The Newsletter of Homerton College, Cambridge & The Homerton Roll

eyond our studies
This year, we have invited two students to give us their impressions
of taking part in university drama and sport at the highest level.
The Greek Play
The 2010 production of the Cambridge
Greek play, the Agamemnon by
Aeschylus, was by all accounts one
of the best of recent years. The
tradition of performing a play in
Greek every three years goes back
to 1882 – this was the 40th in the
series. We asked Phoebe Haines, who
gave an outstanding performance
as Cassandra, to write about her
experience. Katherine Jack, a third year
Education with English and Drama
student, played Clytemenestra.
Aeschylus tells us to ‘Overcome fear,
and behold wonder’. The business
of getting on a stage in any capacity
involves a certain amount of fearquashing;
to trounce these fears whilst
performing in an ancient language is a
veritable challenge.
contours of a range of languages, from
Italian to Catalan. The difficulty with
languages such as Russian and Greek is
the difference in alphabet. So the first
interpretative step was to convert the
Greek alphabet into phonetics which
I could speak and understand. While
much debate is meted out over the
exact phonetic sounds of the Ancient
Greek language, the commonly accepted
versions contain quite a few sounds that
aren’t found in many modern western
European languages, such as the ‘kh’
sound (found in modern day Russian
and Hebrew). Once I had negotiated
my way around the twists and turns
of this rich and flamboyantly textured
language, I found that the process of
characterisation followed with a greater
sense of immediacy and intimacy
than usual.
Aeschylus uses language to characterize
his dramatis personae in an almost
incomprehensibly complex way. Like
Shakespeare, a prescriptive style of blank
verse is used, though Aeschylus’ poetic
convention of choice (the dochmiac)
is far more intricate than our iambic
pentameter. Where Shakespeare’s
I approached my commitment to the
Greek Play with a certain degree of
hesitancy. Having quelled a number
of rumours involving our director’s
alleged determination to retain total
‘faithfulness’ to the script (which would
have involved compulsory head-shaving
and nudity on my part), by the end of
Easter Term 2010 I felt ready to begin
tackling the task at hand: namely, to
learn Ancient Greek in a matter of
weeks. While I had had some brief and
baffling encounters with Latin at prep
school, I had no prior experience of
Greek. The language, with its lyrical
lines and strangely guttural consonants,
sounded to me at first like some sort of
bizarre and incomprehensible Welsh/
Elvish hybrid. After a few sessions
with the wonderful Profs Diggle and
Bowen, I fell truly and obsessively in
love with this strange language. Rarely
approached from the spoken angle,
Ancient Greek is a language that evokes
a totally fascinating and visceral soundworld.
It’s also a joy to sing. Coming
from an operatic background, I am
used to learning at least the spoken
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Homertonian