A long time ago, in the early days of Mamma Mia! a family of Americans dashed up to the Prince Edward box office, five minutes after curtain, in the hope of buying tickets. The children, aged five or six, looked totally devastated when they learned that the show was sold out. The parents only slightly less so.
“What else is good?” the mother asked.
“Well The Medea is really excellent” the Box Office Clerk enthused.
“Where’s it playing?” asked the father, brandishing his SOLT theatre guide.
“It’s just five minutes down the road,” the clerk replied “And it doesn’t start till eight fifteen, so you can easily make it.”
The family made off, showering him with thanks.
“…but it’s not really like Mamma Mia!” he called after them.
That was quite possibly the understatement of the decade. Although there is something quite appealing in the idea of Donna sacrificing Sophie, pegged out on the taverna patio, to the strident strains of ABBA classics. Perhaps Benny and Björn would consider using a Sophocles script for a sequel? (if Pierce Brosnan’s singing wasn’t enough tragedy for one franchise).
The serial disruptors who occupied the Greek Islands (and mainland) back at the dawn of History (a Greek invention) must have had a sense of humour. Because they named another of their inventions ‘Tragedy’ or 'The Song of the Goat,’ because the wailing, woe-struck actors sounded exactly like the horny-headed ruminants they heard bleating on the hillsides every morning on their way to the ‘gym’ (…another Ancient Greek Start-Up).
Thin, mountainous soil made for fine soldiers back then, because you had to look to other peoples’ land to fill your larders, and a couple of hundred years later these same fiercely competitive (‘Olympics’, another Greek first) and technologically advanced (ditto ‘atomic theory’) peoples conquered The Known World (as it was known then).
Their leader was a young Rich Kid, of deceptively diminutive stature, who hailed from Macedonia, the rockiest part of this rocky region. And everywhere he travelled, the young Alexander The Great took a jewelled casket that he’d acquired in battle from the previous ‘King Of The Known World,’ the Persian Emperor Darius III. This casket contained Alexander’s most precious possession, and we are told that he slept with it by his side every night (a totally uninsurable risk given Alex’s legendary alcohol consumption)
In West End terms, the casket contained the book and lyrics for a ten-hour through-sung touring production that had played to packed Houses across the Hellenic world for eight hundreds years (eat your heart out Cameron and Andrew) and was known, on the road, as Homer’s The Iliad.
Okay, it is a war story, and Alex was something of a legendary bruiser (and boozer).
And yes, in the story Greek wiles eventually triumph over Trojan walls.
But it’s not what you’d call a 'happy' ending for either team.
So what was the real appeal to Alexander?
This special, limited edition, copy of The Iliad had been given to Alexander by his teacher, and contained that teacher, Aristotle’s, own notes hand-written beside the text. The great philosopher (some would call Ari ‘The Greatest’ heavyweight of all time) had been appointed as tutor when Alexander was thirteen, and had taught the young prince medicine, philosophy, morals, religion, logic, and art ..to compliment his A+ in siege-craft, battle-strategy, and scaring-the-crap-out-of-people (when he was sixteen, Alex had (allegedly) silenced Demosthenes, the greatest orator in The Known World, by just glowering at him from the stalls.
But of course, we in The Business of Pleasure know Aristotle best as the author of the oldest surviving book on dramatic theory (The Poetics) in which he nails down ‘the song of the goat’ and sets out the components needed to draw audiences in, engage their emotions, and send them out, stirred-but-sated, and with a greater understanding of their own humanity.
We’ll never know the extent to which the Aristotle-annotated Iliad inspired, informed and sustained Alexander on his insatiable pursuit of 18-30 travel and world conquest. We do know that his march into Asia spread Greek culture, including theatre, as far as India and Afghanistan.
But this wasn’t all one-way-traffic (think West End and Broadway). In exchange for epics and plays (and epic plays) Alex and his crew brought back the loin-clothed Indian yogis whose transcendental philosophy would transform Christianity when it surfaced from Judaism three hundred years later.
And thereby dramatically increased the range of ideas and emotions that could be portrayed, well, dramatically, while simultaneously providing the back-story for JCS and Godspell.
So when your carrying your interval ice-cream back to your seat, all set for your second instalment of patricide, incest and offspring-slaughter, spare a thought for Alexander, Aristotle and the immense chain of actors and audiences, directors and dramaturgs, who’ve carried the song of the goat all the way from those rocky hillsides, across three thousand miles and two-and-a-half thousand years, to the neon causeways of Shaftesbury Avenue and Covent Garden.
..but whatever you do, DON’T accidentally step on the toes of the diminutive sixteen-year-old, with the fiery eyes, as you totter through the row tub in hand.
DT 6-12-24
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