disturbing things about The Children of Herakles is the irony that, after she makes her bid for immortality – the girl begs to be honoured in her family’s and Athens’s memory before she goes off to die – we never hear another word about her. There are all sorts of explanations for this cold treatment of a warm-blooded character (not least, that the manuscript of the play is incomplete), but surely one is precisely that everything that Macaria represents must, in fact, disappear in order for the community to persist. Tragedy loves its self-heroizing females, but like the state whose concerns it so subtly enacted, it always found a way to get rid of those unmanageable ‘others’. By bringing Macaria back in the second half of the play, and allowing us to weep over the spectacle of the tiny young girl having her throat cut, Sellars reasserts the energies that Euripides shows – ironically or not – being silenced.
And so, like an earlier generation of classicists who saw little of value in this play except references to contemporary politicking – the speeches were thought to echo fifth-century BC Athenian political debates – Sellars fails to see where the play’s political discourse really lies. Which is to say, in the representation of the two characters who look the least like politicians: a young girl and an old woman. Did Euripides care about refugees? Yes, but mostly because of what refugee crises tell us about the nature of the state. (‘The current event’ he cared about was Athens’s summary execution, the year before the play was produced, of some Spartan envoys – clearly the referent for Alcmene’s climactic act of violence.) Peter Sellars, on the other hand, cares about refugees the way a twenty-first-century person cares – he feels for these poor kids, the mute, wide-eyed boys, the brutalized girls, and wants to make you feel for them, too. The result, alas, is a play that sends a message that isn‘t quite the one Euripides was telegraphing to his audience, by means of symbolic structures they knew well. Someone gets sacrificed in this Children of Herakles, but it isn’t just Macaria.
A similar desire to update a Euripidean classic in terms familiar to today’s audience has, apparently, informed Deborah Warner’s vulgar, loud, and uncomprehending staging of Medea, which went from a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to a Broadway run, which was rapturously received by most critics – mostly because they are rightly impressed by Fiona Shaw’s emotional ferocity. If only it were being put in the service of a reading that did justice to Euripides! For if Sellars’s Euripides ultimately betrays its source because it thinks ‘our’ politics are the play’s politics, Warner’s Euripides fails because it mistakes ‘our’ women for Euripides’ women.
In an interview two years ago with the Guardian, before their Medea had crossed the Atlantic, Warner and Shaw decried the ‘misplaced image of Medea as a strong, wilful, witchy woman’, suggesting instead that the key to their heroine was, in fact, her ‘weakness’. ‘Audiences can identify with weakness,’ Shaw said. ‘I think the Greek playwrights knew that. That they could entice the audience into an emotional debate about failure and dealing with being a failed person.’ This betrays a remarkable failure to understand the nature of Greek tragic drama, which unlike contemporary psychological drama didn’t strive to have audiences ‘identify’ with its characters – if anything, Athenian audiences were likely to find the chorus more sympathetic and recognizable than the outsized heroes with their divine pedigrees – and which was relatively uninterested in the wholly modern notion of ‘dealing’ with failure (and, you suppose, finding ‘closure’). For the Greeks, the allure of so many tragic heroes is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what Warner and Shaw think it is: the heroes’ strength, their grandeur, their power, the attributes of intellect or valour that they must resort to in their staged struggles with a hostile fate – or, as in many plays, like Ajax, their struggles to adapt to post-heroic worlds that have shifted and shrunk beneath them, rendering the heroes outsized, obsolete. (Norma Desmond, the has-been silent film star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, has something of the grotesque yet somehow admirable grandiosity of the latter type of hero; her famous cri de coeur ‘I am big. It was the pictures that got small’ could, mutatis mutandis, be a line from Sophocles.)
And indeed, rather than being what Shaw called ‘very normal’ and Warner referred to as ‘the happy housewife of Corinth’, Euripides’ Medea is deliberately presented as a kind of female reincarnation of one of the most anguished, outsized, titanic dramatic heroes in the ancient canon: Sophocles’ Ajax, the hero of a drama first produced about ten years before Medea. Like Ajax, Medea is first heard, rather uncannily, offstage, groaning over her plight: her abandonment by her husband Jason, who has left her to marry the daughter of Creon, the king of Corinth. She is characterized by what the classicist Bernard Knox, writing at Ajax, has summarized as ‘determined resolve, expressed in uncompromising terms’, by a ‘fearful, terrible … wild’ nature, by ‘passionate intensity’. Like many Sophoclean heroes, she is motivated above all by an outraged sense of having been treated with disrespect, and curses her enemies while she plans her revenge; like Ajax specifically, she is tormented above all by the thought that her enemies will laugh at her.
So ‘strong, wilful, and witchy’ is, in fact, precisely what Euripides’ Medea is. But not Warner’s Medea, who appears to be stranded somewhere between Sylvia Plath and Mia Farrow – a frazzled woman who can’t figure out how to act until the last minute. (Euripides’ Medea can: from the start, she keeps repeating the terrifying word ktenô, ‘I will kill.’) Shaw, an impressive actress, chews up the scenery doing an impersonation of a housewife gone amok. When she comes out on the rather bleak stage at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre – apart from a door upstage centre, there are just some cinder blocks strewn around covered with tarps, as if a construction project had been halted midway, and a swimming pool (by now de rigueur in contemporary stagings of classical texts; there was one in Mary Zimmerman’s Metamorphoses, too) in the centre with a toy boat floating in it – she’s emaciated, hugging herself, haggard, nervously cracking jokes. (She draws a little witch hat in the air above her head at one point.) To reconcile this Valium-starved wreck with the text’s many references to Medea’s fame, power, and semi-divine status, Warner makes some halfhearted references to Medea as being some kind of ‘celebrity’: the chorus, here, is a gang of autograph-seeking groupies – ‘the people who stand outside the Oscars’, as Warner put it. The intention, you imagine, is to throw into the interpretative stew some kind of commentary on ‘celebrity’, but it’s a stupid point to be making: all the heroes of Greek tragedy are famous.
This scaled-down, ‘normal’ Medea makes nonsense of the text in other, more damaging ways. Everyone in Euripides’ play who interacts with Medea shows a healthy respect for the woman they know to be capable of terrible deeds. (She once gave the daughters of one of Jason’s enemies a deliberately misleading recipe for rejuvenating their ageing father, which involved cutting the old man into tiny pieces. Needless to say, it didn’t work. This was the subject of Euripides’ first drama, produced in 455 BC, when he was thirty.) She is august, terrifying; the granddaughter of the sun, for heaven’s sake. The Warner/Shaw Medea looks as if she can barely get herself out of bed in the morning, and the result is that when the plot does require her to do those awful things (the murder of Jason’s fiancée and her father, the slaughter of her own children), you wonder how – and why – she managed it. The problem with making Medea into one of those distraught Susan Smith types, pushed by creepy men into moral regions we can’t ever inhabit, is that it substitutes pat psychological nostrums (‘Someone pushed to the place where she has no choice’: thus Warner) for something that is much more horrific – and vital – in the play. Euripides’ Medea is terrifying and grotesque precisely because her motivations aren’t those of a wounded housewife, but those of a heroic temperament following the brutal logic of heroism: to inflict harm on your enemies at all costs, even if – as here – those enemies turn out to be your own kin.
You could argue, indeed, that what makes Euripides’ heroine awesome is not that she’s a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown, but that, if anything, she has the capacity to think like a man. Or, perhaps, like a lawyer. Euripides, we know, was very interested in the developing art of rhetoric, an instrument of great importance in the workings of the Athenian state. The patent content of Euripides’
