SPARTACUS, AGAIN…

Watched bits of Bolshoi Spartacus on TV Friday night, because I remembered being moved by final scene nearly 50 years ago. I saw the same company do it, in a very similar production in Cairo. I was teaching in a government school, on a year out from Oxford, at a time when the Soviet Union was courting Nasser’s Egypt. Most people in Cairo were not that keen on Russian ballet, and nor was I. But I’d heard of Ulanova and now Plissetskaya, and tickets were cheap enough for me to risk it.

Seeing it again, I’d forgotten how formulaic it was, this Spartacus, with its alternating solos and choruses, virile slaves and camp legionaries, sincere young lovers and cynical coquetry. But the Cuban lead dancer believed in what he was doing, and at the end – after missing most of the battle scenes for Have I got News for You – I was moved again by the final set piece.

Spartacus dead, mourned by his lover and the remnants of his army. Earlier his body has been hoisted aloft, like a dead animal, on the points of Roman spears. Now he is lifted gently by his followers, raised slowly on a human pyre of upstretched arms. The light picks up the whiteness of the arms and fingers that almost hide the body they support. From behind, there rises the body of the bereft woman, vertical, eyes and arms raised in supplication, then folding forward over the body, head down, dark hair like a waterfall onto the bearers’ hands and arms…

Except that this production was not quite as I remembered it. The curtains closed while the woman was still reaching up with a halo of round shield behind her. I prefer to remember it as it was... Isn't memory always as it was?

Now I realise that this is one of several related images I bear in mind and recall from time to time. A couple come from other people’s art, a couple from my own life and this is the first time I’ve made the link between them all.

In the first London production of West Side Story there was a dance sequence marking the death of the young lovers, and what might have been their meeting again. The two bodies rise, as if flying in a dream, lifted, one from each side out of the dark wings. Their paths, orbits, cross, through a pool of light high above the middle of the stage and sink back into darkness. A rainbow drained of its colour and promise, no sweet sorrow, bottomless despair.

Antonioni, in Red Desert, I think, has a young woman driving through the desert inb an old car, hearing the radio report of her lover’s death as the police close in on a plane he’s hijacked then returned to base. Act gratuit… She stops the car by the road, switches the engine off and stands, back to camera, in silence at the side of the road. Beyond her is a scrubby bush, its tangled branches in contrast to the long, smooth hair that hangs down her back. She stands for what seems a long time, then her hair, and the wiry bush begin to move, stirred by a sudden breath of wind.

Only now it occurs to me that these images have engraved themselves on my mind in tribute to an actual memory. I remember, or have reinvented, the sight and sound of my mother as she heard the news of Tony’s, her younger brother’s, death not long before the end of the war. He, I learned later, was killed by a booby trap as the Germans retreated from the Ardennes. We were back in London, in the basement of our house, when she got the news on the phone, from her mother perhaps. All I remember is the wail or groan my mother made, unlike any sound I’d heard from her, and the way she slumped against the wall. It must have been a wall-mounted phone. If I’m not imagining it, she crumpled, slid down into the angle of wall and floor.

My mother had thick, dark hair and her name was Mary. Now I wonder if religious pictures – all those images of Virgin Mary and her crucified son – helped link that early experience of mine, and hers, to later images of stage and film. Images fresh images beget, or hook up like trucks on a train. We seem to need those images, to know what it is we might be feeling or have felt. The images can be received, or made up in our own heads, by mistake, as it were, in dreams or on purpose in words or paint or dance. And music? I’m never sure how that works, carrying so much feeling with no image to speak of…

I was going to say we may need some image between ourselves and a reality we cannot quite face head-on, and some mirror to catch and hold it in. Perseus was given a bright shield, looking into that he could see enough of the head with the snaky locks, to cut it off before it turned him to stone. Perhaps it’s not just monsters we need to contain in images, but things, people, we may have loved.

Not just mothers, or lovers snatched by death. I loved Beatrice, but we parted alive and in good health. She died very young, but it was nearly 20 years after we split up that I heard about that. I had written to her c/o her mother, in the hope we might meet. Not to pick up where we left off, but lay the ghosts of eternal youth, each other all those years ago. Malheureusement, Beatrice est decedee. Her mother's letter shocked me, although she wrote affectionately and enclosed pictures of her daughter's two teenage children. I was shocked not only that Beatrice was dead, but that she'd been dead for four years with me imagining her alive, since just before Will was born. Besides, grief was new to me. I remember walking out of our house in Swindon, going nowhere in particular, and seeing a woman with a child in a pushchair coming towards me. They looked nice, and I was half ashamed to find myself noticing that. Half a minute later, when they were ten yards away from me that I realised that the woman was Ada and the boy in the pushchair Will.

It wasn't long before I remember the story of the other Mary, Magdalen, walking desolate in the garden and mistaking the risen Jesus for a gardener. Religious images, romantic images, have a lot to answer for. What would we do without them?