Picnic Comma Lightning by Laurence Scott

Author:Laurence Scott
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

Intermission

As a brief intermission, let’s return to two vivid obscenities of the Athenian Theatre circuit. It is the fifth century bce. We are back at the doors of the skene. On one side are props and masks and actors, on the other is the circle of the performance, an audience gathered around it in retreating arcs. A pair of notable arrivals through the skene interests us here, because both entrances are somehow against the rules. The first comes from tragedy. There is a story, which some of us moderns might say is from a ‘pre-truth’ world, that the arrival of the Furies onto the stage during performances of Aeschylus’s Eumenides was so outlandish that children fainted and pregnant women in the audience miscarried their babies. While such a tale would likely fail the reality test of today’s over-worked fact-checkers, there is no doubt that the Furies inspired particular dread. It’s possible that the reputation of these blood-lusting deities preceded them, that the very mention of their names, like saying ‘Dalek’ to me in 1987, could be enough to quicken the pulse. Perhaps they were inherently frightening to behold. But the main voltage of their shock-value may have come from the manner of their entrance itself. Aeschylus’s staging in this play is unusual because the Furies arrive through the double doors of the skene. For ancient audiences, this choice of staging would have been astonishing. The Furies, hunting down Orestes for the murder of Clytemnestra, form a malignant chorus, and the traditional domain of the chorus was out front, in the orchestra. In Greek theatre of this period there was a clear division between actors and chorus, represented by the parts of the performing space that they inhabited. There has been debate over whether the actors worked mainly on a raised stage above the orchestra, but it is likely that both actors and chorus roamed around the orchestra, while only the actors made use of the skene’s doors. And so the Furies, being thus unleashed, are in contempt of the laws of the theatre-space. This trespassing surely would have added to their monstrosity.

While the Furies’ occupation of the hidden, obscene spaces of the Theatre of Dionysus is a chilling piece of stage direction, our next guest through the skene’s doors enters to gales of Attic laughter. The scene has shifted to Acharnians, a comedy by Aristophanes. Halfway through the play, the protagonist, Dicaeopolis, calls at the house of the tragic playwright Euripides to ask him for help with an important speech. Euripides’ slave tells Dicaeopolis that his master is ‘within’ and ‘not within’. He means that the poet’s body is in the house, but his mind is elsewhere, composing his tragedies. Yet this riddle becomes a running joke. Euripedes, shouting out through the skene’s doors, reluctantly agrees to see Dicaeopolis, but refuses to leave his writing couch as he has ‘no time to waste’. So how does the audience see inside Euripedes’ house? For such occasions, the Greeks used a piece

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