The Bad Boy of Athens: Classics from the Greeks to Game of Thrones. Daniel Mendelsohn

the first part took longer than expected, with the result that the film at the end of the evening began late, and people started disappearing, despite the temptations of a buffet dinner between parts two and three that featured appropriately politicized entrees (‘grilled Balkan sausage’); and so on. But a lot about the evening was right. It’s rare to see a production of a Greek drama that so seriously and conscientiously attempts to replicate, in some sense, the deeply political context in which the ancient works were originally performed. Whatever its flaws, Sellars’s Children of Herakles makes you feel that an appropriate staging of Greek tragedy entails more than a couple hours’ emoting followed by an argument about where to have dinner.

I found myself objecting, at first, to one of the most extreme gestures the director made: that is, having the children of Herakles themselves embodied (they’re not speaking roles) by Boston-area refugee children, who every now and then went up into the audience to shake our hands. But the sense of being somehow implicated in the real lives of the actors, so foreign to contemporary theatrical sensibilities, would not have been that strange to Euripides’ audiences. The choruses in the theatre of Dionysus at Athens were chosen from among Athenian citizens, boys and men, who would indeed have been known to the spectators, or at least some of them. Modern drama seeks to create estrangement, and distance, between the artifice onstage and the spectators’ everyday lives; ancient drama relied, in its way, on a sense of communal concern.

      Sellars understands, furthermore, that tragedy doesn’t need a lot to achieve its effects, and his staging is rightly stark: a stepped altar in the middle of the stage surrounded by the huddling male offspring of Herakles, who have taken sanctuary there (the top of the altar was supposed to be occupied by a female Kazakh bard – a nice, if misplaced, Homeric touch – but she was ill the night I attended); a microphone, downstage left, into which the Argive envoy and Athenian king speak, which – not inappropriately, I thought – gives the debates at the opening of the play, where the city’s course of action is decided, the air of a press conference; and, for the chorus (their lines were read by Lydon and another person, a woman) a little conference table at the extreme left of the stage, where they sit primly, occasionally making weary bureaucratic noises about how sorry they felt about the refugees’ plight. This is perfect: it gets just right the tone of this work’s chorus, which like the choruses in many tragedies is stranded between good intentions and a healthy self-protectiveness.

What robs the play of the impact it could have had is Sellars’s failure to appreciate the subtle gender dynamics in Euripides’ text. One of the reasons that the actions of Euripides’ Macaria and Alcmene are so striking is that they’re the only actions by females in a play otherwise wholly devoted to ostensibly masculine concerns: the governance of the free state, extradition issues, war. Part of Sellars’s updating, however, is to give the roles of the nasty Argive herald – the one whom Eurystheus sends to intimidate the Athenians into giving up the refugees – and of the Athenian king Demophon (here recast as ‘president’ of Athens) to women. Although the parts are well played – the Demophon in particular comes across as a shrewd contemporary elected official, eager to do right but hamstrung by elaborate political obligations – the shift in gender results in a collapse of the playwright’s meanings. In Euripides’ play, the unexpected and electrifying entrance of Macaria and her offer of self-immolation dramatizes the need to sacrifice the ‘personal’ and ‘domestic’ – things that tragic women were understood to represent – to the larger civic good; the unusual and even revolutionary impact of her appearance and subsequent action is underscored, in the original, by her apology for appearing in public in the first place, something no nice Athenian girl would do. But Sellars’s staging makes nonsense of the lines; it’s absurd for this girl to be apologizing for talking to men outside the confines of the house (and for her to be asserting that she knows that a woman’s place is in the home) when the most politically powerful characters in the play are, as they are in this staging, women. And so the end of the play – the old woman’s violent explosion, reminder that the energies that must be sacrificed to establish the collective good always lurk uneasily within the polity, and can erupt – makes no sense, either. The women in this Children of Herakles are very healthy, thank you very much; there is no ‘repressed’ to return.

Worse still, Sellars stages the sacrifice of Macaria – beautifully, it is true, and bloodily. But it’s not in the play. One of the most famously disturbing things about The Children of Herakles is the irony that, after she makes her bid for immortality – the girl begs to be honoured in her family’s and Athens’s memory before she goes off to die – we never hear another word about her. There are all sorts of explanations for this cold treatment of a warm-blooded character (not least, that the manuscript of the play is incomplete), but surely one is precisely that everything that Macaria represents must, in fact, disappear in order for the community to persist. Tragedy loves its self-heroizing females, but like the state whose concerns it so subtly enacted, it always found a way to get rid of those unmanageable ‘others’. By bringing Macaria back in the second half of the play, and allowing us to weep over the spectacle of the tiny young girl having her throat cut, Sellars reasserts the energies that Euripides shows – ironically or not – being silenced.

      And so, like an earlier generation of classicists who saw little of value in this play except references to contemporary politicking – the speeches were thought to echo fifth-century BC Athenian political debates – Sellars fails to see where the play’s political discourse really lies. Which is to say, in the representation of the two characters who look the least like politicians: a young girl and an old woman. Did Euripides care about refugees? Yes, but mostly because of what refugee crises tell us about the nature of the state. (‘The current event’ he cared about was Athens’s summary execution, the year before the play was produced, of some Spartan envoys – clearly the referent for Alcmene’s climactic act of violence.) Peter Sellars, on the other hand, cares about refugees the way a twenty-first-century person cares – he feels for these poor kids, the mute, wide-eyed boys, the brutalized girls, and wants to make you feel for them, too. The result, alas, is a play that sends a message that isn‘t quite the one Euripides was telegraphing to his audience, by means of symbolic structures they knew well. Someone gets sacrificed in this Children of Herakles, but it isn’t just Macaria.

A similar desire to update a Euripidean classic in terms familiar to today’s audience has, apparently, informed Deborah Warner’s vulgar, loud, and uncomprehending staging of Medea, which went from a limited run at the Brooklyn Academy of Music to a Broadway run, which was rapturously received by most critics – mostly because they are rightly impressed by Fiona Shaw’s emotional ferocity. If only it were being put in the service of a reading that did justice to Euripides! For if Sellars’s Euripides ultimately betrays its source because it thinks ‘our’ politics are the play’s politics, Warner’s Euripides fails because it mistakes ‘our’ women for Euripides’ women.

      In an interview two years ago with the Guardian, before their Medea had crossed the Atlantic, Warner and Shaw decried the ‘misplaced image of Medea as a strong, wilful, witchy woman’, suggesting instead that the key to their heroine was, in fact, her ‘weakness’. ‘Audiences can identify with weakness,’ Shaw said. ‘I think the Greek playwrights knew that. That they could entice the audience into an emotional debate about failure and dealing with being a failed person.’ This betrays a remarkable failure to understand the nature of Greek tragic drama, which unlike contemporary psychological drama didn’t strive to have audiences ‘identify’ with its characters – if anything, Athenian audiences were likely to find the chorus more sympathetic and recognizable than the outsized heroes with their divine pedigrees – and which was relatively uninterested in the wholly modern notion of ‘dealing’ with failure (and, you suppose, finding ‘closure’). For the Greeks, the allure of so many tragic heroes is, in fact, exactly the opposite of what Warner and Shaw think it is: the heroes’ strength, their grandeur, their power, the attributes of intellect or valour that they must resort to in their staged struggles with a hostile fate – or, as in many plays, like Ajax, their struggles to adapt to post-heroic worlds that have shifted and shrunk beneath them, rendering the heroes outsized, obsolete. (Norma Desmond, the has-been silent film star in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, has something