Mike Barnett talks to director Blanche McIntyre about directing The Oresteia, a play which first saw the light of day in 458 BC.
MB: First of all, can you tell me how you first came to work with HOME?
BM: I knew the venue was a home for radical artistic theatre, so I was wildly excited when Walter Meierjohann [Artistic Director: Theatre] and Petra-Jane Tauscher [Dramaturg] saw and liked a show of mine (The Birthday Party – another story of the past grabbing the present by the scruff, and another poetic, dense text, so not too different from The Oresteia). I’m a classicist so I’ve always thought of The Oresteia as the Everest of drama, so I proposed it thinking it would be much too ambitious – but luckily daring programming is also part of your mission statement.
MB: Do you think it was your destiny as a classicist that at one time you would direct The Oresteia?
BM: As a classicist I know that the workings of destiny are dark and obscure and not necessarily positive! It’s always been a play I love passionately and refer to constantly in my head. But The Oresteia is important for all of Western culture. It’s one of the earliest plays we have and the first complete trilogy (first performed in 458 BC). It is a classic text about justice and where humans stand in the world. It starts with a lone watchman on a tower and expands to take in cities, gods and the whole cosmos. Orestes and his dilemma – to take revenge or not – are the ancestors of Hamlet and his, and the play’s interest in the moral question of justice and revenge makes it the ancestor of countless dramas (including most recently Game of Thrones).
MB: After productions at the Almeida and Shakespeare’s Globe this year, why do you think The Oresteia has been the subject of three major productions this year?
BM: There is a contemporary need for Greek dramas – the three Oresteias are the obvious example, but over the last couple of years we’ve also seen at least two Antigones, two Medeas, the Almeida’s Greek season, the RSC’s Hecuba, and the National Theatre of Wales’ Iliad. My hunch is that when current events seem overwhelming, there is a need for plays which give us a way to discuss them and get a handle on them, and in a world overloaded with information there is a need for plays which are clear and uncompromising. Greek plays don’t let anyone off the hook.
MB: You were clearly familiar with the play beforehand, but what is it about this translation, by the late Ted Hughes, that particularly appeals to you?
BM: Ted Hughes’ version is full of power, without waste. The language is heightened but not remote, and crucially (for me) – it’s condensed, so each line packs a punch. Aeschylus’ characters famously speak in a huge, craggy style, language on a gigantic scale. Aristophanes makes him say in Frogs that gods have to speak like gods. (I think it’s a send-up but probably about right.) That’s true, but they have to speak our language as well.
MB: What was your motivation for the age- and gender-swap casting decision?
BM: Greek plays work differently from modern ones – the audience used them as a kind of political investigation, an engine for thinking, so they aren’t naturalistic. The actors don’t so much play characters as channel roles. They act like matadors to the audience, constantly asking us to judge or critique their characters’ behaviour, never forgetting that we are in the room witnessing events. There was also a particular kind of casting in the original plays that linked to this. In Athens, three or sometimes even two actors would have played all the parts, and the way the parts are divided usually draws attention to a link – someone plays both husband and wife, or both killer and victim, who are written never to be on stage at the same time because the second character continues the arc of the first. I thought it was useful to keep this way of doubling, partly because it draws attention to the way the play works, and also because I think the links between roles are one of the most important things. Here, one actor plays both the dispossessed killers, one plays all the believers in a patriarchy (including Electra because her father’s death is more important for her than her sister’s or mother’s), one plays the different voices of reason, oppressed at the beginning but ultimately triumphant. And of course there is Clytemnestra, who refuses to be defined by any kind of label. The play is also fascinated by gender politics – it questions what women and men are differently capable of, and the final trial turns on a (I think intentionally poor) piece of reasoning about gender and biology. The doubling above required me to cast across gender, and I think it’s a useful way of exploring that question in the play, without generalising, or supporting the extreme statements that some of the characters come out with.
MB: There’s obviously a contemporary relevance to the themes of the play, and you referenced the Northern Powerhouse, and the Arab Spring at the start of rehearsals. Was Ted Hughes ahead of the game in this regard, and how has the relevance of ‘today’ surfaced during the rehearsal process?
BM: Current events in Syria make it impossible to think of The Oresteia as anything but a contemporary text. The suffering war causes to ordinary people, the effects of violence and extreme grief, are present in the play and on the news, and part of the role of the play is to present human suffering and ask us to form a to home too – slavery is still found in the west, both in the sense of physically taking someone’s freedom and more widely as an economic trap that keeps people stuck without money or prospects. The question of how far a city can, and should, govern itself is one that Manchester is currently asking, as devo max offers the city wide powers together with a much reduced budget.
MB: What are the particular challenges of directing a play which was written so long ago?
BM: Directing an ancient play is different and tricky because the purpose of it is different. Greek plays were written and produced in a tiny self-governing city-state (a ‘polis’ – the root of the word ‘politics’), and the actors, writers, producers and spectators were all part of a direct democracy, which could use the plays as reference and inspiration when they made laws. It was a sacred duty for the city to ask itself difficult questions about complex issues, and they used stories they knew. So the audience would have had a much more direct connection with the plays themselves and expected to apply the lessons of the plays to contemporary situations. One of my challenges has been about how to get the audience to build the play in their heads. The closest we can get to it is audience involvement, but even that isn’t particularly close.
MB: There’s a major community element to this production. You’ve spoken about the play having a piquancy in that’s its being staged in Manchester, bearing in mind the city’s radical role in the political history of the country. Was the community involvement of the people of the city one of the clinchers to you wanting to direct it here, and how has their input been manifested itself during rehearsals?
BM: Yes, it absolutely was. I think the voice of the people has a central driving role in the play, and staging it here gives it an important resonance – just as Athens was, Manchester is a city where the collective good has been the cause of powerful debate and struggle. I don’t think the choruses act as the audience’s representatives – the women have a dark role inciting two young people to violence, and the Furies in the final act represent a kind of wordless agony of remorse, so they are not ‘us’. But to see three groups struggling in the play – ordinary men dealing with current events, dispossessed women from Troy, and Furies whose moral code is being superseded – it does make you think about how we operate as a group and whether and how we can change it for the better. I like to get input from everyone in the rehearsal room, so working with three choruses has been fascinating and expanded my brain in about 50 ways at once. One of the most interesting things we’ve done is hold mock juries and discussions about the play and the issues. So I’ve tried to get collective input into the ethical angle of the plays as well as the world of the play, which I always do.
The Oresteia runs from Fri 23 Oct – Sat 14 Nov 2015. Find out more and book tickets here.
