THE GOOD WIFE, Classical-Style

King's College Greek Play 2016

Cross London Bridge to the Greenwood Theatre and this week you could watch my students enact the most peculiar of ancient plays. Euripides was always avant-garde, but his Alcestis is borderline outrageous.

Northern Broadsides/Hughes Alcestis

King Admetus gets the unusual chance of avoiding death on his allotted day if he can produce someone to die in his place. Only his wife Alcestis offers. He accepts. She dies. All involved (including their lovely children) weep. Then Admetus’ old chum Heracles turns up, gets drunk, wrestles with Death, and brings Alcestis back from the dead. Everyone (except, conspicuously, Alcestis) cheers.

The sting in the tale is that, even before the play is over, Admetus breaks the single promise he made to Alcestis—that he would never marry again and inflict a step-parent on their children. He doesn’t realise that the attractive veiled lady Heracles offers him a blind date with is, in fact, Alcestis. He takes her in as a new bedmate anyway. So the play ends with a revenant wife who has a bit of a bone to pick with her morally invertebrate husband.

T.S.Eliot's Alcestis, Vivienne

My favourite adaptation is a Victorian musical-comedy burlesque (1850), performed next door to King’s College at the Strand Theatre. This Alcestis leapt at the opportunity to leave her self-important husband and bunk off with the handsome young Death to a fun new life in the Underworld. Its title was Alcestis! The Original Strong-Minded Woman!!!

But writers with absent wives have always taken the play more seriously. Robert Browning adapted it in Balaustion’s Adventure (1871) when trying to cope with the loss of Elizabeth Barrett. T.S. Eliot adapted it in The Cocktail Party, which he wrote in 1948, the year his estranged wife died in a mental hospital. Ted Hughes, who had buried two mothers of his children, left his version when he died, with the instructions that it should be performed by Barrie Rutter’s Northern Broadsides company.

But how can a supposedly gender-equal world restage a patriarchal story in which a woman’s greatest virtue is defined as embracing the idea that her life is worth much less than a man’s? Euripides admittedly does his best, not only by that sinister ending but by portraying Admetus as a weasel-worded slimebag who can’t stick by a principle for two minutes. 

The Ever-youthful Professor Silk

My enterprising students, brilliantly organised by producer David Bullen, also did their best by rewriting the ending and with Marcus Bell’s superb choreography; Pina Bausch-style movements accompanied the exquisite ancient Greek verses recited by my esteemed mellifluous colleague Professor Michael Silk, who knows more than anyone alive about the poetic rhythms of classical Greek. But the play still bothers me and always will.  Anybody out there have any ideas about how the plot could be made truly 21^st-century?