GODS AND GREEKS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 32, Issue 809, 28 January 1955, Page 18

GODS AND GREEKS

{Tt was Euripides’ Electra which saved Athens. Nine years after the great dramatist wrote his version of the savage story, Athens, city of morning and light, fell to the Spartans and their allies. As the conquerors stood without the city gates, says the story, they debated whether to raze the city to the ground. By chance they heard a man of Phocis singing a choral passage from Electra. He sang of the desolation of the heroine’s home, and the Spartans, listening, were touched to compassion. The tragedy of Electra and her brother Orestes is indeed a horrible one. The Greek belief seems to have been that the closer the kinship, the more moving the tragedy. So we hear of Agamemnon sacrificing his daughter Iphigenia for a fair wind on the voyage to Troy. His Queen, Clytemnestra, in revenge, gave herself to his cousin Aegisthus. When the king returned after the ten-year siege his queen and her lover murdered him. For their crime these two were in turn murdered by Agamemnon’s children, Electra and Orestes. Was this deed justice or crime? The great triumvirate of Athenian dramatists all treated the story in a different way. Aeschylus, still regarding the drama as essentially a religious rite, saw it as a conflict of superhuman powers to be written in a grand, imaginative style. Apollo ordered the murder; the Furies punished it and peace was made before the Areopagus of Athens. Sophocles made his characters more human, gave them personalities and so introduced a greater dramatic conflict which turned the old blood-feud into brilliant "theatre." Euripides, the nearest to modern in outlook, was a moralist and rationalist. He thought the murder a foul deed of darkness and the "god who ordained it foul also, but his indignation against the moral order which produced such actions does not prevent his perverse, furious characters from being ne ee en

real. They are no problem-play puppets and that is why, 2500 years later, they live. The BBC World Theatre’s version of Electra is produced by Peter Watts in Gilbert Murray’s translation. The music is composed and conducted by Denis Arundell, and Joan Hart and Peter Coke play Electra and Orestes. Joan Hart has played important parts in a number of BBC plays. She was Viola in the World Theatre production of Twelfth Night, and was in the serial version of Pride and Prejudice. For more than four years she was a member of.the BBC Repertory Company and has been seen in several films. Peter Coke made his London stage debut with Sir Seymour Hicks, and has since played all kinds of parts in radio and on the stage and screen. J. C. Trewin, reviewing the World Theatre production of Electra in the BBC Listener, said that it would be remembered for its quality of excitement, held from the minute the Peasant uttered his prologue to the last splendour and pity of the judging god. Electra will be broadcast by 4YC on Wednesday, February 2, at 8.0 p.m., by 3YC on Saturday, February 5, at 9.30 p.m., by 2YC at 8.45 p.m. on Sunday, February 6, and by 1YC on Saturday, February 12, at 9.2 p.m.