Tom Wright on ‘The Oresteia’
- Nick Terrell
Tom Wright, Associate Director of the Sydney Theatre Company, is drawn to classical tragedy “because it is difficult” and “because it is bigger than us.” Classical tragedy asks difficult questions of our quotidian and pragmatic ideas of order, justice and accountability. Ideally, any new adaptation of the Oresteia will renew and reframe these questions.
I asked Wright why it’s important to keep these works on our stage and how he has approached Aeschylus’ trilogy.
NT: Have you adapted this Oresteia as a thing unto itself or is it inextricably linked to this particular production and process with the Residents?
TW: In some way the adaptation stands alone; it reflects a particular ‘take’ on the piece and chooses to focus on certain aspects ahead of others. In that sense it’s a stand alone. But largely this version has been done for the Residents, as a solution to being presented with five women and four men.
NT: How did you develop this adaptation - have you used multiple translations, multiple versions of the myths? Are you trying to be true to Aeschylus’ language and rhetorical style or to his interpretation of the characters and the narrative?
TW: It would be wrong for me to claim any fidelity to Aeschylean language or style, in the literal sense. I’m dubious that this level of accuracy in adaptation is possible in any event. This version is really an adaptation of Agamemnon and Choephori, with a deus ex machina from Apollo at the end. The idiosyncratic and Athenocentric Eumenides is deeply fascinating but we’ve made the arbitrary decision to stay focused on the core family. In one dramatic sense the energy of the piece dissipates after Clytemnestra’s death. The rest is mopping-up and ideology. I can imagine doing a full version of the Aeschlyus, but we’ve tried to focus intently on the narrative surrounding the house of Atreus and taken note that we’re doing a chamber version of the piece, in Wharf One.
I used the Loeb edition crib and read the Fagles and Hughes, then ignored them. Some of it - particularly in the earlier sections - follows Aeschylean order and imagery fairly closely. Some of it doesn’t.
NT: Do you see the Oresteia (or equally The Women of Troy or Ovid’s Metamorphoses) as archetypes to be reactivated, or conventional platforms that allow for experimentation with a known quantity? Perhaps that question boils down to this: do you anticipate an audience that comes to this story as if for the first time or is it a given that provides common-ground (between an audience and director who know the source material) for an experimental departure?
TW: Both at once. I anticipate an audience that knows the core myth; this might be an erroneous assumption I know. I’m confident most people will be able to follow what happens. Exactly who Cassandra is might be unclear. That doesn’t bother me too greatly. The idea that theatre is an unfolding of a fresh, hitherto undisclosed set of events doesn’t interest me much. For me it’s about doing it again, again, again, same same but different different. The form should be new. The content should be old.
NT: For you, when adapting classical tragedies and presenting them for a modern audience, is it more important to bring period idiosyncracies into line with current expectations, or to maintain the ritual element of the dramas?
TW: Depends. Sometimes you need to be deliberately anachronistic, as if making an aside to the audience. Sometimes you want to keep the mind, language, body, ideology on a distant continent from our own. On the whole I don’t like any great myth being reduced down to a refraction of our current political squabbles, the ‘this play is for our purposes about Kandahar’ school of dramaturgy. I prefer the ‘Kandahar is about this play’ way of looking at things.
NT: The Canadian poet and translator Anne Carson succinctly justified a recent new translation of An Oresteia by explaining “it seems important to get Greek plays performed more”. I expect you would agree with that idea, but can you suggest why its important to do this?
TW: Because, if nothing else, it liberates our theatre from endless mimesis and turgid, facile domesticity.
Because in unpacking these texts we unpack our ideological archaeology.
Because in the west we have a tenuous grasp of the numinous and it turns us into machines. Because one of the definitions of ‘civilised’ is having a powerful set of conversations with the ancestors.
Because they’re difficult.
Because they’re bigger than us.
NT: Following on from that, Carson’s sense that Greek plays are under-performed probably wouldn’t last long if she were based in Australia. Australian writers and theatre-makers clearly see something important, and contemporary, in this tradition. In the past few years there have been your own The Lost Echo, The Women of Troy, Tom Holloway’s Oresteia inspired Don’t Say the Words and Love Me Tender, Louis Nowra’s trilogy based on the Oresteia, Black Medea, Antigone, productions of Stravinsky’s Oedipus Rex in the Sydney Festival, Orestes 2.0, The Golden Ass, Live Acts on Stage, I’m sure I’ve missed many, and there’s also Malthouse’s adpatation of Seneca’s Thyestes coming up. Is there something about these tragedies, as a platform, that has particular appeal for Australian theatre-makers?
TW: Doubt it. I don’t sense a strong interest in Greek or Roman texts. They are barely performed on our mainstages, or our independent stages for that matter. Playwrights nicking structures or thematic lacings for their own texts is well and good, but those works you’ve mentioned don’t speak much to me. I can’t hear an Oresteia in Holloway or Nowra. Saying that our day-to-day experiences are like reverberatory repeats of Aeschylean themes feels like behaviourism to me.
There has been, in the past, forms of classical inquiry in Australia, particularly in relation to two things; nationhood and landscape. One of the ways for artists (particularly in the early 20th century) to grasp Australian-ness was via classical archetypes, as if we were hyperboreans lost. Or look at the paintings of Napier Waller as a sort of patriarchal classicist obsession with control. Or Norman Lindsay’s bacchanals in the Blue Mountains as a counterpoint. Or Sydney Long for a twilight vision, Elysium among the brolgas. Or Bernard O’Dowd’s obscure poesy.
But on our stages? Perhaps the opposite. Perhaps the Greeks are a way for us to connect with the bigger pool, this thing called the world. Maybe they are ways for us to think about ourselves in a different way, not a nationalistic one.
For me the extent to which something is Australian isn’t hugely interesting.
NT: Is it important to stymie that modern moral impulse to think in terms of individual responsibility? To understand or relate to the characters’ choices, duties and obligations solely as moral dilemmas would be to lose something important about their fated roles. How do you keep that something important alive with a modern audience that does not share the cultural understanding Aeschylus would have presumed from his audience?
TW: You don’t. You let it be a problem. You let modern minds wrestle with the implications of fate. You let them problematise the characters; Orestes, Electra, Clytemnestra, Cassandra, they aren’t us. You ask an audience to imagine a universe of gods and relativity. You ask them to hear a bold poem where acts of will by one man are counterpointed with images of childbirth letting loose chaos upon the stars, and ponder what that means.
NT: How do you balance the epic scale of the drama (the broad, humanity-scaled symbolic resonance) with emotional involvement with characters who are specifically fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters and friends? I’m thinking for example of your representation of Noah (in The Mysteries, STC 2010) as an alienated loner, perhaps a Utah Mormon, receiving instructions from god on his transistor radio - an interpretation which keeps the religious myth in play but attaches a parallel almost secular narrative to it. Most of the characters in the Bible myths are ordinary people, they are not the progeny of gods and royal houses - is it possible to re-interpret them in a way similar to this reinterpretation of Noah, without defusing that epic standing?
TW: We’ve had to acknowledge that you can’t do a play like this without in some way acknowledging that we can’t help seeing it through a Freudian prism. I’m not saying the characters act in a Freudian way of course, I’m saying we see their actions that way. But when you do theatre you have to be aware of such distinctions. Agamemnon is a mythic absent father. He is a patriarch. Orestes does have mother shit. Electra eroticises her absent brother.
But to the heart of your question, I don’t know how successful we’ve been. On occasions it should be clear that the subject of the Oresteia is the frail fleshy human being in all its failings.
NT: Is human evil really at play in these mythic vendettas?
TW: No.
NT: No character rejects the destructive obligations of honour (as they see it) and just as no one could really be seen as innocent, can any of the characters in the Oresteia be singled out as more culpable than the others?
TW: No. The Olympian ideology of course sees Clytemnestra’s crime as more despicable. Medea gets the treatment. But all theat Judeo-Christian stuff is no use to us.
NT: Or is the evil at a cultural level. What then do you make of the fact that out of the atavistic feud comes a reconciling innovation - the jury trial. A civilising procedure to administer a quotidian, non-epic, kind of justice. Is this an element of Aeschylus’ trilogy that you have much sympathy with?
TW: I see that as patriarchal logocentric revisionism. I see it as Athenian colonising of darkness. I see it as history. We put all that baggage into the person of Apollo; he can come on and begin the great sweep of law, propriety, right and patriarchy. It’s good and it’s bad.
NT: On one reading of these myths, men do terrible things out of selfless submission to duty, and women do terrible things out of ambition, a sense of personal affront and hysterical spite. But then, of course, the relative virtue of the various characters is wide open to personal affinity. Agamemnon could justifiably be called Clytemnestra, and Sophocles’ version of The Libation Bearers is Elektra. In Aeschylus’ work, Elektra and Clytemnestra are dangerous because they have taken on the authority and self-determination attributed to men. Impressive because they are considered and articulate in their opposition to authority. In your Oresteia, are strong women impressive or dangerous? Is their kind of strident revolt the natural expression of a repressed minority?
TW: Yes, of course it is. Strong women are what makes Greek drama work, for that reason. Clytemnestra’s defiance is that of a society that knows it can’t rationalise, mathematicise, legalise the pain away. Men ‘are’, women are a problem. These texts are some of the founding documents in patriarchy. When Apollo proclaims that the woman you call mother is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed - the man is the source of life, the true parent (Eumenides 665-670) you have the definitional beginnings of an anthropological problem in which we are still enmeshed. In our version women are hopefully dangerous. And as a result, impressive.
NT: I’m generally so well persuaded by Clytemnestra’s case against Agamemnon (bolstered by Agamemnon’s choices in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis) that I find it hard to understand sympathetic depictions of him. Agamemnon is a hero of the Trojan war, he sacrificed his daughter to fulfil an order from Zeus, but even among the extreme inter-family violence that marks Tantalus’ line, the killing of Iphigenia seems most to warrant the vengeance it attracts. How do you see Agamemnon?
TW: On one hand, he had to act. Doing nothing is death. Men are ripping each other apart, dying in their diseased ships while the winds are against them. Agamemnon has a choice, he can fix this, save many lives in the short term, break the curse. One life for many. He had no choice. He had to act. But in doing so he had to face the inevitable price. Nothing comes for free. Orestes talks about his vision of what happens to a human who doesn’t act, doesn’t make a choice. They dessicate, they wither, they lose their organs, they become outcasts, dying in a corner. Agamemnon makes the choice. It was born of pride, but he was trapped. He suffers into truth. The Agamemnon that endures that, and the following decade of war, returns wiser, humane, ready to rule. But it is too late. Beautiful irony.
Sydney Theatre Company’s Residents will perform Tom Wright’s adaptation of Aeschylus’ Oresteia, at Wharf One from the 1st of June to the 4th of July.