Review: IPHIGENIA at the Arcola Theatre

Menelaus, King of Sparta, has been cuckolded when his wife absconds to Troy with the dashing Trojan Prince, Paris. To assuage his humiliation, the incident is reframed as a national insult, which will require the whole of Greece to rise-up and exact vengeance. Older brother Agamemnon, King of Mycenae, is charged with raising the army and fleet of a thousand ships, in a bid to sack Troy and return Helen to her rightful master! The Gods have other ideas and refuse to send the winds necessary for the armada to set sail until a human sacrifice has been offered to Artemis. According to the prophet Calchas, only by sacrificing Agamemnon’s first born, his daughter Iphigenia, will appease their bloodlust and demonstrate the unquestioning devotion of mortals. Caught between a rock (dishonour) and a hard place (war), the men choose sabre-rattling, whilst the mothers who bear their children — here represented by Agamemnon’s wife, Clytemnestra — have to try and make sense of the misery, death and destruction to which their menfolk so readily resort when attempting to save face and maintain their masculine idea of honour.

In the telling of their stories, the Greeks had an uncanny knack of thrusting innocents in harm’s way. Here, the director and cast don’t simply regurgitate the tragic tale but embellish it with personal yarns of their own. The additions are used to emphasise the bond of trust which is formed between children and their elders, which when broken, can often prove the basis for irreparable damage.

As Agamemnon (Simon Kunz) conveys the enormity of his impossible position and the duty he has to the state and its people which outweighs all other considerations, even the most personally painful. His wife Clytemnestra (Indra Ové) instinctively realises that male deception is at work and uses her powers of persuasion and shaming to try and save her child. Meanwhile, Iphigenia (Mithra Malek) is every inch her mother’s daughter, but when she realises the die is cast, her sense of fatalism with honour reflects her father’s determination to ensure national pride.

Interspersed with the actors’ dialogue are moments of projection, during which interviews with women from various nationalities, cultures and backgrounds are screened. They talk of parental relations, war, harm to children and other unsettling matters. But rather than disrupting flow, these moments effectively imbue the play’s classical exchanges with a modern sense of jeopardy and desperation. As a result, the device unexpectedly proves one of the piece’s strengths.

IPHIGENIA plays 80mins straight through and continues at the Arcola until 2nd May.