From Front Row, BBC Radio 4, 7 February 2003. Copyright © “Front Row” BBC Radio 4. Reprinted by permission
We begin with Greek tragedies, specifically the fate of Iphigenia, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra. In the play by Euripides, the king is persuaded to sacrifice his daughter so that the goddess Artemis might look favorable upon his forces in the forthcoming assault on the city of Troy. The soldiers are waiting for wind to sail to Troy to reclaim Helen, wife of Menelaus. Iphigenia’s death will trigger a further cycle of murder and revenge in the house of Atreus. That’s the shadow that hangs over the future in the end of the play, most of Iphigenia is concerned with the father’s duping of a young girl and her mother for political purposes. The Irish writer Edna O’Brien is the latest to adapt Iphigenia in Aeoulus, and when I spoke to her a little earlier she explained the enduring power of Greek tragedy:
Edna O’Brien: The story is as valid and as urgent today as it was when it was written five hundred years before Christ. The story being, as you know, the human drama, the human tension, the human question about the validity of war and why people go to war. Why men go to war. Why they have gone to war down the centuries. Is it for right? Is it for morality to be better or is it for human beings or is it partly to do with their inner sense of conquest?
Francine Stock: Now, you’ve called this a free adaptation, there are, obviously, many translations of Iphigenia already existing; what did you feel you could add?
O’Brien: I removed most of the chorus because the chorus embellish and retell what is going to happen over and over again, and while that might have been wonderful in open air Greek theaters, it is no longer applicable to now. Second change is Euripides didn’t finish the play. It was finished by other hands, and the other hands changed the ending. They softened it to have a deer sacrificed. And it seemed to me, and it will always seem to me, that that softening, and if you like, that total abnegation of everything that had gone on previously in the play and in the drama was suddenly thrown out the window.
Stock: And, as far as the language is concerned, you’ve made it sound contemporary, but by cutting, of course, some of the chorus sections you have lost some of the perhaps more lyrical and elaborate passages. Do you think that that weakens the play in any way?
O’Brien: I have choruses, I haven’t no choruses. I have two women. One is the voice of the appetite for war. The appetite for sacrifice. The appetite for blood. And her opposite is the one who prays that the Goddess—in this case, it could be the God, but it’s a Goddess—would avert this slaughter. So it isn’t that I have removed the chorus, and I love their lyrical language; but I don’t think the stage is the place for long reams of lyrical language. And I’ll tell you this, the greatest teacher, let alone genius of this for anyone writing a play, is Shakespeare. Shakespeare knows when to be lyrical and he knows when to cut it.
Stock: It must, nonetheless, be difficult to gauge what type of language is appropriate for something like this because, as you say, you wanted to make it kind of contemporary in some ways so it sounded reasonably colloquial, but occasionally there’s a phrase, at one point where you say something about not lumping me in with something else, and I slightly kind of stopped at that and thought, oh?
O’Brien: Yes, that’s Clytemnestra. Well, I thought about that word. I thought about it and I decided it was a very organic word so I stayed with it. As regards to the language throughout, I don’t sit down and think, “Oh now, I better choose a language that will please this person or that academic or that ordinary theater goer.” I chose the language that I had A) a freedom with and B) a confidence in. And that’s my imaginative decision.
Stock: Some people spoke of your last novel, In the Forest, as though it were Greek tragedy, I mean, is there any connection, do you think?
O’Brien: Oh yes, it was a Greek tragedy. It was a Greek tragedy that happened. Three people are slaughtered in a forest. In “Iphigenia,” a girl is also going to be brought to a forest, to the Grove of Artemis, for a slaughter which is given the noble name of sacrifice.
Stock: Was there any sense that after the controversy that surrounded In the Forest that you wished to, by returning to one of the classics, avoid anything that might appear to be as contentious?
O’Brien: Oh, not at all. The opposite. The people who attack one or take issue, their reasons are very often quite specious. They are not about “Is something a work of art, is the language, does the language stand up?” They are about prejudice. So I would not let anybody be the decider to tell me what to write or what not to write. It is hard enough anyhow to write, in fact, it’s Hell. But my intent and journey with In the Forest and Iphigenia is to make the journey that I know is very dark that I know, at the same time, is very rich in its human narrative.
Stock: When I read In the Forest, I didn’t in any way doubt that it was a work of art, and I thought that it was beautifully written, but it did make me uneasy that members of the family had not been happy that you should pursue the story.
O’Brien: Well, you read journalists who said that, but it’s not actually true. One person who had been a partner—an estranged partner—of the dead woman made quite a lot of commotion, but no blood relative did, I can assure you of that.