Η τραγωδία Τρωάδες του Ευριπίδη θα παρουσιαστεί το Νοέμβριο στο Malthouse Theatre στη Μελβούρνη σε σκηνοθεσία του Αυστραλού Μπάρι Κόσκι και διασκευή του Τομ Ράιτ. Σε δημοσίευμά της η εφημερίδα «The Age» περιγράφει την υπόθεση του έργου, τις ιστορικές συνθήκες υπό τις οποίες γράφτηκε και τονίζει τη διαχρονική αξία του. Επισημαίνεται ότι οι αναλογίες αυτού του αρχαίου δράματος με τη σύγχρονη εποχή είναι εμφανείς. Έχει παρουσιαστεί και προσαρμοστεί αναφορικά με τον πόλεμο των Μπόερ, το Ολοκαύτωμα, τον πόλεμο στην Αλγερία, τη Χιροσίμα, το Ιράκ - ακόμα και με τις φυλακές του Αμπού Γκράιμπ.
Και ενώ ο Όμηρος επικεντρώνεται στην οδύνη των ανδρών, στον Ευριπίδη προοιωνίζεται η έμφαση της εποχής μας στους σιωπηλούς μάρτυρες του πολέμου και έρχονται στο προσκήνιο οι τραγικές συνέπειες του πολέμου και όχι η δόξα και οι ιαχές της μάχης. Επιπλέον, το έργο αποτελεί μία από τις πρώτες και πιο ισχυρές απεικονίσεις της γυναικείας αξιοπρέπειας σε συνθήκες βίας, του πόνου των αθώων γυναικών και της ικανότητάς τους να συμπάσχουν.
Το δημοσίευμα της «The Age» επικεντρώνεται στην παραγωγή της παράστασης και τους συντελεστές της. Αναφερόμενος στον Ευριπίδη, ο σκηνοθέτης Μπάρι Κόσκι τόνισε: «Ο Ευριπίδης είναι ο αγαπημένος μου Έλληνας τραγικός ποιητής. Οι γυναικείοι χαρακτήρες του είναι εκπληκτικοί όσον αφορά στην ποικιλία και την πολυπλοκότητά τους. Τα έργα του είναι προσωπικά, δεν παίρνουν θέση, τραγωδίες που συχνά θολώνουν τα όρια ανάμεσα στην αγάπη, την τρέλα, την οικογένεια, τις αξίες».
Σημειώνεται ότι το εν λόγω έργο παρουσιάζεται στη Μελβούρνη κατόπιν σειράς παραστάσεων στο Θέατρο του Σίδνεϊ (Sydney Theatre), για τις οποίες δέχτηκε θετικές κριτικές από το σύνολο των αυστραλιανών ΜΜΕ.
Robyn Nevin in The Women of Troy.
Photo: Supplied
The Age, November 1, 2008
What resonated for Greek audiences 2400 years ago still echoes thunderously today, writes Kate Holden.
AT THE BEGINNING OF Euripides' play The Women of Troy (sometimes The Trojan Women), Hecuba, downcast former queen of the conquered city, facing the extinction of her family and her own awful fate as a slave, tells herself to "endure it". By the end of this short but devastating drama the Chorus of Trojan women are crying to her, "Pain! You shout pain!"
There is no end of it in this, one of the most enduring, indeed, of ancient Greek tragedies. Sorrow, as it is portrayed here, has no point of surfeit. In the brief drama of four women's fates we see anguish laid upon anguish; but, as Hecuba says: "Yet if god had not turned the world upside down, we would vanish into obscurity. We would never have given men to come the inspiration to sing of us in their song."
The play is set in the immediate aftermath of the sacking of Troy by the invading Greeks. The gods Poseidon and Athena open the action with a plan for capricious vengeance: the Greeks, who deal death and cruelty in this play, will themselves be brought low. This prospect seems superfluous as consolation, however, because first the women of Troy must see their husbands' bodies defiled, their children murdered, their city torched and themselves enslaved or forcibly married and raped. Imprisoned, bloodily sacrificed or wrenched into exile on the Greek ships, these women come to embody all that is most agonising about the real cost of war.
Hecuba is the centre around which the other characters whirl; in horror she repeatedly totters to her feet and collapses under the strain: "For in the face of all I suffer, all I have suffered and shall go on to suffer, what can I do but fall?" Yet she remains, "enduring", uttering an incessant lament for herself and her loved ones.
The old woman, almost emptied by apprehension, is the audience for a sequence of her female relatives, each of whom will suffer and answer her own suffering in a different way. Cassandra, Hecuba's virgin daughter cursed with the power of unheeded prophecy, goes to her marriage to a Greek king proclaiming, in madness, her joyful willingness to adapt; she also happily foresees his assassination. Andromache, having watched her husband Hector slain in battle and the city taken, will now be married to the son of her husband's killer; she is nearly paralysed with self-pity, but more cruelty is in store: her infant son, a threat to the Greeks, is taken from her arms and hurled to his death. Andromache heeds the advice of the sympathetic Greek messenger, and in exchange for the boy's burial, departs weeping but pliant. Polyxena, Hecuba's youngest daughter, is meanwhile murdered off-stage as a sacrifice: her death is seen as merciful reprieve. "Sorrows are piled upon sorrows," Hecuba mourns.
And at that point Helen, the supposed cause of the entire catastrophe, enters, "splendidly dressed". Her former husband appears, to retrieve her from the city he has devastated and kill her; she is unrepentant. Here Euripides opens up the cherchez la femme assumptions of the traditional myth; indeed, the speciousness of looking for master causes of war apart from, as Hecuba suggests, "fear". The two women on stage are not comrades in victimhood. Previously Andromache and Hecuba have competed for the crown of most wretched; now Helen and Hecuba viciously wrangle over whose unwitting fault provoked the death of all they loved. Sorority in abjection is the prerogative of the Chorus, who with one massed voice speak for individual women ("Your tragedy," they say to Andromache, "is the same as ours. As you lament your own fate, you teach me where I stand in my woes"); the individual female characters of the play behave like real women: that is, they diverge. Noble Hecuba, former queen, now "the wretched, corpse-like", will be a slave; Helen, mistress of Realpolitik, will escape death (but, at least in one modern poet's vision, lose her lethal beauty and become a querulous old woman).
The play is, of course, a meditation through the dialogue of the women on how virtue, beauty, security, pride and love are no protection against violence - or fear. It was performed for the first time in 415BC, shortly after the Athenians (for whom it was written) had slaughtered the male population of the island of Melos and enslaved its women and children simply for claiming neutrality in the war against Sparta. It is strongly probable that Euripides was commenting on the moral cost of this atrocity; however, he resists the clear dichotomies loved by Greek philosophers. There is obvious brutality but little simplicity. The argument between Helen and Hecuba, and Andromache's curse upon Helen for causing the murder of her child, illuminate the unwitting complicity of civilians in conflicts greater than they can escape; the cohesions that are produced under pressure; and the fractures that open up under stress.
The modern analogies of this ancient drama are all too evident. It has been performed and adapted with reference to the Boer War, the Holocaust, the French conflict in Algeria, Hiroshima and of course, Iraq and Abu Ghraib prison. "O you Greeks," spits Andromache as her child is wrested from her, "you who have devised atrocities worthy of barbarians". While Homer is full of men's anguish (and The Iliad is a truly tormented poem), Euripides, anticipating modern focus on the silenced voices of historical witness, brings to the fore an exquisite comprehension of wretched aftermath, not battle cries and glory. This is the true heartbreak of war, to this day too often muffled. Hecuba cries, "Why should I be silent?" But then, "Why should I not be silent?"
It is perhaps awkward to identify
The Trojan Woman as an obvious proto-feminist piece; it is a play by a man in an era where women were virtually chattel, and the highest praise Andromache can claim for herself is that she always kept her tongue quiet and her expression calm. Euripides is not interested in women's rights. The play was performed for men, and acted entirely by men (women were excluded from most Greek theatre). Yet if feminism is that which especially cherishes women, then this play stands as one of the earliest and most powerful portrayals of women's dignity under duress, the great wounds that are visited upon the innocent, and their capacity for feeling - in a world which otherwise placed little daily value on women's sentience.
The dispute between Helen and Hecuba is a fascinating dissection of women's agency, or lack of it as civilian trophies in war. Helen claims to be a toy of the gods: abducted against her will, "ruined by my beauty, and ... damned by those who should have given me a garland to crown my head" and innocent of collaboration with the Trojans. Hecuba will have none of it: she accuses Helen of having made her choices deliberately and of wantonly lusting after Paris. Are women always victims in war? Can they cause one? Could they help prevent it? What of their own responsibilities? "You should have come humbly in rags, shuddering in fear," Hecuba lambasts her daughter-in-law before demanding her co-prisoner's death from her own conqueror. The tension between the two women suggests a knot of paradox; but in the end they are all defenceless. "You have no power," the Greek messenger reminds them, "so do not delude yourself that you have. There is nowhere you can turn for help."
There will be women in the modern audience who have heard these words from soldiers, or abusive husbands, or torturers.
What resonated 2400 years ago still echoes in a world afflicted by violence. Women suffer; children die; men are defeated, but they also decide.
"Did you understand?" Hecuba asks the Chorus at the play's conclusion. "Did you hear?" As the city of the past burns, for the last time she rises to her feet, and walks upright to slavery.
The Women of Troy is at the Malthouse Theatre, November 6-22. www.malthousetheatre.com.au, 96855111.
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