Past Life Hypnotic Regression; what if it were real?
Theatre practice had been a bit samey today. Marcy stomped up the steps from the pit and laid her latest problem on the theatre’s stalwart Miranda.
“There’s a guy showed up who says he writes scripts, pushin’ for a try out. Can you go chase him off?”
Miranda nodded blankly and headed through the stalls to find the interloper. She found him easily. Writers have a certain look about them, as though they live alone and secretly eat hamsters.
“Hi. I’m Miranda. So, what do you write?”
“Humour, mostly. The comedic arts. Perhaps you’d be interested in…”
“Yeah. Not interested. Our company does Shakespearean drama, not gags.”
The playwright’s eyes narrowed protectively. “You think Shakespeare’s tragedies and histories have merit but his comedies do not?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Well, you’ll have to flush a few more times before I go away. Comedy is a serious matter. It is the thing which helps us recover, heal and bond after tragedy. They are pair bonded. Satire, for example, has a societal function. When our leaders become unbalanced or extreme, that is the one thing that corrects their behaviour, the reality check to make people think again and stop the empowered going insane. Forgive me for taking it personally but there’s a reduction in comedy globally, now that everyone’s terrified of speaking freely.”
“Okay”, said Miranda uncrossing her arms. “You do intelligent comedy but, if you don’t know Shakespeare, this theatre company can’t help you.”
The playwright cocked his head, then reproduced the Benedick and Beatrice dialogue from Much Ado About Nothing with no mistakes, even delivering a convincing witty female voice for Beatrice. “Of course they get married in the end. It’s inevitable. It’s Shakespeare, but you’d know that, oh daughter of Prospero.”
“Okay, new respect level unlocked. You’re a Brit.”
“I am.”
“Got a work visa?”
“In the process.”
“That’s what I thought. Ok comedy writer, tell me something hilarious.”
“Nobody is above the law.”
A brittle laugh. “Now that we’ve got the formalities over, what’s your name and what are you writing at the moment?”
“I am Arthur, at your service. It’s a play about a marine biologist who spends her life trying to teach dolphins the Many Worlds Theory. I just think it’s funny when someone dedicates their whole existence to something pointless. Occasionally, someone wandering off on an obscure tangent will stumble upon real world consequences. Then again, I met an old guy once who spent 45 years studying woodlice. I very formally shook his hand.”
Miranda snorted, covering her mouth with her own hand. “Oh my god, that’s… actually kind of beautiful in a weird way. I’m not saying we would stage anything like that but you could fit in around here on an unpaid basis.”
“Well, That’s promising. I could ask you out for pizza but you probably have a gang of boyfriends with wigs and fake plastic daggers lurking in the wings.”
“Now you’re being too bold. I’m currently between tragic love interests, not that it’s any of your business, Arthur. So why Much Ado?”
“Random choice. I’ll quote anything except Timon of Athens, which I found to be a turgid rant. I can recite some dialogues, a few soliloquies, shorter chapters of novels too. I have that kind of memory for script. My recollection is useless for anything verbal. In one ear and straight out the other. Okay. I’m sure you said yes to pizza so let’s go when you’re ready.”
As they stepped out into the cool night air, she turned to him, changed her mind and turned back. No, that would be crazy. Walking on, the pizza place was just around the corner and they did Greek street food too.
“I have to try gyros. It smells so familiar somehow. Pepperoni and gyros. Does that mix or will I get indigestion?” Arthur wondered.
She sniffed the air appreciatively as they approached the fast-food joint, the scent of garlic, oregano and sizzling lamb making Miranda’s stomach growl. “You’re testing my loyalty to pizza, aren’t you?” She pretended to ponder deeply, tapping her chin. “Pizza or gyros…” She appeared to have made up her mind, reached out to collect his arm and pulled him towards the door. “Screw it, let’s get both. It’s been a long day.”
“It’s what Falstaff would have done”, Arthur added. “Then, to be fair, he’d stay up to 4am singing drunken songs with the Prince of Wales. You get all sorts of layabouts in English pubs.”
“Drunken songs? I might join in. I once performed O Fortuna from Carmina Burana at 3am in a karaoke knuckle bar”, she said, evidently pleased with herself.
“You sang O Fortuna alone? Don’t you need a choir of 20 and a herd of demonic horses for that? I’m awestruck. I infer you’re a smidge talented.”
She ducked her eyes and creased the edge of her menu.
Arthur cocked his head in the other direction. “Unusually humble for an actress.”
“Well, it was more like… enthusiastic Mongolian throat-screaming with dramatic arm flails. I like to think of myself as a triple threat: acting, singing and making a complete fool of myself. Between you and me, I can’t sing well.” She made a zipping motion across her lips and sobered slightly, her expression turning more serious. “Really, I do love performing. She smeared a pattern in the table grease with her finger, her voice tired and wistful. There’s just something about being on stage, you know? She looked up at him, her hazelnut eyes searching for a place to land. It’s like… for a few hours, I get to be someone else; braver, sadder, or perchance funnier. She smiled in what looked like forlorn hope of her dreams becoming real. Does that make any sense?”
“Yes, it makes total sense.” Arthur was a good listener and an even better analyst of personalities. Observation and portrayal are key skills in writing comedy and he had bags of them. “Your stage persona isn’t you, so it can be funny, sad, pompous, shameless, exposed to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, then when you go back to being you again it’s all left behind like it happened to someone else. Playing someone else is a license to say risky things because no guilt adheres. Did you notice, all the greatest stand-up comedians used a stage persona? They played a role on stage and found a unique perspective, so what you see isn’t really them. There’s a book called How to Kill in Comedy which covers this, adequately.”
They arose to order food and drinks, then another customer sat the their table so they carried their plates over to sit on the plastic chairs of a small table which stuck up on a metal post. “Classy.”
She nodded slowly, a thoughtful expression on her face as she listened to him. “You were absolutely right earlier. She leaned back and considered his words. It’s like… a mask, but not in a fake way.” Her eyes were momentarily distant as if remembering something. “When I’m on stage, I can say and do things I’d never dare to in real life.” Like, I once played a character who stripped down to her underwear in the middle of a monologue. She grinned, her cheeks brightening slightly, unless Arthur had imagined it, which blokes with imaginations are prone to do. “In real life, I’d die of embarrassment, but it’s somehow fine in public in front of 200 people.”
Arthur nodded his agreement. “It’s the bifurcation of roles, where at one end you’re the same person and at the other you’re not. Accepting the separation as normal could mean actors and performers are utilising their inbuilt psychological defence mechanism. Like when you have an accident and start speaking about yourself in the third person. It also reminds me of the two masks, mouth curled up for comedy and mouth curled down for tragedy. Or maybe life gives you the same mask but sometimes you wear it upside down.”
She stared at him for a moment, her eyes refocussing. “Wow… you big-head squid dive way too deep for me.” She set down her drink, leaning in closer as if sharing a secret. “You know, for a script writer, you’re kind of poetic and you do make me reassess myself but you’ve got to dumb it down a little.” Her finger traced the rim of her nasty, fizzy cola. “The two masks and it’s like we’re trying to figure out which one fits, how we want to portray ourselves to others whether we’re on stage or not. Sometimes you want to make the case you’re the victim of unfairness to win some sympathy and compensation. Other times you want to show off how wealthy, full of status and self-assured you are to make people respect you. It’s the same person underneath the projection, a duality. See, I know long words too.” A faraway look enveloped her, then she snapped back into the room like a teleport beam focussing. “Take off both masks and scare everyone shitless with reality. That’s tempting, if you don’t want to see them again. Okay, tell me Mr Smalltalk, do you do this? I mean, do you hide behind a persona?”
Arthur shook his head. “I never stand on stage in one of those masks, in theatre or metaphorically. No one thinks I’m a victim and my self-glorifying skills are non-existent so I probably won’t pass your citizenship test. I just write the words that it occurs to me to write and I hide faceless in the shadows while they are spoken. Maybe I lack sufficient courage to step forward, stiffen the sinew and do all of that or maybe it’s simply not my appointed task. I do have an internal dialogue though and tonight that’s saying I hope that Miranda likes me because I do like Miranda and hope she’ll hang around.”
She stared at him as his words settled. “Arthur…” She took a deep breath. I like it too but I’ve only just met you. She squeezed his hand lightly, reassuringly, like she didn’t want to give too strong a signal. Her thumb then tried to escape sideways and she attempted to save face by letting it trace slow circles until she became too conscious about the whole episode and had to withdraw her hand. “I’m not just saying that because you can do a mean Beatrice impression but that audition was the deciding factor on me being here.”
“Do you get the feeling planets are aligned and something’s starting?”
“You don’t believe in that crap, do you?” Miranda looked astonished.
“No, of course not. Just trying to be, uh. For someone who pretends all day for a living, you’re dangerously rational. It’s a great attribute if you want to go into heckling.”
In the first week, Arthur and Miranda got to know each other better and Arthur regularly dropped in at the theatre, never mentioning his own work. They stayed out until late whenever they could. Then, on Friday, Miranda had not turned up for work. She wasn’t unwell but she was impulsive and had just exercised her traditional right to decide, to quicken the pace. Men may think they do the choosing but it’s not true. Just ask Jane Austen.
The sound of the mid-day traffic laboured on beyond the four walls as Miranda stretched languidly, her naked body tangled in the sheets as she rolled to face Arthur. “Mmm…” she purred, her eyes still heavy with sleep and satisfaction. “I could get used to this level of attention.” But that’s quite enough of that.
On Saturday evening the cast had a night off as a stage hypnotist called Mr Benble was performing to a small audience. Therefore, for want of anything better to do, the actors gathered around the stage bar to hang out. After the show ended to polite clapping, the hypnotist joined them and sank a generously poured scotch. With the air of a man not making a good living out of his hobby, Mr Benble hawked his services.
“I do past lives hypnotic regression too, if anyone is interested?”
Marcy was quick to answer: “No thanks, we’re actors here anyway so didn’t come in for your show.”
“That’s a shame”, said Benble as he changed tack. “It could be a ticket to fame and fortune. There will be a film team and a researcher from the university recording my regression sessions for the coming month. You could have been in the documentary on a major streaming service.”
Of course, several actors re-evaluated their priorities and volunteered. Miranda nudged Arthur, evident excitement in her expression and her grip on Arthur’s arm tightening. “Past life regression? WTF is that?” She asked, her voice barely audible over the murmur of the other actors. “That sounds…” She shivered, anticipation coursing through her. “Cool.” She turned to Arthur, her hazelnut eyes polished with mischief. “You think I should do it?”, bumping his shoulder.”
“I thought you didn’t go for the supernatural crap.”
“Yeah, yeah but maybe I was a scandalous actress in a past life. Someone please tell me I was Sarah Bernhardt! That would be validation. Or maybe…” She bit her lower lip theatrically, “Maybe I was someone who knew you. I mean, you’ve got to be two years older, so that’s overlap.” Miranda raised an eyebrow, a challenge in her eyes. “What do you think? BS, right? On the other hand, it could be fun and it won’t cost us anything. Did he mention money? I don’t think so.” She glanced at the hypnotist, then back at Arthur. His barely tangible wobble was either a nod or the prelude to hiccups.
“Okay, let’s put our names in the hat”, he said finally.
Miranda raised her hand and called “Sold!” Turning to Arthur, she added “Plus, think of the weird material you could get out of this for your scripts.”
Two hours later, the acting troupe were all mildly pissed, Arthur had gone to the gents and Marcy had to say what the others were surely thinking. “Miranda, darling, what first attracted you to that penniless, swivel-eyed, twist-haired, charmless, self-hating, prattling, brutally well-endowed, illegal immigrant loser, Arthur?” Miranda made a ferret face and of course someone photographed it on their phone. “So, how far has it got, honey? We’re all ears.”
Miranda went for the reveal: “We trialled the option of playing star-crossed lovers and then it seemed to work a lot better without the star-crossing.”
“Knew it!” A few friendly cheers and raised glasses. “Is he any good? At… er… intuitive and penetrative script writing, I mean?”
“Oh yeah, he’s so good.” That’s right, girl. Play to the crowd. Miranda’s internal dialogue laughed with the others and then settled within the confines of her mind on Marcy: If you were less unfriendly, maybe you wouldn’t be the one going home alone tonight to your robot rabbit.
The following day the theatre fell silent for the first time anyone could remember since Covid and Arthur worked alone on his script in another room of the house. Miranda took a shower and then tidied up some printed pages that had fallen out of his satchel. She glanced at the writing. This was a newly written script called Summer Lightning, crossed out and then The Beasts of Mars scrawled underneath it. It was a set-piece concept which featured 4 dialogues and 4 monologues set around a haystack deep into which a biplane had unexpectedly buried itself with a puff of yellow clippings.
Miranda sat cross-legged on the bed, the printed pages spread out before her as she read about the farmer walking around the haystack just as the holy scorpion in apocrypha had circled our Lord thrice on the cross, thus signifying something completely beyond the grasp of human understanding. She felt her eyes widening with each passing page. “Oh my god”, she whispered, her laughter bubbling up uncontrollably. “This is…” She wiped away a tear of mirth, shaking her head in disbelief, then dissolved into laughter again, clutching her midriff as she fumbled to catch her breath. “Oh no, I can just imagine the cast trying not to corpse.” The character studies, random perceptive wisdom, playful rhymes, hit-or-miss satire, clashing wits and memorable quotes amounted to the funniest play that Miranda had ever read.
She scrambled off the bed, padded over to where Arthur was working and threw her arms around him from behind. “You’ve played a blinder, matey”, she attempted in an English accent that hadn’t aged well since Mary Poppins. She pressed a kiss to his cheek, then pulled back. “This play… she shook her head, a slow smile spreading across her face, “is not just funny, it’s…” She searched for the right words, her fingers brushing against the pages. “It’s smart.” She tapped the script with her index finger. The way you weave in the outrage, the character development… not forgetting the highly quotable lines.” She picked up the script, flipping through the pages. “Arthur, this is going to be a hit. I can feel it.” She set the script down, then took his face in her hands, looked into his eyes and kissed him softly, then pulled back, her eyes sparkling with excitement. “Now, when do I get to audition for the role of the country waif who wants to turn the pilot in for being not from ‘round ‘ere, until he persuades her logically that she is a chicken and should work for seed? Of course, if you were bright, you’d guess that was going to happen.”
Arthur gave a small nod of acknowledgement at the praise and then deflated it with “I can’t imagine anyone wanting to stage it but if a miracle happens, you are welcome to play any part you like.”
She clapped her hands together, bouncing on her toes with excitement, so enthusiastic that Arthur didn’t know if she was acting. “Yes!”, then she paused, her brow furrowing slightly as she tried to remember. “The cast party. Read it at that.” She tapped her chin thoughtfully. “I think it’s next Friday?” she speculated more to herself than to him. “I have a confession to make, babe, and I don’t care what you think. I might have told some of the other actors about your Beatrice impression.” She held up her open hands in a placating gesture. “Don’t worry, I didn’t reveal your secret identity as a comedy writer because that would be way too embarrassing.” She stepped closer, her voice sliding into a hush. “They might ask you to perform at the next cast party.”
“I don’t do performance. I have a serious mental block for stuff like that. Anyway, I’d prefer to recite Stephen Fry’s Castle Dracula monologue from Footlights, followed by The Wreck of the Hesperus. Listen. It was the schooner Hesperus that sailed the wintry sea and the skipper had taken his daughter, to bear him compan-ee.”
“Tough beans for you, buster. You’re reading your play script. Better get used to it.” Miranda issued this ruling to Arthur’s face, which looked reluctantly pained.
Days passed with the routine of practicing and delivering lines, all the flounce and fuss of stagecraft, followed by Miranda’s reunion with her boyfriend in the late afternoon. Then, the following Wednesday, it was all suddenly different. Miranda’s face beamed with excitement as she grabbed Arthur’s hand, pulling him towards the hypnotist’s chambers as her friends went in ahead.
“Yes!” She twirled, practically bouncing on her toes. “Oh my god, this is going to be so cool!”
“So dreamy, you mean. We will be asleep… and I’m really not going on the operating table first”, said Athur, ducking back in his shell.
The hypnosis sessions were fascinating. Every single one the volunteers was put under and recounted a past life but all of them were ordinary people, much to their disgust. Jed was an unashamed nationalist racist, of overseas extraction, which didn’t occur to him as a contradiction. Brooke was a ship’s stoker who swore a lot and explained the grades of coal and anthracite and the subtle differences in their smell, all presented as if she were holding in her hand lumps which had been burned a century before. Evelyn was once a baker, who was put in front of the magistrate for cutting the flour with sawdust. She came face to face with the French president once so curtseyed but didn’t say anything. Miranda herself was a simple Catholic girl who died alongside her brother of smoke inhalation at the age of 11, all the time believing her mum would return to the burning house to rescue them. The girl knew the name of her street and the catechisms but not much else. Then she choked out and was gone.
Miranda described the experience later as ‘looking out through your eyes as your mouth just underneath tells a totally new story that you’ve never heard before, so you’re fascinated and listen to see where it’s going.’
Arthur was hypnotised last. For a while there was nothing, so it appeared that either he wasn’t susceptible to hypnosis or he did not have a past life to return to. Mr Benble whispered that sometimes this can mean the past life was much, much deeper in the past.
Then it happened, in fits and starts. There were what seemed like words but they were not in English. The hypnosis session had arrived at that stranger’s traumatic death first, so the hypnotist quickly moved him farther back in his personal timeline to two years previously. The film crew became more intense in their work to record this, as the university researcher remained silent and took notes.
The hypnotist asked Arthur in English to recount something, anything, from his life. Adam spoke in a flowing ancient tongue, unusual for its hard vowel sounds. What it could be, they were all wondering. Everything he spoke was captured on tape so the researcher could identify and transcribe it later. Benble asked questions in English and Arthur responded in confident, casually delivered outlandish utterings. Each time this happened, Benble moved on to the next question, doing his best, despite not knowing the answer to the first. Arthur then spoke in a seemingly endless stream for over an hour without interruption, sometimes raising his hands as if making gestures. When Arthur was finally brought back to consciousness after by far the longest session performed that day, he couldn’t explain anything of what had happened but was visibly pale and shaken in a way you couldn’t simulate. Miranda took charge of Arthur and they headed out, waving away the researcher who was asking for their contact details.
At home an hour later, as Arthur was chewing through his rubbery bowl of undercooked pasta and pretending to enjoy it as Miranda ran through her head the strange events she had witnessed that day. She remembered how she had watched in awe as Arthur spoke, the unfamiliar language flowing from his lips like lyrics. Maybe they were lyrics. What… what was that? During the session, she had leaned forward, her hand reaching out pointlessly to touch his arm ten feet away, as if to anchor herself in reality. “It’s, I don’t know. An enigma” She had murmured, her voice edged with wonder. “I’ve never heard anything like it”, she’d said to Marcy. Miranda recalled that her first instinct was to rush to his side when he was brought back to consciousness, wrapping her arms around him tightly. “Arthur. What the F was that?”, she had asked, her brow furrowed with worry.
Arthur looked up over his pasta. “Why are you staring at me? It’s the prosthetic nose, isn’t it? I knew I shouldn’t have gone for the cheap one.”
Miranda choked. “It’s no laughing matter! You were someone else for an hour and a half!” She left her seat and rested her forehead against his. “Seriously, how are you feeling?” She laced her fingers through his hair and tapped his forehead. “That was so intense. I’ve never seen anything like it.” She pulled him close again, touched his nose to prove it was a real one after all and then spent a few minutes holding him tightly as if afraid he might disappear. The pasta, of course, went cold, which slightly improved it.
After the disturbing hypnosis session, Arthur went to bed early and slept deeply for 12 hours. The next evening, Miranda dragged him out to the cast party and they had fun performing skits and supporting Miranda’s friends, who were natural extroverts. Arthur performed the first act of his play and Miranda tried hard to outdo him with her horror parody monologue called The Duchess of Malfoy gets a Frightful Headache. Arthur led the round of applause.
The party fell interrupted when the filming crew entered the theatre without notice. The university researcher and hypnotist Benble appeared, looking eager and lagging mere paces behind the equipment. Marcy demanded to know what this was about.
The researcher introduced himself as Dr Tyler and informed them that Arthur had been speaking Classical Attic Greek, which he had taken time to differentiate and isolate from the similar dialects of earlier Archaic, Homeric, or later Hellenistic Koine or modern Greek. What is more, and Dr Tyler paused as if making sure he was confident enough to say this, Arthur has recited two of the lost plays of Aristophanes; The Green Well and A Clump of Plinths. He also alluded to the play Goatsong by Aristophanes’ contemporary and rival Eupolis.
“So, he recited two plays. Good memorisation skills, right?”, said Brooke.
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Tyler turned at the statement, surprised he had been misunderstood. “No, these were lost works of which academia only knew the titles, from Roman sources. Plays which have not been in existence for up to two thousand, three hundred years.”
Everyone looked at Arthur.
“He’s a writer, yeah?”, said Marcy. “Makes stuff up.”
“No writer’s that good”, Dr Tyler countered. “Aristophanic comedy using lambic dialogue, anapests and trochees verses and a parabasis chorus, with topical political references from the 5th century? Show me this young man’s other dead foreign language masterworks if he’s got any.”
As Miranda opened her mouth to mention the haystack thing, Arthur shook his head at her meaningfully.
“Do you want the lecture? So be it”, said Tyler. “The playwright Aristophanes was the father of Old Comedy in Athens. Only 11 of his 40 plays survived the ages. The ones Arthur recited can be dated to the Lenaia festivals of January 393 BC and 390 BC because they specifically satirised the leaders of Athens who were ascendent at those times. Arthur, are you available to do more regression sessions?”, he asked.
Arthur turned quiet as Miranda assessed his reaction, her heart pounding in her chest as she registered the shock on his face. “Arthur. She reached for his hand, her fingers joining with his as she tried to ground herself and simultaneously provide reassurance. “This is…” She shook her head, at a loss for words. She looked back at the researcher, her expression a mix of awe and concern, but she then came out to fight.
“How sure can you be? I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon. What if… what if the conscious mind sees and hears things in the day and files all the images, memories and sensory impressions that it doesn’t need in the subconscious mind. Then… then you think you’ve forgotten or deleted all the junk but it’s still in there somewhere, filed away. The hypnosis puts the conscious mind to sleep, right, then they hypnotist talks directly to the subconscious, which can improvise a fake story which you think you’ve never heard before from all of those meaningless impressions and details you’ve experienced!”
Mr Benble responded “It is essentially correct that the unconscious is a repository for memories you think you’ve forgotten, but when did Arthur learn fluent Classical Attic? Who from?”
Dr Tyler leapt in with the coup de grace, “With all my resources, it would take me fifty years to replicate one of those plays. Couple that with the fact that Arthur used fourteen words which do not appear in what we understand to be the Attic vocabulary and what we heard was much more probably an authentic native speaker.”
Miranda looked in Arthur’s direction, her eyes filled with confusion and fear.
“Are you saying he was there, in Greece?”
“I won’t jump to a conclusion that momentous”, Dr Tyler advised her, “but we do have some excellent data. Extraordinary claims do require extraordinary evidence and I would like to build that database of evidence, if you would be willing to support my research?” Tyler was now asking Miranda, as she appeared to be the decision-maker.
Miranda’s expression hardened with protectiveness. “What do you need from him? Is it going to screw him up?”, she asks, her voice steady despite the turmoil inside her. She crossed her arms, her posture defensive as she stood between the film crew and her man. If you think for one second that I’m going to let you experiment on him like some kind of…” She trailed off, searching for the right word. “Like some kind of…”
Dr Tyler finished her sentence for her: “Human time capsule. It’s vital that we have a chance to recover the other 27 lost plays; or prove how he did it.”
Miranda’s hand reached back for Arthur’s. “We need to talk about this. We need time to think.” She looked at Arthur for his reaction but he appeared dazed, so she smiled reassuringly instead and then turned back to the research team. “Thank you for the information”, pointed, direct, with the glimpse of hilt-steel that St George let the dragon see just before it made the mistake of coming at him for elevenses. “We’ll be in touch.” She nodded, then turned, bundling Arthur out and away from the crowd. “Come on, you wet blanket.” Her arm hooked firmly around his waist. “Let’s go somewhere quiet and figure this out.” If a jaw was ever set in determination, it was thus.
“Miranda, I can’t speak Greek, any kind of Greek. I’ve never been there. What is happening? I’ve only ever read The Frogs and that was an English translation.”
She pulled him into a quiet corner in the public street, her hands on his shoulders as she clicked fingers in front of his eyes.
“Arthur, listen to me”, she instructed, her voice low and urgent. “I know this is scary…” She took a deep breath, her thumbs brushing against his cheeks, “but whatever is happening, we’ll figure it out, but we don’t have to do anything they say, okay?” She took a hold of his shoulders, her voice filling with conviction. “You’re not some… some freak-show artifact. You’re Arthur, simply. My Arthur.” She applied a tight hug, her voice muffled against his chest. “In this together, remember? Anyhow, exploitation-wise, imagine what you could do for my acting career.” Arthur smiled back at her at last.
On Sunday, Miranda had been reading the news, after which she’d started pacing around the room like the proud owner of a new expresso machine. This was getting intense and Arthur clearly wasn’t confident enough to leave the house. What should she do to stop him shutting down? “We can’t just ignore this, Arthur, because it won’t end until it’s solved one way or another. First, we need to understand what’s happening to you.” She turned around on the spot, her mind racing. “Maybe we can find someone else who specialises in past life regression. That would rule out whether Mr Benble implanted any suggestions, somehow, even though we were all there. Oh god, I don’t know.”
“I don’t know what to do either! I don’t want to be under the spotlight. I’m relying on you, Miranda. I’m just a nobody who writes humour, mostly to entertain myself. I don’t know how to be anything different and I certainly don’t welcome academics prodding me and devising tests.”
She cupped his face in her hands, as she spoke with quiet intensity, her eyes levelled at the same height as his teeth. “Arthur, listen to me. You are not a nobody. You’re brilliant and talented and funny. I know this is scary. I know it’s overwhelming”, she sighed, her expression caring but exasperated “but you don’t have to be anything different, okay? You’re still you.” She tapped his chest, right over his heart. “The same Arthur who makes me laugh, who writes beautiful words, who…”, she blushes, ducking her head slightly, “who makes me feel appreciated, wanted.”
A few days after that discourse, Arthur felt stronger and agreed to be hypnotised again, but by a different hypnotist. This one happened to be President of the National Association of Hypnotherapists. Mt Benble took the news of the double-blind switcheroo with a degree of supressed resentment. Under a long hypnotic session, Arthur related in Greek what turned out to be a treasure trove of social and political information about Athens in the period directly following the Peloponnesian war. He described what great Athenians looked like their, words in speeches and in private conversation, confidential asides revealing why they took certain decisions, together with the experience of and what exactly happened in the Eleusinian Mysteries. He then recited four more lost plays of Aristophanes. He criticised his competitive rivals at the Lenaia and lamented the 4 days of religious observation leaving only 1 day for plays. As Arthur spoke, his words painted cameos of a long-lost world. Miranda, his guard dog, glanced at the new hypnotist, then back at Arthur, her heart swelling with admiration for what he was evidently able to do. You’re doing it, she thought. I have no idea what you’re saying but you’re sharing these lost stories with the world. She couldn’t wait for the translation.
Arthur had a sudden pain and clutched at his head, despite his hypnotic stupor. After the hypnotist had calmed him down, Arthur related in the ancient tongue how his rival Eupolis had caught the plague that ended Athens’ rein as a naval power and made them vulnerable to the Spartans, who pulled down the city walls. Eupolis survived contracting the plague but at the cost of the affliction paralysing one side of his face. One side of his mouth had then turned up and one side turned down, like the two masks the actors wore to signify their genre. It transpired that the symbolic masks known worldwide today as symbols of theatre owed their popularity and continuity through history to one comedian, Eupolis of Pallene. As Adam spoke, the camera and sound recorded clearly that whoever this man was, he was being remembered in vivid detail. The historian was listening and taking notes, in silence as usual, but even Dr Tyler was showing signs that his calm reserve had been cracked by this historic opportunity. Eupolis, the two masks that every actor in the world recognised, and then they fell off and it was done.
Miranda sighed in relief twenty minutes later, watching the city lights blur past the taxi window. “You know…” she said after a moment, her voice thoughtful. “I used to think that being an actress was the most important thing in the world…”, she breathed softly, shaking her head, “but now…”.
Of course there was another session, and another. The research team had grown and the university acted as if they had a claim on him now. The ethics of modernity required Arthur to sign away things, permissions, rights, but the insistence was there that he had to perform for them anyway. Arthur never wanted to be the focus of attention but they made him succumb.
Arthur gave the researchers the political play The Babylonians, a lost work which had led to Cleon trying to have Aristophanes arrested — but his popularity was too great by this point. Arthur related Aristophanes’ rivalry with Eupolis, who sported the comic and tragic face. Some of this history was fascinating.
Eupolis lived in, and complained a lot about, the fields he had inherited in Pallene after the plague had swept away his cousins, a territory where the soil was full of stones, thin and unfertile, beyond the city’s breached defences. Socrates advised Eupolis to plant beans to improve the soil, counsel which Eupolis ignored, so Aristophanes bought neighbouring land and improved the soil condition there to bait him. Within three years, the land was much improved and Aristophanes grew a good crop of beans, finding it funny that Eupolis did not have enough money from the harvest or the civic sponsors to sponsor his own play The Talking Beards, about philosophers, at the Dionysia Festival that year. Then, just preceding the next Lenaia festival, Eupolis released a large flock of goats onto Aristophanes’ land, while the latter was away in Athens, and all his flourishing bean plants were eaten. Eupolis then bragged in his inimitable style by staging the play Goatsong, with its chorus of goats, at the Lenaia and won that year’s prize for best comic play. The two playwrights then settled their differences and went for a drink, a binge which lasted three days and they broke a public religious statue by accident and ran away to avoid the outcry.
At the next session, Arthur related his greatest regret. Aristophanes’ play The Clouds poked fun at Socrates a little but mainly at a philosophical movement called The Cynics, literally translated as yapping dogs, as they stood in the marketplace being cynical and yapping about everything in return for obols, or pennies, which the poor carried safe from any thievery in their mouths. The enemies of Socrates cherry-picked criticisms of the Cynics from the play and said to the illiterates that these lines were composed about Socrates, which wasn’t true. People who had not seen the play believed them. Arthur then relates, in Attic Greek, the full transcript of the trial of Socrates which led to his execution. Th conviction was a concatenation of circumstances. Firstly, the population had just lost a war and wanted to take it out on someone, anyone. Secondly, Socrates had refused to defend himself. The final straw was when the great man, the most advanced thinker in the ancient world, became critical of his own jury and recommended that his punishment should be that the state should feed him at the public expense. Even after the jury of hundreds of citizens had condemned him to death, they delayed the execution for a month and gave the old man a clear exit route to escape into banishment. Socrates had refused to go, on principle, which was maddening to every educated person in the city state. They were literally holding the jail door open and he wouldn’t budge, saying that even if you don’t agree with the law you must obey it. Arthur was becoming emotional, though nobody in the room knew why until the translation was released, then Arthur broke down and started shaking as if he personally saw his respected colleague condemned to die and waved Plato off into exile as the Athenian democracy he once loved had died at the hand of democratic voting. He related how the Spartans had then forced the divided Athens into submission and set up a ruling group of 30 tyrants, who imposed fear for the next 8 months. It would have been suicide for a comedian to make fun of them, so Aristophanes produced nothing that year for the Lenaia.
He had learned instead of Plato’s belief in the transmutation of souls, what that philosopher taught happened to the soul after death and how it might either return to Earth for another try or could become perfect and assimilate into the dimension of the eternal forms, the spiritual and geometric absolutes behind the universe we see.
Miranda watched Arthur, tangled in grief with the pain of millennia resurfacing, etched on his face, then easing as he explained something else he evidently found interesting.
“Arthur…”, she called almost silently as he started to tremble. “Oh god, Arthur! You’re not there. You’re here.” Then she rounded on the researchers: “Stop the session. He might be getting PTSD.”
At home, Arthur spent some time holding Miranda tight, like he was unable to let go. In turn, she was holding him close, pressing his body against hers. “Shhh” she whispered as she rocked him gently. “It’s going to be okay. Whatever you need.” She kissed the top of his head, then rested her cheek against his hair, simply holding him, loving him, being his anchor in the storm of pent-up memories and emotions that had been released. She just hoped he wasn’t going to grow a beard.
Arthur finally spoke. “I’ve realised something. I see it clearly now. You’re all I care about in this world. If I could write a tragic-comic play about this experience, I would call it The Sleeper. Your role would be the most important character because you are. How would you like to play yourself?”
A month later, all 29 lost plays of Aristophanes and 2 by Eupolis had been recovered and there were preparations to perform them in sequence. Arthur was writing again, his own material this time, the thoughts flowing out of him too freely to get them all down on paper. He became stuck at a desk, scribbling notes in the margins of the script as Miranda read the opening pages, her brow furrowed in concentration.
“The Sleeper… She murmurs, her lips moving silently as she read through. Act One, Scene One: She sat on the edge of the desk, crossing her legs as she went through it. Eventually she became more vocal. “These characters are us, right? I think it would benefit from a scene where I do a dramatic monologue about the nature of love and memory.”
“Boom”, said Arthur, turning around to her. “You’ve all but suggested something brilliant! A monologue about whether love survives death. I could kiss you. Actually, I could kiss you. There’s nothing stopping me, is there?” He kissed her.
Miranda recovered her breath. “Only you in the modern world could come up with something abstract and yet eternally meaningful like that.”
“Oh, I don’t know. That Richard Curtis knows his odd-toed ungulates.”
When they ventured out that day and arrived at the theatre, they were made aware that a lawyer who couldn’t track them down conventionally had left a message for them. It is an offer to help Arthur claim copyright on the Greek plays as the writer. Arthur called the number provided and told the man that this would be impossible as he didn’t write them. The lawyer advised Arthur that copyright expires 70 years after the writer’s death, so if it could be established that the text came from Arthur, it would grow into a significant sum. Adam replied that 70 years after the real author’s death would be about 300BC. The lawyer then asked Arthur if he would be capable of learning the ancient Greek language, to support his case. Arthur told him no he couldn’t, and there wasn’t a case. Feeling he was losing the initiative, the lawyer then argued that there were two possibilities here: either Arthur had written it in his lifetime or it was written by Arthur in his past life under a different name but it was still himself, therefore either way the work was his to profit from. The past life could be proved so a court would endorse the present-day claimant by default. As the works had never been copyrighted before, the copyright claim could begin now and then the clock would start counting. Arthur wanted nothing to do with this and made it clear he wasn’t good enough a writer to have composed those plays, so didn’t feel right about it. He emphasised that he didn’t have the immersion in ancient culture and politics, or the required life experience. Miranda looked proudly on as Arthur refused to take any money. The lawyer made his final pleas and then rang off to dunk his reddening head in a bucket of water, unable to understand any client who wasn’t motivated by cash, especially when the claim was an open goal.
“You’ve really, really failed the citizenship test now”, Miranda chided. “We’ll have to go live in England, where people don’t use money and just give it all away.”
“Well, yes. We did do that with the jet engine.”
In a final visit to the hypnotist, they noticed someone new. Prof. Jane Mace, a specialist in defunct classical languages, was attending. She looked kind of stern and scary. They had no chance to speak to her anyway as she got caught in conversation with Dr Tyler about the extent of Minoan culture on Santorini/Thera.
In the session, Arthur related to the avid listeners Aristophanes’ final, unfinished, play The Lizards and Prof. Mace whispered a live translation of any lines she could comprehend. It is a brilliant satirical critique of Athenian politicians, piracy and democracy which worked toward a conclusion for the benefit of the masses. Aristophanes placed verses in the mouths of the Chorus, who were circling the Lizards (politicians) with a contrast of sustaining them with food and harbouring suspicion about their intentions. Democracy, they sing, produces the best progress, art, wonders and human freedom. Then there was a couplet to end the play which made the normally serious Prof. Mace laugh delightedly.
“What did he say?”, Miranda asked her.
Prof. Mace turned in her seat. “πρωκτός (prōktós). Needless to say, this related to the political climate in Athens 2,418 years ago, not the one extant today, so understand it in historical context.”
“I don’t understand.”
Prof. Mace tried again. “The Chorus, which represents the Polis, meaning the people of the city, has considered all forms of governance of which they are aware. In the first line of the final verse they conclude that democracy is by far the best system, then in the closing line they counterpoint that with the question ‘so why do we keep electing anuses?’”
It became clear to everyone in the room that writing this play got Aristophanes murdered. Despite the pathos, the brilliant insights and truths in the play surely made it the unfinished masterpiece of the Old Comedy era.
As Arthur seeped back into the conscious lights of modern reality, Miranda spoke to him first; “We have to share this, Arthur”, her voice pendulous with conviction. “The world needs to hear this.”
The hypnotist reassures her. “I think the world already knows.”
A month passed and just as the couple were thinking there was nothing more they could do to further this subject, Arthur and Miranda were invited to Athens, to see the theatres where Aristophanes and his rival Eupolis staged their plays. Arthur and Miranda agreed, naturally, and sent the organisers their copy of the final recording, spoken in archaic Greek, which included the unperformed play The Lizards. The organisers quickly responded that they would like to showcase it at the stone outdoor theatre on the side of the Acropolis.
“We’re going to Greece! All those years ago, where Aristophanes rocked the crowd! Let’s go pack! How long have we got?”
“Um, it says early October so about 50 days.”
They arrived at Athens airport and were taken to their hotel in a taxi. They were both quite tired when they got to their room, limbs heavy with jet lag as they dumped suitcases onto the floor.
“Finally”, said Miranda. “Home sweet home for the next few days and an actor’s life for me.” She kicked off her shoes and padded over to the bed. “Oh, that looks heavenly”, she commented, flopping down onto the mattress and sinking in, her eyes already starting to close.
“That’s it? You’re just going to sleep?”
“Yeb”, she responded incoherently.
The next day they saw the sites and walked down from the city to the open-air circular theatre set on the hillside. There they met the Greek cast and Arthur revealed that Miranda was a professional actress. They kindly offered her the part of English language narrator and gave her a copy of the script, so that non-Greek speakers could hear the play live via headsets. Miranda was thrilled to be involved.
She stared at scale of the outdoor theatre, her breath catching in her throat as she took in the cut stones and the breathtaking view of the city below. “Oh my god”, she whispered, snatching a lungful of air, her hand reached for Arthur’s and she feelt a shiver-quiver down her spine. “This is…” She shook her head, at a loss for words. “Awesome? What a boring word to describe this feeling, this view. Athens, where it all began. Aristophanes, Eupolis, on this hill, slugging it out with words. Feck yeah.” She swivelled back to face the theatre, her heart echoing the excitement. “Now…” She took a deep breath, “we get to be a part of it. Mostly me”, she added, waving the script provocatively.
As Miranda prepared and did her voice exercises, Arthur walked around the stone terrace of steps, trying to find any that felt familiar to him that may once have been his seat. He went off to find the cultural archaeologist who he’d seen advising the actors and mentioned that he thought the stone seating had changed. The archaeologist responded that it hadn’t changed in the least, not since it was reconstructed following the earthquake of 253 BC. Arthur nodded to acknowledge this information.
Miranda had been watching Arthur as he moved around the theatre, then during this brief exchange. His confusion called to her. “Arthur”, she asked as he re-joined her, “Are you okay? You look…”
“Discombobulated?”
“Yeah, that.”
Later, many dignitaries arrived and settled onto the stone terraces as the play was about to begin. The audience was mainly composed of ordinary citizens but there was a group of politicians too, probably there to take all the credit. Arthur was seated happily enough, with a good view of the politicians’ faces in the circular bowl, as he listened to Miranda’s English language narration begin via headphones for the foreign audience. The rest of the play was spoken and sung in Greek, intended for the local audience. It was their heritage after all. They’d given theatre to the world.
The middle act of the play ended abruptly because a section remained unwritten when the author had died. It wasn’t a linear process as only the first and last acts were fully formed and intact. The eternal verities of the play were very well received and caused people to laugh at, and then be persuaded to venerate, democracy — with all its failings. There was a disjointed feeling of celebration and pathos, comedy and tragedy, opposites curled up cozily together because that’s where they should fit, like one of Plato’s eternal forms. Arthur assumed that no play had ever ended on these contrasting emotional notes together. The audience rose in applause at the end, except for the politicians who sat stunned by the comparison between themselves and anuses, then everyone joined in the merry clapping, including the reluctant civic leaders.
“This is it. Just as it was meant to be”, said the person standing next to Arthur. “Who are you?”
“Me? I’m nobody.”
As the applause continued, Miranda made her way to Arthur, her arms wrapping around him as she buried her face in his shoulder. “Did it, we really did it… and to think I tried to kick you out of theatre for looking like a lame duck.”
“This is the play he was stabbed to death for. Was that a comedy or a tragedy in the end, do you think? Or, as a metaphor for life, was it both?” Arthur searched her face.
“It was both”, she said, her hand reaching for his as they were jostled at the edge of the ancient theatre, the experience still echoing in their ears. Miranda looked beyond a row of blue-green olive trees to the city, then back to sun setting behind the Acropolis in a blaze of orange and pink. Laughter and tears, the joy and the sorrow, the triumph and the tragedy distilled down into a bawdy punchline that encapsulated democracy. She turned back to him, her thoughts mixed together in this beautiful, messy, wonderful thing the world had become just for one evening.
“Now, what do you say we go celebrate?”, she said. “There’s a taverna that we passed on the way in. They might have authentic moussaka, or possibly grotty octopus.”
“I think we’ve come a long way and dinner can wait a little longer. Let’s walk back to the Parthenon and watch the sun set over the sea.”
“Can you see the sea from the Parthenon?”
“No idea. I’ve never been here before. Let’s find out.”
A short while later, they sat on the plinth where the statute of Athena once stood.
Miranda had a thought. “Although I love all this high-scale theatre, I still think we should perform the haystack play, even if it’s not in tetrameter.”
“What if it fails?”, Arthur asked her.
“It wouldn’t matter. Someone who channels you will appreciate it two or three thousand years from now.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that before”, said Arthur with the beginnings of a smile.
“That’s because I’m an actress and you’re only a writer.”
“Hey!”
