Kings Cross Bloodshed
Agamemnon is a warrior out of luck. The poor sap goes 15 rounds with the Trojans, only to return to his native Greece to learn his wife Clytaemnestra has been sleeping around.
Mind you, the warrior has returned with a tasty Trojan morsel by his side. A fair-skinned prophetess named Cassandra, whom nobody believes. Much like Agamemnon’s noble excuses.
But none of that condones the dagger jutting from the cuckold’s sternum come Act III, the bloody bathroom deed of Clytaemnestra.
Tasmanian playwright Tom Holloway beds down the template of the Aeschylus drama in his own Aussie tribute, Don’t Say The Words. (And if that title sounds familiar, starting mumbling the Split Enz tune, History Never Repeats, and see if the chorus doesn’t solve your déjà vu.)
The play is running at the http://www.griffintheatre.com.au/ in Kings Cross for the next few weeks, a dinkum Greek tragedy set in a Gothic bathroom. All three actors (Jack Finsterer, Anna Lise Phillips and Brett Stiller) live the nightmare with grim fidelity, while Matthew Lutton’s direction enhances the script’s intensity.
A stranglehold of language, the script’s stern repetitions and sparse ambit offer no relent for the audience. Rather than a viewer, you feel more a witness, the reverbing words like so many noose coils around your throat. Here’s a snip:
- So he yells at you and then what?
- He hits me again.
- Right
- Punches me.
- Good.
- Knocks my head against the tiled floor…..
Et cetera, et cetera. Being a tragic for tragedies, I swotted the original script on the Parramatta Rivercat before immersing myself in Holloway Version on Thursday night. I found the differences as profound as the echoes. Aeschylus, I’d say, was writing to a less secular mob in his day, allowing him the allusions of fate and divine justice. Hence the Greek script is richer as a text, yet more static as a drama.
Holloway has a shallower grave to dig. He must entrust two aggro, laconic males and a battered missus to do his story-telling. (Cleverly, the chorus role crops up amid the hypnotic catechisms that both men throw at Clytaemnestra - or C as the script dubs her.) Overall such ground rules create a less luscious effect, sparer, yet more threatening as a spectacle.
Other overlaps intrigue. Like a sacrificed daughter in Script 1 being an aborted child in Script 2. Yet the theme of ‘wealth’, as explored in the original, is surprisingly sidestepped by the Taswegian. Perhaps for reasons of brevity, a further omission is the absent son (think Orestes in the original) – the father’s future avenger.
But please. You don’t need to dabble in Agamemnon to lap up Holloway’s achievement. The script stands alone as ambitious, potent writing, a toxic vernacular loop of hate, fear and ulterior intimacy. Just don’t expect to laugh too often. In fact the bathroom’s only ripple of laughter is a pub-crawl import – an ocker prayer to alcohol that deserves its own posting later in the week. Till then, amen.