Olympus on the Thames

By T.E. Kalem

THE GREEKS Adapted by John Barton and Kenneth Cavander Directed by John Barton

We always return to Greece because it fulfills some need of our own life . . . Other nations made gods, kings, spirits: the Greeks alone made men.

--Werner Jaeger, Paideia: The Ideals of Greek Culture

London's Royal Shakespeare Company has returned to the Greeks in a three-night marathon cycle often plays derived from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides (seven of the ten) and a dramatization by John Barton of a segment of Homer. The cycle is presented as a trilogy: "The War," "The Murders" and "The Gods." Its purpose: to show the turbulent destiny of the doomed House of Atreus in chronological order. Barton, master builder of this endeavor, likes to work on the grand scale. In previous years he was celebrated for The Wars of the Roses, a panorama adapted from Shakespeare's dramas. Here he presents the antecedents, history and consequences of the Trojan War. His actors perform in and out of the chorus and move easily from one major role to another in the epic series. Barton, 51, has made the classic treasures of Western drama accessible to modern playgoers by using straightforward, idiomatic English and concentrating on the endlessly probing light of the Greek mind as the essence of our civilized heritage.

We are in a misty dawn of antiquity when we first see the chorus of high-spirited young women on the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Aldwych Theater. They are prompting one another on the ancient myths, the way children count on their fingers. It sets the conversational tone of this dramatic cycle and evokes a time when people felt themselves to be not only the prey and pawns of the gods but their intimates as well.

The naked, sun-baked disc of a stage, designed by John Napier, is shaped like an inverted shield. The prophet Calchas has told King Agamemnon that the thousand ships becalmed in the harbor at Aulis will receive no favoring wind to retrieve Helen and ravage Troy unless he makes a blood sacrifice of his daughter Iphigenia. With passive fatalism, Agamemnon sends a duplicitous letter to his wife Clytemnestra asking her to bring Iphigenia to Aulis on the pretext that she is to be given in marriage to Achilles, supreme hero-in-arms.

But when a much perturbed Agamemnon (John Shrapnel) first appears onstage, he has changed his mind. He hands his messenger a second letter telling his wife not to leave the palace at Mycenae. Agamemnon's brother and Helen's husband, Menelaus (Tony Church), waylays the messenger and rails at Agamemnon for his vacillating disloyalty to Greece. Achilles (Mike Gwilym) warns that the troops are restive and mutinous after the long delay. Affected by his brother's torment, Menelaus suddenly shifts his adamant position and suggests giving up the entire expedition to Troy. But the fates have decreed otherwise; Iphigenia (Judy Buxton) and Clytemnestra (Janet Suzman) have arrived.

All Greek tragedies move through pitch points of passion, moments when men look into the abyss of self-revelation. In Euripides' Iphigenia in Aulis, which begins this cycle, there are three pitch points. The first comes as Agamemnon reasons with his daughter about the need for her death. Shrapnel sensitively conveys the deep inner anguish of a man torn between duty to his country and love for his child. As Clytemnestra, Suzman moves through a parabola of feelings, marking her again as one of the finest actresses on the English-speaking stage. And as Buxton reaches the heartbreaking conclusion that the one life she has to give for Hellas is the noblest life to have lived, she radiates a great and unforgettable purity of spirit. The final scene in this segment is a visual stunner. The rising wind whips the garment about Clytemnestra's knees. Alone, burnt-eyed, she raises an arm as she watches the Greek fleet under full sail, a Botticelli Venus transformed into the mater dolorosa.

For chronological reasons, Barton had to supply the second play in "The War" himself. He has culled it from Homer and called it Achilles. Considering the audacity of the work, the result is exemplary.

Achilles is played with sullen vanity by Gwilym, and as his mother Thetis, Annie Lambert manages to suggest both a divine sea nymph and a contemporary cocktail-party hostess who, when asked about her mating with a mortal, Peleus, remembers the moment as "brief, hot and sandy."

When the wily Odysseus (Church), he whom Homer called "the man of many devices," thinks up the ruse of the Trojan horse, Troy falls. In Trojan Women by Euripides, the women are to be parceled out among the victors. Queen Hecuba (Eliza Ward) leads the women in a keening catalogue of I woe: she has lost her husband Priam, her son Hector, and will eventually lose all of her children.

At this point, it is worth noting the three basic speech patterns of Greek tragedy. Hecuba embarks on a lamentation that might be called the first language of the Middle East, stretching around the Mediterranean crescent from the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem to the melancholy, snakelike flutes of the Casbah. The second mode is anathema, the curse absolute. The third is the speech of self-absolution. Protagonists in Greek plays never blame themselves for their actions. Either the gods made them do it, or their enemies are culpable or they are the victims of tyche: luck or blind chance.

As Hecuba plays the blame game, Helen, "the whore of Troy," is responsible for everything. Helen (Suzman) appears, as haughty as an international star. She seems to regard the Trojan War as her biggest hit ever. Menelaus is ready to butcher her for adultery, but he is so afraid of Helen's siren sway that he does not look at her. Silkily, she makes her excuse. She was in the power of Aphrodite--her will was not her own. Menelaus' meat-cleaver hand drops, Helen sashays away, whistling in sultry triumph.

The true pitch point of Trojan Women involves Hector's widow, Andromache (Billie Whitelaw) and her toddler son. Odysseus has convinced the Greeks that if the child grows to manhood, he may lead Troy in another war against the Greeks. He must be torn from his mother's skirts and dashed to death from the city's topless towers. One of the most wrenching scenes in all of Greek tragedy is shatteringly performed by Whitelaw when her little boy is taken and returned as a tiny corpse in the shell of Hector's shield.

This is the gory part of the epic: blood lust and revenge couched in the name of justice. Polymestor (Oliver Ford Davies) is an erstwhile friend of Troy to whom King Priam and Queen Hecuba sent their youngest son, Polydorus, for safekeeping--along with a stock of gold. But in Greek tragedy, today's friend is tomorrow's fiend.

As soon as he knew that Troy had fallen, Polymestor murdered the boy and took the gold. Unknown to him, the sea-rotted corpse has drifted to shore and is dumped before Hecuba's gaze. She is past weeping by now. She wants the gift of death, surcease from all sorrow. But she has a priority: vengeance. Before the final curtain, Polymestor lurches forward on all fours, his eye sockets craters of streaming blood. He utters the primal howl that punctuates these plays. It is the moment when all reason has toppled and the dogs of fate rend man with total indifference. In Shakespeare's words, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." And the sport has not finished.

Preceded by fanfare, Agamemnon's chariot is drawn to a halt before the door of his palace. He is the happiest of men, or so he thinks. The chorus of crones, clad in ominous black, knows better: Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegis thus (Peter Woodward), who now rules the land as a tyrant. He is intimately linked to the origin of the curse on the House of Atreus. All too soon the cries of horror sound as if from some echo chamber in hell. The fates are inexorable: the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are eventually hurled onto the stage like the carcasses of animals, and Clytemnestra emerges spattered with blood. As she drapes Cassandra's arm over Agamemnon's shoulder, one wonders whether she murdered him for sacrificing their daughter or for bringing his concubine home.

Electra completes this portion of the cycle. It begins as a long threnody by Electra (Lynn Dearth). Stoking a cauldron of hatred toward her mother Clytemnestra, Dearth is a cauldron herself; if she continues at this level of passion, she cannot fail to be a top actress of this decade.

Electra's brother Orestes (Gwilym) comes home as a stranger. After the famed "recognition" scene, Electra embraces him with incestuous ardor. Modern audiences can easily comprehend Freud's comment that he had merely systematized what the Greek poets had known all along: the slaying of the parent remains a ritual whose power to chill has lost nothing in 2,500 years.

Part 3 of the cycle, in tone and text the work of Euripides, is almost anticlimactic, partly because of the caliber of the plays and partly because of the treatment.

As here constituted, Helen is almost only an amusing cartoon skit. The curtain rises on an Egyptian sarcophagus, and, lolling on top of it, dressed in little more than a beach towel, is the real Helen, seemingly on a summer holiday. Euripides' caustic irony is that a mirror image of Helen went with Paris to Troy. Thousands upon thousands of Greeks and Trojans have suffered and died in a ten-year war for this saucy mirage. Orestes is even more anachronistic when Electra appears toting a submachine gun, rather like the pho tograph of Patty Hearst as Tania. In "The Gods" plays, Barton accelerates the tempo of the tragedies and elides parts of the stories, after somewhat reducing their gravity. Moreover, pro-feminist sentiments are catered to by rendering certain lines as if in oral italics. That is surely an error, since the women in Greek tragedy are the strongest feminine figures in all of dramatic literature. The race that bred Medea and Antigone possessed no Doll's Houses.

Any enterprise of this magnitude must have flaws, but in this case the virtues formidably out weigh them. While the Greeks had no word for sin, this is indeed a grand parable of sin, grace and redemption, which very nearly produces catharsis in the classic sense.

With the aid of towering performances and stark sets, plus the ensemble work of the Royal Shake speare troupe, John Barton has elucidated the meaning of the Greek texts, evoking the ideals that animated them. A special citation should be awarded to Nick Bicat for his inestimably evocative music.

Taverna-like, elegiac, militant, his melodies evoke the epoch when Attica was vernal and bore something more than gnarled olive trees.

To Barton must belong the final honors. He has brought us the Greeks' greatest gifts and restored the original titans of drama to sour petty stages. May Zeus smile 3 on him.

--T.E. Kalem

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