Reviews 2011
Reviews 2011
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by Jean Racine, adapted by Evie Christie, directed by Graham McLaren
Necessary Angel/Luminato, The Theatre Centre, Toronto
June 12-19, 2011
Necessary Angel’s production of Andromache is an example of the mistakes that happen when a director decides that the text of a classic play needs to be updated. Instead of making Jean Racine’s 1667 masterpiece more relevant, Evie Christie’s adaptation and Graham McLaren’s direction replace Racine’s complex insights with simplistic modern clichés. Racine’s meticulously crafted plot survives, but the levels of irony that surround it are lost.
The story of Andromache is one of the many dealing with the aftermath of the Trojan War. Andromache is the widow of Troy’s greatest hero, Hector, who in the standard versions of her story, as in Euripides’ The Trojan Women, suffered the horror of seeing Astyanax, her son by Hector, thrown to his death from the walls of Troy. In Racine’s version, the Trojans managed to substitute another boy for Astyanax, so that both mother and son becomes trophies of war for the Greek commander Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus, however, falls in love with his captive, much to the chagrin of his fiancée Hermione, only daughter of the Spartan Menelaus and Helen. Though it is an arranged marriage meant to unite Sparta with the rest of Greece, Hermione is passionately in love with Pyrrhus. What ignites this combustible mixture of passion is the arrival of Orestes, who is in love with Hermione. This leads Pyrrhus and Hermione to make terrifying demands. Pyrrhus says that Andromache must love him or he will kill her son. Hermione says that Orestes can only win her love if he kills Pyrrhus.
The point of the horrific stories that occur after the Trojan War, like Clytemnestra’s murder of Agamemnon, is that although there is now nominal peace the effects of war still linger and continues to ruin lives. That the effects of war continue despite peace is something we know all too well today and is an insight that needs no updating. Racine also suggests that the blinding passion that rejects all reason enthralling Pyrrhus, Hermione and Orestes is exactly what brings about war in the first place. In fact, Racine has the pre-Freudian insight that the loss of self in passion is akin to a death wish.
These insights are completely lost in Necessary Angel’s Andromache. There is nothing wrong with McLaren’s shifting the setting from semi-mythical Epirus in Greece to 21st-century Iraq, but McLaren’s key error is to place it in an Iraq still at war. All this accomplishes is the notion that the war outside reflects the war inside the characters and misses the essential irony of interior and interpersonal conflict continuing in peace time. It also makes the presence of a princess like Hermione in the midst of a war zone highly improbable, even more so the notion of her wedding there. McLaren begins the play with Pyrrhus’ soldiers playing shoot-’em-up video games to loud rock music. Just after Hermione orders Orestes to kill Pyrrhus to eliminate her obsession with him, McLaren has her console herself in the same way as the soldiers at the start. Rather than Racine’s analysis of the darkness within our inner natures, all McLaren gives us is the annoying cliché that violence in popular culture leads to real violence.
Novelist and poet Evie Christie’s adaptation gives us Racine without the poetry. Racine’s rhymed couplets are so powerful because the form reflects the content. We hear the expression of unbounded passion expressed within the rigid bounds of metric structure, the wildness of the characters’ feelings is trapped within the confines of social acceptability. In a world of soldiers at war, expletives flying, the notion of social confines is obliterated. Christie tries to bring as much up-to-date vocabulary as possible into play, like “waterboarding” and “post-traumatic stress syndrome”, but she can’t avoid old-fashioned words like “gore”, “grueling” and “sovereign” so that the new and old vocabulary are constantly grinding against each other in ways that provoke unintentional laughter. She and McLaren have eliminated Racine’s use of confidants, but this forces them to gives characters even more soliloquies than exist in the original. Why bother to modernize a play if you are only going to render its structure more old-fashioned?
Fine performances can go a long way to making a flawed concept work, but here the cast is very uneven, with the men far out shining the women. As Pyrrhus, Christopher Morris presents a portrait of a man driven to the brink of psychosis because of his unrequited love for Andromache. His love breaks so many boundaries--between political and racial foes, captor and captive, licit and illicit love--that it is beyond his understanding. As a military man it makes sense that this Pyrrhus would react with violence to a force he can’t comprehend.
While Morris’s Pyrrhus is already deeply in the throes of his passion, Steven Gallagher shows how Orestes moves from daring to hope that his commander’s fiancée may love him to being completely taken in by her treachery. He’s an upright man at the start who gradually descends into madness right before our eyes. Ryan Hollyman is excellent as Pylades, the only character in the play to maintain his rationality, but who is helpless to change the self-destructive course of those around him.
Andromache may be the title character but she is not the main character of the play. Arsinée Khanjian conveys the captive’s struggle to maintain a sense of dignity despite ill-treatment more effectively through her body language than through her lines. The prime female role is that of Hermione, who is as deeply in love to the point of madness as is Pyrrhus. McLaren has terribly misconceived Hermione as a “princess” only as far as the term means “spoiled brat”. With no sense of dignity or allure about her it’s impossible to see what could attract so sensitive a person as Orestes. It has to be more than sex, but that’s as far as McLaren seems to understand her. Hermione has to balance Pyrrhus and Andromache in dramatic heft, but as McLaren conceives her and as Christine Horne plays her, she is far too lightweight. Rather than the all-consuming “amour-passion” Racine imagined, all Horne gives us is the superficial tantrums of a twentysomething who still acts like a teenager. In debasing this role, McLaren undermines the seriousness of the entire play.
At least McLaren’s design of an grungy games room is effective with dingy lighting by Andrea Lundy and an amazingly realistic soundscape from John Wynne, with a low-flying jet sound signifying the end of each act. The cast includes eleven men to represent Pyrrhus army. McLaren intends them to establish a threatening atmosphere. It is threatening to us, but he forgets that the atmosphere in the play should be primarily threatening to the characters. In a good production of Racine, we should fear, along with the characters, that the secrets they reveal will be overheard or misused. By focussing that tension on the war outside, McLaren fails to create a tension of revelation indoors.
The last time Toronto saw Andromache was in a period production by Opera Atelier in 1991 when that company still entertained ideas of producing plays as well as operas. While it is not necessary that we see Racine’s characters suffering in gorgeous costumes, it is necessary that the a production capture the essence of his work or else go all the way and proclaim itself a new version of the story. Necessary Angel’s production goes only halfway in this and is therefore only partially successful.
©Christopher Hoile
Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.
Photo: Steven McCarthy and Christine Horne. ©2011 Michael Cooper.
For Tickets, visit www.luminato.com.
2011-06-15
Andromache