Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English
from c.1970 to the Present  

Project Publications
(including Archived Conference papers)

A Democratic Turn

2009 Democratic Turn Eseminar

1998-2008 Archived topics

Mister Heracles

A Review by Professor Lorna Hardwick

(For other reviews of Mister Heraclesplease see database no. 2584)

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Chorus of four (two male, two female) mainly speaking separately but with some chants and songs. They combined the roles of framing the action and commenting on it with participation in the destruction of the family's cardboard home and then rounding them up for execution. They also commented on their own role in this; the effect was to emphasise the concept of the complicit spectator.

Set: The darkened prelude set had a faint image of a spaceman moving towards a moon (the surface of which had grim human features) against a backdrop of a star-lit sky. The title of the play was then revealed in bold letters above.

The opening set was of a derelict palace with cracked classical façade fronted by wrought iron railings which were covered with decayed bouquets of flowers. In front of the house and to the side of the stage was a jumble of cardboard packing cases (in which Heracles’ family was living). After the killing the cracked façade of the house gave way and was lowered to reveal and provide the floor space of the interior, bathed in red light and revealing the corpse of Heracles’ wife lying by a sofa, surrounded by a pool of blood. The children lay to the front of the stage.

Costume:

Modern dress, but the clothes of Amphitryon and Megara looked old fashioned. The boys had shorts or trousers.

When allowed by Lycus to return to the house to be dressed for death, the boys returned with tweed kilts and jackets and tartan sashes, as though pages at a wedding, and Amphitryon wore formal dress with tail coat and military decorations. Megara wore a light coloured formal evening dress with tartan sash. In spite of the repeated references in the text the boys wore no hats. Lycus wore a Nazi style suit. Iris and Madness (who arrived accompanied by the noise of a helicopter with rubbish blowing round the stage, were dressed like World War Two resistance stereotypical figures (Madness carried a wireless in a case). Heracles returned in khaki military uniform, which he shed after the killing. Theseus wore combat camouflage and military boots. The Chorus wore overalls, emphasising the class-contrast with the ‘royal’ family.

Performance Reviewed 17 March 2001 (final performance).

In spite of its desire to convey the resonances of the Heracles legend for modern situations and dilemmas, this production had a curiously old-fashioned air. The blank verse used for the Amphityron and family sequences ushered in a sub-Shakespearean production style and the rhetorical direct address to the audience tended to distance rather than to engage the audience’s sense of the implications for their own situation. The Chorus was more successful in catching the mood of the unwilling but complicit spectator. In range of movement, voices and insights they rescued the play from a mise-en-scene which was overly static. This was affected, perhaps, by the nature of the acting space, which was constrained by the dominant features of the design, especially the palace façade, and by the frozen powerlessness of the family in the face of Lycus’ brutality.

There was a rather odd contrast between the horror of the fate awaiting the children (whether as kindling for Lycus’ bonfire or as victims of their fathers’ wrath) and the TV comedy stereotypes suggested by Iris and Madness in their guise as World War Two resistance fighters. Yet in using the collapse of the house as both a literal and metaphorical device to view its inner workings the second half of the play supported visually the playing out of the Heracles/Theseus ‘buddy’ relationship in which it might otherwise have been hard for the audience to believe. The text and its performance contribute to a growing emphasis on the representation of the problems attached to conceptions of heroism and masculinity in Greek drama and in our own age; visually and somatically the relationship between ancient and modern was vigorously developed, sometimes in challenging ways; the actors were, at this stage in the run, coherently and powerfully communicating the production values. Yet the audience's reception of the work, although warm, was strangely muted. I would like to see a staging of Armitage’s text which hazarded more and perhaps achieved more.

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