Dikaiopolis' Directorial Deliberations: Dover

'There are practical limits to changing and augmenting a play once rehearsals have begun, and whenever we consider the relation between the subject of an Aristophanic play and the political situation at the time of its performance we must not forget that the situation at the time of composition was sometimes significantly different.' These are words that will ring true to anyone who hand a hand in our production of the Acharnians last year, in which Rumsfeld played a starring role, Bush and Cheney were lampooned, and a private peace was made with the Iraqis, several months after the accession to power of a new American Pericles.

They were written by Kenneth Dover, the doyen of scholars of Attic Old Comedy, in his classic survey Aristophanic Comedy. Our usually merry troupe was saddened by the recent death of Sir Kenneth, whose personality was as multi-faceted as his scholarship (only the Telegraph's obituary lives up to its subject's notoriously high standards of frankness), and Dikaiopolis could think of no better way of paying tribute to the former president of his undergraduate college than by working through Dover's exemplary comic textbook and bringing some of his arguments about the staging of Clouds to 'light' here.

One of Dover's virtues as a scholar was a stubborn refusal to move beyond what was warranted by the available evidence, though at times this could lead him into minor absurdity. For example, Dover insists (in his edition of Clouds) that there is no reason to believe that the unnamed creditors who come in near the end of the play correspond to Pasias and Ameinias, the two creditors Strepsiades complains about at the beginning of the play. It is certainly true, as Dover points out, that it makes no sense for Strepsiades to shoo away the second creditor with the words 'Get a move on, Pasias!', as occurs in some manuscripts, since it is the first anonymous creditor who asks for the twelve thousand minae Strepsiades has previously complained of owing to Pasias. But this this textual corruption is cleaned up easily enough by substituting the variant samphoras - 'Get a move on, you particular breed of ancient Greek horse!', or 'Run like a Dodge Viper' in our version. And, once that is taken care of, it is hard to see why we shouldn't go ahead and identify the two creditors as (in our version) with the employees of the Bank of American and Mastercard that Shifty whined about at the beginning of the play.

A more pressing issue, and one of Dikaiopolis' current directorial dilemmas, is how many doors are required in the stage-building (or skene) to do what Aristophanes's script seems to want us to do. No surviving tragedy - apart from one scene in Aeschylus' Libation Bearers - requires more than one door, though stage-buildings may not have been absolutely identical in both tragedy and comedy. There are definitely three doors in Menander's play The Grump, but this was first performed in 316 B.C., half a decade after Aristophanes' last plays. This director would like there to be only one door, partly because it makes the set-design simpler! But he has to admit that one door becomes awkaward in Clouds. For example, near the beginning of the play, Strepsiades says 'Do you see that door and the little house' referring to Socrates' school; but after his son Pheidippides refuses to enter the school, he nonetheless anounces 'Well, then, I'll go inside' - so he must be talking about his family home. This case can, just about, be dealt with by simply leaving to the audience the task of switching the identity of the stage-building when necessary (as seems to be done in Frogs when Dionysus travels from Herakles' house to Pluto's). Or it can be dealt with just by making Shifty show his son a brochure of the school rather than pointing to it (which is what we've done).

Dover thought that the final scene of Clouds made the use of two doors in the play a virtual certainty. Earlier on, Strepsiades was convinced by Socrates that dinos (the Vortex) has replaced Zeus, but after seeing the error of his newfound intellectual ways, he announces that that was only what he was taught 'by this dinos' (here meaning a large type of ancient Greek pot). Shortly afterwards, a repentant Strepsiades has an intimate conversation with the traditional deity Hermes. 'When we remember that a herm [a kind of statue] representing Hermes, normally stood at an Athenian's front door, it seems plausible to suggest that two doors are in use: one, flanked by the conventional herm, represents Strepsiades' house, and the other, flanked by a dinos type of pot, symbolizing the Dinos in which the Socratics believe, represents the school'. This may be a plausible suggestion, but it is also rather speculative, and it doesn't seem to me to be too hard to imagine Strepsiades fetching a pot and a statuette at some point from the skene. Stage-buildings did occasionally simply serve as stroage-rooms for stage-properties, as when the Old Man suddenly orders for a mat to be brought out from the skene in Thesmophoriozusae.

We could close with any number of bon mots from a formidably sententious classicist. (For example: 'The noisy expulsion of gas from the bowels has as good a claim as anything in our experience to be absolutely and unconditionally funny.') But luckily for us, Dover seems to have left some explicit words of encouragement for our project. 'It is always easy to pick holes in other people's translations, and nothing like so easy to produce a translation which will make an audience laugh when it is performed.' And, as if he had been present at last year's performance of Acharnians, he caps his sentence by assuring the reader, 'the modern American translations do make audiences laugh.'

Discussing aspects of production

SCIT conducted its second Stanford Classics Reception Workshop colloquium on March 2, this time covering aspects of production for our 2010 show, Aristophanes' Clouds.

We were lucky enough to enjoy the input of faculty at this session, as well as the perspective of a local thespian, Mr. Bennett Fisher of the Atmos Theatre Company and San Francisco Theater Pub. The latter company produced a version of Euripides lone surviving satyr play the Cyclops featuring our own James Kierstead; the present writer was privileged to see it, and to enjoy a frosty beverage at the bar where it was conducted! How's that for restoring some of the old Dionysiac spirit to Classical drama?

The first set of problems we tackled involved the staging of the agon or "debate" scene from the Clouds, the details of which I will not disclose for the sake of those who want to be surprised at the final show. At the time of the colloquium I presented a paper on the history of interpretations of this scene and on some aspects of the ancient staging. According to one ancient commentator, Aristophanes presented the two participants in the debate onstage as fighting cocks in wicker cages, a scene possibly (though not probably) depicted on the image below of the "Getty birds," from a near-contemporary vase. Needless to say, we will not be replicating this now-obscure metaphor.

Other important issues that came up during this presentation included: whether or not we should supplement comic dialogue with creative staging, pantomime, and tableau, or let the words speak for themselves; how to get an audience into a debate on stage, where it's more about ideas and language than action; and how to create characters who are convincing amalgams of pop-culture stereotypes without being puzzling or distracting.

Next we discussed Socrates' infamous entrance scene. (If you read Plato's Apology you'll see that this scene stuck in many people's minds!) How could we pull it off? Does our performance space permit such "special effects"? And can we do it without breaking our Socrates' neck? (Yes, of course, Mr. Perry, if you're reading this...)

Finally, we talked about our Cloud chorus, which is the one really unchanged holdover from the original Greek version. Choruses are always tricky beasts to incorporate into a modern production, and can run the gamut from being seamlessly integrated into the action to being awkward appendages that no modern audience understands. In our case we also have to address the problem of presenting a chorus which, in 423 BCE, would have made perfect sense as a representation of new, "sophistic" deities tied to developments in natural science, but which now has its closest equivalent in the phrase "head in the clouds." In any case, we're committed to giving our chorus even more song-and-dance numbers than last year, and to getting as creative as possible with our presentation of fluffy white "cloudness."

We came away from the colloquium with several great new ideas and helpful recommendations. Our next step is to read through the script with our wonderful cast!