terror sets stage for greek tragedy

Terror of modern times sets the stage for Greek tragedy

Theatrical revivals seen as direct response to Iraq war

Michael Billington
Saturday June 19, 2004
The Guardian

Where does our theatre instinctively turn in times of crisis? Not to Shakespeare or Shaw but to the Greeks. Iphigenia at Aulis opens next week at the National Theatre. Martin Crimp's updated Sophoclean play, Cruel and Tender, is currently at the Young Vic. Euripides' Ion is playing at Colchester. And no less than two revivals of Hecuba - one at the Donmar this September, the other at Stratford-on-Avon next January - are in the pipeline. What these revivals all have in common is that they are a direct response to the Iraq war.

The critical cliche is that Greek tragedy is "timeless": a permanent part of western culture. The staggering fact is that for centuries the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides went virtually unperformed on the British stage.

It was only with the arrival of playable translations by Gilbert Murray that they infiltrated the repertory a century ago. And even then they were not universally welcomed. Max Beerbohm, writing in 1905 about The Trojan Women, claimed that "an afternoon of wailings that wake no echo in us is an afternoon of boredom".

It is the escalating horrors of the 20th century that explain the passionate renewal of interest in Greek drama. Jean Anouilh's Antigone, first performed in Paris in 1944 during the Occupation, was a landmark in showing how Sophocles could be resonantly updated. Since then writers as varied as Edward Bond, Seamus Heaney and Edna O'Brien have gone back to the Greeks.

Directors too have discovered in these plays a metaphor for our own times. The American Peter Sellars related Ajax and The Persians to the Vietnamese and Gulf wars. And when David Leveaux revived Electra in the 1990s the heroine had the ragged desperation of a Bosnian refugee.

But the current rash of Greek drama is directly attributable to the unfolding tragedy in the Middle East. Katie Mitchell, who directs Iphigenia at Aulis at the National, said: "I was looking for a play that could have a conversation with the audience about the situation in Iraq. This is a play that takes a cynical and satirical look at the actions of public figures and that was written at a time when Euripides was losing faith in political leaders and their inability to extricate themselves from an interminable war.

"Audiences are very clever so you don't need to localise events too much: unlike Euripides' Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter, Tony Blair is not actually killing his own children. But what we recognise in this and other Greek plays is the gap between politicians who talk in moral absolutes and our own sense that everything is muddy, complex and confused."

What is striking is that everyone involved in the current Greek revivals sees the plays as topical works rather than cultural artefacts. Martin Crimp's Cruel and Tender, adapted from Sophocles' Trachiniae, is set in a world where cities are pulverised, liberators turn aggressors and violence is expediently justified.

"If you want to root out terror there is only one rule: kill," says a government minister. Coming at a time when even an independent US commission has denied the Bush regime's linkage of Saddam Hussein's regime to al-Qaida, the words have an ominous ring.

David Lan, who commissioned Cruel and Tender for the Young Vic, sees no problem in updating the play.

"The director, Luc Bondy," he said, "came across Sophocles' play while researching Handel's opera, Heracles, and found in it something that resonated with a world seeking to justify the invasion of Iraq. And, if we constantly go back to the Greeks, it is because of the immediacy of their engagement with the world. Sophocles used a myth the audience all knew to comment on his own time. In a similar way we are using Sophocles' play as a way of illuminating ours."

But, although the Young Vic went back to Sophocles, it is Euripides who dominates the present scene, and it is not hard to see why. He lived through a period when Athens was engaged in a debilitating war against Sparta and eight of his 19 surviving plays deal with the conflict's disastrous political and social consequences. Euripides' scepticism also speaks directly to our own age: as the late Don Taylor, whose translation of Iphigenia at Aulis is being used by the National, once wrote: "Euripides does the biggest demolition job on the Homeric heroes before Shakespeare put them to the sword in Troilus and Cressida."

Intriguingly it is Euripides' Hecuba, written some 16 years before Iphigenia, which seems the hot play, with two productions forthcoming. On one level it is a character study of Priam's widowed queen driven to murderous vengeance by suffering. But Jonathan Kent, who directs the Donmar production opening in September, sees it as more than a study of individual desperation.

"It is," he said, "one of the most savage indictments of war ever written and Frank McGuinness has come up with a new version that has a strong contemporary feel. But in performance you have to strike a balance between articulating the message and allowing the audience to make its own connections. It would be a great mistake to set the action explicitly outside Basra or Baghdad. Yet it would also be a sign of failure if the play didn't bring Iraq to mind."

The Iraq war may not be the only reason why Greek plays are popular. New translations by poetic dramatists of the brilliance of Tony Harrison and Ted Hughes have made the plays accessible. Actors have been liberated from the armpit rhetoric of the past. And, as Kent points out, spaces like the Donmar and the Almeida possess an epic intimacy ideal for Greek tragedy.

But in the end it is the Greek understanding of the human consequences of war and of the gulf between public rhetoric and private feeling that makes these plays seem shockingly relevant to our own divided world.

· Michael Billington is the Guardian's theatre critic