The religious play as choral mass Contemporary analogy and the need for the collective rebellion/release
PROMETHEUS BOUND The religious play as choral mass
I have wanted to see Prometheus Bound in performance for over twenty years ago. It contains images that have remained in my mind's eye from my first reading of it, and ideas that have resonated with me in all the theatre I see, and do.
The premise has a giant, supernatural, tortured body (Prometheus) that cannot move and longs to move, confronted by a small, frail, tortured body (Io) that cannot stop moving and longs to rest. The one, in visual terms, is a sculpture, the other a dance--and both are images of isolation and oppression.
The story has the feeling of great age; it is a ritual action that we have tried to preserve in this production through choral movement and voice. When you see two actors playing Power at the same time, three playing Prometheus, four Io, this is a decision to further emphasize that choral structure. The story is told by a group voice, and not a number of individual, disconnected performers. In fact, Prometheus in this production IS the set–a massive mask that the voices speak for, inhabit. Prometheus remains a part of the rock of the earth–not like those newer Olympian gods, so much more like humanity.
Religious sensibility lies at the heart of this story. Prometheus gave humanity all the tools and skills it needed to survive on earth--not just fire, but arts, crafts, technology, and even our psychological capacity to work toward a better future ("blind hopes" as he says). By giving these gifts, Prometheus allowed humanity to tame its environment--to control "Earth." But Earth in this universe is a living, thinking, feeling part of creation--and, as it happens, Prometheus' mother (in some versions grandmother). Prometheus, then, has placed his mother-god in the care and keeping of a humanity that the other gods declared a non-starter as a species. Humanity might tame, might care for, but might abuse and destroy this "god"--and each other. By giving all this power to humanity, Prometheus effectively allowed the species to live without the benefit of religion, or at least believe it could. The irony is rich, the themes religious. ...AND BOUND AGAIN Contemporary analogy and the need for the collective rebellion/release
But the story also has a secular political tone set against that religious debate. The entrance of Hephaestus and his cronies Power and Violence establish the extremes of revenge and sympathy felt toward the punishment of law-breakers. The entrance of Ocean pits a traitor/rebel that has prospered under the new political regime of Zeus against a figure who could not stop the act of treason/rebellion. And the entrance of Hermes, the bureaucrat, is a fair depiction of the ease with which torture can enter a political system in the name of stability. Io expresses the extremes of abuse against the entirely innocent and apparently apolitical. And the members of the chorus--here played as representatives of humanity--express the extremes of powerlessness.
All of these contemporary issues were explored in the rehearsal for this production, through discussion and improvisation. They must be, if the performers are to understand what they are saying, and why. But how does a modern production explore these issues on stage, in performance? Contemporary productions of Greek tragedy, from my experience, eliminate the religious context in favour of these contemporary analogies, setting productions in a contemporary fascist state (for example), and by so doing incorporating a parody of our notions of tragedy into the performances. I made the decision as director to suppress these contemporary references as much as I could in Prometheus Bound. In exchange, the second half of the evening has been given over to the actors, to present their reactions to Aeschylus' text, to the story of Prometheus and Io, and to the production I directed. I cannot say I had no influence over this half of what you will see. Like Zeus--or Hermes--I exerted my bureaucratic power. Like Prometheus, though, the actors fought the power.
Both religious and political, historical and contemporary approaches raise a number of issues directly associated with the environment–Earth is, after all, both character and setting. These issues make it appropriate as a vehicle for the Environmental Theatre Workshop, and we have explored the relationships between humanity and ‘earth’ in both halves of the production.