Notes From the Rehearsal Room: Eumenides
On adapting Aeschylus' Eumenides at the Athens Conservatoire.
They wear misfitting suits and walk, chatting, from the audience to the stage. They place five chairs in a row and argue about whether they are on their correct marks. When they are satisfied, they sit and begin to settle. And then they wait. They wait until the point that the audience begins to get restless or thinks something has gone wrong.
One of the actors gasps and clutches her chest. She becomes Clytemnestra in the moments before her death. Her breathing is panicked as she staggers away from Orestes – who has also risen from his chair and is following her. She collapses to the floor and exhales. She lies there dead. Orestes looks around confused, suddenly he is like a child lost in a supermarket.
I’m in Athens at the moment having just made an adaptation of the Eumenides with actors from the conservatoire here. It’s been a joyous time. I’ve never felt so welcome somewhere so quickly and the city suits me – I like that, unlike London, people socialise late into the evening having rested in the heat of the afternoon. The city is beautiful and it’s fun to see cats lounging in the shade on every street. I’ve been very happy here and that makes the work much easier.
When I first started thinking about this project, I was admittedly very nervous. The conservatoire was clear: they wanted an adaptation of a classic Greek text. I knew if I made an adaptation I’d want to play with form and to experiment with some of the techniques Square Brackets developed in [crops] but it also felt wrong to arrive in the city that was the spring for Western theatre with a much-changed version of a classic play.
It’s not that I don’t think that these plays shouldn’t be adapted. Robert Icke kindly let me watch some of the rehearsals of Oedipus and that was a very moving version; a modernisation that had Oedipus be a politician in his campaign HQ the evening of an election count. Icke’s version grew from the idea that the alternative title for the plays is Oedipus Tyrannus, instead of Rex; of Oedipus as a populist figure. I borrowed from that for my presentation of Athena.
I took myself to Bloomsbury’s Skoob Books, which is, along with the Calder bookshop opposite the Young Vic, the best bookshop in London for finding second-hand plays. I bought myself a stack of translations of Greek plays and began reading.
Part of what is intimidating about adapting these plays is how big their themes are. Fate and democracy, heroes and Gods – these are not topics that can be adapted lightly. The risk is that you make a GCSE Dramaesque piece, where large themes are alluded to as if their very mention is enough to justify making a piece. The more I thought about it, the more certain I was that an adaptation, especially one made as quickly as this in a black-box theatre, had to play with form as much as possible. We had to find new ways to contextualize these ancient themes to engage our audience.
The Eumenides is the third play of Aeschylus’ Oresteia. The Oresteia is about justice. As Phillip Vellacott writes in his introduction:
What is justice? How is it related to vengeance? Can justice be reconciled with the demands of religion, the violence of human feeling, the forces of fate? […] these are the questions left after a bloody chain of murder and revenge within the royal family of Argus – a chain finally broken only by the intervention of the Goddess Athena.
Athena breaks this cycle by setting up what is essentially the modern Western jury trial but they can’t decide (seems foolish to set up juries with even numbers but hey …). So, she votes. Her vote is that Orestes isn’t guilty of murdering his mother because Clytemnestra killed her husband, Agamemnon, unlawfully. The decision is then that Orestes was right to kill her and is freed. Athena also says that a man’s life is worth more than a woman’s and therefore Orestes’ matricide isn’t as bad as her killing her husband.
As you can see, it’s hardly the gold standard of justice and due process.
After the economic crash in Greece there was a sharp rise in people supporting far-right and fascist movements. The one which gained the most popularity was a Neo-Nazi group called Golden Dawn. Golden Dawn masqueraded as a political party but a landmark court decision classified them as a criminal group in 2016 after a series of violent attacks on migrants.
As with many fascist political groups, Golden Dawn had a habit of referring to a mythical past. Mussolini referred often to the Fasces while Hitler would refer to ideas of Götterdämmerung. Golden Dawn began to refer to Greece’s status as the fount of Western civilization and would use ancient plays as themes in propaganda – one can see then, that Athena saying women’s lives are worth less than men’s and that third parties can vote in jury trials became popular reference points in Golden Dawn discourse. While it is true that the early Greek forms of justice would inform much of Western trial procedure, Golden Dawn selectively preserved the misogyny from plays like the Eumenides and argued that this should have been carried forward into modern political systems. Ancient plays became ammunition for the construction of a mythical version of Greece that should be returned to in Golden Dawn ideology; a version of the country where it would be okay for men and women to be unequal in the eyes of the courts and where violence is celebrated.
This became a long conversation between myself and the actors over the weeks I wrote the play. There seemed to be a gulf between the popular idea that democracy and the justice system appeared from ancient Greece fully formed and perfect and the reality that both the ancient and modern court systems have things that are worth critiquing.
For instance, after thirteen members of Golden Dawn were found guilty of planning the murder of Greek musician Pavlos Fyssas, they received sentences at the lowest end possible of the sentencing guidelines. Furthermore, journalists have been banned from filming in courts which some activists believing it harms transparency.
As this conversation progressed it became clearer that we wanted to use the way Aeschylus’ court fails to find justice for Clytemnestra as a way of asking questions about the current Greek justice system and to use the play to critique the way in which the far-right uses texts like this as examples of what society should be like rather than complicated things, with failings, that should be engaged with critically.
The more we thought about these things the more we realised that we wanted to centre our play on Clytemnestra. Clytemnestra seems to me the person most failed by the justice system in Eumenides. Her daughter is murdered, she is forced to take justice into her own hands and then is murdered by her own son. I wrote a monologue for her that had her talking to the audience about being ‘mother to a murdered daughter and murdering son’ and about why she killed Agamemnon. The plan was for this monologue be delivered from centre stage but something felt wrong about this. The size of an audience made it feel as if she was delivering a political speech like Athena does to the jury, rather than talking about her grief. We asked, how can we make this feel more personal? We arrived at the idea that she would take her chair, sit next to a person in the audience and deliver the monologue directly to them as if they were two friends in conversation. We were fine with the rest of the audience not hearing, in fact we wanted to generate the feeling in them that they were intruding.
Another thing we wanted to do was to make sure that it was clear to an audience that Athena suddenly voting in a trial makes the system unfair. In the world of our play Athena wasn’t a goddess but a bureaucrat responsible for the ministry of justice, similarly the Eumenides were no longer spirits but a press pack. By changing Athena’s power from divine to bureaucratic we were able to focus on the idea of the system being open to corruption.
The jury then developed into being a satirical object – unable to decide for themselves and happy to let Athena vote even though she wasn’t supposed to interfere. We wanted to rid the jury of its sacred status in the same way we had done to Athena. For us, the only sacred jury is a just one but the one in Eumenides is one that can’t come to a decision and is overly content handing over their duties to Athena without question. It reminds me of the juror in Twelve Angry Men who is desperate to arrive at any verdict so he can go to the baseball.
The jury became clownlike. We experimented with having them move in ways borrowed from Jacques Lecoq’s work and one of the actors suggested that they make their decisions by playing rock-paper-scissors. The hope was the audience looks at a jury made unfit for purpose and who blindly follow Athena.
As always, I’m excited by and convinced of the possibilities of including dance in my work as a theatre director. If you’ve read other pieces on here, you would see how over the last year I have been falling in love with dance. With Eumenides it seemed a natural step to include dance in the work. My habit in rehearsals for this project was the same as for [crops]: we would begin each day stretching as a group and then move onto a warmup based around improvising dance and serving as ‘live choreographers’ for each other. I do this partly because it is nice to start each day with joy but also because I’m more and more convinced that imagination comes from the body and not the mind.
Especially when working across two languages, it felt helpful to ground all our exploration from the body first; the body speaks and is often much clearer than words. In earlier work of mine I over focused on text. In this process we worked in the reverse way – we began from character’s bodies with questions of how they might dance and laid the words over top. Especially in black-box theatre, this way of working seems much more likely to produce interesting stage pictures than beginning with text. This added to my nervousness at the beginning of the process. Text feels far safer than dance for me. I’m much more used to it and I can measure whether a piece of spoken theatre is affecting an audience much more accurately than I can dance. I know very little about dance and am conscious of how much I have to learn. I was lucky in this process, as with others, to have performers who were happy to improvise. I can only thank them for their generosity in how they were able to communicate ideas through their bodies throughout rehearsal. I’ve learnt a lot from them.
I had planned for the play to end with a speech but as we worked this felt wrong - it had to end without words, with just a body speaking.
As the courtroom stenographer speaks about whether she is complicit in the injustice or a spectator to it, one by one the other actors stack their chairs and leave. They exit as actors - as themselves - the characters left somewhere on stage. She finishes her speech and follows them and we are left with just Orestes on stage. As Clytemnestra does in the beginning he waits. Suddenly he stands in terror, his hand gripped around an imaginary knife. He stumbles toward the audience. He offers it to them as if saying, ‘you decide if I’m guilty or not’. The lights blackout.
When I watched this scene, it felt far more intense than in rehearsals. His body seemed to shimmer, and his outstretched arm gripped so tightly that the veins rose to the surface. I hadn’t realised it, but he had chosen to offer this imaginary knife to his own mother. She shook her head – ‘no’. And with that the ending of the play became about something even more precious than justice: mercy.
I can’t tell you if the play worked. I can only try to write about some of our thinking and to explain why we were interested in things. I hope that we made a comment on Eumenides that critiqued it out of a love for it rather than a desire to tear it down; I hope we played with form in a way that felt exciting for an audience; I hope people thought it was worth their time. I was happy with the play, but my voice isn’t the one that matters. László Upor – a wonderful translator of Hungarian plays and a director himself – says that the role of the director is to leave plays to the mercy of audiences. I’ll do that - they can be my jury.
Eumenides was performed by Georgianna Zouganeli, Christina Karakosta, Panos Reggas, Zoi Tsirouki and Tasos Bekyros and was assistant directed by Irina Zeza. I’m grateful to them all and to the Athens Conservatoire.