Deadpan comedy resurrects dead Greeks

Malcolm Lay (left) and Harry Love rehearse the play, All's Well That Ends, at the Globe Theatre....
Malcolm Lay (left) and Harry Love rehearse the play, All's Well That Ends, at the Globe Theatre. Photo by Peter McIntosh.
Biting satire and vivacious comedy have been elements of theatre for more than 2500 years. Charmian Smith talks to Harry Love about his new comedy in an old form.

The roots of Western drama go back 2500 years to the ancient Greeks, according to Harry Love, who is directing this year's Otago University classics department play, a joint production with the Globe Theatre.

"Greek drama still reverberates and still functions even in a different theatrical context. The whole idea of interaction and emotional interplay in Greek drama is fundamental to Western theatre," he said.

The ancient Greek tragedians such as Euripides and Sophocles manipulated the emotions of their audiences in ways that still work with modern audiences.

He saw this when he staged Euripides' Hecuba a few years ago, about the queen of the defeated city of Troy, now enslaved by its conqueror Agamemnon, who sacrifices her daughter.

"Viv Aitken played Hecuba and really rocked them out their seats, but it's really down to Euripides in the end," he said.

Ancient Greek comedy, as written by Aristophanes (c446-c386BC), was different.

It tended to be bitingly satirical but also to celebrate the vivacity of the principal characters.

"The subject matter is often the same as today because we still take the mickey out of politics and war and whatever, but the style has changed more radically than in tragedy. I think it would be quite difficult for a modern audience to respond to a very literal production of Aristophanes, but there's enough there to transpose and you can focus on the same sort of satirical end."

An honorary fellow of the department of classics at the University of Otago, Dr Love has been involved with the annual classics production for almost 16 years.

His earlier adaptations of Aristophanes' comedies included Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens deny their men sexual favours until they stop fighting the Spartans, which he adapted into the context of Americans and Arabs, and The Clouds, which lampoons fashions in education, which he adapted to a satire on the vacuousness of modern intellectual and technical language.

This time, however, he has written his own play All's Well that Ends, based on Greek dramatic form, which includes a chorus who comment on the action and control it.

It opened differently to the way contemporary forms of drama did, he said.

"I've taken two dead Greek characters, Aristophanes himself and Socrates, who at least in The Clouds were at daggers drawn and had them wake up in Limbo.

They wonder where they are, what's going on, and where are the fields of Elysium and all that.

"I was interested in playing around with ideas. I have an interest in religion although I'm not religious myself, but religious questions I find interesting. The nice thing about the Greek form of the play is it's so broad and flexible, you have all the elements in it you need - sharp, short dialogue, songs hitting themes on the way through, and the chorus carry on the basic themes of the play.

"It's flexible and you can litter it with all sorts of apparently incidental things that touch on the central theme, which is about hope and expectation and what happens to you after you die. And it is, I'm reliably informed, funny."

The two dead Greeks, serenaded by a chorus of three female singers, experience a parade of visitors: the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse (the Antichrist, War, Famine and Death); Hope, a kind of cross between a schoolmarm and a dominatrix, who teases, disciplines and tells a story about Fariland with the theme of building monuments and hope and vision and things beyond the bounds of reason, he says.

A messenger from the United Religions (as opposed to the United Nations), is a take on T. S. Eliot, and then there are Three Birds of Pray, representing three principal religions, Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.

"In a rather nonsensical way they deliberate on the situation that these two unfortunate dead Greeks won't lie down and in the end have recourse to calling in the Almighty himself," he said.

See it

All's Well that Ends, written and directed by Harry Love, with music by Stephen Stedman, plays at the Globe Theatre, 104 London St, from August 12 to 21. 

 

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