I would like to raise some issues which underlie the contrasting representations of Agamemnon in recent productions of Agamemnon. I shall assume without arguing it that the director’s role is crucial in situating the play within a framework to which the modern audience can relate. Underlying the ways in which Agamemnon has been presented, I suggest, may be a broader change in the ways in which ‘heroes and villains’ are culturally constructed.

One trend in the staging of The Oresteia derives from Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides, in which Aeschylus’ trilogy was preceded by Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. This context crucially affects the impact of the long Chorus in Agamemnon, especially lines 205-257. Although this Chorus does set out Agamemnon’s dilemma at Aulis, its greatest impact is in communicating the pathos and horror of Iphigenia’s situation and the travesty of marriage rites entailed in her sacrifice. So one’s first reaction to an emphasis on Aulis may be to interpret the Chorus as setting the framework for Clytemnestra’s killing of Agamemnon and sanctioning her claim to be the instrument of justice (set out, for example, in her later exchanges with the Chorus from lines 1401, although here Clytemnestra’s vengeance is linked also with Agamemnon’s adulteries and with the history of the house of Atreus).

Even when the Iphigenia itself has not been added, there has recently been a growing tendency to associate with this Chorus some kind of visual/physical re-enactment of the sacrifice, sometimes presented through mime (as in the 1999 Actors of Dionysus Agamemnon, directed by David Stuttard). Sometimes the young Iphigenia appears, as in the Royal National Theatre production of Ted Hughes’ version The Home Guard, directed by Katie Mitchell. The AoD production represented the returning warrior as a political despot (complete with leather Nazi-style coat). He carried a long chain which he jerked periodically and it eventually became apparent that Cassandra was attached to it, cowering on all fours. She hissed and spat at the Chorus as they mocked her in response to Agamemnon’s cynical references to ‘our guest’ while Clytemnestra taunted her as both an idiot and a barbarian. The red cloth held behind Clytemnestra as she recalled the sacrifice of Iphigenia and the exile of Orestes became, with her train, the carpet for Agamemnon to walk on as he entered the palace.

In the RNT production the events at Aulis and Agamemnon’s dilemma were foregrounded. Iphigenia climbed a ladder to the gallery and remained, a silent figure overshadowing the action. Her physical presence in one way served to intensify the personal barrier between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. It also symbolised the price exacted for victory at Troy and thus hinted at understanding of Agamemnon’s situation. This was reinforced by the playing of a tape recording of Agamemnon’s debate on his dilemma.

Alison Burke (in a recent Classical Association conference paper, which I hope she will publish,) has explored the impact of the combination of Hughes’ text and the movement and costume of the RNT production in communicating the betrayal of Iphigenia. This was further developed in the staging of the carpet scene where Mitchell’s direction brought out the guilt of the war-lord Agamemnon as both the slayer of his own daughter and the cause of the deaths of others. (He progressed to the palace over a trail of blood- stained childrens’ dresses.) The production played on the shattering of two aspects of Agamemnon’s identity, father and war-leader/criminal, to show that both involved guilt and invoked retribution. Yet is also problematised this by showing his anguish at Aulis and the tenderness of the ghostly Iphigenia when the bodies of both lay in the bath.

A different approach to Agamemnon’s role as returning warrior was developed in Triche Kehoe’s Children of Clytemnestra, directed by the author and performed by the Debacle Theatre Company at the 2000 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. This was, despite its title, a free version of the Agamemnon. The staging emphasised the themes of war and home-coming and used shadowy black and white video projected onto the rear backcloth to illustrate the effects of becalming on the way to Troy and to make the link with modern wars, through a sequence of grainy, flickering 20^th century news clips of battle scenes. The military-style Chorus took the roles of active participants as well as complicit spectators. Iphigenia lay prone at the front of the acting space as they fought. The recurrent ‘Blot it out’ from the Chorus obliterated first their individuality and eventually their ability to respond to what had happened. This was mirrored in the reaction of Agamemnon, whose calm war-weary speech of justification was subverted by his compulsive walking as he gradually emerged as an exhausted and traumatised victim of war. The play ended with all the figures slowly walking round whispering about their experiences but scarcely able to relate to one another.

All the productions I have mentioned were internally coherent in their representation of Agamemnon but differed in the extent and ways in which he was problematised. The RNT version held a taut balance between different aspects of responsibility (and suffering). Kehoe’s Agamemnon blotted out both responsibility and anguish. I am interested in the repercussions for the triangular relationship between Agamemnon, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra and for the conflicts between Agamemnon’s identity as father and war-leader. The direction of all three productions also left room for the interpretative role of the audience. In that connection I can also see the influence of modern interest in constructions of masculinity (evident also in recent works such as Elizabeth Cook’s Achilles and Simon Armitage’s Mr Hercules). A recent article in the International Journal for the Classical Tradition suggests that modern refiguration of classical texts reflects a fragmented state of consciousness following World War Two (T Ziolkowski, ‘The Fragmented Text: The Classics and Post-War European Literature, IJCT vol. 6 no 6, spring 2000 - but only just published). The representation of Agamemnon in the theatre suggests that this insight may also be relevant to the impact of war on late twentieth century experience, involving as it does problems about the returning soldier and changes in the constructions of heroism and masculinity.

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RESPONSES

Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, The Open University, UK

I’d like to begin by thanking Lorna for her interesting paper. She has given voice to many issues that I have recognized myself while watching recent productions of the Oresteia or Oresteia-related plays. The notion of allowing the audience to witness the past events of Agamemnon’s story, in particular the death of Iphigeneia, is certainly a popular trope in contemporary productions and Lorna has highlighted the most obvious occurrences of this to date – I’m sure there will be many more examples over the next few years.

What I’d like to do here is briefly look at the re-enactment of Agamemnon’s ‘past experiences’ in Mnouchkine’s production of Les Atrides because, as Lorna notes, this staging trend seems to originate with this seminal production. But that is not strictly the case: Mnouchkine’s decision to precede the Oresteia with the Iphigeneia At Aulis certainly had an impact on the production as a whole, especially on the characterizations of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, but the play was meant to stand on its own merits too. But certainly, the choice to combine Iphigeneia with Agamemnon (these two plays were played together four months before Libation Bearers and Eumenides joined the cycle) was meant to set up the dramatic situation which the audience would encounter in Agamemnon.

What is interesting about Mnouchkine’s production as a whole, in light of what has followed, is her desire to strip down – visually – the stage action (most famously, of course, was the fact that there was no ‘carpet’ in the ‘carpet scene’). That is not to say that the direction lacked movement, pace or drive; elaborate dance-routines punctuated the action while the colourful costumes and Kathakali-type makeup added to the visual thrill. When action was required on stage (as when Pylades and Orestes drag Clytemnestra off to her death) then it was used effectively but minimally. Interestingly, though, neither dance nor mime was ever used to endorse or augment a dramatic speech. No character danced and spoke at the same time. The words were allowed the space they deserved and the audience was invited to concentrate on the drama through the use of language and only after a speech had ended did the performers dance. Thus the Chorus of the Agamemnon, recounting the events at Aulis, gave out the details straight. Their impassioned words carried the story. There was little movement on stage at all here. Instead Mnouchkine achieved the required drama through various combinations of choral speaking, solo voice, variations on speech rhythms, musical accompaniment, etc. When the great speech had finished, then, and only then, did the chorus erupt into energetic frenzied dancing, as they executed the complex and rhythmic dance steps in unison. At no point, though, did the audience see a figure of Agamemnon or Clytemnestra nor a ghostly shadow of Iphigeneia. There was no need: the earlier performance of Iphigeneia At Aulis had already done the background work.

But even in the Iphigeneia itself, Mnouchkine conscientiously shied away from resorting to ‘flashbacks’ or scenes of ‘off-stage continuous action.’ Towards the end of the play, the messenger recounts how Iphigeneia had been replaced by a young deer on the sacrificial altar as she ascends with Artemis into the sky. He delivered this speech to Clytemnestra quite traumatized and splattered with blood. The audience, listening intently to his words, were forced to make their own decision: was this the blood of a deer or the blood of Agamemnon’s virgin daughter? The audience was unsure but they were not to be given clues in any excess staging. The messenger’s speech was not played against a backdrop of actors miming the incident, so the affirmed truth was denied to the audience. But the shock registered on the messenger’s bloodied face did not tally with the description of divine intervention and justice he described to the queen. And Clytemnestra herself clearly did not believe a word of it – she sank slowly to her hands and knees as the speech reached its climax. In her heart she knew that Agamemnon had ordered the bloody deed.

But the coupling of Iphigeneia with Agamemnon presented a wonderful opportunity to explore Agamemnon’s character in some depth and to comment in particular on his relationship with his daughter. In the Iphigeneia the audience was left in no doubt of Agamemnon’s doting devotion towards his eldest child. One scene in particular highlighted their special bond, a facet of their relationship highlighted in the text of the Agamemnon: “often in her father’s hospitable halls she had sung, and virginal with pure voice had lovingly honoured the paean” (Ag. 244-46). Agamemnon clearly delighted in his daughter’s performance. In her vision of the Iphigeneia, Mnouchkine endorsed this aspect of Iphigeneia’s tender relationship with her father, also expressed by Euripides in the text (lines 848 ff), by having her perform for her father’s delight one more time. As Agamemnon sat stock still in the middle of the stage the willowy figure of his daughter performed an elegant but energetic dance around him; paean was replaced by dance, but the father-daughter bond was confirmed. In effect, Mnouchkine anticipated what was to come in the Agamemnon and the keen listener to the Chorus’ great sacrifice speech in that play might have picked up the visual resonance in the earlier play.

Agamemnon’s love of Iphigeneia was also expressed at the moment before her sacrifice: dressed in sacred yellow robes, Iphigeneia was held tightly to her father’s chest as he wept copious tears: the effect was astonishing. Wearing the highly stylized Kathakali heroic make up, including the red-eyes, Agamemnon wept genuine kohl-stained tears, which rolled down his white cheeks from his reddened eyes. There was suddenly, at this moment, an astonishing blend of Oriental and Western theatrical elements: there was a realism to the actor’s performance that made him shed Agamemnon’s tears - an internalization of character alien to the Oriental actor who only externalizes his emotions - combined with a static mask-type makeup and stance of a Kathakali performer. The tears trickling down the face of the actor shattered the illusion of the mask and forced the audience to recognize that there was a depth of emotion, a core of intensity, that superseded the outward and deliberately theatrical characterization afforded by the Kathakliesque makeup. “Push internal feeling and external form to the limit” says Mnouchkine. This is what was being realized in the portrayal of Agamemnon. For the first time in the production the mask-like makeup was stripped away and genuine human emotions were allowed to spill out (this would happen repeatedly by most of the protagonists throughout the play cycle, culminating with a sobbing Orestes being stripped of all makeup in the Eumenides). It is no coincidence, of course, that Monouchkine chose this particular moment and this particular character to break the stylized Kathakali conventions. Mnouchkine made a deliberate ploy to make the audience aware that Agamemnon was suffering. With this remarkable image instilled within them, there was no need to replay the events at Aulis in the Agamemnon; the audience had not forgotten the king’s trauma.

So while Mnouchkine’s Les Atrides does contribute to this recent penchant for depicting ‘off-stage action’ or ‘past events’, it has done so in a far more nuanced way. Mnouchkine had the luxury of presenting the events leading up to Agamemnon’s murder in a most complete way, by acting out the events at Aulis in a play that specifically addressed those incidents. She was criticised at the time for making that decision and for ‘polluting’ the purity of the Oresteia with one of Euripides’ problem plays, but it is interesting to see how influential her decision has become and how, nowadays, we can scarcely never see the Agamemnon without seeing a fraction of the Iphigeneia too.

Robert Garland, Colgate University, USA

Lorna Hardwick has raised an important question about the intersection between myth, classical tragedy, contemporary politics, and avant-garde theatre. So many productions eddy around in this same vortex but the triad of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra and Iphigenia demonstrates a particularly fierce tug-of-war for the attention and empathy of the audience. Incidentally, it occurs to me that had Aeschylus ever had to apply for a grant to write the Oresteia, his proposal might well have included the statement 'I am interested in the repercussions for the triangular relationship between Agamemnon, Iphigenia and Clytemnestra and for the conflicts between Agamemnon's identity as father and war-leader.'

I have to confess that I haven't seen any of the productions which Lorna cites, though I have read detailed descriptions of at least some of them (that's another issue, it seems to me, how we characterise and memorialise productions), and it is abundantly clear that the action of the Oresteia sets up a fascinating nexus of competing claims, depending on where one's sympathies are encouraged to go. As to Mnouchkine's Les Atrides, I have also read that the chorus dwarfed Clytemnestra physically, which, along with the Iphigenia at Aulis preface, further stacked the deck against Agamemnon. Reading Lorna's description of the AoD Agamemnon, I'm reminded of James Thompson's Agamemnon, which played at the Theatre Royal in 1738, a critical commentary on the behaviour of George III, who was likewise viewed somewhat as 'a political despot' in that heavily adapted version. In the description of the RNT production of Hughes' translation, I'm reminded of Cacoyannis' film Iphigenia (based on Iph. at Aulis), which certainly enhances the pathos by inventing a scene in which the daughter prepares for the expected wedding, though Agamemnon is himself not without conflict. I'm suddenly talking about a different play here and a different medium and a different set of problems, but I'm picking up on the triangular relationship that Lorna elaborates upon, as it develops in other tragedies.

It is indeed the 'problematisation' of the triangularity which is precious but which is often sacrificed in production. Agamemnon, as Laura says, is exemplary of a man with a conflicted identity. But in admitting that much we almost inevitably take a step back to the 'Ur-myth' or legend, for in some sense, whatever Aeschylus has done with it, there is still something that lies beneath the bedrock of a literary and dramatic work. I wonder, too, uselessly and inappropriately, I know, whether the original audience would have been wholly able to escape their memory of Agamemnon's presentation in the Iliad. In some sense, he could, after all, as an 'exhausted and traumatised victim of war' stand in for the experience of many of the audience.

These thoughts are very random, but investigating the inborn problematics in the triangular relationship seems to me to be such a valid way of eliciting insights into the performance history of the play.

And finally I can't help wondering if it might all have turned out just a little differently if Clytemnestra and Agamemnon had been in constant e-mail contact like their modern counterparts....

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Final Response from Topic Leader Lorna Hardwick

The contributions for Robert and Lloyd both raise important points which converge in some respects. Robert's point about how we characterise and memorialise productions is crucial and Lloyd's account of his own experience of Les Atrides represents one example of how this may be done. Lloyd's description also addresses another key point raised by Robert - where (and how?) one's sympathies are encouraged to go. it was especially useful to have Lloyd's discussion on the nuanced treatment of the Iphigenia theme by Mnouchkine as a reminder of how some subsequent productions have interpreted this in a much narrower way - even as a pressure on the audience to 'take sides' in the Clytemnestra/Agamemnon relationship. (There are probably further implications, too, for the meta-theatrical relationship between canonical and subsequent productions. This might be a future theme for our seminar?)

Underlying the variations on the Agamemnon/Clytemnestra/Iphigenia theme is, I think, a problem about how modern directors relate to the audience. This includes directors assumptions about the audience's knowledge of the 'story' (or lack of knowledge) as well as assumptions about the extent to which audiences will [sc. should?] form their own judgements without being pushed in a particular direction by the production. Robert's point about the impact of Homer's Agamemnon on the consciousness of an audience reminded me of the way in which, in Homer, Agamemnon's weakness in the face of the army contrasts with the imagery used to characterise him and with the way in which his authority is only reasserted by divine intervention. However, how many modern spectators would bring this sensitivity to a performance of the Agamemnon and make the link between this and the way in which Agamemnon loses divine support? So the director may feel he/she has to fill in the gap? The alliance between coherence and nuance is a difficult one and perhaps few modern productions match Aeschylus' achievement in that respect?