Before Sunday, I had seen exactly three Greek tragedies during my years of covering theatre for the Loaf two of them, Medea and The Bacchae, in New York. So it was with great relish that I went down to the Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Cathedral on East Boulevard to see a third Euripides gem, The Trojan Women.
Some major problems plagued the Leonidas Loizides Theatrical Schema presentation. Apparently, the troupe and their baggage took different flights, and the flight of the players was severely delayed. We could see a lot of onstage pacing back and forth beneath the curtain before the play began. Then after the curtains parted and the situation was explained by Holy Trinity Greek School principal Larry Peroulas, a couple of other issues emerged.
As Paola Hadjilambri came forward to favor the audience with an introduction, there was no good light for her to stand in at the lip of the auditorium stage and no lighting crew to provide it. Intelligibility was on a par with visibility as the speakers accent confirmed her authentic Greek lineage. Not the most encouraging harbinger, since Hadjilambri would be portraying the protagonist in Euripides anti-war masterwork, the great Queen Hecuba.
Mostly, the technical problems and the language barriers mattered very little. Hadjilambri may still be working at her English, but she is a superlative actress. Nothing less will do if Hecuba is to remain compelling while bewailing her multitudinous woes in the aftermath of the Trojan War. Its no mean feat to retain your regal dignity after losing your husband, your sons, and swallowing the prospect of exile and slavery for yourself and your surviving daughters. She will be the humiliating spoils of Odysseus, mastermind of that accursed Trojan Horse! All of these massive sorrows are freshened during the action as news reaches her that her daughter is to be sacrificed at the tomb of Achilles, a mere preamble to the coup de grace when her grandson, Astyanax, is ripped out of her arms and tossed off Troys famed battlements.
Ive seen more than one opera in English that was far more difficult to understand, but the same audience strategy was useful: knowing the story, hearing the poetry, and resonating to the emotion. Directing his little troupe, Loizides avoided the Scylla and Charybdis of an overly ritualized and an overly casual approach. This Euripides was mannered but never stiff, and with a bouquet of songs by Mikis Theodorakis, sung in Greek, we had our ritual choral moments served up in modern Aegean rhythms.
Of course, it was fascinating to watch how a production brought to a Christian congregation would deal with the pagan rituals and mythology packaged in Euripides script. In his translation, Michalis Kakojiannis has scrapped the introductory dialogue between Zeus and Athena, replaced by Hadjilambris intro, but a choral ode addressed to Zeus late in the play is retained in abridged form, after Hecuba has convinced cuckolded King Menelaus to take the adulterous Helen home with him for execution in a separate ship.
No, you cant take the Trojan War back to its origins the judgment of Paris on Mount Olympus without dipping into the pagan gods and their mythology. So there is no wholesale purge of the Greek deities, who are, after all, as central to the cultural heritage of Greece as Agamemnon and Odysseus. That a Greek writer could pour so much sympathy on the enemy, the losers of a bloody war is something we can all take pride in 2,420 years after Euripides play was first seen.
The Loizides actors are all first-rate, but a special laurel must be granted to Vivian Ioannou for her powerful Kassandra, the daughter claimed by Agamemnon, a prophetess who is never believed. Best in show where English is concerned. Eftychia Papadopoulou had a queenly dignity of her own as Hecubas daughter-in-law, Andromache, the widow of Hector and mother of the pitiable Astyanax, and Marianna Oikonomidou pleaded eloquently as Helen, claiming to Menelaus that she was a mere plaything of the gods. Tasos Lamakis had two nicely conflicted roles, doubling as the wronged, still loving Menelaus and Talthybius, the stout soldier who must deliver all the devastating news to the traumatized Trojans. His solidly nuanced performance was good news.