The National Theatre of Craiova, the great ensemble company from an ugly industrial town in the south-west corner of Romania, is about to make its third Irish appearance in as many years. An eleventh-hour cash crisis almost put a stop to the plan, but Silviu Purcarete's majestic staging of Aeschylus's Oresteia is still in place as the centrepiece of Sean Doran's swan song programme at the Belfast Festival.
It's especially apt that this, of all Purcarete's work, should be staged in Belfast. It isn't just that the Oresteia has not been performed in Ireland in the 2,500 years since Aeschylus wrote it. It is also that this epic three-play study of blood feud and democracy has an alarmingly contemporary pertinence to Belfast. More than London, Birmingham or Edinburgh (the first three stops on the show's tour), possibly even more than Romania, a country still weighed down by the legacy of the despotic Nicolae Ceausescu, Belfast knows all about conflict being passed on from one generation to the next, about the problem of reconciliation when there's always somebody wanting revenge.
If you didn't know better, you'd say Aeschylus had done a crash-course in the Troubles. The story is briefly this: Having returned from a successful military campaign, Agamemnon is murdered by his wife, Clytemnestra, who is furious that he sacrificed their daughter, Iphigeneia, to the gods. The world is set out of joint. In the second play, (The Libation-bearers), Agamemnon's surviving children, Electra and Orestes, team up to avenge his death by murdering Clytemnestra. The feud continues.
In the final part (The Eumemides), Orestes is tried before a jury by the goddess Athena, the peace process is begun, and the cycle of generational violence is set to be broken. Or is it? This is not the first time Purcarete has turned a classical drama into a play for today. Indeed, it is his forte. You couldn't look at the 50-strong chorus of Egyptian women fleeing their 50 male cousins in Les Danaides without recognising the plight of the modern refugee. And there was nothing old-fashioned about the cruelty and political vision of his Titus Andronicus, or his Ubu Rex (with Scenes from Macbeth). But if we find such allegories in the Oresteia, it is not because Purcarete has planted them, but because Aeschylus planted them 2,500 years ago. The director's work resonates precisely because he doesn't impose an easy modern spin.
"In any ancient Greek play you can find that there are things that are very contemporary, that are linked with things that are happening today," says Purcarete, a well-built, moustachioed 48-year-old. "I decided to make a production of the Oresteia because I was working on texts by Aeschylus for Les Danaides, and during that work I was more and more amazed by the beauty of this play. Of course, there are things that come out unconsciously. Of course, there are political circumstances in which I live. But I never have the intention of speaking about social reality or politics through theatre."
Purcarete stages the trilogy in a big open space (although not as big as the 8,000 square feet of Dublin's National Basketball Arena where he staged Les Danaides), permanently observed by six silhouetted vultures, ominously waiting for blood to be spilled. The birds are the first of a series of portents, culminating, after the interval, in a supernatural display of swinging doors, opening curtains, and gushing tap water. The tone ranges from the unsettling (as above) to the comic (the laughter of the chorus of superannuated businessmen sounds like Mutley in the Wacky Races) to the cruel (supposedly off-stage murders are seen on stage in gory detail) to the politically cynical (Athena pulls the strings when the puppet jury votes). For all the resolution of the story, the play finishes on a note of melancholic uncertainty.
Any ambiguity over the reliability of democracy, insists Purcarete, is in the play already. "Everybody speaks about the Oresteia being the first play to deal with the installation of democracy," he says. "But this act in the play is false because it is manipulated by the goddess. There are an equal number of votes, and the goddess is the one who decides the verdict. Moreover, she gives her verdict before the judgement.
"This is an extremely contemporary problem because all the Eastern European countries are trying to bring the principles of democracy, and it works very ambiguously. If democracy works well in Western countries, it works because of the wealth. If a cataclysm brought poverty to Western Europe, I don't know if democracy would keep on working." It's a contentious opinion - typically one expressed as a question not an answer - and it stems from Purcarete's personal journey from the closed society of Ceausescu's Romania into the spotlight of the international theatre circuit. His company first ventured into the West as recently as 1991, and already Purcarete finds himself working in exile in France where he's in the middle of a three-year contract at the Centre Dramatique National, in Limoges.
The World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre says theatre tickets in Romania "can cost the same as three or four loaves of bread". You can be certain the French don't measure the price of a night out in terms of baguettes.
There's nothing impoverished about Purcarete's theatre, however. The theatrical means might be simple, but the imagination is rich. There is a boldness about his conceptions and a clarity about his imagery. His choral work is outstanding. You feel every moment has been considered and refined. Even when he reduces the second play of the Oresteia to a single page of dialogue, he never uses visuals for their own sake.
"I am extremely attentive to the text," he explains. "The images I am creating are absolutely coming out from the text. I want to capture an essence that lies in a text and express it in another language. I never force an idea on a text. All these images appear while reading and working." Just before I saw the Oresteia at its home base in Craiova, I asked Ilie Gheorghe, who plays Agamemnon and Apollo, what made Purcarete special. "He is the complete author of his performances," the actor replied. "He thinks about the performance as a director, scenographer, composer, costume designer, and as a lighting designer. Very few directors can sign all components of a show. He never leaves a sound or a phrase without polishing it until it takes on the significance he wants. Working with him is a new theatre school for any actor."
The Oresteia plays at the Waterfront Hall on Sunday, November 15th at 4 p.m.
Mark Fisher is Drama Critic for The Glasgow Herald, Scotland
