{"id":116,"date":"2015-12-21T19:54:48","date_gmt":"2015-12-21T19:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cs2.enl.auth.gr\/12\/?p=116"},"modified":"2023-06-03T08:36:44","modified_gmt":"2023-06-03T08:36:44","slug":"on-killing-children-greek-tragedies-on-british-stages-in-2015","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.critical-stages.org\/12\/on-killing-children-greek-tragedies-on-british-stages-in-2015\/","title":{"rendered":"On Killing Children: Greek Tragedies on British Stages in 2015"},"content":{"rendered":"

Margherita Laera<\/strong>*<\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

I have just watched three children die at the hands of their parents, collapsing in their arms. Two were killed by their mother, Medea, and one by her father, Agamemnon. These acts of infanticide took place in London, at the Almeida and Gate Theatre, during Robert Icke\u2019s Oresteia<\/em> and Anne-Louise Sarks\u2019 Medea<\/em>, respectively. The scenes were an uncomfortable sight that filled my heart with grief and moved me to tears. This was not just because, as a mother, I can no longer witness such horror without being affected, but because the directors managed to make the performed deaths look so unusually \u201creal\u201d through hyper-naturalistic acting and the deployment of poisonous drinks as weapons of choice. It was a particularly effective and affective way to represent death in that it does not involve any make-believe goriness, which might slip into the grotesque. Moreover, if there was ever a way to murder one\u2019s child compassionately and portray the killers as relatable individuals, Icke and Sarks have found it: cast a reluctant, tearful parent building up to the deed with declarations of love for their hapless offspring; make them portray their harrowing moral dilemma whilst holding the children in their arms; then resolve to carry out the brutal crime through chemicals, sparing the children pain and fear.<\/p>\n

\"Angus
Angus Wright and Lia Williams in Oresteia<\/em>. By Manuel Harlan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The resulting on-stage deaths were bloodless and lacking in that deranged violence that is often imagined to take place in the off-stage killings of Greek tragedies. The innocent bodies of three children suddenly dropped lifeless, their heads and limbs hanging, held in the arms of those who had both given and taken away their lives. Instead of the remorseless Agamemnon that Clytemnestra depicts in Aeschylus\u2019 play\u2014Iphigenia\u2019s sacrifice is not even dramatised in the Oresteia<\/em>, but only recounted in a choral song\u2014two out of three hours of Icke\u2019s production are devoted to representing a caring father, who is torn between the unspeakable pain of hurting his child and the responsibility he has towards his army and his nation. Instead of a cold, heartless assassin, Sarks\u2019 Medea<\/em> is a loving mother lacerated by agony and torment. As an audience member, I felt I was being asked to put myself in Medea\u2019s or Agamemnon\u2019s shoes\u2014I was being asked to see these alien mythological characters as actual people, the kind of people I might have met. Theatrically speaking, Icke\u2019s and Sarks\u2019s productions were both utterly captivating and exceptionally acted. However the driving impulse behind the adaptation\u2014the desire to make Greek tragedy more \u201crelevant\u201d and plausible\u2014was less than convincing.<\/p>\n

\"Eve
Eve Benioff, L Williams, A Wright, Ilan Galkoff in Oresteia<\/em>. By Manuel Harlan<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

These two productions were only two of many Greek adaptations being staged in the UK during 2015. As the \u201creal\u201d Greek tragedy and the Eurozone crisis unfolded in the news, British theatres responded by programming an unusually high number of \u201cclassical\u201d tragedies. Whilst speculations on \u201cGrexit\u201d\u2014Greece\u2019s exit from the Eurozone and possibly from the EU\u2014were becoming more and more realistic in the summer, as the Greek people voted against the bailout terms in a referendum, Dan Rebellato hailed the so-called \u201cGrentrance\u201d and the political use of Greek plays as British theatre\u2019s answer to austerity both in Europe and at home (2015). In the chic area of Angel, the Almeida Theatre presented a whole Greek season, starting with Icke\u2019s modernised rewriting of the Oresteia <\/em>(which also transferred to the West End), followed by James McDonald\u2019s staging of Bacchae<\/em> in a new version by Anne Carson, and Rupert Goold\u2019s Medea<\/em>, adapted by Rachel Cusk, in which Medea is a writer dumped by her actor-husband who does not kill her children. The Almeida\u2019s Greek season also included many debates and events exploring the relevance of Greek tragedy today and also organized readings of comedies and Homeric poems, such as Frogs<\/em>, Lysistrata<\/em>, and the Iliad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Ilan
Ilan Galkoff, L Williams, A Wright, Eve Benioff Salama, Luke Thompson in Oresteia<\/em>. Almeida. By Manuel Harlan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\"Jessica
Jessica Brown Findlay and Angus Wright in Oresteia<\/em>. By Manuel Harlan.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Above a pub in the wealthy neighbourhood of Notting Hill, the Gate Theatre presented Kate Mulvany\u2019s Medea<\/em> directed by Sarks, a co-production with Belvoir Sydney, in which the story is seen from the point of view of Medea\u2019s children. The Gate also commissioned four retellings of Euripides\u2019 Iphigenia at Aulis<\/em> by writers Caroline Bird, Suhaila El-Bushra, Chris Thorpe and Lulu Raczka, which explore the story from different characters\u2019 perspectives, due to open in April 2016. Over at the Southbank, the Globe staged Rory Mullarkey\u2019s adaptation of the Oresteia<\/em>, directed by Adele Thomas. Not far from the Globe, the Unicorn offered children\u2019s theatre productions of the Minotaur and Odysseus myths adapted by Adam Peck and Timberlake Wertenbaker respectively. While most of the \u201cGrentrance\u201d action took place in London, over in Wales directors Mike Pearson and Mike Brooks staged an immersive, site-specific marathon version of the Iliad <\/em>based on a version by Christopher Logue. In Manchester, HOME commissioned Blanche McIntyre to direct a shortened version of the Oresteia <\/em>translated by Ted Hugues, featuring a chorus of local community members, which mimicked the non-professional composition of Athenian choruses.<\/p>\n

\"Bili
Bili Keogh and Samuel Menhinick. Medea<\/em>. c. ikin yum<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

What is striking in this selection of plays and readings is the marked preponderance of stories in which the main plot or premise hinges on infanticide: young Iphigenia\u2019s sacrifice, which takes place in order for Agamemnon\u2019s warships to reach Troy, is implied in the Oresteia<\/em> (Almeida; Globe; HOME) and the Iliad <\/em>(Almeida; National Theatre of Wales), and dramatised in Iphigenia at Aulis <\/em>(Gate). And of course Medea\u2019s main claim to fame is that she murders her children to hurt her unfaithful husband Jason. We know that the British stage is no stranger to violence against children: Edward Bond\u2019s Saved<\/em> and Sarah Kane\u2019s Blasted<\/em> have given us two of the most iconic scenes of contemporary drama in which babies are brutalised in an unashamedly barbaric manner. But in Icke\u2019s and Sarks\u2019 production there was something even more disturbing than in Bond\u2019s and Kane\u2019s plays, if possible: the bizarre but very popular adaptation strategy that attempts to humanise what is ultimately a set of mythological (not psychological) characters; the intention to make infanticide less symbolic, less removed from everyday life, and more naturalistic, understandable, consumable; the portrayal of parents killing their children as plausible, when none of that familiar atmosphere of domestic life or psychological depth is to be found in Greek tragedy. Identification with characters, as Denis Gu\u00e9noun has argued in his book Le th\u00e9\u00e2tre est-il n\u00e9cessaire?<\/em>, was not a mechanism known the Greeks. It is our own attunement to the mechanisms of naturalism and the principles of psychology that make us read Greek tragedy through those lenses, but the circle cannot be squared that easily. It is like reading feminism into Euripides\u2019 Medea<\/em> when the notion of feminism was totally alien to Euripides. The fact that Euripides\u2019 Medea speaks about women\u2019s oppression and kills her children to hurt her husband does not make her a feminist.<\/p>\n

\"Bili
Bili Keogh, Emma Beattie and Samuel Menhinick. Medea<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The adaptor of the other Medea<\/em> presented at London\u2019s Almeida, Rachel Cusk, has written about her unease with the task she set herself of making the play more \u201cactual,\u201d while at the same time retaining the infanticide. Cusk acknowledges the \u201cinvitation\u201d of Euripides\u2019 play to explore the \u201cparallels\u201d between ancient mythology and contemporary feminist struggles, but also admits that the tragedy as it stands \u201cforbade\u201d this reconciliation between past and present, between the myth of Medea and \u201cordinary people\u201d:<\/p>\n

The text invited this contemporary reading while also forbidding it, for the famous denouement of Medea\u2019s story is that in order to avenge herself against her faithless husband, she kills their two children. How could such an act be incorporated into a tale of modern, ordinary people, people bedevilled by ambition, selfishness, lust, anger and self-pity as may be, but who were nonetheless unlikely even in extremis to pick up a knife and plunge it into their offspring? In our world, a play about a mother who kills her children is a different kind of play altogether. That play does not concern itself with the traducing of female equality by bourgeois domestic politics; that play is about psychosis (2015).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cusk\u2019s decision to omit infanticide from the plot, echoing that of novelist Christa Wolf\u2019s feminist rewriting of Medea <\/em>from 1996, recognises that Greek tragedy resists actualisation. This realisation, however, did not make Cusk desist from actualising Medea <\/em>in her version for Rupert Goold: only the plot changed and, rather than a psychopath, her contemporary Medea is a plausible and relatable feminist, much more relatable and plausible than Icke\u2019s Agamemnon and Sarks\u2019 own Medea.<\/p>\n

When confronted with the new wave of Greek tragedies, we are bound to ask what these productions say about the present. To me, they speak of British theatre-makers\u2019 obsession with \u201crelevance\u201d and \u201cactuality,\u201d as though what is \u201cinactual\u201d or out of fashion had no right to make it on to the stage, no hope of soliciting any interest or desirable emotion in spectators. \u201cNot in vogue? Out of our theatres!\u201d they say. What a paradoxical mission this is: to rid our stages of that which is not \u201cof the time,\u201d whilst simultaneously setting out to rediscover works that emerged out of an entirely different historical period. But what about the unshakable, untranslatable otherness of Greek tragedy vis-\u00e0-vis our contemporary world and theatrical tradition in Britain? What are we to make of Greek tragedy\u2019s alienating devices, its difference, awkwardness, \u201cinactuality\u201d? The director\u2019s task, it seems, has become a bit like that of a fashion magazine editor: pick what is \u00e0 la mode<\/em>, leave behind what is no longer de rigueur<\/em> through the process of actualisation.<\/p>\n

Now ask: is what is \u201cinactual\u201d necessarily \u201cirrelevant\u201d? I am not advocating reconstruction, or the pursuit of the chimera of historical \u201cauthenticity.\u201d As Antoine Vitez wrote in 1966 about staging Sophocles\u2019 Electra<\/em>, \u201cneither actualisation nor reconstruction. I want to find something else\u201d (60). That third way may be found in productions that do not pursue the aesthetics of familiarity and are not afraid of unsettling audiences with \u201cinactual\u201d material. See, for instance, the work of Soc\u00ecetas Raffaello Sanzio.<\/p>\n

To me, these London productions don\u2019t speak about austerity, or about the debt crisis in Greece, although they may have been inspired by them. Rather, they speak to me about how dangerous it can be to exclude otherness from our stages. Refashioning and representing the past as though it had always been like the present is a bit like killing our future\u2014or our children for that matter.<\/p>\n

Works Cited<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cusk, Rachel. \u201cRachel Cusk: \u2018Medea is not psychotic – she\u2019s a realist.\u2019\u201d Telegraph<\/em>. Daily Telegraph, 30 Sept. 2015. Web. 15 Nov. 2015. <http:\/\/www.telegraph.co.uk\/theatre\/actors\/medea-rachel-cusk\/<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Rebellato, Dan. \u201cEnter the Greeks.\u201d 5 July 2015. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.
\n<http:\/\/www.danrebellato.co.uk\/spilledink\/2015\/7\/5\/enter-the-greeks<\/a>>.<\/p>\n

Vitez, Antoine. Le th\u00e9\u00e2tre des id\u00e9es<\/em>. Paris: Gallimard, 1991. Print.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Margherita-Laera\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>*Dr Margherita Laera<\/strong> is a Lecturer in Drama and Theatre at the University of Kent, Canterbury, where she is the Director of the European Theatre Research Network, based in the School of Arts. She is the author of the monograph Reaching Athens: Community, Democracy and Other Mythologies in Adaptations of Greek Tragedy<\/em> (Peter Lang, 2013) and editor of Theatre and Adaptation: Return, Rewrite, Repeat <\/em>(Bloomsbury, 2014).<\/p>\n

Copyright \u00a9<\/strong> 2015 Margherita Laera
\nCritical Stages\/Sc\u00e8nes critiques<\/em> e-ISSN: 2409-7411<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This work is licensed under the
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