SPEAKING VERSUS SINGING

Bow ties are usually worn by men at Wexford Opera

As I have previously said, I like to go to see a play and a performance every week. By performance I mean a live event of some kind – a play, an opera, even a football match. This week I have been going to the Wexford opera festival every night so I have been seeing plenty of performances. I have not seen many films, apart from on Netflix, and many of these have been of variable quality.

 

The operas have been of a high standard. As far as I can tell (which is not very far) the singing has been up to scratch and the stagings have been adventurous and original. I was not entirely convinced y how the Spanish civil war roped into Verdi’s Il Trouvere, which is the original Italian version of Il Troubadore and took place long before the war had begun. Verdi rewrote the opera for a French audience and had died before the war in Spain had begun.

 

Yesterday we went to Deidamia, Handel’s take of the start of the Trojan war with Achilles in a Mediterranean island where, disguised as a woman, where he falls in love with the princess there. I was so used to the Achilles-Patroclus story that I found it difficult to adjust to a new trans version, but it gave the legend a new slant at least. He is later uncovered as a man by Odysseus when he chooses some weapons instead of female trinkets.

 

Handel wrote quite a few operas in Italian, having been trained in it before he became a naturalised British citizen in 1717. In those days we welcomed people like Marx and Handel who were unwelcome or could not make a living in their native Germany. (Sadly, no longer.) We think of him as a composer of religious works like his Messiah or Water Music but he had written a lot of operas before he turned his hand to more sacred subjects.

 

Wexford has a tradition of reviving ‘lost’ operas, so we see a lot of works that we would not in otherwise more traditional settings. I admire them for it and, mainly because my partner loves opera, we make a point of going there in late October when the tourist season has ended and they have their annual opera festival. They even encourage (but do not enforce) the wearing of bow ties and dinner jackets for men attending the main theatre.  

 

I have kept my house in London, which is the centre of the British tourist business and, when I am not working, often enjoy the theatre in the capital. London is one of the great cities in the world for theatre and I usually go to see a spoken word production, just occasionally an operatic one. Put simply, I prefer plays to operas, the spoken word to the sung aria. It is not something I am particularly proud of – it is just my preference.

 

Part of this is related to price. Opera tickets are expensive, whereas I manage to get a theatre seat of about £20-30, by using such things as the TodayTix app and restricting myself to the cheaper seats. I even make my decision occasionally based onprice, not going to The Lady from the Sea, but instead to Clarkston, a gay love story of dubious quality simply because the seats were cheper. (I may revise this decision when I get back to London.)

 

I sometimes go simply because I am curious about the theatre. I went to a matinee of Ragdoll, a play inspired by – bit not officially about - the Patty Hearst story, where she became a participant in robbing banks with the Symbionise Liberation Army, who had kidnapped and raped her. I learned that many of the followers of Charles Manson came from privileged backgrounds and been seduced by the certainty to ‘liberators’ like Manson.

 

Both Clarkston and Ragdoll were short plays without intervals, as was Mary Page Marlowe, about a fictitious American woman which was written by the actor Tracey Letts and starred Susan Sarandon and Andrea Risborough as the woman at different stages of her life. I will not deny that it was the star power of the actors and writer that drew me to the play. I am, when all is said and done, as much a star-fucker as anyone else.

 

I could not name many figures in the world of opera – a few singers like Willard White and Maria Callas, who are as much stars as their theatrical counterparts. Many opera goers will be as aware of the abilities of the performers and the intricacies of the plots as their theatre going equivalents, if not more so. Opera is almost made for the anorak tendency of some fans to get to know the ins and outs of the performers.

 

Going to the theatre, however, is probably a more results-based experience than the opera, where the high price of tickets coupled with the sense of occasion it generates, is more likely to result in a better reception for a traditional version than it possibly merits. For all the reputation of opera goers for expressing their disapproval, lots of this must come from the breaking of tradition at the opera, which is probably less tolerated than at the theatre.

 

Reinterpretation of, for example, Shakespeare is almost compulsory these days, leading to some eccentricities on the part of directors keen to reinterpret the bard in their own way. In the conservative world of the opera, you mess with tradition at your peril, as some directors have found out to their cost. Going to the theatre is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, while going to the opera is related to the occasion. This is why I prefer theatre to opera.

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspt.com

TAKING PILLS EVERY DAY

Just some of my daily pills intake

What is the difference between youth and old age? I had been happy enough to consider myself middle-aged until a recent visit to the doctor who had given me a series of pills I had to take very day. These are statins and Metformin, tablets for diabetes, which both my mother and grandmother suffered from and so it is hardly a surprise that I have it too. Every night and morning I have to remember to take my pills.

No longer can I point out the tablets that the average male and female take over the course of a lifetime with that mixture of scorn and dismissal as I now have to take daily pills. I can no longer pty the man I overheard who had to get up every two hours in the night to pee. I have to do the same thing myself these days as my bladder is no longer strong enough to survive a night in bed without a visit to the loo. No wonder people want a private bathroom when they book a hotel room. Walking across the corridor does not seem that like a minor inconvenience when you have to do it in the middle of the night.

 

Add to the daily tablets I have to take the occasional course of antibiotics for a bladder infection and you have quite a few pills that have to be taken every day. This, I have belatedly discovered, is the real difference between youth and old age: your body is slowly but surely declining in its ability to ward off disease.

 

Leonardo di Caprio has recently celebrated his fiftieth birthday, although he has not settled down to start a family yet and is still going out with younger women, these days half his age. He says that he still feels like he is thirty rather than fifty. God luck to him but sooner or later old age will catch up with him and he will have to get up in the night (if he does not do so already) and start taking the tablets to ward off the effects of old age.

What did Mark Twain say? Only two things in life are inevitable – death and taxes. There is no point in trying to avoid either of them, the first because it comes to us all and the second because sooner or later the Inland Revenue (what Americans call the IRS) will catch up with you eventually. Better to pay your share and have a good moan. Almost everyone moans about taxes because we take the result for granted but disparage the means of collection.

 

Still, I am able to work, to walk and to drive – three of the most important things to me. I rarely use the car and am certainly not going to return to driving guiding, which is simply too much hard work and expense for the reward. I often take people around on public transport and hardly ever bring the car into central London, the cost of parking and congestion charge being too high. I also get free public transport so why not take advantage of it?

 

I am blessed in finding my work enjoyable and interesting and have managed to adapt my career gradually to my aging and failing body. My mind, however, remains sharp. Although I forget names of people and words occasionally, they usually come back to me, so I have decided to continue to work until, as I said to a colleague only the other day, “I drop”. Not that I have any plans to do so anytime soon. That is one decision that is out of my hands. 

Edwin Lerner My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

WNY I AM (STILL) A ZIONIST

The flag of Israel, recognised by the UN in 1948

It is almost like admitting to being a paedophile these days – saying you are a supporter of Israel when there has been virtually universal international condemnation of their actions in Gaza, where women, children and journalists have been killed by the Israeli Defence Force. In the name of wiping out Hamas which they (rightly) see as their mortal enemy, Israel seems to be conducting a policy of ethnic cleansing in the areas they have conquered.

I should say first of all that there are two types of Zionist – those that think Israel is like any other country and can attract criticism and condemnation if it does things that are wrong. Then there are those that think everything Israel does should be defended and justified. There are similarly two types of people who believe in a Palestinian state – those who think it can coexist with Israel and those who think Israel should be abolished in order to create it. 

 

In both cases, I am a believer in the first definition of a Zionist and a supporter of a state for the Palestinians. This means I support a ‘two state solution’ (a phrase you do not hear often these days) in which Israel lives side by side with its Palestinian neighbours. If might be too much to hope that the two countries would do so in peace, but it is essential to the future of the Middle East that they each recognise the others right to exist.

 

Many Israelis are suspicious of the Palestinian desire for a separate state because they say that this will only allow them to move their rockets closer to the Israeli border. They prefer to see the Palestinians as contained in an area where they cannot threaten Israel. In that way, Israel can continue to exist in security if not in peace. Safety and security come above everything else – the rights of the oppressed and the need to make peace permanent.

 

For what it is worth, I think that what the Palestinians lack is a Mahatma Gandhi or a Nelson Mandela, someone who says to his people: “We may not like these people but we have to live with them, so we had better learn to do so.” Everything that comes out of Palestinian leaders seems to say: “Burn, destroy and abolish Israel, so we can create a Palestinian nation in its place.” Is it any wonder that the Israelis have stopped listening?

 

If anyone should know about ethnic cleansing and the destruction of a people, it is the Jews. They suffered – as they often remind us – at the hands of the Nazis and were systematically and comprehensively destroyed in the Holocaust, surely the worst example of mass killing devised by man. “And now they are doing the same to us,” said a Palestinian guide to the Holocaust Museum, according to my partner, who has a lot of sympathy for their cause.

 

Even if they succeeded in destroying Israel, what would happen to the roughly six million Jewish people who live there today? This is a hugely significant number, of course, and I dare say that even those who are most vociferously anti-Zionist are not suggesting the reintroduction of Zyklon B to solve the problem. I make no apology for using it, however, as the matter of what to do about Israel’s Jews is not going to go away.

 

They are hardly going to end up in Florida, are they? Even if the USA supports Israel’s war against the Palestinians, the country would be unlikely to welcome in its people. They have an increasingly closed-border attitude and a hostile view of incomers, both legal and illegal, despite the fact that they rely on them for a badly paid and non-unionised workforce who will work at jobs that ‘real’ Americans are increasingly reluctant to do.

 

We are rapidly approaching the eightieth anniversary of the establishment of Israel by the United Nations in 1948 after the horrors of the Holocaust became clear. I am old enough to remember how (almost) everybody supported Israel in the six-day war in which it was fighting for survival and defeated the Arab - and undemocratic - enemies that surrounded it. As Howard Jacobsen has said, they should have lost that war to retain public support.

 

But this is a very western approach to the problem. Israel wanted – indeed needed – to defeat its enemies to survive. They knew that defeat would result in destruction and wanted to continue to exist rather than be loved. Everybody hates us: we don’t care, as Millwall’s sing with a bit of sarcastic pride. A country’s first duty is to protect its people and the failure to acknowledge this is what is holding the Arabs back.

For various reasons – many originating in Jewish contempt of Arabs, it has to be said – Israel has never been accepted as legitimate by the Arabs. When we saw the film about the Palestinians, there was little doubt about the wish to destroy the Jewish state by the Arab rock-throwers, who were aiming their stones at Israeli soldiers with the aim of driving them out so that a Palestinian state could be established - without any Jewish presence.

 

We seem to be no nearer a solution to the problems of the middle-East. Jews keep voting for Netanyahu, who has never accepted the idea of a Palestinian state; Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed so that this Palestinian state can be set up without Jews; believers in a two-state solution like me are dismissed as hopelessly naïve and unrealistic. Well, let idealism and naivety triumph over defeatism and a repeat of the holocaust.  

 

This explains why I am still why a Zionist, albeit an increasingly reluctant and apologetic one.

Edwin Lerner 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

CHRUCH BUT NOT RELIGION

Rev Giles Fraser, the kind of priest I admire

I believe two things when it comes to religion: first, that there is no after life. ‘This is it. It’s all we have,’ a friend said to me not long ago. An afterlife in heaven might prove a little dull – being nice to people all the time, not enjoying sex or sleep or food - the things we like on this earth. That was best expressed by John Mortimer’s father in his play A Voyage Around My Father in which the same father railed against the sheer pointlessness of life in Heaven.

The other thing I believe is that the creation of religious belief is one of the most creative things humanity has done. Almost every society has religion and a belief system based on the afterlife. That was instilled to make people behave themselves and accept their lot in life on this earth (as another friend said). The existence of an afterlife in which you are rewarded for not creating a fuss is a fairly cynical way of looking at Heaven but a realistic one.

 

It is for this reason that, despite being seen as an atheist who has no belief in the afterlife, I still go to church (occasionally) to reaffirm my belief, not so much in religion as in the church which is a manifestation of it. Religion may be ‘the opiate of the peoples’, as Karl Marx said, but it is still an effective one. Marx had little ability to manage his own life and was very dependent on his friend Engels for financial assistance but he did hit on a few truths here.

 

Christian Aid, a charity I support, puts it well when they thought up the slogan: ‘We believe in life before death.’ People might – or might not – have faith in an afterlife in which their good deeds and acceptance of their fate in this life are rewarded in Heaven, but the charity wants to concentrate on bringing a degree of fairness to this life on earth before death inevitably claims us, as it must do for all – rich and poor on this earth.

 

Once, when I went to a talk given by some African-American writer, he has one of his characters say words to the effect that slavery does not exist in Heaven. Life as a slave was so miserable – giving the lie to people who say and think it is best for those same black people – that it was impossible it could exist in the afterlife as well as this one. I agree with this – it is impossible to imagine a Heaven in which people are not both free and equal.

 

Freedom and equality cannot exist side by side in this world but are alternatives. Start everybody from the same line and some will reach the finish post before others by virtue of ability, luck or the support of parents who are able to help their offspring. Do not underestimate the power of nepotism. We may talk about the dangers of being born with a silver spoon in your mouth but the dangers of a poor background are, in reality, far worse.

 

That is why the church has so often failed people: it encourages them to accept their lot, when it should be supporting them if they rise up against it. The only successful societies that were unashamedly atheist (with ‘museums of atheism’ of all things) were communist ones but their failure has led to churches being packed once again in those same former communist countries that once rejected their teachings.

 

Chruches did not grow because they were imposed on an unwilling people but because those same people wanted them – and still want them – as they believed in a higher power controlling their destiny and at least keeping a tally of what they did and did not do so they could be rewarded (or punished) in the next world. Belief in an afterlife is so strong that only man made societies can reject it and even they have limited success in this.

 

Vladimir Putin is supposed to have embraced the Russian Orthodox church because, presumably, be believed it would be worthwhile. (He is, after all, a politician.) However, he proved to be unwilling to prostrate himself before God, saying words to the effect that was leader of Russia, what did he have to gain by being answerable to some (probably fictitious) deity. He showed his true colours here - not believing in God but knowing that others do.

 

I remain convinced that priests do enormous good in society, going to places which social workers have given up on, and offering comfort to many people who would otherwise face darkness. (Giles Fraser, a writer and priest I admire, has said this.) However, I cannot believe in the Bible as being a true account of how God made the earth and, even if say the Creed when I go to church, I do not really believe in the truth of it in my heart.

 

Yet, I do not think that I am being a Putin-like hypocrite in going to church. Working as a tourist guide, I tend to go in and out of churches quite a lot and, evidently, some of it has rubbed off on me. To fully appreciate a church, you have to experience it as a worshipper who attends a service there sometimes and, even if it is just evensong, you should go to hear the Psalms, readings and choir, who make up so much of the modern church.

 

That church needs worshippers, more than it needs sceptics like me, to survive, so I do not sneer at those who believe in the literal truth of the Bible even if I cannot share their beliefs. In essence I take my religion seriously – but not literally. That is why I cannot believe in an afterlife and I accept that death is the end of what we have on this earth. It is also why I am getting ready for it as my years advance.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

MENS SANA IN CORPORE SANO

A famous drawing by Leonardo of
a healthy man in perfect proportion

It is usually translated as ‘a healthy mind in a healthy body’ as the two usually tend to go together. The only problem with this, as I see it, is that a healthy body requires a good deal of exercise, which I find boring, even as I approve of it in theory. I constantly read about the importance of doing stretches or running, taking part in pilates or yoga. I do start the day by doing a series of stretches to strengthen my knees which takes twenty to thirty minutes.

And that is about it. My work often involves waking a good deal and I am not afraid to do that. By its nature tourist guiding means moving from place to place. Sightseeing can be quite tiring for people away from home and outside their comfort zone and I am always conscious of the need to pace a tour in a way that clients can cope with. The tourist guide is always expected to cope with the pace of a tour he is leading.

 

My oldest friend spends a good deal of time running, swimming and cycling and hopes to win – or at least take part – in an elder’s ironman competition in which he does these three activities. I could join him in at least some of them but, frankly, I cannot be bothered. I do not mind doing necessary exercises to strengthen worn out joints and muscles but I simply get more enjoyment from sitting at a computer than running along a road (or cycling, etc).

 

We live in a society that increasingly worships fitness. The healthy body is considered a prerequisite to a a successful life. Even I, who do not share this view, find myself mentally tutting if someone is seriously overweight or obviously unfit, even if I am a bit overweight myself and reluctant to do much to get myself fitter. There is always someone in worse condition than you and I can (and do) take some comfort from that.

 

I am also suspicious of going to the doctor, although I conscientiously do all the tests I am summoned to complete. As a result of these, I am now taking a statin and diabetic pills every day. My mother and grandmother bot suffered from diabetes and I have had problems with ingrowing toenails, which seem to be an indicator of diabatic a condition, so the news that I had higher than healthy levels of blood sugar was not exactly a surprise.

 

The problem – there is always a problem – is that the pills I am now taking seem to be causing constipation. I am sure that readers do not want to hear about problems with my bowel movements so I will skip over that issue. Suffice to say that David Sedaris, a comic writer I love, has written that he and his partner Hugh (he is gay) do not have bowel movements, or at least do not talk about them in public. Not everyone shares Sedaris’ shyness about shitting. He refers to couples who discuss their bathroom habits and compare effusions from their nether regions but he (and I) are not among them.  

 

This is not the first time prescribed medication has caused constipation. I once had a pain in my leg that was not responding to the usual pain killers of ibuprofen and paracetamol – so I prescribed a stronger type of pain killer. This was codeine, which cleared up the problem but caused me to feel bunged up for a week. I have forgotten the pain but I will never forget the constipation that the ‘cure’ caused me.

 

I sometimes show people is the line of pills in the British Museum taken by the average man and woman in their lives. No longer, however, can I do so with a little feeling of smug superiority at the amount of pills people obediently take. I too have joined the list of senior citizens being dosed up daily byt the pharmaceutical industry. One of the perils of growing old< I suppose. As Mark Twain said, only two things in life are inevitable -death and taxes. 

 

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide,blogspot.com

Edwin Lerner

  

 

SOCIALISM AND CAPITALISM

Communist tyrant Joseph Stalin

I always thought that the phrase ‘democratic socialism’ – which seems to have fallen out of fashion nowadays – contained a contradiction in terms. Socialists believe that their preferred method of organising society is, or should be, permanent, whereas democrats believe that freedom of choice is paramount and every four or five years voters should be free to kick out the incumbent governing party if they have not been running the country properly.

People living in communist societies do not have that freedom, of course. ‘Permanent’ socialism equals communism in practice and the last thing you want to do if you are establishing a permanent system is to give people a chance to change it at the ballot box. It is tempting to paint Joseph Stalin, who ruled over communist Russia for years, as a sort of cuddly figure. This is a temptation to be resisted, however. He was a brutal dictator who ruled until he died.

I put the phrase permanent in inverted commas because communism is now dead where it was invented – Russia – and capitalism has been adopted in nominally communist China. While it survived it was the most horrible system to live under and could only survive by stealing the secrets of nuclear bombs from the USA. Communism did not encourage the kind of inquisitive thinking that led to the development of the nuclear bombs used at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

 

Neither Russia nor China have embraced democracy fully. They have a version of it in Russia but Putin rules the roost and I would not be able to write critically of him if I lived there. Fortunately, I don’t and I live in a free(ish) country where I can express my opinions. For what it is worth, I think that Putin, who is a former KGB officer dedicated to preserving state communism, is trying to go down in history as the man who kept Ukraine Russian.

 

I also think that the decline and death of communism has had an adverse effect on capitalist societies. Without having to look over their shoulder to an alternative system in communist countries, the ultra-rich seem to have lost their inhibitions and increased their wealth exponentially. According to the internet, in the early 1970s the average CEO earned twenty times what the average worker made. By 2021 this ratio had increased to 350 times.

 

There is no hard evidence that this is the case, by the way, but the available evidence is overpowering. As communism went down, unfettered capitalism rose and top earners felt able to increase their wealth dramatically. A coincidence? I do not think so, although I would be hard put to prove it conclusively. It is one of those occasions where two systems diverge but are surely related to one another. As an egalitarian system dies, inequality takes off.

 

I am, incidentally, a big supporter of capitalism as well as democracy. Ken Follet’s Century Trilogy of novels shows how people who are theoretically attached to communism and equality start to doubt their communist commitment as they realise that capitalist systems actually work better at providing people with what they want. There is something about the human spirit which demands freedom of thought with freedom to make money.

 

Interestingly, however, it seems that capitalism does not need democratic freedoms to flourish. China can hardly be said to be a free country and is still nominally a communist one, yet it has long abandoned real communism and embraced money-making as a creed - even though the Chinese people do not seem to want a democratic multi=party society. It seems that you do not need to be free to make money but you need to live amongst money-makers to be free.

 

I support capitalism knowing full well that it is not a perfect system and needs restraints built into it to function fairly. This is what democracy is for. The job of politicians is to decide how much tax we should pay and what it should be spent on. There are good arguments in favour of taxing the ultra-rich with higher rates. The only problem is that you tend to create tax-exiles in doing so by driving people out of the perfect society you are creating.

 

You could always build a wall to keep people in but few people mourned the destruction of the wall which did precisely that in Germany. The celebrations which accompanied the destruction of the Berlin wall must give pause to those who want to prevent freedom of movement, one of the most fundamental freedoms we enjoy in a capitalist society. If you buy a train ticket nobody want to know why you are travelling, just where you want to go to.     

 

Another freedom that people enjoy in a capitalist society is the chance to organise themselves by creating trade unions. Those who run companies hate trade unions but they are merely examples of workers exercising their freedoms, playing the system to protect themselves by getting a fair slice of the cake. Although trade union leaders like to portray themselves as socialists, they are inherently a feature of the freedoms of capitalism.

 

I write this as a trade union member myself. Increasingly, self-employed people need the freedom to negotiate what they are paid and it is because of this that the Association of Professional Tourist Guides was formed; to set fees that the industry broadly respects and honours. When top London hotels charge a thousand pounds a night for their rooms, a few hundred pounds for a tourist guide is not that much of an expense to add to it.

 

The alternative is a race to the bottom. One of the reasons I make a living as a guide but not at writing is that guides have a fee system, which freelance writers do not.  Any guide can work outside the fee system, of course, but not many do and the fees seem to work quite well. It is a good example of socialism parachuted into but ultimately dependent on capitalism. You do not, after all, find free trade unions in communist countries. 

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com

 

I DON'T LIKE ULYSSES

Ralph Fiennes, Juliet Binoche as Ulysses and Penelope

I dare he does not care. He is long gone and is no longer in a position to worry. Maybe that is his secret of his survival, not caring about other people’s opinion of him. I have never warmed to Ulysses, however, and my opinion of him has been brought into focus by a new film called The Return in which Ulysses is portrayed by that fine actor Ralph Fiennes. The film only looks at his return to Ithaca and ignores the various adventures he had on the way back from Troy.

It was Ulysses who thought up the idea of cramming a group of soldiers into the wooden horse which was left as an apparent gift to the Trojans but turned out to be a trap, releasing them into the city they had supposedly besieged unsuccessfully for ten years until they appeared to leave to go home. In fact, they returned to destroy the city and its inhabitants having tricked their way into it before leaving the wooden horse as a supposed gift.

This trick gave us the phrase ‘beware of Greeks bearing gifts’. It was not bravery in battle or superior siege weapons which led to the Greek victory but a rather sneaky sleight of hand thought up by Ulysses. This resulted in an orgy of massacre (and probably rape) by the victorious Greeks. They made sure that all the Trojan males were killed – even the babies – and all the women enslaved after they had sacked the city, leaving no trace of Troy.

 

Then Ulysses begins his long journey home, taking another ten years and having numerous adventures on the way, as described in The Iliad. All his men are killed in this journey until he limps back to Ithaca to reclaim his crown and his long-suffering wife Penelope and their son Telemachus. This is what The Return is about - not the adventures, both military and romantic - that kept him from returning for so long and convinced people that he was dead.

 

Penelope is surrounded by suitors who want to marry her. Not only they are all killed by the returning Ulysses, but the servants who looked after them, most of whom were female, were strung up and hanged. This is what turned me against the so-called hero of the story, the killing of the servants, who were only doing their job in serving the men who were wooing their mistress. This incident is, interestingly, left out of the film. Only the suitors die.

 

Maybe this is a modern way of looking at the story, feeling for the workers, who would surely have been put to death by the suitors themselves if they had refused to serve them and remained loyal to their absent master. The servants were dealing with the reality of the situation, not the impossible ideal of a man returning after being away for two decades. Of course, Ulysses does return but the servants had to deal with the situation as they found it.

 

They had a living to earn, after all, and had to deal with the situation they were in, not one that might occur sometime in the future. Killing the servants as well as the suitors served to cleanse the court thoroughly as their king returned home. Ulysses could start anew with a clean slate, with just his wife and son by his side. No account is given of his death, which surely happened, unless he discovered the secret of immortality as well.

 

In a way, he has done, of course, living beyond the story of what happened at Troy and on the journey home. Ulysses is the ultimate survivor, being a warrior – he dispatches his enemies ruthlessly in the films, even as they beg for mercy – and a clever schemer who does not declare his identity as soon as he comes home, but allows to people think of him as an old drifter who is only recognised by his dog, who cannot speak of his knowledge to humans.

 

Fiennes, who is an excellent actor on screen and stage, plays Ulysses as a survivor, who shelters with a slave, as he slowly but surely reasserts his kingship in Ithaca and disposes of his enemies. This motley crew does not seem very realistic to me. Although Penelope (who is Helen of Troy’s sister) is a great beauty, surely they would in reality have pursued younger and more fertile women, especially in the unforgiving Mediterranean climate.

 

However, this is letting the truth get in the way of a good story, anathema to film-makers around the world. Ulysses has to battle for his crown and ruthlessly dispatches all the suitors with the bow he has managed to thread to prove his worthiness. They die with a whimper as he and his son dispatch them, saving the last blow for the most sympathetic suitor who accepts his fate and is killed, despite Penelope’s pleas, by Telemachus.

In those days men did not expect to die in their beds and to survive you had to be a killer. Being a pacifist was not enough to ensure survival and so Ulysses has to dispatch those who were after all trying to usurp his place. But the servants as well? We live in an egalitarian age when their feelings and motives are taken into account and getting rid of them seems unnecessary and over-vengeful. No wonder the film-makers left that part out.

 

Films and stories demand a high body count these days and a man strolling back to claim his crown unopposed would not have made much of a story. Still, I think that killing the servants was unnecessary and have never forgiven Ulysses for doing so. The film-makers probably agreed and cut this part out of the story, as much to make him sympathetic as to control the length and killing in the film. Still, I have never forgotten - or forgiven - it.

Edwin Lerner

My other blog is diaryofatouristguide.blogspot.com