Sphinx

Of course it’s an untestable, highly speculative hypothesis, if not downright wishful thinking, that the current unspeakable pantomime of stupidity, deranged ideology and blinkered short-term political self-interest that is the Brexit debate in Parliament – no, go on, Nevs, tell us what you really think – might have been slightly less awful if more people had read and reflected upon Thucydides, especially the Melian Dialogue. It’s been quoted, of course, but usually in the utterly reductive form of an isolated line here and there, rather than engaging with the developed arguments on both sides – the (ultimately delusional) self-confidence of the Athenians about their own power and the predictability of future events, the desperate scrabbling of the Melians to find anything – hope, allies, historical precedent, unicorns – to justify their own irrational unswerving commitments. So maybe what was needed was an accessible version, on the YouTube thing that all the young people are watching these days instead of television…

I’ve been wanting to do this for five years, since the original version of my adaptation was performed in Bristol in November 2013 – and not least because Lorna Hardwick wrote a bit about that performance in her chapter on Thucydidean Concepts in the Handbook on his reception. The student team responsible for that performance did actually film a re-run – and apparently then erased the file by mistake; attempts at getting them to do it again fell on deaf ears, and since then it’s been a problem of trying to get students, rehearsal time and money all to line up in the same place. Finally, in conjunction with the collaboration with the Politics Project, we got the go-ahead (and the money…). With many thanks to the Leventis Trust and the College of Humanities, here we go…

The one positive thing about the delay is that I think the script has got a bit tighter over the years. The staging is pretty well unchanged, aiming to be neutral rather than evoking any specific setting – as I’ve discussed elsewhere, it’s easy to imagine different ways of staging this to draw out different aspects and plug into different debates, but this one is intended to be as open as possible to the audience bringing their own concerns and perspectives to bear. It tries to distil the essence of the rhetorics of power and weakness, just as the different games seek to capture the essence of the situation and its dynamics. The big question – which we’ll be exploring with different groups over the next few months – is whether it works best to open with the video and then tease apart the issues raised through activities, or start with games and use the video to draw everything together.

Perhaps it should depend on the audience and the purpose of the exercise. For Brexit, the key point is of course the additional ending: They Were All Wrong And Made Stupid Decisions, And So They All Died…