AGAMEMNON by Nicolas Billon, directed by Sarah Kitz, with Nigel Shawn Williams, Brigit Wilson, Earl Pastko, Susanna Fournier, Ron Kennell, Amy Keating, Samantha Brown, Zita Nyarady and Marcel Stewart (Theatreworks Productions/Agamemnon Collective). January 7 at 9:30 pm, January 9 at 4:15 pm, January 10 at 6:30 pm, January 11 at 8:45 pm, January 14 at 5:30 pm, January 15 at 7:30 pm, January 16 at 8:45 pm, January 17 at 2 pm. See listing.
The Greeks sure knew how to tell family stories that echo through the centuries.
Take that of Agamemnon, who sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia, to get favourable winds to sail off and fight the Trojan War. When he returns home victorious a decade later, his wife, Clytemnestra, kills him with the help of her lover, Aegisthus. And that’s just part of the cycle of murders chronicled by the playwright Aeschylus.
Nicolas Billon has updated the tale with a plot that involves dildos, cellphone texting and imagery right out of the TV show Dexter.
“This version underlines the timelessness and universality of violence and revenge,” says director Sarah Kitz, “and how we are still unbelievably addicted to and wilfully ignorant of the myth that we can purchase peace with war. The means of fighting are more sophisticated, but human interaction hasn’t changed that much in over 3,000 years.”
Billon explored the Iphigenia story in a 2010 SummerWorks play, and here, says Kitz, he offers “the marriage of epic Greek theatre and the basest, most vulgar parts of reality TV. The family at the play’s centre is no longer noble or even socially high on the ladder of respectability.”
The director, who performed in Billon’s 2009 Fringe play The Sicilian, notes that she found her way into the story by “realizing how people sometimes devalue life, such as Agamemnon’s offering Iphigenia [who appears here as a ghost] as a symbol rather than an individual. That devalues everything about her: youth, the feminine, sex, her mind, her heart, her possible future.
“Sex and violence in this show are at such a high pitch that they no longer have any weight.”
The theme of moral emptiness applies not only to the family, but also to others caught up in their lives, including an old man who sits on the sidelines and Cassandra, the young woman Agamemnon brings home from battle.
“Through Cassandra, Nicolas comments on what we do when we ‘other’ a person, turning a human being into an object. It’s shocking in part because Cassandra is treated with such banality. In this production, the actor is an aboriginal performer who speaks Esperanto rather than English.”
And the old man?
“He’s the herald, the messenger from the original Greek tale, as well as a version of Aeschylus’s chorus of old men,” Kitz explains.
“He watches and waits, not involved in the action, and Clytemnestra calls him out on that. She asks him why he sits and waits, and he says it does no harm.
“She replies that his lack of action isn’t nothing, isn’t neutral but rather a choice. In the face of atrocity there can be no neutral position.”
