Philoctetes Amidst the Treacle: Stink Foot at The Yard Theatre, Hackney JUSTINE MCCONNELL Even by the standards of London’s long-established love affair with classical drama, the city is revelling in something near approaching an embarrassment of riches at the moment. Greek tragedy as a star vehicle has seen Juliette Binoche, Helen McCrory, and Kristin Scott Thomas take the title roles in, respectively, Antigone, Medea, and Electra, all within the space of a year.1 Away from the West End too, Greek drama is holding its own. Stink Foot* at the Yard Theatre in Hackney, just a few minutes from the Olympic Stadium built for London 2012, is an impressive and entertaining adaptation of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Like the three productions mentioned above, intensity and a kind of “authenticity” is sought by the exclusion of an interval, thereby echoing that element of the original fifth-century BCE performances in Athens, which were similarly unbroken by a convenient half-time interlude. Unlike those three big-budget West End productions, however, Stink Foot boasts no famous actors, no intricate sets, no star directors —yet it nevertheless securely establishes itself on a par with them in terms of the theatrical experience it offers. The Yard is a relatively new venue on the London performance scene. Converted from a disused warehouse in 2011, the design of the theatre combines a Greek amphitheatre with Elizabethan galleries. The rake of the seating is visible from the bar, as are the actors in the dressing-room, silhouetted by *Stink Foot was adapted and directed by Jeff James, and presented by Jessica Campbell and Dem Productions. arion 22.3 winter 2015 the semi-transparent lightbox that serves as their backstage space. The entrance to the warehouse is found by walking through a car park (ignoring the “No Entry” sign for vehicles ), past a kebab van, and round the corner; it may feel inauspicious on a cold, dark winter’s night, but the atmosphere changes the moment you arrive. The Yard Box Office welcomes you in as if to their own living room; the bar, serving homemade food and locally brewed beers, has none of the formality or inflated price tags of the West End; likewise the ticket prices, which never rise above £12 ($18). Its mission, as Artistic Director Jay Miller has explained, is “to give opportunities to artists who may have never made work before, while simultaneously inviting more established artists to make work at The Yard—this process enables us to discover unheard , brilliant voices.”2 Stink Foot was written and directed by one of these newer voices, Jeff James. Yet he has been fast establishing himself as a figure to watch; Stink Foot may be only his second solo directing project, but the first was a Harold Pinter doublebill at the Young Vic, and he has worked with a number of British theatre’s big names (including Carrie Cracknell, who directed the National Theatre’s Medea). The adaptation’s title announces its irreverent and visceral approach to Sophocles ’ play, and indeed the embodiment of Philoctetes’ diseased foot is one of the most striking features of the play. For, as a programme note thanking Tate and Lyle foreshadows , the play is performed amidst a bath of treacle. The ingenuity of this becomes apparent a few minutes into the play when the sickly-sweet smell of treacle begins to assail the senses. The treacle itself, oozing from Philoctetes’ bandaged foot and dragged across the floor, gradually covers the stage—and the actors—in a red-brown mess resembling blood. Visually, the effect is very powerful, but the real pièce de résistance is the stench that fills the theatre throughout the performance: not strong enough to detract from one’s enjoyment of the show, but nevertheless pungent enough never to slip from the forefront of one’s mind. Which is as it philoctetes amidst the treacle 194 should be, if we are to enlist one more important sense in our engagement with this play. Sophocles himself made much of the horror of the scent emanating from Philoctetes’ wound: touvtou~ d’e[ason, mh; barunqw`sin kakh/` ojsmh/` pro; tou` devonto~3 Compelling the audience to engage...