Two dramatic productions

Remember when I used to write theatre reviews here? Unfortunately I'm not going to be able to get down to see the UCL Frogs or KCL's Dionysus in the Underworld, but I did see a couple of things in January.

I felt a bit of an interloper at Fragments of Divine Ecstasy - almost everyone else in the audience was a student. I really only went along because my friend and colleague Lottie Parkyn was interviewing another friend, David Bullen, at the end of the event (you can see some snippets from the interview on the King's Greek Play Twitter account). But I was very glad I went.

I've had variable experiences with student productions - some have been quite poor. But when they get it right, they can be really on fire. Through a series of vignettes, some adapted from ancient or modern sources, some written by the cast, the production examined aspects of Dionysus. They succeeded in presenting the god in all his forms - intoxicated, ambiguous, sexy, dangerous. A good evening, and I hope those involved go on to do more in this vein.

The other thing I saw was George Eugeniou's production of Oedipus the King at Theatro Technis in Camden. I've seen quite a few productions of Greek drama there, and this was one of the best. Small in scale, it punches well above its weight in emotional terms. The audience are involved from the start as part of the Chorus - when the Chorus is addressed, people turn to the audience. Leigh Hughes' Oedipus conveys all the unnecessary arrogance of the character, and the production is clearly not sympathetic towards him. He is ably supported by the rest of the cast. At the end, the production remembers, as not every one does, that the fall of Oedipus means the lifting of the curse from Thebes.

Two seminars and a review article

I spent yesterday at Masks, Echoes, Shadows: Locating Classical Receptions in the Cinema.  This was a conference organised by Jo Paul and Anastasia Bakogianni of the Open University, aiming to look at less obvious receptions of Classics in movies, i.e. not things set in the ancient world, like Gladiator or 300, but movies using, or apparently using, classical themes in other settings.  Like Jo, who expressed this opinion in her excellent review article in the 2010 issue of Classical Receptions Journal, I am a little suspicious of identifying similar themes in two separate texts, and saying that one is a reception of the other.  For a start, I think this is territorialising, attempting to suborn other fields of study to the interests of Classics.  We Classicists have a habit of doing this, and I'm not sure it's done us a lot of favours in the past.

I also worry that once one similarity between two texts is identified, it can be too easy to go look for other similarities, and impose them upon the texts.  For instance, there is a clear similarity between Virgil's Aeneid and both versions of Battlestar Galactica  - there is a very long war locked in stalemate, which is won by one side with a ruse, leaving a few survivors from the other to flee for a new home that they have been promised in prophecy.  But not everything in the Aeneid is then repeated in Galactica - people have been looking for a Dido figure in BSG, but I don't believe there is one there.

However, Ricardo Apostol made a very interesting point in his paper on Horace and Black Swan; if readers want to see a link between a Classical text and a modern one, who are we to deny them this?  I can see this point - I have no problem with, say, using Steptoe and Son to help explain Aristophanes' Knights, without implying that I believe that Ray Galton and Alan Simpson were thinking of Attic Old Comedy when they created Albert and Harold. 

It becomes more of a problem when one starts suggesting authorial intent for these receptions on tenuous grounds.  I suspect Apostol's not interested in authorial intent anyway.  I have more regard for it - I've never fully held with 'the death of the author', as creative texts are the products of human beings, who clearly had intentions, though I am sympathetic to the idea that authorial intentions and context shouldn't be the only considerations when responding to a text.

I also am concerned about the solipsism of this a bit.  If a reception is apparent to me personally, does it have any value for anyone else?  Possibly not, but if I am going to write about it, I must believe that it does, otherwise why bother communicating this?

Anyway, an excellent day, enhanced by the fact that the afternoon's papers were all on science fiction.


The second seminar is the online e-seminar of the Classical Receptions Studies Network. This has been put together by Jessica Hughes of the OU and Alastair Blanchard of the University of Sydney. The object of the seminar is to compile a list of resources for Classical Reception scholars in the area in which they wish to study the receptions, to which end a number of experts in those fields (or people like me who straddle disciplinary boundaries) have been asked to contribute some suggestions for initial reading. My contribution is, of course, the page on science fiction. I've always said that reception scholars need to work both in Classics and in the field of the reception, and there's really no way round some solid hard work here. But this seminar should help. Go have a look and make some comments. I've already had some good feedback on my page.


The review article is Brett Rogers and Ben Stevens' 'Classical receptions in science fiction'. I knew this was coming, and had, to be honest, some trepidations - what if I didn't like it, or disagreed radically with their theoretical approach? I have a chapter in their forthcoming Classical Traditions in SF, and that could have been awkward. Fortunately, I liked this piece a lot. They engage with sf scholarship in the form of Adam Roberts and Darko Suvin, and whilst there are some odd gaps in the bibliography (such as citing Istvan Csicsery-Ronay's original 'Seven Beauties' article from Science Fiction Studies, rather than the more recent book), in a field as big as sf studies this is hardly surprising.

Their article ends with seven desiderata for the study of Classical reception in sf. I can see why a survey volume that does for sf what Jon Solomon's The Ancient World in the Cinema did for the movies might appear to be something that is needed, but I'm not sure it's possible - the field is already too diverse (to be honest, I'm not sure an update of Solomon, which is already a decade out of date, is practical now either). I'm certainly not interested in writing such a work. And I think the necessity for such a book is removed by their second desideratum, an online database of Classical receptions in sf.  The other desiderata  all seem sensible, and I certainly strongly agree that people interested in Classical receptions in sf need to get out and go to the sf conferences and conventions and present there, something I've been doing for the last decade or so.

Overall, this article has spurred me to get on with my own books in the field, the forthcoming Martial's Martians and Other Stories, which will collect a number of papers I've written on various aspect of this, and a follow-up, tentatively entitled From Constantine to Palpatine, which will be a more theoretical approach.


While I'm here, I should plug a few other events.  The BFI is running a short season of television versions of Greek drama.This has been curated by Amanda Wrigley. I've been peripherally involved - Amanda was kind enough to invite me to be her viewing buddy in the BFI archives on a couple of occasions. And I shall be speaking at the associated symposium, on the sf aesthetic in The Serpent Son. And I can't go to this event (because I shall be teaching an earlier iteration of this course), but it looks really good, and I encourage others to go and tell me what I've missed.

Kidbrooke Lysistrata redux

I raved about this production a couple of months back. Well, it's back, so go and see it if you can.

KCL and UCL Greek Plays 2010

Aeschylus, Persians
2010 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre
Performance seen: 11 February 2010

It is, as the programme notes, quite surprising that the King's Greek Play has never tackled Aeschylus' Persians before. It's a regularly studied text, because of its uniqueness as the only surviving tragedy based on historical events (indeed, events within the lifetime of the audience, featuring onstage depiction of at least one person who was still alive when the play premiered in 472 BCE). So this year, King's took on the challenge of that work.

As is often the case with King's productions, it was okay, though nothing that enormously impressed me. One potential problem with Persians is that it can end up looking very static, and in fairness, this was well-dealt with. The Chorus was used to add movement, and to underline the dialogue through their actions. There are some nods towards tradition, notably in the half-masks worn by the cast.

Other aspects were less successful. Breaking the Messenger down into two roles was innovative, but I thought they were rather aggressive towards Atossa, who is, after all, supposed to be their Queen. And having Xerxes come on stage dressed a bloodied armed soldier misses Aeschylus' point, which is made pretty explicitly in the text: Xerxes has run away from the fight before actually seeing combat, has torn his own rich oriental dress, as a woman would do, and has nothing manly about him at all.

The best performer was Petros Boutros-Vallinatos as Darius, who confidently delivered his dialogue. Charlotte Maskell as Atossa, the Persian Queen, was rather more muted, though hers is the largest part, and therefore the hardest to learn in Greek.

As with last year's Lysistrata one felt that a little more rehearsal was needed. Atossa forgot some of her lines, the Chorus were not always in unison, and the surtitles were often badly out of sync with what was actually being said. But, as ever, one must make allowances for student productions - these are not professionals, and delivering a play in a language that is not your own is difficult.

Aeschylus' Oresteia Parts II and III: Choephori and Eumenides
2010 UCL Greek and Latin Classical Play, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre
Performance seen: 12 February 2010

I would extend the same allowances to the UCL Classical Play, if they ever showed any sign of needing them. Not every UCL production is first-rate - Acharnians in 2007 was a bit weak - but it's been a long time since there was a terrible production, and more often than not, the UCL productions get it right. Of course, they do have some advantages. The need to deliver the text in Greek restricts the pool of performers from which King's can draw - UCL, in contrast, can throw a wider net, which brings in people with considerable experience of the amateur, and in some cases professional, stage. And the benefits show. (Tonight I'm off to see a performance by King's students in English, which may be a fairer comparison.)

Following on from the successful Agamemnon of 2008, in 2010 UCL decided to stage the remaining two plays from the Oresteia trilogy. The burden was eased by giving the two plays to different directors.* This ambitious scheme pays off.

Despite featuring the killing of Clytemnestra, Choephori can easily get slightly lost as the middle play, between Agamemnon and Eumenides. This production brings it into focus. Where Lisa Gosbee's Agamemnon had used masks, here she takes a more naturalistic approach (though still not entirely naturalistic). Highlights of this were the opening entrance of the Chorus, to the sound of a single clear, beautiful voice, and a strong Electra. (Though unfortunately there were a couple of times when members of the Chorus forgot their lines.)

Eumenides was done very differently, in a far more stylized approach. The ghost of Clytemnestra is projected on a screen. The Furies are whiteface goths in tutus. But it works, and doesn't jar with the approach in Choephori. I might have hoped for a more menacing Athena when she speaks to the Furies (underneath Athena's consoling words, I always feel, is an implicit message that in any fight, Athena will not be the loser), but that's a personal bee in my bonnet.

Overall then, two different, complementary and both well-done plays from UCL. I look forward to next year's performance.

* Unfortunately, I have mislaid my programme, so can give no names. I will rectify this as soon as I can.

Publications news from me

One of the side-effects of my prolonged hiatus from this blog is that I've been quite bad about blowing my own trumpet. So, I didn't mention when my review of Greg Bear's City at the End of Time appeared. Nor did I blog the publication of a revision of my piece on Claudius and Nero and the imperial succession.

In fact, 2009 has seemed more a year of abandoning, or at least postponing, projects rather than bringing them to fruition. So it's nice to be reminded that I have actually managed to finish some things this year. One such popped through the letterbox last week. The new issue of the British Science Fiction Association's critical journal, Vector, contains two pieces that at least partly came from me. One is a piece on the way fantasy author Hal Duncan intertwines Greek tragedy into his novels Vellum and Ink. I'm quite pleased with this piece, as is Niall Harrison, the editor, though it's probably not theoretical enough for some. There's also an interview with Duncan conducted by me. When I was transcribing this (which I will never do again - far too time-consuming), I thought that I had asked sensible questions, which rather decided me to choose myself to interview Ian McDonald when he comes to the BSFA London meeting in October.

This issue of Vector has other stuff, of course. Most interesting for the readers of this blog, perhaps, is a piece by Paul Kincaid on the novels of Robert Holdstock, including Holdstock's recent Merlin Codex series, in which Jason and Medea are central characters.

Now, off to finish a few more projects.

2008 University of London Festival of Greek Drama

The University of London’s Festival of Greek Drama has been going on since 1987, and acts as an umbrella for the King’s and UCL Greek plays, as well as lectures and, sometimes, other productions. This year it has afforded the opportunity to see three tragedies in three weeks, representing the three main Athenian tragedians. So I’ve chosen to blog them all in a single entry, rather than separately

Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus

2008 King’s Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: 6 February 2008

I had once evolved a theory that student/youth theatre groups couldn’t really do Greek tragedy (and yes, I know I start every discussion of a student production with this theory). Recent productions of Orestes and Medea have persuaded me that this judgement was in error. I realized that it was based on a couple of dreadful productions of the Oedipus Tyrannos (one of which you can read about here), and a couple of ropey Antigones. Against that, I’ve seen some not-too-bad productions of Trachiniae, and one of Ajax which I recall being okay, though it was nearly thirty years ago and I had little to judge it against at the time. So perhaps it is not even that youngsters can’t do Sophocles, but that they can’t do the Theban plays.

Of course, it’s not just students that this affects. The status of the Oedipus as the recognized foremost example of Attic tragedy means it is the first choice of any theatre company wishing to demonstrate that they can tackle the genre, and therefore where many prove they can’t. Not for nothing did the makers of The Band Wagon choose Oedipus Rex when they wanted to poke fun at the dreariest, most portentous production of a play imaginable.

Unfortunately, the 2008 King’s production does little to convince me to change my mind on this point. It’s not that it’s particularly bad, though there are a couple of elements that I really don’t care for. It more that the individual bits of the staging don’t hang together as a whole, and everyone seems to be in a different production to everyone else.

At one end is Bryan Kitch (Oedipus), who gives a nuanced performance. If he is a little muted at times, that’s at least partly because the rest of the cast give him so little to work with, the one exception being Eleanor Hanham as Jocasta, who, after a bit of gurning, finally hits the right emotional note in the last lines before she leaves the stage. Oedipus and Creon are costumed alike, in silk pyjamas and floor-length tunics that are open at the front and expose a lot of bare chest (so nothing slashy there, then), but the difference in tone between Kitch’s performance and Miles Galaska’s as Creon is quite jarring.

At the other extreme is Simon Willshire, as the Priest. His performance is the sort of amateur dramatics that is often parodied, being all about reciting the lines, but with no investment of emotion in the performance.

Then there’s the Chorus. When they first enter, the people sitting next to me are suppressing their giggles. I was at first annoyed at the gigglers, but after a moment I could see their point. The Chorus here are like a parody of the worst excesses of nineteen-seventies arty theatre workshop formalistic interpretive dance expressionism and Significance, all black-clad, Meaningful Looks and exaggerated Expressive Movements. Only Charlotte Murrie, Deianeira in last year’s Women of Trachis, is memorable. She has sufficient stage presence to always draw one’s attention.

But even the worst Oedipus often has some good ideas. The National Youth Theatre ended with a festal scene, reminding the audience that Oedipus’ banishment lifts Apollo’s curse from Thebes. A UCL production concluded with Oedipus crouched at the front of the stage, but lit from the footlights, so that he cast a far larger shadow on the backdrop than the elders of Thebes, symbolizing the shadow Oedipus’ legacy will cast over Thebes’ future.

Here the neat idea is that every time someone recounts prophecy, they do so in song. That’s certainly an interesting notion. Modern productions always have a problem with the role of music in Greek theatre, because modern musical theatre is not generally associated with tragic themes, unless it’s full-blown opera. So credit to King’s for trying that. But it’s one of a number of ideas that don’t quite come off. Another is casting women as the shepherds - it is a little jarring when the Theban old man is neither aged in appearance nor a man.

On the other hand, the production can’t be blamed for the failure of the stage hangings to collapse as they should have; ending on the distraught Oedipus and cutting the final Chorus is probably the right thing to do (though I doubt King’s are the first to do that); and it’s nice to see surtitles back (even if sometimes moderately lengthy speeches are reduced to a handful of words).

I should emphasize, as I usually do, that I know these are not professional actors and director, so it is unfair to hold them to professional production standards. And I did see this on the first performance, so it may have improved over the next two nights. (And my opinion is not shared by everyone.) But in general, student productions can, and should be, better than this.

Aeschylus, Agamemnon

2008 UCL Classical Play, Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 12 February 2008

To demonstrate my point, I need look no further than this year’s UCL play. Again I saw this on the first night, but where King’s had yet to form a coherent whole out of disparate parts, UCL hit the ground running. Well, it’s more like a gentle stroll, but at least they know where they’re going.

I’m slightly surprised that UCL have returned to the Agamemnon so soon. Their last, not too bad, staging of it was in 2002, and in between they have only staged one tragedy, Medea. The corpus of Greek drama isn’t that small.

The first thing one notices, as the Chorus enters whilst the audience settles, is that the production is masked. This is a risky strategy, which can come off, but doesn’t always. The UCL Oedipus in 2000 was masked, and that was awful.

But here the masks work. They give anonymity, and uniformity to the Chorus. Members of the Chorus can play the Watchman in the first half, and Agamemnon in the second, and the switch of the cast can be done invisibly in the interval.

I wonder if the masks also allow the cast to leave their own personas behind, and project themselves into their roles more. Certainly, this production is full of good performances. The Chorus enunciate clearly, and perform well. Minor criticisms can be made - Luke Davies as the Watchman may be a bit quiet, Hugh Viney as Agamemnon a bit wooden, and Sam Smullen’s Herald weakest of all (oddly, as he has the most stage experience). But none of these are bad, and on the other hand, there are two staggeringly good performances. Mimi Kroll as an ebullient Clytemnestra has presence that dominates the whole theatre. And Jessica Lazar as Cassandra gives a portrayal largely lacking the sort of psychobabble that mars many interpretations. She does strip down to her underwear, but at least there’s a justification of that in the text.

Which brings me to Jamal Saleh’s new translation. It’s really quite good. The language owes much to Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and manages to be both comprehensible and bring a nobility to what is said. It does tend to be a bit prolix, which emphasizes that Aeschylus’ individual scenes are a somewhat overlong. This, combined with a hesitancy on the part of some cast members in delivering their lines, drags things out rather, so that it took over two hours, including interval, to get through what is not actually a very long play in relative terms. The credit for a script editor suggests that some judicious cutting took place. A little more wouldn’t have gone amiss.

All this - the masks, the Chorus speaking for the most part one at a time, the language, even the net motif on the stage dressing, foreshadowing Agamemnon’s death - shows a production that is very traditional in its approach. It reminds me strongly of Sir Peter Hall’s 1981 version of Tony Harrison’s translation, almost as if it was influenced by that. The Hall/Harrison version was staged before most of the cast and crew were born, but I wonder if they had access to a recording of it.

Very occasionally the traditionalism doesn’t work. Rolling the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra out on the ekklema was powerful in Hall’s production, because it was in the centre of the stage - here it’s to the side, and easily missed. But overall, there’s nothing wrong with a traditional approach done well, and that is what we have here. It may not be as good as the Medea of 2006, but it’s clearly better than 90% of student/youth productions, and superior to quite a few more lauded professional productions (such as the NT’s Trojan Women).

Since 2006 UCL’s productions have been under the aegis of a Classical Drama Society. I find myself wondering if such a formalized set-up would benefit King’s. Admittedly, last year’s King’s play, though flawed, was better than UCL’s Acharnians. But King’s has never in my experience delivered anything as good as this or the 2006 Medea.

Euripides, Bacchae

Royal Holloway Classics Students, Jane Holloway Hall

Performance seen: 22 February 2008

At the very least one has to admire the Royal Holloway students’ courage in tackling Bacchae so soon after the memorable Alan Cumming production. Wisely, they don’t take the National Theatre of Scotland version on directly. For a start, the pyrotechnics of the latter are wholly impractical for RHUL.

Instead, they apply a series of solutions that are often diametrically opposite to those taken by John Tiffany. This may or may not be deliberate. For a start, instead of visual stimulation they go for an aural approach, with an effective music score underlying the action.

At the centre of the play is the ambiguous figure of Dionysus, existing in a zone of indeterminate gender. The National Theatre of Scotland dealt with this by casting an androgynous man, and have him act effeminately. RHUL cast an androgynous woman and have her act like a man. This is a splendid performance by Madeleine Taylor, the best thing about this production. She is confident and commands the stage.

Emphasizing Dionysus’ masculinity allows Pentheus to be rather more camp, which at least makes more readily explicable his willingness to dress in women’s clothing. My companion on the night felt that the male members of the cast shouted, whilst the women rushed, suggesting a degree of nervousness, though I myself thought that nobody was actually bad, and Mirjam Frank as Agave conveyed her madness without making it seem laughable.

This is the most ‘cheap-and-cheerful’ of the three productions. Royal Holloway do not have the same tradition of mounting Greek plays, and where King’s and UCL play in mostly full theatres, RHUL has a half-empty sports hall. That the hall was half-empty is a shame.

It sounds patronizing to say that this has the feel of a school play, but what I mean by that is the sense of enthusiasm undimmed by a recognition on the players’ part that they aren’t the most professional cast in the world. It would be fair to say that this is quite a conservative production, with the cast in Grecian dress, and a three-person Chorus that stands and recites rather than moves. But there’s nothing wrong with a conservative production done well, as this is. If the humour of the play is rather lost, the deus ex machina is not marred, as Cumming’s was, by divine petulance (and RHUL recognize that Dionysus in his full godhood requires a costume change). This wasn’t the best production of Euripides that I’ve seen, but at least I didn’t come out thinking ‘What was the point of that?’

Katie Mitchell's Trojan Women

Euripides, Women of Troy

National Theatre
Performance seen: 12th January 2008

Katie Mitchell's new production of Don Taylor's version of Women of Troy (I avoid the term 'translation', as Taylor did not work from the original Greek) has received a number of very favourable reviews (e.g. in The Independent, Time Out, and the Evening Standard). So why didn't I like it?

The production begins with the Chorus (all given individual names in the programme) already on stage. Immediately the prologue, featuring Poseidon and Athena (a rare case of a deus ex machina at the beginning of a play), is cut. I wasn't too surprised by this - Michael Cacoyannis' film version does it, and modern productions can be uncomfortable with actually seeing the gods. But it changes the tone of the piece. Euripides' play is a warning against hubris - the destruction the Greeks have visited upon Troy will be visited on them in turn. This was an important subject of debate in fifth century Athens - Thucydides says the same in the context of the fate of the island of Melos in 416 BC, the event that is often thought to be the allegorical inspiration for Euripides' play. Removing the prologue makes the play an examination of the fate of women in a defeated city, with the Trojan women as victims whose abusers have no signalled comeuppance.

That's not where my problem comes, though. The women are in 1930s ballgowns, looking for all the world as if Hercule Poirot is about to summon them and expose the murderer. I don't have an issue with such modern dress productions, and putting aside the Balkans/Afghanistan/Iraq contemporary war setting that is often found in modern productions of Greek tragedy is refreshing. But these people have had their city and families destroyed around them, so I would expect that the ballgowns would at least be ripped and dirty. But, whilst a couple of the Chorus have bruised arms, their ballgowns are pristine, their make-up perfect, not a hair out of place. This undercuts the play's horror - I felt that, even in the pyrotechnic destruction of the set at the end, Mitchell's production never quite conveys the calamity that has happened to its subjects. As Michael Billington notes in The Guardian, there's something missing from the emotional landscape of the production - only towards the end did I feel it starts to connect with the heart of the text.

I agree with Billington that the words are key. So it is a shame that the dialogue is often difficult to hear. The cast don't project as well as they might, and they have to compete with a constant low hum that is meant to represent the sounds of the docks where the production is set. The action takes place inside a two-level warehouse. The Chorus are at stage level, but above are the offices where Helen is imprisoned. She is constantly seen prowling to and fro, a device which keeps her in mind, but it often distracting.

Though I can be enthusiastic for Anastasia Hille's Andromache, who shows the appropriate level of panic, I'm much less so about some of the other performances. Kate Duchêne's Hecuba seems anodyne in comparison to, say, Katherine Hepburn in Caccoyanis' version. Talthybius' role is split between two actors, both of whom seem quite muted.

And then there's Sinead Matthews as Cassandra. I generally find depictions of Cassandra unsatisfactory. I think this is because so often they try to explain the character in terms of modern psychoanalysis, and I don't think Cassandra's madness can be explained that way. She is insane because she is cursed by Apollo, so that she sees the future clearly, but cannot get anyone to believe her. Reading that through a diagnosis of 'manic depression' doesn't always help. Matthews is hampered by having to compete with shouting and fire alarms, but even so she could be clearer. And I knew almost immediately that she would demonstrate her madness by ripping all her clothes off (similarly, I was not surprised when Helen ended up in nothing but her knickers).

There's also one oddity. Before each choral ode, there is dancing, which beings with muted music, before being overwhelmed by the sounds of the Jazz Age. For me, this device (which Mitchell apparently also used in her production of Iphigeneia at Aulis) just doesn't work (see the review in The Stage, which characterizes these as a distraction). When most of the production is so naturalistic, impressionist moments like this are confusing (and if the production is prepared to embrace impressionism, why ditch the gods?). Further confusion is added when departed characters such as Cassandra and Andromache come back on stage, though I can see the point of reintroducing Menelaus and Helen, to underline the assumption of most productions that Helen will seduce her husband and escape punishment (though the very best production I ever saw, that of Andrei Serban in 1992, concluded Helen's scene with her being stripped, raped by a bear and executed).

This is far from being the worst production of a Greek tragedy that I've ever seen, but it is one of the weaker versions of Trojan Women. But perhaps I want something different to everyone else when I see a Greek tragedy. And this didn't deliver it.

Women of Troy is on until 27th February.

2007 Cambridge Greek Play

Euripides, Medea
2007 Cambridge Greek Play, Cambridge Arts Theatre
Performance seen: Saturday 13th October 2007 (2.30 pm)

There was a time when the Medea was not amongst the most renowned of Euripides' plays. But the combined effects of Sir Denys Page's classic 1938 edition for schoolchildren, and the rise of the feminist movement, which saw themes in the play with which it sympathized, has brought it to prominence. It is now the most performed of all Euripides' works. Still, the chance of seeing three productions in the same year is rare, but that is what has happened in 2007. All three that I've seen have set the play in different types of patriarchal backgrounds, where male dominance is being challenged. In March London Ensemble Productions produced a Medea with a strong preponderance of Scottish accents, conjuring up the assertive masculinity of hard men in Glasgow tenements. Last month, Lazarus Theatre Company set the play against the background of an Afghanistan where Muslim are trying to emerge from the repression of the Taleban.

The Cambridge Greek Play chose to avoid the Muslim country background that is now common in modern settings of Greek tragedy, not least because they were one of the pioneers of it in the 1998 production of Trojan Women, set in the Balkans. Instead, Annie Castledine and Clive Mendus' production takes place in 1912 England. The background is the challenge to male patriarchy that the suffragette movement represented, and the Chorus are clothed as suffragettes. This presents a different dynamic between Medea and Chorus to that normally seen. In most cases, the Chorus are Medea's friends, and their support for her is initially offered out of friendship, until they are repelled by what she plans. By then, of course, she has trapped them into silence, and they can do nothing. This Chorus, on the other hand, supports Medea on ideological principle, because she is a woman. But at the same time, they are frightened of her, and retreat before her rages in terror.

The historical setting has another link back to the original performance. In 1912, England, and the rest of Europe, stood on the brink of a devastating war. That was also the case for Athens in 431 BC - Sparta's ultimatum had been rejected in the previous months, and as the City Dionysia took place in March, Theban troops were attacking Plataea.

Less successful are the occasional brief Edwardian song-and-dance routines performed by the Chorus. I appreciate that movement and music should be part of any Chorus, and approve of all attempts to convey that. But it doesn't always work, and these examples are too reminiscent of Half A Sixpence for my liking.

A more successful injection of music, perhaps, is the sing-song delivery of Holly Strickland's Tutor - never quite an aria, but not quite normal speech either. Of the other secondary characters, Frances Stevenson's Nurse is seemingly costumed in oriental dress, which looks a little odd juxtaposed with the 1912 setting for everything else. Robert Lloyd-Parry, being older than many of the undergraduate cast, brings a gravitas to Aegeus that might otherwise be missing, though he is still portrayed as a slightly buffoonish figure, as is common (it is possible to bring more depth to the character, as the Lazarus production showed). All these are wholly competent. All the actors deliver the Greek in such a way as to indicate that they know the meaning of what they are saying, not just the sounds, though some, such as Matthew Hiscock's wheelchair-bound Creon, cannot conceal that this is not their first language.

The only wrong note is sounded by Virginia Corless' Messenger. Clad in modern dress, when she arrives on stage she leaps over one Chorus member, and kicks another up the bum. This portrayal of the messenger as a trickster figure, for me, drains the pathos from what she has to say - the full horror of what she is reporting is not conveyed, because really, she doesn't seem all that bothered by it herself.

The key relationship in the play is that between Jason and Medea. All three productions I have seen this year have chosen to present that relationship as one which retains a great passion and desire, especially on Jason's part. Marta Zlatic, an impressive Hekabe in 1998, plays Medea as a monster, but a compelling one. She has an excellent foil in Misha Verkerk's Jason. Not only does he deliver the Greek convincingly, he is extremely handsome; one can see why any Greek woman should want him, and why none would want to give him up.

Castledine is quoted in the programme as telling her cast never to judge Jason too harshly. At first this seems odd. Doesn't Euripides himself judge Jason harshly? In the debate between them both, it seems obvious that Medea is the winner, and the Chorus as much as tell him that they are not going to be taken in by his sophistry. But some of the things Jason says would have been heard differently by the original audience. When he tells Medea that she is privileged to have lived amongst Greeks instead of barbarians, a modern audience laughs at such blatant chauvinism. But an Athenian audience would have agreed with Jason. They would probably have done so again when he says that it is better for wives to be sensible when their husbands find new bedmates. So perhaps Castledine has a point.

She certainly gives Jason the last word, after an impressive deus ex machina scene (as with Bacchae, the deus ex machina is also the protagonist of the action). Euripides' text ends with five lines for the Chorus. This is cut here, making the last utterance the despairing curse upon Medea of the devastated Jason.

A last noteworthy point is that there is an element of performance in the round in this staging. There is seating at the back of the stage. I presume the intent is to recapture some of the intimacy and sense of community of an Athenian staging, but for those in the stalls, like me, then the performers addressed the seats on stage, they often had their backs to us, and it became a distancing element. More successful was the musicians, not only placed on stage, but reacting to the action as if they were part of it.

Overall, this version is a success. If it is the least of the three Medeas I have seen this year, and definitely not as enjoyable as UCL's stunning 2006 production, this should be taken as an indication of the high standards set by those productions, not an indication of any failing by this.

Medea in Afghanistan?

Euripides, Medea
Lazarus Theatre Company at Theatro Technis
Performance seen: 27 September 2007

George Eugeniou's Theatro Technis in Camden is fifty years old this year. Given the Greek origins of its proprietor, it's not surprising that Athenian drama has featured regularly amongst its shows. I've seen an Andromache, and a Persians. A poster in the foyer records a past performance of Lysistrata.

And now they act as the venue for Lazarus Theatre's Medea, directed by Ricky Dukes. Medea seems quite popular at the moment. This is the second production I've seen this year (after an enjoyable staging by London Ensemble Production, back in March, which I never got round to blogging), and next month it will be the Cambridge Greek Play. And, taking into account last year's UCL play, it seems to bring out the best in companies.

Much play has been made in publicity for this production of it being set in Afghanistan.* In the end, that amounts to little beyond costuming, most notably giving the female cast members head-scarves, and the use of a jet bomber sound effect at the beginning and end of the play. And nothing about any of this says Afghanistan as distinct from any other Muslim or partially Muslim country, such Iraq or Kosovo or Bosnia. Over the past decade or so I've seen plenty of productions of tragedy that have dressed their casts much the same (I think immediately of the RSC's 2005 Hecuba at the Albery, starring Vanessa Redgrave). All that changes are the nations that one first thinks of when presented with such imagery.

Such universality is no bad thing, really. It certainly suits the text, which is a straight reading of the play, preserving all character and place names. Without the programme, one would assume that the play is set in Corinth, and so it should be.

There are a few changes. As often, the Tutor (Stephen Chertion) is given the Messenger's Speech. More unusually, the Chorus is reduced down to a single person. Lydia Larson delivers a disengaged and aloof Chorus - many of the lines where the Chorus are actively trying to dissuade Medea are given instead to the Nurse (Carrie Whitton), and some Chorus lines are even given to Medea. And the Chorus' greatest moment of horror and pathos - their indecision as Medea murders her sons, is cut altogether.

Kevin Cooke's Aegeus is less of a bumbling old fool and more of an ethically-minded statesman than I’ve seen in the past. And Cooke’s performance is so successful that I was surprised when I looked in the programme and saw that the same actor played Creon. I had not spotted this, so different are the performances.

A production of Medea stands or falls on its lead actress, of course. In Louise Coleman, Lazarus has a Medea who is compelling, who dominates the stage from when she first emerges through the doors from the backstage area. She is denied her apotheosis (as was the case in the production from March) - instead her final confrontation with Jason (played by David Seymour, who rises fully to Coleman’s challenge) is visceral, physical, and violent.

I don't think this production is as innovative as it likes to think it is. What it is, however, is a good solid production, that understands what the play is about, and doesn’t mess around. I could do with more like this.

* It's not really worth mentioning that the one piece of press coverage on display talked about classical drama being 'a millennia old'. Oh dear. On so many levels.

The Bacchae, with Alan Cumming

Euripides, The Bacchae, in a new version by David Greig
Lyric Theatre, Hammersmith
Performance seen: 19 September 2007

The Bacchae is possibly one of the most terrifying pieces of Greek theatre that survives. In it, Euripides returns to the theme of his other horror-play, Medea; that an excessive devotion to rationality and denial of irrational emotion can only lead to disaster.

The horror of the final denouement, as Agave comes on stage bearing the head of her son Pentheus, whom she and her sisters have torn apart, is unsurpassed. This horror is heightened because of its inevitability. The audience knows that Pentheus' destruction is inescapable, because Dionysus, whose true identity only the audience knows, has told them.

But it is also a funny play. There is a deep level of irony, as Dionysus warns Pentheus that (to paraphrase) 'if you insult me you insult the god.' Pentheus takes it metaphorically, but Dionysus means it literally. And when Pentheus is dressed as a Maenad, the audience is clearly meant to laugh. This laughter, as Pentheus can be seen walking into the trap, heightens the horror.

Bacchae is a very intertextual play, putting on stage the god who was already placed in the theatre in wooden statue form. Reference to earlier plays can be seen – Tiresias, for instance, appears fixed in the 'old man' persona that Sophocles had made famous in the Antigone and Oedipus, despite the fact that Bacchae takes place generations earlier. And it was probably influential from even before it was performed. When Aristophanes premiered his Euripidean tribute/parody Frogs in January of 405 BC, he made Dionysus lead character. Though Bacchae was not produced until later, probably in March of the same year, coincidence seems unlikely. Aristophanes might have seen the text found amongst Euripides’ papers after his death in 406.

That influence of Bacchae echoes down the ages. It seems to have influenced some accounts of the death of Orpheus, in which the poet is torn apart by Maenads at Dionysus’ instigation (though in others, such as Ovid, Bacchus punishes those responsible); like Pentheus, all that is left of Orpheus is his head.* Anthony Shaffer must surely have been thinking of the play when he wrote The Wicker Man, in which the upright and rational Sergeant Howie is entwined in the schemes of Dionysiac pagans, and part of the trap involves dressing Howie in clothes appropriate to the pagan celebration.

The National Theatre of Scotland's production, directed by John Tiffany and starring Alan Cumming as Dionysus, comes to Hammersmith laden with expectation, having been the hit of the Edinburgh International Festival. By and large, I think it lives up to those expectations, though it does have something of the curate's egg about it. In many ways, it's a fairly traditional approach. The play's Theban setting is retained, rather than a modern relocation, though the production is in some ways very Scottish – Tony Curran's Pentheus belongs to the line of Glasgow hardmen that James Cosmo and Billy Connolly have played so successfully on screen. The idea of Dionysus as rock star is not particularly novel – I saw it used in a production of Frogs back in 1996. And the androgyny of the god is inherent in his origin myth.

Central to this version, of course, is Cumming's performance. He enters in a deus ex machina brought to the beginning of the play, with his bare arse forming one of the play's main talking points. The night I saw the play, he seemed to be suffering from a cold, and sounded flat in his first song. Nevertheless, his sheer exuberance carries the play along well, together with some impressive special effects (one of which threatens to give you sunburn), and I found it impossible not to have a big grin on my face through much of the play.

The Chorus are portrayed as a group of black women, clad in red, singing and dancing across the stage. They are also made into more active participants in the play. They are not just Dionysus' audience and fan club. They know who he is (which in Euripides' text they do not), and Dionysus disguises them as Theban functionaries, to help him weave his web around Pentheus (the Times reviewer found this distracting, but I think that's unfair). I always intrinsically approve of a staging that restores music and movement to the Chorus (though at least one production has done this in a manner that actually put me off), and I thought the choreography and harmonizing effective and exciting (even if it did remind me of Return to the Forbidden Planet at times). The connection with gospel music highlights (if not, perhaps, deliberately), that the Chorus, and indeed Greek tragedy as a whole, emerged from religious ceremony.

I also like that not only the Chorus sing, but both Dionysus and Pentheus get musical numbers (and Cadmus and Tiresias do a little bit of soft-shoe shuffle). Arias were an important part of Euripidean tragedy. They are difficult to do in a modern production, and it’s nice to see someone try.

For me, the weakness comes at the end of the play (an opinion shared by a number of friends who've seen it). Previous productions I've seen (such as Peter Hall's at the National Theatre in 2002) have tended to play down the comedy. This staging plays that up, which causes problems on the transition to the horror of the end (not helped by bringing Pentheus' remains on stage in a bin bag). Not until Paola Dionisotti's Agave finally realizes what she holds in her hands does the right emotional pitch get hit, and silence descends on the auditorium. And then Cumming comes back on and slightly spoils it all.

So splendid as the god in human disguise, he can't quite carry off the god as god, despite a bank of bright spotlights behind him (though it surprised me that there isn't a costume change to underline the change in status). Instead, he comes across as a petulant child. Faced with Cadmus and Agave’s reasonable statements that the punishment they have received does not fit their crime, Dionysus says that it's not his fault, it's theirs, it serves them right, anyway Zeus approved his plans - he does absolutely anything rather than accept any personal responsibility. This is explicit in Greig's translation - what Euripides intended is hard to divine, as the text is defective at this point, but I suspect he may have intended to convey more of a sense that justice of a sort has been done (compare the end of the Hippolytus). Cadmus (Ewan Hooper), on the other hand, emerges as the only character with his dignity intact.

Despite my qualms, however, this remains a memorable production of a memorable play.

* Edit 21/09/07: A little extra reading shows that this is wrong. Orpheus’ death at the hands of Maenads inspired by Dionysus featured in Aeschylus' lost Bassarae, and so that legend may have influenced the depiction of Pentheus' death, which is not attested in literature before Euripides.

Helen of Troy

Euripides, Helen of Troy
The Scoop at More London
Performance seen: September 7th 2007

The term 'Greek tragedy' covers a wide range of different tonalities. At one extreme is a passionate horror like The Bacchae (currently running at the Lyric Hammersmith). At the other is Helen, which is often described as a light comedy. There's a lot of grounds for such a description. Both Helen and Menelaus can be portrayed as comic characters, flighty and vain, and foolish and rather stupid, respectively. And the play has a 'happy ending', with the reunited lovers escaping, Helen's disappointed suitor Theoclymenus resigned to his fate, and only the nameless Egyptians slaughtered by Menelaus and his Greeks coming off badly. It is easy to play Helen as almost a Noël Coward comedy of manners.

Steam Industry Free Theatre's approach in this production, directed by Phil Wilmott, is slightly different. They don't neglect comedy, by any means. Menelaus' shipmate, here named Atticus and demoted to the rank of slave [Edit 18/08/09: I let myself down here with a lack of familarity with the play - Meneleus' shipmate is clearly marked out as a slave in Euripides' original text.], is outrageously camp in the portrayal by Nick Smithers, whilst Paul Critolph's Theoclymenus is full-on pantomime villain. But Wilmott's adaptation seeks to find the seriousness in the play. Kerry Skinner's Helen is a woman wronged by malicious gossip, whilst Stewart Alexander's Menelaus, if sometimes confused, carries enough dignity to suggest why his wife should actively want him back.

This is quite a lean Helen as well. The action is got through in about seventy-five minutes. This is largely achieved by cutting most of the choral odes (which in any case don't directly address the action in the way most Greek choruses do). But Helen's explanation of her plan to Menelaus is also cut, so both she and her husband are presented as making up their deception of Theoclymenus as they go along. This is both funnier, and makes Helen and Menelaus more admirable. (On the other hand, Atticus' role appears to have been slightly expanded.)

Other changes involve the replacement of Helen's opening monologue with a dialogue conveying the same information to the audience, between her and the god Hermes, as he abducts her from Sparta. Hermes also returns in place of the Dioscuri at the end. Atticus and Teucer deliver the messenger's speech between them (and to the audience, not to Theoclymenus), and minor roles such as the door keeper are subsumed in the the Chorus.

The stage set has the look of a beach on the Indian Ocean. This is rather dictated by the need for it to also serve for an earlier performance of The Jungle Book on the same day. But the costumes are made to fit, with the Chorus clad in long skirts and midriff-baring tops, with the male members clad in baggy multicoloured shirts and shorts. (The beach effect was emphasized when I saw the play by a co-operative stiff breeze down the Thames.)

Steam Industry have often used the Scoop, the small open theatrical space (inaccurately described as an amphitheatre) in in front of City Hall on the south bank of the Thames, to stage Greek drama (Oedipus, Agamemnon and Children of Hercules). But this is the first time I had seen it. Though the space has nothing like the scale of a true Greek theatre, the tiers of stone backless seating and the open-air environment conveys some of the same effect, though Euripides never had the benefit of radio mikes.

I shall watch out for further productions in this venue.

2007 KCL Greek Play

Sophocles, Trachiniae
King's College London Greek Play
Performance seen: February 8th 2007

The first Greek tragedy I ever saw in the original language was Sophocles' Trachiniae (Women of Trachis), in Cambridge in 1983. I still remember it vividly. Now the relatively rarely-staged (compared to the Oedipus Rex and Antigone) Trachiniae becomes the first play I've seen two Greek-language productions of (without, incidentally, seeing an English version in the interim).

I've noticed over the years that the King's Greek Play has a tendency to be theatrically experimental. Even when the staging is fairly conventional, they'll choose a leftfield text like Rhesus. 2007 is no different, and director Caroline Fries scatters throughout the play what I can only describe as artifices, seeking to engage the Greekless audience. Perhaps that's appropriate, as Trachiniae sees Sophocles himself experimenting, with a female character, Deianeira, Heracles' wife, who is, as Judith Mossman noted in her pre-performance talk, not bad in herself, but through naivety and a lack of common sense manages to kill her husband, a central conflict between two characters (Heracles and Deianeira) who never meet, and a Messenger whose initial action is to report an offstage messenger's speech.

The question is, do any of the artifices work?

Before tackling that, I have to be fair and point out that playing a role in a Greek-language production is difficult, especially if one is not a native speaker of the modern language (and there are noticeably fewer people in prominent roles with that sort of background than there have been in previous years). Not only does one have to remember lines in a tongue not one's own, but one has to appear as if one knows what the lines mean. I have seen Greek language productions where actors were speaking words when they clearly had no idea of the meaning, and had just learned the text by rote. No-one in this year's King's Greek Play committed that sin. And these are amateur actors and an amateur production. So I cannot set too harsh a standard upon such a show (which is not to say that student productions cannot sometimes reach very high standards indeed).

So, what are some of the artifices? The production makes a point of eschewing surtitles. I think this is a shame, as I was glad to see them appear in 2005. Instead, there are short readings in English. These are usually given at microphones by the sides of the stage, though the dying Heracles remains on his cot. They are translations of lines of the play, summaries of the action, or texts that resonate with the same themes (I recognized Shakespeare and the King James Bible). There are also short filmed sequences projected on to the backdrop (as there had been in a previous KCL version of the Antigone that I saw, and didn't much like). I'm not sure that this helps the audience follow the play's action - I found myself wondering how someone unfamiliar with the work would cope. The film sequences also occasion the odd pause as the cast wait for them to start, which cause the action to drag. (As does the bringing on of Heracles, where the lights are dimmed as his cot is pulled on by stagehands, who then left before the action resumed - far better, surely, to begin the scene as Heracles is brought on.) All this can only be accommodated through what seemed to be the slashing of significant sections of the Greek - this at least is what I surmised from the way those around me following the work with their Oxford Classical Texts flipped their pages over.

The Chorus are clad in Greek-style dresses, and masked, after a fashion - their faces are painted white, with a black domino mask painted across that. The intent here may be to present the Chorus as uniform, but in fact the make up actually highlights the differences in their faces. But there is some attempt at music (though little movement), with the Chorus singing two songs, and a duet with Deianeira.

Deianeira is portrayed confidently by Charlotte Murrie, and it soon becomes clear that her halting delivery is intended to show Deianeira's state of mind, and not because she has forgotten her lines. (Unfortunately, the play began with an English prologue by an actress who had forgotten her lines.) She is clad in a forties cocktail dress, with a large flower in her hair, an echo, as the programme notes reveal, of Billie Holiday's look. Heracles' new bride, Iole, is clad identically, underlining the way in which she is intended as a replacement for Deianeira. It also adds incestuous overtones to Heracles demand that Iole be married after his death to his son Hyllus - like Oedipus, Hyllus is to plough the furrow previously ploughed by his father.

I can't say that there were any particularly bad ideas used in this production. But the artifices seemed to me not to add up to more than the sum of their parts. There was no unifying theme bringing the various devices together - for all that last year's production seems to have somewhat divided people I've spoken to, there was at least a single central idea from which the other ideas flowed. I couldn't see that in this production.

So this version of Trachiniae seems to me to be a failed experiment. But it is a failure produced by people who have talent. To progress one must experiment, and if that exposes one to the risk of failure, that does not invalidate the experiment, for that is how one learns.

Orestes: Blood and Light

Orestes: Blood & Light
By Helen Edmundson, based on Euripides
Shared Experience/Tricycle Theatre, Kilburn

Performance seen: November 30th 2006

One of the pleasures of teaching for the Open University is the wide variety of backgrounds from which your students come. So it is entirely possible to be leafing through the programme for a production in a north London community arts theatre, and discover that the costume supervisor is a former student. But enough of that ...

Given how everyone talks about how rarely Euripides' Orestes is performed, it seems a bit of a luxury to be able to see two productions in the space of just over a year. Even more to be appreciated is that both productions have been very good. But there comparisons have to stop, as the two versions are very different. The Oxford Greek Play from last year was, bar a few chops here and there, a faithful performance of Euripides' text. For Helen Edmundson, writer of Shared Experience's version (which has previously been performed in the same venue as the Oxford version), Euripides is merely the starting point. Whole characters and scenes are lost (Pylades, the Chorus, Apollo and the deus ex machina, the Messenger, and to all intents and purposes the Phrygian slave, made into an African woman and with her role much curtailed). Those characters that remain are given things to say that Euripides never wrote. The result is something that is a work in its own right. At one point, as Electra and Orestes carefully and tenderly planned to take their own lives, I actually thought that the play would end here, a long way from Euripides. It is entirely correct that Edmundson's name comes before the Athenian's in the credits. And this is no bad thing.

In place of the removed characters and scenes, Edmundson gives a much expanded role to Electra, that Greek girl with an excessive interest in the male members of her family. This Electra is as complex as ever (and Edmundson includes explicit references to Euripides' other portrayal of the character in his Electra). She can see through the lies of others. She has a scene with Tyndareos in which she shreds his self-righteousness to pieces. But she is in her own way as insane as her brother. Electra takes Pylades' role in driving events forward. It is Orestes' sexual desire for his sister that reignites his desire for life, and Electra that suggests the murder of Helen. (Yet at one point Orestes deserts he to plead his case, feeling that she will be a hindrance - this is perhaps a reference to something similar in Euripides' original, where Electra is excluded from Pylades and Orestes' plotting, and treated as a junior partner.)

Helen is given a larger part. Ironically, this makes her less sympathetic. He defence of her own and Clytemnestra's actions contains a strong element of hypocrisy, and rejection of personal responsibility. She fled with Paris because of lust, and that is her excuse.

Menelaos is also a lesser person than Eurpides depicts. In many of the plays that Eurpides wrote about Menelaos, he is either manipulative (Iphigenia at Aulis, Andromache), or foolish (Helen, Trojan Women). In Orestes, however, Menelaos is the most honest character, who never promises more than he can deliver (for which he is condemned by Orestes as a fair-weather friend), and he never allows his temper to affect his judgment (unlike Orestes and Tyndareos). Edmundson's Menelaos on the other hand makes promises to Orestes that he has no intention of keeping. And in that he helps bring about the destruction of his family.

In the end, the theme of Edmundson's play seems to be responsibility, and the avoidance of same. Orestes and Electra claim that they are acting on Apollo's command, Helen blames lust, whilst Menelaos betrays his responsibility to his brother's children. All this leads to an ending that returns to Euripides' apocalyptic vision, shorn of the cop-out of the deus ex machina.

The cast are excellent, though their different ethnic background requires a greater suspension of disbelief to accept that they are all related to one another. The lighting makes effective use of the theatre space. And yes, my student's costumes were good.

I'm not sure whether I agree with Edmundson's reading of Eurpides as an out-and-out anti-warmongering writer (a reading of the play also to be found in Philip Vellacott's introduction to his Penguin translation). But overall, this was a fine piece of work, which I enjoyed rather more than some of the critics seem to have.

Aeschylus, Persians

The Persians by Aeschylus
Adapted and directed by George Eugeniou
Theatro Technis, London

Performance seen: 31st May 2006

The play is not a celebration of Athens's greatness but a great warning to all empires ever since.

So states Theatro Technis' press release for this new production of the oldest surviving piece of western drama, Aeschylus' Persians. I have to disagree, at least partially. I think Persians is a celebration of Athenian greatness, and praises the virtues of democracy over an empire led by an autocrat. It appeals to Athenian prejudice by portraying the naval battle of Salamis as the decisive event in the repelling of Xerxes' invasion of Greece, rather than the later battle of Plataea, in which Athens' rival Sparta took the leading role; in this it has been agenda-setting right down to the present day.* And, I believe, it was meant as a reminder to the Athenians of the achievements of Themistocles, architect of Athenian victory, and, in my view, recently exiled from his home city.**

None of which, of course, means that Persians cannot also be "a great warning to all empires ever since". Great art functions on more than one level, and at a time when imperialism, armies of occupation, and overstretch, have become terms regularly debated, to focus on this aspect of Aeschylus' play it is exactly the right line for a modern audience.

Much of this production is quite traditional, the way I remember Greek plays being presented from the 1980s, with everyone dressed in long shifts from some indeterminate ancient period. There's nothing wrong with that of course, if done well, which it is here, with clear diction.

But Eugeniou reminds us from time to time that what we are watching is not just a slightly older version of Shakespeare and Marlowe. His first device for this is to cast two actresses to play the central role of Darius' queen Atossa. One (played, according to the programme on alternate nights by Josephine Short and Jessica Martenson) speaks her lines in English. The other, Tania Batzoglou, speaks in Greek (and a beautifully enunciated Greek at that, but then she's clearly a native speaker). Batzoglou takes the role twice. Once at the very beginning, when she recites Atossa's dream as three masked actors, who are in position when the audience takes their seats, enact it before us. It might not be clear what is going on at first, but it sticks in the mind sufficiently that when the English Atossa (Short the night I saw it) tells the same story at its proper place in the text, everything falls into place. The second occasion is when Atossa speaks to the ghost of her husband. Here, Darius' answers are in English, and this, and the fact that we have heard much of what Atossa will report already, enables the audience to understand what the queen is saying.

On both occasions Atossa is masked, as is the ghost of Darius, a device that otherwise Eugeniou does not use. Additional devices that take us away from a cosy play are: the performance of Felipe Cura as the Messenger, exhausted, physically broken and driven half-mad by his journey and the terrible news he brings; and the summoning of Darius, an orgiastic scene of shamanic ritual that will appeal to the anthropologically-minded.

In the Chorus Eugeniou has added Persian Women to Aeschylus' Persian Councillors, perhaps under the influence of other Choruses, such as in Euripides' Trojan Women. The Chorus begins by being quite static, lit only by tea light candles (the lighting throughout is muted, which suits Theatro Technis' stage area best). They stand still, though the words flow from one member to another in a skilful fashion that is no doubt difficult to master. (It is not quite clear if the moments when they cut across each other are deliberate or mistakes.) Gradually, they start to move more, and are circling the stage by the end.

One can raise small criticisms. Whether played by Short or Martenson, Atossa is too young (though Short is very good in the role). The device of having members of the Chorus depart to play other roles works best when they return masked, but is often too obvious, especially when Short rejoins. On the other hand, the device also gives Batzoglou one of the best moments -– as the Chorus enthusiastically chant the names of lands, cities and islands over which Darius held sway, she returns to them, having shed the mask of Atossa, and stops them dead with 'Salamis', next in the list of Cypriot towns, but namesake of the island where Persia has been defeated.

Any criticisms are quibbles. This is not the best production of Greek drama I've seen, but it's still pretty good, and very intense. If you're in London, the run has been extended until June 10th, and apparently will be on in Oxford in July. It's worth a look.

You can see another review here.

* My own view is that, despite the loss of the Persian fleet at Salamis, Persian land forces could still prevent the Athenians from returning to their city, and so potentially bring about Athens' surrender. Only with the defeat of Persia on land was the threat to Greece ended. (Wikipedia suggests that Plataea was the subject of one of the other plays produced with Persians, Glaucus Potnieus, but I don't think that's generally accepted, and I certainly don't believe it.)

** This, I will admit, is a minority opinion. Themistocles' ostracism and subsequent exile is not in doubt, but the date is. Usually it is placed in the late 460s BC. This is because Thucydides states that Themistocles fled to the court of the Persian King Artaxerxes, whose reign began in 465 BC. However, other sources state that Themistocles arrived in the Persian empire in the reign of Xerxes. Personally, I've always felt that the late chronology for Themistocles' exile is problematic, cramming too many events into too short a time period, and that this is one of the rare occasions when Thucydides is wrong and other sources correct. That would put Themistocles' ostracism and exile into the late 470s BC, coinciding with the first production of Persians, known to have been in 472 BC - and perhaps providing an explanation why Themistocles' name is not mentioned (though the theme of collective Athens against individualist Persia could also explain that).

Oresteia

Trawling Radio 4's website (actually looking for Bettany Hughes' series about the Medici), I came across the archive for Melvyn Bragg's series In Our Time. There's quite a few programmes there related to Classical antiquity.

I listened this morning to Bragg, Edith Hall, Simon Goldhill, and Tom Healy on Aeschylus' Oresteia. The most interesting bit was where they talked about the final play, the Eumenides. Hall talked about how the Furies are bought off at the end, but how the play admits that they cannot be got rid of, that victim's feelings need to be taken account of in any system of justice. Goldhill made the sensible point that the Furies' power is suborned to the interests of the state.

The confrontation between Athena and the Furies is something that has long fascinated me. Thwarted of their vengeance upon Orestes, the Furies threaten destruction upon Attica. Athena talks calmly and reasonably to them, treating them with respect, offering to ensure that they are honoured, that justice demanded Orestes' acquittal, and asking that they not visit war upon Athens. I have always seen a subtext here. Athena is trying to bribe the Furies not to resort to violence, but behind her words is a message that says, "I don't want this fight, but if you force me to it, there will only be one side standing at the end, and it won't be you." And the Furies know this - that is why they blink first. (Is Athena meant to represent Athens here? Perhaps an expression of how Athens - and every other state with pretensions to liberality ever since - wanted its foreign policy to be seen: "We do not want war, and will do everything we can to avoid it, but if you force us then we'll give you a war you won't forget.")

I must check out the programme on the fall of the Roman empire. And I'm looking forward to Lord Bragg's Presidential Address at the Classical Association this year.

Barton follow-up

Rogueclassicism has put me on to a BMCR review of John Barton's The War That Still Goes On, which I wrote about here.

On being reviewed

Last year I had a piece published (which I'd actually written in 1996) in Lost Dramas of Classical Athens: Greek Tragic Fragments. I think it's not too bad a little piece, though I was a little out of my depth in writing textual criticism.

I recently got put onto a review of the volume, by Martin Cropp in Bryn Mawr Classical Review. This is what Cropp says about my chapter:

In 'Lycians in the Cares of Aeschylus', Anthony Keen reviews what has been drawn (much of it speculatively) from the sparse evidence for Aeschylus' Carians or Europa, a play featuring Sarpedon's death at Troy and the return of his body to his home for burial. (The list of fragments on pp. 81-2 hardly needed to include Aeschylus F 315, whose attribution to this play by Hartung is ignored by Radt.) The discussion includes three vase-paintings thought by some to have been influenced by the play, two of them remotely at best, the third - an early 4th C. Apulian vase (New York, Metropolitan Museum 16.140) - perhaps a little more closely. It should be noted, however, that the interpretation of this vase's second side as showing Europa visiting Zeus on Olympus to beg for her son's body is more implausible than K. suggests (the winged figure on this side is not at all like the winged figure of Hypnos on the other side; and how would the mortal Europa have reached Olympus?), and was firmly rejected by A. Kossatz-Deissmann, Dramen des Aischylos auf westgriechischen Vasen (1978), 72. K. then debates at length the question whether the play was set in Lycia (traditionally Sarpedon's homeland) or in Caria as the title Carians and the reference to Mylasa in F 101 suggest. He interprets the evidence for a mythistorical connection between Carians and Lycians as allowing the conclusion "that Aeschylus did set the action of Cares in Lycia, probably at Xanthus, and that the chorus is composed of leading local citizens, whom Aeschylus calls Carians rather than Lycians since, as far as he is concerned, the two are much the same" (78).

That I missed a piece of bibliography is regrettable, and I take the rap for that. And I've got used to the inability of people to spell my full name correctly, even though it is so done throughout the work reviewed (I spell my name without an 'h', which is the correct original anglicization of Antonius). But what bemuses me most is the remark, "The list of fragments on pp. 81-2 hardly needed to include Aeschylus F 315, whose attribution to this play by Hartung is ignored by Radt." Did Cropp perhaps miss the footnote where I say "This list aims to be comprehensive rather than critical"? My aim was to collect all the fragments that had, at one time or another, been thought to be part of the lost work. That other scholars have disregarded the attribution of some of these is irrelevant. The duty of any catalogue of this type is to assemble all possibly relevant material, and leave it to the people who use the catalogue to decide. If a catalogue of all the fragments of Aeschylus was assembled, I should want all the fragments to be there, including those some scholars considered dubious. (Though in fairness, whilst I do note that it is far from clear that the fragment belongs to the Cares, I could have indicated which collections attribute it to the play and which don't.)

John Barton and Thucydides

As part of a busy weekend of culture, that included Ecclesiazusae and Medea, I went on Sunday 12 February to see John Barton's The War That Still Goes On, a synthesis of Thucydides and Plato, performed by the RSC.

I was familiar with the work from a 1991 version, entitled The War That Never Ends, broadcast by the BBC in the immediate run-up to the first Gulf War, and somewhat misleadingly reported in Simon Goldhill's Love, Sex and Tragedy, but the work was apparently originally written and produced in the late 1960s. Thucydides narrates the history of the Great Peloponnesian War of 431-404 BC, and other characters act out certain key scenes. Scenery and staging are at a minimum - in 1991 actors spoke their lines in a bare studio, in 2006 they sit around a stage and workshop the play.

It's an interesting work, and I have used it in the past to help bring Thucydides alive to students, though one has to be careful with it. The adaptation is very free. Barton can sometimes be a bit indifferent to chronology, presenting events in an order that seems to him dramatically right, rather than the order in which they actually happened. For instance, the Mytilene debate is placed after Brasidas' expedition to the Thracian Chersonese. And I have always suspected that Thucydides' opening lines, "I doubt this war will be finished in my lifetime ...", indicate a belief on Barton's part that because Thucydides did not complete his history, he did not survive the war (in fact, there are clear references to the end of the war in Thucydides' work, even though his main narrative does not get to the end).

This version differed from that I had seen before in being longer. The 1991 version breaks off after the destruction of the Sicilian expedition. The 2006 performance contains a more complete end, including the trial and execution of Socrates (something Thucydides may well not have lived to see). My suspicion is that this is something restored from the original 1960s version. Also of note is that sections previously narrated by Thucydides have now been give to others in the cast to act out - this may be the result of Barton rethinking. There was a good cast, including Timothy West as Socrates, and Clive Francis as Thucydides - but it could, of course, not match the stellar cast assembled in 1991, which included Ben Kingsley, David Calder, Don Henderson, Andrew Keir, Jonathan Hyde - the cream of the classical theatre of the early 1990s.

And the work remains relevant; indeed, when the Athenian ambassadors speak to the Melians about how Melos should capitulate because Athens has the power to do what she wants, it seems more relevant to 2006 than to 1991. Many other characters articulate issues with contemporary relevance. The Spartan King Archidamus has a speech near the beginning about how war is not a good thing, not to be entered into lightly, and the consequences are often unforeseen - and as I watched it again I wished that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld had been exposed to this.

After the performance, there was a debate chaired by John Snow, with Paul Cartledge, Germaine Greer, Helena Kennedy and Haleh Afshar. A few points were raised that I thought interesting.

Germaine Greer had just come back from Bangladesh, where she had been researching the war of 1971. She had discovered that, though stories were spread that many women in Bangladesh who had survived being raped by Pakistani soldiers, the truth was that the vast majority of raped women were murdered. Her point was that the suffering of women is often played down in comparison with what happens to men. Her implication was that, when Thucydides talks of men in a city being killed, and women and children sold into slavery, he is doing the same, and the true fate of those women would be death. Whilst acknowledging some of Greer's point, she overlooks the economic factor. Women in Bangladesh were of no economic value to Pakistani troops - but women in Melos were of economic value to Athenian troops, as they could be sold into slavery. People tend not to destroy what they can make money from.

Paul Cartledge made the point about the Peloponnesian War being shaped by Thucydides, that it was the historian who decided that the conflicts between Athens and Sparta between 431 and 404 were a single war, not two wars broken by a period of uneasy peace. Again, there's some force to that, but I think it overprivileges Thucydides to say that this was entirely his creation - I have always felt that the Lysistrata of Aristophanes, produced in 411 BC, makes more sense if the common perception was of a war that had lasted twenty years rather than one which had lasted less than five.

Haleh Afshar made a point about disinterest in voting, and how in some places people had voted enthusiastically the first time they got the opportunity, but less so on subsequent occasions. This, of course, is something that the Athenians had to contend with - until generous assembly pay was introduced, the democracy had difficulty getting enough people to form a quorum to come to the Assembly. Afshar's point that people often would prefer to get on with their own lives, farming, or doing whatever made them money, than vote, though contested by Helena Kennedy, is recognized in ancient Athens.

The panel ended by saying that the message of Barton's play was that of Socrates, to 'Think straight'. But if the fate of Socrates tells us anything, it's that people don't like to be told to think straight. Socrates, if Plato's dialogues are any indication, went around pointing out to people that believing certain notions necessarily led to accepting other ideas they might find rather less palatable. And in the end, the Athenian people got so fed up of this that they killed him for it.

2006 UCL Classics Play

Euripides, Medea, UCL Classical Drama Society, UCL Bloomsbury Theatre

Performance seen: 11th February 2006

I have long harboured the view that, on the whole, student and youth theatre doesn't do well with Greek tragedy, a viewed formed by some truly awful stagings of Oedipus Rex I was subjected to around the turn of the century. Recent productions seem determined to strip me of my prejudices. First there was Oxford's excellent Orestes. And now along comes Graham Kirby's self-assured production of Medea, under the auspices of the newly-formed UCL Classical Drama Society.

Kirby's production design is simple, yet subtle and effective. A bare room is suggested with a couple of walls and some minimal furniture. An architrave shows scenes from Jason's legend, such as the battle with the Hydra, or the murder of Pelias. Clever lighting contributes to the mood.

Kirby has provided a new translation of the play. One presumes, given the pedigree of the production, that it is true to the Greek (bar reasonable additions such as including the name of Creon's daughter, Glauke, which does not feature in Euripides' text). More importantly, it is an excellent piece of English writing. The lines flow with poetry, and one hopes that Kirby will be able to make this translation available for others to stage.

But of course a production of Medea must stand and fall on the central performance. Here the there is a pure treat, as Dena Arya is incandescent as Medea. From the moment the play opens, as she stands with her back to the audience, bewailing her fate in Greek (only when she switches to English does she show her face), it is clear that something interesting is about to happen. Clad in black slip, housecoat and boots, she is a classic 1970s bitch, such as the likes of Kate O'Mara, Faye Dunaway and Glenda Jackson have built careers on, the sort of fascinating woman that an audience should abhor, but will find themselves rooting for. This is exactly how Medea should be (it is, after all, this very quality that sucks the Chorus into its complicity with her). Arya is careful never to go over the top - she is passionate, but always believable. And she is always worth watching, even when someone else is involved in a long speech, whether it be the killing looks thrown Jason's way, or the almost sexual enjoyment she takes in hearing the fates of Glauke and Creon. Bar a short clip on The Late Show, I was not fortunate enough to see Diana Rigg's performance in 1993/94, which Kirby takes as the gold standard for the role. But I can say that Arya's is one of the best Medeas that I have seen, and definitely better than Fiona Shaw's boggle-eyed interpretation from 2001. Her final departure (perhaps the only deus ex machina in Euripidean tragedy that makes perfect sense) is presented as apotheosis, a notion I first saw in Phylidda Lloyd's 1991 production at Manchester's Royal Exchange.

It is hardly a slight to say that none of the rest of the cast quite measure up to Arya. But, after taking a while to warm up in the role, Adam Greves as Jason very nearly gives as good as he gets. Certainly, his performance underlines the fact that, for all his apparent reasonableness and rationality, Jason is an arse of the highest order. His arguments that he has chosen to marry again out of a desire to protect Medea and her children are so transparently self-serving and specious that it is almost unnecessary for Medea to tear them to shreds.

The other performance that deserves noting is Laurie Wilks as the Nurse. Kirby warns in his foreword to the programme that "elements of what might be called 'camp' have crept in", and so the audience is presented with a cross-dressing nurse, played by a man in woman's clothing, with the Tutor played by a woman dressed as a man. It shouldn't work. But it does, because Wilks imposes himself on the role with such utter conviction that the audience has no choice but to suspend any disbelief. All trace of camp are utterly banished, along with any inappropriate humour. The cross-dressing is exploited for one joke, but that is left to the curtain call.

The more naturalistic a production of Greek tragedy is, the more problematic the Chorus can be. In this staging, the Chorus are clad in black leotards and strips of white gauze. They enter masked, and periodically over the rest of the play they remove and replace their masks. Presumably there was meant to be a pattern to that, but I'm afraid I couldn't quite work out why. Yet, just when I was about to write off the Chorus as an element of the production that didn't quite work, that they didn't quite react enough to the events they were observing, suddenly the choreography gave real power to the way the actual (offstage) infanticide was played out. And I should add that my partner, whilst thinking that the Chorus could have looked better, was much more impressed by them than I was, considereding their speech and choreography to have been excelelnt throughout.

One might find a few elements to suggest didn't work. It might not have been necessary to underline the Messengers' account of Creon and Glauke's deaths with a mime of it from the actors, though other productions in the past (such as the Royal Exchange one mentioned above) have thought that it was. And the costumes of the Messengers, as typical Cockney barrow boys a la My Fair Lady might be considered a bit odd.

But then one thinks of Arya's performance or Kirby's translation, and nothing much else matters. Perhaps it's only the Oedipus Rex that students can't do. I await being proved wrong on that score with interest.