Ovid and the slave girl

This year’s lively Evenings on Campus festival at the University of Malta has presented another play related to classical literature, produced by the Malta Classics Association and Mediteatru.

Peresso constantly reminds the audience of the quality of Ovid’s erotic but always handsome verse by reciting verses in the original Latin- Paul Xuereb

Following last year’s attractive play on Socrates, Is-Simpożju, it has come up with another new piece, commissioned from Ġorġ Peresso, with a Latin title, Ovidius in Exsilio, but with a script that is largely in Maltese, laced with recited quotations from Ovid’s poetry.

Ovid was one of the leading poets during the golden age of the emperor Augustus’s reign. Today he is remembered most of all for his Metamorphoses and his Tristia, but for his contemporaries he was also the daring author of erotic works such as his Amores and, especially, for his Ars Amatoria, a licentious manual on seducing women.

Popular as an author and as a man about town, his good life was interrupted in his early 50s when Augustus started clamping down on licentious literature. Ovidju found himself exiled to faraway Tomis on the west coast of the Black Sea and, despite all the efforts of the poet and of his friends, he was never recalled.

Peresso’s play makes us see the poet’s loneliness and sadness, but the general tone is a light one. The aging Ovidju spends his time teaching Latin to local young men, and, a womaniser still, woos the pretty slave girl who is his housekeeper but who is no easy conquest. His other slave, a male, is his clever adviser and keeps the poet’s high-spirited and lustful pupils in order. It is this slave who suggests to Ovidju that he might become popular again by writing works for the stage.

The poet likes the idea and gets his female slave, whom he calls by his favourite name of Corinna, a name he had used in his Amores, and his three pupils to perform simple dramatisations of two poems from his Metamorphoses: that of Deucalion and Pyrrha, and Narcissus and the Nymph Echo.

Ovid, played with forceful economy by Anthony Ellul, plays Deucalion in the production, while Corinna (Simone de Battista) playing Pyrrha, finds herself drenched in pitcherfuls of water and tightly hugged by Ovidju. In the Narcissus playlet, she plays Echo, the nymph who is in love with the handsome Narcissus.

The slave girl’s growing awareness of Ovidju’s obsessive desire for her ends up by overcoming her reluctance to yield to him, and this she does, ironically, when he has just written but not yet despatched letters to Rome asking for his recall – letters he soon destroys as he prepares to join his young mistress.

Keith Borg, making use of a few props and no set, has combined a toga for Ovid, with contemporary clothes – jeans, modern shoes and all – for the other characters, but introduces classical-style costumes in the plays within the play.

What happens to Ovidju still happens to people all the time, but Ovidju himself remains an important figure of his own time. Thus he never loses entirely his dignity as a great Roman, even when he behaves indecorously, whereas the other characters are people of our own time.

His slave/counsellor (Mark Schembri) is clever and perceptive; the slave girl is not the submissive slave we would have expected, but a modern young woman, who knows how to get out of the sexual situations devised by Ovid until she herself decides she would relish a fling with the great poet famous for his womanising. De Battista brings out well the subtleties in the character’s behaviour.

The students (Claudio Carta, Kurt Pawley and Chris Scicluna) are irreverent students of our own time, though they are never allowed to go over the top intheir mockery of Ovidju. The plays within the play vary from the broad comicality of Deucalion and Pyrrha to the never ponderous seriousness of Narcissus and Echo, with the two parts elegantly played by Scicluna and de Battista respectively.

Peresso constantly reminds the audience of the quality of Ovid’s erotic but always handsome verse by reciting verses in the original Latin.

Incidentally, we are reminded that this production is the work of the Malta Classics Association by the fact that the pronunciation of the Latin verse is not in the Italianate accent so familiar to us in Malta but in the style classical scholars agree it was probably pronounced in Ovid’sown time.

Ovidius in Exsilio is an interesting and attractive experiment well suited to a university arts festival.