ANYTHING LOOKS GOOD IN YOUR THEATRES | August 4th 2008

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After years as a drama critic, James Woodall decides to go back to first things: a complete Greek drama in a proper ancient theatre. In such an overwhelmingly grand setting, he hardly minds breast-beating melodrama ...

I first heard Aeschylus in the original in 1974. I was on a school trip to Greece, a putative scholar of the ancient language (though I took Greek only as far as O-level, and got an indifferent "B"). I loved the lanky classics master who organised the trip: an eccentric, kindly man who also played the school's chapel organ with the twitchy nervousness of a harassed ferret.

Mr Plaister stood plumb in the centre of the ancient Greek theatre in Epidauros, and read a speech from "Agamemnon", part of Aeschylus's "Oresteia" trilogy. A quarter of a mile away from the circular stage, eight schoolboys fidgeted in the back row, but listened. The acoustics of Epidauros are outrageous in their perfection. People typically illustrate this by striking a match from the stage. Mr Plaister's incantation was crystal clear, and echoes down the decades far more memorably than the crackling burn of a tiny head of potassium.

Four years later, I had a fuller experience of Aeschylus, at a small Greek theatre at Bradfield College, a private school in southern England. In those days, Bradfield was boys only and its tradition of performing open-air Greek tragedy about 100 years old. In that "Agamemnon", a tall, elegant Clytemnestra in a tight yellow dress spoke the lines with a lyrical solemnity I didn't think possible for an A-level boy-pupil of my age. (This was another school trip: I was now studying Ancient History.) The experience suggested that Greek drama unfolds not with outsize gestures, but with oratorical gravitas: murderous, yes, but somehow dignified. Of Shakespeare's plays, probably only "Othello" can rival it.

Over the years, I've attended plays in plenty of unorthodox venues: airless cupboards above London pubs; an old aircraft hangar at the Edinburgh Festival; a converted turbine hall in the Ruhr, in west Germany. But if you write about theatre, as I do, the time comes when you absolutely must go back to first things: a complete Greek drama in a proper ancient theatre.

Western theatre--tragedy and comedy--originated in the popular festivals staged all over the ancient Greek world, both to entertain and to instruct. The "Oresteia" turns into an urgent discussion about justice: should Orestes be punished for killing his mother? (Such drama cycles always ended in a bawdy fourth play; alas, virtually no examples of this form of light relief survive.) Aeschylus had deep concerns for democracy, for how we order and manage society. So not only does drama start with him, but perhaps ethics too.

A chance to see how such a spectacle might have looked came with a recent visit to Sicily. When Rome ascended to power at the end of the 3^rd century BC, eastern Sicily--first colonised by the Greeks five centuries earlier--bore rich traces of Hellenic culture. The Romans named this southern Italian region Magna Graecia. Syracuse, a province in Sicily, once rivalled Athens in its splendour, but was cursed with some dotty rulers. 

Hieron II (270-215 BC), however, was unusually enlightened and a great builder: he expanded an astonishing 5^th-century theatre (older even than the one in Epidauros) into more or less what we see today. There remains a fan of brilliant ash-white stone gouged into a hillside, with views over cypresses and down gentle slopes to the Ionian Sea. Only 17 of the original 52 rows are missing.

Every year in late spring, plays are put on here by the National Institute of Ancient Drama. The society was formed in 1914, just as the first world war broke out. So it is fitting that "Agamemnon", a play that considers ten years of attritional combat, kicked the Syracuse theatre back to life.

This spring I witnessed the "Oresteia" at this very theatre, in what felt like the balmiest air and sweetest light. In a production using Pier Paolo Pasolini's Italian translation, there were performances of great energy, but also of breast-beating melodrama, over two nights on the sizeable round stage. Galatea Ranzi, playing both Clytemnestra and then Electra in the trilogy's second play, "Cheophori", was, in turn, imperious and beseeching. Her tragic intensity was mesmerising. But when the Furies in "Eumenides",  the third play, wriggled and writhed in their flimsy black costumes and ridiculous headgear (which looked like dreadlocks at half-cock), I consoled myself with views of the sea.

Of course these flaws didn't really matter. Yes, I was aghast at Orestes's act of matricide on stage (one of the most sacred dramaturgical conventions of Greek tragedy is that murder is never seen). But I gave in to the overwhelming grandeur of the antique site--its seductive warmth and scents and, as the sun set, the shifting colours of the sky. With eyes closed and ears selective, one could almost hear Aeschylus's ancient tongue. The power of Syracuse's Greek theatre over the imagination defies criticism.

I am even tempted to return to Epidauros itself in late August, when "Agamemnon" is to be performed in Greek. To top Mr Plaister's rendition, it will have to be very good indeed.

(James Woodall is a writer based in Berlin. His last piece for More Intelligent Life was about Lydia Lopokova, the "Bloomsbury ballerina".)