From Euripides to 'EastEnders'

Corruption, lust, vengeance and gore: essential to the average blockbuster, these themes have been used for millennia in Greek tragedies, and Dublin audiences can now relish two reimaginings, writes SARA KEATING

ADULTERY, CORRUPTION, vengeance, violence and lots and lots of blood and gore. That might sum up your average Hollywood blockbuster. But it could also describe any ancient Greek tragedy. Despite being more than 2,000 years old these plays contain as much dramatic action as any modern movie thriller. The proof lies in the constant reinterpretation of the mythical stories that were first immortalised in theatrical form by writers such as Aeschylus, Euripides and Sophocles and have inspired poets, composers, writers and film-makers over the centuries. But nowhere have they held their power more than on the stage, with writers from Shakespeare to Sarah Kane finding universal truths in stories that fatally punish human folly and, crucially, interrogate social taboos.

In Ireland over the past few years theatre audiences have had the chance to see contemporary versions of Greek tragedies as persuasively postmodern as a punk-rock musical adaptation of Sophocles's Oedipus trilogy (Pan Pan's Oedipus Loves You) and as traditionally moving as The Burial at Thebes, Seamus Heaney's translation of Antigone.

At the Dublin theatre and fringe festivals this year audiences will be treated to two completely different approaches to the inspiration offered by Greek drama by two companies that hope to demonstrate the contemporary resonance of these ancient stories more than two millennia after they first appeared.

Selina Cartmell, who brought murder and myth to the stage so memorably in Titus Andronicusand Sweeney Todd, is directing the world premiere of a radical new translation of Medeaby the Scottish poet Robin Robertson, which strips Medeaof its mythological origins and provides a clear and rigorous version of the story that is as demotic and domestic as anything you would see on TV on a Monday night. The story involves a jilted lover who discovers her partner's infidelity and murders her children as an act of revenge.

Robertson, whose poetry has drawn from ancient and classical influences such Ovid's Metamorphosesand Dante's Inferno, is clear about what he wanted to achieve in his translation. "I wanted to write a refreshed English version," he says, "that was as true to the Greek as it was to the way English is spoken now . . . to keep the idiomatic English fresh and vigorous . . . [to keep] the music, the natural rhythms of speech."

The exercise was not just about language but about the power of the Medeastory to communicate essential truths despite the distance in time from their original creation. "The ancient Greek plays [show us] ordinary people caught in extraordinary situations," he explains. "In the case of Medeawe see a marriage collapsing amid bitter acrimony; we watch the stand-up fights between the husband and wife, and what we witness on stage feels very much like a Saturday-night domestic. The blank-eyed fury and bitter recrimination, the lies and truth-twisting, the wheedling manipulation and shabby rhetoric – these are familiar to all of us."

Their continuing universal appeal, he continues, is down to the basic truth that “relationships between men and women have not changed much in 2,500 years.” The pertinence of his own translation finds proof in the fact that Cartmell’s production will be followed by a second Irish production, on RTÉ radio, to be broadcast this autumn.

HILARY FANNIN, the playwright and former TV critic of The Irish Times, was also inspired by a violent and sensational ancient story for her new version of Euripides's Phaedra, a summary of which sounds like the sort of rolling headlines you can read on television news every day of the week – "seducer of rape-accused stepson poisons herself". For Fannin the challenge of using Greek source material for contemporary ends was slightly different from a direct translation. "While I think the Greek myths offer a fantastic tool kit or paintbox to modern writers," she says, "we were not interested in doing a direct scene-by-scene translation for this production."

In collaboration with the composer Ellen Cranitch and Rough Magic Theatre Company, Fannin set out to use the story as a springboard for a piece that would be entirely modern in form and context. “We think of it more as a new play emanating from an old story, rather than an adaptation,” she says, “and I suppose the unusual thing is that we are working from a specific version of the play by the 17th-century French dramatist Racine.

That helped to free them from “the heavy Greek mantle”, some of the difficulties of the form that are often associated with the Greek plays, which were originally produced in outdoor amphitheatres and used masks, dancing and choral chanting to communicate across the enormous auditorium.

Fannin could then find what she needed in Phaedra's story to make it ring true to modern life. "I mean, a woman falls in love with her stepson," she says by way of summarising the plot of her play, which blends tragedy with mordant humour. "It's EastEnders. Yes, there is tragedy, but it is entertaining too."

But there are deeper resonances with contemporary culture than soap-opera sensationalism. “We weren’t trying to write a boom play, but we did see how Phaedra’s story might cast a steely eye on contemporary Ireland. It is about lust, but not just sexual lust. It is about greed, avarice, the need for acquisition, how enough is enough and how we always want something more.” The parallel with Celtic Tiger Ireland needs little elaboration.

At the end of our conversation Fannin mentions Joseph Campbell, the author of the seminal anthropological text The Hero with a Thousand Faces, whose assertion that there are only seven stories in the history of humankind has been used in the analysis of every kind of art since its publication, in 1949, from Grimm's fairy tales to George Lucas's Star Wars trilogy. "Those seven stories," Fannin says, "originate with the Greeks in larger-than-life form." Robertson agrees. "The proof that the Greeks still matter," he says, "is the fact that they are still being reinterpreted today."

Siren Theatre’s production of

Medea

by Robin Robertson opens today and runs until September 25th at the Samuel Beckett Theatre, Dublin. Rough Magic’s production of

Phaedra

by Hilary Fannin and Ellen Cranitch runs from September 30th to October 10th at Project Arts Centre, Dublin

A guide to the Greeks

Theatre was invented in ancient Greece, but it has changed radically in the past 2,000 years. If you are looking for authenticism, here are the essential props.

MasksIn the vast open circle of an amphitheatre, the actors performed a long way from the audience. Masks with exaggerated facial expressions allowed the audience to see physical embodiments of particular emotions even if they couldn't hear what was being said. Masks were also used to indicate the sex, role and social standing of various characters: the original stereotypes.

Dei ex machina (Gods from the machinery)Special effects were conventional, if primitive, in the first productions of Greek tragedies. The tragedies often ended with the protagonist ascending heavenwards to join the gods, and the machine was a type of crane that was used to simulate the flight. Another radical invention was the ekkyklema, a wheeled wagon that was used to bring expired characters back from the dead.

AppendagesGreek drama was not all about crisis and despair, and every drama festival offered a programme of comedies too. They just aren't as well known to modern audiences because the humour does not translate quite as well. While the use of phallic props and prosterneda – wooden structures placed in front of the chest, to imitate breasts – have been interpreted by classical scholars as symbols of fertility, it is not too puerile to suggest that they provided visual humour too.

ChorusThe chorus was composed of 12 to 15 male actors who chanted or sang a single part in unison. It was used as a narrator, to provide background to the story, and to represent a unified community in contrast to the individual actors in the tragedy. Because most of the plays are about the tension between the individual and the social good, they usually provide a moral voice, and they are the trickiest part of Greek drama to translate for a modern audience.