The Observer view on Greek drama

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/04/observer-view-greek-drama-theatre-feminism

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The plethora, to use a Greek word, of ancient drama staged this year shows no sign of tapering off. Just as the National Theatre Wales’ Iliad, which closed last night, is judged best production of the year, the curtain is poised to go up on a Manchester production of Ted Hughes’s translation of The Oresteia.

This autumn it might look as if Aeschylus’s trilogy is the only story worth staging, with another version running in London’s West End and a third at the Globe. But a reworking of Euripides’s Medea by Rachel Cusk just opened as the final instalment of the Almeida theatre’s Greek bonanza. Cusk, a writer attacked for taboo-busting books on motherhood and divorce, uses her Greek template to point up issues lurking on the edges of civilised society for at least 2,446 years. To call her version “uncompromising” is redundant, since lack of compromise is the draw of ancient drama.

Meanwhile, Gluck’s opera about Orpheus has been imagined afresh at Covent Garden and also reinterpreted for radio by Simon Armitage, although the poet has since turned his attention to Homer. His modern version of The Odyssey at Liverpool’s Everyman follows a government minister on a diplomatic mission to Turkey.

By now, audiences have watched a chorus of Islington mums in Cusk’s Medea and some Goth-style furies in the Globe’s Oresteia. So what is the sudden appeal? Mary Beard has warned against the notion we recognise ourselves in these tales of death, sex, family and betrayal. It is an alien world, she insists.

Possibly, then, it is distance that allows us to play with the themes and project our own concerns. Today’s dramatists appear to want radical, often feminist, readings. Not surprising when the ancient world offers such towering female roles: Antigone, Clytemnestra, , Electra, Medea, Cassandra and then Hecuba, the Trojan queen, now playing at Stratford-upon-Avon. To return to a time when “childbirth was as deadly to women as battle was to men”, in Beard’s phrase, is handy for giving women’s plight an epic sweep.