Euripides: Electra

Rush Rehm

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350095694
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Arte dramático antiguo y clásico

This new introduction to Euripides' fascinating interpretation of the story of Electra and her brother Orestes emphasizes its theatricality, showing how captivating the play remains to this day. Electra poses many challenges for those drawn to Greek tragedy – students, scholars, actors, directors, stage designers, readers and audiences. Rush Rehm addresses the most important questions about the play: its shift in tone between tragedy and humour; why Euripides arranged the plot as he did; issues of class and gender; the credibility of the gods and heroes, and the power of the myths that keep their stories alive. A series of concise and engaging chapters explore the functions of the characters and chorus, and how their roles change over the course of the play; the language and imagery that affects the audience's response to the events on stage; the themes at work in the tragedy, and how Euripides forges them into a coherent theatrical experience; the later reception of the play, and how an array of writers, directors and filmmakers have interpreted the original. Euripides' Electra has much to say to us in our contemporary world. This thorough, richly informed introduction challenges our understanding of what Greek tragedy was and what it can offer modern theatre, perhaps its most valuable legacy.

1

Theatrical Background

To understand an ancient play like Electra, we need to know what we can about the theatrical environment that brought it into being. Following the establishment of democracy in 508–507 BC, the city of Athens celebrated theatrical performances at the City Dionysia, a weeklong festival dedicated to the god Dionysus. Held each spring in the open-air theatre on the south slope of the Acropolis (site of the famous Parthenon), the performances attracted large crowds and were open to all who could afford a ticket.¹ The festival featured competitions in tragedy (three playwrights entered three tragedies and a satyr-play each), comedy (five playwrights entered one play each), and dithyramb (ten adult male choruses and ten boys’ choruses sang and danced narrative poems dedicated to Dionysus).² Sometime between 422 and 413 BC, Euripides’ Electra premiered at the City Dionysia. Although the titles of the two other tragedies and the satyr play Euripides entered that year are unknown, seventeen additional plays of his survive, as well as the names of many more.³

Shielded from the north wind, the theatre of Dionysus took its shape from the curve of the hillside that formed a natural theatron, ‘a place for seeing’. From where the audience gathered, a panorama opened up over the southern part of the city of Athens, with Mt. Hymettus and the Ilissos river to the east, the city and lowlands leading down to the Bay of Phaleron to the south (with the peaked island of Aegina rising in the distance in the Saronic Gulf), and the Hill of the Muses and the Pnyx (where the Athenian Assembly met) to the west – all visible from various points in the theatre.

As well as providing distant vistas, the theatre of Dionysus drew the audience’s attention to the performance area, called the orchêstra. This flattened surface of beaten earth followed the contours of the slope where the audience sat, bounded by the retaining wall built behind and just below the orchêstra to keep it from eroding down the hillside.⁴ Although a few stone seating blocks from the fifth century have come to light, we know from the comic playwright Aristophanes that some audience members sat on wooden benches. Archaeologists recently have found indications that scaffolding for seats was erected for the festival and removed afterwards. The rest of the audience sat (or stood) on the hillside rising above the temporary seating banks. Even in Euripides’ day, the theatre of Dionysus had a makeshift quality to it.

Fig. 1 Theatre of Dionysus in Athens, late nineteenth century. Courtesy of Deutsches Archäologisches Institut-Athen.

The same applies to the skênê façade, a temporary wooden structure that represented the play’s setting – a temple, a palace, or in the case of Electra a poor farmer’s cottage in the country. A central opening in the façade allowed actors to enter and exit the playing area, providing access to the stage building behind the orchêstra, where the actors could change masks and costumes without being seen. When a playwright wished to reveal the body of someone (usually dead) inside, the doorway opened and a wheeled cart (ekkuklêma) rolled out with the corpse on it. Near the end of Electra, Euripides turns the Farmer’s cottage ‘inside out’ by using the ekkuklêma to reveal the corpses of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus.⁵

The stage building also could support actors on its roof, an area known as the theologeion (‘place where the gods speak’) because stage divinities often appeared there. At the end of Electra, Castor and Polydeuces (the semi-divine brothers of Clytemnestra and Helen) arrive on the roof by means of the mêchanê (‘machine’), from whence we get the Latin phrase deus ex machina, ‘god from the machine’. A lever-and-fulcrum apparatus located behind the skênê raised the actors above the roof and then lowered them onto it, where they spoke from ‘on high’.⁶ Euripides’ Chorus convey their amazement, even incredulity, at the twin gods’ arrival: ‘But look, high, high above the house / some mighty spirits or heavenly gods / are coming our way. This is not the path / that humans walk. Why do they appear / so plainly to our mortal eyes?’ (Eur. El. 1233–37).

Human characters who came from far away normally arrived and departed through one of the two parodoi (‘side roads’, also called eisodoi, ‘roads in’), formed by the gap between the ends of the skênê façade and the front row of seats. Choruses almost always made their initial entrance through one of the parodoi (giving their entry song the name parodos), indicating that they – like the Chorus of Electra – had to travel some distance to reach the location where the play is set. These side entrances were wide enough to allow horse-drawn carts to drive into the orchêstra, as Clytemnestra does (accompanied by her Trojan slaves) when she visits Electra’s cottage.

Because the audience could see a character approaching from the distance, either that character or someone onstage would announce the arrival with lines that ‘covered’ the entrance. This helps account for the Old Man’s self-description as he makes his way into the orchêstra through an eisodos:

Where, where is the young princess, my dear mistress

and child of Agamemnon, whom I reared so long ago?

What a steep approach she has to her house, difficult for this tired,

bent old man to walk up, putting one foot in front of the other.

Still, for the sake of my friends I must drag myself along,

stooped over, weak-kneed, wavering, but still walking.

Oh daughter, now I see you coming from the house…

El. 487–93

During his long entrance, the Old Man provides the audience with important information: decades before, he raised the young Agamemnon; he knows Agamemnon’s daughter Electra well; her cottage lies on a steep hill, hard to reach for someone old and frail like himself; he remains devoted to the family, in spite of the effort it costs him.

The size of the open-air theatre, the public nature of the festival, and the scale of the tragic myths help account for conventions of ancient Greek performance. To provide some perspective, actors and audiences in fifth-century Athens would not have known what to make of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler. Written for an actress in the title role, the play imagines an audience that looked through the ‘fourth wall’ into a private room, where characters used everyday conversation and behaviour to reveal (or hide) the truth of their inner lives. By contrast, Euripides wrote for male performers (both actors and Chorus members), all of whom wore masks that fully covered their face and hair.⁷ How could a masked male performer credibly portray a complex heroine like Electra? How could he bring her character to life, if the spectators could not see his facial expressions, the glint in his eye, the smile and snarl of his mouth, his flaring nostrils and furrowed brows?

Far from hindering the tragic actor, the mask helped project his character-persona out to a large audience. Familiarity with the text, facility with language, control over rhythm and inflection, vocal projection, mastery of movement and gesture mattered more for the actor than ‘identification’ with the imaginary inner life of the character he was playing. To be sure, tragedy seethes with emotions, but in the ancient theatre these feelings were ‘externalized’. Whatever an actor wished to convey needed to find a scale that matched the theatre and the ‘larger than life’ nature of the dramatized myths.⁸ Tragedians composed their plays with these criteria in mind.

At the opening of Electra, the Farmer comes out of his cottage to give the background of the story (El. 1–53).⁹ With no one else onstage, to whom is the Farmer speaking? If he were voicing aloud his private thoughts, would he continue talking for fifty lines without interruption? Orestes delivers what amounts to a second prologue (El. 82–106), explaining his cautious return from exile. He cannot be sharing the information for the benefit of his companion Pylades; the pair has been travelling together for days.

We need to understand that ‘Greek drama was not simply played before an audience (whose existence is tacitly ignored in modern realistic drama), but to an audience which was directly addressed so often that its presence was taken for granted by the actors throughout the performance’.¹⁰ All the speeches in Electra demand an outward, front-footed, audience-orientated acting style, in which the truth (or what passes for it) depends on its public disclosure. This applies to long speeches like the two prologues, and also to dialogue between two characters, which often takes the form of rapid alternating lines called stichomythia. Unspoken feelings, sotto voce asides, and muted inner monologues would have made no impact on an audience at the theatre of Dionysus.¹¹

By enabling the performer to play different ages and genders, masks help explain the so-called ‘three-actor rule’ that operated at the City Dionysia. The city of Athens provided each playwright with three actors who performed all the (non-choral) speaking roles, and in 449 BC the festival instituted a prize for the best actor. In Electra, the protagonist (‘first competitor’) played Electra, the second actor played Orestes, and the third actor took on the remaining roles – the Farmer, the old Tutor, the Messenger, Clytemnestra, and Castor – changing his mask, costume, vocal register, and physical demeanour with speed and dexterity.¹²

A tragic convention even more challenging for modern audiences is the Chorus. Like all Greek tragedies, Electra alternates scenes of spoken verse with lyric sections sung and danced by a fifteen-member ensemble.¹³ In Euripides’ play, this group represents girlfriends of Electra who come to invite her to a festival in Argos. Their motivation quickly drops away, however, for the Chorus performs a far more important function. Combining movement, music, and sung (or chanted) poetry, they gather various mythic strands of the story, singing of the Trojan War, the shield of Achilles, the murder of Agamemnon, and the changing fortunes of the house of Atreus. The Chorus recreate significant events that at f...