Make cakes, not war

I've been remiss in blogging the annual UCL and King's Classics Plays this year. Both were enjoyable.

UCL put on Aristophanes' Lysistrata, for the third time in twelve years. Well, it's a good play, with much to laugh at. I saw it on the first performance, and there was clearly a degree of nervousness in the cast. This was particularly apparent in the actress playing Lysistrata (admittedly, a big, tough role to play). But it clearly was just nerves, and the cast was noticeably more confident after the interval. I'm sure they got better as the run progressed. The Cinesias/Myrrhine scene was well done, always a touchstone of the quality of a production. Setting the whole thing in the Peninsular War was interesting, though the idea wasn't taken much further than as a source for costume design. And whilst I am in principle against retaining the references to Aristophanes' contemporaries that mean nothing to a modern audience, this cast did at least manage to convey the impression that such references meant something to them.

I've been quite lukewarm about recent King's productions, feeling that they often looked under-rehearsed. Last year, I was picked up on this, with a commenter arguing that I was expecting too much of the productions. Well, there's probably some truth, but I do think it's important to say when one thought things could have been better. And they can, as this year's play showed. Because it was clear in the performance I saw that King's have considerably upped their game. Georgia Crick Collins as Helen, Ben Donaldson as Menelaus and Anna Perfitt as Theonoe were particularly good, all managing to act rather than just recite. Donaldson in particular gave the audience a Menelaus who retains his nobility, and is not just an idiot, as can sometimes be the case in this play. And the idea of using the Chorus to enact scenes being recounted, tried out last year in Persians, worked really well this year. The best King's Play I've seen since Rhesus in 2005.

But this isn't the production I want to praise most in this entry. Last night I went to see a production of Lysistrata, given by students of Kidbrooke School. I confess that I hadn't gone expecting much, but it was stunningly good, and I laughed more than I have at an Aristophanes production for a few years; it's certainly the best of the three Lysistratas I've seen in the last twelve months (the other being an Actors of Dionysus production). The whole thing was done as a cross-dressing romp, with most of the female parts played by boys, and the male ones by girls. It's actually quite encouraging that a bunch of teenage boys are willing to dress up in women's clothing and camp it up in front of their mates.

The text used was Laurence Houseman's 1911 version (Houseman was the brother of A.E. Houseman, a gay man when that was very illegal, and a supporter of the Suffragette movement). That might not seem to be the best idea to get the humour of the original out, and indeed, there are few actual laughs in the text, which, unsurprisingly, eliminates a lot of the filth from Aristophanes's text. But the humour and some of the filth are put back by the production, costumes and performances of the cast, as well as a fair bit of political engagement.

What I think makes this production work is an understanding that Lysistrata is not a play about sex, or women's rights, but about war. This is underlined at the beginning, in the introduction of a bloodied figure of Peace (in place of Reconciliation), and in an end which ought to be hackneyed, but is in fact astonishing.

As far as I know, this production has not come out of Classical outreach initiatives, and it is extremely heartening that people still turn unprompted to Greek drama. I would be pleased by this production just for that reason. The bonus on the cake is how good it is. I often find myself feeling that I have become an old cynic, and am far too difficult to impress these days. And then something like this comes along, and just blows me away with what can be achieved.

It's still on this evening and tomorrow. If you have a chance, I urge you to see it.

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.

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?’

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.

King's Greek Play 2006

Aristophanes, Women Take Power (Ecclesiazusae), King's College London Greek Play, Greenwood Theatre

Performance seen: February 9th 2006

Last year, as I reported, University College London chose to produce Aristophanes' Knights, one of the comic writer's earlier plays, before he hit the peak of his form. This year, King's have chosen to stage Ecclesiazusae (usually translated as 'Women At The Assembly'), one of his last plays from when he had, to be frank, gone off the boil a bit. It is a play that presents certain challenges. Aristophanes was moving at a brisk trot down the road that led from Old to New Comedy, which creates something that is up to a point neither one genre or the other (hence Ecclesiazusae is sometimes labelled Middle Comedy). And the structure rather falls apart in the second half in the way that some earlier Aristophanes (e.g. Lysistrata) threatens to but never quite does.

In any case, I wasn't sure what to expect of Aristophanes in Greek - up to now all the Athenian drama I've seen in the original language has been tragedy. It's certainly the case that my usual instinct with Aristophanes, that one should throw out the actual text, does not apply when presenting in Greek. But would the whole thing be funny if one can't follow what is actually said, and is reliant upon surtitles?

The King's production's solution to the structural problem is, to a degree, to try to make a virtue of it, by emphasizing the episodic nature, though, in contrast to previous King's Greek plays, there is no interval, perhaps in case this would make the play too disjointed. I am unsure whether this tries the audience's patience a little too much.

In other ways, however, an attempt is made to grant unity to the play. The disappearance of the central character Praxagora in the middle is dealt with by finding ways of reminding the audience that she has created the society in which the later incidents play out, either by hanging her portrait, or by (slightly oddly) having her silently arm-wrestling, or by giving her some of the Chorus' lines in the final scene.

The solution to the language problem is to turn to the heritage of the silent movie. Rather than surtitles that summarize 50-70% of the dialogue, a small number of captions are used, as in pre-sound cinema. The surtitles are integrated into the performance as a whole, rather than being an additional distraction from the action (with one joke where the captions are in Greek and the actor speaks English). Something is of course lost in such an approach, but it would probably be lost anyway. What is gained is an increased emphasis on the visual aspects of the production, with the spoken text becoming like the music score, an accompaniment to what we are seeing, rather than its raison d'etre. Inevitably this pushes the production towards greater use of slapstick comedy. This shows particularly in the choreography of the Chorus, from whose ranks are drawn minor roles such as the Women who discuss with Praxagora how to take over the Athenian Assembly. The captions are also used to distinguish between the more traditional sections of the play, that strongly feature the Chorus, where the captions have visual illustrations and are arranged to look like artworks in their own right, and the more 'modern' parts that eliminate the Chorus, where traditional text-only captions are used, often with the sort of frames familiar from silents.

The silent movie motif is repeated in the costuming, where Chaplin and the Keystone Kops are referenced. This then leads to a 1920s theme in the production design, which seems to have found Dadaism via Art Deco (a style similar to that used by UCL in their very successful Lysistrata from 1999). Thus one sometimes has the feeling with the King's production of watching not only a silent movie, but a Surrealist one, where, for instance, the facial hair sported by the women as they disguise themselves as men (disguises also indicated by the simple device of wearing trousers, removed - offstage - when the disguises are dropped) apparently influenced by Salvador Dali. I should not have been surprised had the production chosen to rearrange the order of the later episodes of the play - the episodic nature certainly permits such an approach.

It might be pushing the 1920s theme a bit too far to see in Praxagora's army uniform and the military march of the Chorus past her a reference to Mussolini, though other more recent fascist dictatorships are surely intended. But clearly the motif is at the forefront of the one moment of utter comic genius, the staging of the Hag scene, where a hag and a young girl, and then later two hags (two completely different hags from the first in the text, but sensibly this is reduced to two hags overall), compete for the sexual favours of a young man (according to Praxagora's new order, the old and ugly must be sexually serviced before the young and beautiful). Brilliantly, the Greek text here is set to the music of George Gershwin, and the whole scene just works.

That is probably the most successful idea that production has. Some other ideas are not quite so effective - for instance, in a play where women disguising themselves as men is central to the plot, it seems to me distracting to have some of the unequivocally male roles played by women. The lack of props weakens the scene where a householder is getting his property ready for communal division - the miming of movement of household objects doesn't quite work. And the problem of how to represent Blepyrus' onstage defecation is never quite solved. But it is better to have ideas and for some of them not to work than to have no ideas at all.

As is ever the way with this sort of production, some of the performances are better than others. I shan't single out the less good, but Nicola McCabe's confident approach to Praxagora deserves mention.

Overall, I should say that this is an interesting staging, which tries to deal innovatively with the problems of presenting comedy in Greek, and of this particular play. It will certainly remain in my mind, even if, on the whole, the production delivered mild amusement rather than belly laughs. At the very least all concerned deserve praise for trying something a little different.

2005 King's Greek Play

Every year the students of King's College London put on a Greek play in the original language, since 1987 as part of the University of London Festival of Greek Drama. This year the play chosen was the Rhesus, a play that has come down to us amongst the works of Euripides, but is probably by an unknown author, and dates to the beginning of the fourth century BC. (The Internet Classics Archive translation linked to above dates it to c. 450 BC, which is where those who accept it as actually by Euripides date it, considering it an early work.) If the common assumptions are correct, then, as Nick Lowe said in his pre-performance talk, Rhesus represents the only surviving tragedy not by the 'big three' playwrights, Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, the latest tragedy we have, and therefore our best evidence for how tragedy developed in the fourth century. It is also the only play that survives that dramatizes any part of Homer's Iliad, though, just as the Iliad only presents one incident from the Trojan War, so the Rhesus only presents one incident from the Iliad. The play is, however, little studied, and the last performance in the UK was apparently in 1968. I'd never read it before, even in English.

My first thought was how modern the play seems. Partly that was probably the staging, but not entirely. As the programme observes, it's really quite fast-paced. Greek tragedy is magnificent literature, with a huge emotional range and resonances that still touch us to day, but sometimes, it can really drag. Your bum starts to wriggle under the impact of a long choral ode, or an operatic aria by some Greek hero. (The worst offender is the longest play in the tragic corpus, Euripides' Phoenician Women, wherein he tries to do Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes and Sophocles' Antigone and Oedipus Rex all at once - it too isn't performed often, though it was considered one of his best in antiquity.)

Rhesus isn't like that at all. Everything moves quickly, and serves the functions of the plot. The Choruses are pretty short, and no scene outstays its welcome. Moreover, some of the devices that seem to a modern audience most artificial are played down in Rhesus. In other plays the Chorus is often either neutral or powerless - in Rhesus they are active participants on the side of the Trojan prince Hector, and indeed must depart off the stage for a short while, to avoid hearing information that for plot reasons they must not have. The deus ex machina at the end is also played down, and does not, as it often does in Euripides' plays, resolve an otherwise unresolvable conflict between the way the plot is heading and what the audience knows to be the outcome of the story (e.g. Euripides' Orestes; until the arrival of the god Apollo, that play can only end in an almighty bloodbath). In Rhesus, when the Muse Terpsichore, mother of the murdered Thracian prince Rhesus, arrives on stage, she tells the participants what (as Hector comments at the time) they already have guessed, that Rhesus' death was accomplished by Odysseus, not Hector. The only person who doesn't believe this, Rhesus' charioteer, has already left the stage. Elsewhere, the goddess Athena appears as a participant in the action.

It's also notable that the play centres itself around two actors in dialogue - there's only one short scene that requires three on stage at the same time, though some of the costume changes that are required can't be accomplished with only two actors. (For those who don't know, Greek tragedy was written around a small number of masked actors, each playing several roles, originally just one, then two, and finally three. Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus has a short scene at the end which requires four, and is therefore sometime thought suspect, but since people were already experimenting with 'guest' solo singers and extra Choruses, and comedy was already using a fourth actor, I prefer to think of this as another experiment.)

Overall, Rhesus appears to me to indicate a move away from tragedy as ritual civic act towards tragedy as entertainment. Of course, it's enormously unwise to generalize about all of fourth-century tragedy on the basis of a single play, just as it's probably unwise to judge Greek tragedy on the basis of the fairly small percentage of plays that survive.

Enough of the play, what about the production? As I said, it is given a modern staging, by people in modern military dress, with the stage occupied by a small Balkan hut. The wars of the former Yugoslavia still cast a long shadow over modern productions. This approach leads to the most harrowing messenger scene I've ever witnessed, as the bloodied charioteer crawls on stage and proceeds to vomit blood.

At the centre of the King's version are two excellent performances, by Paris Erotokritou as Hector, and Joseph Matlak as the Chorus Leader. Both of these believe in the reality of what they are doing, and are committed to the illusion. Rather too many of the other actors look as if they are in a play. Erotokritou also is (obviously) Greek himself, and so speaks the ancient version of his language with a natural flow that carries conviction. Some of the English actors sounded uncertain of the dialogue, and occasionally stumbled.

There were some good performances amongst the other cast members. Joseph Malcomson as Odysseus and Mike Stephens as Diomedes are worth noting. Also, Lucy Robinson as Athena skillfully conveyed the goddess' transformation into Aphrodite simply through body language. (Though the following scene with Paris is rather pointless, and is just a way of passing the time while Odysseus and Diomedes are offstage killing Rhesus and the Thracians.)

There are some interesting casting and costuming decisions. Rhesus makes his brief appearance (another notable point of the play is how little the character who give it its name is on stage) dressed as a louche Mediterranean gangster, whilst the hapless Trojan spy Dolon is played by a woman. Though both seem rather odd, I suspect the point is to suggest that both characters are out of their depth, and punching above their weight in comparison to the professional soldier Hector. But even Hector deludes himself into thinking that the Trojans can defeat the Greeks.

This is the first time I'd seen a King's Greek Play since they started using English surtitles. Though some might feel this is a step towards barbarism, I think it makes it easier for those without a very thorough familiarity with the play to keep up with the action, and I certainly would have been lost without it. On the other hand, the short film in English dramatizing the events of Iliad Book 10, meant to give the audience an idea of the background to the play, didn't work so well. A confusion of voices that did not always match what one saw on screen made the whole thing hard to follow, though I could see what they were trying to do, and it did become a little more coherent towards the end.

Overall, this production has its good moments, but is not quite as successful as it might be. However, all involved are to be commended for the bold, imaginative choice of play, and for giving what may be the only opportunity I will ever have to see Rhesus on stage. I hope it's not, though, as the point most convincingly carried over by this production is that Rhesus has been unjustly neglected, and deserves a more prominent place in the Greek tragic repertoire. When there is a tendency to reduce the corpus to the Oresteia, Oedipus Rex and Medea (yes, I know that's an exaggeration, but sometimes is seems like that), we need more imaginative choices of material like this.