Thyestes

Director Simon Stone’s run of excellence last year climaxed this month with four Sydney Theatre Awards for his Belvoir production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck.

Actually, Stone threw Ibsen’s words to the wind, completely rewriting the play into contemporary life and staging it in a glass box with miked actors.

His astonishing take on Seneca’s Thyestes – co-written earlier with the three actors from The Hayloft Project for a Melbourne premiere in 2010 – goes even further in discarding the original.

Walls slide up on another luminous box set, the audience flanking both sides, but Seneca’s words are reduced to just pithy plot headings digitally rolled through to announce each scene.

It's still the story of two ultimately feuding brothers, Thyestes (Thomas Henning) and Atreus (Mark Winter); and still with the final horror of Thyestes unwittingly eating his own childr

en at banquet.

But these brothers are cool coke snorting, I-tech Gen Y dudes chatting (very funny) banalities about travel, sex, music and childhood memories. Their violence and obscenity is chillingly incidental. Stone has perfectly succeeded at humanising Seneca’s mythological horrors into the everyday and the commonplace.

Chris Ryan plays other Seneca characters, most women, all victims of incestuous rape, murder and sexual abuse, some initially trapped by the erotic charms of the psychopathic Atreus. The result is an almost unremarkable “queering” of Seneca’s relationships, a modern, even fashionable paradigm through which to focus on how these blokes do sex and violence (and less on “female” victims).

The three outstanding actors are so familiar with their own script that the delivery seems almost improvised, and the atrocities all the more natural, even logical.

This is compelling international festival theatre.

Martin Portus

Photographer: Jamie Williams

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