Tantalus (review)

Abstract

John Barton's Tantalus bills itself repeatedly as "leftovers from the epic cycle." 1 Although his cycle of plays--nine in the stage performance and ten, with prologue and epilogue, in the published script--also remakes some late Euripidean plays, the spirit of the piece as a whole is far more reminiscent of what we know of cyclic epic than tragedy or even the Iliad and Odyssey themselves, which, as Aristotle's Poetics points out, are plotted in a distinctively tragic manner with a single unifying action. Sir Peter Hall and Edward Hall's performance version, which premiered in fall 2000 at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts and then traveled to England, is conveniently divided into hour-long segments with intermissions and meal breaks that cater to the sensibilities and attention spans of viewers accustomed to televised series like Masterpiece Theater. Any attempt to recapture the tight plotting, intensity, complexity, and tension of tragedy would inevitably fail in a performance of this scale. Instead, the viewer is drawn into a long and varied narrative replete with surprising shifts in tone, ranging from ironic to lyrical, from painful to comic; episodes drawn from obscure mythological sources or, occasionally, invented, take center stage, while episodes familiar from Homer and tragedy are deliberately deleted. Viewers can follow characters and children of characters over the series of plays and see the traits of siblings and parents emerge with variation in close relatives--an effect enhanced onstage by the fact that these relatives are often played by the same actors. Like cyclic epic, Tantalus fills in the gaps left by Homer [End Page 427] in the Trojan saga and aspires to tantalize its viewers with the possibi415lity of multiple and unstable versions of mythic truth. In addition, although the play repeatedly evokes the image of the rock of Tantalus poised to crash with finality on everyone's head, it largely espouses a cyclic and inconclusive view of history, in which events and human errors relentlessly repeat themselves without acquiring accessible meaning. "Until the great rock falls / What has happened already / Will happen again: / That is god-law, Agamemnon, / As it's man-law on earth. / Epikou Kuklou leipsana" (362). Playwright Barton and the directors fell out during the rehearsal process; the Irish playwright Colin Teevan shortened, revised, and in some critical ways transformed and trivialized Barton's original script. The stage version retains Barton's concern with the futility of war and human action but radically revises the major point of the original. Barton's script above all engages its audience in the myth-making process and the elusive truth of stories: "Who is to Blame? What is the Truth? Could it be Otherwise?" His script opens with a group of twelve "girls" (Barton's term) sleeping on barren ground. Nine (in the performance, ten) of the girls become a chorus, and the remaining ones (the script says four, though the total of twelve demands three, so there may be an error in the script here) play various female parts throughout the cycle. The group has missed the (real or mythical) boat and begins to tell one another conflicting myths about the origin of the world. The chorus, which claims to know all the traditional Greek myths, wants to know which version is true. It debates whether to drink from the nearby oracular streams of Trophonius. (One stream makes one forget the present moment; the other makes one remember even things one does not consciously know.) A poet (and tutor to Dionysus) enters with a wine bag. The skeptical chorus, which at first prefers its own stories and one truth, is lured into testing out the poet's bag of masks and engaging with multiple conflicting stories. "If you want to know the future / You must go into the past" (511). The poet and the four women don new roles and reenact story fragments for the increasingly engaged chorus. The chorus women toss stones over their shoulders in imitation of the Greek creation...