Ancient Greek Tales For Today

Contemporary Review, June, 2001 by Irene Waters

NINE hours of theatrical performance sounds more like an endurance test than entertainment. When the subject is the Trojan War, a story which old when Homer wrote The Iliad nearly thirty centuries ago ... Then why did people flock to buy tickets? A one-day marathon performance in Newcastle upon Tyne's Theatre Royal (capacity 1,322) sold out weeks in advance and there were few empty seats at the weekend cycle. Answer: this was Tantalus, John Barton's mammoth 17-year-long labour, brought to the stage by an international company directed by Sir Peter Hall and his son Edward.

Barton's play cycle is not merely a re-telling of The Iliad, nor is it a translation of other classical Greek plays. It draws on these sources but also on much earlier myths: the Epic Cycle, only summaries of which remain. Barton took all this material -- tales of gods and heroes -- and fused it into an epic of his own. In the telling, Tantalus also reflects aspects of the organisation and presentation of Greek theatre, which is generally acknowledged to represent the earliest beginnings of that art form.

One theory about the origins of theatre is that it developed from ritual, the formalised acting out of myths. Like all societies, the Greeks had myths to explain the inexplicable: how things began, the destiny of Mankind, relationships between humans and deities. Myths also provide a means by which ambiguities, social tensions and conflicts are aired and - sometimes -- resolved. Although myths often deal with a time before time, a surrealist world in which time and space are suspended and in which nothing is impossible, the core of the story embodies universalities. As good stories, they are passed down through the generations and lose nothing in the telling. Thus there is often more than one version of the same story but, as the Storyteller/Poet reminds us in the Prologue:

With all the best stories

Each version may well be the true one.

Tantalus tells age-old stories of Greek gods and their interaction with mortals, but the underlying message has a relevance for the twenty-first century AD.

The Prologue opens with a group of young women on a contemporary Greek beach. A souvenir seller enters with a trayful of statues of the gods and offers to tell them stories. But the girls are well enough educated for a dialogue to develop -- partly acted out -- setting the scene for the following eight plays. We hear of Leda, the Aetolian princess raped by the god Zeus in the guise of a swan; the union produced a golden egg (larger than ostrich sized!) from which came Helen. Helen was reared by a human father, Tyndareus King of Sparta, with his own daughter, Clytemnestra; Tyndareus also took his brother's sons, Agamemnon and Menelaus, into his care after their father was murdered.

Into this story leaps Thetis, the sea nymph, frustrated because her attempts to seduce Zeus have failed. She had prophesised that any child of her's would be greater than its father, so Zeus married her off to Peleus King of Phthia. At the wedding feast Eris, goddess of discord, throws in a golden apple, the one which Zeus told Paris, son of King Priam of Troy (another descendant of Zeus) to award as a prize in a beauty contest between Athena, Hera and Aphrodite. Athena offered Paris wisdom and victory in war, Hera riches and power, but Aphrodite promised love -- that of the world's most beautiful woman. Needless to say, Aphrodite's bribe won the contest and the abduction of Helen -- by now married to Meneleus -- began the ten-year Trojan war. Priam, though, maintained the seizure of Helen was merely retribution for the capture of his sister, Hesione, taken to Greece by Hercules.

Thetis gives birth to a son, Achilles, whom she attempts to make immortal by dipping him in the magical waters of the River Styx. Peleus takes his son away into the mountains where he learns to be a fierce and fearless warrior, whose skills are considered crucial to the success of the war. Other members of these disfunctional families become involved in events and the plot becomes ever more complicated.

Great concentration is required but each play focuses on one character, seeing events through his/her eyes. Thus the whole cycle is linked together and moves forward play-by-play. Over it all hovers the spectre of Tantalus, the only mortal ever invited to dine with the gods and punished for offending guest-law by being tied to a tree whose fruit he cannot grasp, in a pool of water from which he cannot drink and with a rock above his head poised to fall at any moment.

The audience was warned of pyrotechnics, smoke effects, strobe lighting, fire and nudity. There are some stunning effects: the surprise of Thetis' leap from a pool, the pathos of Iphegenia walking into a golden glow at the back of the stage to her death, the noise and spectacle of the destruction of the temple at Delphi ... But there was much more and, as the play unfolds, there are constant reminders that what is portrayed still goes on today.

There is murder. Agamemnon kills Clytemnestra's husband and child and, having first raped her, marries her himself. During the war his cousin Aegisthus seduces Clytemnestra and when Agamemnon returns, in love with his war prize Cassandra (Priam's daughter), Clytemnestra, in jealous rage, helps Aegisthus murder both of them. Electra (Agamemnon and Clytemnestra's daughter) encourages her brother Orestes to avenge her beloved father's death by killing their mother. Adultery and jealousy account for many inter-family murders today.