Redgrave and Euripedes

It's always pretty hard to get excited about a 2,500 year old play.

That doesn't mean that I haven't made my students read Hecuba, Medea, the satyr play The Cyclops, and other plays by the 5th century B.C. Athenian playwright, Euripides, or his buddies Sophocles, Aristophanes, and Aeschylus. After all, going to plays used to be one of the ways that the ancient Greeks worshipped the gods. Gotta keep Dionysus happy, you know (especially since he's the god of wine!). Hecuba is one of those plays which has managed to weather the millennia pretty well, though, and the Royal Shakespeare Company in England commissioned a new translation which received its premiere last March. They brought the production to the United States for a three-week run at the Kennedy Center, and my friend Scott and I managed to catch a performance on June 9 (and, yes, I know, I'm somewhat late writing this commentary) before the run closed on the 12th. Dear Scott didn't believe me that Shakespeare didn't write this play until I made him read the program. Alas, his Ph.D. is in psychology, so I guess he can't be expected to be literate and aware of ancient Greek drama however important tragedies like Oedipus Rex and Electra are to the fundamental foundations of Freudian and Jungian psychology.

Our primary reason for going to see the play wasn't worshipping Dionysus, or a rush to see the RSC, or even being great fans of Euripides (or Will Shakespeare, in Scott's case), but because the title character was being played by the venerable Vanessa Redgrave. She got rave reviews in all the area newspapers, and I was certainly looking forward to seeing her performance. It's a big role, since Hecuba is on stage almost the entire hour and forty minute duration of the play. And, while I wasn't wowwed, I think she handled the role sufficiently well to keep the play alive and moving, even with the ponderous verse of the new Tony Harrison translation.

This show took place in the Eisenhower Theater at the Kennedy Center, a rather spare auditorium that only seats 1,100. The four-tiered set had Army tents arranged side by side and stacked as though we were looking at a hillside packed with tents. They were treated with various dreary grey, brown, and green pigments, but I thought it rather amusing that a few of the tents had Army stencils painted on the flaps, and on the main stage level, a series of Army foot lockers arranged so each floor level tent had a locker out front also had contemporary stencil markings. A nearly naked "dead" Polydorus in full-body marblizing white and grey paint stood center stage for the opening soliloquy as the curtain rose. I was worried that this was going to be another depressing all-grey set with all-grey costumes, much like the "Soviet" Boris Godunov I saw at the K.C. last January, but once the "living" actors appeared, I was relieved to see vibrant colors. In fact, the women's costumes were actually quite pretty. As you are probably aware, this play is set in heroic era outside Troy immediately after its fall (remember The Iliad and the Trojan horse?). Queen Hecuba and the other royal ladies of the court have been enslaved and are being taken back to Greece by Agamemnon. Since all the ladies are "new" slaves, they were still dressed in some semblance of finery, and the costume designers clad them in flowing gowns with beautiful hues of turquoise, teal, and purple.

The women were also barefoot. I happened to have my opera glasses with me (our seats were way back on row T!), and they allowed me to make two observations: 1) Miss Redgrave's toenails are quite yellowed, and 2) for a woman, she has really big feet!

Miss Redgrave had been a member of the RSC company over forty-five years ago. Her classical technique blended in well with the other RSC actors, but one of the things about her performance which bothered my "modern" dramatic sensibilities was her use of the classical arm gestures and actions which are used to demonstrate extreme emotion in a large house without really very much corresponding facial expression and body language. Nevertheless, she does have an excellent command of her voice and the use of pacing, rhythm, and inflection to create an aural mood.

In addition to Miss Redgrave's performance, Malcolm Tierney as a paternal Agamemnon (do you remember him in Braveheart and In the Name of the Father?) and Darrell D'Silva doubly cast as a slimy Odysseus and an over-the-top Polymestor both put in noteworthy performances.

Greek tragedies were the inspiration for the Renaissance invention of what we know today as opera, so the chorus of twelve woman slaves had music for their choral interjections. Unfortunately, none of the ancient music from Euripidean plays has survived, so a modern composer, Mick Sands, created music for setting the moods and for the chorus. It didn't sound a bit ancient Greek at all to me (there is a tiny body of music from the era), and rather reminded me at times of some of the stock modern Broadway harmonic progressions. I'm sure there aren't many people like me who would know the difference, and I don't suppose it bothered me that much, but it did come up two or three times during the performance. And, Euripide's plot is a bit untenable, but who am I, a mere opera singer, to criticize untenable and fantastical story lines?

All in all, I suppose, it was a good evening at the theater, though my Oklahoma pocketbook still reels at paying $70 for a mediocre seat. But, that's the Kennedy Center.