Last week, I found myself – at the end of a gloomy day – shot through with a burst of fierce, electric energy. It came from watching Sophie Okonedo’s 90 minutes of flat-out fury as she played Medea, opposite Ben Daniels’s Jason, in Dominic Cooke’s production of the Euripides play.
Afterwards, I registered the fact that the woman sitting by me had actually put her hands over her face when Medea decided to murder her own children. I, on the other hand, had not. Why did I mentally urge her on towards the unspeakable deeds, inwardly channelling all the pent-up anti-patriarchal rage at my disposal? Wasn’t there something deeply disturbing about that? Or was the play precisely doing its job in Aristotelian terms: providing a catharsis?
Medea’s murder of her children is the nuclear button when it comes to punishing her faithless husband, who has cast her aside like an old rag: their sons are the symbol and reality of inherited male power. Since Jason has just openly voiced his fantasy that men might give birth to sons without the need for women at all, there’s a magnificent, if gruesome, logic to her crime.
My theatre date quizzed me. She had found Medea a surprisingly sympathetic character … well, for most of the play, and had the script been updated? It had, but not that much: the essentials of Medea’s character were intact, including her immortal words, “It is easier to stand in battle three times in the front line … than to bear one child.”
The audience at the premiere, in Athens in 431BC, mostly male, would have received the story very differently. Athenian women, particularly high-born women, were expected to be silent and remain out of sight and mind of men; in public, they would be veiled. The same year that the play premiered, the Athenian statesman Pericles gave a famous speech in which he said that women’s greatest glory was not to be spoken about. It crossed my mind that my friend had once been a correspondent in Afghanistan.
What on earth do we do with these strange, knotty, difficult texts from the past? Roald Dahl has nothing on Greek tragedy, and yet we seem always to be coming back for more. Okonedo’s Medea was the second brilliant performance I’d seen in a year, after Adura Onashile’s, for the National Theatre of Scotland, last summer. And then there is Phaedra at the National Theatre, starring a magnificent Janet McTeer. The play, by Simon Stone, who also directs, is “after” Euripides’s Hippolytus, Seneca’s Phaedra and Racine’s Phèdre. Those plays tell of how Phaedra, queen of Athens, falls in lust with her stepson, Hippolytus. After he rejects her, she accuses him, falsely, of rape.
I was intensely curious to see how Stone would deal with this storyline. Phaedra’s tale is enormously potent and has parallels in other cultures; for example, the biblical story of Potiphar’s wife. But it’s powerful in a destructive way. It reinforces the patriarchal lie that women, far from being overwhelmingly the victims of sexual violence and abuse, routinely accuse men of rape falsely.
If you disagree that a myth like that can still have a foothold in the modern world, I would politely refer you to the alleged statement by Stephen House, a former Metropolitan police deputy commissioner, that the bulk of rape accusations are, in fact, “regretful sex”. (He denies having used the phrase or believing the statement.) For such reasons, I decided not to include the story of Phaedra in my book Greek Myths: A New Retelling.
As it turned out, Stone also refused the fence. His Phaedra (renamed Helen) does many terrible things, including causing, directly or indirectly, at least two deaths. But in his version of the story, she does not falsely accuse anyone of rape. “What I have her do in my version is no less heinous,” Stone told me. “But it’s not an act that reduces her to a set of cliches that certain parts of society currently use to try to hinder the essential progress towards gender equality.” Is inventing a rape claim worse than causing people’s death? What are we supposed to do with these stories that take you into a world way beyond the boundaries of the taboo?
A couple of weeks ago, I saw another, quite different approach to Greek tragedy, in the Gulbenkian Arts Centre in Canterbury. Several years ago, the playwright David Greig and the director Ramin Gray worked on a hit production, performed in London, Dublin, Manchester, Belfast and Edinburgh, of Aeschylus’s play Suppliants. The story tells of how the 50 daughters of Danaus, forced into marriage with the 50 sons of Aegyptus, flee their homeland in Africa and claim asylum in Argos.
What I saw in Canterbury was the second part of the story, the middle play of what originally would have been a trilogy of tragedies. The twist is that only that first, Suppliants, actually survives. Of the second, Egyptians, only a single word remains, and, of the third, little beyond a few lines hymning Aphrodite. So the play I saw was a complete (bar one word) reconstruction. Greig’s idea, a crazy and quixotic one, was to imagine himself into Aeschylus’s shoes and to build the play without modernising, recuperating, softening or reclaiming it. Impossible, of course, but a fascinating quest.
The result was mesmerising to watch – a thing that both was and wasn’t Greek. It put me in mind of Ossian, whose poems, purporting to be ancient Gaelic epics, were actually faked by the 18th-century Scottish poet James Macpherson – by which I mean it struck me that in years to come, the play will, like Macpherson’s poems, be more revealing of the moment in which it was created than of the culture it aims to reconstruct.
Greig had, I thought, done a good job of being Aeschylean. That is, he had written a play whose likely outcome was the mass rape of 50 women; in which his major female character slits her own throat; and in which the other female character exists solely to uphold the patriarchal values of marriage and family represented by the goddess Hera, whose priestess she is. It’s true that in the next play, which Greig is also planning to write, 49 of the 50 brides murder their rapists/bridegrooms – but Aeschylus was no feminist, and nor, even, was Euripides.
I left with a nagging sense of what a strange – and yet intriguing – thing it was to put a play like this into the world when what the world actually needs is space for the untold stories of women and girls.
And yet we do need difficult, violent intractable texts such as Euripides’s Phaedra with its false rape claim, because the play tracks us back to the origins of a pernicious narrative, but also because Euripides’s play Hippolytus is otherwise ravishingly beautiful (read Anne Carson’s translation in her volume Grief Lessons).
We do need Medea and her horrific child-killing. We need the literature of the past in its spikiness and indigestibility, with its people whom we love and hate, who remind us of ourselves and yet are alien to us. It is one of the few ways we have left of understanding ourselves and other humans in all our destructiveness, and all our deadliness, and all our magnificence.
Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer
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