How, and in what ways can ancient drama help to envisage and comprehend contemporary wars? At first sight the question may seem paradoxical. Undoubtedly, war is the prime material of ancient drama, and more precisely of Greek tragedy - which will be our concern here – regardless of the subject: victors and vanquished (The Persians), the problems of leadership (Iphigenia in Aulis), of the people (The Trojan Women), of strategy in the present (Philoctetes), of its repercussions on future generations (Andromache). But the distance which separates us from them often triggers a reaction of suspicion regarding the temptation of representing them on the contemporary stage: “What do these plays mean today?” (« Was sollen uns diese Stücke heute ? »)1, « Why play Antigone ? » (« Warum Antigone heute spielen ? »)2, « What can the Greeks tell us? » 3, « Is Greek tragedy over? »4, as if it were necessary, over and over, to justify staging them, returning or resorting to a type of drama whose role as a model or place in scholarly heritage are undisputed but whose permanence or recurrence are considered problematic, if not contradictory.
Regarding this suspicion, two attitudes have long prevailed. Either ancient drama is considered as unrelated to our present world because it deals with remote wars, with a culture and dramaturgy that are now extinct: in that case the production will be organized in a museographical perspective, taking the spectator for a voyage in time and history, perhaps trying to retrieve a long lost origin, whose renascence could yet regenerate the seemingly moribund modern stage. Or else, ancient tragedy may be viewed as extolling universal, eternal values, and thus be staged in a humanist perspective, still valid in the modern world.
What we shall deal with now is the type of interpretation that prevails today5, the idea that if the representation of war in ancient tragedy may be of some relevance to the contemporary stage, it is because of the specificity of its dramatic dimension. We shall reflect on the possibility for the dramaturgy of ancient tragedy to help us represent/envisage/feel the complexity and the disturbing or even monstrous nature of contemporary wars, notwithstanding the separation, spelled by Aristotle, between tragedy and monstrosity. In what ways can contemporary drama seek, in ancient drama, a possibility of touching/transforming the individual and the community, when representing war? Our purpose here is not to deal with the possibility of representing ancient tragedy (whether textually or scenically) - a question that has haunted the problematics of reception - but with its function. And our intention is not to provide answers, but to raise questions and to open new paths of reflection.
To avoid too many examples we shall deal with three productions: The Trojan Women, by George Tabori in Bremen in 1976, The Trojan Women again, by Matthias Langhoff in Rennes in 1998, and The Persians, by Dimitri Gotscheff in Berlin in 2006. These productions have one thing in common, in spite of the differences between the plays: they are set in once powerful cities, now devastated (eremos, the Greek text says, repeatedly), and their object is the figures and the words of the victims, even though the term victimization cannot be applied to any character. Broadly speaking, they make it possible to take into account what may constitute, according to David Lescot, the specificity of a dramaturgy of modern warfare, paradoxically at work in Greek tragedy: based on the articulation between heroic individuals and collective identity, on the mixture of the epic (the heroic material, the inserted narrative) and the dramatic, on the juxtaposition of present and memory, with no determining authority to dictate an explicit meaning, Greek tragedy may offer an example of what could be, in David Lescot’s words, « the collective agent of a new type of conflict » within a representation of war as « an instrument of interpretation and comprehension of historical becoming »6. In so far as these two plays increase the otherness due to the distance between them and ourselves by an internal offcentring due to fiction (the Greek spectators were incited to experience the plight of the Persians or the Trojan women while testing the value of their political model, or even the outrageousness, the absurdity of the violence inflicted on them), the contemporary production of each of the plays incites, on the one hand, to dismiss the relation to ancient heritage as part of the continuity of dominant western culture, on the other, to question any Manichean and definitive historic and geopolitical vision.
Finally all three productions were designed by German stage directors. The Persians, as well as The Trojan Women, are ubiquitous on the other side of the Rhine, repeatedly used from a Brechtian viewpoint to represent the complexity of the fractures in German history, its violence and anguish. Without bowing to biographical criticism, let us mention that a good many producers claim a personal traumatic memory of the omnipresence of war: George Tabori’s father died in Auschwitz, Matthias Langhoff’s went to Zurich as an exile to escape the Nazi regime, and Hansgünther Heyme’s (another figure of the reception of ancient tragedy) died on the Russian front7; the picture of the destruction of Dresden is omnipresent in the latter’s work, as in Durs Grünbein’s or Volker Braun’s, who were born there. From one generation to the next, from Braun or Müller to Grünbein, the obsession of fracture and destruction is conveyed, as of an apocalyptic landscape of ruins where survivors are seen wandering.
In 1976, George Tabori gave a performance of The Trojan Women in Bremen, which caused a resounding scandal. The work of Tabori (1914-2007), a dramatist of Hungarian origin, is haunted by the trauma of the Shoah (his father was sent to a concentration camp, his mother managed to escape), which pervades all his work, and particularly The Cannibals, performed in 1968. The idea then was to question the very possibility of a pathetic vision, to hamper any form of compassion that theatrical staging might arouse towards the « victims », through constant recourse to irony, farce or grotesque. Back in the FRG to produce the play after years of exile in the USA, he pursued his research on the representation of relations of dominance and decided in 1976 to produce Matthias Braun’s adaptation of Euripides’ play, much shortened for the occasion and envisaged through the Sartrian prism (Sartre’s adaptation of The Trojan Women, written in 1964, has enjoyed great success in Germany to this day). As Rolf Michaelis, a critic for Theater heute, reported, the play caused a scandal and a good many spectators left the theatre8. At the beginning of the performance Tabori had deleted the prologue, uttered by Athena and Poseidon in Euripides (thus suppressing any reference to a divine intent, leaving men with their own violence). He had replaced it with a mute scene in which the Trojan women, bereft of their children, waited in the attitude of slaves, their clothes in tatters, while blood flowed continuously on the stage. Then they threw their clothes and shoes onto the middle of the stage, thus becoming, in their nudity and in their silence, universal figures of political submission. To quote Rolf Michaelis: […] See the Russian women, dragged away by the Germans as foreign workers; see the Vietnamese women, torn away from their country by American helicopters; see the women of Algeria, of Angola, raped, tortured, murdered […]9.
Thus the production mingles a universal conception of History and a reference to the specificity of the Shoah (with the still recent image of the victims’ dehumanization in the extermination process), within a general process that plays on historical reference and identification, and at the same time on what might be called Brechtian effects of distanciation. By means of recomposing the text, Tabori makes us witness the death of Astyanax, represented on stage with surgical as well as ceremonial gestures by characters that have been likened to Shakespearean clowns or Kafkaian clerks. This scene, unexpected since it does not exist in Euripides’ tragedy, is disturbing, according to Rolf Michaelis, becoming all the more unbearable when the perpetrators carefully wash their hands after the murder, making it appear almost clean and decent. The play ends on Hecuba’s long complaint, which steeps the tragedy into the present of the performance and makes the spectator experience Euripides’ tragedy not as coming from a remote Antiquity, but as linked to the still domineering power of war: Hecuba evokes another woman, also a victim of the Greeks, who lost four children in the war. She concludes her speech – and the play – with these words: « This woman, I understand her », adding, after a long pause: « now » 10.
Thus Tabori tries, through an aesthetics of shock and surprise, to make the spectator experience the violence suffered by the characters of the tragedy (and beyond them by the victims of totalitarian powers) by means of a reshaping of the Greek tragedy, onto which elements of terror are, so to speak, grafted. Monstrousness, rejected by Aristotle, is displayed here, as if to show the horror that Greek tragedy was traditionally not supposed to show. Aristotle’s « compassion » or « pity » is also revisited: refusing any representation of an ideal Greece inherited from Winckelmann’s aesthetics, but also any possibility of « enjoying tears » (which could explain that so many of the spectators walked away), or even of aesthetic pleasure (in spite of the distanciation process), Tabori propounds an experience of atrocity which puts to trial the individual and the community, far from any idea of tragic beauty, in a cathartic process of warning which mixes terror and compassion, even if it eventually erases all the moral ambiguities of the play.
This difficulty raised by Tabori’s performance, and by his temptation - through the specificity of ancient dramaturgy and through the possibilities of present day associations offered by The Trojan Women - to make the spectator experience the trauma of war in a (hopefully) radical way, therefore leading, perhaps, to a metamorphosis, may be exposed as such in another production of the same play. Matthias Langhoff created The Trojan Women (Femmes de Troie) in a French version by Laurence Calame11 at the Théâtre national de Bretagne on 13 January 1998 (the play was also performed in Nanterre from 27 February to 28 March of the same year). In 1998, Matthias Langhoff had already produced several Greek tragedies (including Seven against Thebes, Prometheus, Medea, Oedipus, the Bacchae). Femmes de Troie is the third part of a trilogy conceived by the director on the subject of war (the first two plays were Müller’s Philoctète, staged in 199412 and L’Île du Salut, based on Kafka’s In the Penal Colony, staged in 1996). What Langhoff is interested in is precisely the relation between war and politics, but also the representation of life as impregnated by war, a life that is never far from war. The Trojan Women was chosen, in part, because it permitted to « let the victims speak… the women that are never heard ». According to Langhoff, what makes Euripides modern is the fact that « he was among the first to speak of war crimes »13.
The production stages a post-apocalyptic universe, mingling an evocation of the ruins of Dresden and Berlin in 1945 with the collapse of an amphitheatre, filling the scenic space. At the beginning of the play, the stage is covered with smoke and violently lit. It is invaded by prostitutes brought by the Greeks, characters added to the prologue as so many victims of dominance. Wearing orthopedic prostheses and straightjackets, they participate in a universe of dehumanization, reinforced by the presence of warriors sporting « Mad Max costumes », as Alain Dreyfus wrote in Libération14. Then, the set rotating, enter the chorus of Trojan women, with ill-assorted costumes that could evoke the history of Greece as well as that of the Balkans and, in the background, the war in Yugoslavia. Langhoff thus opposes two groups of women whom at the same time he invites to bring together as victims of the same dominance. Through a scenography that shatters the separation between stage and audience thanks to a set of gangways, through the emotion caused by the songs, he mingles strangeness and closeness in a disaster whose a-temporal character seems to transcend historical differences, making the spectator feel the violence and absurdity of all wars.
This performance also triggered violent and contradictory reactions. Marie-Madeleine Mervant-Roux considers it a failure because, in spite of Langhoff’s proclaimed intention of making the theatre a place of interest for the complexity of « real man », the production « progressively locks [the spectator] in a state of confusion » of feelings and thought, where only is heard « the long complaint of the victims », in an immediacy close to a documentary15. According to her, Langhoff was lured into a Nietzschean-like conception, in which tragedy, dissolved into the non-verbal and the non-differenciated, is brought back to the immaturity of childhood. Yet, if one takes a look at the pictures of the event16 and considers Langhoff’s history, particularly in relation with Greek tragedy, one may perhaps offer a different interpretation: while recognizing the relevance of Greek tragedy to present a questioning of contemporary wars, Langhoff, following the example of a post-Brechtian Heiner Müller, also shows, perhaps, his own doubts as to the efficiency of such a process. If the amphitheatre crumbles down, if the vision, blurred by smoke, can no longer be clear, if words become fragmented and disintegrate (in an aesthetics reminiscent of the production of The Bacchae that Langhoff had given one year before), this may also be a representation of a « devastated » landscape which could be that of Troy (eremos, mentioned repeatedly in Euripides), as well as the « waste land » evoked by T.S. Eliot, or the contemporary world. The performance thus becomes the sign of the impossibility for contemporary drama to recover the unity and cohesion of a theatre whose strong bond with citizenship is also evoked. In the programme for the performance, Langhoff writes:
It is difficult because the audience must be one that feel the same urgent need to clarify their own problems and that go to the theatre for this purpose. The audience could then follow the same process as the Trojan women17.
Langhoff thus highlights the inadequacy between a type of drama that claims political responsibility and a society that is not willing to endorse it. Only the performances offered to the unemployed in the town of Rennes achieved this goal, according to him, the women in the audience being able to establish a link between the fate of the Trojan women and their own situation. So it is only through an extremely tight process of identification (here, the feminine gender, the situation of collective precariousness and exclusion, or even political submissiveness) that Greek tragedy could still have political efficiency, and the staging itself may be seen as anticipating this difficulty, which perhaps existed in Euripides’ play itself. The post-apocalyptic universe, reinforced by the image of Angelus Novus, borrowed from Paul Klee via Walter Benjamin (quoted by Langhoff in the programme), should then be interpreted in the fiction and outside of it, not so much as a return to the immaturity of childhood, but as a leap forward into the catastrophic drama of mankind, reduced to fear and lament, far from any possibility of thinking.
Therefore, Langhoff’s production perhaps introduces doubt, whereas Tabori expressed confidence in the possibility of finding in Greek dramaturgy the stuff (even artificially recreated) of what might be considered a contemporary catharsis. Yet one can see how, through the production of Greek tragedies linked to war, they both problematize the conception of History and the interrogation on the possibility of finding a cathartic effect in contemporary drama: on the one hand, Tabori believes in the efficiency of actualization, in a conception of History where the same schemes keep recurring, and in the capacity of drama to make the individual and the community react; on the other, Langhoff doubts that there is any possibility of re-creation or identification within a decomposing City, in a conception of History as progressing toward (or radically devastated by) catastrophe and de-humanization.
It is also from this dual viewpoint that Dimitri Gotscheff envisaged Aeschylus’ The Persians in 2006. As Euripides did later in The Trojan Women, Aeschylus displays the victims’ point of view. But this time, since the action takes place only in the Persians’ camp, he forces the Greek spectators not just to « sympathize » with the sorrow of those whom the Greek army has defeated, but also to experience being thrown off-centre, invited as they are to try to understand the workings of a political model which is alien to them, and therefore to reflect on their own model. It is this very experience of being thrown off-centre, and its possible consequences, that Dimitri Gotscheff is mainly interested in. To produce the play, he turned to a translation by Heiner Müller, with whom he had often worked and for whom he had been, like Matthias Langhoff, a sort of ambassador on the European stage. He had also produced several ancient plays, translated or rewritten (Philoctetes [1983 and 2005], but also The Trojan Women [1988] or Oedipus Rex [1988 and 2009], more recently Prometheus [2010], Brecht’s Antigone [2011] or Medeamaterial [2011]). Müller’s text introduces a form of opaqueness which is sometimes non-existent in the Greek text. Its purpose is to make the spectator feel a sort of oddness that increases the experience of otherness required by fiction itself. What Müller is interested in, even though his translation was published in 1991, the year of the Gulf War, is not the potential topicality of The Persians, but the experience of a close contact with the Greek original which is at the same time given as remote, or even almost inaccessible18.
In an empty space (scenography is by Mark Lammert), which is necessary, Gotscheff explains, if one is to experience utter, fundamental solitude (he evokes Giacometti’s walking man19), the actors articulate the words with particular clarity, « like meteorites […] that have just exploded » »20: the ancient text, thus proffered, crashes into the present. The costumes, modern but a-temporal (simple black gowns for women; black trousers and increasingly tattered white shirts for men) prevent any historical projection. At the same time, through the distanciated formalism of a particularly stark production, Gotscheff wants to make the spectator feel that continuum between victors and vanquished that Heiner Müller mentioned about the play. Like Tabori and Langhoff he adds a prologue (in a perspective which appears inherited from Brecht’s Antigone’s model). It is a wordless prologue, in which two actors fight for a territory bounded by a gigantic rotating wall, the only item on the stage. Aggressiveness increases little by little, until the opening of the play itself, in which formal distance permits to mingle Greeks and Persians in the present of the performance21. The two actors (Samuel Finzi and Wolfram Koch) jointly play the part of the messenger, then that of the ghost of Darius and of Xerxes, as if to suggest that war turns everyone into a defeated person, transfixed by the same suffering, on either side of the border and of the generations. At the same time, as Mark Lammert himself explains, the wall is also part of Germany’s recent history, a symbol of a succession of fractures and reunions22. Through the disappearance of historical or national landmarks, the relation between winners and losers appears, in Müller’s words, as a continuum, or, to quote Matthias Dreyer, as « a constellation of power, in the society, moving across history »23.
Very far from any process of actualization, or from any catastrophist vision of History, very far also from any aesthetics of complaint or process of terror, Gotscheff finds in the « empty space » of the stage the possibility for drama to re-invent, after the catastrophe, an historical space in which, uncertain and undetermined, the present can manifest itself as radically alien to itself and perchance become, for the spectator, the site of an experience of movement, through off-centring and changing landmarks.
At the close of this too brief survey, we can distinguish an historical trajectory which is linked to the history of contemporary drama and to the ideological and aesthetic challenges that nourished it in succession (Brecht and Müller especially). But at the same time various possibilities of recourse to Greek tragedy are suggested: one is to emphasize the repetitive, cyclical nature of wars, as if to denounce any illusion of progress; another is to attempt to revive the experience of their horror, by revisiting pity and terror; or to direct attention, through the representation of the distance separating us from the ancient text and stage, to the position and possibilities of our present, whose urgency and singularity are to be felt.