Thyestes

I didn’t sleep well the night I saw this production. I walked out of the theatre de-centered, icky – and that is exactly what the play intended. To that end, this radical modernising of Seneca’s Thyestes – among the bloodiest, most profane of Greek tragedies – by Simon Stone’s The Hayloft Project – among the boldest, most challenging of Australian theatre companies – was a visceral, affective experience.

When Greek tragedies were first performed the ubiquitous bloodshed took place offstage. And yet, by operating in the abstract and lyrical, these melodramas cast whole amphitheaters spellbound. The Hayloft Project takes the opposite approach: ahow-all extreme violence is the lifeblood of this production.

The moral lesson, if you will, at the core of Thyestes, the story of intergenerational blood-lusting for power, is an indictment of unbridled masculine authority. To that end, Stone has unpicked the ancient form’s sententiousness and rewoven the script with banal hipster babel, machismo-charged homoeroticism and gender-bending performances. All this amounts to a bold attempt to dismantle extremity and reassemble it as a series of domestic encounters that explore the mundanity of violence. This is exactly the kind of radical re-imagining called for to breathe new life into Seneca’s 1st century spectacle.

Before the curtain is raised on each scene, we are informed with sur/subtitles of the action about to take place. However, what plays out is not what we’ve been told we will see. At least, it’s not how we expect to see it. The point then of this foreshadowing device is to prick our senses, to condition us to read violence into pillow-talk and ping pong.

The well-crafted naturalism, and the witty conceit of a traverse stage (whereby the stage divides the audience into self-facing halves), holds up a mirror to the audience, insisting we position ourselves at once within the action and without. The magician-like mechanics of this arrangement draws attention to the act of watching without seeing and asks to what extent we are complicit in the ravages of patriarchy.

Thomas Henning and Mark Winter play Thyestes and Atreus respectively, and Chris Ryan assumes numerous identities to round out the full list of characters. Winter’s development from ribald-muttering hipster to depraved older man is demanding and he pulls it off with aplomb. Ryan’s versatile and nuanced performance is also very impressive. Henning, as the title character, oddly doesn’t have a lot to say and when he does speak it’s a bit stilted though his outpouring in the final scene is positively harrowing.

My only other reservation is that the free-wheeling dialogue, albeit virtuoso naturalism, could have been reigned in somewhat and the passive aggression could have been more pointed.

The white cube that serves as a stage is as much a convention of theatrical minimalism as it is an approximation of the kind of minimalist apartment the characters might live in. This set is particularly effective at representing the echo chamber of a tormented mind when Atreus tortures himself with a saved voicemail from his dead wife. Squirming about the space in his underwear, he argues with and rants at an unchanging echo of the past bellowing at him from the multi channel speaker system. It really is quite brilliant.

With Simon Stone at the helm, The Hayloft Project has staked its claim as a vital force on the Australian stage.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

Belvoir and Sydney Festival in association with Carriageworks present
Thyestes
Originally created by The Hayloft Project
Co-written by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Simon Stone and Mark Winter after Seneca
Director: Simon Stone
Set & Costume Designer: Claude Marcos
Composer & Sound Designer: Stefan Gregor
Lighting Designer: Govin Ruben
Dramaturg: Anne-Louise Sarks
Cast: Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan, Mark Winter

Bay 20, Carriageworks, Redfern
January 15–February 19, 2012
Bookings: www.belvoir.com.au