07 December 2008

 The Euripides in Trojan Kanthavo

By Vihanga Kusal Perera

Dharmasiri Bandaranayake’s Trojan Kanthavo made a few prominent appearances over the past couple of weeks in several central locations. As the news has it, these will be among the last few productions of the Sinhala adaptation/translation of the Euripidian classic. For the past eight years or so, Trojan Kanthavo has won public applause for its topical thematic base in war and for its core intervention with the traumas and futility of war culture. Staged with an expert cast, the play has also won praise from critics as well as artistes.


Euripides’ Trojan Women (or, in some translations, “The Women of Troy”) concerns with Hecuba and other Trojan royal women, awaiting deportment as slaves in the aftermath of their defeat to the Greek confederacy. This, in other words, is an improvisation on the mythological Trojan War – the legendary Greek invasion of Troy. The Trojan War, in Greek Literature, is a flogged horse. It has been the impetus and the inspiration for many a Greek classic. However, Euripides’ “Trojan Women” has to be located as a “literary bomb” thrown at his contemporary Greek theatron.


Euripides is known as the “revolutionary dramatist” or the “modern dramatist” of his era. He is the dramatist who re-interpreted legends and mythological possibilities on the Greek stage. He, as a literary inverter, revised and re-fashioned many mainstream myths, mythological characters and legends. At a different level, Euripides’ is among the main readings in mythology of the “human and the human condition”. As he re-worked the myths of Medea, Philoctetes, the Trojan expedition etc he foregrounds the human aspect and the frailty of the mortal condition in place of the epic Heroic ethic.


Euripides is also noted for his cynical humour – his sardonic rejection of the gods and the pomposity of established drama forms. In his essentially radical art he quite freely characterizes the gods as insensitive playboys. He toyed with mainstream interpretations and the cultural politics fed into such interpretations. For instance, “The Trojan Women” can be textual subversion, as it strives to locate the psychological trauma of Hecuba – a figure marked for being haughty and arrogant- in mainstream literary interpretation.


Euripides was produced before an Athenian circus with a “holier than the rest” soci-political mindset. Yet, his work often presents material that deflates the said superior ego of “being Greek”. “The Trojan Women” is one such instance – for, the play unfolds the insensitivity and callousness of the Greek army at the brink of victory. The plunder, the carnage and the rape which the play refers to, is, then, unleashed by the Greeks. What the play meant to a super-power Athenian audience of Classical Greece remains only to be speculated. What is clear, though, is as to how impactful Euripides was as an artiste – for, his work and even his personality is often ridiculed in the plays by pro-imperialist “traditionalists” of Aristophanes’ caliber.


Knowing Euripides will help us to understand “Trojan Kanthavo” a degree better. For, what Bandaranayake stages for a 21st century Lankan audience is, still, the topical dramatization which Euripides attempted twenty five centuries before. Personally, I feel that the Sinhala translation/adaptation has “missed the bus” at one level, for it resonates a contrived effort made to “classicize” the script. The production unmistakably borders on the said classicization, missing several subtle implications Euripides may have intended in his work. For instance, “Trojan Women” hints at Poseidon, the sea god, to be a semi-parody (at least in his first appearance). In my personal reading (though I do not press on this) even the portrayal of Menelaus is more aligned with the parodic than not. Yet, in Bandaranayake’s adaptation these subtleties are overlooked/denounced. Of course, one may argue that this is not too untypical of adaptation, which allows/inherits “deviations” from the mother text. But, I see the same as an effort to classicize – which does not fit the Euripidian “order of things”.


The essence of Euripidian drama merges radicalism and experimentation (both in its conceptualization and performance). He is also a master of conjuring horror on stage – as exemplified by the killing of Hector’s young son. According to the chronological account of the Trojan War, Hector’s son has to be at least eleven years old by the time the war ends – since, as the ten year siege first occurs, he is seen as an infant at Andromache’s breast. However, Euripides manipulates the myth to make the son –who is put to death by the Greeks– a pre-adolescent. This makes his death more both a poignancy and a horror.


I felt that Bandaranayake has failed to adapt the structural syntax of the play to fit the psyche and tactility of the modern audience. It is not surprising if the audience feels over-taxed by the one-too-many songs sung by the Chorus. No doubt, the songs are in keeping pace with the Euripidean text – for, “Trojan Women” is one rare occasion where Euripides invests the chorus with an active and central role. Yet, in adaptation, the producer could have negotiated with the excessive singing, which, to the untrained modern audience in classics, could be somewhat tiresome. Admittedly, the chorus of “The Trojan Women” is too central for discarding. Yet, their presentation to a modern day theatre could do with more imagination.


Bandaranayake deploys “modern camouflage” for part of the Greek army. The rest, however, are dressed in the “classical” army costume. This hybridity, to say the least, escapes my comprehension. The least I can imagine is that this is an effort to “modernize” the classic in order to relate to a more contemporary reality. But, as I have noted in the case of the Chorus earlier, the “modernization”, then, remains inconsistent and void of basis.


In spite of these inconsistencies, one cannot hold Bandaranayake at bay for a want in the deployment of creative imagination. The production of “Trojan Kanthavo” has demanded strenuous creative zest; which is evident on numerous instances. The staging of an elaborate armoured car, for instance, is keeping in line with the Euripidian use of excessive machinery. Euripides, as often ridiculed by Aristophanes, is a dramatist who “had a thing for” elaborate machinery on stage. Bandaranayake quite firmly echoes this Euripidian fancy where Andromache is brought on stage in a Greek war car.


“The Trojan Women” also reflect a protest and a vehement critique of a contemporary war in which Athens had locked horns with the Peloponnesian Confederacy. The day one of our own, in that sense, conceptualizes a “Lankan Kanthavo”, we may revisit this topic – and with enhanced ardor.

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