Reflection on
Like The Greeks
Inspiration for Like The Greeks
I undertook Like the Greeks, “A play for the artist and the philosopher in each of us”, after having a dream in which I was descending an ancient stone staircase at the side of a precipice, absolutely terrified. Finally I came to an alcove wherein there were the stone heads carved out of the rock, like the ancient depictions of Sophocles, Aristophanes and the great philosophers of Ancient Greece:
I knew that the stairs led down to Athens.
The Idea of the Great Man and the title.
I took the Ancient Greeks to symbolise a desire to be a historical figure who had an impact on the evolution of human thought and that prompted me to write on the subject. I thought a good start would be a struggling playwright who was trying to come to terms with his role in the world while simultaneously alienating it, or more specifically, those around him.
Throughout the play the idea of being a Great Man, an influential figure in the history of art or philosophy, is signified by the term of being “Like The Greeks.” It was interesting to work with this signifier as I had been reading on Hegel and his idea that there is "World Spirit" (Weltgeist) which guides humanities evolution through the spirits of Great Men who, through their actions, change the world and this fit rather excellently with the ideas I already had to work with. The fact that Hegel was a huge classicist and very much into “The Greeks” was a charming coincidence I was very pleased with, he did my work for me by referring to them in his own writing, and in turn Franz, the protagonist, decides to write a play based on Hegel’s (relatively famous) Master and Slave Dialectic in order to expiate his own feeling of powerlessness and desire to ‘rise up’ from his self-imposed slavery and achieve his potential.
In my dream, when I reached the bottom of the staircase I found myself in a venue where a rock band was playing a very intimate show. They were not on high above their audience. I text my then-girlfriend, “I’m in Athens! So now I can be a Greek like I always wanted!! Papa Roach are playing, I feel like it’s meant to be!”
In the morning when I messaged her to relay the dream she mentioned that she had been listening to the same band all day the day before. This seemed eerily like what the psychoanalyst Karl Jung, who was very into dream interpretation, would call a ‘synchronicity’ - the experience of events that are apparently causally unrelated and unlikely to occur together, occurring together by chance in seemingly a meaningful manner.
In the final scene when Franz offers ex-partner Mary a part in a play he has written, he gives her character the name of Sophia, the Greek word for wisdom. The origin of the choice derives from Jungian psychology where the unconscious female aspect of a male, the anima, goes through four stages of evolution. Eve (as from genesis) deals with the emergence of a male's object of desire, Helen (as of Troy) is capable of worldly success and of being self-reliant, intelligent and insightful, but has lacks in internal qualities such as virtue, faith or imagination. Mary (as in the Virgin) who possesses virtue by the perceiving male, and ultimately Sophia, in which complete integration has occurred, allowing females to be seen and related to as particular individuals who possess both positive and negative qualities. Indeed when Franz bestows the part of Sophia upon Mary it is a symbol of his having gone from seeing her as merely someone virtuous, a means to his own ends, to a person in her own right.
It is worthy of note that I was completely unaware of Jung’s theory when I chose the name Mary for her (she was named after Mary Shelly who was an inspiration to Percy Shelly and Byron) it was a mere matter of coincidence that Sophia turned out to be a Greek name and so I chose it for the character in the play that Franz would write as it gave me the needed link for last two lines of dialogue which I had delineated from the very beginning:
MARY. Like the Greeks?
FRANZ. Like the Greeks.
Exeunt.
I see something of a parallel between Jung’s theory of the collective unconscious (the idea that below our unconscious there is a deeper level of mind which links all of consciousness) and Hegel’s belief in the Weltgeist. If we could ever conceive of such a supernatural force existing I would have to say I felt synchronicities were on my side in the process of writing. This idea found its own home within the play when Franz, a dedicated atheist, unexpectedly declares: “In the moment of creation it is as difficult for an artist to be an atheist as it is for a philosopher to believe in God,” referringhis feeling that, while in the element of writing, that there is something greater than oneself pushing things along.
Sunday in the Park with George
Not long after I had conceived of the concept of Like The Greeks I was working at The Edinburgh Fringe as a theatre critic where I saw the musical Sunday in the Park with George. I saw some parallels between it and my project, as it is about a painter who alienates his significant other by being grumpy, self-obsessed and blind to her needs, but I wanted to use my play as an opportunity to examine the psychological aspects of the characters involved and address some philosophical questions regarding art, and the relationship between oneself and the other.
It was not my aim to romanticise a difficult personality type or make excuses for it, but to expose it. Franz begins with severe writer’s block, unlike George, who paints prolifically. This is, in part, because Franz is extrinsically motivated, he cares that people will find his work insightful, masterful, ground-breakingly original, &c., while George simply feels the desire to paint and acts upon it. Indeed evidence shows that the imposition of external motivations leads to a decline in the ability to motivate oneself intrinsically (such as in Dweck, C. S. (1999) “Self-Theories – Their Role in Motivation, Personality and Development”, Columbia University.)
Art for Art’s Sake
An important theme within the play is the idea of Art as ‘ends-driven’ (by the desire for credibility, acclaim, fame, influence, &c.) versus the desire to pursue art purely as a means of self-expression. Franz describes himself as torn between two elements of his personality:
“On one side of me is a poet who wants to create work of indescribably beauty and bliss. One who couldn’t give a rotten damn about what anyone else may think or say on it. On the other side of me is a philosopher. A great intellectual who wants to influence everyone he meets, startling them with revelation and epiphany. An innovator. A revolutionary - turning everything he touches into gold. I’m just a poet trying to play philosopher and playwright all in one breath, that’s the trouble.”
‘Like the Greeks,’ Franz wants to be a great man with his own place etched out in history, while Mary, his partner, prompts him to write whatever occurs to him while not assessing it too deeply at first glance and to prize quality over originality. Indeed it is when Franz decides that he should write for his own fulfillment that he finally finds it easy to achieve all that he wants, both artistically and philosophically. He places the poet first, but rather than abandon the philosopher he reconciles these two aspects of his personality by making philosophy the ally of art:
“The poet designs clothes for the philosopher to wear, and if no one sees past their charm to what is truly being said, more fool them! He’s still all too glad for the attention.”
At the last, the play is about Franz coming to see his creativity being worthy in its own right rather than an accessory to his ego, and through that process also coming to see Mary as ‘Sophia,’ worthy in her own right.
Suffering for your Art
Throughout the play we see Franz constantly, as he puts it, “at war” with himself. Towards the end of the play he has a monologue which is the turning point of his character. He considers the fact that so many great artists (“great men”) suffered so greatly in their lives: Dostoevsky, Beethoven, Van Gough and Coleridge are some of his examples. He wonders whether their lives of suffering were worth creating some of the greatest works of all time and considers the fact that in some way their suffering makes the story of their lives more compelling. This is when he realises that all that remains is for him to ensure that he always acts in such a way that he can be proud of, as though he were the hero of his own story.
The Evolution of Mary and the Ethics of Like The Greeks
The character of Mary matures long before Franz does. The first step in the matter is realising that her relationship with Franz is unfulfilling to her and brings her more sorrow than joy. While Franz expresses the will to write about morality, she is interested in preserving her virtue in practical terms, and says:
“The saint who sacrifices self in the service of others becomes no longer worthy of the title of saint, for has he not spilled innocent blood though it be his own? Cultivating a bitterness in pursuit of a virtue leaves no virtue to speak of.”
When she breaks up with him reiterates the sentiment: “I have only so much good will to spare and I think its best we spent some time apart.” In other words she has realized that she does not like who she is becoming as a consequence of being together with him, she is unhealthily co-dependent and is substituting encouraging him for pursuit of her own aspirations, she wants to create a better life for herself, “I owe it to myself to consider how I’d like to spend my own future.”
She is being ignored at work and she's being ignored by Franz. She leaves him and would no doubt soon leave her job too. While Franz is too self-involved to be aware of the needs of others, she manages to identify exactly what she thinks love is and would desire from a relationship, “Love isn’t just something you say you feel… it’s something you do! Love is attention. If you don’t give the correct attention your feeling is a bird without wing. Your love doesn’t nurture.”
Foreshadowing and self-reference within Like The Greeks
It was important to me to try to write something that was clever and worked on many levels. The continental philosopher Theodor Adorno believed that good art was constantly cognisant of the whole and worked with its own material immanently rather than evolving in a vacuum with no self-awareness. I agree deeply on this point and long before I was aware of those writings what impressed me in fiction was good foreshadowing, when themes that could have seemed of little significance when first occurring came to greater prominence later in the work or reoccurred in unexpected way. This approach is easily exemplified by “Chekov’s gun,” a literary technique whereby an apparently irrelevant element is introduced early in the story whose significance becomes clear later in the narrative.
There are a number of subtle examples of this within the script, but for brevity I will only discuss two. The first and most significant occurs at the beginning:
FRANZ. How’s the café been?
MARY. The same as ever really, people hear but don't listen. Now and then someone asks me to play the moonlight or sends over a drink, but only because they like the way I look. Were it otherwise they'd be as well to play recordings. I’d like to return to the stage but seems there’s little work open to an unestablished actress. Not in Paris anyway. Looks like I'm stuck behind the piano for the time being.
FRANZ. At least it’s nice for you to get paid for playing.
MARY. But it's dull being part of the furniture! You should really come in some time...
FRANZ. Perhaps I shall.
MARY. Perhaps.
In itself this passage shows Franz completely ignoring Mary’s aspirations; he is unable to pick up on her underlying feelings. All she wants is for him to show he cares by coming in to hear her play at work, and thus when she says “it’s dull being part of the furniture” it takes on a double meaning because she is heard but not listened to within his house as well.
This foreshadows the final scene play in which Franz finally does come into the café to hear her playing:
FRANZ. I always loved the way you played that Chopin étude.
MARY. Really? You never came in to hear it before, you always said perhaps.
FRANZ. Envious for the centre of attention no doubt.
MARY. Not that they pay any attention in here, I think you were overly optimistic.
FRANZ. Perhaps. Still, I'm sure you'd be sorely missed were you absent.
MARY. You think so?
FRANZ. I'm certain of it.
In a reversal of roles, Franz is now speaking of himself. He never paid her adequate attention when they were a couple but now that she’s gone the gap in his life is very apparent. Sometime during their separation Franz has become cognisant of Mary’s aspirations (as he mentions them for the first time in Scene 5) and the play ends with him offering her a role in one of his own plays, prompted (he says) by his director, although there is the suggestion that really she was really the original inspiration for the role.
Another, more subtle, example of self-reference within the script is that in the first scene Franz declares: “I’m simply unable to deliver under these conditions! No one cares what goes into it. No one cares how it works, just so long as it works.” Indeed, for Franz, creating is a difficult process involving much soul searching. Yet true to his prediction the Director of his plays has a strange faith in him demonstrated in this dialogue:
FRANZ. I was always in awe of Da Ponte’s ability to structure a narrative, his use of multiple interweaving ironies in the libretto is most enviable...
DIRECTOR. Enviable? What nonsense my good fellow, that’s exactly the kind of level of complexity I can see you really getting a handle on in the following project.
The Director really means this as a compliment. He thinks Franz is a genius, but he hasn’t seen how difficult it was for Franz to produce the end product. His words only serve to compound the pressure which Franz is already placing upon himself to produce. Mary, on the other hand, when parting ways from Franz a second time, has the empathy to leave with the words, “Franz... your letters... I was dying when I read them…. And I knew you were dying when you wrote them... I just thought you should know.” Ultimately, she did know what went in to them.
A Play about doing what it does
At heart, Like The Greeks is a play is about doing what the play itself does. Franz says of his own writing that the poet designs clothes for the philosopher to wear, and this play is to some degree philosophy dressed in theatre, as Sartre’s Nausea and Kierkegaard’s Either/Or were philosophy dressed in literature. For that reason it is written in a rather romantic vernacular (although notably I do not use dead language) because it seems more beautiful to me. I don’t think the play would have the same impact if it was written in common parlance rather than ‘backdated’ in this way.
Franz practice describes my practice:
“… I just started writing. It was like going for a walk in a dark forest: I didn’t know exactly where I was going, but I came to recognise this familiar tree and the other. Each was a concept or view that had entered my mind at some point and left again... Gradually they came into clarity like a thousand single points of light beyond the darkest dark. And as I weaved those points together in prose like a nebula into a star they gained greater significance by taking upon themselves the tone of the characters who spoke them, for they were not [necessarily] my own opinions but simply combinations of words and ideas which I found aesthetic.”
And Mary’s advice to him describes my approach:
“When we dig deep and be honest – well – we uncover gems that are valuable to others, whether we are trying to please or not.”
I sincerely hope this proves to be the case.
