“A roaring group of men and a woman hoping to gain power by sacrificing for her husband. In the Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou’s dense & iconoclastic version of Euripides’ drama, everything lands in a clear feminist statement…”
“Ironic phalluses in a visually compelling classic play”
The myth of Alcestis, the queen who agrees to die instead of her husband, is not the best known of Greek myths. Yet it touches us, mostly because it is about a structural victim-culture. The woman is the one to bear, not only everyday life, but also she is there to bear the suffering. Alkestis is the first in a number of women who will allow themselves to be subjected to male, mental violence. She’s asking Nora, or Miss Julie.
The Dramaten has asked the Greek director Elli Papakonstantinou to make her own interpretation of Euripides’ more than 2,400-year-old text. She does it with live video and a direction that is as self-conscious as it is ironic. It is full of playful anachronisms, and winks to the audience, and finally a Dionysian, male rage that is quite voyeuristically parodic.
What impresses most is the cavalcade of images that the director rolls forward: scenes from various rites, as well as how Papakonstantinou draws mythological figures. The god Apollo is glittery turquoise and fluid gender – with a refined voice played by Joel Valois – that lets Alkestis become a plaything for Death: Torkel Petersson as a tuxedoed inexorable playboy sends Alkestis to Hades with a rape. Male brutality dominates the choir, here a raw mob that excitedly comments on the event.
The staging is effective and eclectic. The audience gets to follow the dinner of the royal family through a rectangular hatch, and the whole thing is almost reminiscent of a sad Norén confrontation. The funeral of Alkestis describes millennial rituals of death and mourning. The cheeky, phallus on a pedestal worshiped towards the end of the play looks as if it comes out of a Marie-Louise Ekman painting.
Karin Franz Körlof is absolutely perfect as Alkestis who believes that she can create a position of power through her victimisation. Shanti Roney lets her husband Admetos be carried away by a very real grief. Gunnel Fred delivers Hercules, who tries to put everything right, with fine humor.
Euripides leaves Alkestis unable to speak when she returns from the underworld. A woman silenced by violence but also by the realization of death as an eternal absence.
Elli Papakonstantinou opens up the end with a polyphonic dramaturgy. Suddenly phones next to the audience start to ring. It is now the ensemble that wonders what we think. Open to immediate interaction. A reasonable ending to an expressive visual world that sincerely wants to talk about gender, power and structures.