FEBRUARY 2002

Northern Voices: The Rule of the Performance of Greek Tragedy in Creating and Redefining Identities and Boundaries

Dr. Steve Woodward, the Open University, UK

I would like to concentrate my discussion on Barrie Rutter's production for Northern Broadsides of Blake Morrison's Oedipus in order to keep a narrow focus and because the work of Northern Broadsides directly addresses and neatly encapsulates the issues with which I am concerned. Ted Hughes, Tony Harrison and Simon Armitage, three other poets associated with the north and all born in Yorkshire , have created versions of Greek tragedies in recent years. Harrison with his film Prometheus (1998) and Armitage with his transformation of The Madness of Herakles into Mister Heracles (2000) have both also been involved in the processes leading to performance, the former as film director and the latter testing his lines in actors' workshops at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds, UK. Any wider consideration, therefore, of northern voices would require detailed consideration of their plays, to which could be added the radio drama Medea: Mapping the Edge , set in ‘unexpected places in Sheffield' and ‘echoing' classical myth (Radio 3, 25 th November 2001), even though they do not constitute a specific school or movement.

To return to Northern Broadsides, I would like to focus on their performance of Oedipus at The Old Riding Stables, Thoresby in Nottinghamshire at 9.00 p.m. on Friday 9 th November 2001, examining it in a straightforward way through a series of questions. Through this process I hope to highlight the role of performance, something notoriously difficult to pin down, in the construction of identities and boundaries. The questions I would like to ask use the simplest of words of interrogation added to the rest of the question ‘…did the performance take place?': Why? With what script? Where? To whom? When? By whom? With what dramatic/theatrical techniques?

Why did the performance take place? Apart from obvious answers involving financial recompense and obligation, this question is directed towards the company's mission statement, which is readily available on its web-site ( www.northern-broasides.co.uk ) and is concerned specifically with ‘regional style'. It goes further to explain a ‘voice style' embedded in the North of England whose ‘rhythm and cadence have a percussive energy that heighten the passion of the drama'. This appears to position the style precisely, but, if one looks more closely, it is not precise. What is the North of England? Some hard-line Tykes might equate it with Yorkshire, especially given the fact that Northern Broadsides' base is in Halifax . Others might have a general idea of the northern identity that embraces not only Yorkshire and adjacent counties east of the Pennines but also Lancashire and other counties to the west. Others would also reach further south or north. Relative space, therefore, is important. Allied to this is the problem of voice. For, if the area defined as northerly is wide, accent as one expression of it will not be uniform. Nor will cultural expectations and practices, another important aspect of voice, be uniform in view of differences of class, gender and ethnicity. One way round this apparent impasse is to set up an opposition to the North. If the South is seen as such an opposite, the North can be defined in terms of other, as not being the South. This may, of course lead to stereotyping, when, for example, some people in the North could be seen to have more in common with some from the South, - and what about the Midlands? - but despite complexities of definition some progress can be made, especially if one centres on the particular aspects of speech highlighted above, in particular the short ‘a' and ‘u' sounds as an example of ‘percussive speech', which stand in clear opposition to speech more characteristic of the South of England and, in particular, the received pronunciation that has tended to be the vehicle of spoken theatrical discourse.

I would now like to move across to my second question. Based on what script did the performance take place? Barrie Rutter commissioned Blake Morrison to write a version of Oedipus using vernacular language. Morrison did just this, opening his version with a statement by Oedipus designed to show to the people of Thebes that he has the common touch: ‘Now then…' This in itself is not particularly northern in tone and Morrison admits elsewhere ( in an article about the song ‘On Ilkla' Moor Baht'At', Granta 76, winter 2001) that complexities of voice exist even within Yorkshire, making understanding of dialect difficult, but it does conform to the ‘common sense' idea that a northern voice is direct and blunt. In a programme note Edward Pearce goes further than this to assert that there is ‘demotic clarity' in such expression. Morrison certainly avoids complicated language throughout and through Oedipus insists both to the chorus and to the audience ‘I speak the same tongue as you'. Monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon vocabulary is often combined with wise saws (Jocasta: Life's a bran-tub. You take pot luck), humorous asides (Oedipus: I can't believe it! They're on their knees again.) and gritty statements (Oedipus: …the man who killed his father and fucked his Mum…), the percussive sound of the short ‘u' sound reinforcing the plainness of the utterance. What Morrison has done is to create a space with northern connotations, accentuated by the off-stage spaces described, where sheep are ‘on't tops' and ‘dry-stone walls' separate fields and territories.

In order to make further progress I would now like to turn to my third and fourth questions. Where did the performance take place? To whom did the performance take place? I am taking these together, as they are related. The venue was the the renovated old stables of a large estate in Nottinghamshire and it struck me that in order to reach it I, just like Northern Broadsides, had to cross a boundary to reach it. Actually I had to cross just one large boundary, the one between South Yorkshire (Rotherham) and Nottinghamshire, although along the way I passed through several villages, each proudly sporting its own signposts. Oedipus also crosses boundaries, notably between Thebes and Corinth , the play thus homing in on the shifts in identity that this can entail not only within the play but also for the audience. Morrison has created an approachable world through his language, which is deliberately intended to draw in people of the North (whilst presumably not excluding those who are not). I live in the North by this definition and, even though I crossed a county boundary into what many would call the Midlands , I was still in a territory served by Northern Broadsides, which makes it, in a sense, the North of their mission statement. My participation in the performance, therefore, as a member of the audience involved me bringing with me my mental map of who I was and where I had travelled from. This was also true of everyone else in the audience, each person taking in the world presented by the play. The fact that this particular play explores identity makes the experience all the more resonant.

I will now move to my fifth question. When did the performance take place? Clearly, as stated above, there was a particular time and date of performance, which happened to be on a Friday evening. I happened to be in the audience with perhaps one hundred and fifty other people, each one of whom had a particular reason for attending and brought a particular history. Some came in community transport provided by Nottingham City Council, some young people were on a school trip and some came singly, in pairs or in small groups. Thus they we had disparate identities. Yet for an hour and a half we became a communal grouping.

I will now link this to my related sixth and seventh questions. By whom did the performance take place? With what dramatic/ theatrical techniques did the performance take place? Any theory of performance involves performers and audience and in the case of Attic theatre the chorus is essential too as an intermediary dynamic force. In this production the chorus was a relatively small, flexible group of seven actors, four of which doubled up in other parts. They were unmasked and not only wore similar stylised rustic costumes to those worn by other characters (apart from Oedipus who was besuited) but also spoke in a similar style and with similar language, commenting at one point, for example, that Oedipus ‘…heads for a pratfall and deserves…what he gets'. Props were simple and staging practical with no special area for the chorus. Thus there was a communal grouping on stage in two senses, firstly as the community depicted in the play and secondly as the community of Northern Broadsides, which regularly performs a variety of plays. This was linked through performance to the particular audience that had gathered on that particular evening.

Where does this leave us? I would like to make three concluding observations. Firstly, although performance can be a transforming experience, identities and boundaries, being difficult to define, are as easily stereotyped and reinforced as transformed, re-created and redefined. This is as true of Northern Voices as of others, but I would like to think that in view of their aims Northern broadsides should be seen on the more positive side of that spectrum. Secondly, Oedipus Tyrannos is an appropriate play to use in this area as it is concerned primarily with the search for identity and the crossing of boundaries. Thirdly, perhaps it is possible through analysing modern performance of received texts to look imaginatively at performance in 5 th century Athens .

[Please note that further details (reviews/cast etc) of the productions Steve refers to above may be found on the Reception of Texts Project Database : http://www2.open.ac.uk/ClassicalStudies/GreekPlays/

The Reception Project DB id reference numbers for performances referred to are as follows: Prometheus - DB id 946; Mister Herakles - DB id 2584; Mapping the Edge - DB id 2622; Oedipus - 2620.]