Age of Iron Adaptation and the Matter of Troy in Clements’s Indigenous Urban Drama

Abstract

In Age of Iron, Clements freely adapts Euripides’s Trojan Women. In Hutcheon’s terms, she “indigenizes,” drawing on the ancient play selectively and localizing it. Her localization is unusual because she creates a double setting and a palimpsest of Trojan and Indigenous referents. The action occurs in a place which is both contemporary Vancouver and ancient Troy; the fall of Troy is also the conquest of BC’s Aboriginal peoples. This duality allows Clements to lament historical suffering even as she insists that conquest is happening now on the streets of Vancouver. The superimposition of different frames of reference politicizes the gesture of adaptation: Clements’s transformative art implies that past patterns of oppression can be re-shaped. Yet adaptation of a classical text is an ironic gesture, given that the play stages the destructive imposition of European culture. The layered ironies of the play derive, as well, from Clements’s appropriation of the “matter of Troy.” Exposing the instability of national mythologies, she rejects the mythic descent of Britons from exiled Trojans, and claims Troy for her Aboriginal-identified characters. She revises British triumphalism, and instead of prophesying Troy reborn uses setting, set, and performance to dramatize the exilic present of “Trojans” in their homeland.