The Greek Plays

Iphigenia and Other Daughters

Introduction

Iphigenia in Aulis

Iphigenia and Clytemnestra should be present on the stage throughout. The piece should be staged as sparely as possible—the aesthetic leaning toward minimalist dance, rather than naturalistic theater. Silence is important. The pace of the piece should be dictated by the text’s format, which indicates blank verse for Iphigenia (with attention paid to end stops) and prose for Clytemnestra. Stillness is crucial, particularly for Iphigenia herself, who should not move much throughout the bulk of the piece, until the end, if even then. Her entire climactic action might be simply to stand. Nothing should interfere with the intensity of the connection between us and this girl trying to think through an impossible puzzle. Her tone is quietly curious, wry and utterly lacking in self-pity. She is, above all, an intellect articulating itself. Clytemnestra is queenly in her mien and anxiety, never descending into hysteria or vulgarity but not without bitter wit. My instinct is that there should never be physical contact between them. Iphigenia’s relationship to the audience and her own thoughts is clear, if interior, whilst Clytemnestra is a public figure, comfortable with direct address.

As the realization of what is actually happening dawns on Iphigenia, she becomes calmer. All of her intellect and instincts lead her through the course of the piece to the final awesome truth, and in that moment of enlightenment, her entire character is confirmed. She has finally figured it out.

Electra

What interests me about Sophocles’ version of Electra is that he titles it for a character who does not in fact do anything, but whose very inability to do anything forms the nexus of the play. He surrounds her with female characters who are difficult to fit into any satisfying feminist ideology. They are prickly and uncomfortable figures, which makes them interesting to me because they force me up against my own demons—the nightmares at the back of my notions of the female. I think that my fears are common to most women, so these characters have been a compelling and difficult bunch of people to take on.

I believe that most women feel, deep down, that they are not part of the real history of mankind, the important stuff, the heroic stuff, the stuff that matters. And we are indeed correct—the his/story of man/kind is precisely that. So we are left to make up our own, gather stories, sift through what we can make out of the unchronicled, the lost lives, quilts, songs, anonymous poems that might have, could have been rendered by people not unlike ourselves. But there is always a certain self-loathing that one keeps at bay—perhaps I am speaking only for myself here—the sense that one would like to be able to identify oneself with something more substantial, more vivid, more, well, powerful. But power in the hands of women has nearly always been perceived as monstrous in terms of his/story (hence characters like Clytemnestra) or as merely sexual (hence, oh, you name it). So one ends up identifying oneself with men. I know I did. Literature, politics, virtually everything that was part of my education involved my identification with the male. This has its advantages. One learns how men think, feel and act. But there are obvious disadvantages—these are not, ultimately, my stories, my triumphs, my terrors.

This play is also an investigation of the notion of history itself. And since this is based on a Greek source, that entails an investigation of tragedy and fate.

This is an exceedingly intimate play: familial, female. This is not the kind of sphere within which one is used to examining notions of history. That’s what interests me about it.

Clytemnestra clearly feels that she is a part of history; Chrysothemis, that she is outside history; Electra, that she is history. Orestes has the hatred of history that only one who has been part of its chugging engine can feel.

NOTES ON CHARACTERS

CLYTEMNESTRA

Clytemnestra is a woman of the world in a way that neither of her daughters is. She has seen the great landscapes, been part of politics, known and assessed great men. Because she feels that she is part of the big drama, she knows that she is ultimately tragic. It is an aspect of the bargain with fate she made knowingly. Such is the price of the grand gesture. Greek myth is quite stringent about such things, which is why everyone knows the name Clytemnestra and few remember Chrysothemis. Clytemnestra is aware that her reign at the top of the wheel of fortune is finite. It has been secured with blood, it will be ended with blood. Her knowledge of this does not diminish her fear of death. Electra is right: she is terrified. And Clytemnestra’s life at this point is spent in attempts to forestall the inevitable. She is waiting. She is surrounded by her children, who are her own walking nightmares. Electra reminds her of her most apparent fear—that of an imminent and violent death. But Chrysothemis is equally, if more subtly, terrifying; she is there to whisper into Clytemnestra’s ear the awful possibility that her life has been futile and pointless, that because she is merely a woman, nothing she has done has the greatness of scale that real history entails. And then there is the constant specter of her absent son, whose inevitable presence her dream prophesies.

Though Clytemnestra is a queen, her identity in my play is principally, oddly enough, as a mother. Those familiar with the myth will notice that I don’t include the character of Agisthus, Clytemnestra’s lover. That’s because he has always muddied the issue for me. Clytemnestra’s need for revenge always seemed tremendously clear to me, given Agamemnon’s sacrifice of their daughter Iphigenia. Why do we need adultery to explain that murder? Adultery also seems beside the point and vilifying in an unsatisfying way. My Clytemnestra commits murder as an outraged mother and knows that she will die at the hands of her own child. It’s an irony of which she’s fully aware.

Clytemnestra inspires awe, even in her daughters. She has done things; she has made her presence felt; she has been a part of history. Even her far more famous sister Helen was never so actively involved in events. Helen was merely bundled like a statue from one place to the next, one bed to the next. Clytemnestra, like Antigone, made a stand for her own interpretation of justice. This makes her heroic at the same time that it makes her monstrous. She is formidable and impossible to dismiss.

One note: It is important to me that Clytemnestra live and finally die like the queen she is. She should never tip her hand, not to Orestes, not to Electra, not to us, as to the exact moment of her understanding of Orestes’ real identity. I always advise letting the actress make that call and feel no obligation to flag it. Consequently, her death is oddly, but fundamentally, heroic because she goes to it knowingly.

ELECTRA

I see Electra as the eternal child, locked at the moment that she witnessed a crime she will never be able to redress, but that she can never forget either. This is a terrible life to have to live.

She has this effect on clocks—they either stop altogether or are rendered meaningless. Not only can she never seem to enter the world, she can’t seem to enter the flow of time itself. She can’t seem to grow up and tear her eyes from that bloody hearthside but neither can she forestall the sense that time is whipping past her, turning her older and more useless by the second. The notion of justice is very dear to her, dearer even than the notion of death because justice seems to entail release in a way in which death—her own—cannot. If justice were to be rendered in the form of the appropriate redress of her father’s murder, then she could become human perhaps—sleep, eat or simply die. The problem is that the appropriate redress involves Orestes as the murderer, not her, so she must wait and watch and remember. Twenty years is a very long time.

In the meantime, she has devoted her life to being the ultimate scourge and household blight. She cannot kill her mother, but she can make her life miserable and fearful. This is at least as hard on the blight as it is on the blighted. She has driven herself mad and she lives in horrifying squalor and sleeplessness. Technically, I suppose I see her as a manic-depressive, always prowling, never sleeping, seldom eating and always talking, talking, talking.

Electra and Hedda Gabler bear a familial resemblance. They are women who are deeply identified with fathers they never knew and who spend their lives yearning for men who will make for them, in their name the great, masculine gesture on the landscape that they don’t feel capable of making themselves. They share a terrible contempt for all that is feminine without particularly understanding the masculine, since the men they revered were always remote and are now either absent or dead. They share the tragedy of people whose lives must perforce be lived through reluctant others who never have the same script, and thus don’t know their lines or even how to show up on time. Also, no one will ever understand the beauty and power of that script as they do; it is theirs alone.

But Electra is perhaps even more tragic than Hedda because she is smarter, more woefully enmeshed in a punishing myth, and she does not have the luxury of an escape into suicide.

Electra’s sense of justice is directly linked to her sense of history. History, and by extension, life itself, is bearable only if it has meaning, ethical meaning. If there are no gods to assign that meaning then she will have to step in, mortal though she is. She never has any doubts as to what her mother’s crime demands in terms of punishment, but she may occasionally doubt her own abilities to see such a punishment through. She has no confidence that, should her vigilance fail, justice would still prevail.

Electra’s sense of the world is tiny; she has never been allowed outside the confines of her own house and yard. She does not know what is around the bend of the road she looks at through the fence of the property. But her sense of the issues of justice and history is proportionately enormous and rigid in its very abstraction. As I say, this play is overwhelmingly intimate, and yet it is all about history and justice.

CHRYSOTHEMIS

Chrysothemis is the character that no one ever remembers after reading the Sophocles play. So she has become the center of this one. Electra thinks of herself as the nightmare of the house, the incessant speaker of the unspeakable. However, Chrysothemis is actually the most terrifying figure in the house and in this version she has the last word. Chrysothemis is the awful voice that I know so well in my own head and that I think is present in so many women’s heads. She is the one who says: Who do you think you are anyway?; "But whatever made you think you were important?; But you’re just a girl, what do you know about anything of real consequence?" and so forth.

But Chrysothemis is also real, she isn’t just a figment. She is the only functional member of this odd family. She is the only member of the family who isn’t clinically insane, for starters. But she also has the strength and power of someone who is actually engaged in life. She sees everything and she maintains her family’s crazy existence. Without her, nothing. She is graced with the irony that only those who are true survivors possess. Hers is an admittedly mundane and material existence. But that is actually the beauty of it. That is her power. She is no less intelligent or strong than her mother and sister, but she has chosen life, a certain kind of life, over heroism and myth. Therein lies her strangely tragic quality. She is actually the most difficult character for me to encounter because she enunciates the truths I fear the most. But her calm clear-sightedness in facing these things is deeply impressive to me at the same time that it is unbearable to me.

The easiest trap for the actor playing Chrysothemis is to perceive her as a cynic. She isn’t. She is a realist. She lives in the noon light of an illusionless landscape. This is an impossible place for most human beings to live because it is too cold, too bright. Virtually nothing she has to say is anything anyone else can bear to hear. So she mostly watches and assesses her difficult charges.

All this is not to say that she doesn’t have yearnings for scale and drama from time to time. She does wish desperately, I think, for memories, for the sense of consequence that a real, owned personal history would give her. But she has none of that. She knows what she is, the part she has always played. There has never been real love, nor its counterpart, hatred. Not for her.

ORESTES

Orestes is, first and foremost, a veteran. He is the embodiment of what they called in Vietnam the thousand-mile stare. He has done things that he will never be able to live with. He has tried to turn himself into a monster and very nearly succeeded. But the monster he wanted to be, who could kill without feeling anything and who could do the one thing he was saved to do, is a monster he has never quite managed to become. He knows he is a tragic figure, but that has no appeal for him. He did not choose this. He would have preferred a far more ordinary life without this terrible tinge of drama and darkness. But of course that is unthinkable. This has been his condition ever since he can remember. And he can remember a lot—far too much. The crime he was forged upon and his duty in relation to it are as much a part of him as his hands and feet.

Aside from his identity as a veteran, his only other true identity is as an exile. He has been in exile all of his conscious life. But unlike most exiles, he has no home to remember with any joy. His return home is inevitable and terrible to contemplate since it will propel him out into a hostile world again, this time as a criminal as well as an exile.

As far as justice and history are concerned he is deeply ironic, as only a soldier of the First World War could be. There is no notion of honor and justice left after enduring such a spectacularly grotesque, absurd and futile war. But he has an unshakable notion of fate, and that is why he finally comes home to do its bidding. Exhaustion figures chiefly in my image of Orestes. He knows exactly what will become of all this, and he does know the world—all too well. The only tenderness he ever experienced was early on, not only from his sister, but from his mother. I think he remembers that.

Iphigenia in Tauris

This may be the quietest play I’ve ever written, and perhaps the strangest. But then the source, Euripides’ play of the same name, is odd indeed. After the anguished, harrowing doings of Electra, it should seem that we are transported to an entirely different world, a sort of beautiful limbo, in fact, which is precisely what Euripides called for.

The chorus are all girls who, like Iphigenia, were saved from human sacrifice in some vague way, though Iphigenia’s celebrity as the most famous example of such a dramatic personal reprieve obviously lends her prestige and special rights as a priestess in this realm. But they all share the same state now, which is to say that they are all frozen in privilege, preserved in a sort of fugue-state of adolescence. They will never get old. This has its advantages: they will never age, their beauty will never diminish, they will never again be in harm’s way. And there is, as they point out, ostensibly nothing to complain about. It’s all just plain lovely and never anything less, a Greek version of what some Christians hope heaven will offer. But that’s just what doesn’t recommend it. Unrelieved serenity and eternal idleness are frankly inhuman. Even the nicest place imaginable palls after a time, and no one, certainly not someone so acutely curious as Iphigenia, would be content with living out only a fraction of her own life story. So it is with all these girls, exquisitely preserved in their first beauty though they all are.

This is a play about the perils and the costs of privilege, at least in part. I have known many such creatures and was myself a girl blessed with privilege, having been reared in relative financial and social comfort. The minor miseries of such specialness are such that it seems, even for those who suffer from them, tremendously unseemly to dwell on them, given the state of things for most of humanity. But being a girl, no matter how comfortably off, is never an easy thing, and I always look upon my students, caught in the gauntlet of late adolescence, with compassion, no matter how gently they were raised.

But Iphigenia in Tauris is not just about the obscure sorrows of a timeless adolescence; it is about two figures who are emblematic of what culture demands of the young of both sexes. The sibling relationship between Iphigenia and Orestes is at the heart of the play, and their recognition of a common, though sexually distinct, fate is what gives their encounter its subtle piquancy. Iphigenia’s fate is rendered epic by her peculiar status, but it is a fate common to all girls—she is supposed to embody youth and beauty and ingenuous poignancy for all time. She is enjoined never to change, never to unsettle, never, in effect, to mature into particularity. Orestes, on the other hand, is cast unwittingly in the role of the avenger of wrongs he had no hand in, first as a soldier and then as a matricide. He bridles against this, but he knows he never had any real choice in the matter, any more than countless generations of young men have had, enlisted as they have been since time immemorial in the dark projects their elders write with the blood of others, the blood of youth.

The subversive plan the two siblings devise at the end of the piece is a peculiar event, but it is the final recourse these mythical characters have in resolving the perpetual cycle of their myth. They cannot escape from legend into obscurity in any ordinary way; they have always been too special for that, too visible to the gods and posterity. A statue will have to be taken back to civilization. That is what legend demands as a means of releasing Orestes from his cycle of misery. Iphigenia, already translated to limbo by the workings of her saga, volunteers what is left of her humanness and distinctness to give her brother his means of escape. It is an act of self-sacrifice that is personally intentional as no other action of the play has been. In this way, the only two characters capable of a loving relationship in the entire play put their own terrible myth to rest and are quietly released at last into obscurity.

Setting

Iphigenia in Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris are both set in something approaching the timeless, arid landscape of Greek myth. There is a kind of purity about them both that detaches them from ordinary, linear time. However, Electra, the centerpiece of this trilogy, has an entirely different quality for me. Electra takes place in a courtyard and in the midst of an actual, comprehendible day, a day unlike any other, but a day nonetheless in the lives of these three women. As I thought about it, I realized that I was seeing the play set in a Europe between the wars, perhaps just on the heels of the First World War. I suppose the reason I saw it this way had to do with the idea of the twilight of a certain type of aristocracy, but also it informed the notion of these women who spend their lives waiting for news of the great events of history, of the men in their lives and what has become of them. I heard somewhere that when the bombardments were taking place in France during the First World War, the teacups in Dover would shiver in their saucers. I suppose, if I had to nail it down, that was the image that generated Electra. It said so much about a particularly female relationship to history. So I came to think that Agamemnon’s war, the Trojan War in the Greek version, translated roughly into the Boer War, which was perceived, at least in England, as the last satisfyingly exotic, remote and heroic war. Which would make Orestes, his son, a veteran of the First World War, a monstrously absurd and brutish war, fought far too close to home to be comfortingly misted in sentiment. Orestes is often perceived as the first modern hero in Greek literature. He has compunctions and ambiguities. He rails against his fate and doubts the authority and sanctity of the gods. He seemed to be easily translated into a veteran of the first modern war, a war that toppled the notion of heroism and ushered irony into the vocabulary of Western civilization.

The problem I present producers of this trilogy involves what to do about the apparent anachronisms, given the timeless Greek quality of the first and last plays and the modern references of Electra. As for the use of language—the prose of Electra versus the poetry of the Iphigenia plays—I don’t think there should be much stylistic difference in terms of approach. The language is, to be sure, heightened in the first play and the last, but it is so throughout, just as there is a vernacular, ironic tone throughout, even at the gravest, toughest moments. The challenge for the director is to make the play into a seamless whole, so that the more conventionally Greek plays don’t get too portentous and the Electra doesn’t get too glib. That said, I think that the anachronisms in terms of the way eras collide, which are built into the text, are of use and important. Since the set will be, of necessity, relatively spare, given that it needs to serve all three plays, the burden of the anomalies needs to rest on the costumes, which should bear traces of the different eras. In Iphigenia in Aulis, Clytemnestra should look as if she’s in a gorgeous, but not particularly specific, simple full-length gown. Iphigenia should be in the proverbial white dress, nothing fancy, a shift, for instance, made of beautiful material, but uncomplicated—the dress of an ancient princess. However, in Electra, Clytemnestra should have on something stripped down that looks like the clothing of a wealthy woman of 1919, while Chrysothemis should wear the sensible clothing of a woman of that era who does a lot of domestic work but likes to keep herself neat. Electra should be wearing what looks like a destroyed child’s dress of the turn of the previous century (something that looks as if she’s been wearing it for years without ever washing it or taking it off) and her father’s Boer War army boot. And Orestes needs to walk in wearing something that smacks of a World War I uniform. The WW1 theme will then trail into Tauris, because, although Iphigenia is wearing exactly what we last saw her in (and the Chorus is in variations on that look), Orestes is still in the remnants of his WW1 uniform, if only the pants and boots. It’s important that he still look like a relatively modern veteran, and that his presence be surprising and highly masculine in that paradisal context. He is, quite recognizably, a modern figure in an ancient world. The anomalies should be embraced, in other words, for the slightly jarring aesthetic shock they can provide.

The great saga of Greek mythology is the Trojan War. It is the saga toward which all the myths lead and it is the backdrop against which the largest number of mythic characters define themselves. The three plays that I have chosen to adapt here are all plays concerning women, and none of the characters in these plays ever sets foot in Troy. This is interesting to me. When you think of it though, the Trojan War lasts for ten years, the trip home can take quite a long time (in Odysseus’ case, another ten years)—what was going on in those countries all that time the men were gone? Clytemnestra, for instance, runs her country for the duration of the war: she kills her