Let’s acknowledge up front that the mythological backstory is daunting.
In Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land), a Saga Collectif, Architect Theatre and Theatre Passe Muraille Digital Co-production presented virtually until Feb 26, playwright Ho Ka Kei (Jeff Ho) has reimagined ancient Greek playwright Euripides’ Iphigenia among the Taurians.
The play was awarded the Toronto Theatre Critics’ Award for Best New Canadian Play in 2019, after a criminally underattended inaugural run. Ho has added 15 minutes to the now-75-minute virtual production, deepening the play’s characters and conflicts, without sacrificing the urgency that propels it forward.
And without letting it sink under the weight of that backstory.
The source play, rooted in Greek mythology and dating from approximately 413 BCE, will be obscure to the majority of theatregoers. Iphigenia (a steely-eyed, alternately haunted and sardonic Virgilia Griffith) spends more than the first 10 minutes filling in the background a modern audience needs. How she was almost sacrificed by her father Agamemnon (sardonically referred to as “Daddy Aggy”) to appease the Greek goddess Artemis before the Trojan War. How Artemis plucked her away at the last moment, substituting a pig, which was slaughtered in her stead. How, whisked to the distant land of the Taurians and believed dead by her family back in Argos, Iphigenia has become priestess of the temple of Artemis. So how, in a sick symmetry, her duty now is to oversee the ritual sacrifice of foreigners who come among the Taurians. Yes, at her hands, the temple regularly runs red with blood.
As directed by Jonathan Seinen, this is a complex tale told briskly and compellingly. Griffith cuts a regal figure in elegant gold fringes as she prowls the sparse stage before the temple of Artemis, which is conjured by minimalist canvas columns hanging in a less spectral, more grounded new staging by John Hirsch. The static quality of ancient Greek theatre – its long speeches leaching out exposition and internal conflict – is energized by contemporary idioms, speed in the delivery, and unapologetic anachronisms like a bubble tea run. The fantastic extremity of the story and the intensity of Griffith’s telling – alternately waxing melancholic, spitting venom, gasping incredulously, and grasping after meaning – grab our attention.
When her brother Orestes (Kwaku Ok) appears with his companion Pylades (Nathaniel Hanula-James), the play’s core conflict crystallizes. They are two foreigners – two lovers, in fact – on Taurian land. The manic and brooding Orestes has done slaughtering of his own back in Greece, and is being hounded by the Furies of the play’s title. (“Furies, furies, furiesssss”, he recounts in a self-aggrandizing echo.) The play’s tight 75 minutes will turn on brother and sister’s recognition of one another, and the conflict between Iphigenia’s family loyalty and her duty as priestess to sacrifice the foreigners. This is about Greek colonialism “on Taurian land”: the play’s subtitle pointedly echoes land acknowledgements familiar to theatre audiences in a Canadian context where words of reconciliation fall far short of actions.
The final character in Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) is the Greek chorus come to life in the figure of Chorus (PJ Prudat). A Taurian, she is the one to carry out the ritual slaughter of strangers such as Orestes and Pylades. Garbed in black-and-white, she gives wry, urbane and informed voice to Taurian culture and concerns, effortlessly subverting the facile trope of barbarism.
Indeed. Iphigenia’s response to her furies, situated on the ancestral territories of the Taurians, is freighted with significance that outweighs simple family blood – and reverberates loudly across centuries and societies.
For this is ultimately a competition of backstories. Iphigenia’s dominates the first part of the play. Orestes’ emerges in the middle – punctuated by a heartfelt lament from Pylades about his own stillborn story. And in the final part of the play, Chorus’ backstory comes to the fore. Our sympathies swirl in what becomes a high-stakes conflict between incompatible cultures moving inexorably to a conclusion that is both shattering and utterly inevitable.
For what seems like inaccessible, static source material, this play really moves. And on an emotional level, these four performances also move.
Right up until that haunting final speech, so masterfully and mournfully delivered, which stops you dead in your tracks. It stuck with me long after I saw the play in 2019. In our interim of pandemic-incubated intolerance, it has only gained in power.
So yes, the mythological backstory is daunting. But this inventive, intense work proves to be an audience-friendly lesson in Greek myth, Greek theatre and universal subtext crystallized by breathtaking portrayals of four sharply-realized characters.
Iphigenia and the Furies (on Taurian Land) surprises with laughter, delivers sharp insight that brings the margins into the core of the narrative – and closes by knocking you unapologetically to the floor.
It takes a while to get back up.
© Scott Sneddon, SesayArts Magazine, 2022
