Age of Rage

after Euripides and Aeschylus

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 8 May2022

Gerard Koolschijn and Ivo van Hove have devised an epic retelling of the misfortunes of the House of Atreus and the depredations of the Trojan War based on several plays by Euripides and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Van Hove's usual collaborator Jan Versweyveld designed the production, a bare stage with scaffolding at either side for percussion instrumentalists, an area behind a huge mesh screen at the back, apparently the site of nefarious goings-on, and a gangway above allowing for various bodies to be winched out of sight.

It is not, of course, a happy story; indeed it descends into ever more revolting brutality.

As the audience filed in a complex family tree was being projected onto the mesh screen showing the relationships between the Greek characters, many of whom had Zeus as a forebear. The disasters befalling the house of Atreus span many generations, including two occasions when children were murdered and served in feasts to unsuspecting dinner guests. But this is all background: the particular 'age of rage' that we are to witness really begins with the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia, required by the goddess Artemis before she will allow favourable winds so that the Greek fleet (the 'thousand ships') can sail to Troy. The first major action of the play is thus a recasting of Euripides's Iphigeneia in Aulis. 

We were spared a genealogy of the Trojans since they appear only as victims and potential slaves, mainly women apart from the already murdered Polydorus and the hapless boy Astyanax thrown from the walls to his death. These episodes are taken from Hecuba and The Women of Troy, two more plays by Euripides, though the tragic figure of Andromache, the widow of the Trojan prince Hector and mother of Astyanax, was not mentioned. The sacrifice of another girl, Hecuba's youngest daughter Polyxena, to placate the soul of Achilles was a chilling parallel to the initiating obscenity of Iphigeneia's death, underscored here by having both parts played by the same actress (she also represented the dead Trojan boys).

Aeschylus's Agamemnon provided the source for the next scenes in which the general and king is killed by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy. He is accompanied by the hapless Cassandra who can foresee her fate but persuade no-one to believe her, while the queen is abetted by her husband's cousin Aegisthus, eager to pursue his own part in the family feud in order to regain power in Mycenae.

In the second half of the play we return to Euripides (his Orestes and Electra) as a source for the unedifying story of the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra buckling under the strain of needing to avenge their father's death at the cost of killing their mother. The gruesome task achieved, Orestes and Electra become unhinged in guilt and embark on further atrocities until providentially stopped by the intervention of Apollo. The less sensational and more profound version of this part of the story devised by Aeschylus does not really suit the message of Age of Rage that violence leads to ever more violence, and that state-sanctioned violence in one generaton too easily permits personal savagery in the next to go unchecked.

There is a huge amount of sheer narrative to take on board here; I am familiar with the original plays and with other literature both classical and modern dealing with these stories, so I found it easy enough to keep track, but I wonder how easy it was for someone new to the tale. The production had enormous energy, with pulsating music and frenetic dancing at climactic points, and gentler percussive effects building tension during the lengthy expositions. Many of the male actors took several parts by necessity, but the powerful doublings were of Ilke Paddenbourg as the female victims noted above, and of Chris Nietvelt as Clytemnestra and Helen (who were sisters).

There is a formal difficulty in adapting Greek tragedy to the modern stage, which here was largely solved by stripping back the choric odes in order to concentrate on the narrative, while indicating the ritual aspects of performance by the use of music and dance, and by often having almost mute witnesses on stage who occasionally contributed to the dialogue. But there is a tonal difficulty as well in trying to yoke Aeschylus and Euripides together in a single production. These are two playwrights who used the familiar myths and legends to very different dramatic ends, and the peculiar power of the Agamemnon is diminished by its being too closely linked to the Iphigeneia story even though it is entirely plausible to do so in a panoramic telling of the family history. 

The two explicit interventions by deities were the least convincing episodes. In the first, Iphigeneia is said to be miraculously replaced by a hind at the last moment before her sacrifice. This allows for the later story in which she is a priestess in Taurus (on the Black Sea), but renders less effective her sacrifice as an explanation of Clytemnestra's hostility to Agamemnon: though we are told of this divine intervention no-one on stage can take any comfort from it or even have any knowledge of it.

At the end of the play Apollo appears in order to stop Orestes and Electra in their tracks, promising that Orestes will find judicial vindication and perhaps a measure of personal peace in Athens (he says nothing to comfort Electra). Here, Apollo was just another young man on the stage, and there was no attempt to invest his words with any divine authority. Consequently his appearance raised a few unfortunate giggles in the audience, and his intervention seemed merely perfunctory. (It is often proposed that Euripides used the deus ex machina convention ironically, but this was not the way to bring an Age of Rage to a convincing conclusion.)

The performance was given in Dutch by members of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, with English surtitles: only a minor inconvenience as far as understanding was concerned, but perhaps vocal nuance was inevitably a casualty in a production lasting nearly four hours.