HECUBA
by Euripides
Royal Shakespeare Company
Brooklyn Academy of Music
Howard Gilman Opera House
Peter Jay Sharp Building
20 June 2005
I saw Vanessa
Redgrave in Hecuba by Euripides (c. 480-c. 406 BCE) at the Brooklyn
Academy of Music on Friday evening, 17 June [2005]. The performance
and production were, in a word, terrific—at least as far as I’m
concerned. There was a rather cool
review by Charles Isherwood in the New
York Times today [20 June] and his main complaint—he labeled it a “passionless
production”—was the very aspect that I found praiseworthy in Redgrave’s
performance of the captive Queen of Troy—her emotional reserve.
Diana, my frequent
theater partner, said she hadn’t been “engaged,” though she didn’t know exactly
why. I suspected that that had been her response, and when I read
Isherwood’s review, I guessed that she would agree with it. (I gather,
from the review, that the reception in London was similar—especially, as
Isherwood said, in comparison with a better-reviewed production of the same
play earlier.)
My response was
different: I saw Redgrave’s reserve as a portrayal of a woman who had just been
wrung dry—that there wasn’t much left. Maybe what I saw as “talkiness” in
the script (see below) was really this lack of strong emotion, but I didn’t
feel that way while I was watching. It looks, though, like I’m in a
pretty small minority.
Hecuba (c. 424 BCE) was presented as a
one-hour-and-40-minute one-act production in a single set of the slave
encampment for the captive Trojan women, and Redgrave is center stage virtually
the whole time. The set (designed by Es Devlin and lit by Adam Silverman),
which depicts the tent camp of the slaves crowded together climbing up a steep
hill toward the rear of the stage, is all in various shades of a subdued olive
(maybe avacado) green—sort of sun-faded and dusty. (I’ll remark later
that I kept wondering if the director’s intent was to evoke Iraq and the Middle
East—but my impression began here.)
All of the action
takes place in front of the tents, where Hecuba’s is down center (and the only
one that’s actually used). The costumes (also by Devlin) of the Trojan
women are similarly “dusty” and subdued, but include shades of blue and
blue-green and, I think, wine-red. All the women wear some sort of head
covering, but one or two of the chorus wear what can only be described as hejabs,
the Muslim head scarf.
Next to the physical
production and the acting, the most impressive thing I noted was that I could
hear and understand nearly every word of the dialogue—even the chorus, which
sings (not chants) its lines. I don’t think the production is miked—the
voices sound too natural and seem to come right from the stage, as opposed to
speakers in the house. (I was sitting near the house-right wall, right
below a set of speakers, and I couldn’t hear anything coming from them.)
I may be wrong, but
it sure sounded like everyone was projecting like actual actors rather than
film performers. And still, I could hear and understand everything
(except one brief scene when Polymestor, the treacherous king of Thrace—where
the scene is set—is inside Hecuba’s tent. She is killing his sons and
blinding him in revenge for his having killed her son who had been under
Polymestor’s protection. Nice folks, those Greeks.)
As far as the acting
is concerned, the only person worth talking about is Redgrave. As the
script has been rendered, hers is the only full character in the play; all the
others are little more than cameo appearances, with one or two discrete scenes
(with the exception of Polymestor). In fact, except for a couple of
actors, only Redgrave plays a single character. So, focusing on her
Hecuba, I have to say that it was an excellent job of acting in all that that
implies. Redgrave can be a scenery-chewer, but she’s perfectly restrained
here, except when outrage and grief drive the character to a legitimate
extreme.
This is, after all,
the character about whom Hamlet asks in the famous “rogue and peasant slave”
speech in Act 2, scene 2: “What’s Hecuba to him, or he to Hecuba, / That he should
weep for her?”
If you don’t know
the story—Hecuba
isn’t one of Euripides’ more-often produced plays—the former Queen of Troy is
now a slave along with the other women of Troy. King Priam and her sons
who fought at Troy have all been killed; her daughters Cassandra and Polyxena
are captives with her (Cassandra, who doesn’t appear in the play, has been
taken by Agamemnon), and her youngest son, Polydorus, who was spirited away to
Thrace by Priam, fearing that Troy would fall to the Greeks, so that one son
would survive, was placed under the protection of Polymestor, Priam’s longtime
and trusted friend, with a hoard of Trojan gold as his legacy.
Before the play
starts, Polymestor has had Polydorus (Matthew Douglas) killed after the news of
Troy’s defeat and sacking has reached Greece, in order to take the Trojan
gold. Hecuba doesn’t know of this yet, but Polydorus’ ghost delivers the
prologue and lays out the whole story, including that the Greek army has voted
to sacrifice Polyxena (lotsa Polys in this play) on the tomb of Achilles in
order to secure a wind to take them from Thrace, where they have been becalmed,
home to Athens and the Peloponnesus.
Just after Polyxena (Lydia
Leonard) is sacrificed (off stage, of course), and Hecuba has made the burial
arrangements with Agamemnon (Malcolm Tierney), who is her friend and defender,
her servant drags a covered body onto the stage. Hecuba thinks it is her
daughter, then sees that it is her last son and learns of Polymestor’s
treachery. So you can see that there is ample cause for Hecuba to go off
the deep end—it is
a Greek tragedy, after all—and Redgrave handles all this very well, not going
overboard (which, I suppose, is possible, especially for her).
I mean, if you buy
the premise that this is a woman brought horribly low, seen her family slaughtered,
her home destroyed, one of her last two daughters sacrificed on the demand of
the enemy army, and now her last surviving son murdered by a presumed friend,
Redgrave is pretty much believable in her grief, anger, and, finally, thirst
for revenge.
When she lures
Polymestor and his sons to the camp and then into her tent—on the promise that
she will reveal where Priam’s hidden treasure is—and with the help of her women
kills the boys (John Dominici, Christopher Madden, Otto Pippenger; two of these
appear im each performance) and blinds Polymestor, you know she’s a woman who
has just lost all reason to go on. She has nothing more to lose and only
wants to make her treacherous former friend suffer what she has suffered.
Redgrave is angry, but not hysterical.
Polymestor (Darrell
D’Silva, who also plays Odysseus in his one scene near the beginning of the
play) has the only other part that requires a range of acting. (Odysseus
only comes to tell Hecuba of the army’s vote to sacrifice Polyxena; Agamemnon,
who has several scenes, pretty much also only comes to bring news or get
some—in the case of the discovery of Polydorus’ body; and Polyxena has only the
one scene where she is taken for the sacrifice and asks her mother not to beg
for her life, to let her accept her fate with dignity. That last requires
some nuances, I guess, but it’s all one piece—well enough accomplished,
but little variation.)
So D’Silva, as the
villain of the play, I guess, gets the best scenes with Redgrave—he starts out
as her trusted friend and comes to mourn her losses (having just learned of
Polydorus’ death, don’t ya know), then turns to barely suppressed greed as
Hecuba tells Polymestor of Priam’s hidden gold (on top of the cache he’s
already stolen—which he’s told Hecuba is safe back at his palace, don’t ya
know) and follows her into the tent with his sons to learn where the treasure
is hidden.
Finally, when he
emerges blinded and defeated by the “terrorists” (yes, that’s what he calls the
Trojan women who got the drop on him inside the tent), and then stumbles on the
bodies of his two boys, he’s enraged, “destroyed” (that what he calls it), and
aggrieved. (Actually, D’Silva’s the scenery-chewer here—though not
without plenty of reason!) It’s the scene with all the flash and
pyrotechnics, but not more than you’d expect given the envelop.
By the way, there
was one well handled (and designed) tech thing that first appears here—and used
again at the end. Polymestor’s railings after his blinding and the
deaths of this sons are echoed as if bouncing off the hills above the
camp. It’s a very evocative effect, and it appears again when Hecuba
keens over the body of Polydorus as the play ends. (The sound design was by Fergus O’Hare.)
As I hinted, the
script seems to have been severely cut, perhaps to focus it entirely on
Hecuba. (I haven’t looked at a translation to see what might have been
removed.) While the translation (by Tony Harrison, described in the
program as “Britain’s leading theater and film poet,” who also seems to have
directed—more on that in a bit) was fine—not stilted or overly literary, but
not too contemporary, barring a few obvious references: the aforementioned “terrorists”
and the habitual use of “coalition” to designate the Greek forces.
I don’t know if the
cuts or the translation made the play virtually all talk—except for the scenes
with Polymestor—or if that’s the nature of the play. Greek tragedies do
tend to be almost all speeches, of course, since all the violent acts have to
take place off stage. This being the case, the shortness of the
performance was probably a good idea—and so was the singing chorus, which at
least alternated the spoken speeches (there isn’t a lot of actual
dialogue—stichomythia, if you will) with a different kind of delivery.
(In another hint of
evoking the Middle East, I detected a slight redolence of Middle Eastern
rhythms in the chorus music (composed by Mick Sands and directed by Bruce O’Neil).
Just occasionally, to my ears, it sounded like Jewish, rather than Arab,
music. I may have projected this onto the production, though; I’m not
sure it was intentional, even as slight as it was.)
One thing about this
production is slightly odd: there’s no director specifically credited.
The program bills this as “a new version by Tony Harrison,” and his bio
identifies him as a director (not the
director: his function in the company is listed as “new version of Hecuba”) as well as a poet
and translator.
(The New York Times review
identified the original director, Laurence Boswell, and also reported the news
that his name had been removed from the production credits in London. The
article didn’t say why that had been the case, but did suggest that Tony
Harrison, the adapter, had taken over the task of directing, hinting,
however, that it had been a company collaboration, too. A horse designed
by a committee.)
I guess I’m assuming
Harrison’s also the director, for lack of any alternative choice, but the
production does bear what I’ve often seen as the hallmark of a play directed by
its writer: the focus is almost entirely on the words. (I saw the
Broadway revival of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf back
in 1976 which Edward Albee directed, and it was the same phenomenon: I came
away saying to myself, “Wow, what a great script!”)
My impression is
that this production was very specifically designed to showcase Redgrave.
If she initiated it, or if Harrison did, or if they came up with the idea
together, I have no idea, but the way the script was cut so that it focused
entirely on Hecuba, a role for a strong older woman—how many of those are there
in the canon?—and stage design that puts Hecuba center stage all the time, the
lack of any other major character to share the stage—even Polymestor has only one
scene, longer though it is—and the casting that didn’t include one other
recognizable name to balance against Redgrave—it all suggests that this was
deliberately orchestrated to be a star vehicle for Redgrave. Not that
that’s a bad thing, of course; this isn’t really a criticism but just an
observation.
Now, about the
potential contemporary references: I don’t know how far Harrison wanted it to
go. It’s clearly intentional: the play’s synopsis in the program starts
off saying, “The first Great War between the East and the West is over,” and,
of course, Troy was in the Middle East (Asia Minor, anyway—part of what is now
Turkey) and Greece is European.
But despite the uses
if words like “coalition” and “terrorists,” I don’t know how the situation of
Troy and the circumstances of the captive women are really parallel except in
the most general way. (I kept trying to see if the gold for which
Polymestor lusted could somehow be a substitute for oil, but it doesn’t work
really.)
It seems to come
down to an examination of the plight of a defeated and captive people, but not
specifically the Iraqis (who, for all the errors and deceits of George W. Bush
and Tony Blair, et al., aren’t really captive in the same sense—and might not
even be said to be defeated, since it was pretty much just Saddam and his army
who got smashed).
In the end, I don’t
think Harrison (or Harrison and Redgrave) intended this Hecuba to be a comment on
the current conflict in the Middle East/Iraq, but to evoke it; the refs where
meant to resound without being a direct parallel. Anyway, that’s how I
see it, despite Redgrave’s well-known support of the Palestinians and other subjugated
peoples of the region.
By the way, if this
is Hecuba’s
first New York production, as reported by the Daily News, that makes it a U.S.
premiere. If it had been on Broadway, it would have qualified for a Best
Play Tony! (Didn’t that happen recently with another ancient
classic? I have a vague recollection.
[I still don’t remember a previous instance for sure, but it did happen
later with Mark Twain’s unproduced 1898 Is
He Dead?, on Broadway in 2007-2008.
It was eligible for a Best Play Tony but wasn’t nominated.])
*
* * *
OLD COMEDY AFTER ARISTOPHANES’ FROGS
by David Greenspan
Classic Stage Company
26
May 2008
My friend Diana and
I took a subscription to the Classic Stage Company this year [2008] because
there were two shows that looked promising. CSC had a subscription plan
whereby we could take four tickets and divide them up anyway we wanted—four
single seats to four performances, three seats for one play and one for
another, and so on—so we took one four-seat subscription and planned to go to
two plays together, skipping two of the announced schedule, Richard III with Michael
Cumpsty and The Seagull
starring Dianne Wiest and Alan Cumming.
As it turns out,
that may have been a mistake. I’ve already described my problems with the
first of our two selections, New
Jerusalem, the play about philosopher Baruch Spinoza we saw back
last February [see my report posted on Rick On Theater on 20 April 2014]. Now, on Friday, 16 May [2008], we
went over to CSC (in a pouring, all-day rain) to see a new adaptation of a
classic farce billed as Old
Comedy After Aristophanes’ Frogs, the last show of my
planned season (though there may be some Lincoln Center Festival stuff when
that comes along later in the summer).
The pretentious
title should have been a giveaway, I suppose. (Playwright David Greenspan
said in an interview in amNewYork that the title was “a way of
suggesting that it’s more of an original play than an adaptation.” So, is
that a good thing?)
CSC didn’t actually
produce this play, adapted by Greenspan and directed by David Herskovits.
It was a product of one of New York City’s fairly new companies, the Target
Margin Theater (on the scene since 1991). You might remember that
Herskovits, Target Margin’s artistic director, was also the director of The Jew of Malta in March
2007 [in “Some Plays about Jews from
the Archives,” posted on 15 February 2020].
I don’t know the
explanation for CSC’s adoption of the Target Margin show but I suspect there
was at least some element of financial consideration involved in the
decision—it’s cheaper to co-produce a play another theater is already
developing than to come up with an original one from scratch. I don’t
really have a handle on Target Margin’s style and production quality, but they
have something of a rep for good and interesting work, and I suppose CSC could
have bought the production to fill out their season, based on the facts that it’s
a classic and promised to be an interesting and provocative take (Greenspan has
won a playwriting Obie) by a good troupe.
Wrong!
The review in CurtainUp called the play “an
incomprehensible hodgepodge” (it also called it a “mess”), and while that’s
perfectly accurate—it’s also generous. Variety
called it “twee” (which itself is kind of twee, isn’t it?) and “pretentious.”
The Times said
it was “desperate-to-be-current.” All of these are true.
Diana, who said
the New York Times had
been kind, added that the troupe was trying hard to be clever, larding the play
with all kinds of references to every cultural figure they could come up with
from the past 2500 years, and focusing heavily on BushCheneyRove &
Co. (I could make short work of this report by simply pasting in Neil
Genzlinger’s short Times review. But I’m a masochist, so I soldier
on . . . .)
I responded to Diana
that clever was too tolerant. They were trying to be smart-ass! (I’m smarter than YOU are! Lookit
all the pop and cultural refs I can throw in here!) That’s
not clever. Clever might be to make Macbeth
a template for a conspiracy-theory take on the assassination of JFK (ummm . . . that’s Macbird!, in case y’all
missed it). This was frat-boy weisenheimer.
(In that amNY interview, Greenspan
called it “a parody of political malfeasance in our own time.” Riiiight.)
The reviews,
especially Genzlinger’s in the Times,
made a point that all the pop references went by so fast and were so voluminous
that there wasn’t any way to catch them as they flew by. Even if any
of them were funny—and I never heard anyone laugh; I sure didn’t—we never had a
chance in Hell (well, okay, Hades—it is Greek comedy, after all) of glomming onto
any of it. (I’m not saying the material wasn’t funny—just that I never
had a shot at finding out.)
The Times described Herskovits’s
direction as “high-energy”; I might have used a word like “frenetic,”
instead. As several reviewers noted, in addition, the refs to The Bush
League were so flat and commonplace that we’ve heard them all many, many times
before—and he’s so close to being outahere that it’s almost irrelevant now to
boot. (W may be our worst president ever [remember: I wrote this before
November 2016!]—let’s not debate that now, any of you who disagree—but how many
times do we have to hear that. It’s
not news! Preaching to the converted may work in
politics—lookit the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, John McCain,
these recent days—but it makes awful theater.)
The whole enterprise
had the ring of a bunch of college kids sitting up through the night, drinkin’
and tokin’, telling each other their best BushCheneyRove jokes . . . back in 2004! (And
worse, after they sobered up, they still made the rest of us listen to the
jokes they thought were sooo
fuuunny when
they were stoned!)
The icing on this
cake of shame is that Target Margin isn’t a bunch of college kids (or recent
grads), they’re older than that and should know better and be capable of more,
deeper thought. Aristophanes, as far as I know, wasn’t a dummass; he had
things to say to his Athenian audience back then. He wasn’t writing the
predecessor of today’s TV sitcoms—more like, maybe, That Was the Week that Was. (Tom Lehrer
rules!)
Greenspan and the
Target Margin troupe seem to have dummed Aristophanes down and lost an
opportunity to tell us things we might not have thought of or, at least, put
them in startling new perspective. (A mind, to paraphrase Dan Quayle—if
that’s even possible—is
a terrible thing to waste. Mine, not theirs!)
You may have noticed
that I haven’t actually described the play much. Or at all, really.
I can’t. Diana dozed off, but I didn’t and I still can’t tell you what I
saw because it was so incoherent and haphazard I not only couldn’t retain it—I
couldn’t follow it while it was going on in front of me.
That CurtainUp review characterized the
production as “the kitchen sink method of playwriting and performing.” I
can tell you that that isn’t a metaphor: as he was departing the stage,
Dionysus retreats to the back of the playing area, where all the props and set
pieces are stashed in view of the audience, and brings out . . . an actual kitchen sink . .
. which he carries off with him. Ain’t they just too much?
I didn’t nod off
like Diana, but I zoned out, at a complete loss to keep untangling and
deciphering what was happening on stage. I left with the impression that
the actors had all been speed-talking—but I don’t think they really were.
Might as well have been, though.
I can also tell you
that Greenspan kept the basic plot of Aristophanes’ Frogs. (I’ll let you all look that up
if you don’t already know it.) The outline is still there, as far as I
could remember. (I didn’t reread the Aristophanes before I saw the CSC
production.) He just larded it with contemporary references—in addition
to The Bush League, he invokes Arthur Miller, Judy Garland, Gertrude Stein, Eugene
O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, Walt Whitman, and James Joyce, as well as the Iraq
war, torture (with allusions to waterboarding), contemporary Broadway and its
audiences, the Jewish and Christian Bibles, and Roman mythology. (Variety dubbed this “so
much preening, in-jokey shtick.”)
I also haven’t said
anything about the performances, so I’ll just observe that no one embarrassed
himself (except maybe Greenspan and Herskovits), even as no one made much of an
impression. (That’s why I’m not going to mention anyone by name.)
Everyone had lots of energy—they had to—but the end product, as the CurtainUp critic wrote, was “for the
birds”! (Get it?
For the birds? The Birds—another
Aristophanes comedy? Huh? Huh?)
Oh, well . . . .
The performance
lasted only 90 minutes—no intermission. Diana opined that that was done
deliberately—to keep anyone from leaving. (CSC has a three-sided house,
but the whole audience was in the center section—probably to keep the theater
from looking like Yankee Stadium on a non-game day!) Nonetheless, at
least two spectators walked out during the show. Since that required
walking along the edge of the playing area, it’s a pretty good signal of their
response, wouldn’t ya say?
Needless to add (but
I will anyway), Diana and I are not taking out a subscription for CSC next
season.
*
* * *
THE BACCHAE
by Euripides
National Theatre of
Scotland
Lincoln Center Festival
Rose Theatre
Time Warner Center
22
July 2008
My theater friend
Diana and I went to one of the Lincoln Center Festival events on Friday, 11
July [2008]—and, generally speaking, I wish we hadn’t. Sorry. We
went to the “new” Rose Theatre (in the immense Time Warner Center at Columbus
Circle—where the old New York Coliseum used to be) to see Alan Cumming in the
National Theatre of Scotland’s new adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae (405 BCE). (That’s quite a mouthful, all
together!)
Apparently the
production was the bomb at Edinburgh last year, and most of the reviews here
were at worst complimentary of the theatrics and the acting, but I found the
whole experience unmoving and contrived. (Oddly, the only review I read
that was negative was Back
Stage, which I usually perceive as being purposefully kind to
actors—nearly the whole of its readership, after all. Adam Perlman’s 7
July criticism, however, actually dealt Cumming a bad notice. Perlman
even called the production boring!)
First of all, it’s a
musical. Yes! A musical. Well, okay—”a play with music” if
you insist, but, whatever . . . . Perlman likened Tim
Sutton’s music to Galt MacDermot’s score for Hair,
but he’s off base. It was soul music—old-time Motown. It was
Dion(ysus) and the Supremes: the female chorus, all dressed in gowns of different
styles and various hues of red, were all Afro-Europeans (or, in some cases
maybe, African Americans—I couldn’t be sure) and I swear they were all
channeling ’60s girl groups.
Now, I think this
was the heart of the problem. Pop music isn’t weighty—even the sad
songs. (Tragedy in pop music is when your boyfriend is killed in a
motorcycle accident.) It’s a light genre, not like, say, grand opera or
art songs—or even folk songs. It’s impossible, it seems to me, to come
off such a dynamic and get to the abject and awful tragedy of a mother who has
murdered her beloved son.
Not just murdered,
of course, but torn him limb from limb with her bare hands—and is proud of her
feat (because she thinks she and her sister Maenads have rent a mountain
lion). I’m afraid it’s like the old joke: You can’t get there from
here. You can’t get to that kind of horrific tragedy from the Supremes manquées.
I can’t say I was
much bothered by the contemporary adaptation, by playwright David Greig from a
new literal translation by classicist Ian Ruffell. Particularly given the
overall style of the production (directed by John Tiffany), the modernness of
the speech was not part of the problem. Or maybe it was just overridden
by the more harmful elements.
Along with the
playfulness of the musical atmosphere, for instance, was an accompanying
flipness of approach. This was essentially signaled at the very start
when the god Dionysus (Cumming, of course) descended to the stage from the
flies suspended upside down and handcuffed, wearing a gold lamé
skirt/chiton. The chiton, gravity not having been suspended as well, hung
down over Cumming’s head, leaving his butt bare; he wore nothing
underneath. (The New
York Post review on 7 July made quite a point of this—with puns aplenty!)
A bare-assed god. Now, except maybe for Cupid, that’s not what you’d
call a dignified entrance, I wouldn’t say. And the intimation of S&M
doesn’t add to the tone of seriousness for a tragedy-to-be.
Okay, so maybe
Tiffany was playing with undercutting the tragedy, subverting it for some
dramatic or thematic purpose. I don’t know why he would—but what do I
know? (I’ve always felt that the musical beauty of the songs in Peter
Weiss’s Marat/Sade
and Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd
made the subjects all the more devastating because the melodiousness was
in such contrast with the lyrics and the plays’ themes.)
Let’s say he was
subverting the tragedy. But the final scenes, when Agave (Paola
Dionisotti—which, by the way, I think is some kind of Italian variation on ‘Dionysus’)
came down from Mount Cithaeron holding her son’s head and was discovered by her
father, Cadmus (Ewan Hooper), who had gathered the severed parts of his
grandson’s body, were totally piteous. It’s an exceedingly bloody ending,
by the way.
There was no irony
in Tiffany’s treatment of the ending, and no winking sop to the earlier
lightness. There was no segue from the playfulness of the seduction of
Pentheus (Cal MacAninch), the macho-posturing Theban king, dressing him in
women’s clothes, and sending him up the mountain to spy on his mother and her
cohorts.
The mountain
bacchanalia and dismemberment took place off stage, of course, so we got the
flip teasing of Pentheus, the adorning him as a woman—about two-thirds of the
play, I’d say—then, bam,
the tragedy of filicide and Agave’s realization of what she’d done. I don’t
think it works—it didn’t for me. It’s not only too mercurial (to stay
with the ancient god theme—even though that’s his Roman name), it sets us
up for something we’re not going to get—or fails to set us up for what we do
get. In other words, if we don’t know how The Bacchae ends, we’ve been misled, in a
theatrical sense.
(Incidentally, Dionysus
is the Greek name for the Roman god Bacchus, the god of wine and drunkenness. Hence the play’s title—The Bacchae, the followers of Bacchus/Dionysus—and the invocation
of a bacchanalia, above.)
Now, Tiffany did
accomplish a lot of theatricality, which from a technical perspective might
have been interesting—if it had been in aid of something effective. The
Motown verve wasn’t bad in itself—though, of course, it was already a success
in Dreamgirls
over 25 years ago. (Before that, of course, MacDermot did parody the
Supremes in one number in Hair.)
That entrance from
the flies was certainly effective if all that was desired was to make us sit up
and take notice. As Dionysus spoke of his mother’s grave, red
poppies magically popped up from the stage (and I still can’t figure out how
they accomplished that!).
At one point early
on—there’s no intermission in the nearly two-hour production, but it was
earlier than halfway—the whole set burst into flame (gas jets camouflaged along
the walls) which not only was a startling visual effect, but an auditory and
sensory one as well: there was a very loud whoosh
as the flames lit up and you could feel the heat all the way to the balcony
where we were sitting.
This was more an
effect for its own sake than anything dramatic. Dionysus destroys
Pentheus palace, but a) there was no palace set on stage and b) the god does
this by toppling the palace, not burning it. This was just Dionysus
showing off his powers, which I suppose is useful. (God does it in
Exodus, doesn’t he?)
The set, by Miriam
Buether, was very stark and minimalist. It was essentially a serpentine
wall from the proscenium arch up around the back and down again. (To be
precise, it was really two walls; the stage entrance was the gap between them
which was obscured in the upstage darkness.) Everything was white—though
the floor changed color and texture (I never figured how they did that,
either—it was obviously an illusion, but I don’t know the tech).
Along the walls were
a pair of parallel rails so the chorus (and occasionally Dionysus) could stand
on one and use the one above as a hand-hold. (I think the gas jets were
embedded in the lower rail.) My impression was that this was inspired by
(or ripped off from) Brook’s 1970 Midsummer
Night’s Dream, though that production may now be so much a part of
our theater—and theater design—memory that no one realizes when she’s taking
from it anymore. (On the other hand, maybe I’m just projecting.)
Buether seems also
to have done the costumes which, except for Dionysus’ gold chiton (which,
however, could pass for a girl’s party dress), were contemporary clothes.
Well, mostly contemporary—Cadmus and Tiresias (John Bett), two very old men,
wore cut-aways and top hats with spats on their shoes—very Jazz Age. Then
they do a soft-shoe tap routine, canes and all! (Sort of Greco-Scottish
Chevalier-Boyer.) See what I mean by theatricality?
I’ll also say that
the individual performances (and the girl-group routines of the chorus) were
well executed. Cumming may have been a perfect choice for this god of
drink and party, reviving his androgynous party-boy persona from Cabaret (1998-2004;
revived 2013) and his bad-boy villainy of Mack the Knife (The Threepenny Opera, 2006). (He’s currently being seen here
as the host of PBS’s Masterpiece
Mystery—the former Mystery
program that airs all those great British TV crime shows.)
Furthermore, in a
rare confluence of genres, the actor got to display both his classical chops
and his musical acumen. Just to be sure he passed the visual test, his
skirt-like chiton was complemented by a Shirley Temple-curled dark wig (he took
it off at one point—to show us he’s a fake and dissembler—so we know it’s a
piece); and if he didn’t actually mince, he did move in a sexually
ambiguous gait. Cumming, though, sublimed from the gleeful manipulator to
the stone-cold avenger as if he’d just thrown a switch—but that’s the
nature of the role, I think. His charisma, however, was in no way
diminished and Cumming carried off the seduction of his arrogant cousin with
complete conviction.
The other
performances, including Agave’s, tended to be one-note but that wasn’t the
fault of either the actors or the director, but the playwright: they appeared
in scenes whose emotional/psychological content has been keyed to one
heightened moment in the plot. We never saw Agave before she went up
Mount Cithaeron, for instance, so we only know her after she had torn her son
to pieces. We did see the shift Dionisotti made from delusional ecstasy
to total desolation (which happens to be where the previous lightness conflicts
with the progress of the play, but that’s not Dionisotti’s responsibility,
either).
Cadmus was seen
first as the pixilated old-timer off to dance in the woods in praise of
Dionysus, then as the blood-smeared and devastated grandfather who has gathered
Pentheus’ body parts from Mount Cithaeron, but we didn’t get to see Hooper make
the shift, only play the final stages of each state. This, of course, is
the nature of Greek drama: transitions occur off stage.
The cast, indeed,
can’t be faulted for any of this and handled everything excellently (though, as
we actors all know, it’s easier to play emotional extremes than subtler states
or evolving ones). In contrast, we did get to watch the staid and
unmovable Pentheus willingly become a cross-dressing spy (did MacAninch get in
touch with his feminine side, I wonder?) as he stopped just short of giddiness
at the prospect of joining the women in their bacchanal. (When Dionysus
dolled him up in the dress the god has selected for him, Pentheus didn’t
actually ask if it made his butt look big, but such a question hung
in the air somewhere.)
I’d never seen the
National Theatre of Scotland before (they were here last season with the
Iraq-themed Black Watch,
also directed by Tiffany, but I didn’t see it), but from this single exposure,
I believe they are a terrific company on a par with other national companies
like the Abbey in Dublin or the late Ingmar Bergman’s Royal Dramatic Theater of
Sweden.
My final problem was
that in the end I didn’t know what Tiffany was trying to say. If he wasn’t
trying to say anything, then shame on him. Why do a Greek tragedy,
especially if you’re going to re-adapt it and make it so contemporary, if you’re
not going to say something? Do Funny
Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (yeah. I know—that’s
Roman). Do Boys from
Syracuse (and that’s Shakespeare—get off my back!) If he was
trying to tell me something, say about the wages of irreverence or
the penalty for choosing emotion over reason, I missed it. Cost me $36.50
to do it, too!
Given the modern
trappings of this production, from the language to the dress, it’s probably
inevitable that I’d look for a contemporary point. Was there something in
here about fundamentalism, especially of the Taliban-Iranian kind, that
punishes in extremis
anyone, both believer and infidel, who strays from the narrow interpretation of
the faith postulated by a few rigid fanatics?
Was it perhaps a
political comment on blindly following a leader who uses deception and trickery
to persuade and maneuver his constituents?
(Do we know anyone like that?
[Reminder again: this was written before the advent of DJT!]) Were
the creators telling us that forcing our moral views on someone else (I don’t
know—like, maybe gay folks?) is the route to tragedy? There was nothing
but my own imagination to lead to these notions, so I don’t know if Tiffany or
Greig had them or something like them in mind.
This is all a dramaturg’s point of view, of course.
Our three fundamental questions are: Why this play? Why now? Why here?
You don’t do a play unless you have a reason to put it on. Now, that
reason can simply be that it’s entertaining and diverting, to be sure.
There’s nothing wrong with that—at least not in my epistemology.
But Greek tragedy, especially if you’re going to the lengths
of re-adapting it, doesn’t fit that model, I don’t think. On the other
hand, the flip side is that maybe Tiffany and Greig did have some point to
make, and maybe they even made it, but I’m just too dense to have seen
it.
That’s more than possible, but, then, if I missed it, so did
my companion and so did all the reviewers I read on this production.
(Several verbalized some form of Euripides’ point—The Bacchae, which was the
writer’s last play and was left unstaged at his death, is his most ambiguous
with respect to theme, and scholars debate its message continuously.
Anyway, none of the reviewers had anything to offer concerning what
Tiffany or Greig added or revealed with their version.) So, I’m not alone
in my denseness. Like I said: Shame on them!
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