Tony Harrison and the Classics by Sandie Byrne;

Author:Sandie Byrne; [Byrne, Sandie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192605252
Publisher: OUP Premium
Published: 2021-12-02T00:00:00+00:00

The Oresteia

Harrison’s Oresteia for the National was directed by incoming Artistic Director, Peter Hall, with a distinct aesthetic, attempting to explore some of the original performance conditions of Greek tragedy, including the mask.15 Harrison did not continue working with a masked company after his collaboration with Hall (though he used masks occasionally for specific effects, for example the representation of an ancient female chorus in Labourers of Herakles). However, an acting style associated with the mask (and rehearsal techniques for working with masks) would continue to be used by Harrison, and subsequently Rutter. For example, Jack Shepherd recalls that when rehearsing The Trackers of Oxyrhynchus (1988), with Harrison directing, the actors were unmasked but were instructed that ‘principals and chorus should interact by talking only to the audience, without ever contacting each other’ (Shepherd 1991: 427); this is a key technique of mask work (masks can only face out towards the audience, they lose their impact if they start to dialogue in profile) which Hall used in the Oresteia. Rehearsal strategies for working with the mask can be traced in Rutter’s rehearsal processes over the next twenty years; for example, during rehearsals for Blake Morrison’s Oedipus, the chorus wore blinkers to mimic the experience of wearing a mask, though there was never any intention of masking them in performance.16 This forced them to listen to one another and took away their peripheral vision, both things Rutter had found particularly important to chorus formation when he had been in the masked Oresteia chorus himself.

Something more fundamental about the challenge the mask can pose to the audience also transfers into Harrison’s directorial style. When he describes the function of the mask his focus is on the way it challenges the audience:

Masks have the curious ability to look many people in the eye at the same time. They had the effect of that famous Lord Kitchener recruiting poster where it seemed impossible for the unenlisted to avoid the pointing finger and the staring eye. A chorus of twelve or fifteen could patrol (if that’s the right word) the concentration and attention of those spectators on the curved cavea because they were wearing masks. If you think you are being looked at, if you think you are being addressed personally and directly, you listen. And masks make an audience feel exactly that. You can bet your life that when the Furies in the Oresteia talk about individual guilt no one in the audience felt let off the hook of moral scrutiny. (Harrison 1991: 442)

Even when Harrison moves away from using the mask, the insistence on direct address still attempts to allow no audience member to be ‘let off the hook of moral scrutiny’. This style of acting ran against the grain of much of the Naturalist, fourth-wall theatre of the time. Actors in drama schools were still receiving a predominantly Stanislavskian training, focusing on naturalist acting; this was of no interest to either Harrison or Rutter.

Reflecting the original performance conditions, Hall’s production of Harrison’s Oresteia also featured an all-male cast.

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