REFUGEES arrive at the gates of a suspicious city. Women who have left everything they have, to board a boat from North Africa, cross the treacherous Mediterranean sea and seek asylum in Greece. The women, not greeted with overwhelming joy in Argos, have to plead for their lives.
A modern play about the tumult in modern Europe? Not quite. The Suppliant Women, by Aeschylus, is around 2,500 years old. But a new version, by David Greig, the leading playwright, now artistic director of the Royal Lyceum Theatre, is to open at that theatre on October 1. So it is a play written for Athens, staged again in the Athens of the North. Directed by Ramin Gray, it is in rehearsal. After its two-week run in Edinburgh, it will performed in the north of England and Northern Ireland.
The play has a chorus of around 30 women at its heart, aged between 16 and 26. At the Lyceum, these women are from Edinburgh. When it plays in Belfast and Newcastle, the production will have choruses from those cities. The chorus, in fact, as Greig describes it, is the main protagonist of the play, and it is intensely musical from the start. The music is composed by John Browne. The work for the chorus is pivotal and substantial. I met Mr Greig this week, and he said they were being put 'through the mill', the toughness of their task similar to a hard climb or long run, he said.
When it was announced earlier this year that Greig would be re-staging the play, the refugee crisis was of course an urgent issue. It still is. But now, post-Brexit, the play reverberates with even more resonance. How a city (or a country) deals with immigration, with people seeking asylum, is the heart of the play. And, as Greig notes, this is pre-Christian Greece. There are starkly defined moral, economic and political questions. There is not necessarily an emotional pull towards salvation or uplift in the tale.
Greig and his team have taken the decision to "go as true to what we think Aeschylus would have looked for. He was all about rhythm, so if it's not a song, it's almost like hip-hop in that it's intended to be [rhythmic] back and forth. We've gone back too, to what our Greek translator calls Aeschylus' 'tsunami of language', the compounding and crushing of words, new words."
And its relevance? Greig admits it could not be more timely. And not all of the answers that the play, perhaps, provides are faultless, or easy to swallow. But the most potent phrases in the text are words from 2,500 years ago, not Greig's. "I am really anxious that people will think I have updated it, because it is so incredibly relevant to now. People might think 'that's David's line.' Such as 'Where foreigners are concerned, people are always quick to judge, we should keep our heads down'."
That line could have been written in a play about immigrants this morning. He added: "It's almost too relevant. It's urgent, and it's pressing."
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