The Agamemnon of Aeschylus - Louis Macneice

 I keep rediscovring Louis MacNeice.   He was of course pivotal to my thesis on radio drama, having revolutionised the form during World War II, and he is also central to the second series of monographs I am current researching.   The Agamemnon of Aeschylus was translated by MacNeice in 1936, long before he took to radio, but it was performed by the BBC after he scored a massive success with Christopher Columbus and The Dark Tower.   Originally MacNeice made his version for Rupert Doone's Group Theatre, again a central element of my current research.   They certainly hadn't performed it by August 1936 when MacNeice wrote the preface for the Faber first edition, which is what I have been reading.

I of course studied the Oresteia during my first degree at Hull, but that was in the first term (we did the history of drama chronologically) and is now getting on for fifty-three years ago.   I was not a great fan of the lecturer who did the Greeks, nor he of me.   I have tended to avoid them since though I still treasure my Penguin Classic edition.   MacNeice is only concerned with the first play of the trilogy, in which Agamemnon returns to Argos in triumph, having defeated and destroyed Troy.   Aeschylus, said to have been a warrior as a young man, is much more interested in the curse laid upon the House of Atreus.   

Atreus was the father of Agamemnon and Menelaus.   He invited his brother to a feast and served up the butchered remains of his nieces and nephews; only the newborn Aegisthus survived and was brought up in exile.   Agamemnon and Menelaus both became Argive kings and married sisters, Clytemnestra and Helen respectively.   Helen we know ran off with Paris, hence the Trojan war.   Clytemnestra was thought to be loyal to her husband but during his ten-year absence she has become the secret lover of Aegisthus.   She hates Agamemnon because he sacrificed their daughter Iphigeneia to the gods to get a fair wind for Troy.   Now he is finally back, bringing with him one of the Trojan women alloted as slaves to the Greek leaders.   Agamemnon was given Princess Cassandra, daughter of Priam and Hecuba, the prophetess no one believes.   Clytemnestra assumes Cassandra is Agamemnon's sex slave - so she murders them both.

This being Greek drama, the earliest surviving, all this happens in continuous time and the action is all offstage until the 'reveal' of the murder scene.   The audience gets everything reported by the chorus and heralds, the main characters make long set speeches which are then discussed and debated by the chorus.  This, however, all happens on the stage - the raised area at one end of the circular 'orchestra' with a single story building to represent houses, palaces, and general places within.   What scholars argue about is what use, if any, was made of the huge orchestra space.   They tend to agree that it was a dancing area but since we have no extant Greek choreography---

It has always seemed plain to me that the dancers interacted with the drama - registering shock, horror, amusement, concern etc.   It seems to me inevitable that reported action (like, for example, the story of Atreus) was enlivened by being acted out in dance or mime, and that the orchestra did indeed involve live music.

Aeschylus, who died in 456 BC, is the earliest Greek playwright we know of.   That doesn't mean he was necessarily the first, and I doubt very much that the Oresteia was his first play.   He is far too sophisticated for that.   Note, for example, how he breaks up the long speeches with some fast, snappy dialogue between Clytemnestra and the Chorus Leader.   Note also his stagecraft: rather than start with the Chorus, he begins with the watchman, alone on the palace roof, standing guard through the night, as he has done for the past year, and bored out of his skull.   He sees the beacon fire: hasn't a clue what it means.   He descends from the roof - and then the Chorus arrives, a chorus with an identity; they are all old men, the Elders of Argos - and they arrive already debating what the news might be.

I thoroughly enjoyed The Agamemnon as imagined by Louis MacNeice, who was definitely taking his first tentative steps in dramaturgy.   I am tempted to try a paper on how Aeschylus might have influenced MacNeice's next theatrical steps.

It's niche, I know.   But it's my niche.

Starr Bright Will Be With You Soon - Joyce Carol Oates

 Another Joyce Carol Oates?   Yes and no.   Strictly speaking it's Rosamond Smith, a pseudonym Oates used between 1987 and 2001.   And yes, it's another Joyce Carol Oates because it is not possible to have too much of Joyce Carol Oates because she has written so much - and is still writing, more than sixty years after her first novel - and her range is so vast that there has to always be something that appeals.   And there will be more Joyce Carol Oates on this blog because this is only the first of four 'Smith' works (two novels and and two shortish stories) bundled together as Double Trouble in this magnificent new collection from Hard Case Crime, which I was eager to acquire as soon as it was published.

Starr Bright is the story of sisters Sharon and Lily, sisters doubly close in that they are near-identical twins but very different in personality.   Sharon was always that little bit more eye-catching, Lily tending to fade into the background.   Sharon dreams of stardom since her first public appearance on a local TV talent show for kids (featuring the eponymous 'Starr Bright') and heads for the big city at sixteen, returning only once to give birth to a daughter, whom Lily brings up as her own.

Dreams don't always come true.   Now Sharon is nudging forty, losing her looks, and going to cheap motels with unpleasant men to pay the bills.   Sharon and Lily are the daughters of a hellfire pastor - their names are actually Rose of Sharon and Lily of the Valley.   Lily, having stayed home and married and brought up her sister's daughter and cared for her father in his years of long decline, has largely lost her faith.   But Sharon, one night in one particularly skanky motel, is filled with a sense of fire and brimstone, and murders her client, painting stars on the wall and slogans about pigs dying in the victim's blood.   She obviously steals his wallet and his car and thus starts on a career of murder across America.

Finally she turns up on Lily's doorstep, shattered and broken.   She stays over for a few weeks, befriending her daugher Deedee (Dierdre of the Sorrows) though never letting on she is really her mother, flirting a little with Lily's husband Wes, and generally rediscovering her sister and rebuilding a relationship.   Lily, of course, believes she is saving her sibling.   But Sharon has one last mission, one final curtain-call for her demonic alter ego Starr Bright...

It is, of course, a fantastic book, a genuine psychological thriller.   The amount of care Oates/Smith puts into her characters is astonishing, as is the depth of the backstory.   Lethal though Sharon is, humdrum though Lily seems to be, we end up caring for them both.   And it's not just the women, though they are the focus; Wes is the one who has to try and find a balance between the two of them and has a couple of brilliantly executed scenes.

By the way, if you're thinking that 'Rosamond Smith' seems a somewhat lame nom de plume, Oates's first husband and co-founder of The Ontario Review Inc which owns her copyright was Professor Raymond J Smith.

A Reasonable Doubt - Julian Symons

 Got this in a double offer with  The Man Who Lost His Wife (reviewed here last month).  This was the one that caught my eye, the one I really wanted - but it turns out I was much more interested in the novel.   This is non-fiction, stories of famous cases in which Symons argues the accused should never have been convicted, let alone hanged.

What it actually is is three longish accounts of cases in which there really was precious little doubt: Steinie Morrison which was a cause celebre in the first half of the Twentieth Century; the famous porthole case in which a South African minor star was shoved out of the titular porthole and never found; and a squalid saga of feckless husband murdering miserable wife - the Yarmouth Murder, which I was unfamiliar with.   In the latter two cases there is surely no conceivable doubt who did it; Symons' arguments are spurious and take precious little account of the judicial decision-making process.   Obviously I agree that the killers should never have been hanged; the death penalty is always and inexcusably barbaric.   Steinie Morrison, however, was not hanged.   Because there was some doubt (whether it was 'reasonable doubt' is arguable), his sentence was commuted and he died in prison.

The book is padded out with short accounts in which by and large nobody was convicted, though there is precious little doubt who killed the Earl of Erroll or the somewhat unpleasant Sir Harry Oakes.  The one that caught my imagination was the apparently pointless murder of taxi driver Evelyn Foster in January 1931 (in fact, though, the chapter is so hastily put together that I had to Google the date).

It's a book very much of its time (1960) and we should remember, back then hanging was still going on in Britain.   I'm not at all sure which side of the debate Symons was on.

A Prince and a Spy - Rory Clements

 I have reviewed many of Rory Clements' wartime spy series on this blog.   I have enjoyed them all.   This, from 2021, may be the most enjoyable.   Clements sticks to his genre; his mastery of period detail is second to none.   Sometimes he builds his story around a true historical event, as is the case here, with the death in an RAF flying boat accident over Scotland, of HRH George Duke of Kent in 1942.   I was aware of this incident - indeed, I recently watched a TV documentary about it.   But I had somehow got it confused with the defection of Rudolf Hess, which was actually the year before.   Ah well, Clements has straightened me out.

Any royal death by accident draws conspiracy theorists like flies to marmalade.   Clements develops a rather ingenious alternative explanation.   Prince George wasn't secretly flying somewhere, he was returning from a secret meeting somewhere.  On that simple but brilliant inversion the entire novel is constructed.

Professor Tom Wilde has been seconded from Cambridge to the nascent American OSS in London.   With an infant son at home, this puts a massive strain on his domestic arrangements.   He gets involved with the case because President Rossevelt wants to pay official American respects to the late Prince, whose own infant son (Prince Michael) is the President's godson.   So Tom heads for Scotland with an official guarddog in the shape of gay, dandruff-ridden Walter Quayle.   Quayle gets beaten up after propositioning a local lad, which temporarily leave Tom ftee to explore certain anomalies surrounding the crash site.   These include another local lad who claims to have found a woman's body there.

In fact Tom has already met the woman in question, who is very much alive.   He has also been reunited with her platonic boyfriend, a former student of his, who committed suicide in front of him on a train home to Cambridge.   Tom also runs across the young woman's father, the boyfriend's former tutor, whom he finds murdered and dying.   Tom is seen covered in the father's blood and therefore becomes the main supsect for the murder.

That's already quite a slice of plot and there are several levels more.   Clements handles it all with aplomb.  Mainly this is due to his brisk pace - at the end of the day it is, after all, a thriller.   There are fascinating minor characters, several of them associated with a colourful London nightspot, based I suspect on David Tennant's legendary Gargoyle Club.