Queer Gestus, Antifascist Ritualism and Bloody Geopolitics in Oresteia

Penelope Chatzidimitriou*

Oresteia by Aeschylus. Direction and dramaturgy by Theodoros Terzopoulos. Associate director Savvas Stroumpos. Modern Greek translation by Eleni Varopoulou. Set, costumes, lighting design by Theodoros Terzopoulos. Original music by Panayiotis Velianitis. Produced by the National Theatre of Greece, premiered at the ancient theatre of Epidaurus, Greece, 12 July 2024.

Oresteia, directed by Theodoros Terzopoulos for the National Theatre of Greece, turned from a play of resistance into protest theatre, thanks to its spectators. It showed that forging relationships is the foundation of both theatre and democracy.

A Resistance Play

Terzopoulos’ Oresteia opens with a fly buzzing at high volume. It fills our ears, an allusion to Jean-Paul Sartre’s The Flies, a WWII play of resistance against fascism and propaganda, inspired by Oresteia. In this performance, the invisible flies irritate the old Guard (Tasos Dimas) οn the white orchestra, which is surrounded by blood-stained shrouds. The flies he tries to keep off may be feeding on dead human flesh from battlefields and civilian zones. Ragged and weary, this low-class guard has long waited for a sign of Greek victory in Troy. Terzopoulos characteristically uses refined but clear symbols to depict the necrophilia of the war machine.

The ragged Guard (Tasos Dimas) and the chorus of Agamemnon. Photo: Johanna Weber

With such class and political undertones, this Oresteia introduces itself as a political play of resistance, an indictment of those in power, who obtain and preserve their political authority by Machiavellian means at the expense of the innocent multitude. This should not come as a surprise, for Terzopoulos is a director of freedom: from his non-realistic acting technique—which aims at liberating the (post)human body from psychodynamic, socio-cultural and technological restrictions, giving it back its explosive energy and vocal strength—to his Prometheus Bound, Antigone and so on, he creates a theatre of resistance. He focuses on the socially and politically defeated, who nonetheless attempt to destabilize the status quo in rigged political systems and impoverished existential conditions.

A geometry of oppression in Libation Bearers, with the blood-stained sheets lying on the ground. Photo: Johanna Weber

Similarly, he creates Oresteia drawing from his arsenal of theatrical expertise in Greek tragedy, Bertolt Brecht, Heiner Müller and Samuel Beckett, and directs the trilogy as a resistance play at today’s bleak moment in history. After all, in the hands of political and military leaders, Oresteia has often served their ideological agenda of national and racial supremacy, with the 1936 Oresteia production in Nazi Berlin being a telling example.

The power figure of Athena (Aglaia Pappa). Photo: Johanna Weber

Terzopoulos’ Oresteia instead takes its place among productions like Luca Ronconi’ s dystopian Oresteia (1972), Peter Stein’s in post-communist Russia (1994) and Romeo Castellucci’s degenerative Oresteia (an Organic Comedy?) (1995). Such productions depict the current social and historical momentum as a troubling, controversial process.

A geometry of subjection, with autocratic Clytemnestra (Sophia Hill, center) and the chorus. Photo: Johanna Weber
Power and Gestus

As part of this tradition, Terzopoulos is merciless when it comes to the powerful political and divine figures, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, Aegisthus, Athena and Apollo. There is something expressly Brechtian in their gestus and gender performance, which demonstrates their villainy. Thus, Agamemnon (Savvas Stroumpos) is a hyper-masculine war machine, while Clytemnestra (Sophia Hill), in her black pants and arrogant coldness, is a masculine woman. Athena (Aglaia Pappa), spokesperson for her father Zeus and patriarchy, is similarly masculinized in her futuristic suit and gestus.

The “red carpet scene”: Captured bodies form a hubristic tapestry for Agamemnon (Savvas Stroumpos). Photo: Johanna Weber

One may discern a running risk of stereotyping gender here (a case also made by feminist critics of Brechtian gender performance, like Sue-Ellen Case), but Terzopoulos’ choices are not superficial: he has often advocated gender rights in performances like his recent Requiem and Yerma. His suppression of heterosexual desire in Oresteia can be a choice made to clarify a political reasoning and disclose the machinery of power.

Clytemnestra (Sophia Hill) as despotic ruler. Photo: Johanna Weber

The latter also accounts for the gestic queering of the coward Aegisthus (David Maltese), who in Agamemnon is called a woman (l. 1625), and Apollo (Nikos Ntasis), whose mythological male lover is Hyacinthus. Their immaculate white suits contrast with the dark atmosphere of the performance and the blood-smeared sheets. Terzopoulos, who in his early years directed Bremen Freedom (1988) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the postwar German film director who consistently undermined Nazi hyper-masculinity, seems to have been freely inspired by postwar films like Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist and Luchino Visconti’s The Damned. Like them, he feminizes the fascist evil, embracing the camp aesthetic, and changes the fascist construction of hyper-masculine virility into effeminacy. Such choices echo theoreticians like Wilhelm Reich, Klaus Theweleit and George Mosse, who see fascism as a political manifestation of open homosexuality and covert homoeroticism. Also, in the case of Aegisthus, who dexterously gestures with a red fan, the director draws from the tradition of Beijing Opera (like Brecht in the 1930s) and men playing female roles (dan).

Aegisthus (David Maltese), among the abused chorus, holding his red fan. Photo: Johanna Weber
The Human Face of the Oppressed

Contrastingly, in this performance of resistance, Terzopoulos foregrounds the natural humanity of the siblings, Electra and Orestes (Niovi Charalambous and Kostas Kontogeorgopoulos). He abandons the cold Brechtian gestus for those who are the prey of aggressive masculinity, like the mantic Cassandra (performed by the Greek-Syrian Evelyn Assouad), victim of Apollo’s desires and Agamemnon’s war-prize. She culminates in an Arabic threnody, a song both culturally specific and cosmic, created and delivered by the human voice. In Terzopoulos’ tragedies, the aural impact is as important as the spectacle, and the tragic voice is not only rhetorical but sonic, an essential part of the tragic aesthetic experience, which extends from the body to world politics.

Agamemnon (Savvas Stroumpos) steps over Cassandra (Evelyn Assouad, bottom) to reach Clytemnestra (Sophia Hill, top). Photo: Johanna Weber

The chorus is similarly humane. Powerfully ritualistic in its geometric arrangements, strong physicality and pulsating rhythms, this is the director’s signature chorus. Trained in his acting method, the twenty-two young chorus members make up a body politic, literally physical and collective, which suffers because of its hubristic ruling head. Such ritualism acts as a social bonding mechanism, giving spectators a feeling of belonging and becoming part of this theatrical project of resistance. This is very different from pathological rituals like the fascist mass meetings, inspired by Greek theatre to stage a delusion of belonging (see Günter Berghaus, Fascism and Theatre, 1996).

The performance teaser evokes archaic fear. Video: http://www.youtube.com/@NationalTheatreofGreece

Through his sculptural chorus, which enacts the nightmares of the traumatized collective subconscious, Terzopoulos orchestrates Oresteia progressively as a trilogy of political accountability and civic repression (Agamemnon), resistance (Libation Bearers) and defeat (Eumenides).

The Furies are inspired by Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Francis Bacon’s paintings. Photo: Johanna Weber
Never “the Kindly Ones”

In Eumenides, the most important part of Oresteia for Terzopoulos, the chorus of Furies is defeated and their uprising crushed. Unlike conventional interpretations, the new Olympian order is not the celebratory end of moral chaos because it depends on power, deceit and the monopoly of violence. Terzopoulos explores how leaders, from antiquity through the Weimar Republic to the present, manipulate society’s post-traumatic fear for their own ends, and the threat that this poses for democracy.

Athena (Aglaia Pappa) and Apollo (Nikos Ntasis) as manipulative agents of the new order. Photo: Johanna Weber
A Protest Play

Terzopoulos adds an unexpected Müllerian finale to the trilogy, treating myth as a high speed, multigear machine, with its accelerating energy bursting open the cultural sphere. A recorded voice welcomes us to the “New World,” which is not Athena’ s professed utopia. The current global crisis is indicated by a barrage of air-raid sirens, stock market indices, lists of war dead and refugees, and Middle-Eastern laments. In this sonic vortex (music Panagiotis Velianitis), a frantic chorus member (Giulio Germano Cervi) tries to clear up the bloody scene.

Lamenting the bloody business of geopolitics. Actor: Giulio Germano Cervi. Photo: Johanna Weber

This image evoked such strong emotions that most spectators rose and protested with tears, applause and cries against the ongoing crisis. The shock of recognition of the precariousness of contemporary human existence united audience and performers, reality and theatrical illusion. Thanks to them, this performance can enter the performance history of Oresteia in the twenty-first century as an exceptional play of resistance but also as a protest play. 


*Penelope Chatzidimitriou (Greece) has been an affiliated theatre lecturer at universities and in acting schools, holding a PhD in Theatre Studies, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, and an MA in Theatre Studies and Directing, Royal Holloway. As a scholar, she has collaborated with director Theodoros Terzopoulos since 2000 and has published a monograph on his work. She has also published articles in Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, Peter Lang, Theater der Zeit and so on, and reviews internationally and in Greece, specializing in director’s theatre and performance.

Copyright © 2024 Penelope Chatzidimitriou
Critical Stages/Scènes critiques, #30, Dec. 2024
e-ISSN: 2409-7411

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