thyestes simon stone, belvoir

holland festival
thyestes
simon stone, belvoir
info
CREDITS
dates
Mon 23, Tue 24, Wed 25, Thu 26,
Fri 27 June 2014
venue
Theater Bellevue
starting time
8.30 pm
running time
1 hour 30 minutes, no interval
language
English with Dutch surtitles
introduction
by Cecile Brommer
7.45 pm
meet the artist
with Simon Stone
Tue 24.6, after the performance
moderator Cecile Brommer
website
www.belvoir.com.au
co-written by
Thomas Henning, Chris Ryan,
Simon Stone, Mark Winter
after Seneca
direction
Simon Stone
set and costume design
Claude Marcos
composer and sound design
Stefan Gregory
lighting design
Govin Ruben
dramaturgy
Anne-Louise Sarks
stage manager
Karen Faure
assistant stage manager
Isabella Kerdijk
cast
Thomas Henning
Chris Ryan
Toby Schmitz
lighting realisor
Chris Mercer
production manager
Todd Wilson
artistic director
Ralph Myers
executive director
Brenna Hobson
production
Belvoir
originally created by
The Hayloft Project
commissioned by
Malthouse Theatre
with thanks to
Australia Council for the Arts,
Andrew Cameron Family
podcast
https://soundcloud.com/hollandfestival
holland festival partners
Hoofdbegunstiger
Foundation, The Keir Foundation,
Mark Carnegie and Jessica Block
world premiere
Melbourne, 12.9.2010
thyestes is selected by HF Young
HF Young is made possible by
THE THYESTES OF THE I-POD GENERATION
Simon Stone, the young director who has made a name for himself
over the last several years with his radical adaptations of great classics, is back at the Holland Festival. After his hit production of The
Wild Duck last year, the Australian is joining us again with his adaptation of Thyestes, for which he transposed Seneca’s classical play to
his own social environment. This is the prototypical myth of cycles
of vengeance that are unstoppable.
Don’t expect classical verses and lofty dialogue from Simon Stone
this time around either. His characters are perfectly normal young
men that you can encounter in any bar and on every street corner,
dressed in hoodies, jeans and athletic shoes. They drink wine, listen
to music on their iPods and talk as boys do amongst each other, with
the usual nonchalance, bravura, tendency to score points off one
another and, not least, the requisite eruptions of physical and verbal
violence.
The young Simon Stone (29) has attracted international attention
the past few years with his contemporary adaptations of great classical plays. Besides Thyestes, he has for example done Wedekind’s
Spring Awakening, Chekhov’s Platonov and Three Sisters, Bertolt
Brecht’s Baal and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Last year, we
spoke with him in the run-up to his first appearance at the Holland
Festival with The Wild Duck, in which he moved Ibsen’s story to the
present. He said then about his approach to the classics, ‘The great
plays have proved themselves, so they’re perfect to put on stage. But
you have to do it in your own language, otherwise you won’t be recognizable to your audience.’
In order to put these stories into their own familiar language,
Stone and his actors first dig into the script and take it apart, analyse
the characters and find out where there is common ground with
themselves. Then they build the play up again, using the language,
gestures and conventions of today. As he said last year, the director is
essentially ‘putting the characters in a time machine and transporting
them to our world’. Therefore, his actors do not speak in old verses
but in contemporary Australian English and as said before, as boys
amongst boys, recognizable to everyone.
Says Stone, ‘My work in the theatre has been about helping the
audience see the similarities between themselves and the people on
stage. These stories are not dusty, distant tales of fantastical goings
on. They were written by people worried by the same things as us.
They’re all about sex and death, and what if someone stole your land
or killed someone you know? Those are things that piss us off as
human beings.’
Simon Stone made Thyestes in 2010 for The Hayloft Project and
the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne. The play tells the story of a
well-nigh endless chain of vengeance and retribution in the family
of Tantalus, his son Pelops, Pelops’s sons Atreus and Thyestes and
Thyestes’ son Aegisthus, who was raised by Atreus. The macabre low
point is the moment when King Atreus serves Thyestes the bloody
heads of his sons during a banquet to get revenge on him, which
drives Thyestes out of his mind.
Stone says he uses the story to show how ridiculous the culture
of vengeance actually is. ‘It’s all about ego. Someone saying, “I’ve
been slighted and I cannot find a way to let that lie, so I must do something more horrific than what’s already been done.”’
The director uses the classical story as a frame to show how hate,
jealousy, revenge and violence arise in our own time. Before each
scene, a projection screen is lowered to let us know where we are in
the classical myth. Once the screen rises again, we see the actors in
a contemporary setting – a white space with florescent lighting, as
if they are at a party – and talking about things that interest young
men nowadays. But there is a continual parallel with the events in the
myth, such as at the beginning of the performance when two boys
shoot and kill a third (Atreus’s and Thyestes’ murder of their halfbrother).
Apart from that, the violence is mostly suggested; it never becomes bloody on stage and the most horrific deeds take place offstage.
The actors perform the violence that does occur on stage in a deliberately unemotional way. Says Stone, ‘The violence is presented as
a very normal, almost boring moment because we wanted to show
that the randomness and the mundane nature of violence is the most
horrific thing.’
The critics were unanimously enthusiastic. ‘Simon Stone’s brave and
bold reimagining of Seneca’s bloody tragedy Thyestes is thrilling and
astounding,’ declared The Age, which praised the script, direction
and acting to the skies. The Australian emphasized that the show
among other things was not only ‘confronting’, ‘transgressive’ and
‘obscene rock ‘n roll theatre’ but also ‘uncomfortably hilarious’. The
Herald Sun lauded the production as a ‘shocking’, ‘engrossing’ and
‘superbly realized’ work, although this paper also gave a light warning to sensitive souls: ‘It’s not for the fainthearted!’
Synopsis
The myth of Thyestes served as material for a tragedy for Greek
and Roman playwrights who were not the least of them: Homer,
Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Seneca. It is accordingly seen
as the mother of vengeance tragedies. The seed for all the vengeance
is planted when Tantalus kills his own son, Pelops, chopping him
up and serving him to the gods at a banquet in order to test whether
they truly are omniscient. The gods immediately discover the ruse
and Pelops is reassembled and brought back to life at Zeus’s command. Once Pelops grows up, he arranges to have a king killed so
that he can marry his daughter. But he later deceives this hard-won
woman just as easily; he leaves her for a younger woman and has an
illegitimate son, Chrysippus, with her.
Simon Stone’s production starts at the moment when the legal
wife of this King Pelops discovers that her husband has declared that
his illegitimate child is heir to the throne. In a rage, she spurs on her
sons Atreus and Thyestes to kill their half-brother, which they immediately do. As punishment, they are exiled, and their mother commits
suicide. The brothers become kings elsewhere. After a time, Thyestes
steals Atreus’s kingdom and sleeps with his wife. To win her back,
Atreus starts a war, which Thyestes loses. Atreus then invites Thyestes to a banquet, kills Thyestes’ children and serves them to his brother as a meal, just as their grandfather had once served their father
as a festive meal to the gods. This drives Thyestes insane. An oracle
tells him that he must conceive a son with his own daughter, Pelopia,
and that this son will later kill Atreus. Thyestes thereupon rapes his
daughter in the dark, without her knowing who her assailant is. A
few years later, she encounters Atreus and marries him. She raises
Aegisthus, the son engendered by her rapist, as Atreus’s son. When
he is big enough, his mother gives him the sword that she stole from
her rapist that dark night, and tells him that if he finds its owner, he
will know who his real father is. Aegisthus finds Thyestes and discovers how badly Atreus acted. He goes back to kill the man who raised
him.
This is where Stone’s production ends, but the cycle of vengeance and
killing does not stop here. As a sequel, Aeschylus wrote a famous play
in which Atreus’s sons Agamemnon and Menelaus continue the chain
of revenge and retribution after they return from the Trojan War.
BIOGRAPHIES
Simon Stone (1984) is an Australian actor and theatre director.
He is one of the greatest young talents of the Australian theatre.
Stone was born in Basel. From there he moved with his parents and
his two sisters to Cambridge in the UK and finally to Australia.
There he studied at the Victorian College of the Arts at the
University of Melbourne. In 2007 he founded the independent
theatre company The Hayloft Project, where he adapted and
directed Wedekind’s Frühlings Erwachen, Chekov’s Platonov and
3xSisters, The Suicide by Erdman and The Only Child, a new version
of Ibsen’s Little Eyolf. In 2010 he wrote and directed a version of
Seneca’s Thyestes for the Hayloft Project and the Malthouse Theatre
in Melbourne. This production won Green Room Awards for Best
Adaptation, Best Production and Best Ensemble. In 2011 Stone
became the Resident Director at Belvoir. In his first year he wrote
and directed a new version of Henrik Ibsen’s The Wild Duck, which
won the Helpmann Award for Best Play and Best Director and
Best Mainstage Production at the Sydney Theatre Awards. In 2013
Stone managed to impress again with a new version of Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard, with the Melbourne Theatre Company. After
his success with The Wild Duck in Amsterdam and Vienna, Stone
received numerous invitations to create new work in Europe. In
early January 2014 his staging of Aeschylos’ Oresteiai premiered
in Oberhausen and in October Stone is directing Medea for
Toneelgroep Amsterdam.
Belvoir is an Australian theatre company based at the Belvoir St
Theatre in Sydney, Australia. In 1984 the old Nimrod Theatre
was saved from demolition by more than six hundred Australian
arts, entertainment and media professionals, including Nicole
Kidman, Judy Davis, Gillian Armstrong, Sam Neil and Dame
Joan Sutherland. The theatre was renamed the Belvoir St Theatre.
The theatre company Belvoir was formed that same year and has
since built a reputation as an innovative and important company
engaging Australia’s most prominent and promising playwrights,
directors and actors. Among the actors who worked with the
company are famous names such as Geoffrey Rush, Cate Blanchett
and Jacqueline McKenzie.
text and editing Lonneke Kok, MoreTXT
translation Jane Bemont, Frank van Lieshout
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