My first production at Leeds was the Agamemnon of Aeschylus, in the translation of Louis MacNeice, done for the Leeds University Union Theatre Group, then under the Presidency of Professor Bonamy Dobrée, in 1946. Since the problems raised by the intermingling of rhetoric and colloquialism in the long chorus pieces of the drama’s first movement may be related to our discussions (pp. 275–7) of this same intermingling, which T. S. Eliot once observed as a main Elizabethan characteristic (‘Seneca in Elizabethan Translation’, II), in Shakespeare, a brief account of the production may be of interest.
During some preliminary discussion two points were raised which are worth recording. These were, that the Watchman on the housetop who speaks first constitutes a difficulty in set-design; and that the use of masks might be a good idea.
For the first. It is a dangerous but not unusual error to let a single incident control the design of a permanent set. I have seen a permanent setting for Antony and Cleopatra arranged in such a way that the quite unimportant hoisting up of Antony at his death should be effective, though the visual result was of no significance till then. The Watchman is perfectly well placed on the palace steps. Picked out by lights, and with no known referentials to indicate his height, he can deliver his lines to full effect. As for the masks, such attempts to strike an archaeological note would be in any case useless without the original Greek surroundings and climate, the vast open theatre, and so on. Besides, the principle involved is wrong. What is wanted today is a better use of facial and bodily expression than is usual, not a muffling; faces are too often muffled as it is by their own mask-like dullness. Moreover, our tendency should be towards a freer use of the physical than is usual, not towards the obscuring of what is normally revealed.
We used a Mycenean setting to tone with the drama’s barbaric and Dionysian quality, using two dark pillars widening to the top to give us a palace front of ominous impact. A white or grey edifice would have been less suitable. Classic architecture is so widespread that it holds no overtones of mystery: it is so easy to think oneself in Cheltenham. Besides, the effect is rather Apollonian than Dionysian, and that is not helpful for Aeschylus, though for Sophocles our choice might be different. We had costumes of a more or less Mycenean design using effects of naked shoulders, or for a slave more than that, to build a sense of the barbaric.
The palace door was central between the pillars; steps led down, and the main stage had a central platform and two more levels; there were also two small fore-stages, on a yet lower level, at either side of the proscenium, so that when they were used the drama widened out. The auditorium of the Riley Smith Hall at Leeds extends too far on either side of the proscenium for intimacy, and this widening out of our stage did much to remedy the fault. It has two downstage porticos which made entrances on to the fore-stages easy.
The suggestion of a palace front at one side of the stage was ruled out. The Chorus would lose power. Whether in an ancient or in a modern production its function is to act between audience and actors. When other characters were on the stage it was placed down-stage at the wings and on the fore-stages, widening out on both sides.
Aeschylus’ use of the chorus in the Agamemnon is unique and presents unique problems in staging. The first third of the play is nearly all chorus, serving as a kind of vast prologue to the trilogy of which the Agamemnon is the beginning. These early choric passages constitute probing commentaries of considerable power, but also of considerable obscurity to a modern audience. They discuss the background of mysterious evil impinging on the House of Atreus, and the various rights and wrongs, hereditary, personal, civic and international, from which the action develops. It was necessary that the Chorus should, if only because there is so much of it, be dramatically exciting, even if not fully understood; and that meant working out manifold variations in speech and action to give stage impact to the meanings. The producer must study the text’s meanings in detail; the audience is to receive, not these meanings intellectually apprehended, but their stage embodiment. Here we have a peculiarly vivid example of a general principle.
Our chorus was composed of six men and six women. Lines were allotted to separate persons according to their voices and speaking in unison was rare, though much was made of crowd repetitions and crowd murmurs. In MacNeice’s translation the speeches divide fairly easily into the colloquial and the formal. The former were given to the men who expressed the communal power of crowd reaction, and the latter to the women who expressed the other, numinous and Sibylline, power of foreboding. The division was in alignment with the nature of poetic, and especially Shakespearian, drama, depending as it did on the interweaving of the colloquial and the formal. We had continual movement. The one group would be central, the other either behind or more usually outfurling down to the side fore-stages, three on either side; and then the men and women would change position, their every movement however appearing to come naturally and being designed not merely to chime with, but also to help interpret, the text. The men, but not the women, carried sticks or staves and acted with burly realism; the women acted in a more stylized fashion. But the former on occasion worked up to a semi-stylized unity of action and voice, and the latter used muted conversation. The men acted freely and individually, and the women sometimes used mime, those of them not speaking miming the speaker’s words. Much of the effect for both groups depended on the way speeches were split up among appropriate voices, a single sentence being often made to leap, as it were, from one side to the other of the stage by being divided between two or more speakers at a distance.
This was my arrangement for the early choruses. The six men enter on the main stage, starting ‘The tenth year it is …’ The speeches are at first so divided that each has a few lines. Changes occurred at: ‘Their hearts howling’, ‘But above there is One’, ‘Many the dog-tired’, ‘Things are what they are’, ‘For the marrow’, ‘While the man’. During this, they move about, variously; any murmurs, laughs, or repetitions that are helpful can be used.
Now the six women enter up-stage of the men who are grouped towards the wings, and, half-addressing the palace, speak the words from ‘But you, daughter of Tyndareus’ to ‘eating away our hearts’. Sentences can be split. At ‘From here, from there, all sides, all corners’, the four pieces can go to different persons, but the supplication ‘Of these things tell’ is spoken by all, at least down to ‘trouble’, though the last lines are better with one or two voices only. The women are now looking up-stage, directly addressing the palace.
The men eagerly interrupt, offering answers. They take central positions down-stage and in front of the women. One, my ‘No. 4’ man, spoke from ‘Of the omen’ to ‘angry birds’. Then followed some rapid-fire interruptions, as follows. I give the men’s numbers from my prompt script:
5: |
Kings of the birds to our kings came, |
6: |
One with a white rump, the other black, |
5: |
Appearing near the palace on the spear-arm side |
4: |
Where all could see them, |
1: |
Tearing a pregnant hare with the unborn young, |
Men: |
Foiled of their courses. |
Women: |
Cry, cry upon Death—1, 2, 3 (Men): but may the good prevail. |
Next a long sequence was given to 2, until the second ‘Cry, cry upon Death; but may the good prevail’, spoken by the six men. The third and last time it was spoken by the whole company.
The men’s acting was realistic, as of a crowd of people. The lines were allotted nevertheless with exact care as to their voices, deep or light. A woman speaks the quoted passage ‘But though you are so kind, goddess’ down to ‘forgetting its due’. Then a man speaks. Men shake their heads at ‘evil and good together’. These last speeches were given with the women in a line upstage and the men in two groups of three in front down-stage and widening out a little, but all still on the main stage. In the prayer to Zeus all come close, making a circular group, as round an altar. After it the men stump down to the two small fore-stages far right and left, three to each, muttering, as they move, about the law ‘that men must learn by suffering’, shaking their heads, speaking in turn, being platitudinously wise.
This leaves the women alone on the main stage for the long passage, starting ‘So at that time …’ After the men’s doubtful mumblings the women sound a clearer note, reminding us of wrongs and evils, here the wrong of Iphigenia’s sacrifice. Changes of voice occurred at ‘For unable to sail’, ‘But the winds that blew from the Strymon’, ‘Then the elder king’, ‘But when he had put on the halter of Necessity’, ‘Her prayers and her cries of father’, Then dropping on the ground her saffron dress’. At ‘the third libation’ the men start to move up from the fore-stages, so leaving free passages for the women to come there during their platitudinous, but more formally delivered, lines, divided among them variously, from ‘The sequel to this’ down to ‘the shining of the dawn’. At Clytemnestra’s entry the men are on the main stage to meet and talk to her and the women on the two fore-stages. Clytemnestra tells them of Agamemnon’s victory. The war is over.
Movements of the Chorus following ‘The hymn for happiness at the third libation’ and leading up to Clytemnestra’s entry.
After Clytemnestra’s exit we have another long chorus, in which the men show a repellent complacency, attributing the victory to Zeus:
This at least can be established,
They have fared according to his ruling.
When one of them observes how foolishly some deny that providence punishes wickedness, a new voice breaks in with ‘It is the impious man says this …’ When someone says ‘Measure is the best’ there are murmurs of approval, ‘Ay, ay’. Great excitement is registered at
Who makes such things his practice
The gods destroy him.
Murmurs repeat angrily, ‘Yes, destroy him’. The men’s talk should arouse a sense of the provisionality and superficiality of their triumph.
Now the women take over. The four lines ‘This way came Paris’ to ‘stealing the wife of his host’ were spoken by the men, moving down to the sides, and then repeated by the women, who again take the central position. The women speak allotted sections in separate single voices, down to the lines on the bereavement of women:
For those they sent to war
They know, but in place of men
That which comes home to them
Is merely an urn and ashes.
Others accompanied the last line with appropriate action, pointing to the earth.
Now comes our third movement, driving home the futility of the war. The men are no longer triumphant. They are caught by the women’s mood. At the women’s words ‘But for another man’s wife’ they murmur; at ‘muffled and muttered words’ they are looking half up-stage, and threaten the palace with their staves. They face it more deliberately, repeating the women’s phrases ‘sons of Atreus’ and ‘Trojan ground’, in anger. All are now moving up to the palace, backs to the audience, in a close group. A man’s voice, the figure sideways, half facing up-stage, threatens
Heavy is the murmur of an angry people
Performing the purpose of a public curse.
A woman on the palace steps, facing across, cries
There is something cowled in the night …
A woman is still speaking at
the black
Furies in time
When a man prospers in sin
but the whole company, men and women, now come in with terrifying volume, while all turn to the audience, faces flashing out and gestures strong with uplifted arms and staves, for
By erosion of life reduce him to darkness.
That is our climax, ‘darkness’ being spoken with explosive force. We cut from ‘Who, once among the lost can no more be helped’, following on with two resounding, but not shouted, concluding sentences, spoken by men. One says, deeply, ‘Over-great glory is a sore burden’ and the other more resonantly: ‘The high peak is blasted by the eyes of Zeus’. This was our curtain line, on a rising note. Aeschylus’ long movement, for there is a unity as of a single ‘act’ running through it all, received in this way a fitting modern exposition. The concentration has been severe and tiring, and an interval is needed.
There has been little speaking in unison. I was asked what I was doing for what the Greeks called their choric ‘dance’, the word covering formal procession and movement. But there was little need of any specialized technique. The action was made to grow naturally from the living text, and an unspecialized knowledge of movement and gesture was enough. Reliance was placed on the performers’ varied voices in mutual interplay with each other and with stage movement. Speaking in unison was left mainly for repetition of something already said, or for words that could not suffer by it. These choruses are of a peculiar kind, and build a dramatic atmosphere from many precise details and contrasts which, though their intellectual content may not be fully received by the audience, must be adequately, and that means excitingly, projected. Groups of people chanting together, whatever they may be saying, convey as a rule no more than a general sense of groups of people chanting together. Instead of that we generated an electrical atmosphere.
The remaining action was easier, being more ordinarily dramatic. The chorus men were grouped on the main stage, sometimes four on one side and two on the other. The women, used for appropriate speeches, entered and left by the down-stage porticos on to the two fore-stages. When the chorus was alone we followed the principles already indicated.
Cassandra is a short part, but difficult. Her every speech is different: trance, clairvoyance, terror, pathos, lyricism, horror, denunciation, bitterness, fury, pride, resignation—never were such changes so compacted. The unique stage power and dramatic inclusiveness of her brief scene may be referred to its occult contacts. A similar power is found in the Ghost scenes of Hamlet: the dramatic essence and the occult are in close relation.
Agamemnon’s important entry into his palace over a purple carpet demands care. The drape must first be held up so that everyone can see it, the action being accompanied by doubtful murmurs from the Chorus. His actual ascent cannot be too openly disapproved, or there is no glory; and yet acclamations would be wrong. We used a long fanfare, accompanied by deadly silence from the community. Afterwards Agamemnon’s blood-stained body was shown through the doors naked but for the net, making a lurid cameo of horror and beauty.
An interesting problem arose concerning the talk and movements of Clytemnestra. After her crime she is up-stage talking exultantly to the men, drunk with the intoxication of murder. But soon after the chorus of women, on the fore-stages, attribute the deed to the household demon, and as her intoxication wears off Clytemnestra agrees. For her agreement she came down-stage, walking as in a trance, and standing frozen, speaking in a statuesque formality matching that of the women and the nature of the insight being recorded.
It is important to make sure of crowd-work, as when Clytemnestra and Aegisthus are threatened by the crowd at the end; their defence was arranged by the entry of a negro body-guard with bows and arrows. There is a danger in leaving crowds to get right at the last moment; they need as much care as any individual performance, perhaps more, and exact rehearsal. The secret of production consists very largely in giving care to those matters which will not get right by nature and leaving to nature what will.
Since the Agamemnon is only the first part of a trilogy its action looks forward. Louis MacNeice composed for us a choric epilogue to round off the performance with some indication of what was to follow. We used only our six women on the main stage. I print the text as given us except for the numerals in brackets which indicate the voices actually used. Only the producer, who knows his people and their vocal qualities, can decide this. Here is the epilogue:
It may seem that a single voice was sometimes used where three or more would have been better; but I knew the actual voices and the effect gained was powerful. The withholding of all the voices until near the end had a peculiarly strong impact following our usual principle of gathering power, the climax coming on ‘Only blood’ and ‘Her own’. After that the words were more quiet, but firm, and emphatically and deliberately drawn out with pauses at ‘Well—we—know.’ Throughout vivid tonal contrasts were used, rising for lilting questions and deep for such words as ‘The anger of a murdered man.’ This brilliantly devised epilogue made a perfect conclusion.