Euripides has a problem

Greek travesty: Euripides's 'Helen' in London

In
6 minute read
Downie (left) and McGann: Up against the gods, the cast, and London air traffic.
Downie (left) and McGann: Up against the gods, the cast, and London air traffic.
Hell hath no fury like a goddess scorned. Helen of Troy, in one version of her rich legend, was adjudged the fairest of the fair sex, to the extreme displeasure both of Aphrodite and Hera. The latter decided to punish Helen not only by depriving her of her husband, King Menelaus of Sparta, but also by making her the author of a general disaster, the Trojan War. This she accomplished by creating a phantom Helen who, abducted by a Trojan playboy, Paris, is the occasion of a war between Greece and Troy that leaves the latter in ruins.

Menelaus himself, blown off course on his way home by a divine wind, finds himself washed ashore on Egypt, fugitive and derelict. Unbeknownst to him, the real Helen is sequestered here, the unwilling guest of a local ruler, Theoclymenus, whose attentions she is running out of ways to avoid.

This appears to be the stuff of comedy, but that art was still in its infancy at the time. On the ancient Athenian stage, tragedies were interspersed with so-called "satyr plays"— bawdy farces that offered a breather from the heavy stuff but little sophistication or wit. Euripides— the last of the great tragedians and a transitional figure between his great predecessors Aeschylus and Sophocles and the first genuinely comic playwright, Aristophanes— incorporated elements of irony and satire in his work. This mixed (or, as purists would say, bastardized) form addressed the tastes of an increasingly urbane audience, not quite ready to spoof the gods but skeptical of the taller tales told about them.

Those capricious gods

On the surface, then, Euripides's Helen is a tragedy, in which humans anxiously strive to placate the gods and suffer their wrath when they fail to do so. The gods typically take offense when humans violate the moral order decreed by them, although the gods are not subject to it themselves. That order, when viewed from below, often appears as caprice, and a terrible war begun over a lost beauty contest would certainly seem excessive retribution.

But the notion that humans might not measure themselves against the gods in any way— the sin of hubris— was fundamental to the Greek conception of divinity, and defined the proper boundary between the divine and human realms. Thus the version of Helen's myth drawn on by Euripides was decidedly unironic, and the Euripides text, on a surface level, is perfectly serious as tragic drama. Between the lines, however, a late Fifth-Century B.C.E. audience would have smiled at the contretemps that ensues when husband and wife are reunited, and some at least might have smiled at the gods as well.

A farcical device

We cannot know how an ancient Athenian production would have handled Helen's subtext, but a modern one must take particular care lest it fall between two stools. What appear to us as the comedic elements of the play must be accommodated in some way, because the domestic reunion is the heart of its interest for us, and Hera's jealousy seems a labored, not to say a farcical device for launching the plot. Euripides's audience, on the other hand, would not only have accepted but expected divine involvement, since no ancient tragedy we know of lacks this critical element, and not until the Renaissance was tragic drama truly conceivable without it.

In other words, Helen cannot be simply performed as a comedy, and however Euripides and his audience may wink back and forth at each other in invoking the gods and accepting them, his play is still wholly tragic in form and to a considerable extent in content. Any production must honor this fact.

What would Shakespeare do?

In a way, then, Helen presents us with issues similar to those of Shakespeare's problem plays, in which serious moral questions are raised in an equivocally comic context. The serious question in Euripides is the absurdity of war, symbolized in the delusion over which both the Greeks and the Trojans slaughter each other.

Blood is nearly spilt at the end of Helen, too, when the angry Theoclymenus, blaming his sister Theonoe for the escape of Helen and Menelaus from Egypt, is forestalled only by the intervention of the posthumously divinized twins, Castor and Pollux, who appear as a deus ex machina to stay his hand. The choice of this pair to represent the will of the gods is strategic, since they, too, have been victims of the Trojan War. Even the immortals, Euripides seems to be saying, can have enough of the violence they provoke.

Deborah Bruce's production of Helen, now running at London's Shakespeare Globe Theatre in tandem with Shakespeare's Greek-themed Troilus and Cressida, gets all these elements wrong.

The audience laughed

There is some business before the action begins involving two workers in white overalls who seem to be dawdling over a construction site. These two appear at the end, with white wings attached, to play Castor and Pollux. Only Castor appears on schedule, looking for his absent twin, getting tangled up in his harness, and falling ingloriously to earth. The audience finds this funny, of course, but in Euripides's tragic context the twins' appearance is a moment of high seriousness, and even though it affords a nominally comic resolution to the play— no one gets killed, and the lovers escape— it cinches its anti-war message with a particularly effective twist to the well-worn genre device of divine closure. To make a travesty of it is to make a travesty of the play.

What value exists in this misconceived staging is mostly in Penny Downie's performance of the title role. Downie is of a certain age, and her face is not the kind that would launch a thousand ships; but she has vigor and dash, and spunk too as the faithful wife who knows how to get out of a tight spot. Paul McGann's Menelaus was serviceable, but no one else is much more than adequate, and the chorus was a mess.

A finger pointed upward

London air traffic did not help— the restored Globe Theatre has no roof— and at one point it halted Downie in mid-speech. She simply pointed a finger upward at the interruption, at which the audience also laughed. Hard seats and plein air settings in authentic ancient theaters such as Epidaurus and Herod Atticus are one thing, but resurrecting the Globe, pit for the groundlings and all, was a very dubious idea. I'm also bound to report that the seat advertised to me as unobstructed was very far from it, and future patrons are hereby advised of the unreliability of the theater's box office in this regard.

London's theater scene is lively, as my BSR colleague Toby Zinman has recently reported, but not all that glitters is gold. You can do the Greeks as theater of the absurd or as solemn ritual; there is no performance tradition (except modern ones) to go by. Aeschylus and Sophocles are hard to do because their grandeur is alien to us, and perhaps beyond us too.

Euripides seems more modern: skeptical, inquisitive, a deconstructor of received myth and value. But he was a modern man in relation to Periclean Athenians, not to us, and we can't simply transpose him without understanding his milieu. Screwball comedy was definitely not part of it.







What, When, Where

Helen. By Euripides; directed by Deborah Bruce. Through August 23, 2009 at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, 21 Bankside, London, United Kingdom. www.shakespeares-globe.org.

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