Euripedes' Electra

Poor old Euripides shuddered in his urn again last night while a curiously halting and pigeon-toed bevy of our too-familiar Loebsters murdered Aegisthus, Clytemnestra and his play as well. He should be used to short shrift by now, though, after centuries of being mistranslated, misplayed and misunderstood.

That people will misunderstand Euripides is a phenomenon easily explained. They read translations by classicists like Gilbert Murray who have forced the subtleties of a sophisticated text into duller patterns jerry-built for modern use.

At the Loeb they chant ominously through the Vermeule translations so beloved to Gen Ed and, occasionally, when they forget they are in a ritual drama and stop trying to sound like an unearthly shaman or the Delphic priestess, their speech becomes intelligible, and they show us "just how modern the old bard really was." At least I think their interpretation follows certain simple but "classic" lines: Euripides mocks the old religious motifs that Aeschylus so deeply felt, ergo he was an atheist rebelling against the pious establishment. The Loeb production seems to follow this interpretation or, shall I say, to adopt it suddenly and without warning near the end of the play when the speech of the Dioscuroi and one reference to prayer are played for laughs. They probably should be, to a certain extent, but the extent bothers me, and I doubt they meant to provoke as much mirth as they did.

Of course it is also possible to read the play as literary criticism in literary terms of the tragic tradition, and of Sophocles' Electra and Aeschylus' Eumenides in particular. Euripides packs his recognition scene with allusions to earlier versions of the same myth and to several apposite situations in Homer.

His language constantly points backward with malice to other poets' diction, to their barely credible recognition scenes based on flimsy evidence like scars, footprints and locks of hair, to their unquestioning awe of traditional elements of all kinds.

Euripides wrote at the end of an era, and he re-examined the work of his predecessors with a quizzical air, rearranging, complicating, and at the same time exposing the flaws in their methods. He resembles the painter Caravaggio who worked at the tail end of the Renaissance when there was little more to say about Madonnas or Crucifixions; he substituted peasants with dirty feet for the idealized figures of Raphael.

Euripides dresses Electra in rags (we know this was considered revolutionary because Aristophanes lambastes him for it in the Acharnians), burlesques the recognition scene and makes a farce of divine intervention and mercy, but he aims his barbs at authors not gods. He is never irreligious; quite the reverse.

In fact, our great problem in reading him is to reconcile speeches of high seriousness that must "mean what they say" with more Swifrian passages that cut with a double edge. Perhaps there can be no truly satisfying resolution to this incongruity, but some attempt at clarity should be made.

The Loeb players, under the direction of Charles Ascheim, doubtless considered the question of tone, but their very basic failings in elocution and movement kept them from pulling off the simplest entrance or greeting, to say nothing of the titanically difficult transitions that plague any one who acts this play.

Now and then I felt I saw the inchoate shape of an idea struggling to be born amid the sloppy shambles of stiff movement and stiffer speaking that I actually witnessed. But nothing so refined as an idea emerged, when simple problems distracted attention even from the sense of the words.

Anne Lilley (Electra) amirked coyly in some of her most serious speeches and several times mouthed the opening word of a line silently or made a tentative gesture before going through with the actual business. And Carl Nagin (Orestes) didn't help the pace much either with his oracular delivery.

David Mills (Old Man) treated us to the same lively but limited range of vocal inflections he turns on in each new appearance, ever so slightly modifying the basic routine to suit his new costume. Still, practice makes perfect, and Mills did stand out vividly in his present company.

Lynn Milgrim (Clytemnestra), on the other hand, did not perfect nearly so interesting a pose and had to settle for a mask of hauteur. The chorus was innocuous, which is something, and the play is short.