CHAPTER 13
Jane Montgomery Griffiths
In theater, as in love, the subject is disappearance.
(Blau 1982: 94)
Blau’s statement forms a fitting start to this chapter about the tantalizing impossibilities of trying to perform Sappho. “Love” and “disappearance”—could any two words better sum up the chequered fortunes of Sappho? Pulsating with erotic presence yet famous for her textual absence, the image of Sappho and her fragmented remains embody all the love and disappearance of our ephemeral experience. This is, however, a romantic gloss on Sappho’s status. It falls into the trap that studies of the reception of Sappho have often explicated: that we all project back into Sappho’s gaps our subjective desires and imaginative constructions.1
In this chapter, rather than follow the well-trodden path of Sappho’s reception, which scholars before me have excellently and extensively bituminned,2 I want to unpack Blau’s ontological conundrum in relation to Sappho and in particular the performance of Sappho. In this collection of scholarly writing about lyric poetry, this chapter might seem anomalous. Rather than hypothesize on ancient performance practices or present an historical contextualization of Sappho’s songs in the seventh/sixth century, it will deal with present performance. Rather than analyzing the theatrical and operatic incarnations of Lawrence Durrell and Peggy Glanville-Hicks,3 it will focus on one relatively recent performance outing. And rather than utilizing scholarly objectivity, it will be unashamedly subjective and personal. Asking the seemingly simple question “How do you perform a gap?,” it will tease out the phenomenological issues around the theatrical embodiment of a Sappho’s absence to argue that the performer’s body on stage is both the means and ends of reception, but that in that process, Sappho herself suffers simultaneous erasure at the very point of embodiment.
Defining Performance
An article on the performance of Sappho should, you might think, begin with a definition of performance. This is not an easy task. The attempt is every bit as doomed as an effort to pin down Sappho; gaps and lacunae accompany every try. There is no consensus, only complexity, instability, and question marks. In performance studies, definitions can range from ritualistic performance (Turner 1982; Schechner 1988) to linguistic performativity (Austin 1975; Searle 1969), from performance of gender (Butler 1990) to performative writing (Phelan 1993, 1998), from circumscribed play (Huizinga 1970; Caillois 2001) to a wide-open definition that eschews definition itself. As Bial wryly states, “the only definition that is universally applicable to the field is a tautology: performance studies is what performance studies people do” (Bial 2007: 1). Strine, Long, and Hopkins succinctly sum up the ill-fated attempt to find a single referent for the term; the definition is “an essentially contested concept” (Strine, Long & Hopkins 1990: 183), one that necessitates “sophisticated disagreement” to navigate the opposing sides in performance theory.
This disagreement can be embraced. As Taylor says, “I find [performance’s] very undefinability and complexity reassuring” (Taylor 2004: 385). But such hermeneutic openness, in its anarchic refusal to be pigeonholed, can lead to a reductio ad absurdum: if everything can be a performance, the meaning of the term is lost in ever decreasing circles.
In such a hall of mirrors, the Classicist’s and philologist’s training seeks order, rigor, and logical boundaries. In her paper, “Towards a Theory of Performance Reception,” Edith Hall sets out the current state of the relationship between Classics and performance theory and reception and attempts to delineate such a taxonomy. Starting with the fundamental issues underpinning the nature of performance, Hall gives her own “commonsense” (Hall 2004: 51) definition of performance;
[T]o say that something from ancient Greece or Rome has been performed implies an aesthetic phenomenon in which humans have realized an archetypal text, narrative or idea by acting, puppet manipulation, dance, recital, or song; the category Performance Reception therefore excludes individuals reading a text to themselves, or the visual arts (except, hypothetically, when they are of a type requiring the label performance art).
(Hall 2004: 51)
Hall’s approach is seductive. Eschewing the excesses of performance theory, it comes up with a strong and, one could say, self-evident definition of performance: a physical manifestation and re-imagining of an ancient subject, created through various modes of embodiment. This categorization, however appealing, is nonetheless antithetical to the very premise of performance theory which sees such divisions as arbitrary and, as Kirshenblatt- Gimblett describes, works against the hermeneutic and ontological openness of performance: “Performance studies starts from the premise that its objects of study are not to be divided up and parcelled out, medium by medium,…” (cited in Schechner 2002: 3).
In such a case, all interpretation, all artistic and cultural expression can come under the banner of performance. It is not the demarcation, but the attention to the permeability of those demarcations that frames performance. Look for the breaches between formerly secure categories, and one finds, in the rupture, the essence of performance. And it is here that we see the analogy between performance and Sappho’s dismembered fragments. Just as in performance we look at the spaces between to find meaning, so with Sappho, we find her in the very emptiness of her image. Her poetry, her historical identity and our reception of both seep into each other through the gaps, erasing the comfort of secure definitions.
This erasure is what links performance, Sappho and the theatrical event. Phelan states that in the theatre “[p]erformance […] becomes itself through disappearance” (Phelan 1993: 146).
This is seemingly paradoxical. Theatre takes place in a circumscribed space to an audience of spectators’ bodies through the mediation of actors’ bodies. There is very visible presence. Yet there is an uncanniness in this encounter that bizarrely foregrounds disappearance. The ephemerality of the performance, the disappearance of actor into character and character into actor, the mimetic realm that makes the real world vanish and a new reality occur all speak to the processes of erasure underpinning the theatrical event.4 Theater is always embracing shifting identities, morphing subjectivities, and disappearing presences, created, as every actor and audience member feels, if not knows, by the absence and presence of the body. “[It] is, and has always been,” as Shepherd says, “a place which exhibits what a human body is, what it does, what it is capable of” (2006: 1). In this respect, classical performance reception is not just the study of how plays have been adapted, appropriated, and made manifest in different cultural contexts, but is also the study of how bodies have operated in, on, and around the performance event. These bodily operations perform on various levels: the mimetic platform of the stage, on which the actor’s body works as both signifier and sign, simultaneously representing and becoming the character; the receptive arena of the audience, where the spectator’s body reacts on multiple planes to the experience before her; and the uncontainable receptacle of memory—somatic, intellectual, emotional—on which and in which the performance event replays its effect and affect.
The ever-entwining factors comprising performance create an uncanniness that, when we try to build a performative construction of Sappho, underpins and queers each attempt. In the endless possibilities of performance studies, that construction can move outside biological embodiment to include fine art, fiction, and scholarship. Performance studies can claim a performativity in the painting of Mengin’s dark portrait or Queen Victoria’s demure sketching5; in Winterson’s (1994) and Yourcenar’s (1981) sensual fiction; in du Bois’ (1995), Williamson’s (1995), and Reynold’s (2003) cascading scholarly prose. Contrary to Hall’s exclusions, performance studies can lay a claim for every interpretation of Sappho to be a performance, operating, and creating meaning in the eye of the beholder and in fissures of time, space, and emotion.6 In theatrical performance, however, the uncanniness lies with the paradox of using a body to represent a bodiless ghost.
Performing the Ghost of Sappho
Each theatrical performance is shadowed by what Blau calls “ghosting” (1982: 283). Each script is haunted by intertextuality; each actor’s characterization, by the ghost of what has occurred before. As Carlson says,
Everything in the theatre, the bodies, the materials utilized, the language, the space itself, is now and has always been haunted, and that haunting has been an essential part of the theatre’s meaning to and reception by its audiences in all times and all places.
(Carlson 2003: 15)
The foremost question in trying to stage Sappho is simple: how can we embody that ghost, a ghost who exists only as a collection of gaps surrounded by fragmented words? In performative writing or reading of Sappho, her presence is created through her absence in a virtual embodiment that is created by the interplay of contextual knowledge and imaginative construction. In theatrical performance, however, the gaps of Sappho must be filled by a physical presence, an emendatio created through flesh and blood. For any actor or writer trying to stage Sappho, her absence is an insistent nag, haunting the performer with the unavoidable failure of her attempt.
We see in theatrical performance the ghostly traces of the past coupled with the somatic force of the actor’s embodiment: the “phenomenological frontality,” as States (1992) would say, through which the actor presents his/her new self—complete with a new textual weave—to the audience. In so doing, the actor both objectifies herself, and reconfigures herself in a new subjectivity that is not hers, but that will encrust and seep into her. Operating simultaneously through an internal and external frame, she elides the boundaries of her self and her character. Her character lives within her but is not she; her character maps itself onto her, and so is she. The boundaries of character and actor are semi-permeable, and through their availability to the gaze of the audience, create an ever growing and, indeed, potentially infinite paratext to the play and the character. The audience interprets this through a complicated process of besideness, juggling their pre-existing transtextual knowledge of the inscribed text and the practitioner before them with their immediate decoding of the persona presenting itself to them on stage. Through this phenomenological “besideness” which is at the heart of the actor’s relationship with the audience, the actor’s body becomes both the recipient of the character, and the conduit through which it will be received by others. The actor’s body becomes, in other words, the core of performance reception.
This theorizing is all well and good, and sets up the phenomenological context for trying to stage Sappho. It does not, however, solve the problem of how to do it. How do you stage a gap? How do you embody an absence? This dilemma became significant to me almost by accident, and in trying to solve it, I discovered experientially as well as theoretically, the multiple levels of embodiment, affect, and intertexuality that must attend any such attempt. I said at the beginning of this chapter that it would be unashamedly subjective and personal. This is not, admittedly, the way of most classicists. The brief flowering of personal voice theory in the mid-1990s with Hallet and Van Nortwick’s Compromising Traditions (1997) withered as quickly as it had bloomed. Yet I would argue that in writing the creative process, the personal voice necessarily intertwines with the academic voice to capture different, yet complementary, nuances of reception.
Acting the Emptiness of Sappho
Blau’s prefacing quotation said that in theater, as in love, the subject is disappearance. And so I confess that 10 years ago, for a few years, I was in love with Sappho. It is hard to say whether it was requited or not: she played very hard to get. But finally I got her. Or rather, she got me. This impenetrable woman unreservedly penetrated me. Our affair was visceral, embodied and very, very visible in the theatrical arena of public performance. Despite that visibility, however, our bodies did “disappear” into, and indeed erase each other’s. In their absence and their presence, our bodies became the field on which were exercised all the core questions of performance.
I started off this relationship quite invisible: a slightly reluctant novice playwright, commissioned out of the blue to write a one-woman show about Sappho for a reasonably well-known Australian television actor. I finished it as the actor who, through a strange combination of circumstances, ended up playing Sappho in a rainbow-hued hallucinatory cocktail of writer and performer that turns me into “the entire perceptual framework” (States 1992: 373) for both Sappho and the text. Sappho, meanwhile, began this relationship as the vehicle for a television star’s tour de force: the recalcitrant object of desire, passively aggressive as she lay back and thought of Lesbos. She ended it, though, completely in control: the conspicuous manipulator of the entire process of creation, using my voice and being, through an uncanny combination of ventriloquism and body snatching, to fill in her gaps. Word became flesh, as those lines which I wrote, stolen from her and never designed for me to speak, ended up becoming the both of us—a peculiar melding together (in several senses of the word).
I was commissioned to write Sappho in August 2007 for The Stork, a small pub theater in Melbourne that had gained a reputation for staging “Theatre of the Mind” and become something of a cultural anomaly-come-icon to Melburnians. This very earthy, unpretentious and, by equal turns, part charming, part insalubrious drinking hole had developed a reputation over the years as a place where art and ideas could (and should) be discussed, and where, even given its limited resources, a vibrant intellectual and cultural community could find a home. The pub regularly held philosophical symposia and Socratic dinners; it hosted ancient Greek and Gaelic reading groups; it provided a home to The University in the Pub; and it commissioned stage adaptations of the works of Camus, Duras, and Proust, and semi-staged recitations of Homer and Virgil. Jostling diners from the pub’s restaurant, these performances took place in the hotel’s back room with a minimum of theatrical trappings. The chairs were hard and uncomfortable, and in the Australian summer, the heat was unbearable. Performances were forced to contend with the shriek of police sirens, the thundering of trams and the whirl of ineffectual air conditioners. And yet, night after night, performances would be packed out with audiences prepared to brave the conditions to have a night of unashamedly intellectual theater. My writing brief was very open: the play should be 90-minutes long, intellectually stimulating, give the audience an idea of why Sappho was so extraordinary, avoid too much Ancient Greek, and not be “a lesbian play” (I remember wondering if this was meant with a capital or miniscule “L”). Other than that, I had carte blanche to write what I wanted.
Prins, in Victorian Sappho, asks “What is Sappho except a name?” (Prins 1999: 8), and in that deceptively simple-seeming question, lies the crux of the Sappho conundrum. To be asked to write a play about Sappho is to be asked to write a play about an absence for which not even the name helps. Her name just shows me the difficulties. “Projected from the past into the future and from the future into the past, ‘Sappho’ is presented to us now, in the present tense, as a name that lives on” (Prins 1999: 8). But lives on how? Projected onto what? The name “Sappho” contains all the issues of readership articulated by reception theory: mediation, situation, contingency (Martindale 2006: 3). It carries with it so many connotations, so many possibilities. It drags with it the baggage of millennia and the luggage labels of thousands—all those self-contained groups of cultural tourists with their pinned-on name tags: “academic,” “classicist,” “Greek,” “lesbian,” feminist,” “intellectual,” etc. It is not an easy name to circumscribe.
Monique Wittig and Sande Zeig (1979) could get away with leaving a blank page for Sappho, but I have no such luxury. I sit down before a glaringly empty computer screen to write a play about a woman whose name scares me with possibility of blankness. So how to begin? Begin with the name? But the name gains meaning only in its historicity, and how can you explain something’s historicity without describing its reception? And how can you describe that reception without knowing the subject that is being “received?” Begin with the story? But the story of Sappho is not hers, but that of her interpreters—people who, just like I am trying to do, worked the brief of pinning her down, explaining her to others; people who tried to fill her gaps with their own fantasies, fears, and fancies?i So I begin the play (at least initially) with that very question, “How do you tell the story when there are so many gaps?” For several days, that was all I had. The name, blankness, that question, and then more blankness. And that was my problem: there was an honesty about the nothingness that seemed to say everything I wanted to say about Sappho. Somehow I needed to put a gap on stage, and to do that, I needed to make a virtue of her absences. The play should be, consequently, an exercise in fragmentation. It should use Sappho’s own words, in their completeness and absences, to weave together disparate narratives about her that deliberately leave gaps. It would deliberately suggest to the audience that they need to read between the lines themselves, if they are ever to find even an approximation of the whole story.
I started with the fragments, studying them in both the Greek and in different English versions, knowing there was something about the nature of translation and transmission I wanted to explore in the script.7 In the end, about a third of the play was written from, or based on, my own direct but very free translations of Sappho—although it is becomes hard to pinpoint the exact ratio of new writing to translation, so much did Sappho seep into me during the writing process. Similarly, it is hard to weigh up adequately my debt to other translations: my own versions had become “encrusted” with the interpretations that had gone before. In the finished script, the allusions, quotations, and resonances of other translations ultimately reflect both an appreciative homage to earlier translators, and a practical enactment of the constantly mutating processes of reception from source to target text.
The fascinating moment of connection, however, happened with the Greek. Looking through Campbell’s Loeb edition, I was stopped when I came to fragment 105a,
οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρεύθεται ἄκρωι ἐπ’ ὔσδωι, ἄκρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτωι, λελάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηες· οὐ μὰν ἐκλελάθοντ’, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐδύναντ’ ἐπίκεσθαι.
Just as the sweetest apple blushes on the highest bough,
up there, so high, so high, quite forgotten by the apple-pickers.
but no, not forgotten… only out of reach.
The effect of reading this was a shock. It was a physical and emotional jarring: a sudden jolt; a direct connection to something from my past; something at the back of my mind I had almost forgotten; something someone had once said to me long ago. And there I was, sitting in Melbourne, reading this Greek in the Australian sunshine, but also right back in time, right back in that room, right back in that freezing winter in Yorkshire 20 years before, with that person, saying those words to me about a blush that could only be captured by her. And suddenly, in that instant, Sappho invaded me, and I fell in love with her. What happened in this strange moment of personal connection to this fragment was, I suppose, an affective sense of understanding her at last; an experiential sense of the love and the loss that flows through her words, and that fragment would become a pivotal moment in the play:
“You have a very endearing way of blushing, you know…
like the sweetest apple reddening on the furthest bow
…you go pink there – just there on your neck…a perfect rosy triangle…” And her fingers trace a “v” on my throat; she plucks my Adam’s apple, harvests my confusion; her hands are rosy fingered with my blush…
(Montgomery Griffiths 2010: 14)
I knew in that moment that the play would have to be a double act between Sappho and me; my own understanding of love and loss, channeled through Sappho’s fragments. We would weave together two intertwined but distinct stories. One strand would be Sappho (or “a” Sappho) reflecting on her reception over the age; the other would be a love story, of sorts, that would somehow try to capture the pain and longing that runs through the poetry. It would be an attempt to make an audience feel Sappho without realizing they were even hearing her; an attempt to put reception on stage in an affective form. An academic narrative by stealth, told not through reason and objectivity, but through emotion and subjectivity.
So the play developed along two distinct paths: Sappho’s and her lover’s. Divided into nine separate fragments—for no particular reason apart from the echo of Sappho’s nine volumes of poetry—the play would juxtapose the voice of Sappho in the “odd” numbered fragments, with the voice of her lover in the “evens.” Sappho’s sections would give an historical/cultural view of her figure and influence; her lover’s sections would tell/enact their passionate and ultimately desolate love affair. In putting together these strands, I undertook two separate processes. The first was research into the reception route for the Sappho sections. I read “other” Sapphos avidly; firstly looking to fiction (the high-wire butch of Yourcenar, the time-travelling sensualist of Winterson, to name but a few), secondly turning to scholarship (Reynolds and Williamson, Carson and du Bois, Greene, Johnson, and Prins). These readings led me to concentrate on the intertextuality of Sapphic reception: the readings between the lines of the readings between the lines. They demonstrated the affective way in which her figure and her fragments lure her different interpreters, in a sensual act of literary seduction, that forces even the words of a scholarly work of reception studies to contain the passion and pain of Sappho’s eroticism.
Each “fragment” of Sappho’s story in the play took shape to tell a version of her reception: her uses and abuses through history and her passive/aggressive connection with those that had “revivified” her through their own imaginings and interpretations. The Sappho who was materializing from all this was not a particularly pleasant woman but was nonetheless strangely irresistible: highly intelligent, highly charismatic, witty, urbane, detached, desperate, needy, resentful, angry, immature, sophisticated, bemused, judgmental, conservative, snobbish, yearning, bereft. Plus any other hundred more adjectives you might like to throw at her. The strongest element that was coming through to me, however, as I gave her words to tell the world about how the world had used her, was her pain. She was living in a kind of hell, or limbo: the post-love void, when life is as meaningless as a forgotten but gnawing hunger. Her bravado slowed the drip of pain, sometimes, but could not staunch the flow. And I started to pity her, this woman I was creating, who was really no more than my imagination, no more than a reflection of my own and others’ fantasies, yet seemed to be developing a life all her own. And as I started to pity her, I started to fall for her, warts and all. I started to want to tend her in her vulnerability; to protect her from her misinterpreters—all the while quite aware that I was probably as guilty of misreading her as those from whom I would rescue her.
It is a very strange feeling to fall in love with a character you are creating and this oddness was increased as the second story line of Sappho’s lover started to take shape. In this second strand, I needed a modern counterpart to this ancient/timeless Sappho, so I had to ask, who would Sappho be if she were around today? Write about what you know, they say, so Sappho would become an actor, an amalgam of all the great actresses I had seen, admired, worked with, and known. A monstrous talent, a star, a siren, a lodestone. As for her lover, there were so many to choose from: Gyrrhina, Gongyla, Andromeda, Mnasidika, Atthis? Atthis it would have to be. There was something so strange in what was said and not said in fragment 49 (“I loved you once, Atthis, long ago. You were like a child—so graceless and naïve”). There was such desperate pain in the untold story of fragment 131 (“Atthis hates the very thought of me…”).
And Atthis would become that everyone/nobody who has ever lost herself in the quagmire of longing; as empty and interchangeable with all the other victims of love, just as her name’s pun suggests:
Fact no. 1: young women are easily seduced.
“Atthis,” she said, “I will call you Atthis.”
But that’s not my name, I said.
“No matter. Atthis, Hatthis – whatever, whoever. You shall be my Atthis.” Her little joke. I didn’t know then what I know now. Greek is cruel: only a breath between person and pronoun. I could have been any of them. Who I was was unimportant, so long as I was her Atthis.
Poor Atthis – so like a child – so graceless, so naïve…I loved you once.
(Montgomery Griffiths 2010: 5–6)
The story of this passionate and desperate love would be told from Atthis’s perspective, a young, naïve actress sifting through fragments of post-breakup grief. Who she would be, however, was an interesting problem. Here is a young woman who appears in only four fragments; yet her influence pervades what we have of Sappho. For anyone trying to tell Sappho’s story, Atthis is crucial. Who was she, who is she for us? An unknown—a young woman who moved a great older woman; who was with her and who left her; who went off with another woman, and could not bear even to look at Sappho; a nonentity who touched a star but scraped her fingers on the sky (Campbell 52). However we approach Atthis says much more about the subjective dangers of reception than it does about Sappho. So in reading between the lines of Atthis and Sappho, I also read the subtext of my own experience. My love, my passion, my heartbreak, my ownership. And since, in my writing of Sappho, I have fallen in love with her, as I write of Atthis’s love for Sappho, I must be writing my own story. Of course, the Atthis story in the play is emphatically not autobiographical. There are some elements which come from my own experience but Atthis is her own woman. She is created, though, from a combination of myself and Sappho, and I use in the Atthis “fragments,” much more of the poetry than I do in Sappho’s story. A case in point is “Fragment 6,” the “seduction” scene (Montgomery Griffiths 2010: 19–22), the latter part of which is entirely woven from, or based on, Sappho’s fragments (1; 3; 4; 21; 23;30; 31; 34; 36; 37; 38; 41; 46; 48; 51; 63;96; 126; 138; 141; 154), so that Sappho and Atthis in effect end up becoming one and the same to tell their story.
In this blending between the two voices, something interesting happened, which had to do with the conjoining of my own voice with theirs. Through a twist of circumstances, I ended up acting the play: our designated lead got a film, we had advanced bookings and no actor, so I was employed to perform the monologue. Consequently, though I had never originally intended to do so, I ended up lending my voice to Sappho’s words, words which I had appropriated, to give voice to both her and Atthis. So although I started off as Sappho’s creator, she ended up as mine, as her words came together with my presence and voice to create a new entity. This is the phenomenological conundrum of performance, as States says,
… the problem is complicated still further by the fact that the character is being played by an actor who is not the character but who forms the entire perceptual ground from which any such essence as character can appear.
(States 1997: 137)
In this complication, not only words but bodies conjoin. If there is “any such essence as character” it exists through phenomenological braiding of actor and part which brings the inside to the outside in the viscerality of performance. This can be confusing; it is interesting to note how confused so many of the audience were as to who was Sappho, who was Atthis, and who was I. If it was confusing for the audience, it was even more so for me. Take the act of crying on stage. These tears are interesting things. Whose are they? The character’s, the performer’s? I rarely have cried “for real” on stage—it’s rather frowned upon in British theatrical tradition as something a little too self-indulgent to be quite appropriate—but I cannot get through Sappho without some serious crying. I don’t know why; I don’t know what it is about this story, these words, this grief that affects me so badly. And I do not know if it is affecting me, or affecting the two characters I am playing. I act a young woman on a freezing winter’s night, standing naked before the gaze of her lover (I am, incidentally, fully clothed and wearing a duffle coat) while in the theater it is 41C in a Melbourne heat wave. I say the words “And it’s freezing, but I’m sweating as I look at her,” soaked with perspiration from the broiling heat, while trying to conjure the goose bumps of one shivering with cold. My sweat is a sign of the parallel universes of performance. And the same is true of my tears. I say the words of the Sappho character (based on fragments 55 and 137) that will destroy Atthis’s world;
If you were not so embarrassed by everything, you might possibly have something worth saying; but you are a coward and a talentless mediocrity, and this “shame” you talk about is nothing more than a cover for your many inadequacies.
(Montgomery Griffiths 2010, p.)
and I simultaneously cause the pain and receive the pain. Sappho and Atthis become one with/in me, so that the tears I weep as Atthis are carried through to become Sappho’s in her last scene. And meanwhile I’m the one who ends up feeling thoroughly miserable, empty, and drained after the show. Perhaps there is something about the double act of writing and performing that makes the words too close to home; too uncomfortable because just too familiar for both the writer/performer and the audience to take in easily.
The Stork’s production opened in November 2007 and played for three weeks to sell-out audience and a very favorable positive critical response. On the basis of that, it was picked up by Malthouse Theatre, one of Melbourne’s leading theaters, renowned for innovative and provocative productions. It would go into further script development and then be mounted in an entirely new production. Now the play would be performed in a major professional venue, to a much wider audience. Now, the full financial resources of a respected and well-funded professional production company would lie behind it. Now the Australian Research Council would give me a fellowship and time to rewrite, rehearse, and research around the play. And now, of course, a different creative team would add their own interpretations and take Sappho in their own direction. Whereas The Stork production had been “Theatre of the Mind,” the Malthouse production would be “Theatre of the Senses”: visceral, affective, shocking, seductive. The major distinction between the two approaches would be played out in the design. As reviewers noted, there was a substantial difference in the visual framework between the two production;
Alex Pinder’s original production at the Stork saw the stage littered with torn paper, an evocative symbol of the state of Sappho’s surviving manuscripts. Marion Potts’ re-staging at the Malthouse replaces this literal image with the sensuous metaphor of a bath of golden ambrosia, slowly draining onto the stage…suggest[ing][that as the nectar of Sappho’s work is drained away by her greedy followers, what is left is a rotting carcass.(Ball 2010)8
The mise en scène of the Malthouse tried to become the sensuality of the poetry;
The audience is placed on three sides, facing a tank that appears to be full of honey, which gradually empties onto the stage during the course of the monologue. Sappho’s naked body is gradually revealed inside the tank, at last emerging from this amber prison to a soundscape composed of fragments of Greek, the trickling of fluid and archaic percussion.(Croggon 2010) 9
My own appearance, my own body, changed dramatically between the two productions.
Whereas at The Stork, Sappho was clearly “feminine” and wore a little black dress, and Atthis was differentiated by a duffle coast, the “entire perceptual framework” at the Malthouse was infinitely more complex:
First seen naked with a shaved head, Griffiths’s toned androgyny is as open and complex as Sappho’s work. The addition of comfy undies helps to define her gender and outlook, and a lush fur coat adds power, control and something to hide behind. Anna Cordingley’s clever costumes wrap Sappho in meaning…(Peard 2010)10
And yet, and yet, the same words (although there had been major rewrite between the two productions) and the same actor. It was still my body and my words creating Sappho, yet, through the process of reception exemplified in the development between the productions, my body and Sappho’s had disappeared and reappeared through time, the theatrical frame and the erasure that hangs over the ephemerality of performance. We had become, simultaneously, a body and a gap. And I, while citing her poems, had also become her poems;
Through the performance, Montgomery Griffiths embodies several things at once. She performs the poet herself, but also becomes her poems - there’s a moment where she is the fragments of papyri which have lain underground for centuries, begging to be discovered, to be read again.
(Croggon 2010)
Two years later, the play was restaged in London and Oxford, now with a new director, a return to the original script and an entirely new design. For me, the changes in performative frame were making me increasingly bewildered. I was losing sight of Sappho; our feelings for each other were beginning to wane. I think she was becoming a little bored of me and our relationship was being tested. The passion that had been so potent in The Malthouse production was replaced by something much more academic that lay halfway between “Theatre of the Mind” and “Theatre of the Senses.” Perhaps this was “Theatre of Reception.” Mullan, in her article on the production, makes a similar distinction:
…the use of different dramaturgical devices and staging alters each production’s thematic concerns. The Malthouse production, for example, was lauded by critics for Marion Potts’ striking staging …The production stressed the enigma of Sappho with emphasis on the continual dissection of her work by (predominantly male) scholars. The London performance, however…was directed by Helen Eastman and featured a reworked set, composed of mirrors and light bulbs. This new staging shifted focus onto another narrative strand emerging from the production: the interconnectedness and merging of the past and present.
(Mullan 2017: 245)
For Mullan, the use of mirrors, the atemporal, spatially open design of this production and the less evident distinction between Sappho and Atthis allowed for an assessment of the text as a time machine, demonstrating the cyclical nature of passion, history, and reception. In its complex weave of its language, characters, and bodies, the production “queered” performance, reception, and time (Mullan 2017: 245), mirroring the receptive possibilities and temporal openness of “theater/archaeology”:
In this context, the examination of presence and its performance is linked to inscriptions of the past into the present, even as performance theory may consider the cues and prompts in which a future sense of presence may come to be enacted.
(Giannachi, Kaye & Shanks 2012: 1)
Each twist and turn of my relationship with the performance of Sappho has shown a strand both of the complexity of reception and also the openness and permeability of performance. My Sappho took place in theaters, but the oscillation of time, space, subjectivity, identity, visibility, and invisibility are part of the process that performance studies explores and celebrates: the pulling down of distinctions of frame, medium, and demarcations. Now the text is published, so other readers will “perform” in their heads my Sappho, and consequently myself, as they sit on their sofa or in bed at night reading. And now other people will stage my love affair and enact me, enacting Sappho, enacting me.11
But the final twist in my love affair with Sappho takes me away from the materiality of the body, or the tangibility of the printed page and indeed, takes us back to a place of disappearance. Two years after the Malthouse production, I was asked to record the play for ABC Radio National. Now, standing in the recording studio, acting to a microphone, Sappho is again disembodied, robbed of that fleshy materiality that had been so integral to the naked, shaven-headed Sappho who emerged from her honey-dripping coffin at The Malthouse; she was wiped clean of tears, mucus, and sweat that had involuntarily coursed from her physical presence in the sweltering heat of The Stork. Now she was, again, nothing but words. Words that could not be read, could not be held. Words that could only be “performed” in the imagination of the listener. The radio production returned Sappho to an oral culture, allowing her words, for a short time, to be heard and perhaps remembered, but never exactly and only as a lingering memory. This Sappho could never be revived or reified, and, as the recording went from air to the ABC’s website, from the website to the sound archives, and from the archive to deletion, so Sappho returned to her fragmented self. Despite all my efforts to stage and perform her, despite my attempts to embody her, I had found only the impossibility of doing so. She had, yet again, become victim to the ephemerality and disappearance inherent to oral performance. She had, yet again, become just a gap.
FURTHER READING
Approaching Performance Studies for the first time can seem more than daunting. Scholarly works in the field are notorious for being abstruse as they try to come to terms with the ontological complexity of the topic. One of the best introductions is States 1987. This little book has no pretentions to solve all the complexities of performance, but rather it aims to make the reader feel the uncanniness of performance. As such, it is not only informative but also a joy to read. For a general introduction to the field, as well as the distinctions between performance and theater, Shepherd and Wallis 2004 is very useful. The field of Sappho studies is niche but surprisingly large. As regards Sappho, Johnson 2007 is a very informative short book on her. For those wanting a very scholarly collection of the best essays on Sappho’s poetry and historical context, I’d recommend Greene 1996a and 1996b. These edited volumes are very comprehensive and provide a thorough overview of scholarly discourse surrounding her. My favorite works on Sappho tip over into the “performative writing” category because of their personal (as well as academic) style. I would recommend looking at Williamson 1995, Du Bois 1995, and Reynolds 2000 and 2003 for that. Finally, all studies of classical themes in performance must be contextualized through an understanding of Reception Studies. Hardwick 2003 provides a terrific introduction to this fascinating field.
Notes
1 Cf. du Bois 1995; Williamson 1995; Reynolds 2003; and the introduction to Barnstone’s translation 1999.
2 Johnson 2007 provides a useful introduction to Sappho scholarship, while Greene’s two edited volumes (1996a and 1996b) are excellent collections showing the range of Sappho scholarship. For the early reception of Sappho, see Yatromanolakis 2007.
3 Durrell and Glanville-Hicks’ opera Sappho has had a curious history. Written in 1963 and based on Durrell’s 1950 play of the same name, it was created as a vehicle for Maria Callas but not staged until Jennifer Condon’s 2012 production. For more information, see www.sappho.au. ABC Radio National also has an interesting downloadable interview with Condon (https://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/musicshow/jennifer-condon-brings-sappho-to-life/4390128).
4 For more on presence, disappearance and erasure in performance, see Phelan 1993; Auslander 1994 and 1997; Diamond 1997; Goodall 2008. Giannachi et al 2012 are particularly interesting in relation to presence, temporality, and theater as archaeology: “Presence implies temporality, too—a fulcrum of presence is tense and the relationship between past and present [sic]. In this context, the examination of presence and its performance is linked to inscriptions of the past into the present, even as performance theory may consider the cues and prompts in which a future sense of presence may come to be enacted” (2012: 1).
5 For an analysis of the reception and performativity of Mengin’s painting, see Goldhill 2004; 2006.
6 For the performativity of writing and reading, see Kemp 1996; Pollock 1998.
7 For their different forms and narratives I found particularly interesting the translations of Barnstone 1999; Carson 2002; Balmer 1997; Lombardo 2002; Barnard 1958.
8 Ball, M. 2010, “Sappho…In 9 Fragments” Review, Sydney Morning Herald, viewed 7 January 2019, https://www.smh.com.au/entertainment/theatre/sapphoin-9-fragments-20100806-11o5x.html.
9 Croggon, A. 2010, “Review: Sappho in 9 fragments,” Theatre Notes, viewed 7 January 2019, http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2010/08/review-sapphoin-9-fragments.html.
10 Peard, A.M. 2010, “Sappho…in 9 Fragments – Review,” Aussie Theatre.com, viewed 7 January 2019, https://aussietheatre.com.au/reviews/sapphoin-9-fragments-2.