Harrison’s Hecubas

Abstract

Harrison’s Hecuba provides an opportunity to examine his engagement with the centrality of a significant female role from the perspective of his persona as a political activist. Harrison’s collaboration with Vanessa Redgrave enabled him to craft a production criticizing the intervention of the USA and its allies in Iraq, and to take his critique to the geopolitical centre of the policies he condemns through his portrayal of Hecuba’s interaction with her Greek victors. Harrison’s introduction to the published text addresses the contradictory attitude whereby the public weeps for one Hecuba but allows the war zone to be flooded with many Hecubas. This multiplicity of Hecubas provides a further insight to Harrison’s approaches to translation, performance, and activism through its reoccurrence in Harrison’s original play Fram. Fram has an international agenda, moving from Fridtjof Nansen’s polar exploration in 1895 to contemporary protests by Kurdish poets and frozen African stowaways. Fram also resurrects the classicist translator Gilbert Murray and his regular actor Sybil Thorndike, ‘who portrayed Hecuba’. This chapter reads Fram as Harrison’s commentary on his role as an activist writer in relation to his production of Hecuba. It investigates the intersection of Harrison’s activities of poet, translator, adaptor, and director and examines Harrison’s conviction of the relevance of Classical drama for contemporary issues and the persuasive role of performance as activism.