Iphigenuous: Stories Like These & Griffin Independent’s Minus One Sister

Off the top of my head, this is the fifth retelling of the myth of Orestes (and/or Elektra; they were siblings after all) that I have seen in the past couple of years. There is nothing necessarily wrong with that, except that I am still confused as to the finer points of what actually happens in the myth, traditionally-speaking. Some of the retellings, like Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired chose to set their action decades after the events, while others, like Elektra/Orestes earlier this year thrust us right into the thick of it.

Winner of the 2013 Patrick White Playwrights’ Award, Anna Barnes’ Minus One Sister is based off of Sophocles’ version of the story, and unfolds in a fractured whirlwind of naturalistic dialogue scenes and chorus scenes. The story of a family – three sisters, their younger brother, and their parents – as much as the unspeakable crimes the parents commit, and the siblings’ need for retribution, Minus One Sister is a furious and fast-paced play, but I wonder if its swirl of words actually detracts from telling its stories.

Elektrafying: Belvoir’s Elektra / Orestes

In uncertain times, we often turn to myths and classic stories to help us make sense of what we are seeing in the world around us. Despite their age, the Greek tragedies still maintain their appeal, and perhaps more so than before, are currently experiencing a new breath of life in often radically-reimagined settings and versions. In the past year alone in Sydney, we have seen versions of Antigone, Phaedre, Oedipus Rex, with a version of the Oresteia still to come, no doubt among countless others. And while I’ve never really been a particular fan of the Greek plays, there is something in their cyclical nature, in the way they routinely invoke powers larger and more vengeful than anything we can imagine as humans that is intoxicating and affecting.

Enter Belvoir’s Elektra / Orestes, a kind of double-bill about two members of the house of Atreus, told with verve and boldness by Anne-Louise Sarks and Jada Alberts. Rather than a double-bill in the traditional theatrical sense – two plays in repertory, often playing back-to-back on one night – here we have the same story told from two different perspectives, literally from either side of a wall. In many ways – thematically, mythically – it is a companion to Kit Brookman’s Small and Tired from 2013: where that was first and foremost about people and relationships, Elektra / Orestes is about actions and consequences, and is a good old fashioned revenge tragedy.

Punked: Lies, Lies and Propaganda's Phaedra

In the Tap Gallery’s intimate Downstairs theatre, a table stands, laid for a banquet. A man sits at the table, hungrily stuffing his face with food, a headless deer lies in front of him, and four figures stand around the space statues. This is Euripides’ Phaedra, as told by Lies, Lies and Propaganda (henceforth LLP), one of Sydney’s newest independent theatre companies.

Phaedra is the story of a woman (Phaedra) who falls in love with her stepson Hippolytus, and the effect it has on the family and the way the gods intervene and clean up after the tragedy. Like all Greek tragedies, Phaedra is grandiose, epic, full-blooded and, well, tragic. In the hands of LLP’s artistic director Michael Dean, Euripides’ play becomes an examination of erotic shame, sacrifice, passion and synth-pop.

The gods must be crazy: Furies’ Antigone: The Burial at Thebes

Sophocles’ Theban plays are among the all-time greatest stories in literature, and along with Aeschylus and Euripides, was one of the great dramatists of the Athenian Golden Age. Mythic, epic and created on a grand scale, Sophocles’ plays changed theatrical form as it was then known and became classics of their time and for all time. Presented here by independent company Furies at Darlinghurst’s Tap Gallery’s intimate downstairs theatre, Antigone is, alongside Oedipus the King (or Oedipus Rex as it is more commonly known), perhaps his most well known play. The story of Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, it tells the struggle of how she strove to give her brother Polyneices the burial he deserved. Defying the order of the king, she faces the consequences of her actions, setting in motion a tragic (albeit preventable) train of events.

It’s all Greek to me: Bell Shakespeare’s Phèdre

Untranslatable is a word often used to describe Racine’s plays, we are told in the program to Bell Shakespeare’s latest production, Phèdre. And watching the play, part of me cannot help but wish it had stayed thus, however much it hurts me to admit it. Based on the Greek myth of Phèdre, Racine’s play is a downward spiralling tragedy, much like Shakespeare’s own Macbeth and Hamlet, until at the end, tragedy befalls everyone, and Theseus and Théramène are left to pick up the pieces.

If Anna Cordingely’s set was anything to go by, the production should’ve been sumptuous. A decaying room, perhaps in a French palace, it consisted of an elongated octagonal room with the front walls removed – stairs tiled in black and white, six large windows at the rear, a ceiling with a hole smashed through it (due to a god’s intervention, perhaps?), a chaise divan and two similarly-upholstered chairs… a picture of faded elegance. The space was lit effectively by Paul Jackson in bolts of harsh fluorescence, gentle gold, and electric blue, and added to the former grandeur of the play’s location. Kelly Ryall’s sound design and ‘score’ were both effective in unsettling the audience from the opening salvo of scratching susurrations to the final blackout, almost as if the gods somewhere were spinning disks of thunder and lightning. It was used in scene breaks too, and in tiny unobtrusive blurts when a character entered via the stairs, and though my description of it sounds somewhat disparaging, it was one of the production’s strongest points, and complemented the set in its depiction of a once-faded decadence, something familiar now in disarray, beyond repair. However, when you added the cast – headed by Catherine McClements as Phèdre – something inherently 'magical' disappeared.