The performance of “War Gifts” that was given in Athens at the theatre “Hororoes” by the Italian company “Astragali” of Lecce on November 12th, 2005 under the direction of Fabio Tolledi, contained all the elements of a post-modern performance with an intertextual character. Euripides' “Trojan women” formed the work of reference, with the help of which the plot was developed.
The play was composed of independent, autonomous episodes and scenes, originating from various areas in Balkans and the Eastern Mediterranean. Songs from Kosovo and Cyprus, Senegal and Italy, gave a real multinational character in the performance, illustrating the tragic character of war, the impasse of violent conflict, the horror of violent death, the despair because of the loss of beloved persons.
Troy, Hecuba, Odysseus, Hector and the other persons of the Trojan War existed as completely abstract and depersonalized units, without any particular characterization.
The stress mainly fell on the impact of their actions on the others, on the suffering and the disaster that war inflicts on those who cause it, but also on those innocent victims who are unwillingly involved in it. Lamentation songs from Cyprus and other regions of Greece, in combination with the recitation of representative extracts from Euripides' text, together with the other songs included in the performance, were characteristic of the way with which the popular culture and the tradition of persons who live in this turbulent region of the world, have depicted the tragic character of man's fate, pray as he is of the caprices and the interests of those in power. As Helen's abduction by Paris was used as a pretext for the beginning of the Trojan war, so the re-establishment of Democracy gave the pretext to the Americans to invade Iraque and Yogoslavia, to overthrow the dictatorships of Sadam Hussein and Miloshevits respectively.
Besides the tragic fate of those in power there is the fate of the ordinary people who see their homes burned, their children killed, their girls raped, themselves remaining alone and desolate in life. The heart-breaking Cypriot lamentation songs, sung by a Cypriote actor, gave the size of tragic feeling that the Cypriot population had experienced in his recent history, and so did the songs from Kosovo and Syria. “Gifts of War”, the tragic irony and oxymoron of the title, comprises all the conceptual background of the play.
The performance, as an artistic event, was absolutely identified with the signified. The contradiction and the oxymoron of the subject-matter ("Gifts of War ") was noticed by the spectator right from the beginning, when the triumphant and cheerful music of R. Strauss accompanied the movements of an actors who, holding a slaughtered lamb in his hands as though keeping the dead body of a relative killed in battle, crossed the stage and laid it at the back of it, as a symbol of havoc and destruction. The war game of the actress who, singing in Arab, swayed two swords, implying indirectly battle and war, functioned in the same abstract way. The outcome of war, namely victory, arrogance and pride of the ones, slavery and destruction of the others, was illustrated very successfully with the women tied at the winner's chariot, an expression of absolute submission, together with the woman's lament (Hekuba, Kassandra, Andromache, no matter what her actual name is) who lost her husband and her son in battle. The chorus in ancient tragedy, as a common denominator and a base of modern drama, was represented by Greek amateur actors, undergraduate and postgraduate students of the University of Athens and new professionals as well, who, after hardly one week of intensive rehearsals, responded successfully to the requirements of their role. Dressed in black and white, the colors used in mourning all over the world, together with the basic Italian actors, illustrated in the best way the disaster and the grief caused by war, while certain other actresses with equally frugal red tunic, reminded the bloodshed and the violence of war.
The actors, having the upper parts of their body naked and with a Dorian acting, with slow imposing movements and contrapuntal recitation with what the chorus sang, illustrated the negative side, representing the victimizer, the conqueror.
The end of the performance was given in a circular way, as it began, with the same triumphant music and the actor who represented the war spraying with red color the woman-peace's body, covering thus with blood-red the white of her dress.
The spectators watched very attentively the evocative and atmospheric development of the performance, shivering from the poetic pictures and from genuine artistic emotion, which overcame the obstacle of the language, and realized in the best way the communication of the stage with the audience. Together with the actors-heroes of the play and the impersonal collective consciousness of the women-chorus, the spectator recalled similar experiences with those presented on the stage, which allowed him to realize the seriousness of the enacted events and the feeling of tragedy prevailing throughout the whole performance.
Greek spectators more familiar with theatre recalled former performances of ancient tragedy, which they had seen, read or heard about, where “fear” and “pity” were sought after. These performances were based on the teachings of Max Reinhardt on how to perform ancient tragedy, combining ideas of Hegel and Nietzsche about tragedy, introduced to Greece by Fotos Politis and, mainly, Dimitris Rontiris. The latter was the major founder of the Greek school of presentation of ancient drama, with performances like Helectra given in 1938 in Epidaurus, with which the ancient theatre of Polyklitos was inaugurated. He introduced a ritual way in the interpretation of tragedy, based on the musicality of the recited text, the recitation of the chorus, the geometrical placement of actors on the stage, the austerity and abstraction of the decor.
Such precisely was the performance created in a magnificent way by Fabio Tolledi: respect to the initial text (Trojan women), stress on the words, musicality in the articulation, parallel recitation (which in this particular case was turned into song), geometrical placement and movement of the actors on the stage, austerity of the figurative means, exploitation of popular culture and tradition (in our case of a multinational cultural heritage). In this way, the Athenian audience that filled the theatre was lucky enough to have a magnificent experience of this extremely successful multicultural spectacle, which confirmed once more in its specific way, that tragedy isn't dead, but on the contrary thrives as a way of artistic expression and as a field of secondary signification of reality.
Thodoros Grammatas Professor of Theatre Studies University of Athens