Theater: Olympus on the Thames

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(3 of 4)

The true pitch point of Trojan Women involves Hector's widow, Andromache (Billie Whitelaw) and her toddler son. Odysseus has convinced the Greeks that if the child grows to manhood, he may lead Troy in another war against the Greeks. He must be torn from his mother's skirts and dashed to death from the city's topless towers. One of the most wrenching scenes in all of Greek tragedy is shatteringly performed by Whitelaw when her little boy is taken and returned as a tiny corpse in the shell of Hector's shield.

This is the gory part of the epic: blood lust and revenge couched in the name of justice. Polymestor (Oliver Ford Davies) is an erstwhile friend of Troy to whom King Priam and Queen Hecuba sent their youngest son, Polydorus, for safekeeping—along with a stock of gold. But in Greek tragedy, today's friend is tomorrow's fiend.

As soon as he knew that Troy had fallen, Polymestor murdered the boy and took the gold. Unknown to him, the sea-rotted corpse has drifted to shore and is dumped before Hecuba's gaze. She is past weeping by now. She wants the gift of death, surcease from all sorrow. But she has a priority: vengeance. Before the final curtain, Polymestor lurches forward on all fours, his eye sockets craters of streaming blood. He utters the primal howl that punctuates these plays. It is the moment when all reason has toppled and the dogs of fate rend man with total indifference. In Shakespeare's words, "As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport." And the sport has not finished.

Preceded by fanfare, Agamemnon's chariot is drawn to a halt before the door of his palace. He is the happiest of men, or so he thinks. The chorus of crones, clad in ominous black, knows better: Clytemnestra has taken a lover, Aegis thus (Peter Woodward), who now rules the land as a tyrant. He is intimately linked to the origin of the curse on the House of Atreus. All too soon the cries of horror sound as if from some echo chamber in hell. The fates are inexorable: the bodies of Agamemnon and Cassandra are eventually hurled onto the stage like the carcasses of animals, and Clytemnestra emerges spattered with blood. As she drapes Cassandra's arm over Agamemnon's shoulder, one wonders whether she murdered him for sacrificing their daughter or for bringing his concubine home.

Electra completes this portion of the cycle. It begins as a long threnody by Electra (Lynn Dearth). Stoking a cauldron of hatred toward her mother Clytemnestra, Dearth is a cauldron herself; if she continues at this level of passion, she cannot fail to be a top actress of this decade.

Electra's brother Orestes (Gwilym) comes home as a stranger. After the famed "recognition" scene, Electra embraces him with incestuous ardor. Modern audiences can easily comprehend Freud's comment that he had merely systematized what the Greek poets had known all along: the slaying of the parent remains a ritual whose power to chill has lost nothing in 2,500 years.

Part 3 of the cycle, in tone and text the work of Euripides, is almost anticlimactic, partly because of the caliber of the plays and partly because of the treatment.