When I lived briefly in London back in 1990, I roved the city at pretty much all hours of the day and night, and can't recall ever having felt in danger.
Well, except that once.
We tend to think of Classical sculpture as pure, austere: all white surfaces and rippling marble. But, of course, the ancestors knew it as far otherwise: painted with bright colors that strike us today as garish.
(Of course, viewed as the ancestors would have seen them—by flickering firelight or the supple, piercing sunlight of Greece—they don't look garish at all.)
Same with Classical drama. Back in the day, those soaring, searing tragedies were interspersed with comic relief skits known as satyr plays: raucous, bawdy, earthy.
(This vision of balanced life tells you something pretty profound about the ancients and, indeed, about the paganisms generally, but let's lay that by for now.)
The tragedies, of course, with their deep human pathos, survived. No one bothered to save any of those throw-away satyr plays, though—hey, they're just comic relief, right?—so for years they were entirely lost to us.
Then, in the 1890s, a couple of British archaeologists named Grenfall and Hunt, digging a rubbish dump outside the ancient city of Oxyrynchus in Egypt, discovered fragments of Sophocles' 5th-century BCE satyr play, The Ichneutae.
British playwright Tony Harrison's 1988 The Trackers of Oxyrynchus melded the reconstructed satyr play itself with the story of Grenfall and Hunt's archaeological expedition. Though the play itself is a brilliant achievement, its stars are (of course) the satyrs, who athletically clog-dance their way through it more-or-less naked, with cute-grotesque snub-nosed satyr masks, big bouncing phalli (fake) and rippling, muscular butts (real).
Luckily for me, who had always wanted to see it, the show was remounted in 1990 at the Royal National Theatre.
That's how I came to be wandering South Bank that evening.
