Music – NathalieBazán and Joseph Harper
Writer: Euripides
Translators: Jay Kardan and Laura-Gray Street
Director: Nathalie Bazán
It might be conceded that the programme notes tonight deserved hasty revision to reference context to the unfolding barbarity of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Unnecessary. Euripides’ voice howls enough in anger across the millennia with emphatic, contemporary prescience.
If Sophocles’ eye-openingOedipus Rexhasn’t set the Tragedean horror-bar high enough, Euripides follows
with the infanticide revenge, Medea. But there is worse, so much worse to come. Following the sack of Troy, his Trojan Women establishes the enslavement of female survivours, Queen Hecuba, daughters Polyxena and the seeress, Casandra, by the victorious, megalomanic, Agamemnon. Euripides established a radical dramatic narrative construct wherein there are no abstractions of Gods, no Fates, nor Furies to blame: the causes and consequences of War are Man’s alone – until the corruption cascades further.
If the opening-night, post-show debriefing by Director, Nathalie Bazán, had some nit-picking to address she’d be well advised to caress those pesky nits and return them with glowing, under-the-skin, endorsement to this accomplished cast – keeping them itchy/scratchy vibrant for the remaining performances. This is a highly confident production embracing the talents of a disparate, evolving ensemble cast immersed in the pursuit of their craft. For ones so young, the prospect of a play written more than two millennia ago, that descends into the very bowels of human horror; to hold their nerve, deliver, arguably, some of the most profound eloquence of language, is rather astonishing. As is the cataclysmic denouement where the Chorus descends on the infanticidal Polymestor, rendered-up with gleeful disgust by bling King, Alexander Wolverson. What a superbly murderous, loathsome git he is. He’d best keep an eye out for those Chorus girls alright.
With any production of Hecuba, plot-spoilers are a given. Tonight’s saw tattered cloths and rags draped from high above to what will become a cauldron of virtual Hades below. Video projections, accompanied with taut sound dynamics – both contemporary and nuanced ancient timbres – enhance the tension. The essence must remain with Euripides’ language: the exquisite paradoxical agony of Hecuba’s moral destruction expressed in such lucid, humane oratory. Kate Pothecary’s heart-scything Hecuba does that and more in a catastrophic hysteria of violent revenge.
Where hands that once writhed with inchoate despair and rage become salved in a blood-soaked, near post-coital calmed glow of murderous ecstasy, this makes late-runners, Shakespeare, Marlow and Webster seem lightweights.
Both Christian Jae’s muscular preening wily words as Odysseus and the juggling morality of self-advancement from Agamemnon, played by Jacob Wright, lend brusque, convincing immediacy. And of Roseanna Swani – her young, maiden Polyxena, who shames the supine Greeks grovelling for approval from that good-riddance-dead, blow-hard bully, Achilles bloke, who really should have paid attention to lower-body armour? She’s another of most promising talent; as with the wonderfully named Kasai Parchment, the bearer of grave tidings, Talthybius. If this is the already, ridiculously high-bar set by Nathalie Bazán and her troupers – she needs to be wary of Greeks bearing gifts – they could be after her job.
Runs Until 19 March 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
A studied hysteria of violence
