the Greek project

I think that I have been away from this blog which we began for A Cargo of Curiosities for at least two years which was when that project ended. I know! I am a fickle and erratic blogger but having spent part of last week back at the Hall with Chris, we decided (round

about the 3rd glass of Prosecco), that we should resurrect the blog and communicate some of the creative thoughts that we have been pursuing. Edgeways Productions is still alive and well and both Chris and I have been busy trying to keep up with old ideas and to fire off new ones. I hope any friends of Edgeways still occasionally look us up and haven’t given up on our creative productivity completely.

Having attempted to apply for funding for large projects (mostly unsuccessfully) we have both been concentrating on the kind of writing that is our bread and butter, Chris as a playwright and myself as a poet. You can read about those activities in the ongoing projects section. What I want to start this new flurry of blogging with is the project we are building over the next few months. First I should explain a bit of the backstory.

When Chris and I were very young, 22 and just out of university, we decided that we needed an adventure. In those days of the faraway early eighties, we lived in a hopeful, pre-brexit, pre-xenophobia climate when travel, at least across Europe, without a great deal of organisation, was still possible. We decided that we would take our favourite and most recent theatrical production (Agamemnon by Aeschylus) to Greece, specifically to Athens where, we believed, we would find an appreciative audience for our work. The fact that we thought the Greeks would welcome our version, in a modern English translation, of their ancient classic, probably and from this distance shows the depth of our naivete. At the time it seemed a perfectly credible idea. Each time Chris and I and our families spend time together these days, the constant refrain after a good meal and a couple of glasses of wine is, Tell the one about the time when you......Our kids love the Greek adventure stories and consider their parents to have been frontiersmen and women of the outer limits of europe. They have badgered us to put our memories down somewhere and make a piece of work about those formative experiences of our young lives, even volunteering to play us when the script is taken up as a Hollywood blockbuster. So we finally listened to them and decided to piece together the fragmented memories and stories as a single piece.

There are a number of problems with trying to retrieve memories from an earlier time in your life, mostly to do with accuracy and chronology but also to do with emotional memory. We were both there and we can agree on most of the broad detail but the intricacies and emotional memories differ; some events have become conflated, some are simply missing.

We began the process by trying to remember the route we took from London to Athens in the autumn of 1981 and had to use a map to try and piece together the minutiae of the journey, arguing about what happened where. We have aimed at being absolutely honest about our memories, our competing versions of events, our reactions to them then and our excavation of them now. However we are hampered by our different experiences of the same events. Not everything is perceived in a nostalgic glow and it is clear that we often behaved very badly and that sometimes we realised that even at the time. It is difficult to look at your younger self and to admit that you weren’t always very nice. There are times when we have been simply horrified at the risks we took and dangers we ignored and at the end of each conversation we have both been shocked at our youthful arrogance and determination. Did we really do that? has been a constant refrain. Neither of us can imagine being happy for our own children, roughly the same age now as we were then, undertaking such a precarious project. I hate to think how my own parents must have worried at the time and how little thought I gave to their reservations although they never expressed them to me.

We have a framework now in the shape of a series of poems which comment on the action, and also upon our own understandings of and references to the classical literature with which we were so engaged. Now we have to write the scenes. Neither of us quite knows what this beast is actually going to be: a play, a film, a mixed media story, anything is possible at this stage. What we are acutely aware of is that this adventure was a formative one for both of us and has influenced our subsequent careers and artistic tastes and aspirations.

I am enjoying the journey though and am surprised at how vivid the memories become when they are explored as more than a passing visit. There are some episodes which I have experienced almost as vividly as when were actually living them (and certainly more soberly). I have spent a lot of my working life working with other people, older people or people living with dementia to retrieve their memories and have always been amazed at how powerfully detailed they can be. It is a huge adventure to dig out my own experiences and enjoy the colours and textures which are still imprinted in my memory from forty years ago. It is a story of youthful bravado, ignorance and creativity and though we had thought of it as a sort of anarchic Withnail and I story, or Five go mad in Greece, it is not that at all. Is it a road movie, a coming of age story, a classic retelling? Is it film? theatre? At this stage who knows?