphere
of original Greek tragedy, and their contribution to the tone
of the play cannot be over-emphasised.
In Mister Heracles, it is as if the whole family
history has occurred within the lifespan of one family. Atomic
weapons and spears are spoken of in the same sentence, quantum
physics and spinning wheels considered in the same thought.
It is probably the cardinal sin of any treatment of Greek
drama to include within it a reference to a Roman Caesar,
but no cultural or historical co-ordinates were beyond possibility
using this full-spectrum approach. Today Heracles travels
at the speed of light - it seems only yesterday he was hitching
a team of horses to his chariot. Of further relevance is the
fact that Zeus is dead. When the gods die, they leave man
in control of his own moral identity, and after experiencing
his gravest tragedy, Heracles must confront his greatest challenge.
We observe the agonising creation of the new kind of superman:
one who takes responsibility for his actions.
Mister Heracles was commissioned by the West Yorkshire
Playhouse for performance in the year 2000. I am grateful
for their support in this project, especially to Natasha Betteridge,
and to the many actors who tried and tested the play over
two separate weeks of workshopping and rehearsal. The development
of the text would not have been possible without their involvement.
Initially, it is a uncomfortable experience to hand over material
written in private to a group of total strangers, who then
set about it with their minds, voices and bodies, pulling
it, stretching it, and on occasion tearing it to pieces. but
through a process that included small running repairs on the
one hand, to a complete re-threading of plot-lines on the
other, I'm sure a more cohesive and comprehensive piece of
work has been produced. It is a pity that the same kinds of
external quality-control mechanisms are not made available
to more writers, poets and novelists included.
More specifically I am grateful to Simon Godwin, who suggested
the project in the first place, and who contributed a great
deal to the theory and thinking that underpins this interpretation.
Having been spooked by the play for a number of years, it
was his enthusiasm for that haunting which lured me into the
Heracles myth and Euripides' treatment of it. From that starting
point, the intention has been to re-present the play in the
here and now, combining what we might think of as the eternal,
universal issues with the undeniable changes that have taken
place in the last two and a half thousand years, both materially
and philosophically. Hopefully, there is something of tomorrow
in Mister Heracles as well, reflecting not just the
relative velocity of modern living - the pace of life compared
with that of Ancient Greece - but its astonishing acceleration
towards the future and the unknown.
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