Venusberg | That's not your heart, it's a piece of helicopter casing

Saturday, April 16, 2005

Lobster fights sea hare. Squishy.

So, Hecuba on Wednesday. It's come in for some piebald reviews, and I can see why. Redgrave's performance seems quiet, inward. The small size of the Albery, even compared to the Swan, gives her some space to do this, but the heavy, deadening grief that fills her performance plays oddly with the vigorous, fully-sung interludes of the full chorus, which have the natural impact of a dozen singers with extensive breath training in a smallish theatre. The music was simple, and did feel a little obvious - the costumes also walked a line between evocation and orientalising. Generally, they did very well, until Polymestor appeared as a sort of Bollywood cowboy - pink shirt, slicked-back hair and chaps. Unless a set of very specific conditions are fulfilled, one of which would require the presence of the late John Ford, you can forget about being convincingly tragic in leather chaps. It just doesn't happen.

The actors, and in particular the chorus, were also up against Tony Harrison's translation. I remember shortly before Iraq 1 a very stark, very minimal recreation of the debates around the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, as recorded in Thucydides, was screened. Without the gratuitous creation of parallels, it successfully evoked and referenced the apparently inevitable spiral into war. Given the geographical correspondences - the opposition of East and West, of Asia and Europe - and the cultural discomforts - the Greeks insisting that their civilisation is superior even as they spurn suppliance and sacrifice children - there are all sorts of allusive references and readings available.

Tony Harrison is clearly having none of that allusion bollocks. The Greeks are "the coalition", Hecuba is called a terrorist. Odysseus, slick and Blairite, offers to "spin through" the account of the decision to sacrifice Polyxena - a rather liberal interpretation of "all'homos phraso" (but I will declare it anyway). You're waiting near the crest of every line for the Chorus to leap in with a cry of "how eerily this situation mirrors the plight of the women of Baghdad, or other victims of oppression!". Which is a shame, because it really doesn't need it, and also because nothing clearly emerges from Hecuba, except maybe that being a slave sucks. It's a complex and somewhat bewildering play, where everybody claims to be the injured party and everybody, as far as they have the power, inflicts the very same injuries by disdaining the ties of suppliance and guest-friendship, and as such does not lend itself well to simple allegory.

The other problem with the translation is that at times it is just really not much cop. The rhymes in the stychomythia between Odysseus and Hecuba at times sound more like Inigo and Fezzik than the Queen of Troy and an Achaean king, and the tripartite alliteration that at times trip up the choral pieces sound plain dumb in speech - some sort of tribute to . I'm not saying he's lost it, but can anyone think of anything Harrison has done since Prometheus.. oh, hang on. I am, aren't I?

Ah well. It was an interesting collection of parts, and worth seeing, but didn't quite gel - what did not go too far seemed not to go far enough. Strong, measured performances (Hecuba, although seeing Redgrave muff the odd line was surprising, Agamemnon, Polyxena, Talthybius) were up against an all-singing chorus and an all-bellowing Odysseus and Polymestor. It felt a little as if translator and director were looking for a clearer modern relevance and, denied by the complexities of the three-sided cultural exchange (Greek, Trojan, Thracian), they decided to mess with the equaliser a bit.

Speaking of three-sided exchanges, I, like all who love the arts, experienced a quickening of the pulse at the news that Stan Collymore is to appear in Basic Instinct 2. High art.

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