464
PARTISAN RI!VIEW
Out-maximed circus Maximus.
I hung the bright shields up, I spun the drill,
Clubbed the spears and strzndar.ds, axe and mace.
I teased the olive, and all budding things
Int o the loop that wheels a victor's head
And tor his blood their own bright berries drop
Now I won't make the obvious point that no human being would ever
talk like that. What I will say is that it would be impossible for even
the most intelligent audience to decipher the meaning of these lines
when hearing them spoken on the stage. But I want to make a still
further point, and thus bring out the difference between a stage work
and a piece of writing which looks like a play yet really isn't one. Now
then, suppose the audience for Miss Barnes's
The Antiphon
could be
cajoled into studying her play before seeing it: what would be their
reward? They could not have an immediate contact with the play until
after they had studied it-which means they could never have an
immediate contact with it. They would have to know the play by heart
to hear it-that is to see it-for the first time! Let me put the matter
differently. A really good dramatic work should reveal itself most es–
sentially when produced. I never really understood the Antigone, not
of Anouilh, but of Sophocles, until I
~aw
it done on the stage by the
Comedie Franc;aise. But it is quite clear that no light could be thrown
on Miss Barnes's play by any production of it. I have read it through
twice, and I am still not sure I have gotten the story
in
its dramatic
details...
SOUTH: Can you be so sure it's bad if you don't know what it's
about?
NORTH: Oh I know what it's about. Or, to be precise, I know
what it means, rather than exactly what happens in it. And this, I think,
is the play's fault, not mine...
The Antiphon
is an Electra play. The
action takes place
in
a contemporary setting-the time is 1939-and
there is no supernatural machinery, which, from my point of view,
would be all to the good, if there were only some other kind of ma–
chinery- that is, plot-to get the action going. But there is scarcely
any action, the play being the end and term of what happened before
off-stage. Here, too, we have a modernization of an old myth, but with
much more justification, apparently, than in the case of MacLeish's
handling of the Job story. Miss Barnes
does
have a reason for modern–
izing, personalizing her Electra figure, for in
The Antiphon,
the daughter
represents to the mother the full horror of what has happened to her
