Playing against the text: Les Atrides and the history of reading Aeschylus.

Those of us who study drama would do well to remind ourselves that "theory" and "theatre" come from the same Greek root, a fact which both classicists and performers too often ignore--to their mutual detriment. The Theatre du Soleil's Les Atrides tetralogy unquestionably engages with the texts. But when it comes to Aeschylus, the word "engage" has overtones of battle rather than of marriage for Ariane Mnouchkine, director of the theatre and of the production. She revises as she revives, and the result is both spectacularly successful and sadly disappointing. Scholars and directors alike have much to learn from the sheer theatricality of Les Atrides, but no classicist can fail to notice the absence of precisely those theatrical moments which even the most book-bound cannot ignore. Aeschylus was quintessentially a man of the theatre, and his plays demand performance. In granting such a high profile performance, Mnouchkine has done both Aeschylus and Euripides a favor. But on an interpretive level, Mnouchkine does Aeschylus a grave disservice, consistently overriding his directorial decisions. Despite this tactic, in the first three plays Les Atrides gives us incredible theatre. But in Les Eumenides, the tetralogy's conclusion, Mnouchkine's defiance of Aeschylus results in a static, contrived performance--a dramatic letdown.

Aeschylus has been characterized as a conservative, patriotic, religious, militaristic poet of the good old days, at least since Aristophanes wrote Frogs in 405 BCE. But while almost no one for the last 2,400-odd years has thought to question this characterization, it has no basis in the texts of Aeschylean plays as they have come down to us. For one thing, the good old days were not particularly good: 458, the year in which the Oresteia was produced, was a time of political upheaval and civic strife which may indeed have resulted in the physical destruction of parts of Athens. And Eumenides, contrary to popular and scholarly belief, is, dramaturgically and politically, the most radical of Aeschylus' works.

Mnouchkine is hardly the first to fail to recognize this fact, but her misreading, embodied as it is in a production seen by thousands of people in several countries, constitutes a spectacularly public misstep. A closer relation to the text in its context, a relation less mediated by the tradition of reading Eumenides as a propatriarchal endorsement of Athens, would have resulted in a far more gripping spectacle. As talented as Mnouchkine and her actors are, with Les Eumenides they fall prey to the influence of interpreters like Aristophanes who have ideological reasons for presenting Aeschylus as the exponent of their own political views. Mnouchkine's production succumbs to the traditional and pervasive interpretation of Eumenides as a play with a happy ending, and this is the reason why even reviewers who were not classically trained perceived Les Eumenides as "more sentimental than provocative" (Rich 1992:B4) and "burden[ed ...] with clunky symbolism" (Henry 1992:83). Mnouchkine put considerable effort into making a personal connection with the plays of Les Atrides. Thanks to her familiarity with non-naturalistic theatrical traditions, she establishes a very good link in the area of stagecraft, and Les Atrides obviously represents a great deal of research and of thought.

But what is she really mean by saying "I'm faithful to the texts; I invent nothing" (Lamont 1992:19)? Though she did study Greek in order to produce Les Atrides, her contact with the ancient poets, like that of most people, has been via translations. To whose text, exactly, is she being faithful in Les Euminides? Aeschylus' or Helene Cixous'? That the two might be wildly different is illustrated by a scene which occurred after the performance of Iphigenie on 20 September 1992 in Montreal. On the way back from the Arena Maurice-Richard, I remarked to my companions, students and teachers of theatre, that it was interesting that Mnouchkine had brought Agamemnon back on after the sacrifice of Iphigeneia. "What do you mean it isn't in the text?" one of them asked me, pointing to the translation she'd bought before the performance. "It's right there." In the script, yes, of course: Agamemnon had to get his lines from somewhere. But it isn't in Euripides.

Nor was it an accident that Les Euminides had everything in it but Aeschylus. From the very beginning of Les Atrides, Mnouchkine is engaged in reading--and therefore, since she is a director, in playing--against the text. Why "against"? Because the text itself is assumed to be inadequate for her purposes; Aeschylus, unmeddled with, cannot possibly have anything true or empowering to say about women. There is a brand of essentialist feminism which denies to man the physical capacity to speak for women. Helene Cixous, who is not only responsible for the translation used for Les Euminides but also a longtime collaborator with Mnouchkine, espouses this essentialism. "Woman must write woman," she writes in "The Laugh of the Medusa," "and man, man" 1980:247). So Mnouchkine would appear to believe. From the perspective of a leading feminist scholar in the theatre, "the feminist reader of the Oresteia [...] must read against the text" (Case 1985:324).

Yet later in the above-mentioned essay, Cixous herself says:

There have been poets who would go to any lengths to slip something

by at odds with tradition--men capable of loving love and

hence capable of loving others and of wanting them, of imagining

the woman who could hold out against oppression and constitute

herself as a superb, equal, hence "impossible" subject, untenable in

a real social framework. (1980:249)

The Japanese noh playwright and actor Zeami, whose work Mnouchkine admires, refers more than once to the extreme attention which must be paid to properly representing women, an indication that in at least one culture which sponsors an all-male theatre, there has been a conscientious attempt by at least one playwright to represent women accurately. And the most patriarchal production of the Oresteia I ever saw succeeded at diminishing and denigrating Klytaimnestra only by removing substantial quantities of Aeschylus' text.(1)

If Mnouchkine's engagement with Aeschylus and Euripides was mediated by translations, our engagement with Les Atrides was even more carefully and explicitly mediated by Ariane Mnouchkine. At any moment when the audience was present, the actors and their supporting staff were performing. The actors dressed and applied their kathakali-inspired makeup in full view under the wooden stands, drawing the audience into the theatrical world well before the beginning of the play proper. The audiences in Athens had a relationship to the cast: both were part of the same community, and each was visible to the other, not only before but during the performance. The audience of Les Atrides was invited to form a relationship with the actors, to speak with them while they dressed, to be seen by them, a move simultaneously ancient and innovative. Like the Athenian audience, those who came to Les Atrides were in some way complicit in, responsible for, the production. And it is difficult to be simultaneously accomplice and critic. Beneath the vertiginously steep wooden bleachers, the actors added layer after layer to become larger than life. Yards of wool in red and ocher, expressive makeup in black on white, bells and mirrors and ornaments reminiscent of modem Greek folk costume transformed actors/dancers of both genders into a chorus of eager young virgins. Like the square bullring of a stage, of pale wood like the stands, this mix of Asian traditions of costume generated a Minoan atmosphere. And while the assortment of instruments on the long platform dedicated to composer Jean-Jacques Lemetre was globally eclectic, the responsibility of a small number of musicians for an enormous output of sound was in the best Athenian tradition.

The thunder of the drums preceding the first entry of the chorus of Iphigenie lifted us to the edge of our seats as the double-doors at the rear of the stage swung open to reveal that tumultuous, vibrant ensemble. I have never been particularly impressed by the chorus of Iphigeneia in Aulis. I fell in love with it that night. Between odes the choreuts sprinted around bull-blocking baffles to watch from behind or above the walls, straining to catch …