Reviews 2000
Reviews 2000
✭✭✭✭✭
by Aeschylus, translated by Ted Hughes, directed by Katie Mitchell
du Maurier World Stage Festival, du Maurier Theatre, Toronto
April 11-15, 2000
“Six Magnificent Hours of Theatre”
Greek tragedies were first performed as trilogies and Aeschylus’ “Oresteia” is the only surviving such trilogy to come down to us. To see any production of this cornerstone of Western drama is something no theatre-lover should miss. The production by the Royal National Theatre of London, here as part of the du Maurier World Stage festival, however, is not “any” production. Rather, it is the most gripping and most intelligent production of a Greek tragedy I have ever seen. We should be grateful to Don Shipley, artistic director of the du Maurier World Stage, for bringing it to Toronto.
One of the many factors working in favour of this production is its use of a fresh translation by the late Ted Hughes. Hughes’s tough, sinewy poetry is a perfect match for Aeschylus’ great portrayal of human barbarity and its eventual supersession by civilization. One succinct image succeeds the next without the filler of so many other translations so that the translation has great clarity and bite. It is as if Hughes has sandblasted grime from an old building: we know that the building is old but it looks new and the bricks have been revealed. It is also an eminently speakable translation and in itself a pleasure to listen to. One wishes Hughes had been able to take on the whole canon.
Perfectly suited to this translation, and perhaps prompted by it, are Katie Mitchell’s direction and Vicki Mortimer’s design. One approach, like that of Niketi Kontouri in her production of Euripides’ “Medea” for the National Theatre of Greece seen here in 1998, is to make the action elegant and highly stylized, focussing on the psychology that leads to barbarism rather than the barbarism itself. Such an approach to the “Oresteia” would not be appropriate since the barbarism of the first two plays must be made clear if we are to understand its overthrow in the third. And, indeed, Aeschylus is not so much interested in psychology as in explaining, as does Milton, “the ways of God to Man”. Mitchell and Mortimer show they have a firm command of the arc of Aeschylus’ conception. To portray this to a modern audience they have minimized the monumentalism of Aeschylus’ ritualistic action to find the gritty, more accessible realism in the story itself.
Mitchell has divided the trilogy into two parts, with Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” retitled as “The Home Guard” and with “The Libation Bearers” and “The Eumenides” presented together with an interval between them and retitled “The Daughters of Darkness”. The two 3-hour parts could be viewed separately or seen, as I did on one day. For purposes of clarity I will use the plays’ usual names and speak of them as three plays.
One of Mitchell’s techniques is to extract a symbolic element from the text of one play and apply it to the other two to create a sense of unity and to underscore structure and meaning. In Aeschylus’ trilogy, a ghost appears only in the last play. Taking her cue from this, Mitchell has a ghost physically preside over the action of the first two plays and appears via video in the last. In each case the ghost represents a wrongful death that is the prime motivation for revenge for the central figure of each play. In “Agamemnon”, Iphigenia, with a gag still in her mouth, the daughter sacrificed so that the assembled ships of the Greeks could sail against Troy, watches over the action of the play. Mitchell makes her constantly present just as she is constantly present in the mind of her mother, Clytemnestra, who has waited ten years for the return of Agamemnon to exact her revenge for this sacrifice. Once he is killed, he takes the place of the vanished ghost of his daughter and continues to observe the action of the second play.
In “The Libation Bearers”, Orestes and Electra plot the murder of their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegithus in revenge for Agamemnon’s death. Once she is killed, her body raises itself from the table where she has been laid and calls for the Furies to avenge her by hounding Orestes to death. The image of her calling for revenge appears in the third play only as a projected video. The video image fades just as the need for taking personal revenge also fades with the institution of trial by jury, where disputes are settled by the reasoned deliberation of outsiders not by individuals seeking personal justice through murder.
Mitchell can also tie the three plays together with a simple prop. From Aegisthus we hear that Thyestes, when he cursed the House of Atreus (Agamemnon being Atreus’ son) broke a bowl and prophesied that thus the whole House would break apart. So, at the moment Agamemnon death cry is heard, Mitchell has the ghost of Iphigenia shatter a bowl. So does the ghost of Agamemnon when Orestes kills Clytemnestra. But in “The Eumenides”, when a bowl appears it is passed around from Athena to the now-tamed Furies as a sign of reconciliation and the end of the curse.
Properties in general are kept to a minimum--two tables, some chairs, a washtub--but their continual re-use creates links among the three plays. The most brilliant stroke of the design is the red “carpet” that Clytemnestra rolls out for Agamemnon tempting him to step on it even though such an action is only appropriate for the gods. The “carpet” is in fact made up of little girl’s dresses, dyed red and sewn together, reminding us of Iphigenia’s sacrifice and of the transgression Clytemnestra thinks her husband has made in carrying it out. In the second play Orestes reveals this same “carpet” as the net Clytemnestra used to ensnare her husband and his paramour Cassandra before killing them. Indeed, Clytemnestra’s tempting Agamemnon to walk on the carpet is meant to ensnare him in his own hubris.
The designer, Vicki Mortimer, has moved the setting of the plays to the 1940’s to provide an analog for a modern audience of a great war now over. Mixed in with this are a remote-controlled door, compact tape-recorders and video cameras. Some may have found this mixture jarring but it conjures up the sense of mythological time which is both in the past and, since still relevant, also in the present. The principal characters, while alive, have no change of costume from play to play, giving them a kind of iconic status. We can think of Clytemnestra only in her red-flowered dress (the flowers foreshadowing and later recalling stains of blood) or Aegisthus in the slick tuxedo of a womanizer. There is the homey touch of Orestes’ change from his camping gear to nicer clothes for his trial, but that corresponds with his change from seeking vengeance to accepting judgment. Mitchell and Mortimer have also noted how the nature of the chorus alters from play to play, moving from having differing and even contradictory responses in the first play, to a more uniform response in the second to the stultifyingly monolithic front they present in the third. Accordingly, Mortimer has given the chorus of old soldiers individualized costumes in “Agamemnon”, variations on female serving costumes as the titular “Libation Bearers” of the second play, and conservative blue uniforms as the “Eumenides” of the third.
The plays which began their run in 1999 at the Cottesloe Theatre, the smallest of the three theatres in the Royal National Theatre complex, were played here on the floor of the du Maurier Theatre with the audience surrounding the playing area on three sides giving the gory goings-on a cringe-making immediacy. The only set element was built across the fourth side and consisted of a huge sliding door set in a metal wall. Characters “activated” this by remote control or by pressing buttons so that we heard a warning electronic buzz before the door grindingly slid open or clanged shut. This, of course, stood in for the important central door of the “skene” in ancient drama and was used for the same effect--to emphasize significant entrances or exits and to reveal emblematic scenes such as the slain Agamemnon and Cassandra in a bathtub. The high-tech adaptation of the door suggested not only a security system Clytemnestra and Aegisthus use to keep rebels or avengers out but also a kind of dungeon door trapping victims, ultimately themselves, inside.
Although all twelve actors, including the two musicians, took part in the various choruses and took on various roles, individual performances still stood out. Chief among these was Helen Schlesinger as Clytemnestra. Hers was a superb portrait of the cynical politician--in public saying what the people want to hear, reacting as people think she should react, all the while hiding her obsession with revenge. Once she has killed Agamemnon and Cassandra, she let the mask drop, exulting in every detail of the murders, revelling in the blood, daring the elders to condemn her and proclaiming her crime as justice. It was a supremely forceful and chilling performance that she carried into the second play. There is a scene in which she begs Orestes not to kill her, using a rapid series of ploys which only show him her innate duplicity. Their extended struggle with each other around a formal dining table is one of the most excruciating scenes I have witnessed.
Lilo Baur as Cassandra, a prophetess who can sense the aura of past atrocities and can foresee the future including her own death but is condemned not to be believed, gave an almost unbearably intense performance communicating the full horror and frustration of her character. As Electra in the second play, she suitably muted her vehemence, relying primarily on posture and demeanour to differentiate the child from the prophetess. Joy Richardson’s role as the goddess Athena in the third play did not require the emotional intensity of the other women’s roles. She had the right steadiness and clarity of speech to suggest a character for whom reasoned persuasion is paramount. Luckily, the trial and reconciliation scenes of the third play were not done as a kind of cynical media event, as in Josephine LeGrice’s 1997 Toronto Actors’ Equity production, which vitiated the resolution the first two plays demand. Richardson made Athena’s conversion of the Furies seem authentic as it should be.
Michael Gould as Agamemnon was not the conflicted hero Aeschylus must have imagined, but rather a kind of swaggering brute unaware of the pointlessness of the war he has just fought. As Apollo in the third play, clad in a corduroy suit, he seemed not so much the god of poetry as a kind of left-wing lawyer trying to get his client, Orestes, off. His notorious speech devaluing the role of woman in having children thus came off more as a part of his polemic rather than as the accepted view of the time. Paul Hilton sharply differentiated his three roles. He made the Watchman, whose long speech opens the trilogy, into a kind of prototype for the porter in “Macbeth”, beginning the work on an unexpected note of comedy. He continued this strain as the chief of the chorus of old men, characterizing him as a kind of befuddled history buff who delights in taping the sound bites he thinks may be important.
All three choruses were very good, the chorus of old men in the first play being the most enjoyable because the most individualized. The traditional speaking in unison was abandoned, except for certain significant words, in favour of having each of the wheelchair-bound veterans create a character appropriate to the lines he says. This procedure made sense of the many contradictory lines this chorus has in response to actions they disapprove of but are powerless to stop. The chorus of serving women in the second play was probably the least involving. While their lines express a complete unity of purpose, the variable accents of the speakers often made their words unclear and their speeches less effective. In the third play the blue-uniformed Furies were wittily transformed from supernatural beings to members of some kind of arch-conservative religious cult--they are, after all, believers in the old ways, not the new. They alternated between precise unison and individual declamation, reflecting the unified front they present to Apollo and Athena but also suggesting the eventual crumbling of their hard-line stance. At the end of the final play, when the twelve performers took their bows, it seemed incredible that so few people with such minimal means had created a story of so wide a scope.
This was a superb production of a masterful translation of one of the fundamental works of Western dramatic literature. Anyone who had devoted six hours to viewing it had cause only for great delight and satisfaction. The hours in fact seemed to fly by as happens only when a production has fully engaged the mind and the senses. In the audience there was a real sense gratitude both to the performers and to the festival that had brought them to us.
©Christopher Hoile
Photo: (top) Lilo Baur as Cassandra in The Home Guard; (middle) Paul Hilton as Orestes in The Daughters of Darkness. ©1999 Ivan Kynci.
2000-04-18
Oresteia