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

Week #2: 'The League of Youth' by Henrik Ibsen

A political idealist is released and consequentially run out of town because of social and sexual complications .... How poetic! (especially  in this day and age of political tenacities!)


The League of Youth, written in 1869, was a turning point for Ibsen as it marked his first play in colloquial language away from his previous verse writing.  The play of five acts (and over 125 pages...) centres on protagonist Stensgaard and the beginning (and ultimately the crashing demise) of his young and vivacious anti-capitalist political party 'League of Youth'.
Stensgaard is a conceited entrepreneur who has been suitably termed by many as 'a political Peer Gynt."  He first sets a provincial town in Norway alight by his radical attack on the social structures of the town and the formation of the 'League of Youth'.
Although, ingratiated by the community's conservative, all-powerful chamberlain, Stensgaard swiftly changes tact and, after a local electoral triumph, is happy to be proposed for a seat in higher parliament.  What eventually undoes Stensgaard is his sexual, rather than his political, cynicism.  it is discovered by the town that he simultaneously proposed to three differing women (and comprehensively rejected by all three), he becomes a local laughing stock and is run out of town.

Having started reading this play with full intentions of its possibilities for a younger cast (namely my Theatre Studies class), I propelled myself into reading it, only to come to a halting end.  The language is, in true Ibsen fashion, proper and loquacious.  Unfortunately I could not envisage the production, making it difficult to form a deep impression for reflective comment.

It has been said that the character of Stensgaard was a political allegory of Norwegian outsider Herman Bagger, who in the 1830s, arrived in the town of Skein (Ibsen's home town), was subsequently elected to political office in 1848.  Even though Bagger was involved in a few scandals, he went on to further his political life and eventually retiring from office in 1874.

This is a script that is rarely staged.  The most recent production was in 2011 adapted by Andy Barrett and Directed by Giles Croft for Nottingham Playhouse.  This production, complete with traditional setting, was highly commented upon.
Steve Orme for the British Theatre Guide states "in the programme Andy Barrett points out that Ibsen's original work is a very long, five-act play and he's had to condense it so that it could be bought to a UK stage for the first time." ... "Barrett's adaptation is authentically perceptive, Giles Croft directs with an assured confidence, Dawn Allsopp's design is impressively grand and the actors - fifteen townspeople and servants as well as eleven speaking parts - throw themselves wholeheartedly into the production."

Michael Billington for The Guardian comments - "Although the play strains the resources of a regional theatre, Giles Croft's production adroitly makes use of non-professionals to embody Stensgaard's supporters, and allows the teeming action to spill out into the auditorium.  There are also good performances from Sam Callis as the overwhelming antihero, smiling unfazed by temporary setbacks, Phillip Bretherton as the easily hoodwinked chamberlain and David Acton as a suave conservative who sees though Stensgaard's expediency."

The production took use of modern political imagery, most notably the iconic two tone blue and red image used in the Obama election.  Maybe this was a political theatrical opportunist choice in itself in order to garner an audience?? (I would say that it was a very clever marketing ploy for this particular production for their season in conjunction with the Nottingham European Arts and Theatre Festival.)

I can recognise that if you were to adapt this script to a more contemporary setting, that audiences could create a deeper understanding of the context in which it was written and form a greater appreciation to the overall comical presence within the play.  Particularly if it was to be adapted for an Australian audience; due to the current political climate and humorous nature of the catastrophes that the two major parties have placed themselves in, an audience could immediately associate the attempts at forming a working party for the masses, whether they are the working class or the upper ranks of society.
It would be a highly poignant production is treated with a modern re-write and adaptation to our current political mess.




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

Week #1 : 'Miss Julie' by August Strindberg

Miss Julie..... Mistress Julie...... Mademoiselle Julie....... Oh, how your prestigious birthright belies you...

August Strindberg wrote a gripping tale of a society woman bent on seducing her fathers porter into a sexual experience to prove that she still has power over men of any status after her disastrous engagement that has just ended. The events that follow allow herself to be wrapped in his tangling web of seductions all to be humiliated, belittled and ultimately manipulated into sacrificing herself in the end.

Written in 1888, 'Miss Julie' was so controversial, it was not produced in Swedish theatres for over 14 years. This seminal text of the Naturalism period, that Strindberg himself described as a "modern psychological drama", has been depicted as volatile, psychologically turbulent and captivating. 

Strindberg influenced such writers as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and Ingmar Bergman (to name just a few) with his intellectual thoughts on morals and class structures all wrapped up in characters that were multidimensional and contained within a plot that was not fabricated. 

'Miss Julie' is all this and so much more!

                    

The action happens across the span of a single night where societal status is challenged and crumbled beneath the weight of seductions from both Julie and John. Both try to best each other with desperate actions that would shake the morals of any human being, yet John takes it in his stride and cuttingly overhands the dangerously enticing situation to manipulate and ruin Julie for his own gratifications.

The script allows a man and a woman to create a growing psychological tension on stage that not only covers sexual attraction and eventual domination, but the mechanisms of polarised upbringings of the upper and lower classes of society and their desperate layers of control.

          "Why do you go about in livery on a holiday evening? Take it off at once." (Julie to John when in the company of his fiancée - the kitchenmaid)

John, who will not be bested in any situation, seemingly plays right into Julie's flirtations and enables the situation to grown beyond her power. As the night spins beyond anyones control, the status of men and women, class distinction and the strong and the weak are put to the test.  John clearly sets the tone and in one fowl swoop, cheapens Julie's actions and a forces a flow of abuse onto her:

          "No one in my station of life could have made herself so cheap as the way you carried on tonight, my girl... Have you ever seen a girl in my position offer herself in the way you did?" 

Strindberg was quite specific about the way in which he wanted his play to be seen: a small stage, the single setting of a small working kitchen and fireplace, with a glass door leading to the garden. Other items on stage reveal a large bell and a horn for the residents of the upper house to contact their staff. (Later on also Julie's pet canary and large knife...)

The dialectic of class conflict is delivered through the only openings to other parts of the household: the staff quarters on one side of the stage and the opulent gardens on the other. The kitchen then becomes the intermediary between both worlds. The very personalised relationship display between Julie and John in this middle ground forces the tension out in the open where the themes of love, desire and control in a world with rigid class conventions override any visceral perceptions. 

Strindberg's stage directions are almost stifling in specificity in parts, but kept relatively open when the dialogue becomes overwrought with dramatics and emotions. Writing around the same time as Ibsen, whom also heavily focused on the specificity of the actors movements; Strindberg knew exactly how he wanted his writings to be imagined on stage and did so in these directions to whomever tackled his script. (Oh,and painted  backdrops were definitely not allowed on a Strindberg production!) 

In 2012, Yael Farber re-imagined Strindberg's play to post-apartheid era with tremendous success, winning the Carol Tambour Best of Edinburgh Award. Claire Simpson reviewed the performance for Fringe Reviews: "One of those rare exceptional productions where all the elements - writing, direction performance and technical direction - combine to become more than the sum of its parts, this powerful Mies Julie lets out a cry of anguish for today's South Africa that won't be easily forgotten." Rory Eddington also commented on the performance: "While individually giving exhilarating performances, the chemistry between Bongile Mantsai and Hilda Cronje is torrid, creating a perspiration drenched eroticism. Yet perhaps the most enduring image is that of John clutching both shovel and scythe at the play’s denouement as if to ask one simple question: is this the only way? Sexy, dangerous and riveting."

     

Not so successful was the French adaptation in 2011 staring Juliette Binoche, however more for the bold minimalist modern setting rather than the performances. The reviews for this show focus on the design rather than the acting, which is disappointing considering Juliette Binoche is renowned for creating deep and often beguiling female characters. One comment made by Michael Billington for 'The Guardian' concluded that "In the end, the production makes little sense. Strindberg dreamed of a 'small stage and a small auditorium' where the entire focus would be on the situation's emotional reality. Instead the play is presented as a pictorial spectacle with the emphasis on a mood of debauched glamour and where either the glass screens or the lighting render the actors' faces semi-visible."

     

I feel that I could easily write a thesis discussing the psychological complexities of this play, let alone the numerous adaptations of the text. However, I think I may have to stop here as I draw alarmingly close to the 1,000 word mark.....

I chose this play to be my first as it will be on at the Belvoir St Theatre in Sydney in August/Sept with aussie actor Brendan Cowell as John.  I had the chance to work with Letitia Cáceres at MTC and I am really interested to see how she will tackle this with Simon Stone's adaptation of the original text.

http://belvoir.com.au/productions/miss-julie/

Next week: 'The League of Youth' by Henrik Ibsen

When the going gets tough, read a play (or 52)!

The beginning is just a play script away...

Intellectual challenges have been few and far between these last few years. Since completing my Honours of Arts (Theatre and Performance) in 2010 after completing a double degree in Secondary Education and Arts (double majoring in Drama and Literature), I have not had too much of a chance to extend my theatrical repertoire as of late.  

Starting my career in Secondary Teaching has been a tumultuous time (especially in trying to find a secure position at a school), the lack of time and, ok-ok I'll admit it, the drive to read outside the texts I have been teaching has been severely depleted. My decision to return to postgraduate studies part time, specifically Masters of Fine Arts (Theatre), has me jumping for joy! What doesn't have me joyful is my cache of script knowledge. Titles of plays and synopsis - Tick! Actually having read the majority of those plays - oh dear.... 

After being accepted and completing a Masterclass Directing workshop at the Melbourne Theatre Company with Associate Artistic Director Sam Strong and Associate Director Leticia Caceres, hearing what they had to say about their practices and directorial skills had me thinking very long and hard. If I ever want to have the chance to make my way into the world of theatre, then I really need to step up my game and not just will myself in being, but actually set myself a challenge that is a stretch, but one that still can be achievable in my current situation. 

And here comes the reason for this blog...

I challenge myself to read 52 plays in 52 weeks, along with conducting literary research and researching past reviews on each of the scripts.

I have never been good at keeping a blog, diary or any form of diarising events in my life. However, since this is something that I have been working towards ever since I started my journey into theatre, this is one challenge that I am determined to keep. (Plus I made my gorgeous senior Theatre Studies students create a challenge for themselves to work on something in class that they felt they needed to improve on... And I made them write it down and sign it as a contract. So I really need to keep up my end of the bargain too!)

For starters, I am going to read the scripts of playwrights that I know well, but have only read some of their works. For instance, I have never read Shakespeare's 'A Comedy of Errors', but have read many of his other works... I have read Wilde's 'The Importance of Being Earnest', but never 'Lady Windermere's Fan'... And the list continues...

Each Sunday I will write about the play and research here.

As with my fiction choices, I will make a decision based on what I feel like reading next once I have finished the current book, or in this case, play script. At the end of each week I will tell you the next instalment of this challenge.

From you I am seeking suggestions of other lesser known playwrights and scripts that you think I should read. Any and all suggestions will be taken into account. 

I hear you whispering amongst yourselves 'but just reading and researching plays scripts won't get you into theatre' ...  I know, but extending my knowledge, practicing my research capabilities and improving my understanding on the inner workings of the different styles of writing and theatre practice will, somewhat, help. As much as I loved my Drama major at Uni and working on self devised theatre, gaining the knowledge of past practitioners was an aspect that was removed from the course. I don't know if I can say that this was of any detriment or not, because I certainly learnt SO much from my lecturers and use that knowledge every day when teaching my own 'little cherubs'. However, something just clicked inside of me when listening to Sam at MTC.... That one day Masterclass propelled me into overdrive and to finally kick start the career I have only been dreaming about.

Wish me luck!!

Week 1: 'Miss Julie' by August Strindberg