beyond our studies This year, we have invited two students to give us their impressions of taking part in university drama and sport at the highest level.
The Greek Play The 2010 production of the Cambridge Greek play, the Agamemnon by Aeschylus, was by all accounts one of the best of recent years. The tradition of performing a play in Greek every three years goes back to 1882 – this was the 40th in the series. We asked Phoebe Haines, who gave an outstanding performance as Cassandra, to write about her experience. Katherine Jack, a third year Education with English and Drama student, played Clytemenestra. Aeschylus tells us to ‘Overcome fear, and behold wonder’. The business of getting on a stage in any capacity involves a certain amount of fearquashing; to trounce these fears whilst performing in an ancient language is a veritable challenge. I approached my commitment to the Greek Play with a certain degree of hesitancy. Having quelled a number of rumours involving our director’s alleged determination to retain total ‘faithfulness’ to the script (which would have involved compulsory head-shaving and nudity on my part), by the end of Easter Term 2010 I felt ready to begin tackling the task at hand: namely, to learn Ancient Greek in a matter of weeks. While I had had some brief and baffling encounters with Latin at prep school, I had no prior experience of Greek. The language, with its lyrical lines and strangely guttural consonants, sounded to me at first like some sort of bizarre and incomprehensible Welsh/ Elvish hybrid. After a few sessions with the wonderful Profs Diggle and Bowen, I fell truly and obsessively in love with this strange language. Rarely approached from the spoken angle, Ancient Greek is a language that evokes a totally fascinating and visceral soundworld. It’s also a joy to sing. Coming from an operatic background, I am used to learning at least the spoken
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contours of a range of languages, from Italian to Catalan. The difficulty with languages such as Russian and Greek is the difference in alphabet. So the first interpretative step was to convert the Greek alphabet into phonetics which I could speak and understand. While much debate is meted out over the exact phonetic sounds of the Ancient Greek language, the commonly accepted versions contain quite a few sounds that aren’t found in many modern western European languages, such as the ‘kh’ sound (found in modern day Russian and Hebrew). Once I had negotiated
my way around the twists and turns of this rich and flamboyantly textured language, I found that the process of characterisation followed with a greater sense of immediacy and intimacy than usual. Aeschylus uses language to characterize his dramatis personae in an almost incomprehensibly complex way. Like Shakespeare, a prescriptive style of blank verse is used, though Aeschylus’ poetic convention of choice (the dochmiac) is far more intricate than our iambic pentameter. Where Shakespeare’s