Day 64: Antigone, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

Having once again noticed the use of modern turns of phrase, and this time quite an obvious one ("you bet" for yes...) I did have a look at the notes and find that this was deliberate, but I also noticed that certain parts which felt more classical did so for a reason - they are written in verse which doesn't generally rhyme, but for certain characters is in iambic pentameter. This third installment in the cycle feels more lyrical in general, there were certainly large parts that felt like they should be sung (as suggested in the stage directions, and as they would have been in their original form) far more so than the previous two.

The actual plot line in this play is very short: Antigone buries her brother, against the mandate of the new king of Thebes, and this leads fairly directly to a triple suicide. Cheerful stuff, and without the politics and cliffhangers of the previous plays. It does rather feel like a devastating postscript to a story already dripping with tragedy. The new king seems to have a family as cursed by prophesy as Oedipus's was, but the difference is that he brought it, consciously, upon himself where Oedipus was following a path that seemed to be written for him at birth. There's a difference too in the way each of them copes with his respective downfall. Oedipus finds a renewed faith in his last days and dies mysteriously, vanishing without a trace on a sacred hilltop with at most a single witness sworn to secrecy. All this after living a life exiled for crimes of which he is guilty but couldn't possibly have known it at the time. Kreon, the new king, could be seen to inherit the curse through his association with the family, as it is Antigone's death which leads to his son's suicide, in turn triggering Kreon's wife to follow suit. It was mentioned earlier in the cycle that due to the curse of basically inbreeding, the daughters would never be considered eligible and were expected to die untouched. A more modern story might twist the ending in a more positive light and have Kreon make the right call to save Antigone's life and thus perhaps break the curse and give everyone (who's left by this point) a happy ending... but then, it wouldn't be a tragedy. Instead, he sticks doggedly to his belief that as rightful king his word must be law, and to his plan to see Antigone put to death. With his entire family dead, he realises too late that he has no other choice but to turn to his guards, and have them escort him away.

There are resonances in the final scenes of this play with the deposition scene in Richard II, but rather than stepping down to a usurping Lord as Richard does, Kreon is admitting defeat to prophesy and the Gods themselves. Both have an arrogant sense of right to rule, and both are struck low in a melodramatic way... and both have a strong thread of Faith running through their story. Finally, both seem ready to accept death at the end, seeing no life ahead of them after loss of leadership.

Day 61: Oedipus at Kolonos, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg) ...and EAS Audition.

I'll keep my commentary on both the reading and the audition brief. I'm writing this a day late and wrestling with partly wanting to ignore the entire project (at least for the day) and partly knowing now it's more important than ever to throw myself back in and keep swimming.

Really enjoyed the story here, complete with a mysterious "how did he die" cliffhanger ending Moffat would have been proud of. I did find myself noticing the text feeling a little bit more modern-sounding than I expected, mixed in with other phrases which read like the careful word-for-word translations I remember from learning latin at school. Once again I find myself feeling I can't really comment too much on the translation when I wouldn't be able to read the original and haven't seen any other translations.

I'll admit my focus was a little bit more on this evening's audition than on the reading for the day, so I'll turn a bit of attention to that. For my monologue, I was aware of keeping myself a bit close and protected... exactly what led to doing the T-rex impression in practice. Good to know what my default nervous "tell" is, now I can keep an eye out for it. I could feel myself holding back... and I'll cut to the spoiler, I didn't get in. Thinking about it though, I am five years out of practice, particularly with opening up to an audience. I'll still be doing the weekly Improvers classes, and hopefully that will help me get back some of the confidence I've lost over the years. I suspect not having slept well the night before also didn't help.

Day 58: Oedipus the King, by Sophocles (translation by Robert Bagg)

I may have picked up the Oedipus Cycle book in Waterstones almost entirely because I felt cultured doing so, and joked about being the picture of privilege settling down to read this morning with Classic FM on in the background. As it turned out, my limited knowledge of the story wound up making the whole thing an addictive page-turner. I also found myself wondering why it was never pointed out to me when we were performing Murder in the Cathedral at school that it was quite clearly stylistically based on greek tragedy (something I couldn't have noticed for myself until I'd actually read some). Admittedly that was an extra-curricular performance rather than part of normal lessons. It's just one more time I've found myself cursing time spent in secondary school losing my curiosity for language and history. I wasn't expecting to find quite such a revalation in reading this. If anything I might have been expecting a bit of a slog as I did in Congreve's plays, but this goes back so much further and touches that fascination for ancient civilizations I had in primary school.

I found myself musing that I wouldn't be able to tackle the original material, since greek isn't one of my languages. I picked up a (translated) anthology of Brecht plays at the library today, if I find one of those that I like, I might dust off my decade-out-of-use German to have a go. I doubt I still have enough latin to try anything in that, though I remember at GCSE being given a passage or two of Illiad to play with and loving it. On the subject of languages, I've recently acquired a beginner book of Irish, since my other half lives over there (and has suggested it might be worth applying to one or two schools there as well as here in the UK). Now that I've got the book, I have become suddenly very self-conscious about actually trying to learn to speak the language. I think that's partly because over the years I have learned languages (or at least smatterings of them) either at school or through necessity in places where English wasn't widely spoken. In itself the fact that everyone in Germany is more or less fluent in English made it quite tricky to make full use of exchange programmes - once out there, if you sounded like you were remotely struggling, the locals would just switch to far better English than I could ever hope my German to be. The complete opposite is true backpacking in Tanzania, where apart from hiring a tour guide, it was very useful for a couple of us to make friends with a phrase book for several hours a day and I came back with a few hundred words. That was quite some time ago and I've forgotten most of it, but the joy of codes, riddles and languages (which I think I always approached as more or less the same thing) was a huge part of who I was when I was younger and it's just one more thing I'm eager to reconnect with.

I seem to have massively diverted from the play in question, but for the first time in a while I've found my reading has sparked memories and thought processes at a tangent, and that's worth exploring whenever I can. More specifically then, there are some really quite grisley turns of phrase and graphic gory descriptions of the offstage action. I'd have to see other translations to know for sure, but I suspect those are not an artefact of the translation and are probably some of the closest words to the original intent. Particularly in the earlier part of the play, most of the language wouldn't sound entirely out of place in an entirely modern setting, aside from explicit references to singing and dancing the lines. After the reveal though, the whole thing feels much more deliberately tragic. In performance I'm sure that change of pace would only help the final scenes feel even more devastating. Again though, I'd have to look at other translations to see whether the shift is a common device (and so presumably evident in the original work) or a choice by Bagg to update the voices of the characters for most of the play to appeal to a modern audience.