Word: sappho
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...Festival of the arts promises a return to pre-eminence this year under a new artistic director, Lord Harewood, 38, music-critic cousin of Queen Elizabeth. With John Osborne's Luther (see above), he will present the Bristol Old Vic's version of Lawrence Durrell's Sappho and Wolf (Expresso Bongo) Mankowitz' adaptation of Friedrich Duerrenmatt's Frank V, described as the "musical history of a private bank." Then there is also the famed Edinburgh "Fringe"-small, independent productions that sprout by the dozen (about 60 last year), have no official connection with the festival...
Among the works of lesser known artists, Renee Sintenis' edition of Sappho (in Greek) is a combined triumph of drawing and typography. the Greek letters engraved by the artist's husband, E.R. Weiss, match the style of the graceful line engravings...