Hello. For much of the
past six months I have been up to my eyebrows in the Oresteia
as I was fortunate enough to perform with By Jove Theatre
Company’s inaugural production The Women Screaming Beyond.
We took the myth apart, closely scrutinised each part of it, and with
the aid of modern dramatic techniques put it back together again to
suit our purposes. It was recognisably the same myth with which we’d
started but it was now better, faster, and stronger. It was like the
Six Million Dollar Man but with Homer, Classical Athens, and
Brecht instead of blood, muscle, and carbon fibre. It was the most
interesting theatrical thing of which I’ve been a part. This said,
theatre, like gin, is something for which I have a great love but
rather limited technical knowledge, so I shall instead share some of
the reasons why this was the most interesting Classical thing of
which I’ve been a part. I shall limit myself to simply my most
important realisations because I’m needlessly loquacious and
senselessly sesquipedalian and space is limited; and will only become
more so once I crowbar in another gin reference for my own amusement.
A script is a good starting point for a piece of theatre but we had a way to go to get to this point. There are several surviving versions of the myth we wanted to portray, or rather versions of parts of it. The differences between the versions varied from the precise details of character biography to full-on alternate realities – the differences between Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Orestes are like those between Batman as portrayed by Adam West and Christian Bale. Even once we’d settled on which storyboard we wanted to hang our play’s message we had to think about which bits of the myth needed to be showed to the audience, which could just be dealt with by exposition, and which could be quietly cut (sorry, Pylades, I love you, but you are just dead weight). We had fiddled with the myth extensively to get a version that made the points we wanted within the time an audience could reasonably be expected to sit on uncomfortable chairs in a Shoreditch theatre, but it was still definitely the same story. It doesn’t matter that what Euripides spent an entire play exploring in his Medea Ovid passes over in a single line in Book VIII of his Metamorphoses; they’re using the same gloriously flexible starting material to make masterpieces as different in their aims as they are magnificent in their execution.
The second point I have to make is one that, considering the likely audience of Non-Sequitur, you might say I don’t need to make. I am going to make it anyway because I believe it is fundamentally important to keep it in mind at all times. The point is this: having people properly educated in the ancient world (and other areas without direct relevance to specific careers) is vital. The director of the piece knew more about the plays relevant to the project than I do; the man who played Apollo knows more than his share of myth; the cast were all diligent in their research for their characters, but despite this there were times when their knowledge was not enough. At those times one of the Classicists in the company was able to resolve the query quicker than a library and more reliably than Wikipedia. We could jump in on the factual, ancient stuff because some excellent titbit Jonathan Powell once mentioned while resolutely not making eye-contact had happened to stick. We could help in the non-specific problems where our colleagues couldn’t because we’d immersed ourselves in different Great Works, ideas, and ways of thinking and so could approach the same problem from a different and more fruitful direction. For any education policy-makers who happen to be reading this, I suppose what I’m trying to say is this: You might not like gin, you might be genuinely confused as to why anyone choose to drink gin, but don’t go around smashing up the gin distilleries because you might find out the only thing that will make the mugger release your daughter is the flask of Bombay Sapphire that I happen to have concealed in the folds of my toga.
A script is a good starting point for a piece of theatre but we had a way to go to get to this point. There are several surviving versions of the myth we wanted to portray, or rather versions of parts of it. The differences between the versions varied from the precise details of character biography to full-on alternate realities – the differences between Aeschylus’ Eumenides and Euripides’ Orestes are like those between Batman as portrayed by Adam West and Christian Bale. Even once we’d settled on which storyboard we wanted to hang our play’s message we had to think about which bits of the myth needed to be showed to the audience, which could just be dealt with by exposition, and which could be quietly cut (sorry, Pylades, I love you, but you are just dead weight). We had fiddled with the myth extensively to get a version that made the points we wanted within the time an audience could reasonably be expected to sit on uncomfortable chairs in a Shoreditch theatre, but it was still definitely the same story. It doesn’t matter that what Euripides spent an entire play exploring in his Medea Ovid passes over in a single line in Book VIII of his Metamorphoses; they’re using the same gloriously flexible starting material to make masterpieces as different in their aims as they are magnificent in their execution.
The second point I have to make is one that, considering the likely audience of Non-Sequitur, you might say I don’t need to make. I am going to make it anyway because I believe it is fundamentally important to keep it in mind at all times. The point is this: having people properly educated in the ancient world (and other areas without direct relevance to specific careers) is vital. The director of the piece knew more about the plays relevant to the project than I do; the man who played Apollo knows more than his share of myth; the cast were all diligent in their research for their characters, but despite this there were times when their knowledge was not enough. At those times one of the Classicists in the company was able to resolve the query quicker than a library and more reliably than Wikipedia. We could jump in on the factual, ancient stuff because some excellent titbit Jonathan Powell once mentioned while resolutely not making eye-contact had happened to stick. We could help in the non-specific problems where our colleagues couldn’t because we’d immersed ourselves in different Great Works, ideas, and ways of thinking and so could approach the same problem from a different and more fruitful direction. For any education policy-makers who happen to be reading this, I suppose what I’m trying to say is this: You might not like gin, you might be genuinely confused as to why anyone choose to drink gin, but don’t go around smashing up the gin distilleries because you might find out the only thing that will make the mugger release your daughter is the flask of Bombay Sapphire that I happen to have concealed in the folds of my toga.
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