A contemporary Greek tragedy

For centuries, many authors, mostly playwrights, have revisited Greco-Latin myths and borrowed characters and legends from classical Greece to tell, not so much what we think happened to them, but to metaphorize their exploits when talking about the men and women of today.

Oedipus, Antigone, Prometheus, Medea and Icarus have been the most chosen. But others have occupied for centuries the secondary role that the authors of the time have wanted to give them. A few years ago the writer Manuel Tirado and the veteran stage director and novelist Francisco Suárez decided to imbue Clytemnestra, mother of Iphigenia, Electra and Orestes, as a tragic woman capable of carrying on her shoulders the weight of a great myth.

In 2016, they staged The Last Battle, with Tirado as the creator of a text that Suárez adapted and directed. This month, before starting a tour of Spain, the piece was re-released in Barcelona's new Dau al Sec theatre (playing with the name of the avant-garde movement and the location of the space) with a new actor, Damià Plensa, who, playing with the tradition of Japanese theatre of playing women full of pain, becomes a Clytemnestra in her underwear, with a kind of bathrobe, dressed in the Japanese way, deeply distressed, drunk, sweet, flirtatious, confused and confused, vengeful and furious, arrogant in both senses, jealous, detestable and murderous (the well-known story is not spoiled).

In his transmutation, Plensa—son of the well-known sculptor—hypnotizes with a story full of contradictions, such as those that can only be shown by someone who loves and hates simultaneously and passionately and is consumed by jealousy.

In this sense, it is important to see a man interpreting a pain that can be experienced so deeply from any identity, although the director of the piece sees that the fact that it is a man is a firm commitment to denouncing sexist abuse from the authority of a male voice, and adds: “That is the game, it is powerful that he denounces what has been done to women being a man, he is not a transvestite man or an effeminate man, he is an actor embodying a woman who says 'all happy women look alike, but unhappy women are unhappy in different ways. I, by dint of living with pain, have become a woman with a man's heart'. It is assumed that it can also be seen that way, which surely further enriches this show full of winks to our culture, with phrases that remain in the collective imagination, from names like Almodóvar, Goya, Lope de Vega, or even the striking verse by Caballero Bonald , contributed by the director: “We are only the time we have left”.

And as in any good Greek tragedy, there is no lack of a chorus of women who influence the action, here represented by songs by Chavela Vargas, Olga Guillot, Omara Portuondo and Mayte Martín, all of them sunk by absent love, abandonment, and impossible oblivion. Although the soundtrack features, at the beginning, Bernardo Bonezzi's initial theme for Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and at the end, the one that composer Bernard Herrmann created for Psycho , behind Hitchcock's back, very well titled for the 1960 film and for this little theatrical gem: The Murder. This time, it is that of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae and leader of the Trojan War, at that time husband of Clytemnestra, who has to kill him because she must avenge the death of her daughter Iphigenia (although the work does not put much emphasis on this fact) and settle many other serious pending accounts.

The piece at times recalls Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice , because both speak of the pain of abandonment and because on this occasion the voice heard is that of a man, as would have been desirable in some staging of The Human Voice , given that today it is known that Cocteau wrote about the loss of his beloved.

The final battle ( Agamemnon 's, of course) is also, without a doubt, a fight between actor and director, from which both emerge unscathed, surely due to the restraint and good work of both who have not been carried away by some obvious things that one or the other could easily fall into. Especially taking into account that the character (hopefully not the actor) drinks an entire 700 ml bottle of good whisky with a volume of 40% (verified).