The poster of the 2010 season
The 46th Cycle of Classical Plays will have its opening on May the 8th with Sophocles’ Ajax, with Maurizio Donadoni in the main role; the premiere of Euripides’ Phaedra, with Elisabetta Pozzi in the title role is scheduled for the 9th May. The two tragedies will alternate on the stage day after day until 20th June 2010.
The images of a strong and somewhat cryptic Medea and an Oedipus who takes the fate in his own hands without revealing the ultimate enigma to his children stand at the end of INDA’s Theatre Season 2009 which tended to answer the everlasting question of the mysterious nature of life and death, unseizable to the wits of man. The leitmotiv of the 46th Cycle of Classical Plays that will bring on the stage of Syracuse’s Greek Theatre two colossal personalities, Ajax and Phaedra, is the terrifying force of irrational that bursts unleashed into one’s life.
Written approximately around 450 BC, the Sophocles’ Ajax is developed around the namesake Homeric hero who preserves intact the stamina, spirit and the values of the heroic past. Among all of these values, our hero is best portrayed by the untameable wreath which brought him to desperately desire the utter massacre of the Greeks who had favoured Odysseus over him and deprived him from Achilles’ weapons to which he held himself a rightful heir.
Bewitched by the Athena’s spell, Ajax slaughters a flock of sheep believing to be killing his war companions: his brutal violence and madness Athena plunged him into culminate once he comes to his senses with the only solution possible that a hero knows of – the suicide. The same fate is the one Phaedra will meet. Terrible passion, awaken by Aphrodite, towards her stepson Hippolytus, represents an Eros pictured as a petrifying force that can drag a person into abyss of pain. Although clearly provoked from the outside, by a divine intervention, this “passion and death” destiny, this forbidden love is in a way a hereditary disease of Phaedra who, while talking to the nurse, recalls her mother Pasiphae, guilty of the outrageous bestiality with a bull, and her sister Ariadne with whom Dionysus fell in love.
Despite the traditional title – The Crowned Hippolytus (with a different epithet comparing to the first version), this tragedy is to be thought of as Phaedra given that the female figure is the indisputable protagonist of the drama. However, this Euripidean “Phaedra” that has greatly influenced the Western theatre and literature through numerous “adaptations” (Seneca, Racine, D’Annunzio, Ritsos, Cvetaeva etc.), is actually a variation itself. After the Veiled Hippolytus (Hippolytus veiled his face terrified by the obscene behaviour of his stepmother) had lacked the plaudits of Athenians shocked by the Phaedra’s immorality and her scandalous direct offers to her stepson, Euripides rewrote the play. The new version, which won him the first prize witnesses in a way a dialog between the tragedian and the city where the community’s censure has been transformed into a winning formula - the case of the utmost immorality became the “masterpiece of modesty” with its acme in the scene where Phaedra confesses her feelings to the nurse. Paradoxically, Phaedra and Hippolytus never meet and therefore, the third person assumes an important dramatic function, that of the mediator, thus becoming Shakespearean ante litteram.
In these plays, the madness is not seen simply as an illness that consumes and brings to death. For it wouldn’t exercise the same destructive force over the protagonists if it wasn’t connected to another element, to another leitmotiv present in both tragedies, although in a different way: the relationship with the community that keeps a watchful eye over their actions. The pressure of such a public judgement is so strong that it brings the two main characters to the point where the only compensation for the irrevocably lost honour is suicide – disgrace wins over guilt. Both Phaedra and Ajax get off the stage somewhere towards the middle of the tragedies (Ajax at the 632nd verse, while Phaedra at the 731st) but their role, that of the central pilaster in drama’s architecture, remains intact if not increased. Thus, the once timid Phaedra from the confessional dialogue with the nurse struggling not to reveal her burning passion, will revenge with such a ferocity that betrays the same obscure side of her character that associates the heroine with another woman of the solar descendent, the barbaric princess Medea. Just like in the Sophocles’ Trachiniae, here too “the dead kill the living” (there we have robe with the blood of a dying centaur, here the queen’s deceptive suicide letter). However, unlike Deianeira, Phaedra is perfectly aware of her deeds as she deliberately destroys the object of her lust. There is a whole infinity of now explicit, now ambiguous insinuations, citation, antithesis that interlace these masterpieces of the classical theatre.
Likewise, the final part of Ajax is a perfect prelude to the argument represented in Antigone: the dispute over whether to deny the burial of a disgraced man. The philia Teucer has for his half-brother clashes here with the will of higher authorities (Agamemnon and Menelaus) who vetoes the burial of the traitor. Nevertheless, owing to the intervention of Odysseus, the discussion in this drama will have a whole different outcome comparing to Antigone. The witty hero, while calling for the equal respect for both dead and the living, seems to be sending a clear warning to whom governs the city. He embodies together the political talent and interior power that, however, conceal the “melancholic awareness” of the one who sees his own reflection and the fragility of the humans in his defeated enemy.