On July 10 I was in Nicosia and privileged to witness the first public performance of a production of Euripides’ Phoenician Women directed by a great classicist and former PhD student of mine. The review has been published in Greek. Here is the English-language original.
Gaping Wounds in the Cypriot Body Politic
The opening night of the THOK Phoenissae in Magdalena
Zira’s magnificent production was unbearably hot and airless. The actors must
have struggled to keep up the amazing energy of the performance. But somehow
the sense of strain enhanced the evocation of incurable tensions within the
city-state of Thebes.
The play premiered in 409 BCE, when Athens had just
undergone four years of desperate trauma:
a catastrophic military defeat, thousands of fatalities, an oligarchic
coup, the restoration of the democracy and vicious reprisals in the lawcourts
leading to summary executions. The city was split into hostile factions.
Magdalena chose Phoenissae this year because
only a Civil War play is appropriate to the 50th anniversary of the
Turkish occupation of Cyprus, which tore so many longstanding communities apart.
It led to much suffering, death, and the displacement and exile faced by
Oedipus and Antigone at the end of the action.
Zira is a highly trained classical scholar who always remains
true to the text and spirit of the ancient play, while using visual and aural
means to make it speak resonantly to our modern context. The set suggested both
the painted timber of military walls on ancient vases and the half-finished
houses, their metal frames jutting out of concrete blocks, so familiar on Greek
and Cypriot horizons; the soldiers wore costumes evoking 20th- or 21st-century
militiamen. The shouting and violence
just beyond the encircling walls of the city was represented by a brilliant
soundscape.
When I first discussed the play with Magdalena, I
advised her that the most difficult aspect of this long, stately piece of epic
theatre, at least to make intelligible in
modern performance, is the chorus. This play is rarely performed in northern
Europe, where nobody knows much about the ancient Phoenicians. But she smiled.
Her own PhD was on the chorus in Greek tragedy and how
to perform it today. Moreover, she reminded me that Cypriot people are
descendants of Phoenicians as well as Greek-speakers, and—even more
relevantly—the sight of refugee women from the Levant and Syria is an everyday
fact of Cypriot life. We understood exactly what these lonely travellers were
doing in Thebes and why the events they were witnessing so stirred their
emotions. They are also specialists in myth and ritual, as hierodules on their
way to Delphi.
The amazing chorale about Ares, whose primordial rage
at the execution of his serpent-son is now massacring the present generation of
Thebans, was perhaps the most exciting piece of musical theatre I have ever
witnessed in a Greek tragic performance.
The Thebans belonged to one of two families, Oedipus’, directly descended from the Phoenician immigrant Cadmus, and Creon’s, sprung from the serpent’s teeth. The figure who unites and divides them simultaneously is Creon’s sister Jocasta, whose contested body symbolizes the Theban Body Politic. When she greeted Polynices, the physicality of their embraces represented in searing terms the deep love as well as hate integral to this household, and the dangerous possibility of incestuous desires. The altercation between the two brothers was executed with such commitment, passion and oratorical precision that the audience was physically trembling by the time Polynices stormed off to the battlefield.
The ending is perhaps the bleakest in the ancient
stage repertoire. It is not just that three young men and a longsuffering
mother lie dead and bloodied before our eyes. As Creon terrifyingly assumes the
mask of power, his tyrannical disposition fully exposed by the action, we know
that there is to be no healing or redemption in this community. Truly a
tale—and a production—for our own dark and divided times.
