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James K. Baxter Complete Prose Volume 2

Programme Note for The Sore-Footed Man

Programme Note for The Sore-Footed Man

The central problem of military honour on which the Greek play hinges is now a dead letter in the modern world (our problem is simply to kill on the widest scale possible without being killed) and the long lamenting choruses of the Greek are hardly suitable for the modern stage.

I was drawn to the play first because it concerns a man who had to become a hermit. His situation seemed to me thoroughly contemporary.

Philoctetes was left behind by the Greeks on the way to the Trojan War, because a snake bite had made him agonisingly lame; but after ten years Odysseus and Neoptolemus return with the intention of tricking him into participation in the war, since they need both him and the bow of Herakles which he alone can wield in order to capture Troy.

I show Philoctetes as an introvert, a ‘beat’ character one might say; and he is balanced by the opposite character of Odysseus, whom one could perhaps call ‘hip’, since he believes that danger is the only element in which man is fully alive.

And I have given Philoctetes a very active and real wife, Eunoe, since ten years is a long time for anyone to spend on an island on his own.

1967 (457)