My abiding memory of Tony Harrison’s play at the National Theatre in 1990 is of a chorus of clog-dancing satyrs with toweringly erect phalluses. Even if the mock penises in this revival tend to dangle, there is nothing limp about Jimmy Walters’ production, nor about a work that uses the discovery of a lost Greek satyr play to offer some sharp barbs on contemporary culture.
Harrison starts by showing two Oxford papyrologists, Grenfell and Hunt, coming across fragments of Sophocles’s The Ichneutae at a site in Egypt in 1907. The two men then transmute into characters from the play: the manic Grenfell turns into the god Apollo grieving at the loss of his cattle, and Hunt into Silenus whose attendant satyrs discover that the stolen cowhide has been used by the infant Hermes to create a lyre. It’s a slight piece, of which only 400 lines survive, but Harrison fills out the story and uses it to attack the divorce in today’s world between high and low art.
In the quarter-century since Harrison wrote the piece, the idea of rigid cultural hierarchies has been radically questioned, with areas of supposed elitism eagerly embracing popular entertainment: you now get musicals in the opera house, and a week of Ivor Novello on Radio 3. But Harrison’s argument that we lack the wholeness of the Greek imagination, in which a tragic trilogy was followed by a comic satyr play, still has weight – and his rhyming verse is a constant delight. It’s hard not to warm to a play in which Apollo says of Hermes: “This bovver babe, this bovicidal maniac – I’ll beat him black and blue to get my bulls back.”
Walters’ production makes clever use of a tiny space, Philip Lindley’s design captures the debris of a desert dig, and there are good performances from Tom Purbeck as the wild-eyed Grenfell/Apollo, Richard Glaves as the earthbound Hunt/Silenus and Peta Cornish as a wasp-waisted nymph. Practising what he preaches about the union of high and low art, Harrison even gets us to sing along to a chorus from Sophocles.
- At the Finborough, London, until 28 January. Box office: 0844 847 1652.
