The Brag

Thyestes
Simon Stone’s Therapeutic Tragedy
By Pierce Wilcox

For a director on the cutting edge of the Australian theatre scene, Simon Stone is surprisingly open about his commitment to ancient ideas. “Recognition,” he says. “Revelation and recognition. Aristotle was writing about that in his Poetics – that being the central aim of tragedy. I think he had it dead right.”

Stone has spent the last few years carving a path through the canon with his fiercely contemporary adaptations, most recently creating a riveting glass-encased rendition of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck. For the 2012 Sydney Festival, he’s gone almost two thousand years earlier and set his sights on Seneca’s vicious, unforgiving tragedy, Thyestes.

Dealing with a classical play, explains Stone, means finding a way “to tell those stories without it feeling like an obscure rendering of the way the world ‘used to work’. It forces you to create a strong juxtaposition between the otherworldliness of things that come from ancient cultures, and the mundane recognition of elements that are exactly the same nowadays: brothers are jealous of each other, wives cheat on their husbands, and husbands cheat on their wives.”

Stone’s process is about removing the barriers to that identification of sameness. “It’s far less easy to have a revelation as an audience member if you’re finding it very difficult to associate with the character on stage. It becomes about the costumes, the completely unaffordable golden crown which is therefore made out of plastic.” To circumvent this problem, Thyestes presents three actors – who look like they could have walked in off the street – in an empty white box.

“The more engaged an audience can be, the more successful theatre is,” says the director. “The more they feel like they’re seeing themselves onstage, seeing other humans that are human like them, the more there’s a ritual feeling to the otherworldliness that you can then create.”

And from that first step, the mechanisms of tragedy unfold. “You watch a human being like you being put through a series of circumstances that are completely unfair and out of their control. You watch someone else go through the terrible shit that you have, at one point, had happen to you.”

The goal of Stone’s project, he says, is “the recognition that you’re not alone. That’s what catharsis is. The recognition of yourself onstage. A revelation that other human beings are as dirty, messy, complicated, inept, and inelegant as you are. The fact that no matter how we try to live constructed, organised and sophisticated lives, at the end of the day, we fuck up – and we fuck up regularly. That’s what we see in the theatre. Because otherwise we’d be going mad with the idea that we’re the only person that has trouble living.”

Stone’s work is shot through with violence and terror, but he sees this kind of theatre as a unique comfort zone. “Theatre is like a good friend. It’s the person that says, ‘No matter who you are, no matter how you’ve lived your life, as long as you’re well-intentioned, I can forgive you anything.’ It’s seeing someone else contemplating suicide onstage, someone else having a terrible argument with their son, someone else having too much pride to apologise. We see ourselves in each of these events…. we see people like the people we love represented onstage. And we come to know ourselves better, and we come to know other people better, and we come to have more forgiveness, for points of view that we have never properly been able to understand.”

What: Thyestes (after Seneca) by Simon Stone
When: January 15 – February 19
Where: CarriageWorks Bay 20
More: sydneyfestival.org.au/thyestes