Welcome to Thebes

This new play by Moira Buffini is running at London’s National Theatre. It updates a number of Greek stories to modern West Africa, taking on big geopolitical issues with a mainly black cast. Thebes is an unspecified country where civil was has recently ended in the election of Eurydice (Creon’s surviving wife) as president. She is trying amid the ruins of her country to re-establish some kind of civilisation. To help her in this Theseus (Athens’ “first citizen”) is visiting to try to arrange some kind of international aid. The drama thus raises the questions of democracy v. tyranny, women in politics, race (Theseus has white aides), religion (the charismatic warlord Tydeus is possessed by Dionysus), the state v. the individual, child soldiers, and many others. It is perhaps too issue-driven for its own dramatic coherence and it contains enough material for a whole trilogy with a comedy to follow.

For the classicist the interest is in the use of mythological figures in the modern setting. All the characters have Greek names which fit their character role. One of Theseus’ (white) aides is called Talthybia after the tragic message-carrying figure; one of the child-soldiers is named after one of the Furies (Megaera) who she tells us she represents; some cabinet ministers are named after the Muses, while others are called Strife (Eris, chief of police) and Force (Bia). The main characters (Eurydice, Theseus, Antigone, Ismene and Tiresias) are recognisably derived from their equivalents in Athenian tragedy. The emphasis from the author and the production team seems to be on the recreation of ancient myth in a modern setting, but there is also a large input from Greek literature as well. Sophocles’ Antigone is the main narrative line and it follows the story closely: Polynices’ body is found and lies bloodily to the side of the stage throughout. Eurydice (standing in for her dead husband Creon) forbids its burial in an autocratic decree at odds with her democratic credentials. Antigone (the “mad one”) decides to bury the body, while Ismene (the “nice one”) agonises over whether to help her. After a very tense scene in which one the black child-soldiers is shot by a white security guard, Eurydice changes her mind and the two victims of the violence are buried together. Buffini chooses not to make this motivate the final section of the play where Theseus changes his mind and decides to help the tottering state of Thebes, but it becomes just one of a number of highly-charged scenes racing the action forward. This pushes things on at a furious pace but does not allow the dramatic conflicts to linger and come to a slow climax. Instead she turns to another tragedy, Euripides Hippolytus, for the event that makes Theseus see things differently. He has been in touch by mobile phone with things at home and the events familiar to National Theatre audiences from last year’s highly successful Phèdre have been taking place off-stage. With extra extended references to Euripides’ Bacchai as well as Aeschylus’s Eumenides this is a rich mix of tragic themes. Even Aristophanes gets a look in with reminiscences of his Lysistrata in the takeover of government by women.

For all its serious themes, it is a very funny play with some excellent lines, but perhaps sometimes it appears as if Aristophanes had contributed extra jokes to a Sophocles script. At one point a character says to Antigone and Ismene “… and as for your motherf…ing father!” The Athenian festival of Dionysus knew better to keep tragedy and comedy firmly separated.

With strong performances from all the large committed cast, pacy direction and an atmospheric set this production shows how the old Greek stories can be used creatively to speak to each generation afresh. The dialogue with the Greeks continues to be lively, with that competitive edge which shows how the moderns can attempt to go one better. As Theseus says in the play “Tragedy shows us how to live”.

Italian Renaissance Drawings

The British Museum has brought together a stunning collection of drawings by all the big names of Italian renaissance art: Leonardo, Michelangelo, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Raphael and many others. With informative displays and videos about the technique and materials of drawing including the manufacture of paper, this is an exemplary exhibition. This drawing of Raffaellino del Garbo (left) shows the risen Christ based on Roman copies of Greek originals of the god Bacchus (right).

The explanation label beside this drawing says that Italian renaissance artists did not slavishly copy Classical models, but used them to spark their creativity. They engaged with these Greek and Roman predecessors in a dialogue, often with a competitive edge. That comment, overturning years of prejudice about the dead hand of classicism on contemporary art, seems to me sum excellently what Classicists are seeking to do in making the Classical world in all its facets (languages, literatures, art, history and so on) available to each new generation. How refreshing to be thought of “engaging in a dialogue with a competitive edge” with our classical models rather than the usual dreary assumptions of dryness, pedantry and outmoded ideas. Top marks to the exhibition and the curator Hugo Chapman.

Semele/Salome

Semele/Salome

Which young female heroine asks a powerful male figure to grant her whatever she wishes? The granting of this favour then leads to her destruction. By a curious juxtaposition we had tickets for two operas on consecutive nights which provided two answers to this question. Handel’s Semele asks Jupiter to appear to her as a god, and Richard Strauss’s Salome asks Herod to give her whatever she wants in return for performing a dance before him. Semele as a mortal cannot withstand the sight of Jupiter and is burnt up, while Salome wants John the Baptist’s head on a silver charger, which Herod egged on by his wife Herodias, Salome’s mother, gives her. Herod is so repulsed by her favour that he orders her death. Handel is comic and amusing where Strauss is violent and shocking. (What would it be like to have Handel’s Salome and Strauss’s Semele? Could Handel be as striking and could Strauss be as light?) This was my second Semele of the year, with the same conductor and orchestra (Christophe Rousset and the Talens Lyriques) but was a very different affair to the earlier Chinese production in Brussels (see earlier post in September 2009). The singing here was much stronger with Danielle De Niese and Vivica Genaux in the roles of Semele and Ino/Juno, but without the theatrical production by David McVicar from Paris in the concert version I saw at the Barbican in London. Here the comedy was more apparent with Ovid’s rather ditzy heroine causing her own downfall by her vanity (De Niese making the most of her mirror aria “If I persist in gazing”). David McVicar was also responsible for the production of Salome at the Royal Opera Covent Garden. Here the strength of his vision made the lack of it at the Barbican all the more apparent. Set in the grim kitchen area of a swanky restaurant the violence and raw emotion was always there just under the surface and even in the bloody final scene was never overdone or indulgent. The figure of the naked executioner emerging covered in blood from the cistern with John the Baptist’s head is one of the strongest stage images I have seen. With Angela Denoke’s soprano soaring over the orchestra this scene packs a shocking punch, with Salome cradling the severed head in her lap like Agave with Pentheus’s head in Euripides’ Bacchae. It is not often that a biblical story can rival the mythical power of a Greek myth, but Oscar Wilde in his original play saw the potential of this episode to produce a new kind of Greek tragedy. Both pieces are based on strong literary texts: Congreve’s Semele and Wilde’s Salome. The surtitles projected to clarify the sung texts carried their own richness unusual in the librettos of operas. The highly contrasting treatments of two broadly similar stories show how classical myth can supply the raw ingredients for art which can be served up in different ways according to taste.