Sappho – Southwark Playhouse Elephant, London

Writer: Wendy Beckett

Directors: Wendy Beckett and Adam Fitzgerald

Sappho, a Greek poet from the island of Lesbos, has long stood out in ancient history for the poetry she wrote expressing love and intimacy between women. Although the uses of the terms “Sapphic” and “lesbian” to describe female same-sex relationships are comparatively new by comparison – referred to in the 17th century, but not popularised until the end of the 19th – Sappho is now heralded as an icon for queer women.

Australian playwright Wendy Beckett has taken the fragments of what we know about Sappho, stripped them down and created a play that attempts to talk to our modern sensibilities and obsessions as much as it works to bring the poet to life.

Sappho was first performed in a Greek translation in 2022, and its use of Greek drama conventions, most especially its chorus, makes sense both thematically and structurally. Premiering in its English language version here, though, some of the cracks soon begin to emerge.

The root of the story is as much a political class struggle as it is of love. Georgie Fellows’s Sappho spends her days mooning over a mysterious dancer, Adore (Eleanor Kane), but her mother, Cleis, has a more conventionally heteronormative future in mind for her. Jumoké Fashola’s Cleis and her partner Pittacus (Fanos Xenofos) are a lowly Lesbian couple who dream of converting their island from one ruled by the aristocracy to a truly democratic province. To achieve that, though, they need power – which they can only gain by joining the aristocracy themselves, by marrying Sappho to the son of one of the island’s ruling families.

There’s a distinctly Shakespearean vibe to proceedings, especially when Fellows gets the opportunity to express Sappho’s romantically poetic side. That extends into the portrayal of Sappho’s god – Velile Tshabalala’s Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love – who, as well as offering oblique guidance to her subject, has her own dynamic with her husband Hephaestus (Aidan Banyard). The separate lives, but parallel issues, between mortals and other-worldly beings is part of a long tradition that Shakespeare drew on for Oberon and Titania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, among others.

Here, Beckett uses the gods’ own story to point out that they, like Sappho, had an arranged marriage. The parallels are undone somewhat by a broadness, particularly in Tshabalala’s portrayal, and a more modern approach to dialogue that sits uncomfortably against the lyricism of Fellows’s scenes.

And that jarring tonal nature pervades throughout. Emmanuel Akwafo’s narrator – strutting in high heels and basque, a very modern form of campness that we have seen so many times elsewhere – bounces uncomfortably between styles, called upon to participate in the play’s more lyrical moments one second and being a fierce, modern queen the next.

Some of the parallels to modern politics, from the way money has a grip on power to Brexit references and harking to contemporary LGTBQ+ issues, feel unnecessary. It’s as if Beckett and her co-director, Adam Fitzgerald, worry that the audience won’t appreciate the parallels and feel the need to sledgehammer them into place. That does her play a disservice, for when it is at its most classical, it is also at its most clear.

Some of the modern trappings do work, from the art deco-cum-disco set design to some of the ensemble dance numbers. But the production as a whole raises enough question marks to prevent Sappho from being the tribute to same-sex romance that one wishes it could truly be.

Continues until 25 May 2024