WAR EXILE UTOPIA

Themes

The Historical and Conceptual Framework
Between 415 and 409 BC — within a remarkably brief span of years — Athens was swept by profound upheavals that would undermine its political hegemony and its supremacy over the other Greek cities: the disastrous Sicilian Expedition and the defeat at Syracuse (415 BC), the massacre of the inhabitants of the island of Melos (415 BC), the oligarchic coup of the Four Hundred (411 BC), followed by the restoration of democracy and the measures of exile and political disenfranchisement imposed on those involved in the coup.
Three plays, written within a few years of one another — Euripides’ Trojan Women, Aristophanes’ Birds, and Sophocles’ Philoctetes — brought the names and stories of myth to the stage of the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens in order to strip bare and represent the searing reality of the Peloponnesian War. Through tragedy and comedy, Athenian theatre becomes a mirror of a profound crisis, tracing the coordinates of a triad that speaks powerfully to our own time: War · Exile · Utopia.

WAR | Euripides’ Trojan Women (415 BC)
The day after the fall of Troy, tragedy brings to the stage the rawest and most ruthless face of the suffering of the defeated and the victors alike. Hecuba, Andromache and the other Trojan women — until yesterday the rulers of the most powerful city in the world, today reduced to a mass of slaves — embody the violence of massacre and the division and dispossession of human bodies. From Cassandra’s mad, deadly wedding dance to the merciless execution of the little Astyanax, the cry that rises from the theatre of Athens is the clearest possible denunciation of the atrocities of every war: “Greeks, you have more strength than sense: what were you afraid of in a child? It is a disgrace to all Greece!”

UTOPIA | Aristophanes’ Birds (414 BC)
Aristophanes’ visionary response to the horrors of war and the corruption of the polis is the utopia of a radical refoundation. Suspended between heaven and earth, Cloudcuckooland — the new city founded by the birds — is born from the desire to escape the distortions and failures of Athenian democracy.It is the triumph of fantastic storytelling, but also the embodiment of the fragile, precariously consoling and far-from-peaceful nature of Utopia: even within the ideal refuge, rivalries, ambitions and human pettiness inevitably resurface.

EXILE | Sophocles’ Philoctetes (409 BC)
On the deserted island of Lemnos, the hero Philoctetes has lived in forced exile for ten years, brutalised by pain and betrayed by his companions. Odysseus, a cynical political strategist, must bring him back to Troy through deception, because the oracle has decreed that the city will fall only through the use of his bow, a gift from Heracles. Using the young Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, as bait, Odysseus brings to the stage a head-on confrontation between the archaic values of honour, friendship and loyalty and the manipulative rhetoric of power, capable of corrupting even the souls of heroes.

ODYSSEUS: THE LAST ODYSSEY (A Rewriting of Homer)
The 62nd season concludes with a rewriting of the foundational poem of Western civilisation.
In the figure of Odysseus, the three figures of myth converge: the warrior, the exile, and the traveller through the lands of Utopia.
War: At Troy, Odysseus is the architect of victory, the mastermind behind the strategy that brings the conflict to an end but irreparably destroys a world.
Exile: Throughout the long years of his wandering, Odysseus experiences the muted pain of nostos — the loss of his homeland, the solitude of exile, and the obsession with return.
Utopia: Along his journey, he reaches other worlds — Calypso’s enchanted island, where she offers him immortality; the ideal land of the Phaeacians — places in which another life might have been possible. And yet Odysseus, stubbornly human, rejects every illusion and chooses to set out once more, heading towards his imperfect, rocky and rugged Ithaca.