BILL BRAY introduces our February play
It is inevitable that after more than two thousand years we do not have a complete picture of the plays presented in those wonderful theatres in Greece and other places around the Mediterranean where Greek colonies had been established. We are aware of the form of the Drama but much else is conjecture and, inevitably, when only a part of the evidence has come down to us, two and two have sometimes been construed as adding up to five. However, we think we know the form of the plays and, to some extent, the constraints and traditions that operated in their performance.
Theatre was an important part of Athens life in the fifth century BC and was part of religious celebrations at particular times of the year. The playwrights were in competition and were expected to conform to set patterns. Divergence from established convention brought criticism and we see satirical comment from that time in the comedies of Aristophanes. The Frogs is a comic debate on the respective merits of the traditional old-style tragedy of Aeschylus and the newer ideas of Euripides in plays like the Medea.
Euripides is considered by many as being the most modern of the classic Greek playwrights. He lived at a time when Athens was in conflict following a golden age of comparative peace. Like our own time, unpopular and draining wars had broken out which brought about the destruction of a remarkable and exemplary society. Euripides seems to be projecting a debate and provoking questioning by introducing into tragedy a seam of scepticism and dissent.
His plots deal with extremes of tragic action and Medea is regarded as the peak of Euripides' achievement by drawing a tragic figure of such awful, merciless power. Medea is a woman scorned by her husband, humiliated, insulted and driven to revenge in the most appalling manner. Violence is not shown on stage but is described and the results may be revealed. It was a traditional story and the Athenian audience would have known it well. The cast would have been all male. A group of women of Corinth are witnesses to the events and here we see another parallel with modern times. The chorus stand by witnessing the dreadful happenings but do nothing to intervene to stop them. They discuss their difficult situation, much as modern journalists and TV crews have defended their decision not to interfere in similar circumstances.
The GWT has not presented a play from the classic period of Greek drama since 1954 when the Electra of Euripides was presented in the original hut theatre. After more than fifty years we should be ready to experience the force of Euripidean theatre and recognise its place in our dramatic heritage. We do not know much about Euripides and less than a quarter of his plays survive. It is thought that he was acquainted with Socrates. He left Athens at the end of his life and died in Macedon in 406 B.C.
Director Margaret Young writes:
Some Greeks (or Grecians, as President Bush calls them) are still at it: worship of the gods who live on Mount Olympus. One can be sure the gods ― after all, they must have godly powers - will find it easy to cope with the atmospheric pollution blasting up from the traffic-choked streets of Athens. Medea was written 2,437 years ago, when all Greeks were polytheist and the Orthodox Church had yet to be invented. Although the play refers to mythical events of 4,000 years ago, the essence of the story could appear as an episode of EastEnders.
I once thought we might set the play among the barons of West Kingsdown in modern dress, with Jason of the Argonauts, medallion-chested, arriving on stage on a Harley-Davidson, but I changed my mind. The aim now is to go for the full Monty, creating a performance as close as possible to what would have been seen by the audience of up to 17,000 perched on their stone seats in the amphitheatre during the Festival of Dionysus over 2,000 years ago.
You will have spotted obvious drawbacks to this decision. The GWT is not an open-air theatre (despite the recent trouble with the roof) and we lack that order of seating capacity and, big as it is, our stage is far too small and has no stone-built permanent back-drop. Furthermore, only male actors were used; hence the need of masks (of which more elsewhere in this issue) when they were in female roles.
However, for the rest, we hope to create the experience of ancient Greek theatre. The play is authentic Euripides (in a faithful translation); we have not messed about with the costume, there is a chorus, there are masks and there is obeisance to the god Dionysus.
Medea is full of timeless, universal truths. For example, from a parent:
Look at the parents, look at their eyes.
The radiant lines of love and worry.
Is there enough for us all to eat,
Are they warm and well?
Will they lead good lives or grow up bad?
On human frailty:
But the rage of my heart is stronger than my reason.
When you come into the GWT car park and glance up at the mosaic mural, what do you see? A scene from Greek theatre. And as you enter the foyer, looking down on you are the Commedia dell'arte masks, based on the ancient Greek masks for comedy and tragedy.
Our experiment with Medea - Some background to the production
by COLIN YARDLEY (Designer for Medea)
I suppose all theatre is rather self-indulgent. You take a script and a group of actors and technicians, enjoy yourself realising a dream and then you expect other people to come along and pay to see it. So, what has been the approach to Medea at the GWT?
When the play was first mounted, some two and a half millennia ago, Euripides would have been expected to direct it as well as write it. Our team has enjoyed greater division of labour. In Euripides' day all plays were written in iambic pentameters, meaning 5 double beats to the line, with an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed one: di dum di dum di dum di dum di dum; as an example, the opening line of Thomas Gray's Elegy: "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day." But our translator, in order to give as true an English version as possible, has not attempted verse, although you will catch a rhyming couplet here and there.
As well as democracy, Olympic Games and urns, the Greeks invented subsidised theatre (the great Geoffrey Whitworth re-inventing it in 1948 for this country), the state paying the principal actors and the members of the chorus being paid by wealthy citizens. The state also subsidised the tickets (yes, it is thought that they even invented tickets) of poorer citizens. The GWT will be emulating the ancient Greeks by selling tickets for Medea, but they will not be subsidised.
If we were to be strictly authentic we would have the seven adult principals in Medea played by just 3 or 4 actors, who would don different masks for the various roles. As we are breaking with authenticity in this regard we might as well sin also by having women playing the female characters. Having individualised these parts we have also un-masked them.
Not so the chorus. They are in masks throughout the play. We should have 12 to 15 in the chorus, but our stage is simply not big enough for that and so the number has been reduced to 6. The chorus is a collective character arguably with the biggest and most exacting part in the play. Its members are on stage for almost the entire play, commenting on the action and reacting to everything, as if on the audience's behalf.
The principals either address one another, or the chorus; they never speak to the audience. The chorus sometimes addresses an actor, sometimes the audience. The audience cannot question an actor, let alone remonstrate - that would be against convention, theatre etiquette - but the chorus is able to do so, reflecting the audience's concerns.
Sometimes the chorus speaks in unison, but in the main, only one voice speaks and it appears that they have all spoken, because no lips can be seen to move. The whole chorus has to learn the full text, because the solo voice has to be accompanied by the collective gestures. The members of our chorus are ordinary women of Corinth, friends of Medea, sympathetic to her in her plight, but not averse to warning her when she risks self-destruction. They never argue with one another, but the chorus collectively vacillates from agreement with Medea to disagreement, from resolution to irresolution, reflecting the conscious and sub-conscious positions shared with the audience.
The Greek chorus would have sung and danced. Ours does not, but its longer speeches are accompanied by music, which has been specially composed for this production, using the pentatonic scale of the Greeks and reproducing the sounds of the instruments they had: lyre, horn, flute and human voice.
Peter O'Toole has spoken of an actor's art depending on "this bit of meat", pointing to his face. There are over 20 pairs of muscles playing a major part in facial expression and in normal life we depend enormously on the face for non-verbal communication, so why make life so much more difficult for the actors by putting them in masks? Well, our ancient Greeks were in a massive amphitheatre, with excellent acoustics, but no opera glasses; actors' facial expressions would not have been visible to most of the audience; the key dramatic devices would have been voice and gesture. This has been the central challenge for our chorus in rehearsal: how to convey an array of emotions, including the most extreme, facelessly and often voicelessly. The vocabulary uses movements of the body, the head, arms and hands. Sometimes the chorus acts in unison, sometimes reactions ripple from one to another through the group.
Any actor, in order to be fully immersed in the role, must show abnegation of self. The mask helps in this regard; by removing the actor's face it takes sacrifice of self to the extreme. I started this article by talking about the self-indulgence of theatre and yet finish up by describing the actors' self-denial. If this contradiction is real, perhaps someone else can resolve it for me.
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