Akhenaten

The British film-maker, artist and activist Derek Jarman (1942-94) and the American minimalist composer Philip Glass (b. 1937) had very different reasons for appropriating Akhenaten - Jarman in an unrealised screenplay Akenaten [j?c] (written 1975, first published 1996) and Philip Glass in the opera Akhnaten (first performed 1984). Jarman and Glass may seem like unlikely bedfellows, but both have written about Akhenaten's relevance to their larger creative projects in ways that show their versions of him can be usefully discussed side by side. They share a very similar relationship to the Akhenaten myth by appropriating the past in a deliberately anachronistic way and using conventional histories alongside fringe scholarship which offers more exciting dramatic and visual potential. Both Jar- man and Glass were much influenced by Immanuel Velikovsky's psychoanalytic Oedipus and Akhenaten

(1960), whose theory of Akhenaten being the Oedipus of myth was ridiculed by scholars but reached a wide non-specialist audience and influenced many fiction writers.¹⁴ Widely available through book clubs and paperback editions, Oedipus and Akhenaten exploited the filtering down of Freudian psychology by stressing the sexuality of Akhenaten's relationship with his mother Tiye, and his hatred of Amunhotep III. Oedifms and Akhenaten

dictates the central place of Oedipal sexuality and Akhenaten's hypersexual body in Jarman's and Glass's treatments. Also, with their emphases on artifice, exaggeration and unbounded sexuality, the opera and the screenplay are examples of high camp. The production of Glass's opera I saw in London in 1987 was certainly extremely camp. The singers, with their towering crowns, outrageous drag-queen eye make­up and huge gaudy jewellery, looked like refugees from the Egyptian float of a Mardi Gras parade on Fire Island. Sadly, Jarman's Akenaten was never filmed, so one can only guess at how he would have visualised its camp elements, but there are plenty in the written script. As camp moments I particularly like scene 37 in Akenaten, where the king sits dressed in full panoply as the sun-god, watching the struggles of a butterfly attached to his finger by a gold chain, and scene 7, where child beauticians fuss around the ageing Amunhotep III, attempting to make him look younger ('more red on the lips ... it gives the illusion of youth').

Jarman's Akenaten

is difficult to categorise. A friend who read it said to me that it was like waking up in someone else's wet dream. It is simultaneously a vision of Orientalist excess, a homoerotic fantasy, and the first entry in Jarman's personal register of gay history - he went on to write and film screenplays about gay figures like Saint Sebastian and Edward II. Shortly before his death, Jarman wrote that he had been 'cursed with curiosity' about ancient Egypt. He started to research Akenaten in the early 1970s, at the time of the Tutankhamun exhibition in London, and eventually amassed his own Egyptological library. The Egyptian background of Akenaten also appealed to Jarman's interest in the occult - at the same time he was preoccupied with the Elizabethan astrologer and Hermetic scholar John Dee (1527-1608). Although Jarman never managed to finance the filming of Akenaten

and eventually lost interest in it, he had considered the casting. David Bowie, androgyne of the 1970s par excellence, was to play Akhenaten. Jarman wanted the production to be 'no Cleopatra' (referring to the notoriously extravagant 1963 film with Elizabeth Taylor) but 'as simple as butter muslin with fine white limestone walls, sand and perhaps a gold bracelet or a scarlet ribbon'.^1:1 The simplicity he wanted belies Akenaten s violence, sensuality and melodrama.