Day 15 - Ben Hymn - that is, hymn, with its hymen-like spelling. A holy song of worship.

Let’s look for the last time at Joseph, his brothers and his musical! Old Testament Joseph has a great story. Readable, memorable, and in the 20th Century, full of catchy tunes! I don’t know what views you hold on Andrew Lloyd-Webber - hot and cold, personally - but Joseph and His Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat really works, as a telling. It’s fast and funny, and the only bit I really never liked is the stuff about the colours of the coat, first because a list of colours is the least witty part of the libretto, and second because I can never remember the order, meaning I can’t sing along.

It’s a great adaptation of the story, as a story. It’ll excite you, it’ll move you, and it makes prudent snips and edits - and a couple of really remarkable stylistic choices, to take us on a journey. The story’s not quite there on a plate in the Bible, but the highlights are. Tim Rice had a lot to work with, but he did a lot with it. The musical doesn’t mention God, which personally I feel is an oversight, given the significant role of miracles. The only people who get praised and worshipped are Joseph - ‘Joseph, how can we ever say, all that we want to about you’ - and Pharoah, who praises himself. This is a Joseph who persists through faith in an abstract promise. ‘Anyone from anywhere could make it if the had a lucky break’, he tells us. The Bible begs to differ: Joseph said to them, “Do not interpretations belong to God? Tell me your dreams.”

I especially like the material in the prison in any given telling, as it feels like a brief insight into a sitcom, where Joseph sets himself up as a counsellor in the Deanna Troi vein, patiently meeting bakers and butlers and other functionaries whose job begins with a ‘B’, and interpreting their dreams. I want to see episodes with a bard, a book-binder, a bus-boy, a bell-boy, a baby-farmer, a bobbin-boy, a bombadier, a burgomeister, and a Build-a-Bear bear-builder. And a boner. That’s someone who removes bones in the meat industry. I’m not sure what the butler and the baker did to get relegated to the prison, but there’s no real suggestion any of these prisoners did much in the way of crime. Potiphar plainly thinks Joseph is innocent, as the crime of which he was accused usually carried the death penalty, or so I’ve read. The butler is sent to prison but later let off. Was he sent down for a pecadillo, to cool off for a few days, or was there a real crime, a web of a web of mayhem and intrigue happening upstairs in the pharoah’s palace, in which the true criminal was finally exposed, vindicating the butler once and for all? I do not know.

While he’s down there, Joseph sings ‘Close Every Door to Me’, which used to be my least favourite song in the thing, because it was sober, rather than fun. But I really came round to it on my recent relistens. It’s the one moment of real emotion in the whole work, with Joseph resolved to rot in jail, but resolute. The song’s claim that ‘children of Israel are never alone’ is almost an acknowledgement of God, but it is not one. Almost is not enough.

I particularly like the 1994 recording, as, in the last verse, when the whole cast join in haunting harmonies - there is a brief moment at the climax where Jacob’s sorrowing voice above the crowd, a tiny moment of mourning. Jacob is a thankless role, as he only has four lines to sing in ‘Jacob and Sons’ and two in ‘One More Angel in Heaven’. He might have lines in ‘Those Canaan Days’ but since it’s performed in heavy French accents, who can really tell?

Back to Joseph and the dreams. Pharoah is plagued by dreams of horses coming up from the water and eating crops. There is a type of voraciously-hungry, infamously-destructive water-horse indigenous to Egypt. We know it by the Greek word for ‘water horse’: hippo-potamus.

But the dream that has always fascinated me and confused me is the one Joseph has at the beginning. To quote Genesis 37, *‘I had another dream, and this time the sun and moon and eleven stars were bowing down to me.”*

*10 When he told his father as well as his brothers, his father rebuked him and said, “What is this dream you had? Will your mother and I and your brothers actually come and bow down to the ground before you?”*

I don’t get that. His eleventh brother was Benjamin, my erstwhile namesake, but Joseph’s mother died while giving birth to Benjamin. It’s notable, because she calls him ‘Ben oni’, son of my sorrow, which is changed to ‘Ben-jimin’, son of the right hand, most valued, indispensable. If all eleven brothers are bowing, in the interpretation, how can Rachel, the mother be there to bow as well. It makes me wonder if everyone got the interpretation wrong, and it was in fact a prophecy of something completely different, but I really have no data. Or maybe the moon is Joseph’s not-in-the-musical sister, Dinah. It’s possible Jacob merely miscounted his wives. He had a starter wife and a favourite wife and they both had understudies in the bedroom. People didn’t believe in divorce in those days, so great men had all their wives at the same time.

Benjamin is a curious one. In the Bible passages it makes complete sense that he’s a babe in arms when Joseph is supposedly ‘killed off’ and sold into slavery. In the musical, he’s one of the brothers who do the evil deed! He helps round out the numbers, but I think this spoils the tale a bit.

Let’s talk about the Benjamin Calypso. At the dramatic highpoint of the story - maybe that’s overplaying it, after all, Joseph is thrown in a pit and his father mourns his death in act 1 - but at the dramatic highpoint of Act 2 of the story, Joseph frames Benjamin for theft.

So, he knows his brothers and their pretty major crime against him, but they don’t recognise him. He’s risen from a pit to a servant, back down to a prison, and up to miraculous economist, who not only predicts the famine, but gets given full political power over Egypt’s fourteen-year response tactics. He’s the home secretary, and he frames his only innocent brother, to see if the hearts of the others have really changed. In the Bible the brothers are aghast. They weep. They tear their clothes. In the musical this is presented as a very uptempo calypso number. It’s catchy, it’s a foot-tapper, it’s almost parodically Trinidadian - in fact I’ll take back that ‘almost’.

Side-bar here for a moment. Back when Joseph was big in the nineties, you’d always end up with Joseph and ten of Jacob’s sons being played by white actors, with the sole black actor as Judah, who gets the solo, singing ‘I hear de steel drums sing their song’, and ‘Benjamin is straighter than the big bamboo’ and ‘Sure as bananas need the sun, we are the criminal guilty ones’, in broken English and a heightened accent, which is problematic in ways.

I’m not sure casting a white actor to sing it makes things any better. If I was casting the musical and being very literal, I’d work like this: Jacob did have children with four wives, so he could plausibly have had quite a multi-ethnic set of children. So Judah is black, then so was his mother Leah, who was among Jacob’s favourite wives. Leah gave birth to seven of Jacob’s children, and her sister Rachel gave birth to another two, Joseph and Benjamin, so I’d be inclined to cast almost everyone with actors of colour, with the only tighty whities being Gad and Asher and Dan and Naphtali, sons who don’t get any solos at all.

Benjamin Calypso, as well as being maybe slightly racist, must surely set a high bar for its sheer dissonance between the horror and sorrow of the moment, and jaunty dancing with coconuts... I don’t know. It’s not my favourite bit. All in all, I think the good stuff mainly comes before the interval, but that’s just my view.

That’s enough about Joseph and his musical for now, but I’ll say a little more about Benjamin. He was perhaps the cutest of the sons. It all worked out for him in the end and he got to father an entire tribe. St Paul was a Benjamite. The Benjamites were generally known for their valour, but after a particularly wretched incident a few centuries later they were nearly wiped out. They did eventually get their groove back. I was named after Benjamin. I’m going to segue to talking about myself now, and I hope you’ll indulge me.

I was baptised Benjamin, twice, which is once more than people are meant to be baptised. When I got my deed poll, to straighten out a few things, I ummed and ahhed about my forename. Benjamin a really good name, and despite my extraordinary gender circumstances, I was loathe to get rid of it. I did consider some alternatives, but none seemed to suit me like ‘Ben’, which I eventually resolved was a gender-neutral name. But the full form ‘Benjamin’ wasn’t right. People asked me, ‘will you be called Benjamina’, which always seemed like a stupid question. I thought, should I shorten it to just ‘Ben’, which is the part I use. No. It didn’t seem right, and I felt by taking away syllables from its Jewish origin I’d feel anti-semitic, in a very abstract sense. Nonetheless, I got my deed-poll, Benjamin Helga Goudie Swithen’, but I felt like the man in the joke: ‘there was once a man named John Smelly, who didn’t like his name, so he changed it, to Fred Smelly’. I tore up my deed-polls after a few days and ordered another with a small twirk: I would not diminish Benjamin, who was loved by Jacob, but add something of my own: Benjamilian. Now there is a non-binary name to behold. Not for every-day use, but festive enough to make me glad. It also made my full name an example of trochaic pentameter: Benjamilian Helga Goudie Swithen. And if Charlton Heston can be Ben hur, and a song praising Joseph’s brother is a ben hymn, then I can delight as Ben them.