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.

"Is this the face ...?"

I've just caught up with last Thursday's Twenty Minutes from BBC Radio 3. In the performance break of a concert focussing on 'Shostakovich and His Heroes', Bettany Hughes, everybody's first choice these days for Greek history, gets to talk some more on Helen of Troy. Fortunately she is not looking at the evidence for the 'historical' Helen, as she has in her book and recent Channel 4 programme (my thoughts on the programme can be found here), but pursuing what to my mind is the more profitable seam of Helen-as-icon, in this case in the artistic tradition of Britain.

The most interesting bit was David Lan talking about how he had dealt with the problems of bringing Helen on stage in a production of Dr Faustus. As Lan notes, Helen represents an ideal, the most beautiful woman in the world. Represented solely by the written word, the reader can construct her appearance according to their own taste in female beauty. But once you put an actress on stage, you have something concrete and real, that may not accord with the audience's expectations. For me, this is most obvious in Michael Cacoyannis' otherwise excellent The Trojan Women, where Irene Pappas' Helen matches far less well with my idea of what a beautiful woman should look like than Vanessa Redgrave's radiant Andromache.

One interesting way of solving this is actually to be found in a Doctor Who story, 'The Myth Makers', where Helen is spoken of, but never actually appears. Lan's solution in Dr Faustus is ingenious. Instead of bringing Helen on stage, he had Faustus catch sight of his own reflection.

You can still catch the programme for the next twenty-four hours on http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/radio3.shtml

Helen of Troy

I watched Channel 4's much-trailed Helen of Troy documentary, presented by Bettany Hughes.

On the plus side, this is a programme that makes no attempt to talk down to the audience. Hughes is happy to throw in Greek verbs (or even just the concept of the verb) and assume the audience will keep up.

On the minus side, I think the programme is flawed by an attempt to do two separate things, to investigate the 'real' Helen and to examine Helen as a symbol, and blurring the distinction between the two. Hughes talks about her conviction that behind the legendary Helen lies a real Bronze Age queen. She offers no evidence to prove this, because, as she admits, there is none. This doesn't mean that she's wrong, of course. Mythology often coalesces around real individuals (just look at the American West for an example where we can still trace the historical personages concerned), and I am not unhappy to imagine that there might have been a 'real' Helen, or a 'real' Agamemnon, etc. But, as with King Arthur, I wouldn't go much further than that. It's okay to look at what we know of the lives of women in the Mycenaean period. It's okay to look at how archaeologically-attested details turn up in the later legend. It's okay to look at how the political reality revealed by Hittite documents is partially preserved in Homer. It's okay to look at how Helen developed as a symbol for later Greeks (though here Hughes cheats a little, saying at the beginning that we must strip away later interpretations, but being happy to use material from later sources when it suits her). The moment, however, that you begin to retroject details from the legendary Helen to tell the story of the 'real' queen, you're in trouble. The legends have passed through many hands even before they are first written down. Each retelling will add something new, and by the time it gets to Homer, much of the story will be made up. Homer will make stuff up himself - it's what writers do. This isn't to say that some of what we find in the legends of Helen doesn't go back to a real person's life, but to say that it is irrecoverable what is real and what is made up.

Take, for instance, the eloping of Helen and Paris. Now, it may very well be the case that had a foreign prince arrived at Sparta as a xenos, a 'guest-friend', then it would be a very serious breach of etiquette and protocol to run off with the king's wife, and that this could have very serious consequences. Hughes points to records of two Hittite vassal states coming close to war over a princess. But Helen and Paris is also a great romantic story, and simply showing that it is plausible that states might go to war over a woman doesn't show that this story is true.

This programme took the most recent developments in archaeology and Hittitology (which seems to have moved on considerably since I last had any idea what was going on) and weds it to a very traditional approach, the search for the 'truth' behind the legend.