London Voices, “Greek” Style
In Conjunction With Greek, Part of BAM’s 2018 Next Wave Festival
This article is part of Eidolon’s collaboration with BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music) for their “Speaking Truth to Power” series, co-presented by BAM and the Onassis Cultural Center New York. By publishing these themed essays on Eidolon’s digital platform, we hope to spark dialogue about the series and make its ideas and performances accessible to a broader audience. For more on Speaking Truth to Power, check out BAM’s website and the other articles in our collaboration.
My introduction to the classical world was oblique, and impressively obscene. My parents are musicians, so I spent a lot of my childhood tagging along to rehearsals and concerts around London. When I was about 10, I found myself sitting in on some of the earliest UK performances of Mark-Anthony Turnage’s opera Greek. Asterix comics aside, this was my first encounter with the ancient world. Greek, based on a play by Steven Berkoff, is a brash, burlesque retelling of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, set in a caricatured Thatcherite London riven by dystopian disease, bigotry, and violence. It’s not exactly a child-friendly piece.
As with so many ancient tragedies, the drama of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King emerges not from pivotal events — most of which have taken place before the play begins — but from characters developing a new understanding of themselves over the course of the play. Oedipus’ drive to comprehend his place in the world is fueled by his fascination with language. He begins the play as king of Thebes, desperate to hear, to understand, and to articulate his history and that of the plague-ridden city for which he considers himself responsible since defeating its Sphinx years earlier.
He is an enlightened leader, a champion of free speech, or what the Greeks called parrhesia. “Tell me!”, “Tell everyone!”, punctuates his exchanges with others. He rages against Tiresias when the prophet warily refuses to tell Oedipus what he knows. But when Tiresias does speak the unpalatable truth to power, explaining that Thebes is suffering because Oedipus has killed his father and married his mother, Oedipus suddenly becomes resistant to words and their meanings. He perversely interprets Tiresias’ claims as sedition fomented by his brother-in-law (and uncle) Creon, and refuses to listen to Creon’s denial.
By the end of the play Oedipus, finally forced to face up to the reality of his existence, is broken in body and speech: “Where is my voice?”. Betrayed by the words he initially welcomed, Oedipus cleanses the city of the plague while wreaking violent retribution upon his own body and family: his wife and mother Jocasta hangs herself and Oedipus gouges out his own eyes.
Greek rejigs this narrative and expands its timeframe. The opera begins with Oedipus — now Eddy — leaving the home he shared with his adoptive parents. It tells of how he falls into a sexual relationship with his biological mother, allows 10 years to pass, stages his confrontation with the Sphinx, then addresses his strange reckoning with his family history. Yet words, with their slippery meanings and elusive music, remain as central to Greek as they are to Oedipus the King. Indeed, as in Sophocles’ play, it is the main hero of the opera who is (or becomes) most conscious of how powerful speech can be, for good or ill, when it is properly timed, articulated, and directed.
In Greek the constantly shifting register of Berkoff’s English libretto is matched by Turnage’s thrillingly unpredictable musical setting. Turnage has a magpie approach to composition, a witty allusiveness that matches that of the most learned of the Roman poets; Greek jumbles Sophocles with everything from TV jingles to football songs. My favourite example occurs after Eddy has defeated the Sphinx, when his family sings triumphantly “Nice one Eddy, nice one [beat] son!”. They are echoing the ‘70s song for the Spurs footballer Cyril Knowles, “Nice one Cyril, nice one son! Nice one Cyril, let’s ’ave another one!” while playing brilliantly on the ambiguity of Eddy’s parentage (“son!”).
The opera opens with a choral scene set in a pub. The chorus releases snippets of colloquial, cockney dialectal phrases — “Out of order!”— or partisan local football pride — “Arsenal!” — which punctuate meaningless gabble, “nah nah nah nah.” This is a stereotypical working-class London, whose disempowerment is demonstrated by the chorus’ empty song, projected straight into their pints of beer. Eddy introduces himself with precise references to his supposed birthplace, not singing but speaking with an exaggerated Cockney twang that is written into the score: extended sliding diphthongs in “An-gel” and “Stam-ford Hill,” and dropped syllable in “Tott’nham.” Eddy’s adoptive family are introduced by their racist speech — “send the darkies back to the jungle”; the soundbite is shocking and cruel, but also pathetically clichéd.
Eddy appears to have an instinctive distaste for this world, for its language and its concomitant aggression, small-minded and ineffectual as it is. Yet Eddy is a product of it, and he learns to harness its implicit violence to “better” himself. After he leaves home he is caught up in a riot and beaten by the police. This scene is characterized by a surreal music-language, semi-spoken and semi-sung, in which each kick or punch is verbalized by the aggressor in an aural evocation of comic book fights, or perhaps the Pop Art inspired by them.
The police chant “SMASH CRASH SPLATTER KERACK” in rhythmic unison, to the stamping of their boots. In the production I saw as a child they were accompanied by an old recording of “The Laughing Policeman.” This humorous music-hall song, with its chorus of rhythmic laughter, is given a horrific edge in its new context. The police, figures of authority and institutional violence, laugh and stamp their way through the riot with imperviousness to human suffering even as they vocalize the pain they are doling out: “Oof! Oof!”. These are the crude acoustics of oppression: the authorities’ utterance facilitates their violence. Eddy’s response to being beaten by the police is a furious evocation of the despairing final act of self-inflicted violence performed by Sophocles’ Oedipus. He bellows, “Let me take a skewer and jab their eyes out, lovely — GREEK STYLE!”
Though Eddy is unable to follow through with this threat, he learns from the riot. He proceeds to fall into a fight with a café owner, his unrecognized biological father. As their words turn to physical aggression, Eddy adopts the police’s verbal technique, “Hit Hurt Crunch…”, to the point of murder: “Scream Fury Strength Overpower Overcome.” The café owner’s wife says to Eddy in horror, “You killed him. I never realised words can kill.”
At this point Eddy’s linguistic power suddenly takes on a further dimension. With a surge of desire, he begins the seduction of his mother with the response, “So can looks.” This mastery of double entendre goes on to serve him well. When Eddy confronts the Sphinx he solves their riddle with the help of an innuendo concerning man’s “third leg” in the evening, a joke with all the sophistication of a Benny Hill gag.
At the end of the opera, Eddy finds a way in which words can even overturn the trajectory of the Oedipus myth itself. As Eddy laments his fate, he begins to hum ecstatically, thinking of his mother. Meanwhile he is comforted by the communal voice of his family, which sings to him with unusual lyricism “It doesn’t matter.” In the face of this verbal and musical expression of love, Eddy decides to reject the traditional conclusion to the myth, stating baldly “Bollocks to all that!”.
Over the course of the opera Eddy has grown increasingly confident in his right to speak — and sing — freely, no matter how taboo-bustingly violent, sexual, or loving his language is. This has taken him from the solipsistic, beer-swilling inadequacies of the opening scene in the pub, to the thwarting of the Sphinx and cleansing of the city of London, while also assuring his own happiness at home and his social elevation (“our colour TV, hi-fi, home movies showing fair Ibiza and Thebes”). Eddy’s parrhesia, a power drawn from ancient Greece, paradoxically guarantees the burlesque ending of Greek: love conquers all, tragic myth is subverted, and Eddy lives a yuppie lifestyle with his mother happily ever after.
Greek is directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins. The show will run at BAM Howard Gilman Opera House from December 5–9, 2018. You can find more information and buy tickets online here.
Emily Pillinger is Lecturer in Latin Language and Literature at King’s College London. Her first book Cassandra and the Poetics of Prophecy in Greek and Latin Literature will be out in early 2019. She is currently researching the use of Greco-Roman myth and history in music composed after the Second World War.
