Harrison, Herakles, and Wailing Women: ‘Labourers’ at Delphi

Abstract

As well as being a widely published poet, Tony Harrison is well known as a dramatist for his reworkings of classical materials, from ancient Greek to medieval. When he was invited to contribute a play for the eighth International Meeting on Ancient Greek Drama, on the theme of ‘Crossing Millennia’, to be held at the European Cultural Centre of Delphi in August 1995, he chose to present a version of The Labourers of Herakles set on a building site – a building site the Greek sponsors specially ‘constructed’ for the event. In describing the single performance of the play, Carol Chillington Rutter, who teaches in the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, vividly evokes the theatrical forcefulness of the occasion: but she questions what she considers the ambivalence of Harrison's theatre work in its presentation and treatment of women – of which the decision to visualize the chorus of women in Labourers as cement mixers was most strikingly emblematic.