Alcestis by Ted Hughes, reviewed by Pat Boran

Alcestis by Ted Hughes. Faber and Faber. £12.99 UK HB.

PAT BORAN

(Sunday Business Post)

'The dead must die forever. / That is what the thunder says,' declares Apollo in the opening speech of Ted Hughes' new and posthumously published version of Euripides' Alcestis.

Of course, the subject matter, along with the time of the book's publication (the first anniversary of the poet's death) lend such lines an added poignancy. Nevertheless, the work, like all his others, must stand in its own right.

Alcestis is one of Euripides 19 surviving plays (from a total of 92), and predates, for example, the better-known and more often translated Medea, The Trojan Women and Bacchants.

Perhaps partly for this reason, Hughes seems content to keep much to the plan of the original (apart from the highly effective expansion of one key scene towards the end) but as always he brings to bear his own unique talent for creating muscular and graphic soundscapes which gives the text a simultaneously haunted and haunting quality.

The story, for those new to it, concerns Admetos, king of Thessaly, who in a typically Greek negotiation with the gods is granted the right to postpone his death if he can find someone to die in his place. The nature, dept and power of love quickly establish themselves as central strands of the play as Admetos, turned away even by the 'walking cadavers' who are his parents, is saved by the sacrifice of his wife and queen, Alcestis.

'Still so young. / Still juicy, still a beauty,' says Death, almost audibly licking his lips. 'It's a long way / To the underworld / And I have my perks.'

The question of how the king, now powerless to reverse the decline of his beloved queen ('The strength I had has all gone into weight,' she manages to say) threatens to turn the story inwards into a philosophy of loss and guilt. But the plot is quickly hauled back into the light by the arrival of Heracles en route to Thrace.

Admetos, though now in mourning, can't refuse his friend a place to stay, and knowing Heracles would insist on recommencing his journey if he knew the real circumstances, explains away the dark mood of the castle by saying a servant has died.

Ted Hughes' Heracles is a wild man and visionary, a cross between William Blake, Keith Moon and Iron John who is almost in orbit in a recreation of his labours when he learns that it is in fact his friend Alcestis who is dead. This is the scene where Hughes has awarded himself the greatest poetic licence in an attempt to lend the play's twist a more dramatic and less philosophical aspect.

To make up for his appalling behaviour as a guest, Heracles goes after the gods to wrest back from them the life of Alcestis, or, as he himself puts it, 'to get my double nelson / On an immortal neck.'

That he succeeds so that the play can end on the line 'Let this give man hope' may be somewhat predictable, and the product of simpler times, but the redemption and rebirth which Hughes manages here has more to do with the gods of language and telling than with those figures who would tug our life-strings. If we agree with Death's claim that, 'Man is deluded and his ludicrous gods / Are his delusion,' the great achievement of this play is that it can grapple with and contain those diametrically opposed statements and, through language, in the face of grim experience, give the last word to hope.