Memories of Hassan: Murdoch, Flecker and me

‘Of course, it would be a marvellous finale, wouldn’t it? Like the end of Hassan.’
‘Like what?’
‘Never mind. But it does look as if, my dear, dear love, you will have to choose, we will have to choose, between, well, everything for a short time and very little for a long time, whether to live dully or die gloriously.’
(2 days later)
‘I looked up Hassan.’
Hassan? I had forgotten about Hassan, I was miles beyond that, Hassan was child’s play.

You’ll probably have recognised Murdoch’s 1975 first person narrative A Word Child here. But did you notice the Hassan reference, caught up as you were in the drama between Hilary Burde and Lady Kitty at the end of that novel?

Hassan was the work of James Elroy Flecker, the poet, novelist and playwright, born in 1884 but dying in 1915 of tuberculosis at the age of only 30. Hassan (The Story of Hassan of Bagdad and How He Came to Make the Golden Journey to Samarkand) is a five-act drama in prose with verse passages and songs. It has a double plot, telling the story of Hassan, a man from Baghdad who embarks on a journey to Samarkand, a city in Central Asia, meeting many adventures along the way, including courting the lovely Yasmin, (it’s a kind of quest narrative), but also the doomed love story of Rafi, Prince of Thieves and his love Pervaneh who had been captured and taken by the Caliph of Baghdad for his harem before the opening of the play.

Hassan was not staged in Flecker’s short lifetime, and was published posthumously in 1922, followed by an extravagant production in London in 1923. Frederick Delius wrote the incidental music and there were ballets choreographed by Fokine. The exoticism of the play and its setting captured the imagination of the post-war audience and Delius’s music has continued as a concert item to this day.

However, it has been very difficult to trace further theatrical productions of this monumental work, least of all to pinpoint when or where Murdoch could have seen it. I haven’t discovered any biographical or autobiographical mentions. It seems that another London production was part of the Festival of Britain celebrations in 1951, once again produced by Basil Dean, who had directed the 1923 production. A lavish production was also undertaken in South Africa the year before (1950), travelling to various cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town, and also directed by Basil Dean.

There are many possible reasons why the play hasn’t been a regular item in the theatrical repertoire. In its 5-act form it is very long, with its Middle Eastern setting exposing various possible cultural problems; it has been criticised, for example, as a ‘sort of oriental pantomime with stereotypical characters drawn from fairy tales, or, worse, in the 21st century, a hangover from British imperialism.’* (Flecker had been a reluctant member of the diplomatic service). For any amateur group it presents many drawbacks: an enormous cast, many of them speaking parts; it has music, singing, dancing; and staging challenges such as the house with moving walls, the fountain, the platform hoist which lifts characters up from the stage into the gods, not to mention a wealth of exotic costumes. Additionally, together with the romance and the exoticism, the magic and colour, are scenes of cruelty such as the procession of the torturers complete with hideous instruments, driving the shackled lovers across the stage, which today would occasion a multiplicity of trigger warnings, I’m sure.

But in spite of this, in 1961, an amateur drama group in Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia), with an ambitious director, Laurie Hall, decided to produce the play and to enter it for the country-wide annual drama festival. And the young Elizabeth Elliott (now Whittome), together with her sisters and parents, became deeply involved in this massive undertaking.

I only appreciated much later how fortunate I was to share this unusual experience. My sisters and I, keen members of the Junior Drama Group, were here only extras; so we were beggars, slaves, loiterers, courtiers, soldiers, crowds and finally, of course, pilgrims who, in the last scene, were taking the Golden Road to Samarkand. My dear parents, neither of whom ever set foot on the stage to act, were the kind of wonderful, reliable backstage people so much appreciated in any amateur theatricals. My mother provided props and my father was the set constructor and stage manager. I remember he spent weeks working out how to build the house with moving walls for the company’s own small theatre; and then, how this scheme could be dismantled and transported for the festival to an unknown theatre space in the town of Chingola in the north of Zambia. (The good folk of Chingola had to give the 50-odd cast and crew beds for the night over the festival period, which was of course part of the fun for us.) The cast included my English teacher, Noel Wright, a handsome and dashing fellow. Like so many teachers of English Literature he was a very good actor, and he played the hero Rafi. (He now lives in Western Australia but we are still in touch after all these years and I have introduced him to Murdoch’s novels!)

Our amateur version used all the Delius music as well as Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade for the incidental music. We all had to sing: I can still remember the song of the Saracens (‘We are they who ride faster than fate’) not to mention, of course, ‘We take the Golden Road for Samarkand’ for the final scene. We had Indian dancing girls, slave girls, wily merchants, acrobats, thieves. In spite of much doubling-up, a tent outside was needed to augment the theatre’s inadequate dressing-rooms.

I would love to have seen the play as a member of the audience, but of course participation and many costume changes for the lowly extras meant that this was impossible. There was, however, one scene which I always saw, from the wings, while waiting to go on for the finale, ‘We take the golden road to Samarkand’. In order to give the impression of hundreds of pilgrims we had to pick up bundles, cross the stage, change bundles, hats and cloaks behind the set, then reappear in different groups, trying to look dissimilar, so that it seemed as if a stream of pilgrims were passing through. Every member of the cast, meanwhile, had to sing backstage to make the chorus a rousing one. But before that last scene, there I was in the wings, waiting to go on to be a pilgrim; and every night I was absorbed imaginatively into the penultimate sequence on the stage, the most touching and delicate scene in the play: the ghosts at the fountain.

And here we have our Murdoch reference. In the play, Rafi and Pervaneh have been given the choice: a day and a night together as lovers, then both tortured and executed; or, release and never see each other again: he to exile and she into the Caliph’s harem. They choose to ‘die gloriously’ as Hilary Burde puts it: the tragic end, put to death by the pitiless Caliph. As the fountain softly plays in the dark at the end of the play, the penultimate scene, their insubstantial ghosts meet again but cannot touch – now the passionate lovers are faint and weak, their voices fading to nothing as they melt into the host of other phantoms and meet the spirits of the yet unborn, who ask them what life is like. ‘Why, life is sweet, my children’, says Pervaneh. The scene is unbearably poignant, and it certainly was to a young girl such as I was, inclined to the romantic. Even now, it brings tears to the eyes.

But what of A Word Child? Murdoch has grasped the essence of that choice so aptly in her characterisation of Hilary Burde. For Hilary to make this melodramatic reference to the lovers in Hassan reminds us of what a self-indulgent egoist he is. His relationship with Lady Kitty, the mirror of a previous obsession, is brief, illusory and self-dramatising; it ends suddenly with her death, but not his. Perhaps he may be redeemed at last, giving up Crystal to Arthur and marrying Tommy? An atmosphere of greater realism obtains finally, but it remains ambiguous.

When did Murdoch see the play to realise this connection so aptly? Although I would love to think that she made a trip to central Africa and happened upon an amateur production of Hassan in the early sixties, I realised I had to find another link. Then, researching through what references I could muster, I discovered that the BBC had made Hassan into a radio play, with the music of Delius, and participation by well-known actors such as Joss Ackland and Robert Hardy, broadcast on 23 December 1973. A Word Child was written in '74 and published in '75. Surely this was it?

Iris Murdoch must have heard the play on the radio. (Or does anyone know better?)

*Paul Corfield Godfrey, in a review of a Chandos recording of Delius’s incidental music to Hassan.

Author bio: Elizabeth Whittome is an avid reader, and re-reader, of Murdoch. For many years she was the Chief and Principal Examiner of English for Cambridge Examinations. She has published several books on studying English at A-Level with Cambridge University Press. She is currently writing a monograph on Murdoch and Shakespeare.