Reviews 2003
Reviews 2003
✭✭✩✩✩
by Aristophanes, translated by Dudley Fitts, directed Nikos Dionysios
Stratford Festival, Tom Patterson Theatre, Stratford
June 25-September 27, 2003
"As in Dodo"
The current Stratford production of Aristophanes' "The Birds" is a major disappointment. Stratford has mounted tragedies by Sophocles and Euripides and has a tragedy by Aeschylus opening later this week. But only now has it attempted to stage an ancient Greek comedy. How sad then that the various components of text, music and design do not go together and that a show that begins with such promise quickly outstays its welcome.
If theatre-goers have encountered ancient comedy before, it is most likely to have been the type known as New Comedy that formed the basis of the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence. This is the world of wily servants, character types and farcical plots later adapted by Ben Jonson and Molière to Sondheim in his musical "A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum".
Aristophanes (c. 448-388 BC) represents the earlier form known as Old Comedy, a type based on a critique of current events, often pressing its satire into the realm of fantasy, all interspersed with song and dance. If you were to cross the topicality, parody and topsy-turvydom of Gilbert and Sullivan with the rudeness of and absurdity Monty Python, you'd get a pretty good idea of what Aristophanes is like.
In "The Birds" two friends, Pisthetairos and Euelpides, seek the quiet life away from an Athens at war with Sparta. They have used their pet ravens to guide them to the realm of Tereus, now known as Epops, an Athenian changed by the gods into a hoopoe. The two humans, happy among the birds, decide to stay, but to get the birds on their side they have to encourage them to regain their former revered status versus the gods and found their own city, Cloudcuckooland. By intercepting the smoke from animal sacrifices on which the gods live and by charging taxes on passage between heaven and earth, they and the birds will become rich.
The play is rife with irony and given the themes of war, religion, demagoguery and taxes could easily be framed as a satire of modern current events. Unfortunately, director Nikos Dionysios has treated Dudley Fitts's 1959 translation with too much reverence. In 1996 when the Ancient Comic Opera Company in mounted its long-running production of Aristophanes' "Clouds" in Toronto, it constantly updated Aristophanes' references to apply to the news of the day. In Dionysios's "The Birds", we are continually being asked to laugh at references that may have been hilarious in 414 BC but are obscure now even to classical scholars. As it is, Aristophanes' plentiful allusions to Greek mythology, history and geography and especially to specific members of his audience, require projected footnotes to let us in on what the characters on stage think is so funny.
Dionysios' academic approach is all the more out of place since the design and music have been updated. Teresa Przybylski has costumed Pisthetairos and Euelpides like two early 20th-century explorers. The parade of visitors to Cloudcuckooland all appear in exaggerated modern garb with the Parricide as a leather-and-stud clad punk. The three gods are in modern business suits. Only the goddess Iris and Pisthetairos' symbolic bride Basilea wear the ancient chiton. For the chorus of birds, Przybylski has designed light frames covered with coloured streamers, long-beaked half-masks and dance boots in a matching colour. Delightful as these costumes are, she has done nothing to connect each chorus member with the specific type of bird or even the specific colour mentioned in the text. Her abstract set consists of what looks like a large white burr serving as both cloud and nest against a blue background. The arrival of the goddess Iris on a metal crane is the visual highlight of the show. Louise Guinand's lighting seems to have only two settings--bright and dim.
Unlike Przybylski's postmodern design, Michael Vieira's music for the many songs takes us back to the 1960s. The settings are so awkward you would think Fitts's translation was in prose not poetry. They all sound like rejects from "Godspell", their soft-grained tone contrasting so much with the acerbic satire they kill what little momentum the dialogue generates. Dionysios takes credit as choreographer if grade school hopping and skipping and locker-room drills are choreography. When the birds listen to Pisthetairos, he has them strike poses after every phrase. This may be amusing once or twice, but over two hours becomes quite annoying.
Besides failing to update the text, Dionysios' main flaw is not making the central action clear. The play begins well enough with our two Athenians feeling their way through a strange fantasy world. But as soon as the chorus appears the narrative line is lost. He lets Act 2 turn into a kind of ancient version of "Laugh In" with a stream of wacky guest appearances but gives us no clue of where the story is heading. The point he completely misses is that Pisthetairos, who has left Athens because of unfair laws and warfare, founds a utopia based on both and becomes just like the rulers he despised. We should get some sense of his growing autocracy and hubris, but we never do. Unlike tragedy, Aristophanes' comedy rewards Pisthetairos' hubris with Basilea ("royal power"), but the irony and artifice of the ending must be clear. Dionysios ends with a portentous fade-out on Pisthetairos staring a bird, but only Dionysios knows what it's supposed to signify.
At the beginning Keith Dinicol and Bernard Hopkins play Pisthetairos and Euelpides like the ancestors of Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon. The encounter with the genial Epops, David Kirby in a fine physical performance, augurs a coming adventure. With the arrival of the birds, however, Dinicol pitches his style so high it has nowhere to go and so loses any sense of his character's gradual development.
David Francis, Tim Campbell and Joanna Schellenberg make an excellent set of koryphairoi (choral leaders), though Campbell's continual imitation of the Chicken Lady rapidly wears thin. (Besides he's supposed to be a woodpecker.) Daniela Lama creates a sense of nobility as Iris. Kim Horsman as Messengers #1 and #3 is one of the few actors in the chorus who, when playing an individual part, can make sense of her lines.
It is possible to make Aristophanes' comedies work today as the Ancient Comic Opera Company proved with its "Clouds" that ran in Toronto for more than a year. The current Stratford production will give most people the impression that Aristophanes' brand of comedy has rightly become extinct. It hasn't. It's the director's imagination that is wanting.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: A version of this review appeared in Eye Weekly 2003-07-10.
Photo: David Kirby as Epops. ©2003 John Lederman.
2003-07-09
The Birds