Marine Justine

The play was talky, structurally awkward, and failed to reach a natural climax. It was overloaded with subplots, and it did not capitalize on its most dramatic situations. It suffered from cloudy characterization. But it was brilliant.

In its first English production, Lawrence Durrell's Sappho is the outstanding offering of the current Edinburgh Festival. Written more than ten years ago when Durrell had only seen two plays ("And one of them was Charley's Aunt"), Sappho probably belongs on the bookshelf rather than the stage. But as a first play, it contains ample evidence that Novelist Durrell could become a major English dramatist, following his recently stated ambition to "explore the vein" of modern verse drama opened by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden and Christopher Fry, but "in terms of drama not morality plays, of human beings not metaphysics."

Female Oedipus. Since little is known of the poetess Sappho, Durrell follows history as far as it goes, then dives outward into the freedom of his own imagination. In his play, set on the island of Lesbos in 650 B.C., she is the wife of Kreon, a rich landowner who wishes to become the most powerful economic force in the Aeolian world by recovering a set of deeds from his villa in the old city of Eresos, which has disappeared beneath the sea in an earthquake. He wants to use his power to finance the dictatorship and earth-conquering ambitions of Pit-takos, a general who returns victorious from a siege of Athens. But with the inexorable intrusion of Fate, up from the drowned city come not only the deeds but evidence that Sappho--in an Oedipal twist--is her own husband's daughter. To placate an angry populace, Pittakos sends her into exile, where she successfully plots the destruction of the Lesbian state.

Playwright Durrell sprays his plot with all the intricacy--and sensuality--of his Alexandria Quartet. Ignoring the popular tradition that the lady was the prototype female deviate, he makes her a sort of marine Justine. With the generous approval of her husband, she is a voracious lover of men, including Pittakos (who sends her a gold bracelet from Athens, still attached to a severed arm, in memory of their affair). Before the first act is over she has seduced Pittakos' twin brother Phaon, the diver who recovers the tablets from the lost city. Like his Novelist Pursewarden in the Quartet, Durrell is a superb ironist, and the play's central theme--that man is responsible for his world as immutably as he is its victim-turns on the fact that Sappho herself has forced the destiny of Lesbos by deceitfully assuming the voice of the island's controlling oracle.

Seismic Holocaust. Played by Margaret Rawlings as Sappho and Nigel Davenport as Pittakos, the Edinburgh production won cool notices from British critics as drama but enthusiastic praise as literature, and properly so, since what is memorable in the play comes in the towering flashes of Durrell's style. Written in colloquial free verse, the poetry again and again slides nonchalantly toward prose, only to be redeemed by the discipline of recurrent, formal, five-foot lines. Durrell's expositional narrative is often as vivid as Shakespeare's or Chaucer's, as when Pittakos tells of killing one of his young cowardly lieutenants in battle or in a description of the seismic holocaust that sank the ancient city, "houses being lowered, it seemed, slowly into smoke."

The play's similes and metaphors are full of humor and insight, whether an exceedingly minor poet is seen "cutting his poems in red wax as children cut their milk teeth, with his tongue behind his ear from concentration," or an improbable love affair is summed up as "two bankrupt states combining empty treasuries against a famine." And sometimes, as in the Quartet, the word-mad writer simply lets go of the steering wheel and goes recklessly, marvelously off the road into a wildness of words:

What are the fortunes of the world

we live in?

A glut of gold, a common of tyrants, A snail of virtues, a carp of critics, A gape of satyrs, a lobe of lechers, A deception of wigs, a knife of lawyers, A chirp of whores, and a whole heaving

heap

Of ineffably herbaceous Alexandrian hermaphrodites.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.