The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge has said the university has ‘lessons to learn from the Jason Arday tragedy’. Well, you can make words mean what you want – the ancient Greeks invented the word tragôidia and it meant ‘goat-song’ – but is ‘tragic’ really the word for Arday?
Tragedies reworked the fate of great ancient heroes, whose death was of high significance and meaning to the watching audience. Such dramas were typically characterised by a number of markers. They could include prophecies, warnings, ignorance of the true state of affairs (generating irony), over-confidence accompanied by self-delusion and understanding too late to avoid disaster. A hero’s fall created sympathy because he usually acted for the best of intentions, generating a strong sense of pointless loss when the inevitable occurred and creating a coherent, aesthetically satisfying emotional experience for the audience.
It would be a brave man who attempted to make a tragedy in such terms about Arday. But there is one technical sense in which he meets the criterion of the tragic actor on the Greek stage. Arday seems to have spent much of his life creating a persona for himself. That is the Latin word for a stage mask. The Greek word was prosôpon, which meant both a mask and a dramatic part or character. Dionysus, the god of theatre, was never seen without his mask. On stage the human actor wore one to help him reinvent himself so that he could convincingly inhabit his new character. Arday did this so successfully that he became a regular voice on the BBC and its comment shows such as The Moral Maze and Question Time, and as guest editor on Today, and gained a series of chairs of sociology at provincial universities. His academic and teaching records were not especially lustrous but, with his ‘diversity’, he gained the chair at Cambridge. Journalistic nemesis then struck with devastating revelations about the nature of many of his claims. His persona fell apart, so did his world, so did Cambridge and so did he.
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