Week #6 : 'Electra' by Euripides (and Sophocles... and Aeschylus...)

"And if death in justice demands death, why, then, I and your son Orestes must kill you to avenge our father's death; For if the one revenge is just, so is the other."  

(Peter Vellacott's translation of Euripides Electra.)

Electra, with accounts written by the three most powerful Greek playwrights - Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus, each wrote plays surrounding her and her tragic tale of murder, revenge and redemption.  
Each playwright wrote differing accounts of her tale, and depending on which Greek Tragedian you prefer, you are bound to find a version to suit your tastes (Me... I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Euripides).  


She is one of the great female characters in Greek Tragedy.  Set aside from her counterparts of the defective and rejected muse 'Cassandra' (again, this depends entirely on who's version of Cassandra you're reading) and the revengeful and tortured soul 'Medea'; Electra is terrifyingly brutal in her attack on her own mother and (step) father.

Stamford University 2009 Electra Festival

In Euripides version the audience first hears the story of Agamemnon and his conquests in Troy retold by a Peasant.  We soon hear that he has been murdered by Aegisthus who has also returned to Argos and married Agamemnon's widow Clytemnestra.  With the thoughts that Clytemnestra's children Electra (and her future children) and Orestes will revenge their fathers death - Aegisthus then removes Orestes to Phocis to be bought up by strangers and waits until Electra is of childbearing age, he marries her off to a Peasant (who is retelling this story now) so her children will grow up poor and lowly, and therefore less likely to have the ability to avenge the death of Agamemnon. 
Electra, whom is still a virgin (as the Peasant will not touch her as he believes that he is not of noble enough birth to bed her) laments her situation and the loss of her mother and father.  One day she is visited by a man who delivers her information about her brother.  After receiving some cryptic information from an Old Man (who used to be her fathers servant), she realises that this man is her brother.  Soon they conspire to avenge Agamemnon's death and discuss how they are to kill Aegisthus and realise that they must also take vengeance on their mother Clytemnestra.  Electra takes this challenge for herself:

"The killing of my mother I shall claim myself."

Orestes attends the sacrificing ritual to honour the Nymphs that Aegisthus is presiding over.  Aegistus is killed and bought to the hut that Electra lives in.  During this time Clytemnestra is told that Electra has given birth and she is to come and witness her grandson for the customary 10th day sacrifice.  Just before she arrives, Orestes tried to convince Electra that she does not have to kill her mother, that killing Aegisthus was enough to avenge their fathers death.  Yet Electra, convinced that it is the only thing to do, is resolved to kill Clytemnestra.
The time comes for vengeance and Electra is steely in her resolve.  Clytemnestra enters the house and as an aside to the audience we see Electra's vengeance is cold and hard.

"All is prepared.  The sword of sacrifice which felled the bull, by whose side you shall fall, is sharpened for you.  In the house of death you shall be still his bride whose bed you shared in life.  This 'favour' is all I grant you.  In return I take justice, your life in payment for my father's life."

Clytemnestra is slaughtered and bought next to Aegisthus' body.  
As a final act of retribution to the slaying of these two bodies, the Gods send The Dioscori to demand that Electra and Orestes come to Olympus to be trialed for their crimes. 

The Sophocles version, written in about 410BC directly addresses the character of Electra which focuses on the reasoning of why a daughter would want to so vehemently murder her mother.  In this version Electra prevails and triumphs, which turns his version into more of a case study of female desires as a revenge drama and as a psychological account of Electra herself.

Aeschylus' account of Electra is interwoven into the Oresteia Trilogy.  This version focusses more on the ethical issues of the murders within the frame of a family blood feud.

Euripides, similarly to Sophocles, focuses somewhat on the character traits of Electra, but also brings Orestes into the plot further.  His version is less of a case study on the blinding revenge that Electra has - Euripides also facilitates the cost of the blood revenge and makes Electra account for her vengeance. 


According to  Ruth Hazel in her article 'Electra: A Fragmented Woman' Sophocles Electra is one of the most performed, stating that this is because of a more realistic style of performance which offers a more complex and challenging role for the actress portraying Electra. She has less of an urge to force her brother Orestes into the revenge on their mother and father and has no qualms about committing matricide.  Hazel describes Euripides version as 'the most unappealing, the least heroic, the most mentally disturbed and disturbing.'  Whereas Aeschylus' version of Electra as stylised, more likely to be performed by a man and and with traditional primitive masks.

It is not possible to count how many performances and adaptations of Electra there have been.  Besides Euripides' 'Women of Troy' and 'Medea' , it amounts to being one of the most performed and re-envisioned Greek plays of the modern Greek theatrical experiences.
 

                      

Some of the most recent adaptations bought to the   stage have been: set in America in John Deere Country with modern singers and dancers and Washburn University (Topeka, Kansas, USA) hosted British playwright, Nick Payne, adaptation based on Neo-Freudian psychology to revision Sophocles text.  
Last year at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Tadashi Suzuki bought his adaptation of Euripides text which was described as 'Euripides, meets Beckett, meets The Exorcist'...

Each and every director has their own take on how Electra needs to be portrayed, especially with the choice of playwright.  
Had I enough time, I would have read the other three versions.  I may be remiss in doing so, and it may have given me further abilities in discussing this text at length.




Next Week: 'Equus' by Peter Shaffer

Week #5 : 'Crave' by Sarah Kane

M - I don't want to die alone and not be found till my bones are clean 

and the rent is overdue.

A - I am not what I am, I am what I do.

C - No one can hate me more than I hate myself.

B - The fags aren't killing me fast enough.

These are the characters of Sarah Kane's 'Crave'. Four disturbed and self-destructive characters of interweaving dialogues where there is no clear ending or beginning for any of them.

It remains unclear whom is talking to whom, if at all.  Multiple conversations, multiple plot lines, multiple phrases of repetition, yet you get this unyielding feeling that no one is really talking to anyone and that no one truly understand what the others are saying.  Yet you get the feeling that each character really does understand the others.

The four characters, known only by singular letters, have distinct personalities and tones within the script:

A is an older man whom has lost his partner.  We are not given specifics to the facts behind her departure... He admits that he is a pedophile (we can take a pretty clear guess and to why she left).

B, a younger man is intent on killing himself with booze and cigarettes, but without it looking like a suicide.

C is a younger woman whom, we assume, was abused by her father with only her mother as solitude.  She is a sufferer of anorexia and bulimia.

M, an older woman, who is desperate to have a baby before she dies.

The premise of 'Crave' is.... well..... I'm not really sure how to describe it....  
The play really has no plot per say, it is a non conventional, non physical indication about four different characters journeys towards love, truth, lies, and self destruction... yet there is something about the script that draws you in, wanting to know more, wanting the characters to give up more information about themselves.  There is no location, no time setting, no tangible information to allow you to grasp onto anything.  All you have is this wanting to find out more - Who are A, B, C & M? Where are they? Why are they here? How are they connected? Is there even a connection to be made?
It is a fascinating and riveting play that allows you into the psyche of these four characters.

Sarah Kane, a inherently private person who wrote experimentally and with an uncompromising vision for In-Yer-Face theatre and it's forms.  She was heralded as one of the most talented playwrights of the 1990s.  Unfortunately, the world lost this prolific writer in 1999 when she committed suicide.  Mark Ravenhill (a fellow playwright who wrote 'Shopping and Fucking') labelled her "a contemporary writer with a classical sensibility who created a theatre of great moments of beauty and cruelty, a theatre to which it was only possible to respond with a sense of awe."

'4.48 Psychosis' (which was posthumously directed at the Royal Court Theatre in 2000) is often stated as her suicide note, but I personally think we need to be careful not to read into all of her plays as a layered version of her life and depression as we can often do with other poets whom have suffered from debilitating illnesses.

This short documentary (4 minutes) gives a fantastic snapshot of her and her works and their importance within the post-modern theatrical society.

Her dialogue in 'Crave' is less of a dramatic script but more of a tonal poem that is fractured and lacking direction of any linear form.  For instance, over 2 pages we are surrounded by the words 'Yes' and 'No' repearted over and over by all of the characters in no repetitive format.  Sometimes the characters respond to each other, mostly it seems they talk to themselves, infrequently you can follow a characters lines (disregarding the lines in-between) to follow a plot angle of a particular character. Each character also has their prophetic moments in this seemingly ramble of random dialogue. 

C - Depression's inadequate.  A full scale emotional collapse is the minimum required to justify letting everyone down.

A - Death is my lover and he wants to move in.

B - There's a difference between articulacy and intelligence.  I can't articulate the difference but there is one.

M - There's something very unflattering about being desired when the other person is so drunk they can't see.

Kane deliberately uses no stage directions in her poetry driven plays (she does use them in her more linear scripts - 'Cleansed' and 'Blasted', and sparingly in 'Phaedra's Love' - however they do not interfere with the dialogue and are more used in moments of silence and to frame a particular emotive premise).

Is this really true?
It takes an imaginative mind to work
towards a truly inspiring art form that has
been created by another imaginative person.

All of her five plays (and one 10 minute screen play) do not conform to the rules of grammar, but use punctuation to indicate delivery of the lines instead.  Kane had a clear idea on how she wanted her works to be heard, not staged.  

Her plays are tough, terse and troubled yet deal with a tremendous amount of compassion and drive.  (yes, I see what I have done there with the alliteration... I didn't mean it!)

Due to the difficult language and inherently difficult staging, so little Kane productions are directed that it was difficult to find a recent review of 'Crave'.  

The most recent production that I can find was in 2012 (the previous one was 2008) in York at the Theatre Royal.  It was played as a double bill with a Russian play - 'Illusions' by Ivan Viripaev.  Reviewer Lyn Gardner writes "... there is noting remotely cosy about this evening, which turns despair into an art form and constantly asks what it is that makes us human: our capacity to love, or our capacity to lie to others - and most of all to ourselves?

During Crave, the audience experiences a universe seen though a cracked mirror; Illusions begin with the expectation of a punchline, but as it continues it starts to feel as if we, huddled on the stage and staring out at the empty auditorium, are the joke.  it's like a bedtime story gone awry.  The threat is our inability to make sense of a shifting universe, to really know another human being and keep love constant." 

Sarah Kane's plays will never date.  They will endure though time and space.

Next Week: 'Electra' by Euripides

Week #4 : 'Die Hamletmaschine' by Heiner Muller

For a 9 page script, Die HamletMaschine (or in English - Hamletmachine) certainly packs a massive punch.  A visual feast as well as a thought provoking experience.

Written by German Heiner Muller in 1977, Die Hamletmaschine is a short 5 scene play script that is loosely based on the lengthy text  - Shakespeare's Hamlet, but more on the bare components that make up the tragic tale.  The images are striking and are a great hook for the audience.  For instance:

"Grief gave way to joy, joy into munching, on the empty coffin the murder mounted the widow SHOULD I HELP YOU UP UNCLE OPEN THE LEGS OF MAMA."

"One should sew the wenches shut, a world without mothers."

It is a post-modern script that is open to varying different interpretations.  Some versions focus on the consumerism and the references to such (Coca Cola, "I go though the street malls faces, with the scars of the shopping blitz").  Some performances have focuses entirely on the images and neglected the script.  Some the entire focus is the references to East Germany Communism and and the influential role of intellectuals during that time.  In 1992 a university recreated the text set in meat factory setting with Ophelia hanging on meat hooks...  
There is no right or wrong way to perform this script.  You devise your performance from how the script speaks to you and your actors.  
It has been performed as a radio drama which included a soundtrack by Einstürzende Neubauten.  
Listen to it!  And listen to it LOUD!! I dare you!!!!!


From the opening scene (FAMILY ALBUM) we are introduced to the character Hamlet and are instantly aware of his internal monologue and the links and allusions to the original Shakespearean text.
However, the audience are also immediately aware that the actor playing Hamlet is looking onto himself as a character.  The very first line - "I was Hamlet"  to where he describes himself as an actor "Horatio Polonius.  I knew that you're an actor.  I'm one too, I play Hamlet."

In Scene 4 - PEST IN BUDA BATTLE OF GREENLAND, again we see Hamlet refer to himself as an actor playing a role "I am not Hamlet.  I play no role anymore.  My words have nothing more to say to me.... My drama is cancelled.  Behind me the scenery is being taken down."

In opposition is Ophelia's first line in the second scene (THE EUROPE OF THE WOMAN)- "I am Ophelia".  Muller describes her as having a clock as a heart.  Immediately the audience connects with Ophelia and knows that her time is coming to an end.  The contrast is that 'Hamlet' can look from the inside out and in again, whereas 'Ophelia' looks from the outside in.  She describes her end "I dig the clock which was my heart out of my breast."

In the 5th and final scene - WILDSTRAINING/IN THE FEARSOME ARMAMENTS/MILLENIA Ophelia is onstage alone in the deep sea strapped into a wheelchair with body parts floating past (again a direct link to the original text), she laments that she is not Elektra with her heart of darkness and under a sun of torture.  In this she speaks about burying the revolution and that all will know the truth soon.


Muller has also used capital letters and spacing that doesn't form to the rules of grammar in order to create these visual images.  For instance Scene 3 is nearly entirely all imagery where 'Hamlet' is dresses up as a woman by 'Ophelia' and voices are heard from the coffin. However Scene 1 and 4 are very aural based where 'Hamlet' is speaking directly to the audience as to the dealings within the script and his interpretation of his life and what he believes to be true - or not.

If you haven't had the chance to read the script, I highly recommend that you do.  You can download it here.  I really have only just scrapped the surface of the text in this post. Remember it's only 9 pages long..... but you will be engrossed with it for hours!

Next Week : 'Crave' by Sarah Kane

Week #3 : 'Six Characters in Search of an Author' by Luigi Pirandello

"We have this illusion of being one person for all, of having a personality that is unique to all our acts. But it isn't true. We perceive this when, tragically perhaps, in something we do, we are as it were, suspended, caught up in the air on a kind of hook. Then we perceive that all of us was not in tha act, and that it would be an atrocious injustice to judge us by that action alone, as if all our existence were summed up in that one deed." (The Father)

'Six Characters in Search of an Author' is an absurdist play based on metatheatrical ideas. Six characters walk into a rehearsal in progress asking for an author to complete their story. The characters know what is to happen to them, but they need to play it out in order or it to be complete. The director/producer becomes enamoured with their story and is determined to replay their scenes with the actors of his company.

A paradox in the making? Complete nonsense? Prophetic and life destroying? 

Let us ask the character of the FATHER:

"...if we have no other reality beyond the illusion, you too must not count overmuch on your reality as you feel it today, since, like that of yesterday, it may prove an illusion for you tomorrow."

Confused yet? You're not far off the context of this play. As you start to read, Pirandello lulls you into a false sense of security: The characters story seems to be quite straight forward, the comedy of the actors watching this tragic (and in parts tragically awful) story that embodies traits of Mills and Boons formulaic writing.  Yet it is far from that as we delve deeper into the characters narrative, it becomes more of a 'game' for the Director and acting troupe, but so much more of a life for the Characters. 

The prose is beautifully written in two differing forms - Naturalistic and often comedically colloquial for the troupe of actors and poetical and prophetic for the characters. This alludes to the starkly different natures that Pirandello has specifically created for the audience to disassociate the two halves of diametrically opposed 'reality and make believe'.

Pericles Lewis at Yale University discusses that 'Pirandello’s work plays with the central tension in the modern theater between the desire to create a perfect illusion of extra-theatrical reality on the stage and the contrary impulse to celebrate the very illusoriness of all theater. Modern drama calls attention to the fact that theater is both a representational art, like painting or writing, and a performing art, like dance or music.  The actors on stage are at the same time real people and representatives of fictional characters. One of the startling elements of Pirandello’s play is the separation (which he emphasized in his stage directions) between the “characters” and the “actors.” As the theorist Bert States has written,

"we tend generally to undervalue the elementary fact that theater—unlike fiction, painting, sculpture and film—is really a language whose words consist to an unusual degree of things that are what they seem to be…. Or, as [the playwright] Peter Handke puts it, in the theater light is brightness pretending to be other brightness, a chair is a chair pretending to be another chair,”

and, of course, a person is a person pretending to be another person.'

FATHER (jumping up suddenly): Illusion? I would ask you not to speak of illusion! I would beg you not to use that word. For us it has a particularly cruel ring!
PRODUCER (astonished): For heaven’s sake, why?
FATHER: Oh, yes, cruel, cruel! You really ought to understand.
PRODUCER: What are we supposed to say? Illusion is our stock-in-trade [...]
FATHER: I entirely understand [...] As artists [...], you have to create a perfect illusion of reality.
PRODUCER: That’s right.
FATHER: But what if you stop to consider that we, the six of us (he gestures briefly to indicate the six characters) have no other reality; that we don’t exist outside this illusion!

In 1921 it was greeted with great hostility (and inciting riots in the theatre) in Italy when it was first produced, but soon became heralded as a great piece of Modernist theatre when it was performed in 1923 in Paris, helping to forge the way ahead for Beckett and Ionesco's Theatre of the Absurd.

This play, being in the public domain, has been adapted for the stage many a time. The most recent in Australia or the 2010 Sydney Festival. The team at 'Headlong Theatre' used a docu-drama premise for the very beginning of the play and coupled it with the use of video and white noise to disrupt the flow of the character and actor interaction to establish a sense of authenticity of the falsehood of the situation but also fragmentation of the plot devices.

This play would certainly be a challenging script to adapt for any producer/director/actor, but it would also bring great joy in the triumph of gaining the right mix of contemporary and ancient theatre practices.

Next Week: Hamletmachine by Heiner Muller

On a side note!

Recently I was asked to write a guest post for the blog 'The Plath Diaries - A PhD blog' about my work in transferring Sylvia Plath's poem Three Women for the stage.

You can check out my post here!

http://theplathdiaries.blogspot.com.au/2013/08/guest-blog-sylvia-plaths-three-women-in.html