Orestria

Picture taken by Daniel Etter.

I admit, I have come late to the day for Orestria, it's already way past transfer and a hundred or two reviews and meditations. I have even already seen the sorely disappointing Bakkhai, the second 'Greek' in the Almeida's seasonal trilogy. I've well and truly missed the cultural zeitgeist. So my reflections will be personal, with the hope that some universality will be contained within.



One of my best friends is Greek. She is, quite surprisingly for a Greek, terrible at telling stories, but recently she tried to tell me the meaning of a Greek saying; 'Fuck you and your carjack.' Its meaning has something to do with a man who has broken down and walks for hours to find help, imagining all sorts of bad things in the dark and when he comes across a house that offers help and someone opens the door and offers a carjack, this is his reply. Apparently it's what Greeks say to someone who always imagines the worse outcome, so when they encounter good fortune they can't see it for what it is. It seems typically fatalistic, no matter what good opportunities come your way, tragedies will always be so. This sense of inevitability has meant that Greek plays have always been a struggle for me.

I never studied any Greek plays at school or had any call to perform in them. As a fairly even tempered person from Hemel Hempstead with no great displacements to speak of, Greek plays seemed alien to me. Big emotions, big acts, deep feelings, war and murder, Kings, Queens and Gods. Girls in my drama class who liked to shout and beat their chest were always performing monologues from them, and they all blended in to one for me. As the daughter of athiests, I just couldn't relate to it.

Since then, however, I have got older. I realise that bad things happen to you that are beyond your control and in the fall out you have no choice but to ask; What should I do? How am I supposed to act?  I could credit this change in sensibility to my growing attraction to Greek plays but more likely it is that in recent years, I have seen a few contemporary productions which helped to spell out their relevance to contemporary life more clearly. ie. I am an idiot who needs modern dress for me to 'get it.' So sue me.

My favourite scene in the production, which I believe acts as an illustration of this. Is the scene in which Agamemnon has to decide whether to sacrifice his daughter to the Gods in order to save the war. It is such a bizarrely abstract concept to us in our secular society. My initial thinking is 'Well, duh there is no decision to be made, there is no God so what you are considering is non sensical, murder and also insane.' Yet, the way the scene played out (credit entirely here to Robert Icke's writing and Angus Wright's performance) felt entirely relatable, authentic even. It reminded me of an ethical conundrum put forward by Political philosopher Michael Sandal?

'There are those who say yes you should torture a terror suspect to find the ticking bomb. That’s a utilitarian idea—numbers count, consequences count. As against Kantians who would say ‘No there are certain universal human rights and certain things are just wrong—torture is one of them, regardless of the consequences.’ So we’re very familiar with the debate between utilitarian and rights-oriented views. I think what we neglect often is the Aristotelian strand.

Take the torture debate. Some would say on utilitarian grounds that you should torture the terrorist suspect if you need the information desperately and you can’t get it any other way and many lives are at stake. But then put to the utilitarian this question: suppose the only way to get the information from the terrorist suspect is not to torture him but to torture his innocent 14 year old daughter. Would you do it? Even most utilitarians would hesitate. Why? Not because they don’t care about numbers, but because there’s a deep moral intuition that the girl is innocent, she doesn’t deserve to be tortured. Whereas a lot of people who would say torture in the original ticking time bomb situation is justified—many of them are resting that thought on the idea that ‘Well he’s a pretty bad guy anyhow, he desrrves rough treatment, he’s a terrorist.’ So this idea of who deserves what and why, and what does this have to do with the virtue of persons is at play often without our realising it, in many of the arguments we have. So what I’m trying to do is to show that in many of the debates we have about justice, not only utility and rights but also questions of desert, virtue and the common good as Aristotle understood them, are in play and indispensable today.'

There are often choices like these that are made on our behalf, to protect us, in which lives are sacrificed to protect our way of life, our society. If we choose to carry on regardless are we not complicit in these sacrifices too? If you choose to turn a blind eye to the children killed in their families efforts to cross the border into the UK, if you choose to send them back, are you not also complicit? There maybe a little bit of Agemmemon in all of us, even girls from Hemel Hempstead.