It's all Greek

Welcome to Thebes at the National Theatre was a strange night out. On the one hand, at a very basic level, it's extraordinary to be watching a modern play with a cast of 30 people (including a few musicians) on stage. Thrilling, in fact, and something in the commercial sector unlikely to happen outside the world of West End musicals. But Thebes is a serious play with sweeping ambition.


The fact that it fails as a serious play with sweeping ambition is something else. Apparently set in an African country (at one point there was a reference to one side of the civil war being made up of "Hutsi" -- presumably a conflation of Rwanda's Hutu and Tutsi -- while a new post-war beginning under a feminist president is presumably mirroring Liberia), the protagonists constantly refer to Athens, Sparta and, of course, Thebes itself. And they all have the names of characters from Greek tragedy (and, in some instances, the character of those same characters -- Antigone wandering around like a madwoman, for instance, and facing crude abuse about her "motherfucking father").


There were moments of real passion (but far too much shouty pretend-passion), and of affecting acting (alongside drama school term 1 movement class -- "woman to run in pigeon steps and then stop abruptly short", to show conflicted condition...). There were one or two zingy one-liners.

But there was an uncomfortable tension at the heart of the action, between traditional Greek tragedy (so we know the heroes are heading for a fall -- that's the point) and the message of the script, that we have free will to find (and lead in) a new political direction and escape from the horrors we have experienced.


Thrown in were parallels to Obama and Iraq, to Cold War super-power dynamics where the puppet masters are played off against each other in a bidding war (always a dangerous game), and the idea that, if only women were in charge, everything would be so much better.

Ambitious and audacious and a noble failure.

It reminded me of Pasolini's film Edipo Re, a retelling of a great Sophoclean tragedy.


In my view this is one of the most under-rated of Pasolini's films and his realist style reinforces the power of a primal psychodynamic phantasy.

The alien world of Thebes is brilliant created from the mud cities of Morocco, and terrifying masks (another key Freudian device) work with strange costumes to reinforce our sense of dislocation.


And yet that world seems all too palpable and real.

Where Welcome to Thebes felt artificial, Ediopo Re feels sweatily real.