Bloody Family: A metatheatrical meditation that falls flat

Share

You know the old story. Dad kills daughter; mom kills dad; son kills mom; son is chased by the furies until the goddess of law and justice steps in.

Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, was the first to have a go at dramatizing the bloody family of the House of Atreus in a trilogy of plays known as The Oresteia. And we still live in a society shaped by the underlying message of those dramas: The cycle of revenge only comes to an end when the son, Orestes, is tried in front of a jury of 12 Athenians – and the responsibility for justice is shifted from the individual to the state.

Naturally, every generation of theatre artist since Aeschylus has been unable to resist the urge to rework this foundational myth of Western civilization. Director Philip McKee and actor Tanja Jacobs are the latest to have a go at rebooting the trilogy, continuing a tradition that stretches back to Sophocles and Euripides – though their Bloody Family is as much about the retelling of the story as a retelling of the story.

McKee plays a version of himself in the show (a difficult task that he only semi-successfully pulls off), arriving with his iPhone to record an interview with Clytemnestra (played by Jacobs) about what happened to her family. He tells Clytemnestra that he believes she has received short shrift from the ancient Greeks and that he understands why she would have have been murderously miffed at her husband for sacrificing her daughter to the Trojan war machine. (Agamemnon killed Iphigenia to get a wind in his sails.)

McKee would like to make Clytemnestra the protagonist of a new play – one that will also provide a strong role for a "woman who has been through menopause." (McKee is poking fun at his own tendencies here; in his Lear of two years ago, the emerging director reworked another classic for another veteran female actor, Clare Coulter.)

Clytemnestra, however, is not impressed by McKee or his 21st-century politics. She says her husband was right to do what he did. "War is necessary. War is eternal. War is something that cannot be banished from civilized society." As for why she killed him then, she says simply: "I was psychotic; I wasn't myself."

What follows is a metatheatrical meditation on on larger-than-life mythmaking versus life itself, and the motivations theatremakers have for trying to bridge that unbridgeable gap between reality and fiction. McKee has Clytemnestra read and improvise a scenes from his play with two younger actors, Norah Sadava and Ishan Davé, who step into the roles of her children, Iphegenia and Orestes.

In one of the most striking scenes, Clytemnestra makes a sandwich for her son, while Orestes builds a coffin for his mother. "Do you think about your future at all?" she asks. "I don't think killing me would be good for your future."

As with his Lear, McKee is interested in having different generations of theatre artists confront one and in juxtaposing styles rather than attempting to seamlessly integrate them. While his Lear tried to include every trick in the book, however, Bloody Family is a minimalist production comprised of small movements and gestures. When an image is created, it is done painstakingly, ritualistically – Clytemnestra pouring a bucket of red paint on her daughter's head; Orestes pouring a pile of dirt out of his military rucksack.

Jacobs, an actor not usually known for restraint, is kept underwraps throughout – in fact, even more so than when she was buried up to her heck in sand in Samuel Beckett's Happy Days at the National Arts Centre. She speaks impassively, but her eyes are constantly brimming with tears. She is a bottle of soda, shaken violently then opened very slowly, a tiny twist of the cap at a time.

By contrast, her children – or the actors playing her children – remain aloof, distanced, (especially the chillingly cool Sadava).

Bloody Family has an intriguing quality to it and is often surprisingly funny, but the game it plays is closed off. This is theatre-making intellectualized to the point of emotional and narrative inaccessibility – near self-negation. At the end of the show, Clytemnestra confronts McKee. "I don't see the value in repeating the same thing over and over, causing suffering." Bloody Family seems to side with her, though the value of telling The Oresteia, over and over, seems pretty clear to those of us who aren't mythical characters. This is a piece of theatre that is deeply ambivalent about the value of theatre itself, and it's hard not to feel equally ambivalent about it as an audience member.

Bloody Family runs until Oct. 5.