THE PENIS PARADE
or
A TALE OF A TAIL

Tim Younger

In the early summer of 2000, my friend Amanda calls me up because she’s in need of actors. Her husband John is studying classical Greek music, but has also been working on a new translation of Aristophanes’ comedy "Clouds" with a colleague, and they want to take a production to the Edinburgh Festival – am I interested? Of course I am.

The budding translators have been "keeping true to the spirit of the original text", which essentially means it’s teeming with (what can only be described as) ‘knob gags’ – apparently all the rage in Ancient Greece. John has composed some period music to be sung by a chorus of winged Goddesses. And to top it all, we will be resurrecting the Penis Parade…

Now, John claims that comedies of the time frequently opened with a procession, a hangover from the celebrations of summer fertility rites. The cast would carry a large phallus around the streets, gathering the townsfolk who would follow the phallus down to the auditorium, ready to enjoy the show. In accordance with this tradition, we have created a magnificent 20-foot-long pink monster – fashioned in a retractable concertina style in order to fit it on the train to Edinburgh without too many raised eyebrows.

Those of you familiar with the Festival will know that performers wishing to advertise their shows are restricted to part of the city centre, where dozens of groups are vying for the attention of the potential audiences. And so we find ourselves entertaining the assembled crowds by carrying the inflated member above our heads – normally an activity for which one would be arrested, yet here a welcome alternative to thrusting flyers into the unwilling hands of festival-goers.
Unfortunately, the festival staff policing the street are less impressed with our proud display, and promptly ban us on the grounds of ‘public obscenity’. Claims that we are simply following a two-thousand-year-old artistic tradition fall on deaf ears, as do our attempts to pass it off as a jolly pink caterpillar, and so we are forced to retreat with our tail between our legs. Or, in this case, over our heads still.

Nonetheless, we decide to capitalise on our misfortune, using the old adage, ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity’. On the assumption that this outrageous treatment will make for a good story, we alert the local media who eagerly pick up the scent of censorship and contact the Festival office. Sadly for the newshounds, but happily for us, the Festival organisers categorically deny that any such ban has taken place, leading our merry crew to reconvene the very next day with Mr Pinky, having snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.

Only to be banned again.

(Interested parties should note that 2000 was also the year that colourful posters for "The Puppetry of the Penis", in which two Aussies manipulate mannekins with their manhoods, are emblazoned across the city – double standards, anyone?)

Deprived of our unique selling point, we are forced to join the hordes of actors handing out flyers. But then, inspiration strikes! Some of the more talented cast members have brought musical instruments with them for friendship, and offer to provide a tuneful accompaniment to our flyer distribution, which should at least give us a slight advantage over our competitors. Sadly, John’s pseudo-Grecian soundtrack does not sound so good when played by two violins and an accordian, so the musicians decide to busk it…

And so it comes to pass that I find myself prancing around the Edinburgh streets, bewigged and barefoot, to the strains of some improvised East European folk music. Bizarrely, the tourists interpret the sight of me hopping from one dirty foot to the other as some sort of applaudable artistic triumph, and devote many minutes of their home video footage to our scrappy antics. Festival-goers in Edinburgh, it seems, can be very easily entertained. It was a shame, really, that neither the music nor the dancing were remotely connected to the play we were promoting.

The show itself goes fairly well, with audience sizes starting at (the fringe-festival-average) 3, but steadily rising to a respectable 30-odd by the end of the week. Inspired by this word-of-mouth success, John vows that the show must go on. Elsewhere.

Which it does a year later, in the summer of 2001. I get another call, from John who has migrated to study at the American Academy in Rome. Somehow he has convinced the Academy management that they should fly us all out to Rome and put us up for a week, in order for us to give a few performances in the Academy grounds – are we interested? Of course we are. And, staying true to the scholarly spirit of the original production, we also manage to smuggle our concertina’d companion onto the plane.

The students and locals around the Academy are all remarkably supportive of our arrival, with audiences numbering in the hundreds for the three performances. It is a real treat to compare these crowds to the meagre few who attended the previous year in Edinburgh, although obviously we had less competition this time round. We are playing outside, in a corner of the main quad, which is architecturally quite simple. However, it opens out onto some beautiful grounds which could rival a few of the Guild’s Oxford college settings – and the warm Italian weather is certainly more favourable.

Meanwhile, the popularity of our pink polythene pal’s appearance during an instrumental ‘dream sequence’ leads to an inevitable decision. Our closing gala performance will be at the Palazzo Altemps, a museum of antiquities housed in a newly-restored Renaissance palace. This finale has been sponsored by the Greek Embassy in Rome, and two Greek airline companies, many of whom will be in attendance. What better occasion could there be to resurrect the Penis Parade?
A bright sunny Sunday afternoon finds us once again preparing to carry our giant organ through the streets. We begin at Trastevere, and wend our way to the Piazza Navona, a magnificent square with three ornate fountains, close to the museum. As we circle the fountains, groups of people begin to gather behind us, intrigued by this motley collection of costumed foreigners carting a whopping willy around the Roman hotspots. Remarkably, as we finish the procession and head off to the Palazzo Altemps, many of our new followers stay with us, buy tickets and come in to see our swansong.
As it turns out, it is not so much a grand finale, more a showpiece of highlights – apparently the Embassy staff have a short attention span, and cannot be expected to sit through the whole play. Nonetheless, everyone seems to appreciate it.
And, as we perform the last extracts, it dawns on the cast that we have actually achieved a perfect re-enactment of those phallic processions from 2500 years ago, gathering the audience just as our Athenian ancestors did en route to the amphitheatres.

Truly a case of history repeating.