How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken

by Daniel Mendelsohn

  Those who would stage Athenian drama today must, like Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, make an unsavory choice that involves a terrible sacrifice. To strip away (as often happens) the inconvenient bits that don’t speak to us today—the chorus, the masks, the angular gestures, the abstruse mythic allusions, the high poeticisms of the language—is essentially to misrepresent the genre; without those elements, the elements that make plots into allegories, the domestic into the political (and even the cosmic), tragedy is miniaturized. And yet to reproduce a Greek tragedy today would be a meaningless exercise in theatrical embalming. Even if it were possible to re-create the elements of the staging, it would be quite impossible to replicate the shared civic experience that was Athenian theater.

  How, then, to proceed? Three stylistically very different productions of Greek tragedies that were staged in New York in the past few months—of which I discuss two here, and the third in a subsequent essay—suggested, paradoxically, that the best way to honor the spirit of the ancient plays was to stray very far indeed from what the playwrights wrote.

  All three of the canonical Athenian tragedians were represented onstage in November and December 2001; ironically, it was Euripides, the most formally daring and ideologically subversive of the three, who received the most banal and conventional treatment.

  You can see where the temptation to treat this twenty-five-hundred-year-old author as a contemporary might come from. The youngest of the three great dramatists—he was born a decade after Sophocles and forty years after Aeschylus—Euripides has always seemed to be the most accessible to contemporary audiences. For the postwar generation of classicists, there has indeed always been something eerily familiar about the playwright’s mordantly ironic tone, about his prescient interest in, and use of, female psychology in his plays, about his flirtation with the Derrida-like Sophists and their newfangled arguments about the nature of, and connection between, language and reality; something bracingly contemporary about his language, which eschews the archaic and hieratic grandiosity of his predecessors and approaches something more streamlined, more “modern.”

  And indeed, as the Peloponnesian War ground on for thirty bitter years, during which Athens collapsed both politically and morally, that playwright increasingly rejected the traditional received forms of theater in favor of what looks to us like an almost postmodern array of theatrical modes and styles—pageant, melodrama, absurdist farce, romance, sci-fi fantasy—in order to expose the morally bankrupt behavior of his city, and the immorality of war itself. Iphigenia at Aulis was the last of the poet’s so-called war plays—a group that includes, most famously, Trojan Women. (It is, indeed, the last of all his plays: composed during Euripides’ final years of self-imposed exile in Macedon, it was produced posthumously, along with the Bacchae, following his death at seventy-nine early in 406 B.C.) In this final work, the poet returned to a mythic beginning: the pivotal moment in the story of the Trojan War when Agamemnon, the Greek commander in chief, decides to sacrifice his own daughter in order to win favorable winds for the expedition to Troy and (he thinks) everlasting glory.

  Aristotle rather enigmatically calls Euripides the “most tragic” of the three great tragedians; Iphigenia at Aulis suggests why. You’d think that the brutal murder of a young girl by her own father would be enough to arouse pity and fear; Aeschylus, after all, narrates the sacrifice briefly but harrowingly in a chorus of Agamemnon (which achingly describes the gagged girl pleading with her eyes for mercy). But Euripides brilliantly ratchets up the emotional ante in his last play, creating a complex and convoluted plot that yields terrible poignancies. Here Agamemnon, becalmed with his fleet at Aulis, has written home to lure Iphigenia to Aulis with the false promise that she is to be married to the hero Achilles (who is ignorant of the ruse); tormented by guilt, he sends a second letter warning his wife to ignore the first and thereby to save their child. This second letter is intercepted, however, and so the clueless Clytemnestra and her daughter arrive, preparing for a wedding that—as Agamemnon knows but now, pressured by his fellow generals, can no longer reveal—will be a murder. (Now it is he who is “gagged.”) The ongoing tension in the play between the rite that Iphigenia and her excited mother expect to take place and the one that does in fact occur—the climax of the play is the narration of Iphigenia’s bravery at the moment she is sacrificed—is one of the most wrenching that tragedy has to offer.

  If the plot is contrived and artificial, then so too is the characterization. Euripides more than any other playwright had no qualms about sacrificing naturalistic verisimilitude to a larger dramatic point. In play after play, he introduces spectacular surprises and bizarre turnarounds in an almost absurdist attempt to provoke reexamination of our expectations of human nature, or divine goodwill, or fate (or indeed of the theater). One of the striking things about Iphigenia at Aulis is the way in which nearly every major character has a sudden volte-face: Agamemnon writes his second letter; his brother Menelaus at first denounces him for trying to save Iphigenia, only to return in the next scene, repentant and swearing fealty to his kin; Achilles furiously rejects the idea of the false wedding—and then seems to fall in love with Iphigenia; Iphigenia herself at first resists her fate, only to embrace it moments later, volunteering for death. (“Second thoughts are somehow wiser,” the Nurse in Euripides’ Hippolytus famously asserts, and that would certainly seem to be the case here.) Aristotle cited the heroine of this play as a particularly egregious example of “inconsistency”; but as you watch Iphigenia at Aulis, you wonder if the real point here is that consistency of thought and emotion is impossible during a war—that violence has a disintegrative effect on the very minds of those touched by it.

  None of this—a feeling for the dire real-life circumstances that shadow the play; an awareness of Euripides’ personality as a dramatist, or of the centrality of this particular moment in the myth as the ideal vehicle to investigate the nature of violence and our apparent inability to resist it; a sensitivity to apparently deliberate structural anomalies—was evident in the performances of this play by New York’s Pearl Theatre Company. You’d never have guessed, from Shepard Sobel’s blandly earnest production, that there was much difference between Euripides and Philip Barrie; it would certainly come as a surprise, after seeing his Iphigenia, that this play is one that the classicist Bernard Knox could cite as an example of tragedy’s, and especially Euripides’, penchant for creating characters who speak “more like marionettes than living, feeling human beings.”

  Indeed all you got, in Sobel’s production, was living, feeling men and women, as if what happened at Aulis was Lyme disease, or a bad dot-com investment, something awful that might well befall the nice people next door and that you vaguely hope won’t happen to you. In high tragedy, complex abstractions and extreme emotion are conveyed by means of high stylization: the deeply poetic texts, the rich allusive vocabulary of myth, the ritualistic singing and dancing that resonates with shared religious and social values—the very artificiality, to which Knox alludes, that enhances rather than diminishes grand themes and emotions. Without the stylization, the naked texts seem embarrassingly deflated.

  Sobel’s failure to appreciate this key point was evident first of all in his casting: the bearing, gestures, and diction of the actors suggested an unfortunately extended acquaintance with made-for-television miniseries. This wasn’t always necessarily disastrous, at least during those moments when Euripides does get sentimental: the Pearl’s Iphigenia nicely combined virginal fragility and bouncy girlishness, with the result that her first scene with her father (the horribly ironic “Aren’t you happy to see me, Daddy?” scene) had some real pathos. But more often than not, the style grotesquely dishonored the play—and the genre. This was particularly true of the dismally suburban Clytemnestra, who conveyed absolutely no sense that the play in which she was appearing was a unique representation of the pivotal moment in her towering and tormented character’s evolution—the great and terrible day that turns Agamemno
n’s conventional wife into the monster we recognize from the Oresteia. In this production, Clytemnestra’s dire discovery of the real reason for Iphigenia’s presence at Aulis had all the moral and emotional impact of a Long Island matron discovering a faux pas in the placement for her daughter’s bat mitzvah reception.

  It’s something when you can reach the end of Iphigenia at Aulis with no sense that anything of great import—the morality of the characters’ political goals, the fate of their marriages and households, the destinies of their royal houses, their honor, their lives—had ever really been at stake. But then, there are no stakes if you see this as being about real people in plausible situations—if you smooth away the baroque artificiality of the plot and diction, and therefore make nothing of the deeper questions that such artificiality raises. Sobel is good at producing real-looking surfaces, and as far as they went, I suppose you could say that these answered some questions. You knew this was Greece, for instance, because the characters went around in classical-looking tunics, and you knew there was a war going on, because there was a rack of very real-looking spears downstage left. But you didn’t learn much else. Why does everyone in the play change his or her mind at some crucial juncture? What are the public pressures that might compel a man who is at once a general and a father to kill his own child? What is this play telling us about war and what it does to people’s characters? In such a production as Sobel’s you neither know nor care. The narrow focus of Sobel’s production on what, to us, looks reassuringly familiar and “relevant”—on the domestic, private nature of the pain in Euripides’ play—ultimately robs it of its truly tragic stature, and effect. True, Aristotle argues that the best dramas are those about families, and this play is nothing if not a drama about one of the most dysfunctional families in world literature. But Sobel’s failure to provide any sense of the vast public, imperial, and martial ramifications of this family’s actions (ramifications that the Athenians would have felt) trivializes what Euripides wrote.

  It’s not that you can’t do Iphigenia “straight,” as Sobel clearly wants to do; others have, with impressive results. In Michael Cacoyannis’s harrowing if uneven 1977 film version of the play, the director devotes a great deal of time to a lengthy opening sequence showing the restive soldiers grumpily hanging around next to their becalmed ships, bickering and getting into scuffles out of sheer boredom, and after seeing a few dozen shots of this sort of thing you had a very solid sense that the lack of favorable wind was more than a meteorological annoyance, but rather a potentially disastrous political and military crisis just waiting to explode, with fearsome consequences for Agamemnon, his rule, and indeed for all of Greece. It was clear, because Cacoyannis had made it clear, that the heroes at Aulis would welcome a fair wind at any price, even the price of a young girl’s life piteously cut short. Sobel gave you none of this. Or, maybe, half: there was pity, but no fear.

  In many ways Tadashi Suzuki’s Sophocles—a Noh-inflected Oedipus, performed in Japanese with English surtitles at the Japan Society last fall—represented a huge improvement over the Pearl Company’s Euripides and showed a thoroughgoing understanding not only of the spirit of classical drama but of its style. Suzuki has devoted much of his distinguished career to staging Greek tragedy, and his highly stylized technique (which arises out of philosophical antipathy to technology, and which emphasizes the alternating containment and explosion of “animal energy” by the actors onstage) has suited the highly stylized Greek texts very well. In his printed comments on the Oedipus production, Suzuki rightly notes the affinities between the Japanese and Greek theaters:

  Obviously, they resemble each other on the levels of stage structure. Both use a chorus as an inseparable part of the dramatic action, and both use masks, thus enabling one to three main actors to play more than a single role…. Depicting the disastrous deaths of noble heroes, both dramas pay homage to them, or pacify their souls. What they ultimately face up to is the inevitable fact of human weakness in the context of eternal nature or laws beyond human understanding. It is this vision, and the starkness with which it is represented, that are significantly common to Greek tragedy and noh.

  It would have been difficult to find a more starkly beautiful representation of Sophocles’ great drama of fate and self-knowledge (and ignorance) than the one Suzuki presented. The pared-down, elemental quality you want from performances of tragedy—that is, the sense of distillation that makes allegory and allusiveness possible—was present here in a number of ways, starting with superb performances that, in the classical style, made use of a limited but extreme gestural vocabulary, conveying a great deal with a fierce economy. I suppose there is a way that a real woman might react on hearing she’d borne four children to her own son, but Sophocles isn’t interested in that—in his play, the incest and parricide are part of more abstracted and elaborately coded theatrical and mythic discourse about selfhood and otherness and “knowing.” The brilliantly drawn-out, stylized recoil of Suzuki’s Jocasta, when she finally realizes who her husband is, suggested extremes of horror, loathing, and abjection in a way that no realistic enactment could ever have attained.

  Suzuki’s deeply classical technical emphasis on patterns of movement, on alternating compressions and explosions of physical energy, is, indeed, ideally suited to the highly conventional structure of Greek tragic action, which itself is organized as a series of compressions and explosions: dialogic exchanges, each beginning more or less calmly and climaxing in anger or violence or revelation, are framed between choral interludes of comparative calm. This is nowhere more the case than in Oedipus, which is constructed as a series of confrontations between Oedipus and various other characters, during each of which Oedipus gleans another piece of information that leads him to the identity of the criminal whose crime, we learn, is so terrible that it has brought a plague down on Thebes. First there is the priest who appeals to him to discover the cause of the plague; then his brother-in-law, Creon, who returns from a mission to Delphi with an oracle saying that the cause of the plague is a sinner who lives among the Thebans; then the seer Teiresias, who eventually reveals that the sinner is Oedipus himself; then his wife, Jocasta, who tells him to pay no heed to silly oracles, since after all she and her late husband once had an oracle saying that the husband would be killed by his son, which never came to pass (he was, she says, killed by some robbers at a crossroads just before Oedipus came to town); and so forth. What’s interesting is that not only that each successive dialogue is of increasing urgency, but each dialogue is itself constructed as a progression from calm to explosion. Oedipus begins by listening to his brother-in-law attentively, only to explode in rage later on, accusing Creon of taking bribes; he is polite enough with Teiresias, but that exchange also ends in rage and in threats that Oedipus makes against the old man; and he similarly threatens physical harm at the end of his exchange, late in the play, with the old shepherd who’s brought in to testify about what he knows about a certain baby who was supposed to have been exposed years earlier. And so on.

  The striking physical control emphasized by the Suzuki technique, the emphasis on alternations between restraint and release, was therefore ideally suited to the structure of Oedipus, and clarified Sophocles’ text in subtle ways. In what is surely one of the greatest dramatic gambles ever made by a playwright, the truth of Oedipus’s real identity—that he is the pollution he seeks; that he is the incestuous parricide he searches for—is announced to him by Teiresias very early on in the play. (The old seer doesn’t want to tell the young king what he knows at first, but the arrogant Oedipus ticks him off so much that he finally reveals all.) Since the drama is, at one level, about the Theban ruler’s search for the criminal whose past actions have brought a plague on his city, the play could conceivably collapse at this point; after all, we’re told who the culprit is a third of the way through the action. But of course this is really a drama about knowledge, and self-knowledge. The genius of Sophocles’ play, encapsulated in this scene, is th
e way in which it suggests that it is the process of knowing, rather than the possession of mere data, that is crucial to our humanity.

  To bring off this moment you need to have the sense that Oedipus, the man who solved the Sphinx’s riddle and thereby saved Thebes, is so intellectually and morally self-confident that Teiresias’s words simply don’t penetrate—with the result that the revelation of the truth all the characters are searching for doesn’t feel like a revelation at all. In Suzuki’s production, the sense of Oedipus as disastrously isolated in his self-sufficiency was admirably conveyed. The fierce Oedipus of Kiyosumi Niihori sits absolutely still, facing the audience, during the seer’s tirade; that uncanny, almost ritualized, self-absorbed stillness (which will soon explode into violent movement as Oedipus in his turn rails at Teiresias) explains a lot about the character, about both his past and his present inability to see the evidence that is right before his eyes.

  The physical production similarly emphasized to great effect the way in which minimalist, allusive style yields the greatest results in the staging of classical texts. The stage at the Japan Society was equipped, as was the Theater of Dionysos at Athens, with the bare minimum of structures necessary to convey both an interior space (the palace), in which things—terrible things—took place, and a public space outside, in which those things were revealed: there was a small platform downstage for Oedipus to speak from and to be spoken to, and some sliding screens upstage from which entrances and exits were made, sometimes with unnerving stealth. (One of the screens seemed at first to be nothing more than a mirror, but turned out to be transparent as well, so that characters could see both themselves reflected in it and other characters revealed behind it; this was a superbly well considered effect for a drama in which every “self” turns out, disastrously, to be an “other”: the husband a son, the wife a mother, the detective a criminal, the city’s rescuer its vile pollution, the king an outlaw, the foreigner a native.) The effect of these minimalist sets was to focus your attention fiercely on the characters—or, rather, on the magnificent costumes, by Tomoko Nakamura and Kana Tsukamoto, that these characters were weighed down by: ponderous, heavily embroidered robes and gowns and crowns that well conveyed the imperial status that these private persons enjoyed—or were oppressed by. In tragedy, as in its distant descendant, nineteenth-century opera, what makes the private agonies particularly unbearable is the fact that they are often endured in public, where the characters’ royal status squarely places them.