Warning: This piece of criticism has never been published anywhere. You’ll see why – it’s huge. Might edit it later. It also contains spoilers galore. If you haven’t yet seen this production of Thyestes and plan to, just take my word for it that it’s a work of genius and read no further. Also, I’ll fix the photo soon as I can be arsed.
Thyestes, The Hayloft Project, Malthouse Theatre. Directed by Simon Stone, Performed by Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan and Mark Leonard Winter.
Season Extended until Oct 9
“Tragedy, the tragedy of tragedy, has always been but an attempt at tragedy.”
– Thomas Bernhard
It is easier to exclude harmful passions than to rule them, and to deny them admittance than to control them after they have been admitted.
– Seneca
PHOTO: Jeff Busby From L-R: Mark Leonard Winter, Thomas Henning and Chris Ryan.
It would be easy to begin talking about The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes – a stunning, frantically sculpted interrogation of that bloodiest of Greek legends – by referencing Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. It would also be stupid, for two reasons.
1.) I read Nietzsche’s book many years ago (to help edit and ghost-write an honours thesis on the subject) – apparently in exchange for beer money and a generous quantity of seventh-generation purple buddha.
2.) Having prostituted Apollo to feed Dionysus, as it were, I came to realise that Nietzsche’s concepts of the Apollonian and the Dionysian were seductive phantasms. They’re plastic. The gullible mind could mould this show to find them almost anywhere it cared to look – the grossest and most unedifying example would be (a) The Hayloft Project, director Simon Stone (Apollonian); (b) Black Lung, actors Thomas Henning and Mark Leonard Winter (Dionysian).
Life isn’t as simple as that. Nor are The Hayloft Project and Black Lung; nor is their theatre. Moreover, even were we to imagine ‘life’, or these two theatre companies, as poised on a spectrum between the A. and the D. – we would be doing them an injustice.
The savage and serene playfulness of this Thyestes emerges from a time – and a philosophy – where (the young) Nietzsche’s brand of dialectic has kaleidoscoped to a point where it has more or less collapsed. What Simon Stone’s production shows us about violence is distinctly post-modern.
A better place to start might be Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence (1921), published shortly after the orgy of destruction that gave rise to the modern age, and Jacques Derrida’s labyrinthine engagement with Benjamin, The Force of Law: “The Mystical Foundation of Authority” – a peroration he gave to (no doubt largely bewildered) American lawyers in 1989.
Amid cruel clusters of Greek myth, Benjamin uses the analogy of “ordinary language” to describe a “non-mediate function of violence”. Following Wittgenstein, Derrida, picks up on this. According to him, it’s no metaphor. Violence lurks behind all language: “language is manifestation, epiphany, before it is mediation. The explosion of violence, in anger, is not a means that looks toward an end; it has no object other than to show and show itself … disinterested, immediate, and uncalculated …”
A shallow view of postmodern theory sees this as a depressing notion. If violence is inescapable, present even in our silences, then aesthetic relativism is its obvious corollary. A more penetrating, and optimistic, analysis sees that the innumerable creative possibilities opened up by postmodern thought bring with them a potent critical obligation; a heightened sensitivity to the impact of our choices. It’s this latter view that The Hayloft Project’s Thyestes embodies with great acuity, confronting us with a terrible beauty.
Structurally, a large part of this gruesome myth’s narrative – with its fratricide and incest, its massacre of innocents and boundless vengeance – remains liminal to the performance. Each development is related through textual intertitles: horizons to which each scene grasps but can never reach, or perhaps ‘event horizons’ beyond which hide truths of such intense gravity we cannot directly sense them.
What lies between is aching and human, even at its most horrific. We read that brothers Atreus (Winter) and Thyestes (Henning) have been goaded by their mother into killing their half-brother Chrysippus (Chris Ryan plays this and all remaining roles). We expect blood to flow.
Something more radical happens. When the curtain opens on the three brothers, there’s stillness. They are bored. All the vitality and latent menace arrives from the instantly familiar dialogue – the sort of matey couch-talk you might overhear in any student share house in the country.
Chrysippus is telling a story full of anecdotes – his trip to Guatemala, a mistranslation that leads to him missing a rendezvous with his girlfriend, witnessing casual violence toward animals. Atreus isn’t really listening, obsessed with an iPhone game; Thyestes keeps his end up with oblique commentary and sexual ribaldry.
A dazzling and disarming reinvigoration what ‘naturalism’ might mean for Generation Y, it’s a sublime gambit that re-sensitises an audience fully immunized against realistic violence through its endemic, often graphic depiction. We anticipate blood – yet the only gore to be found is in “ordinary language”: the linguistic tics, verbal imprecision and circumlocution of unselfconscious chat.
The acting here is virtuosic, creating much more than a sense that, as Shakespeare put it: “There’s no art / To find the mind’s construction in the face.” It forces consciousness of – and an immediate reckoning with – the seemingly innocuous oscillations of quotidian speech, its ‘cut and thrust’. Reading murder into each phrase, we become complicit in the violence, conspirators. (There is a road back to Seneca here, should we choose to take it: caught up in the assassination plot against Nero, he is bleeding to death in his own bath …)
The first scene makes every detail matter. A more direct comparison would be to David Michod’s Animal Kingdom, where the worst violence is implied through coded conversation and subtle gesture – we’re left to imagine it for ourselves. In any event, there’s no need for Thyestes to pull out a gun as the curtain falls. The nod to Tarantino wasn’t necessary. A glance between the brothers; Thyestes’ hand lingering in his pocket would have been enough.
I felt like I’d stared too long at the sun. Though no less brilliant, each scene that followed – the blind, radioactive legacy of the original killing – seemed darker and more indistinct to me, each one more demanding of concentration, ‘presence of mind’.
The exiled brothers share a distant throne; competition is inevitable. Their nascent sibling rivalry is shown through a rambunctious game of table tennis. I can only invite you to consider the host of implications, here: Can games be art? How might game theory inform (and limit) contemporary aesthetic practice? What happens when someone cheats?
From here, each move on the chessboard evolves into a sharp position full of possibility. The brothers’ romantic war over Aerope is set in a familiar demimonde of misspent youth – the drug-induced haze of house parties. Familiarity spirals into delusion, mutating into a psychosis that fuels Atreus’ revenge on Thyestes for stealing his girlfriend and kingdom.
Winter’s portrayal of this descent is visceral, gruelling and naked. Addiction and despair explode in scenes of primal, theatrical horror. In one, he repeats an old voicemail from Aerope saved on his mobile – arguing with and ranting at an unchanging echo of the past.
The penultimate step in his revenge – a reunion with Aerope, now his captive – captures the essential impotence of torture as a mediating force. Through monstrous visual poetry, violence becomes a mutually castrating pas de deux. Atreus forces Aerope to fellate him, but her mouth is gaffer-taped shut; by the end of the dance, she is compelled to wear a strap-on dildo, and he sucks on his own self-defilement.
The final atrocity – the Thyestean feast – is deferred. Stone travels instead to the (nominal) end of the myth; Thyestes’ revenge on his brother happens in reverse. The scenes are shorter, now. The black hole has been located. The sense that we are ineluctably approaching the piece’s Schwarzschild radius intensifies into dread.
There is no catharsis in Atreus’ death. The production makes it clear he has died long before his final moments, which come slumped in an armchair, watching old slides of the nephews he slaughtered.
We know from the myth that Aegisthus – the instrument of Thyestes’ revenge – is born of a prophecy. Thyestes must rape his own daughter Pelopia. We see only a few moments to suggest the vile act. Its immediate aftermath is captured in still life – an elegantly posed portrait of suffering, like the most disturbing war photographers’ work. Another scene shows Thyestes himself driven mad, ravaged by dementia in a wheelchair.
All of this is preceded by Pelopia’s suicide, on discovering the identity of her rapist. It’s the one death sublimated utterly into music. Ryan’s pure tenor is breathtaking; so is the sudden arrival of a grand piano on the traverse stage’s clinical whiteness. (Anyone who can tell me what he sang gets a koala stamp. I thought Schubert but lost my program.)
And so this vertiginous and precisely calibrated masterpiece comes to a climax. Atreus, having secretly murdered Thyestes’ children, prepares a meal from their flesh and feeds it to their unwitting father. It’s spaghetti Bolognese. The conversation is fraternal, easygoing, understated.
We’ve returned now to the source of violence; the opening scene; “ordinary language”. When Atreus drops the mask, the curtain rises and falls compulsively. Theatre can show us only in brief snatches the appalling scene – Atreus’ triumphant, maniacal laughter; Thyestes’ anguish as he vomits up chunks of his ghastly dinner.
The acting in Thyestes is an extraordinary achievement. It proceeds from what Derrida called “a thinking that knows there is … no justice, no responsibility except in exposing oneself to all risks, beyond certitude and good conscience.”
The stage becomes a dissecting table as much as an altar, with Henning, Ryan and Winter all sacrificing themselves in a total commitment to the craft. The production requires and delivers the most audacious, demanding kind of performance – nudity, physical immediacy, presence; the kind of verbal finesse that can make a script seem unscripted; and the histrionic skill to imagine unimaginable pain and make it vibrate to the marrow.
As for director Simon Stone … well if you can get Roy Orbison into Thyestes and make it seem uncontrived, you can do anything. More seriously, what makes Stone the best Australian director of his generation is the phenomenal level of critical engagement he brings to his work, and the way he can distil and disguise that engagement to create theatre that compels thought; that crucially implicates your intellect, as well as your senses, in its enterprise.
Perhaps his most radical act here is to redraw the boundaries of ‘naturalism’ by using facets of experience and idiomatic dialogue that hold a mirror to the generation of Australians under 35. To assume it as a starting point that allows him to suggest lineages of 20th century thought about violence and language: from Benjamin, through echoes of Wittgenstein’s language-games and insistence on “ordinary language”, to Derrida and deconstruction. (You could even find Nietzsche, were you so inclined.)
You might also see the influence of Castellucci or Kosky in this Thyestes, but such flourishes feed into everything that is original and ingenious about it. Stone’s vision is more avant-garde for resisting much of the heraldry that has attached itself to that flag. He knows, I think, that the idea of the avant-garde loses all meaning the moment it presents itself as orthodoxy.
Of course, you don’t need to know any of this to appreciate that Thyestes is a masterpiece. A piercing, dangerous, and brutally executed interrogation of what tragedy might mean to us today, it holds all these pulses inside it, waiting to be discovered in the electric immediacy of performance.
For my part, Thyestes left me reeling, leaking ideas; with the overmastering sensation that it was created “just for me”.
There are many reasons for that, but the one that stands out is a peculiar consequence of postmodern thought – one that has haunted me lately. Increasingly, it seems, art and criticism must be regarded as cannibals at the same feast. Stone must realise this too. In a violent critical act worthy of the play, he slashed the show from 2.5 hours to 90 minutes in the week before it opened. What remains of Thyestes shows how enriching such a relationship can be.
Congratulations, Cameron! Good to have you here among all the other voices.
But… Nietzsche? Simple? Perhaps only to the careless reader… And not even in his first book, which was received so disastrously and of which he himself was most critical. If you were looking, this critic was quoting Ecco Homo, his last book, written just before he went mad, which is both hilarious and tragic and is full of chapter headings like “Why I Am A Destiny” or “Why I Write Great Books”. Its craziness seemed entirely appropriate to this production, and certainly illustrative of “collapse”.
The great message of The Birth of Tragedy is, of course, Nietzsche’s insistence on how a healthy society (as he imagined the Greeks were) were able to gaze into the abyss, to stare into catastrophe, through the use of tragedy. Which is no more than what you say this production does.
Your last paragraph seems a tad naive… surely art and criticism have been bedfellows forever? I have certainly always approached criticism as an artist first. Which is maybe the difference between you and me.
Hi Alison,
I haven’t actually read your review of this yet. Didn’t want to be influenced by it before I’d written mine, though I did glance at “Nietzsche” and “The Birth of Tragedy” at the start. Nietzsche’s later work does speak to this production in a way The Birth of Tragedy doesn’t, so I’ll be interested to read what you have to say.
As for “bedfellows” – re art and criticism. Your consistent line on the relationship – repeated at the Wheeler Centre – has been to use Pope’s idea that criticism is “handmaiden” to art. To approach criticism “as an artist first” strikes a pose, but I’m not sure it’s even possible. It’s an expression that has little meaning to me, at least not if it necessarily privileges art over criticism (which it does). I approach criticism as both artist and critic at the same time – no other road seems open to me without amputating some part of my mind. That’s the difference between us I think, and it’s why I’ve said they’re “cannibals at the same feast”. More on this in my “Another Essay On Criticism” post, anyway.
No, not at all. In various online conversations over the years, perhaps more in the poetry world (where I’m much more likely to speak of my practice as an artist) I’ve often likened criticism/theory to scaffolding – I use it to build a structure from which artistic practice can leap to another place; and that flight itself inspires more critical thought. All works of art are in a sense critiques, of their traditions, of the world in which they exist. But if you think of art as basically a kind of sub-branch of criticism, you are missing something crucial about it. Art incorporates critique, of course, and here we agree: but it is doing something else as well. Criticism seldom reaches those heights: Frank O’Hara writing a poem in response to Pollock is an exception rather than a rule. Literary and critical writing especially cross over all the time, and you can get writers who explicitly fold it into their art, like WG Sebald. But, in the end, as a person who is both critic and artist, and deeply values both activities, I unapologetically privilege art. Art is harder, and bigger, and takes more out of you.
1. We both love Sebald (surely a writer who embodies what I’m arguing for here).
2. I don’t think of art as a “sub-branch of criticism”, nor would I ever say so. “Cannibals at the same feast” hardly implies it.
3. Your idea of “scaffolding” is more supple, but not radical enough for me.
Here’s the crux of the matter, as I see it. You said:
(a) “I unapologetically privilege art. Art is harder, and bigger, and takes more out of you.”
(b) “Art incorporates critique, of course, and here we agree: but it is doing something else as well. Criticism seldom reaches those heights: Frank O’Hara writing a poem in response to Pollock is an exception rather than a rule.”
Leaving aside the ambiguity of what “something else” might mean, I see statements like (a) as inherently political.
Have you ever thought that (b) is true BECAUSE so many uncritically believe (a)?
4. “Art is … bigger.” Criticism is bigger, mathematically speaking. We can prove as much through set theory. I think, in fact, that this is one of the real reasons for privileging art over criticism – the former’s relative scarcity. Classical economics. Ugh.
5. “Art is harder … and takes more out of you.” I find criticism challenging, not least because art is always leaking into it unbidden. My art – what there is of it – is much more liberating.
6. If we admit there are “exceptions”: O’Hara’s poem, Sebald, etc, shouldn’t we question the convention that insists on a clear division between criticism and art? What conservative ideologies underpin it? How is it working? To whose advantage? etc etc.
[...] “Thyestes is a masterpiece. A piercing, dangerous, and brutally executed interrogation of what tragedy might mean to us today” – Cameron Woodhead (read full review) [...]
[...] “Thyestes is a masterpiece. A piercing, dangerous, and brutally executed interrogation of what tragedy might mean to us today” – Cameron Woodhead (read full review) [...]
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