The Suppliant Women @ the Royal Exchange Theatre

The Suppliant Women

By Aeschylus

Royal Exchange Theatre, 14 March 2017

David Grieg’s new version of Aeschylus’ great tragedy, a dramatisation of the myth of the fifty daughters of Danaos, is exciting from beginning to end.

The young women come to Argos as suppliants, having fled Egypt to escape forced marriage to their so-called barbarian cousins. So now the question becomes whether they will be granted asylum, and at what cost.

Though the contemporary resonance of the play is clear, it is never laboured, and those who like their Greek tragedies served straight, no nonsense, will be well satisfied here. My one qualm with Grieg’s version of the text is that it does not make it plain that while Danaos and his daughters are granted protection and asylum they are not given full citizenship rights. Instead, they are given the status of resident aliens (metics or metoikoi), not citizens, by the Argive assembly. And I expect there were many Argives who saw the newcomers as bogus Greeks, barbarians even… (Though it is interesting to note here that Aeschylus’ text remarks, without prejudice of any kind, on the girls’ dark skin.)

This production uses song and dance and music to great dramatic effect; and even when the actors speak there is music, the effect being to make you happily and acutely aware of the rhythm and metre present in the spoken dialogue. For this we must praise the two musicians, Ben Burton and Callum Armstrong. I got a lot out of this excellent, exciting, thought-provoking Royal Exchange production.

The Suppliant Women is showing at the Royal Exchange until 1 April, further details can be found here.

The Oresteia @ HOME

The Oresteia

By Aeschylus

HOME, 28 October 2015

Simon Trinder (Orestes) with The Furies in The Oresteia. Photo by Graeme Cooper.

This powerful production uses Ted Hughes’ chiselled, perspicacious version of Aeschylus’ blood-shrouded trilogy.

He was an interesting fellow, this Aeschylus. An earlier play, Persae (472 BCE), presented a sympathetic portrait of the Persians, the Greeks’ great adversary in war; a foe against whom Aeschylus had fought some years earlier. In The Oresteia a lot of the action takes place in Argos, the Argives being a people both Egyptian and Greek. Danaus features in their foundation myth.

At the start, we have a society dealing with the aftermath of war. Troy has fallen and the warriors, triumphant and/or trauma-stricken, return home. Among them is Agamemnon, but what awaits him is not a triumphal procession but bloody death at the hands of his wife Clytemnestra. She no longer wants to know him. More violence follows. They aren’t kind of heart, those Furies.

We had a strong cast, led by Gary Shelford (Agamemnon) and Lyndsey Marshal (Clytemnestra), among whom Simon Trinder (Orestes) in particular caught the eye. What was special about this production, though, was that you became immersed in the drama from the very start. There was an immediacy; it was a matter of quality, not quanta. Right from the get-go, you were an involved witness in the unfolding tragedy, if not quite a member of the chorus.

While watching the drama unfold – and this was likely a consequence of Blanche McIntyre’s approach, whether intended or not, I don’t know – I thought of how local it all was. Reflecting back, it struck me that the action on stage undercut all the talk of justice at the end. These people were family, neighbours (as in Jedwabne in 1941), and the (village) violence arose from someone wanting more, just as it might come out of a petty squabble. Or occur as a matter of settling old scores, a grievance or insult that preys on the mind. War and tyranny created the opportunity for this violence to escalate. It is significant that the gods are the ones who at the close, from their exalted vantage point, come out with all this stuff about justice. Won’t ever happen in this world: revenge will always trump reconciliation.

Classics are always topical, almost by definition. The Oresteia is a classic but not an uplifting one. That’s because its theme, the problem of how we keep past violence in the past, is one we are hardly ever likely to solve.

The Oresteia is showing at HOME until 14 November, further details can be found here.