Our second article this month comes from Conjoint Professor Michael Ewans at the University of Newcastle. Michael is a Professor of Drama but has a long relationship with the Classics department, as he works on Greco-Roman theatre, reception studies and teaches courses on culture and ancient literature. In 2019 he staged Theocritus’ Love Magic (Idyll 2). The performance can be viewed on YouTube, where you can also find interviews with people involved. Since staging Love Magic, Michael has started working towards a production of Euripides’ Medea.
THEOCRITUS: LOVE MAGIC (Idyll 2)
In mid 2018 Theocritus’ Pharmakeutria emerged as a possible subject for collaborative research between Profs. Marguerite Johnson (Classics) and Michael Ewans (Drama) at The University of Newcastle, Australia. It soon became clear that there was an opportunity for a project which combined our strengths as researchers. Marguerite Johnson has much to contribute to the literature on Simaitha’s use of magic; and I welcomed the challenge of seeing if a new translation could make this monologue into a viable theatre piece today. I believe that Theocritus wrote Poems 2, 14 and 15 not merely for readers but as mimes for performance; my task was to see if Poem 2 could be effectively re-created for a modern Australian audience, and to investigate how it might have been performed for Theocritus’ own audience.
Theocritus’ three urban mimes have been deemed unperformable by many scholars, who regard them as only literary works destined for readers, not performers. Only recently, and tentatively, has the proposition been entertained that they could have been designed for performance. I determined to test this out by mounting a full production of Idyll 2, Pharmakeutria, under the title Love Magic.
This demanded a new translation, which was at once as accurate as possible, actable, and written in a contemporary English idiom. No currently available translation of the monologue attempts to achieve these three aims; they are either literal translations with no pretensions to literary or dramatic merit, or free versions which were clearly intended to be read rather than spoken. Some of the published translations also use old-fashioned English words and idioms, which would distance the modern spectator from Simaitha’s very real predicament and her emotions; these shine through in the original, even though it is written in hexameters and in Doric dialect.
The new translation was refined during the rehearsal process, to increase its actability while not falling below a high standard of accuracy. It was necessary to find a flexible contemporary English idiom which gives Simaitha a modern ‘voice’; the translation must also credibly encompass the range of types of speech that she employs while avoiding any incongruity, which might break the theatrical illusion.
Casting was difficult. In only 165 lines of verse Simaitha undergoes a very wide gamut of emotions. Her range stretches all the way from quiet, meditative brooding to a powerful outcry of grief directed at Eros, and her style moves from the highly colloquial to echoes of Homeric epic and Sapphic lyric. The performer must be able to express the sequence of intense, rapidly changing feelings and thoughts which Theocritus has created, while maintaining an overall sense of Simaitha as a consistent character throughout her journey. It was essential to cast a young actress who could achieve this goal; she had to be mature enough to present credibly a wide range of emotion, and this meant that she could not be in her teens, as Simaitha might perhaps be imagined as being, but in her mid-twenties.
Our production was first performed on 14 August 2019 at the Royal Exchange Theatre in Newcastle, Australia. Siobhan Caulfield played Simaitha. I directed, Marguerite Johnson was the dramaturg, and Stray Dogs Theatre Company staged the performances with financial support from the Centre for 21st Century Humanities at The University of Newcastle.
The production used only one prop – the fire into which Simaitha throws various items during the course of her spells. Everything else – including her slave Thestylis – was imagined. I believe that this is true to the original; a look at the list of props implied by the text, and the speed with which they are supposed to be produced, shows beyond doubt that using these actual props would make impossible demands on both the actress playing Simaitha and one playing the mute part of Thestylis. Without props or a real mute slave the actress is liberated to make the many movements and gestures which are implied by the text.
Theocritus’ mimes could have been performed as an upmarket version of the same genre as Herodas’, and perhaps staged in a salon at the Court of Ptolemy (who came from Cos, the island where the action of Love Magic takes place). An alternative theory, which I find attractive, is that they were conceived for performance, just like Herodas’ mimes, in a lower-class venue where non-literary mimes were regularly performed – perhaps an open-air market-place with a temporary stage; the literary set would have been ‘slumming it’ to join an audience very different from that for a reading of Callimachus in the Library.
If, as is probable, the performances of mime were given unmasked, and therefore before small audiences, we should consider the possibility that actresses played female parts. We have no evidence about the performance conditions for the mimes of Herodas and Theocritus. But we do know that in Rome actresses played the female roles in their (also unmasked) mimes. Why not then in Alexandria, where women were no longer as secluded as they had been in fifth-century Athens? The genre, the playing space, the audience numbers and the requirements of the roles in the mimes were completely different from those of New Comedy, which had been written to be performed by masked male actors in a very large theatre. In particular, the role of Simaitha, and (in a very different way) those of Gorgo and Praxinoa in Idyll 15, demand a far greater understanding of what it is to be female than the relatively anaemic and far less nuanced female characters in most of the surviving plays of Menander; so, they are better suited to female performers than to men in drag. For myself, I cannot imagine a credible unmasked, small-audience performance of Love Magic by a male.
Certainty about the original venue and the gender of the performer is impossible. But it is certain that we have shown in our production that Love Magic is a highly performable, intensely dramatic and emotional monologue. And the audience response (measured in a questionnaire) was enthusiastic. The general reaction to the play (apart from warm acclamation of Siobhan Caulfield’s performance) was a delighted surprise that it had not dated, but the issues and the heroine’s predicament came across as freshly as if it had been written by one of our contemporaries. I had hoped that the audiences would ‘learn from Simaitha’s impassioned performance how little the human heart has changed’, and that quote from the program was echoed by several questionnaire respondents; one simply wrote: ‘Great stuff – could be 2019’. Theocritus captures perfectly how passionate love followed by loss has a devastating effect on young people. And the two young women who worked on the production (the actress and the research assistant/body art painter) both felt that Theocritus shows great insight and real understanding of the psychology of their age group.
Photographs of Siobhan Caulfield as Simaitha © Debra Hely