Stinkfoot and others: Sophocles on stage

Sophocles on Stage

Ajax at Southwark Playhouse in the sands of Afghanistan, all the Oedipus plays as a new opera from Julian Anderson at ENO, Women of Trachis at the Young Vic a few years ago, and now Electra at the Old Vic with Kristin Scott Thomas and finally Philoctetes at The Yard in Hackney Wick: all seven plays of Sophocles have been recently reinterpreted for the London stage.  Why Greek tragedy?  What does Sophocles have to say to all these young creative people today?  It seems that each age can find something to communicate in these strange texts from two and a half millennia ago.  Some of these productions have been small scale and experimental but others have been big budget productions with long runs, and all have been fully professional.  Sophocles is no longer the property of student groups and amateurs but is being taken seriously by the arts community at the highest level.  English National Opera commissioned the full-length opera Thebans and the Old Vic managed to get a very well known film actor to take part in their four-month run of Electra in autumn 2014.  Yet all of them have remained faithful to the original texts, although they have been transformed into a workable English version, by Frank McGuiness (Thebans, Electra), Timberlake Wertenbaker (Our Ajax), Jeff James in Stinkfoot (his version of Philoctetes) and Martin Crimp whose Cruel and Tender is a version of Trachiniae.  The myths found in Sophocles are all treated seriously as archetypal narratives while their settings may be updated: (Our Ajax and Cruel and Tender in a modern military world), or left vague and unstated in a ancient world which can almost unnoticed metamorphose into our own times (Thebans, Electra).  The simplicity of the plots and settings seem to appeal to experimental or rough theatre (in Peter Brook’s phrase) as seen in Our Ajax and Stinkfoot, where unconventional spaces have been transformed into theatres and a different audience has been engaged with Greek tragedy, perhaps for the first time.  The Young Vic, which staged Cruel and Tender, is also an experimental space but this production was part of a European tour with a known name (Kerry Fox as the Deianeira figure) and an experienced director, Luc Bondy.  Joe Dixon who played the Heracles figure again appeared as Ajax in the Southwark Playhouse Our Ajax.  In addition Sophocles provides plays for us today that have excellent female parts for leading actors.  Top women actors are attracted to roles like Electra or Antigone, which like Euripides’ Medea or Clytemnestra in the Oresteia, are not always there in other theatrical traditions.  Juliette Binoche is due to play Antigone in London in English soon.  On the other hand Philoctetes has no female parts at all, although this did not worry the Stinkfoot team who recast Odysseus as a female and simply changed all the pronouns.

Treacle as metaphor

Stinkfoot has a single image around which the production is based (perhaps more influence from Peter Brook).  This image is treacle.  Treacle is so central to the action that the front rows had to be protected with plastic sheeting.  Blankets were also provided even for the back rows where I was sitting, but I eventually realised on a chilly December evening that this was against the cold.  Philoctetes is discovered on stage with his left lower leg wrapped in a foul bandage, lying in a pool of dark brown viscous liquid.  It emerges from the text that he has a chronic condition, perhaps some kind of ulcer, which seems to be incurable and most importantly smells awful.  For this reason he has been abandoned by his Greek fellow-soldiers on a desert island and left to rot.  He has his bow that enables him to survive by shooting vultures, some of whose bodies are littered across the acting space.  The image of the wound and its implications are the central to the moral questions which make up the plot, and while the director can show the appearance of this repellent wound on Philoctetes’ leg, and even the foul suppurations which ooze from the ulcer, it is more difficult to convey the overwhelming aspect of this condition: the smell which caused his companions to send him away and confine him to this island.  This is where the treacle comes in:  it makes us conscious of this aspect of the ulcer by filling the room with a sweet and cloying odour.  The physical presence of the treacle can also be heard and almost felt and tasted as the actors slip about in the pools of the stuff which cover the stage.  The audience’s feet even stick to the floor as they enter the space.  The sensory effect of this substance is all-encompassing and inescapable.  In an attack of pain, accompanied by shrieking sound, Philoctetes wallows in a pool of it as Odysseus flings exploding bags of treacle at him, causing one audience member to flee to the back of the room.  There are many things to talk about in the production: the way the chorus was completely cut out; the final parody of the god figure Hercules who appears at the end of the play to resolve the issues; the paring down of the text to an essential colloquial register that sounded how military men would naturally speak to each other; the bare, minimal set and crude lighting effects and the dodgy-looking sports wear for the actors.  Yet much original material remains: the Trojan war setting, the gods, and the bow that passes from Philoctetes to Neoptolemos and back as a symbol of the xenia or guest-friendship between them, even as Neoptolemos is deceiving him and trying to trick him into coming back to Troy to win the war for the Greeks.  Daniel Millar as Philoctetes was outstanding in the episodes of pain that affect his diseased foot and as he reached the depths of despair in the filth; Joshua Miles as Neo is innocent and noble at first but then is drawn into the immoral game of deception and gets himself covered in the same metaphorical corruption as Philoctetes; Rosie Thomson is suitably tough-talking and scheming, as the unlikeable Odysseus of the Iliad.  The remoteness and strangeness of the characters, mythical archetypes onto whom all kinds of modern preoccupations can be projected, is one thing that makes Greek tragedy suitable for a modern audience, and the awkward juxtapositions and anachronisms seem to melt away, or perhaps become dissolved into the treacle, when given such a vivid and committed performance.