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by Montserrat Roig, translated by Elisabet Rafols-Sagues & Anne Szumigalski, directed by Dragana Varagic

April Productions, Theatre Passe Muraille Backspace, Toronto, March 21-25, 2012;

Isabel Bader Theatre, Toronto

March 31, 2012

“Holding a Mirror Up to Myth”

The Vindication of Clito Mestres is both an updating of the ancient Greek story of Clytemnestra and a feminist revision of it.  The queen is one of the central characters of The Oresteia (458 bc) by Aeschylus, who murders her husband Agamemnon on his return home from the Trojan War and is in turn murdered by her son Orestes at the urging of her daughter Electra.  In the hour-long solo play from 1990, Catalan author Montserrat Roig (1946-91) presents the tale through multiple metatheatrical layers.  She shows us an actress who is preparing to play the role of Clytemnestra, even though as the wordplay on her name suggests, her own life is a modern twist on the very role she is rehearsing.

In Roig’s play, Barcelonan actress Clotilde Mestres, who mispronounced her first name as “Clito” as a girl, marries a the German real estate agent Hans who takes her to live in Hamburg, a city whose coldness and fog distress her.  Not knowing German, she has to give up acting and eventually bears the orchidophile Hans a daughter they name Iris.  Hans begins an affair with a woman named Helena and against Clito’s wishes takes Iris on a skiing trip to the Alps, where she dies in an accident.  To shake off their grief Hans moves with Clito to an unnamed German city on a river.  Those who know their German literature will realize this is Tübingen on the Neckar because of Clito’s comment that the town was famous for a poet who went mad in a tower, a reference to Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843).  There Clito gives birth to twins, a boy and a girl, but has no motherly feeling for them.  Her greatest pleasure comes from a love affair she has with a man named Helmut.  Once they are found out, she, too, feels she is going mad, and so she leaves Hans and her now grown children and moves back to Barcelona, where she meets the director of a theatre company who wants Clito to play Clytemnestra.

Those who know Homer’s Iliad or Aeschylus’ Oresteia will already have notices that the contrast between Catalonia and Germany in Roig’s play parallels the contrast between Sparta and Argos in the Greek sources.  Like Clytemnestra Clito is taken away from her home to live in a foreign place she doesn’t like.  Like Agamemnon, Hans brings about the death of her daughter--by association in Roig, through human sacrifice in Aeschylus.  Hans is seduced by a woman named Helena just as Agamemnon is seduced by the cause to rescue Helen of Troy.  Clito bears twins just as Clytemnestra bears the twins Electra and Orestes.  Just as Clytemnestra begins an affair with Aegisthus in Agamemnon’s absence, so Clito begins one with Helmut when Hans is away.

Despite these parallels to Greek tragedy, Roig gives the story of her Clito a happy ending.  Roig is interested in how without forcing any details an ordinary woman’s life can reflect that of a woman of ancient legend.  Aeschylus portrays Clytemnestra as ruthless woman whose life has been consumed for ten years by her plans of taking revenge on Agamemnon for killing their daughter Iphigenia.  In Roig, Clito forgives Hans though the death of Iris effectively kills their relationship.  Roig is primarily interested in how Clito’s life abroad stifles her, makes her lose her identity as if lost in a fog. 

One of many ironies is that Clito does not realize as she tells her story that her life has mimicked that of the role she is about to play.  What Clito focusses on is her director’s statement that if she could play Electra, as Clito did, she can also play Clytemnestra--that is, if she can play a daughter who kills her father, she can also play a wife who kills her husband.  In Roig’s play, Clito never actually or metaphorically “kills” her father, but rather honours him throughout.  Instead, Clito’s ruthlessness lies elsewhere.  We learn that Clito got to play the role of Electra that she was understudying by deliberately sabotaging the health of the lead actress so that Clito had to play the role on opening night where she reaped all the accolades.

Dragana Varagic, who plays Clito and directs, played the role a decade ago in a more conventional production.  Now she has re-imagined the play and has added the use of video by Vojin Vasovic.  At the beginning of the show, Clito enters from the audience and throws open a red curtain to reveal a dressing room.  Then she throws open a red curtain at the back of the dressing room to reveal, in Vasovic’s projections, a second dressing room identical to the one on stage but reversed left to right.  Through the play Dragana on stage interacts with her filmed self whom designer Snezana Pesic has costumed in less contemporary style. 

It may take an average audience most of the play or longer to understand what the two Clitos represent.  The key, it seems, lies in the fact that the onstage Clito has a remote controls that can pause, fade out or fast-forward the filmed Clito.  My conclusion was that the filmed Clito represents what Clito was and what she still may be inside while the onstage Clito represents what Clito now is and how she presents herself.  The filmed Clito is noticeably more emotionally labile than the onstage Clito, suggesting, since the onstage Clito holds the control, that she can present a cool or even comic façade despite remembered emotional turmoil.  It’s a fascinating concept even if not every audience member clues in to what it means.  At the very least, the use of projections is a constant reminder that Roig’s play is not just about a woman but also about the theatre.

Varagic gives a wonderfully complex performance, both on stage and in the film.  She has a gift that more Canadian actors, male and female, need to learn of saying one thing and suggesting exactly the opposite though subtle use of gesture and tone of voice.  Both Clitos often try to appear carefree with the effort needed undermining the effect they desire.  The interaction between the two Clitos is so natural you tend to forget that the filmed Clito is not real.

This is, of course, part of the point.  The reason why Roig’s Clito has a happy ending unlike her ancient Greek counterpart is that she has managed to transmute her suffering into art.  Clito tells us that, as with her name, she makes mistakes when speaking in real life, but never when she is on stage.  Roig’s play itself, then, becomes a vindication not just of the lives of Clito and Clytemnestra but of the importance of women creating theatre from the own point of view about their own experiences.        

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Dragana Varagic as Clito Mestres. ©2012 Ray Gniewek.

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