An evening with The Furies

Last Saturday evening I went with two friends to the Oxford Playhouse to see the Oxford Greek Play, a triennial event in which a classical Greek play is presented in the original language, but with modern staging and costuming, and with surtitles for those of us deficient in Classical Greek.

This year the production was of The Furies (The Eumenides), the concluding part of Aeschylus' Oresteia, first performed in 458 BC. I had not seen the play before, although I knew its basic structure and plot - it is, I suppose, incidentally, the first court room drama. There is much more about the play at Eumenides Study Guide, Book Notes, Summary, & Full Length Text . There is more about the legend of Orestes here.Three years ago I saw the previous such production, The Libation Bearers, the play which precedes it in the trilogy, and which is perhaps better known. I posted about that production in All Greek to me.

The house of Aetrius is one of the more, well, problematic dynasties one might encounter - you sense they were a family not at ease with themselves. Indeed as the Victorian lady commented after seeing Sarah Bernhardt as Cleopatra, "So unlike, so very unlike, the home life of our own dear Queen."

The Furies themselves made me wonder if I was witnessing some of the young female personages one sees heading off to the various night-clubs of Oxford on a weekend evening (one tries to practise custody of the eyes on such occasions) or a meeting of OUSU* Womens Committee.

In respect of the latter they would no doubt fault Aeschylus for not being feminist in that Apollo's defence of Orestes rested partly on the argument that his father had a greater claim on his loyalty than his mother. Apollo argued that it was Orestes' father, Agamemnon, who had borne him, not his mother, Clytemnestra, who was merely the carrier of the child. A biological view that is, even I would concede, a little outdated in terms of our knowledge of human reproductive sciences. 

The real argument of the play is about taming forces of unremitting, unceasing vengeance and creating civil society by mobilising those elemental forces to underpin it, and the risk of anarchy if they are unleashed. To prevent this there has to be such a thing as society, and that has to have law as a means of control and as a means of giving true freedom to humans.

This was a good production of a text which is both simple and elemental and yet also complex and reflective. There is an online newspaper review of the production from the Oxford Student at “Frenzying, Maddening”: The Oxford Greek Play

Orestes being purified by Apollo
Clytemnestra tries to awake the sleeping Erinyes/Furies to the left.
Side A from an Apulian red-figure bell-krater, 380–370 BC. From Armento?

Louvre Paris

 Image;Wikimedia

* Oxford University Students Union - not to be confused with The Oxford Union.

All Greek to me

Last night the Clever Boy and the Catholic Schoolmaster betook themselves to the Oxford Playhouse to see Clytemnestra, the triennial Greek play production from the Oxford University Classical Drama Society. It is quite a few years since I attended a production in Greek of a classical play, and this time the play was accompanied by an on-screen simultaneous translation either side of the stage.

Aeschylus' Oresteia was first perfomed in 458 BC, and 2,469 years later the play has lost little of its raw impact. The performances were good, and displayed both technical ability and real understanding. It is very good that such a tradition can be maintained, and indeed appreciated - the theatre was full.

Over supper afterwards we ruminated whether one could interpret the Furies in their pursuit of Orestes as Social Services, as usual arriving too late on the scene, offering to the House of Atreus courses in bereavement counselling, anger management and family conflict resolution.