Triptych and Iphigenia (7 page)

DAUGHTER
   There's a girl with him.

MISTRESS
   Five hours. Five hours.

A scene of confusion follows, each doing something to defer the dreaded news.

Mistress relights the candle, holds it, murmuring to it, a prayer.

Daughter speaks to her cell phone … imploring it to ring.

WIFE
   He's not dead Brandy … I would know … feel my pulse (
impatient
).
Feel
it.

DAUGHTER
   You drove him to this.

WIFE
   He wanted to go … a little dalliance.

DAUGHTER
   (
to phone
) Don't die Daddy … don't, don't die.

WIFE
   Cut it out Brandy.

DAUGHTER
   I heard you the night before he left … shouting, screaming. What did you threaten him with—a bloodbath … you me and him or her? You would have done anything to split them up.

WIFE
   Hold your tongue … these people have made you morbid.

DAUGHTER
   These people live there and they know … they know the worst.

MISTRESS
   (
to daughter
) Who called you … a doctor?

DAUGHTER
   A priest. A brother of the girl … he said he would have stopped but he was saying mass … she was in love with the sea … the sea was calling to her and Daddy … she heard voices.

MISTRESS
   She's snared him.

WIFE
   She's sick. I must talk to this priest.

DAUGHTER
   You can't … he's gone down to the sea shore … they're saying rosaries.

WIFE
   Why aren't they out in lifeboats finding him?

DAUGHTER
   They were … they gave up.

Auburn Girl singing offstage, her voice clear, enchanted and ghostly.

Wife speaks over the song to shut it out.

AUBURN GIRL
   (
offstage
)

My dead love came in

He came in so sweetly

His feet made no din

And this he did say

O it will not be long love

Till our wedding day

WIFE
   (
tenderly to Henry
) My darling I will hold you in my arms, I will cradle you and hold you the way you hold me
when I've been silly. I will never let you out of my sight again.

Wife exits to inner room.

MISTRESS
   Why did he go?

Daughter ignores the question.

MISTRESS
   Why?

DAUGHTER
   You know my father … anyone ask him a favor and he says yes. She pestered him. It was to launch some poetry magazine … a flying visit.

MISTRESS
   He will be back. We need him. We all need him so much.

Wife reenters carrying a black hat with veiling.

WIFE
   (
to Daughter
) Get ready … he'll want us there … to celebrate … to bring him home.

Wife looks in mirror as she puts on the hat.

Telephone rings offstage from inner room.

All three stand frozen, paralyzed.

Auburn Girl offstage in rasping urgent whisper, over the ringing phone.

AUBURN GIRL
   (
offstage
)

And the people they do be saying

No two were 'ere wed

But one had a sorrow

That never was said

Wife opens her mouth to speak but can't, no words come. She staggers.

Daughter goes and holds her.

Mistress looks on, the perpetual outsider.

The phone still ringing offstage.

Lights slowly go down.

A silence.

S
CENE
T
WENTY-FOUR

Lights.

Spotlight on each.

WIFE
   My husband was a wonderful man and a great writer … we were inseparable … so much so, that, he left a novel unfinished and I have decided to carry on the torch … it will be my hand but Henry's immortal words.

DAUGHTER
   (
showing a tattoo on her collar bone
) What do you think Daddy … do you like it? I'm seeing Zachary now … big time … we've been dating for quite a while … he's so wise, so different from all the other slobs … being a scientist he knows about the origins of life and stuff and I feel I can talk to him, tell him things, things about us, about you and me, the fun we had.

MISTRESS
   I know it seems crazy … but … there's this pigeon that comes on my balcony at all hours … whitish with tan spots … without a mate … potters, potters about and I know, it's Henry … I know it's Henry making sure things are okay … keeping watch over me. (
quieter
) It folds
its wings and settles down at night … Henry loved the night … the silence.

Mistress stops suddenly, turns and whistles softly.

The THREE stand very still.

CURTAIN

Euripides
was born near Athens between 485 and 480 BC and grew up during the years of Athenian recovery after the Persian Wars. His first play was presented in 455 BC and he wrote some hundred altogether. Nineteen survive—a greater number than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles combined—including
Electra, Hippolytos, Andromache, Ion, Alkestis
and
The Women of Troy.
A year or two before his death he left Athens to lie at the court of the King of Macedon, dying there in 406 BC.

Euripides
was the scourge of his native Athens, his plays regarded as seditious and corrupting. Born in exile, on the island of Salamis, in 480 BC, he died in exile in Macedonia in his mid-seventies. Accounts differ as to the nature of his death, but chief among them is the hearsay that he was set upon and torn to death by mad dogs or mad women who could not tolerate his depiction of them as passionate, avenging, and murderous. His plays shocked public opinion, offended the critics, and ensured that he was overlooked year after year in the state competitions, with Sophocles and Aeschylus sharing the laurels. Sophocles was a distinguished figure who enjoyed public prestige, and Aeschylus could boast of his prowess in the war against the invading Persians. Euripides, however, was marginalized even though, as an able-bodied young man, he would have had to serve in army and fleet since Athens was vulnerable to marauders from east and west.

His crimes were legion. He had questioned the prestige of the state, of pious honor and ancient injunctions, had portrayed the gods as vicious, merciless, sparring creatures who gave rein to violent, even insane passions. Medea, who sent a robe of burning poison to her rival and subsequently butchered her children, was a heroine whose deeds were a blight on enlightened Athens, and the official judges of the annual prize put it at the bottom of the list. Three and a half centuries later, the historian Aelian said the judges “were either ignorant, imbecilic philistines, or else bribed.” Euripides' depiction of women led to scatological rumors such as that he had learned their abnormal tendencies and sexual misconduct from everyday experience, that his mother Clito was an illiterate quack dabbling in herbs, potions, and fortune-telling, moreover he was a cuckold, a bigamist, and a misogynist who lived in rancorous isolation in a cave. It says much for his inward
spirit and dedication to his calling that he wrote over a hundred plays—nineteen of which are in existense—and that when he died in Macedonia, Sophocles, out of a mark of delayed homage for his great rival, made his chorus wear mourning for the evening performance.

Euripides is the dramatist, along with Shakespeare, who delved most deeply into the doings and passions of men and women. His dramas, while being political, religious, and philosophic, are also lasting myths in which the beauty and lamentation of his choruses are in direct contrast with the barbarity of his subjects. As with Shakespeare he found the existing stories and legends too good, too primal, to be abandoned and so he appropriated tales from Homeric times, rewrote them, transformed them, and made them a foil for his prodigious imagination so that they serve as staple and forerunner for all drama that came after him. Sophocles' characters can seem stiff, their language elaborate, but Euripides'—vacillating, egotistical, unbridled, and warring—are as timely now as when they were conceived in the fifth century before Christ.

Iphigenia in Aulis
is the least performed of his plays, having been described by ongoing scholars as being picturesque, burlesque, and in the vein of “New Comedy.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The story is glaringly stark—Agamemnon, head of an oligarchic army, who has lived for power and conquest, is asked to sacrifice that which he loves most, his daughter Iphigenia. He demurs but we know that the lust for glory will prevail and yet in Euripides' drama, each voice, each need, each nuance is beautifully and thoroughly rendered. Iphigenia is for the chop but at the moment when her little universe is shattered, when she realizes that she is being betrayed by both God and man, she pitches herself into an exalted mental realm, the realm of the martyr-mystic who is prepared to die but not to kill for her country. It is of course, as probably in the myth surrounding Joan of Arc, a heightened, histrionic moment which pitches its heroine
in the ranks of the immortals. If one of the prerogatives of art is to catapult an audience from the base to the sublime, from the rotten to the unrotten, from the hating to the non-hating, then Iphigenia does that, but her sacrifice prefigures a more hideous fate. The catharsis is brief, as the grand mechanism of war and slaughter has been set in place. Clytemnestra, the mother, helpless to avert her daughter's death, becomes an avenging fiend and ten years hence, when Agamemnon, victorious from Troy, will return with his Trojan concubine, the crazed prophetess Cassandra, he will meet a gory end at the hands of Clytemnestra and her paramour Aegisthus.

After his death in 408 BC three plays by Euripides were found—
Iphigenia in Aulis, Alcmaeon,
and
The Bacchanals
and were put on the stage by his son, Euripides III.
Iphigenia
was incomplete and finished by another hand. The other hand is what gives the play as we know it a false and substanseless ending. At the very last moment the sacrifice is aborted, Iphigenia whisked away and a deer put lying on the ground, the altar sprinkled with the necessary blood. It seems unthinkable that an artist of Euripides' unflinching integrity, with a depth and mercilessness of sensibility, would soften his powerful story for public palliation.

History has righted his standing. The Latin poets Virgil, Horace, and Ovid all acknowledged their debt to him, Plutarch would boast that he knew the plays by heart, and Goëthe devoted himself to reconstructing several of his plays from fragments. He now is recognized as the greatest of that triad of Athenian giants and even his fellow countryman Aristotle, after much carping, crowned him “that most tragic of poets.”

Edna O'Brien

January 2003

For Michael Straughan who brought it to light

Iphigenia
premiered at the Crucible Theatre, Sheffield on February 5, 2003. The cast was as follows:

WITCH/NURSE
   Joanna Bacon

CALCHAS/MENELAUS
   John Marquez

OLD MAN
   Jack Carr

AGAMEMNON
   Lloyd Owen

SIXTH GIRL
   Charlotte Randle

IPHIGENIA
   Lisa Dillon

CLYTEMNESTRA
   Susan Brown

MESSENGER
   Dominic Charles-Rouse

ACHILLES
   Ben Price

Director
Anna Mackmin

Designer
Hayden Griffen

Lighting
Oliver Fenwick

Composers
Ben Ellin, Terry Davies

Sound Designer
Huw Williams

Choreographer
Scarlett Mackmin

S
CENE
O
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