Alcestis
7 November 2008
Written by 
Euripides’ Alcestis, a not-quite-tragic Greek tragedy, centres upon a wife’s self-sacrificing decision to die in her doomed husband’s place. Ted Hughes’ version of the play is a visceral and uncompromising meditation on the struggle to live ‘in the same world as death’, to survive and nurture hope in the face of inescapable suffering.
Daniel Winder’s modern-dress production is sometimes impressively liturgical, and sometimes wilfully slow, with flashes of hallucinatory visual excess. A couple of episodes of not-very-passionate dumbshow add little to Hughes’ spare, powerful verse, but some of the show’s other effects work much better, and Alcestis’ funeral procession spilling out into the Covent Garden night is a wonderful collision between worlds.
The chorus of three are gossipy, grudge-bearing neighbours, vulgarly curious beneath their funereal finery. The show’s physical score sometimes pushes these hardworking actresses beyond their comfort and competence, but their singing is glorious, and they tackle the verse with intelligent, northern-vowelled bluntness. Chorus leader Emma Garrett is a figure of compelling authority, stoical, defiant and utterly unglamorous, roughly admonishing Shaun French’s Admetos to ‘meet Necessity with a cheerful face’.
Sarah Kempton as Alcestis is in another world from the beginning, pale and self-possessed and impatient of her husband’s sorrow. John Harwood’s Pheres, doddery, slovenly and incorrigible, makes an unexpectedly eloquent case for an old man clinging to life, and his exchanges with his son over Alcestis’ bier sparkle with a shared sense of grim humour. Christina Gallon and Elizabeth Boag, as Nursemaid and Servant, handle their big speeches with skill, while Matthew Mellelieu and Tom Deplae exploit the hilarity of Heracles’ play-within-a-play to hysterical, discomfiting effect.
The acoustics of The Actor’s Church are distinctly boomy, and the whole company works hard to make themselves heard and understood. Hughes’ gut-wrenching poetry rolls around the cavernous church like rumbling Olympian thunder. And the sacred space is an excellent foil for the play’s howls of bereft despair, and bellows of boozy good-fellowship. Iris Theatre’s Alcestis is an oddly-compounded interpretation of a complicated, tragi-comic drama, but it builds towards a measured and satisfying finale with tragedy, temporarily, averted.
Alcestis is at The Actor’s Church, Covent Garden until 15 November: www.iristheatre.com
Photo top: Anne-Marie Piazza, Emma Garrett, Julie Gilby in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.
Photo bottom: John Harwood in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.
Leave your response!