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

I saw the touring production of Tantalus at Norwich Theatre Royal on the afternoon and evening of Saturday 7 April and the afternoon of Sunday 8 April, 2001. This was towards the end of the production’s UK tour, before its opening at the Barbican. The Theatre Royal in Norwich has a good apron stage, which allowed the orchestra-like circle of the sanded playing space to project into the audience. However, no entrances or exits were made through the audience. Much use was made of special effects, including coloured lights, strobe, smoke/dry ice, and recorded music and sound, as well as on-stage singing. Microphones were not used, nor were video screens, although I understand these had been used in the Denver production.

The raison d’être of Tantalus is presented as the need for a community to tell and hear stories; indeed, the programme note by Paul Cartledge is sub-titled:

‘"I want to tell you a story." The eternal catchphrase, not merely of Max Bygraves, but of the ancient Greeks.’

It seemed to me paradoxical, therefore, that what one remembers about the production are the visual effects. When I saw the show (and this really does seem an example of a production which may be thus described), I had not read Barton’s script. Hence, I was not aware that, whereas the Halls père & fils open Play 1: ‘Prologue’ with a modern beach scene (with American women in bikinis, who have been lolling around listening to Walkmans and rubbing in the sun-oil, being accosted by a seedy souvenir-seller), Barton had set his opening scene in a much less time-specific and neutral setting, and his narrator figure is named ‘The Poet’.

Hall’s version of the Prologue was, as far as I was concerned, worrying on a number of counts. First, the modern setting suggested that either one or both of the following was the case: 1) some ‘dumbing down’ was going on in an attempt to make the production’s material accessible to non-classicists; or 2) a modern setting was being used to transmit the ‘look how timeless and relevant to us are the stories of ancient myths’ message. Both of those possibilities suggest a patronising attitude to the audience and a lack of belief in ancient myth’s potential to engage subsequent generations and cultures. Then, suspecting that the beach-bimbos were later to transmutate into a Chorus, I was not happy with the degree of vocal technical skill they possessed. I couldn’t see how these voices could be sufficiently adaptable - or, indeed, strong enough - to carry the narrative as a Chorus must. Rhoda Koenig in The Independent 10 May 2001 was later to describe the nine-women chorus as having ‘flat, tinny sitcom voices’. This was not inaccurate. Nor did I like the occasional harshness of Hecuba (Ann Mitchell). The ‘modernising’ setting felt like a rather out-dated cliché, and the technical insufficiencies seemed amateurish. I was put in mind of that stock lead-in of ‘showbusiness shows’ of the late 1950s: ‘Say - why don’t we do the show right here!!!’.

The designer for Tantalus was Dionysis Foutopoulos who had previously worked with Peter Hall on Lysistrata and The Oedipus Plays. A major figure in the history of twentieth-century realisation of Greek drama, Foutopoulos gave the audience a stunning succession of stage pictures; it was like seeing a ‘masterpiece’ - in the original sense of the word, where the craftsman displayed every aspect of his technical expertise with every kind of material. From the sand circle of ‘Prologue’, with its beach shower, upturned boat-prow and life-guard’s chair, the scene became, in Play 2: ‘Telephus’, an enclosed palace space, with metallic screen and a fire. The elements of fire and water were to be recurrent design motifs - from Thetis’s sea-robes to the burning of Troy. In Play 3: ‘Iphigenia’, all the elements were represented: a great shimmering tent of parachute-silk at the start of the scene suggested the wind needed for departure to Troy; a fire burnt on the sand of the stage, and downstage a gobbo produced a sea-water ripple effect. The stage was dominated by the bleeding carcass of a deer, suspended centre stage on a huge rack which looked as if it were made of spears. It was during the course of this play that the beach-bimbos transformed themselves into Choruswomen by dipping their faces into flour to create masks.

A word about the use of masks in general in the show: I learnt later that Peter Hall’s decision to use masks was a tolerably late one - and one which, I understand, lost him one of his original ex-RSC cast choices. In his 1980 RSC production, The Greeks, Barton had not used them and had thus been able to keep a fairly realistic acting style. In the Oedipus Plays, Hall had reprised his 1981 Oresteia use of formal, stylised acting and full-face masks. In Tantalus, the mix of bare-faces and masks was surely a hostage to fortune. Once Hecuba had been established as a Dalek-like figure in Play 5: ‘Priam’, with her android metallic mask, it was difficult for her to develop in Plays 6 and 7 the realistic characterisation which Euripides’ plays permit and Barton’s text transmits. (However, the image of Greg Hicks as Priam on lifts with crutches - half-man, half-Zimmerframe - was so striking it has been used for all the posters.) Then, at the end of Play 7: ‘Cassandra’, what were we to make of Agamemnon’s removing Cassandra’s mask, and she his, preparatory to the wedding dance strip which both performed? Was this an attempt to say something about actors playing roles/characters playing roles? Why were the actors’ real faces revealed, and not just another ‘mask’? Was the unmasking supposed to be the ultimate strip? In that case, why did it happen before and not after the characters had divested themselves of clothes? ( Incidentally, it seemed to me that the image of beautiful naked bodies in the firelight has been so often used in erotic scenes in cinema from the 1960s onwards that what was presumably intended to be visually seductive and emotionally climactic - the sexual encounter of Agamemnon and Cassandra at the end of Play 7 - felt like cliché.) Overall, however, I liked the masks, in spite of what has been said about their giving all characters a moustache or a sneer, but what I didn’t feel worked was the movement between two modes of theatre: stylised and realistic.

To return to the memorable visual moments: Play 5: ‘Priam’ had as its dominating image a huge classical head (upstage left), with another vast Ozymandias-like statue part upstage right. I recalled that the same effect - a beautiful but fractured giant female face - had been used by designer Anthony Ward in Sam Mendes’ production of Troilus and Cressida at The Swan in Stratford in 1990, where it had symbolised the flawed beauty of Helen. Here, the images of a fractured or fragmented culture, together with the stylised robes and acting style of Priam and Hecuba, served to dehumanise the Trojans. There was, in addition, a compelling grotesqueness about ancient Priam (looking like something out of ‘Doctor Who’) welcoming into his city as a potential bride/daughter the disguised Neoptolemus, who, dressed in the saffron robes of marriage, echoed the other sacrificial daughters of myth: Iphigenia, Polyxena and Cassandra.

In this and the following play, ‘Odysseus’, the huge central opening represented the gates of Troy, and another coup de théâtre was the slow trundling past the doorway of gigantic wheels (the trolley carrying the Wooden Horse). Play 6 equates roughly to Trojan Women, and again, spectacular visual effects were achieved in tolerably simple ways: a forest of tall spears had sprouted in the interval between Plays 5 and 6, each bearing a fragment of skeleton or a representative piece of armour - breastplate, helmet, greaves. The sand performance circle was strewn with pieces of torn cloth, while the Chorus women were in red ‘Wedding clothes’ to signify the violent parodies of marriage to which they were to be subjected. Much use was made of red light and smoke effects.

Play 7: ‘Cassandra’ (the part which ended with the naked love scene) was just too packed with action, it seemed to me. It included the material of Euripides’ Hecuba; Hecuba’s arrival in Thrace and her blinding of Polymestor in revenge for the murder of her son, but then showed her cutting out her tongue and transforming to the non-human Bitch of myth. The play then followed Cassandra’s being taken possession of by Agamemnon - quite unequivocally, this Agamemnon possesses his Trojan princess sexually, and she is by no means unwilling; nor did there seem to be any paradox about her being able to see the end of the affair. This was just one instance of Barton’s deviating from the line taken in original plays, and of telling, as the Narrator promised in the ‘Prologue’, the ‘bits between the [well-known] stories’. I wondered, not for the first time, who Barton had been writing for - the people who know the stories of the Iliad and of Greek tragedy, or people who just want to be told a set of new stories? This was a thought to which I would return after the dust of the performance had settled in my mind.

In the final two plays, ‘Hermione’ and ‘Helen/Epilogue’, there was further evidence of directorial display - inventive or wrong-headed, depending on one’s point of view. ‘Hermione’ opened on a totally new scene: the sand circle was now largely covered by a tiled dais, and above the central upstage entrance was a large aquarium-like glass case with plants growing in it and garishly lit with, alternately, purple, green and orange lights. Upstage left of the sand circle was a stand carrying the golden armour of Achilles - for this was the house of Neoptolemus. The chorus of Trojan slavewomen was first seen from rear view, on hands and knees, scrubbing the dais floor, looking, in pinnies and headscarves, like 1940s housewives. So we were moving into a non-ancient-Greek setting; so far, so good. But with the perky little number the slavewomen were singing and the sight of assorted rumps swinging in unison, the tone was set for comedy. This looked like the satyr play after the tragedy. Hermione (Mia Yoo) tottered on in heels, hat and handbag, looking like Blanche Dubois at Happy Hour. The result was that Andromache (Annalee Jefferies) shone out in this play as the shining light of womanhood she proclaims herself to be in Trojan Women: sane, self-possessed, as much as any enslaved woman could be, and beautiful in her uncluttered lack of ornament and make-up.

That the same actress played Helen was one of the happier strokes which the production’s doubling achieved. In Play 9: ‘Helen/Epilogue’, Annalee Jefferies brought the same self-possession to Helen, who, in a black robe, gold mask and silver-white hair, was the emblem of the eidolon which Hera actually sent to Troy while the real Helen was in Egypt. The Choruswomen had also been transformed into iconic representations of women - the fierce black-clad village women of all those films about Greece - Zorba the Greek and Never on a Sunday - with masks made of photocopies of real faces. They were to reveal the skull-masks of judges when they tried to pass sentence on Helen. It was in this final play that one felt the effect of Hall’s cutting of Barton’s script; as in Play 7, there was too much to be accomplished in an hour. As a result, the ‘Epilogue’ was anticlimactic and hurried; it became apparent that the only way out of the narrative was by a return to the beach party of the ‘Prologue’, with the Choruswomen reverting to beach-girls. Were they any wiser? any more emotionally educated? One felt not. There had been no individualising of this on-stage audience, so there was no sense of their being touched as individuals by what they had seen and acted out. Moreover, in a narrative so much concerned with ‘Man’- his militarism, his religious beliefs, his use and abuse of woman - there were just not enough men on stage. Certainly Greg Hicks, David Ryall, Alan Dobie and Robert Petkoff did an admirable job with their doubling (although Greg Hicks is surely too young and attractive for Menelaus), but there was little sense of the menace of a militaristic or male-orientated society. (It was unfortunate, I felt, that the Myrmidons, in their black leather-and-studs ensembles looked like something from a gay nightclub cabaret, and, given the prevailing feel that this was Lloyd-Webber territory, one expected them to break into an S & M song-and-dance routine!)

At the end of the show, many of the real audience around me were on their feet applauding, but I felt strangely unmoved although impressed by the succession of theatrical moments I had witnessed. The production had been heralded as something quite new in its intentions; not a re-make of ancient Greek tragedy but an attempt to ‘re-invent the ‘Epic Cycle’’ about the Trojan Wars and the House of Atreus. In his programme note, Barton says: ‘I believe the whole straggling and fragmentary epic does comprise an organic, coherent whole, and that to experience the whole story will qualify and enrich an audience’s feelings and some of its assumptions about its more famous parts’. This statement reveals Barton’s expectations of his audience: they will already know the ‘more famous parts’ of the Epic Cycle, and will have assumptions which he hopes to ‘qualify’. It is because he has such expectations that he avoids telling the main lines of the story and takes lateral approaches into it, and this results, occasionally, in major plot developments being dealt with in a few lines or through tangential references. For Greek audiences in the fifth century BC, this was not a problem; for modern audiences, it can be. Those in any Tantalus audience who do not know their classical legends might be floundering; trying to work out who Thetis is; what Cassandra is foreseeing for herself and her lover; who and where are the gods who are referred to but never represented; and who it was who suggested that Helen didn’t ever go to Troy. Those who do know their Homer or their Greek tragedy might get held up by odious comparisons, and ask whether the money spent on this production might have been better disposed funding separate productions of ancient Greek originals. Or, they might question whether it is possible to translate into a modern, secular theatre context a narrative which relies so intrinsically on the existence of, and belief in, gods. In this production, the gods were only sketchily represented on stage (for example, thunder and lightning for Zeus), yet the programme spelt out ‘The Immortals’, so, clearly, it was felt necessary for the audience to know about them. The programme also contained material on the Mortals, ‘the Genealogy’, ‘the Geography’ and synopses of the nine plays, but there was no indication as to whether it was necessary to have read and internalised all this information before the play started. Did one need to know the narrative before being told it?

Perhaps the problem was that writer and director(s) had different agendas. Barton’s intention seems to have been to tell the story; Hall’s, to show it. In this respect, at least, Hall had got it right since he could point to the very word ‘theatre’ as coming from the Greek word theatron or ‘showing-place’. The combination of spectacle, singing, music, choreographed movement - all of which we now accept in musicals - might be very much like what spectators at the Dionysia would have expected of the drama festivals. But because the production was established very early on as being strong on visual and sound effects, extended passages of dialogue seemed slow-paced. This was a great shame because one needed to listen particularly attentively to pick up the oblique references and throw-away remarks through which the narrative was at times conveyed. (Indeed, it was sometimes unclear whether characters such as Odysseus (the excellent Alan Dobie) or Agamemnon were slipping out from behind their masks when they made knowing in-jokes or arch comments more appropriate for the Narrator.)

Just a few weeks before I went to Tantalus I had seen, on three successive evenings at the Swan Theatre in Stratford, Michael Boyd’s production of the three parts of Shakespeare’s Henry VI. In terms of stage-hours, it was about the same length as Tantalus. This production stuck to a spare, schematic design, and although it used a mix of realistic and stylised presentation (overt doubling; the figure of a ‘Gatekeeper’ conducting the dead offstage; dead characters re-joining action; ‘battles’ in slow-motion), it was consistent in its use of semiotics. I could, with pleasure, have watched that production again within a short time. At the end of Tantalus I left the theatre with some relief that it had finished. I was glad to have seen it and I hold many memorable images from it in my mind, but feel that it was a splendid display of disparate elements - like a patchwork quilt which included bits of bone, bark, plastic bag, and tin foil. The grandeur of Barton’s intention must have seemed to demand such lavish production, but it might have been better served by a sparer interpretation which would have concentrated attention on the words. The sad fact is that, because of its length, Tantalus is not a work which is likely to be given frequent staging, and therefore, one which we may not have the opportunity to see offered in other production styles.

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

Tantalus

A Review by Dr. Ruth Hazel

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