A new take on Greek tragedy

REVERENCE is a dirty word at the Almeida Theatre in Islington, north London. Rupert Goold, the artistic director, and Robert Icke, his associate, are resolved to take dusty, distant cultural artefacts of drama and shake them hard, so that they will entertain modern audiences, especially those with no previous knowledge of the plays. Mr Icke holds that to save the classics from withering, a director must be willing even to reinterpret the original author’s intentions.

This summer Messrs Goold and Icke have directed freshly translated versions of the oldest of all “dusty theatrical artefacts”: the ancient Greek tragedies of Aeschylus and Euripides. These versions ruthlessly rewrite texts and alter plots. In Euripides’s “Medea”, the last of the season of three plays, which opened on October 1st directed by Mr Goold, Medea murders her two children as revenge on her unfaithful husband. Not at the Almeida: in this version, her sons die—or perhaps do not—by eating sleeping pills.

Mr Icke’s version of “Oresteia” by Aeschylus is described as “a new adaptation”, but classics scholars insist that it is much more than that. The masked male chorus which propels all Greek tragedy, so memorable in Sir Peter Hall’s production at the National Theatre in 1981, is jettisoned. Mr Icke’s “Oresteia” starts with 46 pages of text (out of 113 in all) that are a dramatisation of the long choral ode in Aeschylus’s “Agamemnon”. It deals with his decision to sacrifice his daughter Iphigenia to ensure his ships a fair wind for Troy. Mr Icke believes that, without this prelude, it is hard to appreciate fully the ensuing, awe-inspiring family tragedy in which his wife Klytemnestra kills Agamemnon to avenge their daughter’s death, and then is murdered in turn by their son, Orestes. The extra material makes for a long evening, but it speeds by. Only the “Bakkhai”, the second of the Almeida’s three plays, conforms to the traditional Greek unities of time and place and, as in ancient Greece, has all the speaking roles played by three actors, backed by a chorus (though of Bacchic ladies rather than masked men).

Although the end of “Medea” may not be as dreadful as Euripides intended, these radical departures have been a critical success. Simon Goldhill, a professor of Greek literature at King’s College, Cambridge, has no trouble justifying the wholesale reassessment of Greek tragedy, arguing that great works require heavy maintenance to restore their power. “All translators are traitors,” he writes, “but some traitors turn out to be liberators who let us recalibrate what matters.”

The Greek season defines the Almeida’s style of work. Mr Goold has unearthed a rich new seam of modern theatre by reviving and generally energising work by authors such as Luigi Pirandello and Bret Easton Ellis. His delightful version of “The Merchant of Venice” set in Las Vegas, was played largely for laughs, with the verse adapting easily to a singsong southern American accent. Even his failures, such as a “King Lear” and Puccini at the English National Opera, had moments that linger in the memory.

Now aged 43, Mr Goold is an ebullient figure. “I’m a populist basically,” he says. Art shouldn’t be a chore or a trial. A graduate of Cambridge University, he served an apprenticeship in repertory theatres in Salisbury and Northampton, unlike Mr Icke, whom he hired not long after he graduated (he says he envied Mr Icke’s confidence). To ensure that he directed his choice of plays, Mr Icke had started his own companies, at home in Stockton-on-Tees and as a student at Cambridge.

Little, it seems, is safe from their revisionist ardour. Mr Icke rescued George Orwell’s “1984” from the obscurity of the sixth-form syllabus and transformed it into a taut, macabre West End hit. But the Almeida has a fondness for new work as well as reimagined classics; plays by award-winning young British writers such as Lucy Kirkwood (“Chimerica”) and Mike Bartlett (“King Charles III”, which is due to open in New York on October 10th), were performed in Islington before transferring to the West End or Broadway.

Actors like working there. Since small theatres like the Almeida cannot pay well, actors choose the work over the money. In this Greek season, the two most memorable performances are by Lia Williams (pictured, below) as Klytemnestra and Kate Fleetwood, who is Mr Goold’s wife (pictured, above), as Medea. Each exhibits an emotional range that holds the action together. The rage, temper and insult of the dialogue between Medea and her husband Jason, here conducted on their mobile phones, reveal a direct linguistic link from ancient Greece to contemporary soap opera.

Whatever quibbles there might be about the editing, cutting and rewriting of the texts, surely the significant question about this ambitious project is whether the audience is gripped by the performances. Enthusiastic word-of-mouth suggests the answer is yes.