Stage Door News
Stage Door News
Deianira, Antigone and Electra – Tragic Heroines and Fateful Choices. Des Femmes is the first opus in the “Sophocles project”, a collaboration between the director Wajdi Mouawad and the poet Robert Davreu, who was asked by Mouawad for a new translation of the ancient plays. The Sophocles project involves a Quebec artistic team staging seven tragedies by the Greek poet Sophocles, presented in their entirety: Ajax, Antigone, Œdipe roi, Électre, Les Trachiniennes (The Women of Trachis), Philoctète and Œdipe à Colone.
The ancient Greek texts have been a great source of inspiration in his own work (as can be seen in Tideline, Scorched and Forests), and here Wajdi Mouawad returns to the source, grouping the plays in three thematic sections: Des Femmes, Des Héros, Des Mourants. The final phase will be a presentation in 2015 of all seven plays, in chronological order, at Mons, the European Capital of Culture for 2015.
It is the great heroines who are highlighted in Des Femmes, which is composed of Les Trachiniennes, Antigone and Électre. Between the laws of nature and the laws of man, the tragic destiny of each of these women is sealed by her choices: Deianira, whose “capacity for love is equal to her pain and grief”; Antigone and her quest for “justice and reconciliation”; and Electra, who seeks to obtain “redress for murder through vengeance”.
Des Femmes emphasizes the moment of revelation, when characters at their peak of good fortune are plunged into tragedy, as though the gods had raised them up only to show them their blindness and lack of self-knowledge. With feet of clay, the hero falls.
Sophocles portrays not only the intemperance of men, their suffering and their sorrows, but the indifference of the gods. For Wajdi Mouawad, there is “something profoundly moving in how Sophocles seems to capture and recreate our condition, which is both sublime and lamentable, for no one can know. Before his death no mortal knows whether his life has been beneficial or disastrous”.
Photo: A scene from Les Trachiennes. ©2012 Jean-Louis Fernadez.
2012-04-13
Ottawa: The NAC French Theatre announces the North American premiere of “Des Femmes” April 25-29