How do you make a new version of the first play in the Western theatrical canon, which also happens to be the World’s oldest recorded script, first produced in 472 BCE and written, in my opinion, by a genius?
The PERSIANS group page has lain silent for so long partly because of the efforts needed to broach the above, and my superstitious Irish soul not wanting to hex the process in what has been one of the most illuminating and exhilarating projects of my life.
PERSIANS sings.
Unfortunately, as I am not a linguist, I was unable to read the text in the Ancient Greek, but through my close reading of 23 translations, made across three centuries, I like to think I have a sense of the bass line – the original ‘voice’: Aerschylus, poet, philosopher, soldier-playwright, anti-warmonger, humanist. He chose to write about an astonishing, almost miraculous event, a David and Goliath of its day: the spectacular and relatively recent defeat of the marauding Persian Imperial force by the people of Athens at the Battle of Salamis. Aeschylus was an Athenian. He could have written a swaggering tale of victory, of the battle-prowess Greeks and their cunning and sacrifice to protect this early, emerging experiment in democracy. He could have written a xenophobic pageant of blood-lust and warriors, filled with self-congratulatory jingoism and gloating over the dead. Instead he chose to write a powerful anti-war play which painfully depicts the waste and agonies of conflict – the pity of war - written with fire and dignity from the point of view of the defeated.
That in itself is surely a remarkable achievement.
When I knew that Mike Pearson would be directing, and on Ministry of Defence land where soldiers are trained before being deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq – part of the former Persian Empire – how could I say no?
I’m Kaite O’Reilly, and I’m writing a new version of Aeschylus’s PERSIANS, and I will share some of the process over the coming months.