On a definition of love

Karm Serracino, an active member of the recently set up Malta Classics Association and also a theatre critic, has come up with an entertaining piece in Maltese, Is-Simpożju (Evenings on Campus, Tal-Qroqq) based on Plato’s celebrated work The Symposium.

Plato wrote a lively dialogue involving a number of well-known Athenians of the period, including the celebrated Socrates, one of the greatest names in the history of philosophy, whom Serracino has reduced to five people, one of whom, Kristobolu, is not a historical character, and another, Fedra, replaces Phaedrus and is given the speech written for him by Plato.

Plato’s work uses the guise of a discussion over a formal dinner held to celebrate the victory just won by Agatun, a poet, for a tragedy he wrote for that year’s great drama festival. Agatun and his guests agree that to pass the time they should discuss love, each having to deliver a speech in praise of it.

One of Serracino’s departures from Plato, who says the guests agree to send away the flute-girl employed to entertain them so they can concentrate on their discussion, is to bring in not one but five young courtesans who are also dancers, and to have them stay on stage and occasionally participate.

His aim in doing this and in changing Fedrus into Fedra is to introduce heterosexual love into a work meant to be largely a celebration of the sexual love between men so common and intellectually fashionable in his day.

Lesbian love is also mentioned, and the production makes it clear that at least some of the dancing girls are lesbian, but heterosexual love is given scant importance by Plato.

Serracino uses Aristofani, the famous writer of satirical and often scabrous comedies, to depict a man who clearly enjoys sex with young women, but Michael Tabone, a wonderfully horny and coarse-mouthed Aristofani, leaves us in no doubt that for him women are just sex objects, and his speech exalts love between men above all others.

His speech is famous for his humorous suggestion that some humans were once hermaphrodites but were subsequently split up by Zeus in two, with the result that the two halves can find love only by finding their original other half.

Shirley Blake is a tough Fedra who is perfectly at her ease in the company of men and is unimpressed by Aristofani. On the other hand, the speech she is given is unchanged from Phaedrus’s text in Plato, and her exalting of love as making lovers so reluctant to do anything shaming them in the sight of their beloved finds its climax in her saying that for this reason an army of lovers is greatly desirable.

On the other hand, the example she gives with much pleasure of Alcestis, who chose to die for her husband, is certainly one of sublime heterosexual love.

Agatun is played by Tyrone Grima, whose tall figure is garbed in modern fashion, like all the rest of the cast, but he is not only elegant but also very camp both in speech and in gestures.

An actor as well as a writer, he makes a big thing of his speech in which he disagrees with Fedra’s view that love is the oldest of the gods, believing that love is actually the oldest, this being why he hates old age. Love for him has all the good qualities imaginable, including that of filling humans with the spirit of kinship.

Sokrati, played by Kris Spiteri who certainly does not deserve the description of satyr-faced given to him by Alċibjadi later on, is not elegant but comes in bare-footed.

Roderick Vassallo, who directs the piece with restraint but gives his cast enough leeway to make it lively, is here following what Plato says at one point in his text about Sokrati’s dressing habits. Spiteri’s philosopher is quiet, apt to fall into moments of contemplation, and ready to bring out his thoughts even when they are found inconvenient.

After criticising the previous speakers for producing panegyrics about love instead of trying to find the truth about it, and making poor Agatun appear to be a philosophical ninny, Sokrati gives us not his thoughts but those he has heard from a person called Diotima, who is not just wise but, extraordinarily, a woman.

He says love is neither a god nor a man, but a spirit who bridges the gap between men and gods and helps humans to procreate beauty and thus achieve the immortality everyone desires. Serracino’s text understandably does not include the whole of Sokrati’s long speech in the original text, but it retains its essential nobility and elegance.

The audience has been hearing about the handsome and de-bauched Alċibjadi, a great politician and seducer of both young men and young women. Kritobolu (Kurt Pawley) who appears early in the play, is so besotted with Alċibjadi that he soon runs out to look for him, and never returns, but Alċibjadi himself (Keith Borg) late in the piece suddenly makes a drunken irruption upon the guests.

When he spots Sokrati, he launches into an extraordinary speech in which he expatiates on his great obsession, physical as well as intellectual, with the ugly old philosopher who, he avers, is greatly attracted to him but whom he has in vain tried to seduce.

As Alċibjadi speaks, it is clear that Sokrati is still fascinated by him but the philosopher will not be won, presumably because love of Alċibjadi, however desirable, would not enable him to create the immortal beauty he has just been speaking of. Alċibjadi comes across as a man who loves a man who, though not beautiful, is an extraordinary person.

This is confirmed in the new ending written for the piece by Serracino, in which policemen come in violently to arrest Sokrati for heretical ideas about the gods and for corruption of young people, and this when the audience has just seen Sokrati resisting Alċibjadi’s eloquent courtship.

Alċibjadi, a great warrior, rashly resists the arrest but is finally overcome and left lying helpless. This ending not only gives the play a stirring conclusion but reminds us that Sokrati actually lost his life when the Athenians condemned him to death, and that Alċibjadi’s career also ended disastrously after his ill-judged invasion of Syracuse.

Serracino’s play fitted beautifully inside the courtyard of the University’s Institute of World Systems. I thought the dancing girls were too obtrusive, but Vassallo’s production as a whole managed to be intellectually stimulating without failing to hold my attention as spectacle. I look forward to more work for the theatre by Serracino.