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Iphigenia and her Mother at Aulis:
A Study in the Revival of a Euripidean Classic*
They will sing that here was a hero who was ready to shoulder his responsibilities, ready to set his private feelings aside for the sake of his country. They will call him the conqueror of Troy, They will call him the founder of Greater Mycenae. They will celebrate his return from the war, Agamemnon, Sacker of Cities, loaded with slaves and plunder, a five-star general, clasped in the welcoming arms of his queen Clytemnestra. [Barry Unsworth,The Songs of the Kings (2002), p. 100]
1. From the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century Since the late 1990s, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis has enjoyed a sudden revival in the cultural arena; this essay asks what the reasons for this rediscovery might be. Its particular focus is on some recent Irish productions and versions by Irish writers. The argument proposes that what they have in common is less a shared stance on Ireland, religion, gender, or even theatrical aesthetics, than a conviction that mendacious political rhetoric has in recent years become more effective, and that the rise of spin- doctoring has only been made possible by the epistemological and metaphysical vacuum situated at the centre of the western collective psyche. The essay also suggests that thinking about the reasons for the recent stage rediscovery of this particular play can illuminate some of the special qualities it displayed in its original performance context in Athens in 405 BC, especially the instability of its characters and the unparalleled bleakness of its evocation of religious and moral aporia. But some more recent historical context is required in order to appreciate the significance of the play’s revival. One of Euripides’ last and most sombre plays, Iphigenia in Aulis exerted a
profound influence on Greek and Roman antiquity, since it was the canonical dramatisation of what became a favourite theme in painting and narrative poetry. 1 The Euripidean version of the sacrifice at Aulis was also replayed consistently in the performance arts, from the Hellenistic tragic stage and concert hall to the Roman balletic dance medium of chorally accompanied pantomime. 2 Yet, since the Renaissance, the career of Iphigenia in Aulis has been extremely uneven: popularity in the 16 th^ to 18 th centuries was followed by a spectacular fall from favour which lasted from the French revolution until nearly the end of the twentieth century. In comparison with most other Greek tragedies, the play certainly made a major impact on Renaissance Europe after it was first printed, in the Aldine edition of all seventeen Euripidean plays, at Venice in 1503. It was almost immediately translated by Erasmus into Latin (1506), along with Hecuba , with the result that for the whole of the 16 th^ century these two tragedies were the most read and adapted of all Euripides’ works. 3 Iphigenia in Aulis was Italianised by Ludovico Dolce (1543-47); 4 it also became the earliest Greek tragedy to receive a translation into English, Lady Jane Lumley’s The Tragedie of Iphigeneia , a version on which this young aristocrat worked during the restoration of Catholicism under Mary Tudor; Lady Jane then presented it, apparently without irony, to her father (1553-8).^5 Subsequently, the Greek play’s political potential was realised in a Dutch satire composed by Samuel Coster (1617).^6 Once Racine’s Iphigénie had achieved its immediate success in 1674, Iphigenia in Aulis became one of the most popular theatrical archetypes of the late 17 th^ and 18 th^ centuries. 7 The marriageable maiden’s graceful obedience to her father, the wielding of his absolute patriarchal authority, the motif of the sacramental human sacrifice -– all these were more than congenial to the Christian, indeed dominantly Catholic culture and unequal gender ideals of pre-revolutionary Europe; it is revealing to note how starkly the popularity of the story in Catholic Italy and France contrasts with the absence of revivals or new dramatic versions to emerge from Whiggish, Anglican, anti-Catholic mainland Britain, at least after the French Huguenot exile Abel Boyer’s English-language Achilles (1700), an unsatisfactory attempt to render the myth palatable to Protestant
accompany the choruses and a few of the actor’s speeches). This had been performed on a raised Greek stage, complete with Ionic pillars, ‘authentic’ tripods, and a set containing no fewer than five doors. 13 The inflated tone of the reviews indicate that Faucit’s performance as Antigone was a triumph. 14 She excited all who watched her by managing to convey both a cool, abstract sense of the apprehension of a mournful destiny, and a tactile, loving intimacy. The consistent theme in the ecstatic Dublin press is her reconciliation of the formal, classical and ideal with warm humanity and emotion. Faucit’s ‘Grecian’ poses and gestures, her elegant limbs framed in flowing drapery, were captured in the portrait created by Sir Frederick Burton, the Director of the National Gallery in Dublin, and impressed every commentator. 15 She seems to have been an acceptable object of male sexual desire. 16 It is scarcely surprising that Faucit and Calcraft attempted, in November 1846, to build on this lucrative triumph by staging a second Greek tragedy featuring a persecuted virgin, Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis. This time the play was proudly (although inaccurately) billed as offering the first original production of a Greek tragedy in Ireland.^17 Calcraft composed an English translation by synthesising several different versions, and cast himself as Agamemnon. Faucit successfully extracted the maximum pathos out of Iphigenia’s predicament, without succumbing to sentimentality, when (as The Freeman’s Journal for Monday November 30 th^ put it) she appeared ‘a suppliant at her father’s feet, shuddering with horror at that gloom and dark uncertainty that awaited her’. The symphony orchestra and oratorio-style chorus performed an original score (unusually not an adaptation of Gluck), composed by the theatre’s musical director, Richard Levey. Like many directors before and since, Calcraft ameliorated the psychological harshness of the play by using the more comfortable (and almost certainly post-Euripidean) alternative denouement in which Iphigenia is replaced by a deer and whisked off to safety by the goddess Artemis, thus exonerating her father from his crime.^18 Calcraft offered his audience what The Freeman’s Journal described as ‘a magnificent tableau’, involving Agamemnon’s departing galley and ‘the Grecian fleet wafted by a favouring gale from the winding bay of Aulis’. But despite all Calcraft’s
efforts the audiences were not as enthusiastic as they had been the previous year, and plans to take the play to Edinburgh never materialised. Calcraft had failed to see that while both Antigone and Iphigenia conform to strict models of ideal womanhood, Antigone displays moral strength as she stands up to male authority in order to defend her family’s interests, while Iphigenia accedes to a male assault on her family’s interests. In the ideological climate following the Infant British Custody Act of 1839, which had begun, at least, to undermine the almost total power 19th-century British men had previously wielded over their wives and families, the simple obedience to male authority displayed by Iphigenia was no longer the unquestioned ideal it once had been. The fate of the Dublin Iphigenia in Aulis thus heralded this tragedy’s inability to strike resonant social and emotional chords throughout the entire Victorian period. Neither the supernatural, fantastic ending chosen by Calcraft, nor the (at that time still intolerable) horror of the text if performed without the miraculous substitution, was remotely congenial to the rational but sentimental subjectivity of that era. Neither Iphigenia’s warlike rhetoric, nor Clytemnestra’s veiled threats to Agamemnon (on which see further below), conformed to the contemporary idealisation of responsible maidenhood, gentle wifehood, and sanctified maternity. This relative lack of interest in the play was to continue to prevent it finding significant theatrical realisation, at least outside Greece, more or less throughout the first eight decades of the twentieth century. This near-absence from public stages stands in stark contrast to the rediscovery of many other Greek tragedies as performance texts, and the canonisation of their important place in the standard repertoire. The early twentieth century rediscovered such Euripidean heroines as Medea (for example, in Gilbert Murray’s famous translation, directed by Harley Granville Barker at the Savoy Theatre, London, in 1907), and such ‘anti-war’ plays such as Trojan Women (first revived by Granville Barker at the Royal Court Theatre in 1905, but consistently revived thereafter).^19 Iphigenia in Aulis , on the other hand, almost completely failed to recover a presence in performance (outside the opera house) during almost all of the twentieth century. And this was despite the brilliance of Michael Cacoyannis’ film version (1976),
attracted more directors given that it is fundamentally structured by two contrasting but isomorphic rituals (marriage and sacrifice), and that it includes both extensive funereal motifs, and choral odes featuring quite different ritual genres, including elements of paean, cultic-aetiological narrative, and propemptikon. 25 But there were still hardly any Aulis Iphigenias, and none of much cultural significance, in the late 1970s or 1980s. It is essential to grasp this background in order to make sense of the more recent explosion of interest in the play. For at some point in the 1990s -– and more particularly the early third millennium -- everything changed. Iphigenia’s experiences at Aulis have lately been enacted in a huge number of diverse productions. This point can be amply illustrated by a tiny selection of examples: in 2003 the tragedy was produced, in Friedrich von Schiller’s 1790 recently rehabilitated verse translation, at the Deutsches Theater in Göttingen, and (in an English translation of Schiller) also in the Bay Area Parks production of the Shotgun Players in Los Angeles. 26 In early 2001 Iphigenia in Aulis was performed at the Pearl Theatre Company, New York, and the Dutch company Teater Aksiedent staged Iphigeneia: Koningskind , directed by. T. Lenaerts, in March of that year.^27 Without even considering the new efflorescence of productions of Racine and especially of Gluck, or even the relevant third play of John Barton’s 2001 epic cycle Tantalus , the Euripidean Iphigenia was in 2002 prepared for sacrifice in quite separate productions in Vicenza in September, at the Teatro Olimpico by the Teatro Stabile di Catania, and both Frankfurt and Basel in November.^28 It swiftly became a favourite on the US academic stage, performed at Denver (2001), Yale, Kansas (January 2003), and Colby College, Maine, 29 among many other venues. It began to be echoed in contemporary fiction, for example Ann-Marie MacDonald’s story of child murder in a mid- twentieth-century military base, The Way the Crow Flies. 30 There was also an intriguing cluster of performances or performed adaptations of Iphigenia in Aulis in the professional theatres of England and Ireland between 1999 and 2004, a cluster complemented by the distinguished northern English novelist Barry Unsworth’s novel based on Iphigenia in Aulis , entitled The Songs of the Kings (2002). Colin Teevan’s stage adaptation Iph… was first performed at the Lyric Theatre, Belfast, on
March 2 nd^ 1999, and has subsequently been twice broadcast on BBC Radio. Three years before her acclaimed 2004 production at London’s National Theatre, Katie Mitchell first directed Euripides’ own Iphigenia at Aulis , in the English translation by Don Taylor, at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin, opening on March 28 th^ 2001. A month after Unsworth’s novel was published, Marina Carr’s Ariel premièred at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. And on February 5 th^ 2003, Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia opened at the Sheffield Crucible. This cluster of plays (most of which I was fortunate enough to experience in performance myself) represents a noteworthy cultural phenomenon. Taken together, these versions and adaptations offer a promising intellectual context for investigating the reasons why this particular Greek tragedy has suddenly become so attractive to writers and directors, especially those associated with Ireland.
3. Interconnected Revivals It is clear that all the instances of international interest in the play -– whether in Germany, the USA, Britain, Ireland or elsewhere –- are profoundly inter-connected. Three important strands in the Iphigenia tapestry recently have been constituted by the rediscovery of Schiller’s translation of the play in German-speaking theatres, Michel Azama’s 1991 Iphigénie ou le Péché des Dieux , produced, for example, in Quebec in 2003,^31 and, in the English-speaking world, the second part of Neil LaBute’s Bash , entitled Iphigenia In Orem , in which a businessman chillingly relates the circumstances surrounding the death of his infant daughter. Bash was first staged in 1999 and filmed in 2000; LaBute’s interests in Medea (the first part of Bash is Medea Redux ) and in Iphigenia in Aulis , both plays about male power (underscored by religious authority) over the family, may or may not have anything to do with his commitment (which has since lapsed) to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latterday Saints. Bash is still performed with some regularity, recently in the UK at Oxford University in January 2004, and in 2005 in both Montreal and in Salem, Minneapolis. 32 And when it comes to the recent spate of Irish and English theatrical Iphigenias, there is no doubt that they have significant bearings upon each other. Three of the playscripts are by Irish writers from south of the
4. Shared Aesthetics But neither the professional theatrical grapevine nor aesthetic fashion can alone explain why any particular ancient play returns with such power into the contemporary consciousness. Nor does the ‘ritual’ argument work with Iphigenia in Aulis as it does with, for example, the several recent productions of Hecuba and Katie Mitchell's own RSC Phoenician Women (1995), where the opportunity to explore Balkan and Georgian singing traditions and funeral customs has been fundamental to the attractiveness of the texts. 36 Not one of these Anglo-Irish Iphigenias has been particularly interested in ritual, or musically experimental; indeed, they have been surprisingly conservative in the naturalism of their visual designs, costuming, acting and performance styles. Another ‘aesthetic’ feature of Iphigenia in Aulis which might help to explain its recent appeal might, rather, be its unusually novelistic features; O’Brien treats the play as might be expected of a writer who is primarily a novelist, adding (to my mind) superfluous extra narrators in the form of Agamemnon’s concubine, the old witch woman, and Iphigenia’s nurse. A particularly ‘novelistic’ element in the Euripidean play is the device of the letter Agamemnon has sent to invite Iphigenia to Aulis, since the mendacious epistle, as in Euripides’ Hippolytus and his lost Palamedes , always underscores the capacity of language for deceit.^37 Iphigenia in Aulis does indeed contain considerable explicit epistemological commentary on the nature of truth and fiction, appearance and illusion. But it must be conceded that cognitive issues have not been made prominent in any of the productions (although, as we shall see, they have been very preoccupied with the science of persuasion). Another aesthetic dimension which needs considering is the play’s pronounced ‘intertextuality’; within the Classics academy, at any rate, late twentieth-century literary taste increasingly appreciated Euripides’ allusive, inter-mythical playfulness. 38 And in Iphigenia in Aulis almost all the characters provide narratives from the past or predictions of the future, thus often elaborately alluding to other texts in the mythical and dramatic tradition. Some of the self-conscious literariness which lends Iphigenia in Aulis such a distinctively ‘modern’ (if not ‘post-modern’) tone engages with the Iliad : 39
Euripides, for example, dangles before us the possibility of an entirely new, pre-Iliadic, ‘wrath of Achilles’, by creating a whole new dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon. 40 But the category of intertextuality leads the argument back ineluctably to the importance of the play’s relationship with the Oresteia , for Euripides wrote this tragedy (as all his plays about the children of Agamemnon, including Electra and Orestes ) partly in reaction to the Aeschylean trilogic archetype which had caused such a sensation in his youth. It was through the Oresteia that theatre audiences of the late fifth century had developed familiarity with the Atridae (knowledge of the trilogy is required by the audience of Aristophanes’ Frogs (1124, 1128), first produced in 405, the same year as Iphigenia in Aulis ). They would therefore have been equipped to take pleasure in the specifically proleptic features of Iphigenia in Aulis such as the stage presence of the baby Orestes. 41 Similarly, third-millennium audiences, who have become increasingly well acquainted over the last two decades with the Oresteia , can now appreciate the dialectical relationship between that mainstay of the repertoire and the neglected ‘foundling’ Iphigenia in Aulis.^42
5. Gender Issues Unlike some other Greek tragedies, above all Medea and Oedipus , Iphigenia in Aulis was rarely associated with the feminist movement or the often frantic discussion of gender inequality that characterised western culture in the 1970s and 1980s. 43 Yet any performance or adaptation of a play in which a father authorises the killing of his daughter, in the face of desperate protests from his wife (and her mother), will inevitably find itself implicated in contemporary debates about patriarchy and its residues. There is a whole set of interlocking ways in which Iphigenia in Aulis could be used to explore the contemporary patriarchal status quo –- above all in Eire, where the experiences of women, attitudes to female sexuality, and controversies over family legislation have taken forms different from those experienced in much of Northern Europe and the USA, mainly because of the country’s overwhelmingly Catholic inheritance. The patria potestas which the established Catholic Church has for centuries
Clytemnestra and Elaine / Electra. There was, however, a suggestion in Edna O’Brien’s version that Agamemnon was sexually attracted to Iphigenia (underscored by the introduction of the idea that he had committed adultery with a very young woman long before even leaving for Troy); child abuse, physical and sexual, is of course a red-hot issue in Ireland, where allegations of endemic pederasty have rocked the Catholic church to its foundations. In 1992, on a notorious episode of Saturday Night Live , Sinead O’Connor tore up a picture of the Pope and denounced the prevalence of sexual abuse of children in Ireland, routinely covered up, she alleged, by Catholic authorities. She was dressed in white robes, with head shorn, sitting beside a table of candles, looking for all the world (as a reporter in the Los Angeles Times of October 6 th^ put it) like ‘a sacrificial virgin’. Yet, besides the O’Brien version, none of the productions of Iphigenia in Aulis under discussion here has emphasised this potentially explosive dimension of the play. What is more pertinent is the interest in wife abuse. The scale of the problem of marital violence against women in Ireland, especially in rural areas, is rarely admitted. 47 And the mistreatment of Clytemnestra by Agamemnon seems to have caught the attention of all three Irish adaptors -- Teevan, Carr, and O’Brien. More particularly, they all focus on the dimension of Iphigenia in Aulis which functions as offering a crucial aetiology for the vengeful Clytemnestra of the Oresteia. This is certainly the case in Marina Carr’s Ariel , the most radically adapted of the versions. Frances has numerous grievances against her husband Fermoy, including her belief that he was responsible for the death of the son born to her in a previous marriage (a detail Carr has adopted from Clytemnestra’s memory of Agamemnon’s slaughter of her son by Tantalus at Iphigenia in Aulis 1151-2). But it is only when Frances overhears the information that the man responsible for the death of her daughter was none other than Fermoy that she is precipitated into attacking him lethally. 48 All the other variable motives which the theatrical tradition from Seneca to Eugene O'Neill has attributed to Clytemnestra –- sexual passion for Aegisthus, desire for political power, fear for her own life, retaliation for Agamememnon's adultery -– are almost completely effaced in Ariel.^49
This element of psychological aetiology for the Aeschylean murderess is undoubtedly already present in the Euripidean text. There is emotional horror in the revelation that Agamemnon killed her first baby by smashing his head on the ground, and there is subtle menace in the way that the desperate mother, trying to dissuade her husband from the sacrifice, implicitly threatens him with the plot of the Agamemnon : 50
Think about it. If you go off to war, leaving me behind at home during your long absence over there, how do you think I will feel every time I catch sight in our house of one of the chairs she used to sit in, now standing empty, and the girls' quarters empty, while I sit alone with nothing to do but weep, forever singing this dirge for her: “The father who created you has destroyed you, my child. He killed you himself…'' It will require only the slightest of excuses before the other girls you have left behind and I receive you back as it is fitting that you should be received [ IA 1171-82; my translation]
What is striking about the recent modern versions is that they uniformly see this passage as of central importance to the impact of the play as a whole. Teevan and O’Brien’s plays, which are much more lightly adapted versions than the first act of Carr’s highly original Ariel , both extract the Euripidean passage, expand it significantly, add material actually taken directly from the Aeschylean Agamemnon , and place it in a significant position at the end of the play. Both thus negotiate the ‘problem’ of the Euripidean conclusion by reassuring their audiences that Iphigenia will not long remain unavenged, for the action dramatised in the first play of the Oresteia is imminent. Teevan’s play actually concludes with a ‘flash forward’, introduced by the stage direction ‘ Ten years later. Night. The roof of the palace at Mycenae, the evening of AGAMEMNON’s return from Troy ’. The Euripidean Old Man appears, suggesting the Aeschylean watchman, while Klytaimnestra attacks Agamemnon backstage. His death cries are heard, and Klytaimnestra enters, to conclude the play by reporting that ‘All the dead, they whisper revenge’. 51 Euripides’ moral bleakness, in leaving Agamemnon
if it is simultaneously offered the more sympathetic Clytemnestra of Iphigenia in Aulis. The reverse, I would like to suggest, holds as true. The portrayal of male power over wife and daughter in Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis , the apparent glorification of a young female role model who agrees to die with fervour just because her father tells her to (a role model felt problematic to western sensibility as early as the mid-19 th^ century, let alone by the late 20th century), are both made palatable to post-feminist audiences by the perceived implementation of the punishment of Agamemnon. What seems to be troublesome to the contemporary world is the idea that both Iphigenia and Clytemnestra suffer passively, without assuming moral agency or putting up any appreciable resistance. By extracting the murder of Agamemnon from Aeschylus, and fusing it with the Euripidean version, Clytemnestra is rescued from victimhood, and transformed into a responsive moral subject and autonomous agent. Thus can Iphigenia in Aulis finally be recuperated for the modern stage.
6. Politics Katie Mitchell’s productions were both set against identifiably Fascist backgrounds, 56 but the Irish provenance of the versions under discussion might be expected to lend local resonances to the play. Does Iphigenia in Aulis address with special force the history of twentieth-century Irish politics? I confess that I originally expected adaptations of this particular drama, if written by Irish authors, to reverberate with the theme of the blood sacrifice to the goddess Eire (Danu), a theme formulated by the Irish Republican martyr and mystic Patrick (Padraic) Pearse, whose own execution after the 1916 uprising became a potent sacrificial symbol. Drawing on the gospels’ presentation of the crucifixion, as well the ancient Irish Táin ’s narrative of the death of the warrior Cú Chulainn, Pearce’s fusion of Catholicism with Nationalism and Gaelic revivalism produced the heady conception of the redemptive sacrifice of youthful Irish blood: as he said in ‘The Coming Revolution’ (Nov. 1913): ‘bloodshed is a cleansing and a sanctifying thing, and a nation which regards it as the final horror has lost its manhood.’ 57 MacDara, the self-immolating nationalist hero of Pearse’s 1915 play The Singer, celebrates the
‘feminine’ destiny of suffering: ‘to be a woman and to serve and suffer as women do is the highest thing’. Both the language of sacrifice for the national ideal, and the pointedly gendered categories of thought, are startlingly similar to the overblown idiom adopted by some of Euripides’ characters in Iphigenia in Aulis. Pearse’s own rhetoric swiftly penetrated to the core of the romanticised picture of Irish revolutionary endeavour, especially his aestheticised presentation of the heroic corpse: as MacDara’s lover Sighle puts it in The Singer , ‘they will lie very still on the hillside -- so still and white, with no red in their cheeks, but maybe a red wound in their white breasts, or on their white foreheads.’^58 Above all, Pearse’s own poetry put centre-stage the figure of the lamenting Irish universal Mother, whose children must be sacrificed on the altar of the Nation’s freedom: in the poem he is said to have written on the actual eve of his execution, entitled The Mother , the narrator comforts herself with the knowledge that although she has lost her children, ‘In bloody protest for a glorious thing, / They shall be spoken of among their people’. 59
In recent years, at least, Pearse’s rhetoric has been increasingly criticised not only as evidence of a narcissistic psychopathology, but also as fanning the flames of fanaticism and violence in Ireland’s youth for nearly a century. It was, therefore, a legitimate expectation that any contemporary Irish treatments of Iphigenia in Aulis would explore the dangers inherent in the glorification of the idea of blood sacrifice motivated by enthusiasm for a patriotic war. Yet this was not the case. Not one of the versions made any noticeable attempt to evoke the mythology and rhetoric of Irish republicanism. Although Ariel satirises the role played by corruption in parliamentary career-building within Eire, the one version with any noticeable ‘topicalisation’ in terms of religious factionalism, paramilitary violence, or the conflict between Ulster loyalists and republicans is also the only one to have premiered north of the Irish border. 60 In Teevan’s Iph … the poetry speaks -- occasionally -- of the ‘ghetto’, the ‘Grandmaster’, and ‘ghettomen’.^61 Teevan, indeed, has pointed out that Iph ... was developed at the time of the worst post-war loss of Irish civilian life in the Omagh bombing of August 1998, and that the play transplants to contemporary Ireland the barbarous story of the
machismo by eroticising it, as the swooning chorus do in their admiration of the handsome soldiers assembling at Aulis (164-302). It is no mere chance that the recent revival of Iphigenia in Aulis coincided with George Bush’s 2000 election campaign and arrival in the White House; the relevance of the situation in Aulis to the run-up to the 2003 Iraq war was trenchantly expressed by the president of Colby College in Maine, himself a Vietnam veteran. 66 The Pearl Theatre Company in New York produced their transparently political version in 2001, several months before 9/11, in the slightly stilted 1978 translation by Merwin and Dimock. 67 Edna O’Brien’s Iphigenia opened in February 2003, in the last tense weeks before the outbreak of war as it grew increasingly inevitable; no spectator could help feeling the topical reverberations, which are prominent in virtually all the reviews.^68 O’Brien has denied that she deliberately set out to provide a commentary on the increasing likelihood of US-Iraq conflict. But when dealing with apparently unplanned, spontaneous and arbitrary ‘topical relevance’ in performance history, it is important to remember that contemporary concerns can act on a writer’s psyche in the absence of either intention or self-consciousness. An old play can seem newly apposite at a purely intuitive level.
7. Spin Game Gender relations, mediated through the modern audiences’ knowledge of the Oresteia , and their awareness of the international political situation leading up to the 2003 Iraq war, are thus both factors in the recent spate of Iphigenias in Aulis. But for a play to attract directors like Mnouchkine and Mitchell, let alone novelists of the calibre of Unsworth and O’Brien, there must be something more cerebral, more intellectual, and more specific going on here. A clue lies in the penetrating insight formulated by the classical scholar Karl Reinhardt in his famous article ‘Die Sinneskreise bei Euripides’ (1957), in language that shows him responding to a Existentialist tradition traced explicitly through Kafka and Sartre, and which reveals the profound influence of Samuel Beckett’s dramatic universe. The term ‘absurd’ is prominent: Euripides' Medea is no longer the 'uncanny Undine' of earlier legend, but has 'dwindled into absurdity';
Iphigenia in Aulis teeters on the brink of 'the sheerest absurdity'. Reinhardt argued that Euripides is less a poet of direct protest than a nihilist, an Existentialist practitioner of the theatre of the absurd, dedicated to revealing the hollowness of the intellectual and linguistic strategies by which humans struggle to comprehend their situation; by the last years of the Peloponnesian War, moreover, Reinhardt saw Euripides as reacting to a sense of loss and meaning in the world, which he thought must have felt similar to the catastrophic context of 1944, when Sartre wrote his Existentialist theatrical masterpiece Huis Clos (the origin of the famous phrase 'Hell is other people'). 69 The politics of the revival of Iphigenia in Aulis are related to this tradition of Euripidean interpretation. The third-millennial spectator’s experience of the recent productions confirms that some of the most powerful moments (measured unscientifically in terms of apprehended audience tension and reaction) were not at times when problematic masculinity or militarism were the central focus. They were at those times when characters on stage, unable to extricate themselves from absurd situations, were resorting to transparently hollow justifications, ‘spinning’ an argument, or attempting to make sense of their circumstances by conspicuously employing (in ancient terminology) the science of rhetoric. One example was Iphigenia’s volte-face speech in O’Brien’s adaptation (when, after electing to go to her death voluntarily, she enumerates the ‘advantages’ of her decision); another was the posturing of Agamemnon (brilliantly acted by Ben Daniels) to the chorus during his encounter with Menelaus in Katie Mitchell’s 2004 RNT production. Daniels conveyed a sense of thinking up lies at incredible speed under the pressure of public scrutiny. The most revealing example is Fermoy Fitzgerald’s television interview scene in Carr’s Ariel , which begins humorously but becomes more sinister as the scene is retrospectively 'edited' at its conclusion: Fermoy is advised to play his daughter's death as his 'trump card'. What people want, he is told, are the details of his personal life. He must, at all costs, not admit that he enjoys power, but work instead on his image as bereaved father. 70 What is encouraging about this aspect of the revivals being considered here is that it shows Greek drama being treated as an intellectual art-form. Over the last three
