The Theatre of Ancient Greece - A Greek Adventure with the Histronauts by Frances Durkin

Have you been to the theatre?

You might have seen a pantomime, or a Shakespeare play, or a big musical with lots of songs and dance routines. Did it make you laugh? Did you cry? Are you excited to see something else? Maybe you’ve even performed in a show and you’d like to be an actor one day.

Theatre is a really popular pastime all over the world and it’s one of my favourite hobbies. In fact, before I became a historian, I spent a very long time working backstage on a show called Les Misérables in London. I was a dresser in a wardrobe department and it was my job to help look after costumes and make sure the actors were wearing the right clothes for each scene. Even though I don’t work there anymore, I do still love to go to the theatre and to experience live performances!

 The Histronauts - A Greek Adventure by Frances Durkin

The origins of theatre, as we recognise in the western world, can be traced back to the religious festivals of ancient Greece and the influence of those early performances can still be seen today. When I started writing A Greek Adventure, I knew that I wanted to make theatre a big part of the story. At the beginning of the book, The Histronauts find an old theatre token that transports them back to ancient Greece and they immediately meet a skeuopoios named Kimon who makes all the masks and props that are used in the performances. He tells them all about life in the theatre of ancient Greece and welcomes them to Athens during the Great Dionysia Festival. Festivals to honour the gods took place all over Greece and this annual spring celebration of the god Dionysus featured theatrical performances of brand-new plays. At the end of the festival, the judges chose which plays they liked and the writer of the best play was declared the winner. A very famous playwright named Sophocles won the first prize eighteen times.

Theatres

The theatres of ancient Greece were called amphitheatres. This word comes from the Greek words amphi which means ‘around’, and theatron which means ‘viewing place’. The semi-circular rows of stone seats gave everyone a good view of the performance and the shape of the amphitheatre meant that sound travelled all the way from the stage to the audience members at the very back. The largest amphitheatres that we know about had room for more than 15,000 people. The play itself happened in an area called the orchestra which meant ‘dancing space’. At the back the actors could enter and exit through doors in a skene which was decorated to show the setting for the play. Going to the theatre was a really popular experience for ancient Athenians and audiences would clap, shout, hiss and stamp their feet in response to the play. Many of those amphitheatres are still standing today and they are sometimes used to stage performances for live audiences.

Plays

Three different types of plays were performed at the Great Dionysia Festival: comedy, tragedy and satyr plays. The comedies were funny, the tragedies were sad, and the satyr plays were rude comedy plays. Thousands of plays were written in ancient Greece but today only a handful remain. The oldest one that remains is called The Persians and it was written in 472 B.C. Many of those that we do know are still regularly performed and they give us a wonderful, living insight into what it was like to watch a show in the ancient world. Maybe you might get to see one too.

Actors

Actors brought these plays to life but their performances were quite different from what you would usually see on stage or in a movie today. The earliest known actor was called Thespis of Attica and he lived in the sixth century B.C. You might have heard actors referred to as ‘thespians’ and we get that word from his name. The cast of a play was made up of between one and three professional actors who were paid by the state, and twelve amateur performers, called the chorus, who sang and danced. The actors used painted masks made of leather, wood or cork to show the audience which character they were playing in each scene. The masks all had exaggerated expressions to show the emotions of the characters and wide-open mouths that amplified the actors’ voices. The masks could be quickly changed and this made it easy for the actors to play many different parts in the same play.

Theatre is a wonderful experience that audiences have shared for thousands of years. New and old plays are still being staged all over the world so, next time you see a poster for a show or watch a pantomime, think about the ancient Greeks and how they created something that lives on today.

Writing Prompt

Imagine that you are going to write your own short play for the Dionysia Festival. It can be about anything you like. It could be about a trip to a restaurant, or a day at the zoo, or even a walk in the woods. Will you write a comedy or a tragedy? How many characters do you have? How does it feel to write a story through the dialogue that the actors will perform? What stage directions will you write to describe the scene and their actions? Can you perform your play with your friends?

Frances Durkin

Frances is a writer, historian and author of the award-winning Histronauts book series. She holds a PhD in Medieval History from the University of Birmingham and is most at home wandering around the grounds of medieval castles or sat amongst stacks of books in the library. She is a regular contributor to Aquila magazine and blogs about making history accessible for the entire family, whether that’s through places to visit, books to read, shows to watch, or things to do. You can find out more about her at historiannextdoor.co.uk

The Histronauts books can be bought at all good booksellers or direct from the publisher:

 

https://bsmall.co.uk/series/the-histronauts

 

 

Contrasting a peaceful setting with an action scene - by Jeannie Waudby

I wanted to write a sinister scene in which one character seems to have all the power. My story is set in 1848 and initially this scene was set in an upstairs room in an inn. But then I read a feature on the Palm House at Kew Gardens – a place I often visit – and I was intrigued to see that it first opened in 1848. It was always for the public to enjoy since by this time Kew Gardens was a botanical garden, open to everyone.

I could imagine the amazement Victorian Londoners must have felt to see all these beautiful tropical plants for the first time: hands of green bananas, mangoes, palm trees reaching up to the glass roof. I thought about the people wandering through the glasshouse in their colourful and elaborate clothes.

 

To me, the tropical plants feel like home because I saw many of them growing outside in Hong Kong when I was a child. I know that Kew is preserving plants against extinction and climate change. But to the character in my book, from the north of Scotland, the plants might have looked strange, exciting and larger-than-life. I thought of the dark side of British exploration to tropical countries in the nineteenth century and already a sinister note felt present in this setting, in spite of the gently dripping leaves and the gorgeously coloured tropical flowers.

 

 

Sometimes an obviously scary setting enhances a scary scene – a chase at the top of a skyscraper, through dark woods or in twisting tunnels. They tap into fears we may already have: vertigo, the dark or claustrophobia. But it adds an element of surprise to set a scary scene in a peaceful setting.

 

 Writing challenge

This week’s writing challenge is to write a high-stakes chase scene set in a surprising setting. You can choose who is the ‘good’ character – the pursuer or the pursued. Instead of a scary environment, choose somewhere that would normally be a tranquil space: a library, a hospital, a place of worship or a garden for instance. Or a glasshouse like the Palm House.

 

Use the things in your setting to make the scene come to life: tumbling books, rolling trolleys, galleries or pews for instance. You can use the specific sounds of these places too: silence disturbed, beeping machines, chanting or singing. The more peaceful the setting is to begin with, the greater the shock value when you disturb it with your characters crashing through.

 

 

One Of Us by Jeannie Waudby is a YA thriller/love story, published by Chicken House. It was shortlisted for the Bolton Children's Fiction Award and the Lancashire Book of the Year 2016 and has been adapted by Mike Kenny as a play in the Oxford Playscripts series.
One Of Us is published by Chicken House
The Oxford Playscripts play is published by Oxford University Press

 

 

 

For more information about Jeannie and her books visit her website. 

Remember, remember - by Ally Sherrick

The two main inspirations or story sparks for my first novel for young people, Black Powder, were a real life event – the infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 – and a place – Cowdray House on the edge of the historic market town of Midhurst in West Sussex.

The Gunpowder Plot – the reason why we light bonfires and set off fireworks every fifth of November – was the failed attempt by a band of desperate young Catholic men to assassinate the Protestant King James I and VI of Scotland, and many of the most important lords and bishops in the land as they met in Parliament.

Bonfire night revellers - copyright Elizabeth Doak

Cowdray, destroyed by fire in the late 18th century, is now a ruin. But when, on a visit several years ago, I discovered a certain Guy Fawkes had once been employed as a gentleman servant to the owner, the wealthy and influential, Anthony Maria-Browne, Lord Montague it proved too much for my writer’s imagination to resist!

Cowdray House ruins, West Sussex - author's own photo

It didn’t take long – asking the classic story question ‘What if’ – to come up with the outline for the story of a brave young Catholic boy, Tom Garnett who unwittingly gets caught up with the events culminating in the Plot.

Writing a story set in the past is a bit like doing a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces. As a general rule, the further back you travel in time, the less likely you are to have a complete – or as complete as you can hope for – picture of the events, the places and the people who lived then. Records, if they were made, might have been lost. And if they survive, they often only tell one side, or a fraction of the story. For a real-life jigsaw puzzler, such ‘missing pieces’ would be terribly frustrating, but for an historical novelist, they are story gold.

This is true for all my stories, but particularly for Black Powder.

Thanks to surviving documents of the day – including the intelligence gathered by the king’s spymaster and chief minister, Robert Cecil, the confessions of the plotters and official reports of their trials – we have quite a few jigsaw pieces to help us build a reasonably accurate account of the people and actions involved in the Gunpowder Plot. But it’s always important, when using such sources, to think about who is setting down the ‘facts’ and whether they can be trusted to tell it as it was or have maybe altered it in some way to suit their own ends.

Some of the pieces I discovered in the puzzle box when I started researching the true-life story of the Gunpowder Plot included:

· the identities, backgrounds and motives of the plotters and their leader, Robert Catesby (not Guy Fawkes, as so many people believe)

· their arrangements for hiring the cellar beneath the House of Lords, and stacking the 36 barrels of gunpowder inside it

· the plotters’ plans – if they had been successful in killing the king – to raise a rebellion in the country, to put the king’s young nine year-old daughter, the Princess Elizabeth, on the throne as a ‘puppet queen’, and to have all the anti-Catholic laws which provoked them to take their extreme action, reversed.

The Gunpowder Plotters

But these things are, in the main, drawn from official records of the time. They do not – and could not – give details of everything the plotters did or thought. For example, their conversations with each other, the things that made them laugh, or that made them sad or angry – aside of course from how badly treated they felt, because of the religious persecution they and their fellow Catholics had had to endure for so many years. And they don’t account for everyone they might have met and kept company with in the days leading up to the fateful events of the fifth of November 1605. This is where I could have fun with my imagination and start creating my own pieces of the jigsaw to fill in the gaps and tell a tale, linked to the story of the actual plot, but which was all my own. Some of the pieces I created include:

• my hero, 12 year-old Tom Garnett, who accidentally betrays his father after he rescues a Catholic priest from the harbour and then has to try and right that wrong and save him from the hangman’s noose with the help of a mysterious stranger called the Falcon
  
  
• Cressida Montague, daughter of Lord Montague and the rich and privileged cousin Tom never knew he had. They dislike each other intensely at first but eventually become good friends and allies
  
  
• two fictional spies who Tom, his mouse, Jago and Cressida must outwit if they are to succeed in their mission to rescue Tom’s father before it’s too late.

Of course, when you’re writing any form of historical fiction, whether for children, or adults, it’s important to maintain a balance between presenting everything that’s known versus telling a good story. But as long as you respect the facts of any real-life events or circumstances which form the backdrop to your story wherever you can, and have done the research which suggests what might be plausible to help flesh out the bits you don’t know, then how you complete the rest of the puzzle is up to you.

Can you use a real-life historical person or event to spark a new story idea? Or perhaps a favourite place? Think of something that intrigues you and makes you want to ask the magic story question ‘What if?’ Keep on asking the question every time you come up with an answer and see where it might lead. Then do some research of your own to fill in the missing pieces.

Happy plot puzzling!

Ally Sherrick is the author of books full of history, mystery and adventure including Black Powder, winner of the Historical Association’s Young Quills Award 2017. She is published by Chicken House Books and her books are widely available in bookshops and online. You can find out more about her and her books at www.allysherrick.com and follow her on Twitter: @ally_sherrick