Warmth in Greece in summer time was anticipated, however its depth startled me. Wherever I went — Athens, Aegina, Delphi, the Peloponnese — the grass was parched, brittle and hay-colored, and appeared able to catch hearth. The air was scorching and dry. On the sanctuary, night introduced aid. We have been seated underneath the open sky on concentric stone benches within the acoustically superb theater. The solar had simply gone down as “Agamemnon” started. The efficiency was by a Munich-based ensemble, the Residenztheater, underneath the path of Ulrich Rasche. This “Agamemnon” was in fashionable German, delivered in a declamatory, shouting model, and I can’t have been the one particular person current who had preliminary doubts. There have been surtitles in English and Greek, and a musical rating, heavy on percussion, someplace between techno, heavy metallic and classical minimalism, which was carried out by 4 musicians who by no means left the stage. The stage itself was a circle, rotating on a hidden mechanism. If a given actor wished to stay in our view, he or she needed to stroll towards the rotation. The stage typically modified velocity or path, but it surely by no means stopped. The impact of those constraints — the shouted speech, the propulsive music, the perpetual movement — was visceral and hypnotic. The actors yelled their traces out, offended, pleading, conceited, frantic, in a rhythm that was locked with or syncopated towards the actions of their stalking legs. My doubts evaporated.
When Cassandra, who had already endured battle, bereavement, captivity and sexual violation, screamed out her prophecy of the approaching homicide of Agamemnon and herself, a prophecy doomed to be disbelieved as all her prophecies have been, I seemed away from the stage. It was nearly as if, if I didn’t see the motion, the inevitable wouldn’t unfold. So, briefly, I turned my eyes to the sky, to the glittering constellations that have been now seen above Argolis.
Everybody has their causes. Close to the tip of the play, Clytemnestra hauls into view a black sheet with the bloodied our bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra. She is bare, grotesque and dazzling underneath the stage lights. She exults in her revenge on Agamemnon for his sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia earlier than the battle. Then her lover and co-conspirator, Aegisthus, seems, additionally bare. He recounts the grudge he held on behalf of his father, Thyestes, whom Agamemnon’s father, Atreus, had tricked into consuming his personal youngsters. However Clytemnestra and Aegisthus had additionally murdered Agamemnon for causes of lust and energy. These will not be good individuals. In Ted Hughes’s highly effective translation of the play, the refrain says:
The place is true and incorrect
On this nightmare?
Every turns into the ghost of the opposite.
Every is pushed mad
By the ghost of the opposite.
Who can purpose it out?