Hay Festival is an event both well-known and well-respected within the literature world, and despite living only a 40-minute drive away from it my entire life, my first visit to the festival was just last May. My mum and I set out for the country roads separating our small Welsh town from the Hay Festival in the last weekend of May, and we were surprised to find a lot of drivers evidently doing the same. As we descended upon Hay-on-Wye, weaving through the congestion which only grew as we got closer, we realised how popular it had become since it opened in 1988.
The festival was filled with local exhibitors, like an Abergavenny coffee roastery, or solicitors there to talk with people affected by environmental pollution, and endless others at the heart of Welsh communities. We spent long hours perusing all the vendors and the bookshop, and by the time we reached the box office we were exhausted. Confronted with an onslaught of options to choose from and eager to decide, my mum and I’s shared love of Greek mythology is what led us into buying a last-minute ticket for the Natalie Hayne’s event, ‘No Friend to This House: One Woman Show’.
As the audience waited agitatedly in plastic seats in the suffocatingly hot room, people chatted mindlessly, fanning themselves with whatever they could get their hands on, and I had begun to wonder if the talk was worth being stuck shoulder to shoulder with sticky strangers in the blistering heat. In the first 5 minutes since Haynes took the stage, all my apprehension had disappeared.
Haynes talked with such a captivating air, paying homage to the classics she is committed to keeping alive, while threading comedy through her talk to keep everyone invested. She made it accessible to everyone in the room, whether they were a Greek mythology die-hard or someone with barely any knowledge on Greek myths, who picked up a ticket just because. Greek mythology had it’s time as the centre of attention of the literary world for several years, with the great success of Madeline Miller’s books at its forefront, but the buzz around novels of the genre has significantly dwindled the last few years. Nevertheless, she commanded all our attention at that podium, and on the recording of the event on BBC’s page you can hear just how often the crowd burst into laughter at her jokes.
Haynes retells the story of Jason and the Argonaut’s quest for the Golden Fleece, all while threading in asides like, “You’re not in Kansas anymore” when Jason approaches the corpse-littered palace of Aeetes, or that we may as well imagine the Argonauts as the Avengers, instead of bothering to read the several hundred lines listing them all. I was impressed at how easily she intertwined modern pop-culture with a talk about classic literature and Greek mythology.
Classics have garnered the reputation of being boring and endless, off-putting many readers, but Haynes managed to make classics both comedic and inviting for people of all ages, a feat I didn’t previously think possible.
