Letter from Epidaurus
Referring to the terrorist brothers Xeros, film director Nikos Koundouros, 74, was angry and blunt: «Clearly, it’s their parents’ fault. They are the formidable product of this priest’s seed and the priest’s wife,» he said, speaking about the terrorists’ family last Friday morning on a talk-show on the NET TV channel. Sophocles – the terror of generations of schoolboys who had to learn chunks of his plays by heart – notes in his «Antigone» something that does not quite fit the above: «It is for this that men pray: to sire and raise in their homes children who are obedient, that they may requite their father’s enemy with evil and honor his friend just as their father does.» Yet, he also says of the elderly (film directors and such), «…anger knows no old age» («Oedipus at Colonus»). So much for terrorism and November 17. Now to Epidaurus. Quite different legends of cursed offspring were presented last weekend during the four performances of the Theban Cycle by the Dusseldorf State Theater, Germany, at the Ancient Theater of Epidaurus. It is always a good idea to introduce the thoughts of German classical scholars and stage directors into Greek tragedies, as my German teacher in Thessaloniki, the late Graf von Posadowsky-Wehner, said. Only this time in Epidaurus, it was Greek Theodoros Terzopoulos, Japanese Tadashi Suzuki, Russian Valery Fokin and Polish Anna Badora who were directing. The money, mind you, was German. The performances of such perverted works as Euripides «Bacchae» and Sophocles «Oedipus Rex» on Friday night, as well as Aeschylus’ unrelenting «Seven Against Thebes» and its abrasive sequel, Sophocles’ «Antigone» – where contempt for death enables a feeble maiden to overmaster a powerful ruler – last Saturday went ahead without Kounellis’s sets. The prolific world-famous Greek artist withdrew his work following a disagreement with the Central Archaeological Council. No big loss really. The theater of the Asklepieion of Epidaurus, praised in antiquity by Pausanias for its symmetry and beauty, hardly needs any scenery or stage designs for theater productions. British director Peter Hall understood this when he refrained from any stage designs when he presented his unforgettable «Bacchae» – Euripides’ terrible and moving play that goes beyond any moral categories of good or evil – some weeks ago. Persisting with his usual stamping awkwardness, Theodoros Terzopoulos produced a tawdry version filled with recycled ideas, which certainly did not correspond to the author’s preoccupations with a myth in which King Pentheus is torn to pieces for his resistance against the god of wine and revelry, Dionysus. Terzopoulos’s undulating uggah-buggah chorus was as loopy as July bugs from the beginning to the end. On the other hand, the austere Tadashi Suzuki directed the first-night performance of «Oedipus Rex» ( that is the man who killed his father, Laius, married his mother, Jocasta, became king, and when he found out what he’d done, blinded himself) with the stylized movements of the Japanese Noh theater. As with our current terrorists, the Theban Cycle is a family affair. The story of Thebes, the capital of Boeotia founded by Cadmus, is one of the great moments and heroic rallying points of Greek mythology. Cadmus is famous for the search for his sister Europa, whom Zeus had carried away. As any child knows, Greek gods had the form of men and, sometimes, of animals: They got drunk, they belched, were adulterous, or worse still. The story of Europa is a famous one: The beautiful maiden was playing with her friends in Phoenicia – the very place where Jews and Palestinians are fighting for land and recognition – when a bull (Zeus in disguise) wandered along the shore. Europa ran up to him to pat his neck and throw a wreath of flowers over his horns. She then clambered onto his back. The bull started running, then swam into the sea and brought the girl to the land of Crete, where he took full advantage. Soon after that, her father sent off his sons to search for her. One of these sons was Cadmus. (He appears as an old man in «The Bacchae,» where, with the blind seer Tiresias, he staggers out to join the maenads [or madwomen]). Young Cadmus, who did not know where to look for his sister, goes, sensibly, to the oracle of Delphi for advice. «Cadmus, you’re wasting your time wandering around seeking a bull that never can be found,» was Apollo’s answer. So, the god told him to follow the first heifer he met. He was to build a city on the spot where she lay down to rest. In this way was Thebes (one of the most unpleasant of modern Greek cities) founded. Among the mythological personalities associated with Thebes are Cadmus, Agave, Pentheus, Antigone, Ismene, Jocasta, Tiresias and Capaneus – all of them characters in the four tragedies we saw in the four performances of Mania Thebaia, as the Germans from Dusseldorf – in collaboration with the Greek Cultural Olympiad – named their cycle in Epidaurus. Anna Badora directed Sophocles’ «Antigone» – where a young woman gives a proper burial to her rebellious brother probably in accordance with the saying by the German 19th-century philosopher, Hegel, that tragedy isn’t about right versus wrong but about right versus right. Her uncle, King Creon, asserts the right of the state to punish traitors when he orders the body be left unconsecrated. This was one of the most stimulating productions. Full of insinuating percussion, the staging (by Valery Fokin of Russia) of «Seven Against Thebes» by Aeschylus was long on stage effects and short on catharsis. After a complete TV catharsis for two consecutive nights, back to Athens where television broadcasters continued to sow confusion over the future of November 17. What would seer Tiresias have said to his daughter? «The man who practices the prophet’s art is a fool; for if he happens to give an adverse answer, he makes himself disliked by those for whom he takes the omens; while if he pities and deceives those who are consulting him, he wrongs the gods.» [Euripides, «Phoenician Women,» 955]
