Bearing candles and a sacrificial rooster, Circe leads a ceremony of Shango priests, dancers, and drummers into a yard on stage. She hands Odysseus a wooden sword, telling him to “wound the ground” and “enter this divided stone” so as to arrive at a “station” with “echoing arches.”Footnote 1 Taking the sword, Odysseus marks an “L” into the ground; Circe and the other celebrants withdraw as “the earth opens” to what the stage directions describe as “The Underground,” presumably the London Underground. The scene shifts, now complete with platforms, tracks, turnstiles, coins, trains, and the phantom of Odysseus’s mother standing “in a coat, hat and scarf” on the far platform.Footnote 2 “Odysseus?” Anticlea asks her son, “You’re now one of our bodiless freight?” She warns him of the dangers of this particular Underground: “You never get off. The train goes on forever.” A train rushes by, filled with fallen warriors who “screamed in the window behind the glass”; when asked if he can hear them, Odysseus replies simply, “No. Not a sound.”Footnote 3 Resonant with the voices and music of the Shango celebrants, this sudden transition casts the subterranean glow of the Underground in a new light: a buried space of displacement, where multiple stages of Britain’s colonial history with the Caribbean—from the trans-Atlantic slave trade to the Empire Windrush’s post-WWII shipment of Caribbean immigrants during Britain’s reconstruction—coalesce through metonymic transfer into the now-uncanny space of the Underground. Here, Anticlea associates people with cargo; she speaks of never-ending journeys without rest or arrival; she gives us a vision of a world without a future, and without a recoverable past. We see a train pass filled with lost souls, silenced—in anguish, but unable to be heard. This scene speaks to the historical present of a colonial circuit that has persisted through multiple eras, one that has not only dehumanized, but disembodied—in this case, transforming once-powerful warriors into trapped, voiceless phantoms, carried away by forces beyond their control.Footnote 4 In a small section of one scene alone, we see already many of the themes, tensions, and resonances Walcott’s The Odyssey begins to work out on stage.
The history of this play’s initial 1992 production with the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon, however, challenges our understanding of this scene’s Caribbean and postcolonial resonances. One might argue, even, that the facts of this play’s production “problematize understanding The Odyssey as a Caribbean play, or even as a play rooted in the African diaspora.”Footnote 5 For example, the actor playing Odysseus is not Caribbean, but rather a White Englishman named Ron Cook. The cast is, as a whole, “predominantly white European.”Footnote 6 And because of the RSC’s actor repertory system, members of this ensemble were simultaneously rehearsing and performing other RSC plays with different directors at Stratford: as one reviewer puts it, because Cook plays a disguised, beggarly Odysseus as well as “the merry rogue at the center of ‘A Jovial Crew,’ he barely has to change his clothes between performances.”Footnote 7 Moreover, although Walcott remains the author of this text, it emerged out of workshops in collaboration with the RSC: Walcott initially brought “sketches of key moments” in for “a fortnight of intensive workshops with a few RSC actors,” after which he wrote “another 100 pages”;Footnote 8 director Greg Doran was “impressed with Walcott’s flexibility over his text, saying that he was always willing to revise, cut, or write new passages as the need arose” as the production developed in workshops at The Other Place in Stratford.Footnote 9 Moreover, the decision to stage an adaptation of Homer’s Odyssey came not from Walcott, but from Doran: when asked by Adrian Noble, then-recently appointed artistic director of the RSC, what he would direct “given carte blanche,” Doran replied “Homer’s Odyssey”; when Noble “packed him off to find a writer for the job,” Doran decided on Walcott, contacting and commissioning him in 1991. When asked whose idea it was to adapt the Odyssey, Walcott replied: “It certainly wasn’t mine. I wouldn’t have done it,” if not for Doran coming to him with the idea.Footnote 10 Doran claims to have contributed significantly to the play’s final state as well: “I’ve been a sort of editor,” he has said in an interview, citing tangents and digressions he considers key to the poetic effect of Omeros but perhaps problematic for this adaptation—“what I’ve done is to shape this sprawling epic into three hours’ traffic upon the stage.”Footnote 11
In this paper I will examine the international web of literary and institutional entanglements that have worked to “shape this sprawling epic” into the first production of The Odyssey: A Stage Version at The Other Place in Stratford-upon-Avon in July 1992. At the core of this investigation is an interest in many of the concerns normally brought to bear on Walcott’s poetry—colonial history, the weight of English literary history, the voice, circum-Atlantic travel—but with a focus on Walcott not as solitary poet but as theatrical collaborator in a collaborative field shaped by colonial history. In this sense, what “shape[s] this sprawling epic into three hours’ traffic upon the stage” is not solely author Derek Walcott, I argue, but the larger structures of collaboration on which the relevant theatrical institutions depend: in this case, structures lopsided by previously established asymmetries of power and authority, wherein, for example, a White Englishman is cast as Odysseus in an Odyssey deeply entangled with Caribbean history, culture, and language. To examine the contours of these forces, then, involves two linked analyses: first, an analysis of the material histories of colonial and postcolonial theater as well as the English theatrical habitus represented by the RSC at The Other Place in Stratford. What do we know about how this play was produced? What does it mean, exactly, for a Saint Lucian man to be contracted to translate a well-worn Greek epic into a piece of theater for the Royal Shakespeare Company, a theatrical institution funded by government subsidies and deeply entangled with the symbolic weight, public accountability, and financial politics of a national theater?Footnote 12 This when, as Helen Gilbert and Joanne Tompkins note, colonial powers often “boasted theatres” in their colonies as a state-sanctioned means of reproducing “the conventions of the metropolitan centre”?Footnote 13 Second, in addition to these questions, we must read and listen carefully for the ways in which Walcott’s text might anticipate and speak back to the circumstances of its own production—theater, audience, ensemble, and so on—as well as pointedly beyond these original constraints to future performances and audiences beyond that of the RSC’s original commission.
In pursuing this line of inquiry, I find Wai Chee Dimock’s “theory of resonance” extremely useful—an approach to cultural formations concerned with “the traveling frequencies of literary texts” and how these “frequencies received and amplified across time” might “mov[e] farther and farther from their points of origin, causing unexpected vibrations in unexpected places.”Footnote 14 For Dimock, a theory of resonance hopes to honor literary objects as “diachronic objects” that persist and survive through time as much as they accumulate noise, the reverb of controversy, and continued life through the Derridean “not yet” of future readers, speakers, and listeners.Footnote 15 I find parallels of Dimock’s theory of resonance in other scholars of Walcott and postcolonial theater: Antonio Benitez-Rojo’s analysis of carnival in Walcott’s Drums and Colours argues “that Caribbean history is underlaid by a transhistorical order, that is, a ritualistic and self-referential message that always exists in the present”;Footnote 16 Gilbert and Tompkins in Post-Colonial Drama argue similarly that theatrical performance has the capacity for “dismantling imperialist history” and representing “different temporal moments simultaneously”;Footnote 17 Jahan Ramazani’s exemplary analysis of Omeros in The Hybrid Muse likewise centers the postcolonial dimensions of Walcott’s work even as it enters into conversation with Greek texts and traditions.Footnote 18 In discussion of Omeros and James Joyce’s reworking of Homer, Walcott himself theorizes that artistic concepts converse with one another as “simultaneous concepts, not chronological concepts,” such that “Joyce is a contemporary of Homer (which Joyce knew)”—a perspective that avoids thinking “of art merely in terms of chronology” and thus being “patronizing to certain cultures.”Footnote 19
In an effort to sit with this simultaneity, the long diachronic life of art objects that can make contemporaries of seemingly disparate figures, I expand on Dimock’s theory of resonance to investigate how these diachronic currents might come together with specific performance circumstances to make the stage into a kind of spatially localized resonance chamber. In this space, resonances of all sort—literary, colonial, institutional, conceptual, or physical—become entangled and interfere not only with the institutions that structure them, but the affective dimensions of performance through which they are staged and embodied. For Dimock, this interpretive and contextual “noise is the condition for the enduring resonance of texts, not a nuisance that endangers them”—and listening for this unresolvable noisiness in our repeated attempts to make sense of a work strengthens our understanding of it.Footnote 20 With the case of The Odyssey, I argue that listening carefully to the reverberations emerging from its initial production at the RSC makes certain elements of the play newly audible: namely, that Walcott’s restructuring of the original myth to emphasize theatrical embodiment, particularly the voice, produces moments of meta-theatrical feedback between the text of The Odyssey and the circumstances of its production in a theatrical habitus shaped by colonial history as well as canonical works like Joyce’s Ulysses. Understanding this production as a resonance chamber, I argue, helps to expand our interpretive bandwidth in order to better hear—and make sense of—the rich discord housed within The Odyssey: A Stage Version.
“This Huge Monster, This Jabberwocky”: The Premiere of The Odyssey: A Stage Version
In an interview published on July 1, 1992, the day before The Odyssey opened, director Greg Doran described the play’s status as follows: “I feel as if I’ve got a Chihuahua lead and I’m running up this huge monster, this jabberwocky, and trying to pull it through a small door.”Footnote 21 Unfortunately, the interviewer leaves Doran’s highly figurative description to speak for itself; taking our cue from the extant scholarship on The Odyssey, however, we might take this characterization of the production as monstrous to reflect Doran’s concerns over the play’s historical, cultural, and artistic expansiveness, as well as whether this expansiveness will “read” with audiences. In the sudden transition from Shango celebrants to deserted Underground from the aforementioned scene, we see a juxtaposition typical of the play’s cultural and temporal reach: this is an Odyssey with characters like Billy Blue, a blind vagabond and blues musician who sings in a modern idiom, who acts as a framing device between scenes, bookends the play, and steps into multiple roles himself though always seemingly from the remove of history, a disruptive, almost Brechtian device that Gilbert and Tompkins attribute to much postcolonial theater.Footnote 22 This is also an Odyssey where Odysseus’s slaughter of the suitors resonates directly with experiences of veterans of contemporary wars,Footnote 23 where Telemachus’s nurse Eurycleia is an Egyptian woman who teaches him, in the spirit of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena, that “Is Egypt who cradle Greece till Greece mature,”Footnote 24 and where Nausicaa’s maids play ball on the beach as Gerty MacDowell does in Joyce’s Ulysses, while storm-wracked Odysseus introduces himself as Leopold Bloom does by returning the ball after a stray throw.Footnote 25 When Telemachus flees the suitors to find more about his missing father, the oarsmen count off in transliterated Greek—chanting each stroke, “Ayis! Do-o! Trayis! Tetra! Pente! Ex!”—alongside Billy Blue, who counts off right after as though leading in a jazz tune—“A one, a two, a three, four, five, six goes the mattock.”Footnote 26 Even at a line-by-line level, the verse play maintains a formal meter and rhyme scheme in which characters mostly speak in alternate verse, one line at a time, exchanging a brisk stichomythic back and forth that often echoes with rhyme and repetition.Footnote 27 Its staging likewise had many moving parts: clocking in at “over three hours,” it was performed with a live band, a “cast of 16,” costumes that “mix Greek and Caribbean,” and a sandy, beach-like set;Footnote 28 the play also had “special effects”:Footnote 29 mermaids,Footnote 30 a terrifying skull-spangled Scylla,Footnote 31 and ship-sinking storms that rage with “bone-white skeletal horses’ heads.”Footnote 32 This Odyssey crosses time, space, and language, conversing with literary scholarship and literary canons all while offering a technically sophisticated viewing experience.
When we look to the first reviews of the play, Doran’s wariness feels justified—most have something to say about what Lisa Pike Fiorindi calls the play’s “apparent incongruities,” the combination of “ancient and modern, Standard English and Creole, high poetic, low pun and innuendo.”Footnote 33 While The Independent praises Odysseus and Anticlea’s reunion in the Underground as a moment where “two epochs are hauntingly juxtaposed,”Footnote 34 and The Guardian calls the play “an energetically kaleidoscopic affair,”Footnote 35 the reviewer in The Times describes the play’s “incongruities of both language and character” as a serious problem: “The lack of coherence can grate,” he writes—“the evening needed more magic, less reductive modernity.”Footnote 36 Others felt similarly: another review in The Independent describes Walcott’s “forging new meaning out of the past” as “less secure,” citing Penelope’s critique of Odysseus’s violence in the slaughter of the suitors as halfhearted and ambivalent—“You can just about swallow this un-Homeric gear change. But, having made it, Walcott then reverts to the original recognition scene . . . Even Ron Cook’s Odysseus, whose craft, wit, and homesick passion have carried him intrepidly through the show, is defeated by this scene.”Footnote 37 The Sunday Times notes that within the dialogue’s eclectic range “between the high Homeric” and “low comic” it “rarely hit[s] the authentic, personal pitch [Walcott] is seeking”;Footnote 38 meanwhile Financial Times writes that The Odyssey “fails to match the scope of Walcott’s vision,” unable to live up to what it sees as the more successful expansiveness of Omeros.Footnote 39 At its crudest, we see this complaint in the first sentence of a New York Times review published a few weeks after opening, describing the play simply as “a misguided melange of Homer and West Indian patois.”Footnote 40
Although the “apparent incongruities” of this play bothered many reviewers, we might also see, as Fiorindi writes, why subsequent scholarship has “focused on Walcott’s skill at holding these very same seemingly opposites in delicate balance and tension,” championing exactly those aspects of the play that many initial reviewers reproached:Footnote 41 Fiorindi and others write on the text’s intricate suspension of too-easy binaries,Footnote 42 while others investigate its exploration of hybridized cultures, chronologies, and geographies,Footnote 43 as well as its troubling of the logic behind classic sequences like the slaughter of the suitors.Footnote 44 For the most part, much of the scholarship surrounding The Odyssey reads it from a Caribbean or postcolonial perspective that builds on Walcott’s earlier work,Footnote 45 a text newly in conversation with Greek traditions or intertextually linked with other treatments of Homer’s Odyssey,Footnote 46 or as a play with particularly unique formal and thematic features worth reading closely in their own right.Footnote 47 Little scholarship, however, has placed these issues in the context of the play’s original production—a perspective that, I argue, helps us to make sense of the shaping forces behind this play and how Walcott’s text might anticipate and respond to them.
For example, in the varied articulation of a common complaint by reviewers in established newspapers, and in Greg Doran’s concerned anticipation of this complaint (however playfully expressed), we gain a glimpse into the particular theatrical habitus into which The Odyssey: A Stage Version was produced and staged. Namely, one in which adapting a canonical text like Homer’s Odyssey—temporally, spatially, culturally—is viewed automatically as a kind of tampering, trespass, or superficial adornment to an already-complete object (the phrase “politically correct” appeared in more than one reviewFootnote 48 ). An example: “Anybody who presumes to dramatise Odysseus’s epic spin round the Aegean deserves applause for his nerve,” begins The Times review; “and Derek Walcott and his director, Gregory Doran, both seem refreshingly strong in the chutzpah department.”Footnote 49 In other words, any Homer other than the Homer we already know is itself a kind of incongruity, and anyone audacious (or presumptuous) enough to make such changes—however “strong in the chutzpah department”—is guilty until proven innocent. In this sense, we might read Doran’s initial concern over the play’s unwieldiness as relating not to the “jabberwocky” of the production per se, but the “small door” through which he was trying to pull it: namely, the habitus of English theater represented by the RSC’s The Other Place in July 1992.
The “Hallowed Ground” of the English Stage
The Shakespeare Memorial Theatre first opened in Stratford in 1879, a space some have described as “a backwater market town”Footnote 50 that was also “geographically and politically the heart of conservative middle England.”Footnote 51 This “provincial theatre” was “entirely self-supporting and independent of government subsidy until the 1960s,”Footnote 52 when it applied for and received government funding along with the Old Vic and the National Theatre.Footnote 53 One account describes the RSC as “Britain’s first large-scale, permanent repertoire company” that by the mid-1960s had become “a socially engaged, vibrant national institution.”Footnote 54 More recent decades, however, have proven challenging for the RSC: in a 1991 article on new artistic director Adrian Noble—who gave director Doran the “carte blanche” that turned into The Odyssey—the Sunday Times recognized the RSC as “our oldest and biggest theatre company,” but also a theater in “financial crisis” that had “crumbled from within” in terms of leadership.Footnote 55 A year earlier they published an article describing the “besieged RSC” that Noble would inherit as “the most complex theatrical empire in Britain, with its five stages in two centres [Stratford and London] 100 miles apart, its 700 staff and its Pounds 2.9m deficit” all “in severe financial disarray”—an institution “extravagant and misdirected according to its critics, underfunded and under siege according to its friends.”Footnote 56 In other words, Walcott wrote and the RSC produced The Odyssey: A Stage Version during “a period of great flux.”Footnote 57
One continuity, however, was Noble’s insistence that the RSC continue its tradition of putting classical works into conversation with new and contemporary work.Footnote 58 Like his predecessors, Noble was said to maintain “that contemporary drama adds edge and bite to the company’s classical acting, and that its classical work brings depth and discipline to its contemporary performances.”Footnote 59 The Other Place, one of the RSC’s five performance spaces and the site in which The Odyssey was produced and performed, plays a unique role in this cross-temporal experimentation. Built in 1963 “as a closed lab and rehearsal room,” The Other Place acquired its name as well as a new reputation after being transformed by Buzz Goodbody a decade later into a theater with “electrifying close-contact properties” and intentional political dimensions.Footnote 60 Goodbody brought her “communist ideology and fringe-theatre experience” to bear on the space, as well as the mission to “make high-quality theatre accessible to a socially inclusive audience,” ultimately producing “raw, politically engaged drama” distinct from what was being produced in other RSC spaces.Footnote 61 The space “had its own aura”;Footnote 62 its unfinished, exposed feel lent it a “simple, flexible intimacy.”Footnote 63 One critic describes it as “like stepping into a carpentry shop and being privileged to watch the craftsman seriously at work. Things were being made here. Creativity, not comfort, mattered.”Footnote 64 The RSC claims that, prior to The Other Place’s renovation, its “unconventional auditorium . . . aimed to create a sense of community and intimacy between actors and audience”—all of which contributed to its reputation as a space for incubating the experimental.Footnote 65 After the 1989–1991 renovation, now “a permanent brick building,” the RSC reframed The Other Place as “the creative engine at the heart of the Royal Shakespeare Company”Footnote 66 —what one critic calls a “creative smithy, a place for experiment and practical development.”Footnote 67 Walcott’s The Odyssey was one of the first plays produced in this newly renovated building during this “period of great flux” under the new artistic director Noble—a bold adaptation of a classic text staged in an exciting, unusual, even strange theatrical space; an affirmation from the new RSC administration that audiences would continue to be exposed to the new, the untried, and the avant-garde along with traditional Shakespearean texts.
In one sense, this particular habitus of English theater invited experiment—the “chutzpah” behind director Doran’s “jabberwocky” of a production. In another sense, however, the RSC represented some of the more conservative strains of the English theatrical tradition: as one historian of the RSC notes, the legacy of Shakespeare participated actively in both “the making of the nation” as well as “the former empire as a conduit of English moral superiority.”Footnote 68 Moreover, Noble in many ways honored this tradition, describing his mission as new artistic director as follows:
My aim is that we should be the natural home of directors, actors and designers who are interested in classical theatre. My aim is that we should be the best classical theatre company in the English-speaking world. It’s as simple as that.Footnote 69
In other words, although the RSC would continue to produce more experimental work, its central purpose would continue to be “classical theater”—a field epitomized here by the work of William Shakespeare. The global reach of Noble’s claims (“the best . . . in the English-speaking world”) and the RSC’s naturalized centrality in this system draws its unquestionable authority (“It’s as simple as that”) from Shakespeare’s own global cultural authority and the imperial project on which this authority was founded. For example, consider that around the same time Noble became artistic director, the Prince of Wales became the RSC’s president, offering “to join the Royal Shakespeare Company on tours abroad to give ‘combined cultural clout where it’s most effective.’”Footnote 70 In this sense, while The Other Place represented a space fostering the theatrical avant-garde, this space remained secondary to the RSC’s classical work—a project entangled with the RSC’s cultural authority, this authority’s role in colonial history, and its official responsibility to the English public from which it still receives substantial subsidies.
Much scholarship has worked to reconstruct these connections between the “cultural clout” of “classical” literary texts and colonial practice. At least one scholar links Walcott’s The Odyssey to Gauri Viswanathan’s text on the English literary study as an “active instrument of Western hegemony” and colonialism in India,Footnote 71 noting the role Greek texts played in colonial education systems as a means of granting cultural authority to English colonizers.Footnote 72 With regard to theater and performance, concepts such as Joseph Roach’s “behavioral vortex” help make sense of how longstanding, deeply rooted expectations of what does and does not count as proper kinds of embodiment move from colonial metropole to colony; likewise Joanne Tompkins’s reworking of Foucault’s heterotopia—how theatrical spaces can house “a whole series of places that are foreign to one another,”Footnote 73 all of which “are distinguished from [the] actual world, but that resonate with it”—aid us in understanding “the space of performance . . . in relation to its physical and historical community.”Footnote 74 These frameworks, I believe, help to illuminate the fraught complexity of a performance like The Odyssey at The Other Place.
In addition to this scholarship, Walcott himself explores the challenges of producing theater in a former colony and of former colonial subjects attempting to enter into the long tradition of theater in “the English-speaking world.” Drawn from his experiences with the Trinidad Theatre Workshop, Walcott explains that he “would learn that every tribe hoards its culture as fiercely as its prejudices, that English literature, even in the theatre, was hallowed ground.”Footnote 75 The forces consecrating the stage as “hallowed” go beyond material concerns like audience, funding, and infrastructure to include more subtle effects on how a West Indian artist might embody a character on stage: “an actor rises to a text and his tongue stumbles on words that have less immediacy than his dialect”; “he confronts proper speech as his body once confronted certain ‘inflexible’ classical gestures.”Footnote 76 Behind this confrontation lies “a fear that he lacked proper weapons, that his voice, colour and body were no match for the civilized concepts of theater”—that “the ragged, untutored landscape seem[ed] as uncultured as our syntax.”Footnote 77 In Walcott’s examples, we see how a theatrical habitus can literally constrain people’s bodies through gesture, dialect, and syntax—a confrontation between two theatrical life-worlds, one of which still wields what Prince Charles described as the “combined cultural clout” of Shakespeare and the English Crown. For Walcott, this is a contest in which the cultural and embodied forms of expression to which the West Indian woman or man has access are “no match,” regarded as “forged or stolen weapons” by a theatrical habitus still structurally designed to discount or discredit their modes of embodied performance as theatrical performance.Footnote 78
In short, the “behavioral vortices” and “physical and historical communities” of the RSC authorize it as a certain kind of space with a certain kind of theatrical project. Namely, one that can have a building devoted to theatrical experimentation while also receiving state-sanctioned endorsements from Prince Charles and maintaining a reputation as the national torch-bearer of Shakespearean theater (“the best classical theatre company in the English-speaking world”), reproducing power structures that have their origins in Britain’s colonial history. When Walcott came to Stratford, he was the first Black author to produce a piece of theater with the RSC; the RSC thought The Odyssey an important opportunity for more diverse casting.Footnote 79 But if the recent controversy surrounding the 2014 production of The Orphan of Zhao is any indication, casting still remains a fraught issue for the RSC: after casting an almost entirely White ensemble to perform an adaptation of a traditional Chinese text, many argued that the RSC’s color-blind casting practices were color-blind in name only, described by Anna Chen as “a moveable feast” that “always privilege the white actor.”Footnote 80 When we read The Odyssey: A Stage Version with this habitus in mind, however, we discover moments in which the text uses voice and embodiment to reveal the constraining circumstances of its own production.
“Your Tone Is Just Like Troy’s . . . I Never Forget a Voice.”
The Cyclops episode of Walcott’s The Odyssey takes place in a kind of totalitarian dystopic future. The scene is “A long, grey, empty wharf” with a sheep carcass “hanging on a pole”; a philosopher who “rummages” through an oil drum recognizes Odysseus as a long-dead historical figure (“History’s repeated! A second Odysseus!”), only to tell him to “return to that age of heroes” from whence he came.Footnote 81 This is “a place where dreams are killed,” where “thought is forbidden” and “history erased” beneath the all-seeing, dictatorial “Eye” of the Cyclops, also known as “The Great Shepherd.”Footnote 82 The conversation between Odysseus and the Cyclops plays out in a curt, fragmentary back-and-forth as compared with the stichomythic line-by-line exchanges seen in the rest of the play: in their first encounter, they rarely say more than a few words to each other at a time (“Don’t stare.” “Sorry.” “What is your name?” “Nobody.” “Where’re you from?” “Nowhere.” “Where’re you going?” “I don’t know.”).Footnote 83 This episode has also received a substantial amount of critical attention, with scholars noting its explorations of totalitarianism, surveillance culture, and the nationalism associated with dictatorial states.Footnote 84 None, however, have examined in any depth its links with a key intertext that also reworked this encounter so as to address questions of nationalism, racism, and empire—Joyce’s Ulysses.
In an interview prior to opening night, Walcott brings up Joyce several times: he draws parallels between the play’s “theme of recurrence” and “déjà vu” with the circular nature of Leopold Bloom’s journey;Footnote 85 he argues that, in the same way that he attends to the vernacular language and energy of the Odyssey, Joyce too was sensitive to the humorous nature of the original myth (“it is a humorous book and Joyce knew that”).Footnote 86 If this interview is any indication, Joyce’s repurposing of the myth was a consistent touchstone in Walcott’s writing, rehearsing, and producing of The Odyssey. The Cyclops episode in particular alludes to the infamously heated conversation between Joyce’s “two-eyed” Leopold Bloom and his “one-eyed” interlocutor, a “citizen” modeled on Michael Cusack, in a Dublin pub. Vincent J. Cheng has connected this episode in Ulysses to questions of nation and nationhood wherein Joyce satirizes “the xenophobic ideologies of radical Celticists”—the one-eyed men in the pub have the “limited, monologic, cycloptic vision of an ethnocentric and xenophobic nationalism.”Footnote 87 Walcott imports this trope of two-eyed-ness directly into his totalitarian dystopia. When Odysseus crosses his eyes for a laugh from the Cyclops, he quickly elaborates on the other benefits of having two, rather than one, eye: “God gave us two eyes because we’re human . . . One is for laughter, the other one cries.”Footnote 88 The Cyclops, now interested, asks “Why do you need two eyes? One does just as well,” to which Odysseus gives a reply straight out of Leopold Bloom’s playbook: “For balance. Proportion. Contrast. Mortals need two.”Footnote 89 When Bloom leaves the pub in Joyce’s novel, he concludes a conversation in which he has tried to defend his “two-eyed” sense of self, ethnicity, and nationhood against the monologic belligerence of the Citizen, a struggle over the definition of nationhood, and nationalism staged in an Irish colonial context. Unlike the Cyclops and the nationalists Bloom faces in the pub who are “blind to the self-contradicting irony inherent” in the anti-Semitism they practice, Walcott’s Odysseus, like Bloom, knows he needs to see both sides of something in order to survive.Footnote 90
Parallels between the two texts go beyond the episode’s themes, however. When asked in an interview about the many dialects in the play, “that mix of language,” Walcott counters that “it’s not a mix”:
[t]o make it exotic or to make it Caribbean, or do it in dialect is to get very nationalistic, and I’m not interested in that because that’s like trying to claim Homer in the same way the British try to claim Homer. The English think Homer belongs to them and the attitude will be, that basically it’s an English poem that has been translated into Greek.Footnote 91
Here Walcott anticipates the discourse of nationalistic ownership against which his adaptation would collide—much like the confrontation between West Indian actor and traditional English theatrical habitus—where Homer “belongs” to England, even to the point of anachronistic priority (“an English poem . . . translated into Greek”). In response, rather than rehearse the same nationalistic claims to cultural lineages, he turns to what he sees as the specific vernacular “regionality” of Homer’s own “demotic language,” one that “is in itself colloquial,” filled with “a lot of bad puns,” and “energized by a kind of vulgarity, not by a kind of pomposity.”Footnote 92 For Walcott, the hectic energy, mix of high and low humor, and vernacular language of The Odyssey: A Stage Version come not from taking the Odyssey and “mak[ing] it Caribbean,” but from exploring those qualities indigenous to the regional specificity of the Odyssey itself—claims that, Walcott implies, can also be made of Joyce’s reworking of the myth, with which Walcott explicitly aligns himself. In this sense, Walcott’s text confronts the classical theatrical habitus represented by the RSC by drawing on the authority of Joyce’s Ulysses to retheorize the language of Homer’s Odyssey through a lens of local, unruly, and vernacular specificity.
Although these parallels set the stage for this scene’s interrogation of empire, language, and the “hallowed ground” of the English stage, its actual performance as embodied by RSC actors at The Other Place generates another, more critically self-aware, level of critique. For example, when attempting to disarm the Cyclops, Odysseus begins addressing him in what the stage directions call a “black accent”: “God, what accent is that?” the Cyclops asks, roaring with laughter, “I’m going to die.” Odysseus replies, “Oh, you will, you will, boss.”Footnote 93 Walcott wrote this scene knowing that it would be performed by Ron Cook, a White Englishman, and that it would require Cook’s Odysseus to give a minstrel performance as a means of tricking the tyrannical Cyclops. The action of the scene, then, hinges on a kind of racial codeswitching—the ability to manipulate what Eric Lott calls the “competing ‘national’ vernaculars . . . housed within the minstrel show,” an unstable complex that was “less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” as a shifting working class came to articulate discontent and desire in racialized terms.Footnote 94 But because the signifying material unique to theater is human bodies, as scholars like Martin Puchner have argued, the potential experiences of this moment vary dramatically depending on the ethnicity of the actor giving the performance. Does Odysseus’s use of a “black accent” hearken back to a moment when “fascinated white men” first realized that there was “fame and money to be made” in appropriating “black sounds” in such essentialized stereotypes?Footnote 95 Or does it resonate with the possibility of “a black man in blackface . . . offer[ing] credible imitations of white men imitating him,” manipulating stereotypes with vernacular ingenuity so as to escape a violent captor?Footnote 96 The meaning of this fraught exchange unfolded in the bodies and voices of the actors on stage at The Other Place on July 2, 1992. I would argue that in coordinating this moment of tension between actor and character, Walcott provides a new take on Odysseus being “two-eyed”: a meta-theatrical double vision, a dissonance of space, performance, and production built into the text of the play that might shake actors loose from their roles and offer an almost Brechtian glimpse at the apparatus of the RSC shaping this particular performance.
By building such moments of contingency into the text of the play, and grounding this contingency in the bodies and voices of the performers in question, Walcott highlights the constraints that structure a given theatrical work. This scene takes it one step further: after Odysseus blinds the Cyclops at the conclusion of the episode, there is a blackout until the start of the next scene. Through this darkness, we hear Odysseus shout: “SON OF POSEIDON! YOU OBSCENE OCTOPUS! / YOU TON OF SQUID-SHIT, WITH YOUR EYE POURING BLACK INK! / MY NAME IS NOT NOBODY! IT’S ODYSSEUS! / AND LEARN, YOU BLOODY TYRANTS, THAT MEN CAN STILL THINK!”Footnote 97 This moment of recognition, usually a sign of hubris for which Odysseus is later punished, combines with the parallel from Ulysses to take on newly revolutionary tones: Peter Burian has described this revelation as being “not merely out of pride, but from defiance of oppression in a world that has killed history and banned thought.”Footnote 98 Walcott himself describes the tyranny of the Cyclops as in keeping with the Periclean tyranny of “the colonels of Greece,” wherein “the foundation of democracy does turn into a tyranny. People forget. . . . it’s really a poem about rebellion.”Footnote 99 I would also emphasize, in light of the colonial history behind this particular theatrical habitus, that Odysseus’s cries here are written by a Saint Lucian playwright to be shouted in the “hallowed ground” of an intimate national theater which has, historically, denied certain voices and bodies from counting as proper theatrical performance. Moreover, Odysseus addresses his cry not to one singular tyrant, but rather “YOU BLOODY TYRANTS” in the plural—as if he speaks to all tyrants, all oppressors, throughout history. Blinded, the Cyclops can know Odysseus by nothing but his voice, and, because of the blackout and second-person plural address, the audience listening in the intimate space of The Other Place is in the same position. Attuning ourselves to this moment with an ear for the stage as a resonance chamber, these words ring with startling feedback in its powerful, even accusational overtones of direct, meta-theatrical address.
Walcott transforms other scenes of recognition to operate at a similar register: rather than have Odysseus reveal first his identity to Queen Arete and King Alcinous after weeping at Demodocus’s stories of the Trojan War, the courtiers and Phemius (played by Billy Blue) have a brief aside before an incognito Odysseus tells his tale of the Cyclops:
PHEMIUS [Billy Blue]
I heard that voice at Troy. This is Odysseus.
THIRD COURTIER
Why lie about it? Natural cunning, I suppose.Footnote 100
In this moment, Odysseus reveals himself not through a profusion of feeling, but by the sound of his voice. As in the aforementioned scene, Odysseus and the actor playing him are to be known by how they speak. This dynamic becomes particularly charged on a stage where dialect plays into certain characters’ dialogue, how rhymed verses are pronounced, and how audience members learn to “watch” for actors playing multiple characters—trying, like Polyphemus, to recognize recurring characters by their voices. All this works once again to shake actors loose from their characters and foreground the realities of their physical embodiment.
Reading Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version through the lens of something like Dimock’s resonance, and the circumstances of its initial production as a spatially localized resonance chamber, helps us to parse the noisy relationship between the two: one in which legacies of cultural hegemony in a colonial context constrain the kinds of theater that are possible in the venue afforded by the RSC’s The Other Place, but also in which a work of theater might be constructed so as to bring these institutional constraints to the fore. In a later scene, the text theorizes itself in similar terms as Demodocus (also Billy Blue) recognizes Odysseus upon his return to Ithaca: “Your tone is just like Troy’s,” Demodocus says. “I never forget a voice.”Footnote 101 Odysseus replies, commenting on the “strange dialect” of the modern Billy Blue / ancient Demodocus, “What island are you from?”
DEMODOCUS [Billy Blue]
A far archipelago. Blue seas. Just like yours.
ODYSSEUS
So you pick up various stories and you stitch them?
DEMODOCUS
The sea speaks the same language around the world’s shores.Footnote 102
For a play so filled with the sea—fog, mist, surf, salt, sand, and foam feature prominently in its literal and figurative language—it makes sense that islands—dialects, cultures, histories—might resonate without overriding or laying hierarchical claim to one another. It is a relationship of diachronic yet simultaneous contemporaries, not of chronological order and influence. The moment seems also to reflect on its life beyond this particular performance—the idea that this story may be “stitched” on other “shores,” performed elsewhere by other companies on other stages, published as a book, purchased, read, and explored by scholars as a text. From this perspective, Walcott’s The Odyssey: A Stage Version illustrates the vexed life that a work of theater lives as it intersects with the collaborative infrastructures of theatrical production as shaped by colonial and postcolonial history. As we attempt to account for the diverse overlapping forces of The Odyssey’s textual content and the material history of its production, we find that the stage becomes a uniquely charged site for hearing resonance as well as dissonance within and without a work of art—among characters, canons, actors, writers, directors, theaters—and the conceptual and physical entanglements that make them possible.
